I tap his bony shoulder, and his eyes jolt open, cloudy, blinking in confusion. “Hobble,” he says eventually, pleased that I have come.
“I brought your magic.” I hand him a small clay vessel of my mother’s silverweed liniment, the same blend my father uses to soothe a shoulder grown stiff under the weight of the hammer he swings in his forge.
We comment on the warmth of the day, the fields that are nearly ready for seed, our desire that the weather hold until the wheat is planted, and then I prod. “Tell me what he was like, the man my mother loved first.”
Old Man tells me Arc was orphaned at eight, his father departed from this world for the next after he was bitten by a cursed hound. Arc’s mother railed and shook a fist, accusing the gods of forsaking her mate, and the next morning was found pale blue and rigid on her pallet. After that Arc lived in the smallest shack at Black Lake, at first with Old Gazer, a loner who spent his days wandering and plenty of warm, clear nights stretched out beneath the stars. As a young boy, Arc had walked behind him, examining the deer print or swallow nest at the tip of Old Gazer’s staff. Once Old Gazer began to ail, he ambled off, perhaps desiring solitude for his final breaths, and Arc found himself alone.
I go to others. I prompt. I dig. I return to my mother, coax another fragment from her—a feat better accomplished when our hands are busy picking leaf from stem, straining herbs from draft.
I wait for my father’s thoughts to come to me, too, for sometimes in this world of wonder they appear inside my own head and they are often useful in piecing together the patchwork. Those thoughts arrive indiscriminately, without a pattern that I can figure out. They enter my mind more like a scene, an impression given all at once, than a stream of words.
He had barely stepped in from his forge the first time I understood he had not spoken the thought that materialized in my mind. As he closed the door behind him, poof, it came to me that he was considering whether a bog dweller called Tanner would trade a section of deerskin for a new fleshing knife, whether the hide would please my mother, whether she minded the shabbiness of the sack she hung from her shoulder. “She doesn’t mind that her sack is old,” I said. She sometimes tapped a particular repair and said “From your father’s old jerkin” or “From your first shoes.”
My father eyed me, uncertainty hanging in his mind, a vague itch it seemed best not to scratch. Ignore the tingle, the prickling, and it would go away.
I have known to proceed with caution ever since, to keep to myself those thoughts he has not spoken aloud. Any notion that I knew his private mind would surely be as unwelcome as mealworms in the flour.
* * *
—
Today my mother keeps constant vigil from the fields. Her hoe stills, and her eyes lift to the southeast. I see her throat constrict, soften, but no amount of swallowing seems to rid her of the bitter taste of dread. She has forbidden me to wander the woodland, even to collect sweet violet for the draft that eases sleep. “But what about Walker?” I said, well knowing my mother’s soft spot for the woman who, deprived of the draft, would pace through the night. Without shifting her gaze from the far horizon, my mother shook her head.
As I trudge in from the fields my father looks up from his work in the forge, fixes on my lopsided gait, and lays a hand over his heart. My deformity so pains him. And my status as a field hand, too. How far the Smith clan has fallen since the days of his youth. It is just the three of us now—my father, my mother, and me. Beyond my parents, the only kin to have welcomed my birth was my mother’s mother, and even she is gone now, succumbed to an unrelenting cough soon after I had taken my first steps.
Though he works alone, the forge is expansive—some twenty paces in breadth, large enough to accommodate a dozen blacksmiths. In my father’s youth, his father, brothers, uncles, and cousins all shouted over the din of iron clanking iron. Much more so than my mother and me, he feels the ruin in the unoccupied anvils, the ordinariness of our clothes, the storage vessels empty of smoked venison and salted pork, the shelves cleared of the finery traded away over the years for the iron bars that allow him to work, for the hard cheese that preserves my family those years the harvest is poor.
The forge stands roughly at the center of the clearing and is ringed on one side by the nine roundhouses where Black Lake’s hundred and forty-two men, women, and children live. With its low walls, the forge is more roofed shelter than cabin. My father likes it that way. The open walls mean that the hearth’s tremendous heat drifts away; that he can exchange greetings with the bog dwellers as they go about their lives; and, most of all, that he is often able to glimpse my mother and me as we work.
He calls out, “Hard day?”
“Not so bad.” I pull my tired shoulders straight.
Hot iron sizzles as he drops it into the cooling trough. He unfastens the ties of his jerkin and steps from the forge. When I am within reach, he tousles my hair, and I lean into his hand.
Had I been a boy born to a tradesman—a blacksmith, in my father’s case—I would have inherited my father’s trade. But as a girl, I take my status from my mother and that makes me a hand, a bog dweller born into a life of sowing and reaping. As our healer, my mother leaves the fields midafternoon to prepare the remedies that keep us well. It is our hope that one day special dispensation will be extended to me, too. For now, though, I remain unrecognized as apprentice healer and raise my hoe daybreak to nightfall, bringing it down on clods of clumped earth.
Though my days are hard, after I am through in the fields, my father and I make a daily sojourn to the bog, where I run the length of the causeway—a platform of rough timbers that reaches across wet earth and then out over Black Lake’s shallow pool. My mother says the running lessons—as she likes to call them—began as soon as I first stood on two feet. She had already explained the nature of my imperfection to my father—how the thighbone of one leg was not fully nestled in the hip socket, how I would always limp. I have imagined his head in his hands as he wept. Who would love his child? What would become of a cripple hand? My lame leg made me a runt. I expect that, even as tears rolled over his cheeks, he had made up his mind: I would learn to run.
My speed has improved, and each year at the games that accompany the Harvest Feast, I race the other youths and show the entire settlement my strength. I have seen a sparrow knock a hatchling with a bent wing out of its nest, a ewe prod a runt away from a milk-laden teat. I remember the deformed hoof of the boar, the cleft palate of the lamb—both slain on the stone altar, offerings to the gods, each a runt, as tradition holds. I know the importance of never appearing weak.
“Let’s go,” I say.
He unthreads his fingers from my hair.
“It’s so peaceful at the bog,” I say, pushing merriment into my voice. “I like the mist and the way the mud smells. I like how it gets dark there first.”
He thinks a minute, then nods his agreement that, yes, it is true. Any given evening, it is darker at the bog than in the clearing. “You notice so much,” he says. “Always have.”