Sparks at Sundown

Zeke Hale woke before the sun as he always had: the way a man wakes who knows metal will not wait for mercy. The shop was a black cutout against the lightening sky, a silhouette of bellows and chains and the squat shape of the anvil like the backbone of a small animal. He threw a blanket off and listened to the town breathe in measured roughness — a dog that was bored of the street, the municipal bell in the square clearing its throat, and, beneath everything, a clockwork-of-horses whooping in the distance as a feed wagon made its slow rounds. Woodsmoke threaded the early air and the ground was thin with last night's frost, which would bake out by noon and leave the road a polishing grit until the next wind.

He set coals to the forge with hands that had learned the conversation of iron: patient at first, then asking for a fiercer talk. Tongs met a red rod; the hammer came down as if it were a word. Sparks sprang and fell like small startled birds. Zeke liked the beginning of a day in metal because it was a contract he could keep — heat, strike, bend, cool — and in those steps the world simplified into honest motions. The first shoe he shaped that morning had a nick in it from an old nail; he ground it out and, on the second strike, felt the rhythm settle into the place he belonged.

Buttons, the raccoon, was already at the threshold. The creature's eyes were luminous beads and his paws were the kind of small, efficient thieves that prefer metal to sweets. He had the day's first small joke waiting: three horseshoes rearranged into an impish smile on the door's lintel. Zeke pretended to scowl. "You show that to June and she'll swear you made me a friend," he told the raccoon, bending to sweep the path. Buttons, with his usual diplomatic lack of remorse, removed a small iron tack from the broom and tucked it into his fur like a badge.

June Hollis had left a tin cup of coffee by the back step with the same stubborn warmth she always left: thick as syrup and hot as something that would argue with a man's mood. He refused her coffee in words out of habit but kept it in the corner of his eye while he worked. She trusted him in the way one trusts a ridge of hill to keep the wind off; she led with an expectation that a person who could mend an axle could mend more than metal. Her tavern smelled of cooked beans and molasses that morning — the town's steady breakfast smell — and the faint sweetness made the shop a less lonely place.

Sheriff Amos Keane arrived on the clop of his boots and the slow creak of his saddle, carrying a wheel bigger than a man's life and smelling of the road. He set it down with a grunt next to the forge. "Morning, Zeke. This came off the stage this side of the ridge. Got a crack, if you ask me." He wiped his palms on his trousers in a motion that said he wanted Zeke's verdict without embroiling himself in worry.

Zeke accepted the wheel in both hands and rolled it until the rim found a place his eyes liked. He rolled it again, listening with the same hunger he reserved for hitches and horses. The wood spoke when a man knew how to put an ear to a spoke: the dry wheeze of a poor spoke, the faint give that happens when one end of a hub stops agreeing with the other. He turned the wheel and felt a thudding that belonged to something else entirely.

"Not just a crack?" the sheriff asked, squinting as if the world might be coaxed into a different explanation.

"Maybe." Zeke's voice had the gravel of the path outside, and he didn't spare it. He hefted the wheel onto the stand and pried the hub with a leather-wrapped bar, feeling for the way the grain split under pressure. The hub moved a fraction of an inch more than it should. He unspooled the coiled brake line — a flat lash of hemp wound with iron wire — and ran his thumb along the fibers. He found a section roughened as if by long use. He took his knife, and with a skill he had practiced on straps and tongues, cut back a length. The exposed cut surprised him: clean, deliberate, not ragged from wear.

"Cut clean as a trade knife," he observed, and the words had a weight to them that did not sit well on the morning.

Sheriff Keane drew a breath and set his jaw. "Hard to tell on the road. Could be a rodent, could be—"

—He didn't finish. Zeke would not let him. He folded the strip back and held the halter-like line up. It looked like a knife did it; a pry or a rat wouldn't list the filaments so even. The small irony sat between them like a horseshoe on a counter: a town mending its things could not afford a tourist's mischief.

"You say it's theft of luck, then?" the sheriff said, half a joke, partly mollifying the weirdness.

Zeke grunted. He was not built to declare catastrophes in neat words. He leaned over the wheel again, fingers moving with the memory in them. The wheel felt like a thing that had been pushed to obey convenience rather than craft; someone had taken a blade to the line where the brake tied off and meant for the wheel to give drama down the road. Buttons decided that this was a good time to perform another small, absurd service: he stole the sheriff's hat and stuck it on the wheel's axle like a coronet. The sheriff barked a laugh despite himself and the tension slid by a degree. "Give that back, you thief, or I'll fine you for larceny of headwear," Keane said, smacking his palm as if the raccoon were as dangerous as a duel.