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.