The Blade

I went up the ridge once a week for six years, and the visits never became a thing I could predict.

Sometimes there was nothing but the cake and the clocks and Mrs. Ashby asking me questions about what the hollow thought of her, which I could not answer, and which she did not want answered. Sometimes there were other people — her relatives, two pale women and a man named Pell, who came for money and left with less of it and hated me for being there. And sometimes there was Vera, and when there was Vera, the rest of the house did not exist.

She was taught at home by a tutor who had gone away before I arrived. She had read everything. She had been to Europe twice and remembered the hotel rooms and not the cities. She was twelve and then fourteen and then fifteen, and the whole time she was being assembled.

"You have grown coarse," she told me when I was fifteen, the spring after I went into the shop. "It is not your fault. Nobody has taken you in hand."

"Emmet took me in hand."

"Your brother-in-law welds pipes."

"He welds more than pipes."

"Now you are being loyal," she said. "That is a thing people do instead of improving themselves. It is very cheap, loyalty."

She said things like that and then she would stand at the window with her back to the room and I would see her shoulders not entirely still, and I would understand that she had learned the sentence somewhere and was trying it on me to see whether it fit.

By then I was in the shop with Emmet.

I had been apprenticed at fourteen. It was, in those years, a license with a fee and three years of hours, and I liked the work more than I have ever been willing to admit: the puddle at the base of a good weld, the sound a torch makes when you have the gas right, and the fact that a thing you had joined stayed joined. I burned my right hand badly that first winter, across the palm, and Emmet put a glove on it and told me to keep working with the other hand.

Della never got any easier. She got slower and louder, and then she got quiet, and the quiet frightened me more. She had a way of standing in the door of the shop watching Emmet work, not saying anything, and once I heard her say to him, in the yard, "You spend it all on that boy," and I heard him answer, patiently, "He's not a thing I spend it on," and after that I understood something about my situation that it would take me twenty-eight years to want to write down.

I stopped being able to read. That is not the way people say it; people say they fell behind. What happened was I had discovered that the hollow was a place where nobody asked me anything and where a boy who could read was a novelty, and I had begun to notice that a great many of the words in my books were words about people who had been given something. Inheritances. Wills. Benefactors. I got to be sixteen and could not get through a page of anything without putting it down and walking out to the coal seam in the bank and standing there.

Ruthie Milam fixed it.

She was a year ahead of me and she had a mother in a wheelchair and she kept her grades like a bank account. She found me one evening at the culvert with a book I had opened four times and closed four times and asked me, without any particular sympathy, what I was afraid of.

"I'm not afraid."

"I'm not a newspaper. What are you afraid of."

"That it's not mine."

She sat down on the concrete without cleaning it first, which nobody in that hollow did, and she said, "Everything you've ever read was written by somebody who got it off somebody else. You want to be a thing they gave something to, or you want to read?"

I said the second thing, because it was the answer she would accept.

Then I read. She made me read out loud to her, six years of it, standing at the culvert or walking the road between the school and the hardware store, and everything I know about how a sentence holds a roof up I got from a girl with a sick mother and no patience, and I have never been able to tell her so.

In the spring of that year Mrs. Ashby called me into the room with the clocks and had me stand in front of her, and looked at me the way a man at the fair looks at a horse he has just been offered for nothing.

"You want her," she said.

I did not answer.

"I asked you something."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I want her."

"And you will never have her." She said it with enormous satisfaction, her hands folded, her one shoe on. "Look around you. Look. Do you know what this house is?"

"It's a house."

"It is an hour," said Mrs. Ashby. "It is one hour of my life, held up where I can see it, and I have arranged to keep it. I have arranged everything. Every consideration. Every arrangement. Everything that ever walked through that door was arranged for." The ticking silver watch on her breast went on marking a time that had nothing to do with hers. "And you. You're going to want an arrangement made for you as well. Everyone does."

She sent me out to the gravel and stood at the door and watched me go down the drive, and I looked back once, at the top of the ridge, and Vera was at her window, and neither of us did anything with our hands.

That night I told Emmet I was going to leave the shop, and he was quiet a long time, and then he asked me whose idea it was.

"Nobody's. I want to be something more than this."

"More than what?"

"More than here."

He was sharpening a chisel against a stone wheel and he did not stop for it. "I'll tell you the one thing I know about that," he said. "You'll get there, and you'll look around, and the man who is standing where you thought you'd be is going to be wearing your boots. That's not a warning. That's just what they don't say in the books."

Then, later, at the door, when he thought I was asleep on the couch and could not hear him, he said something to my sister that I have carried ever since.

"That woman up the hill never paid me a dime and I never asked her for one. Don't you ever let him think this is a trade."