The forge sat at the south edge of the yard with the night closed down around it, and the night closed down around it tonight the way it closed down around it most nights — the cold plains wind off the Black Hills coming in under the door at the floor and the heat of the coals coming up off the bed and meeting the cold at about waist-height, where the meeting made the small slow eddies of air that anyone who spent any time in a forge learned to read as part of the building. The coal smoke had thinned to its evening register, the sharp morning bite of fresh coal worn off by the day's burning into the slower mellow tar smell of a fire that had been fed and refed since first light. The anvil at the center had gone cold along its outer edges and held its warm interior the way an anvil held its warm interior at evening, the heat concentrated where the day's strikes had concentrated it. The slack tub at the eastern wall gave off its small clean steel smell from the day's quenchings, the water in it gone the cloudy green of water that had been quenching scale for a season. The secondary anvil at the south wall, where Sigurd worked, sat in the smaller heat of the smaller bed.
Sigurd was at the secondary bed banking the coals for the night's slower burn when Walt's footsteps came across the floor behind him.
He did not turn. He had been at the forge since before the morning's water runs and through the morning's hinge pin set and through the afternoon's strap pieces under Walt's hand on the main anvil, and the day in his shoulders sat the way the day sat in a boy who had carried water and patched the sod corner of the lean-to under the south fence and stood at two anvils for the better part of his waking hours. The yoke's small permanent compression rode the muscle along the tops of his shoulders. The patching from the afternoon had left grit under his fingernails that the forge's grit had since covered over. His apron was dark at the chest where the day's scale had stuck and dark at the front of the legs where the strap-piece weld had thrown small fine sparks down across the leather. He banked the coals with the long iron rod the way Walt had taught him to bank coals, the small careful adjustments that produced a bed that would hold its heat through the night without consuming itself, and his hands moved at the practiced unhurried rate of a boy who had been banking coals at this bed for two years now.
Walt stopped at the secondary anvil. He set his big hand flat on the back of Sigurd's shoulder for a beat and the hand was the heavy old hand of a man who had been at the trade for forty years, broad-knuckled and dry at the palm and warm through with the heat the forge had been giving back to it. The hand rested. The hand did not pat. Walt did not pat. Walt's affection had been measured out across his life in beats of contact that did not announce themselves and did not need to.
"Strap pieces hold true," Walt said. His voice came out the way it came out at the end of a long day, dry from the smoke and quiet from the years. "Gate foreman won't get any adjustments past me in the morning."
"No sir."
"Hinge pin set is racked. I marked the four you finished. Anyone asks, the four are yours."
"Yes sir."
Walt let the hand stay another beat. Then he lifted it. He stood at the secondary anvil with his weight set on his right leg the way he set it when the left knee had had its day, and he gave the small dry nod he gave when the day had been a good day at the forge and the apprentice across from him had not needed instruction past what the iron had given. The nod was rare. The nod meant the only thing Walt's nods ever meant, which was that the apprentice across from the secondary anvil had been trusted with the bed for the night's burning and that the bed would still be a bed in the morning when Walt came back to it.
"Bank deep on the main," Walt said. "Wind off the plain's coming up. The bed wants it tonight."
"Yes sir."
"Lock the front. I'll come round at first light."
"Yes sir."
Walt turned. He went the slow even way across the floor he went at the end of every day, the bent posture of the long trade easing fractionally as the walk loosened the knee, and he picked his coat off the peg at the door and put the coat on and pulled the door open to the cold. The plains wind came in once at the floor and the coals shifted in their banking with the small soft sound coals made when a draft found them, and Walt closed the door behind him, and the wind went out with him.
Sigurd finished the banking. He banked the main bed deep the way Walt had told him to bank it, the iron rod moving in his hand at the unhurried rate, and the bed settled into the long slow heat that the bed would hold through the night. He came back to the secondary anvil and laid the rod across its rest and stood a moment with the heat coming up off the main bed across the room and the cold coming in along the floor under the door, and let the day in his shoulders ease the small amount it eased when a boy had been standing through a long day and had come to the part of the day where the standing had a different texture.
He had not yet eaten his evening meal.
He had not yet eaten because he had not yet gone for it. The cookhouse foreman set aside a portion for him most evenings at the back kitchen door and Sigurd most evenings collected it on the way back from the forge to the lean-to under the south fence, and most evenings he ate the portion sitting on the bench inside the lean-to with the patched sod corner at his elbow. Tonight he had been planning to do the same. He was about to lift the bar off the rack and check the coals on the secondary bed one more time before he went for it.
The forge door opened.
It opened the small careful way the forge door opened when the person opening it was not in a hurry to be inside the building before the person had decided to be. The plains wind came in once at the floor again and the coals on the main bed shifted again, and Gudrun came in behind the wind with the cloth-wrapped bundle in her hands and the door closed behind her with the small soft closure of a door pulled to by a girl who had spent her life learning which doors made the sound and which doors did not.
Sigurd turned. The day in his shoulders did the small involuntary thing it did when she came through a door, the brief uncrumpling at the seam between the shoulder blades that he had not yet learned to govern. He set the iron rod across its rest the rest of the way and he set his weight even and he took the apron off the chest with his hands and wiped his hands down the front of the leather where the scale would not stick, and he set his face at the careful undisturbed expression that was the expression he had taught himself to wear when she came through a door.
"You hadn't eaten yet," Gudrun said. She said it the way she said most things to him, the small even statement of a true thing about his evening that she had figured out from the other side of the compound and had no embarrassment about being known to have figured out. She came across the floor to the overturned crate that Walt sometimes used as a footrest at the secondary anvil. She set the bundle on the crate. She sat down on the crate beside the bundle with the long uncomplicated sitting-down of a girl who had not yet learned to sit any way except the way her body wanted to sit, and she folded back the cloth.
The smell of the meal came up out of the cloth into the forge air, and the smell mixed with the coal smoke and the steel and the slack tub the way warm food smelled when it was set down in a place that had been smelling of warm iron for hours — the small clean sweetness of cookhouse bread, the brown grease smell of the cookhouse foreman's evening stew, the lighter sharper edge of two pickled cucumbers laid alongside on the same cloth. The cloth was the coarse handwoven kind the cookhouse used for trade goods. The grain of the cloth had the slightly rough catch against a boy's palm that the handwoven cloths had at a year's wear. Gudrun smoothed the edge of it without thinking, as though the smoothing were a piece of the meal itself.
"Stew's hot still," she said. "I came across the yard fast."
"You shouldn't have come across the yard fast in the cold."
"I came across the yard fast because the stew was hot still."
She gave him the small unguarded version of the smile she did not do at her father's table. He sat down on the second crate at the secondary anvil's other side, the crate the size of the day in his shoulders set against the crate the size of her on the other side of the bundle. He had wiped his hands on the apron and the apron had not gotten the worst of it off and he wiped them once more on the cleaner inner part of the apron at his waist and took the spoon she had brought folded inside the cloth and started in on the stew.
He ate the slow careful way he ate most things. The stew was good. The cookhouse foreman had put the last of the season's potatoes in it and a piece of the salt beef the southern arc had sent up the previous week, and the broth had the long-cooked richness of a broth that had been kept warm at the back of the stove since the cookhouse's main service had ended. He took the first spoonfuls slowly because the stew was hot still and because his throat had not had anything but water on it since the morning bread on the bench. The salt of the beef came across his tongue in the slow patient way salt came across the tongue of a boy who had been working through a day in a hot place and had been losing salt in his own sweat across the day's hours without thinking about it. The bread he tore in half and dipped one half in the broth and ate that and tore the other half and dipped that and ate that.
Gudrun watched him eat. She did not pretend not to. She had taken on the watching the way she had taken on the bringing of the bread and the cheese in the mornings, without pretending it was a route she happened to be taking. She sat on the crate with her hands in her lap and her boots crossed at the ankles and the small thirteen-year-old patience of a girl who had decided that watching the boy across the anvil eat the meal she had brought him was the part of her evening she had been organizing the rest of her evening around.
"Father brought back a wagon of walnut from the eastern run," she said, after a while. "From the migration that came through last week. They had a wagon of it. He traded for the whole load."
"Walnut?"
"Walnut." She made a small face. "He's going to panel the second-ring office with it. The one off the elevator stair. He says the second ring's wives complain about the bare lumber walls when they come up for the spring meetings and that walnut will sit better in the photographs."
Sigurd thought about that. He ate another spoonful of the stew. He thought about the walnut.
"Walnut warps if it isn't seasoned," he said. "If they had it in a wagon out of one of the burnt cities it hasn't been seasoned. He's going to put it up and the walls are going to move on him by next winter."
"That's what I thought." She did not look smug about being right. She did. "I said it to him. He said walnut from the burnt cities was seasoned by being burnt around for a season."
"Burnt around isn't seasoned."
"That's what I told him."
He almost smiled. The careful undisturbed expression eased a fraction at the seam at his mouth and went back to its careful undisturbed register before it got loose enough to be a smile, and Gudrun saw the eased fraction and counted it the way she counted such fractions when they came, which was as her morning's main reward.
She talked about the second-ring sycophants for a while. She did not call them sycophants, because she had not had the word given to her yet, but she described the men's wives who curtsied at her in the second-ring corridor when she came past, and the men's sons who stood straighter and held doors longer than the doors required, and the men who lowered their voices to the small softened register grown men sometimes lowered their voices to when they were talking to her father's daughter and not to her father. She described one of the second-ring sons who had told her at the spring meeting that her hair was the color of a sunrise. She said the boy had said it with his eyes already on the wall behind her shoulder and that she had stood there a beat with the sunrise hanging between them and then had said thank you and walked on, and that the boy had told two of his friends about it within the hour and that the wives of the men of the second ring had all said something complimentary to her by the end of the afternoon.
"They call me princess," she said. She said it the way she said most things, evenly. The corner of her mouth turned down a fraction. "Daddy's princess. The second-ring wives say it. They think they're being warm. They are not being warm. They are putting a leash on me with the word. The leash goes back through the word to my father and then through my father to whichever piece of leverage the husband of the second-ring wife is trying to apply to my father that week. The leash is a piece of business. The word is the piece of business. I am thirteen and I know all of this and they think they are being warm."
Sigurd ate. He chewed the last spoonful of the stew slowly and set the spoon on the cloth and reached for the first pickled cucumber and bit into it. The sharp clean vinegar bite of the cucumber went across his tongue against the salt of the beef and washed it clean. He chewed.
"You're not a princess," he said.
She did not say anything to that.
"Princess is a word the second-ring wives use because the word does the business you said the word does. The word is not yours. You are Gudrun. You are also the daughter of the man who runs the settlement, which is a thing about you, and the thing has its weight in the second-ring corridor, but the thing is not the larger thing about you. The larger thing about you is you."
"What is the larger thing about me."
He thought about it. He chewed the rest of the cucumber. He set the cucumber's small end on the cloth.
"You told me a season ago that the steel coming out of the forge had changed because of Walt's apprentice, and that you had noticed it before anyone in the second ring had noticed it because you watch the things that come out of the forge and you do not watch the things that come out of the cookhouse, because the cookhouse is loud and the forge is quiet and you pay attention to quiet places." He set his hands on his knees. "I have not had anybody in the compound say a thing like that to me since I came to Cutter's Bend. Walt has not said it. Walt would not say it. He notices and he says nothing because that is how Walt is. The second-ring sons would not say it because the second-ring sons do not look at the forge. You said it because you said it. That is the larger thing about you. You see the quiet places and you say true things about them out loud. That is not a princess. That is a person."
She was very still on the crate. Her hands in her lap had stopped doing the small unconscious folding her hands had been doing across the front of her apron. The corner of her mouth had come back up the fraction it had come down a beat before.
"Sigurd."
"Yes."
"That is the longest you have said anything since I started bringing you bread."
"It needed saying."
She held that. She let it sit. She looked at the secondary anvil and at the rod across its rest and at the small heat of the main bed across the floor, and she did not look at his face because looking at his face would have required of her face a piece of arrangement that her face was not at thirteen yet ready to perform. She lifted the cloth off the crate. She folded it. She tucked the spoon inside the folded cloth.
"I'll bring you breakfast at the bench in the morning," she said.
"I'll be at the bench."
She got up off the crate the long uncomplicated way she had got down onto it, and she carried the folded cloth in her hand across the floor to the door, and she turned at the door and looked back at him at the secondary anvil with the small unarranged version of her face that nobody in the compound saw, and she pulled the door open and the cold came in once at the floor again and the coals on the main bed shifted again in the deep banking. She went out. The door closed behind her with the same small soft closure.
The forge held the warmth she had left in it for a few breaths after the door closed. The warmth was not the warmth of the coals. The warmth was the warmth of a girl having been across the secondary anvil from him in the cold of the evening with a cloth-wrapped bundle of stew on a crate between them and the line of her boots crossed at the ankles in his secondary peripheral. The warmth thinned. The cold from under the door came up under the warmth and replaced it the patient inevitable way cold replaced warmth in a room with one heat source at the far end and one heat source at the near end and a door between the room and the plains, and the day in his shoulders came back the small fraction it had eased while she was on the crate, and he sat at the secondary anvil for a beat with the cucumber-end on the empty space where the cloth had been.
He stood up.
He had not yet done his own work.
His own work tonight was a piece of scrap iron he had set into the secondary coals at the morning's first banking. The scrap was a length of old rebar that had come in with the previous month's migration out of the Cascadia line — one of the long rough pieces the migrants had pulled out of the slab of a parking garage on their walk east and had been carrying as trade goods until the trade had not worked out at the gate. Walt had taken the rebar in for the value of the iron in it. The iron in it was bad iron. Walt had said so over the rebar with the small dry shake of his head he gave at bad iron, the iron not the iron the trade had been before the burning of the cities had run its slow corruption through the world's steel supply, the iron weak at the grain and full of the small mineral pockets that bad iron carried that no amount of heating and hammering ever fully cleared. He had given the length of it to Sigurd to practice with. He had said: see what you can do with it.
Sigurd had been seeing what he could do with it for a week.
He pulled the rebar out of the coals with the long tongs. It came out at the deep cherry that the secondary bed could hold, the color even along the length, the color that meant the iron was at the temperature where the iron's structure would move under the hammer. He carried it to the secondary anvil. He laid the rebar across the horn at the angle that the long pieces wanted to be laid across the horn. He took the smaller hammer in his right hand the way Walt had taught him to take the smaller hammer, the grip loose at the bottom of the haft, the wrist flexible above the grip.
He brought the hammer down.
The hammer came down at the rate it came down most nights when he was alone at the secondary anvil with a piece of practice iron, the steady close rhythm of an apprentice working a piece without an audience, the percussion ringing back into the building's air at the high clear note that the smaller hammer rang at against the secondary anvil's smaller face. He brought it down again. He brought it down a third time.
On the third strike the thing arrived.
He could not have said in words what arrived. He had no language for what arrived. He was twelve. He had been at the secondary anvil for two years and had hit pieces of iron at this anvil more times than he had counted and had felt the iron move under the hammer the iron's regular way each of those times, and what arrived on the third strike was not the iron's regular way. The iron's regular way was a feeling at the wrist — the small report of the hammer back through the haft, the boy's wrist learning whether the strike had taken or had skipped. What arrived on the third strike was not a feeling at the wrist. It was a feeling further in. It was the feeling of seeing the iron from a place that was not the eye and not the hand and not the wrist. It was the feeling of seeing the iron from inside the iron.
He saw the grain.
He saw the grain the way a boy in a creek bed saw a creek bed in clear water at noon, with the small pebbles distinct against the larger pebbles and the long flecks of clay distinct against the small pebbles and the slow shift of the larger pebbles distinct against the bed's underlying stone. He saw the grain of the rebar at the place the hammer had struck and he saw the grain of the rebar two inches further along where the hammer had not struck and he saw the grain of the rebar at the cooling end where the cherry was fading toward the dull. He saw the small mineral pockets the bad iron carried. He saw them as small dark spots inside the grain — three of them along the length of the piece, the largest one about a third of the way back from the strike. He saw the long fine cracks the burning of the cities had run through the iron's structure when the rebar had been part of a slab in a parking garage that had failed under fire. He saw the cracks as small bright lines along the grain, oriented the way the load on the slab had oriented them. He saw the grain ahead of where the next strike would land and he saw the grain behind where the last strike had landed and he saw, with a small unbidden completeness that did not feel to him at twelve like magic and did not feel to him at twelve like anything except seeing, exactly the way the grain wanted to be moved.
He brought the hammer down a fourth time.
The hammer landed at the place his eye that was not his eye had told him to land it. The grain at the strike site moved. The pocket a third of the way back from the strike moved with it — not in a way the eye could have seen if the eye had been an ordinary eye, in the way the iron's interior moved when the strike at one end of a hot bar pushed the structure along its length, the pocket sliding a fraction along the grain toward the cooling end where the cooling end was not yet ready to receive it. He saw the pocket slide. He saw it stop a fraction short of where his eye had told him it would stop. He adjusted the next strike for the fraction without thinking about the adjusting.
The hammer came down a fifth time.
The pocket slid the fraction his eye had told him it would slide. It met the cooling end and it could not enter the cooling end and it had nowhere left to slide back to, and the strike came down a sixth time and the pocket gave up its mineral the way a pocket gave up its mineral when the iron's grain had been moved around it from every direction and the pocket no longer had a structure to sit inside, and the pocket emptied out into the iron's grain and the grain closed over the place the pocket had been, and the pocket was gone.
He stood at the secondary anvil with the hammer in his right hand and the tongs in his left and his eye that was not his eye still in the iron, and he did not have a word for what he had done, but he had a word for what he could see now: he could see what Walt had been able to do at the secondary anvil and what Walt had not been able to do at the secondary anvil. Walt had been able to take the pocket out of the iron by working the piece across the main anvil with the larger hammer over a long stretch of the evening, the way good smiths had been taking pockets out of bad iron for as long as good smiths had been working bad iron. Walt had not been able to see the pocket while the pocket was inside the iron. Walt had been working blind to the inside the way every smith Sigurd had ever heard of had been working blind to the inside, the smith reading the outside of the piece and the temperature of the bed and the report of the hammer back through the haft, and inferring the inside from the outside the way good smiths had been inferring the inside for as long as good smiths had been inferring it.
Sigurd was not inferring.
He worked the rebar through the rest of the small pockets the same way he had worked the first one. He found the second pocket and slid it to the cooling end and emptied it out. He found the third pocket and did the same. He found the long fine cracks the burning of the cities had run through the grain and he saw the way the cracks oriented themselves along the lines of the failed load, and he worked the grain across the lines of the failed load until the lines were no longer lines, the strikes coming down at the rate and angle his eye that was not his eye told him the strikes wanted to come down at, the smaller hammer in his right hand at the easy rhythm of a hand that was being directed by something further in than the hand. The iron at the secondary anvil moved under the hammer the way iron moved when iron had been seen from inside.
He worked the long piece down. He worked it down the way he and Walt would have worked it down together if Walt had been at the main anvil with the bigger hammer and the bigger heat, except that Sigurd was working it alone at the secondary anvil with the smaller hammer and the smaller heat and the iron was coming under his hand the way the iron at the main anvil under Walt's hand had not come even at Walt's best evenings. The piece came down to a rough length the size of a working blade. He laid the rough length back across the horn of the secondary anvil and he refined the line of it the way Walt had taught him to refine a line, and he refined it past the line Walt had taught him to refine to, because his eye that was not his eye was telling him where the next line was. He took the rough length to the cooling shelf and let the color go down a few degrees and brought it back to the secondary anvil and finished the bevel at the cooler color and let the bevel set the way a bevel set at the cooler color.
He carried the blade across the floor to the slack tub.
The slack tub at the eastern wall held the day's quenching water gone the cloudy green it went at a season's end. The oil tub sat beside it on the wooden stand Walt had built into the east wall when Walt had been forty and the wood of the stand had gone dark across the decades with the slow oil that had crept into it. The oil in the tub was the dark rendered oil Walt mixed himself from the cookhouse's pork fat and the cooking grease and the small amounts of mineral oil they could spare. It had the specific pungent smell of an oil tub that had been quenching for years — the rendered fat at its base, the iron scale that had built into the bottom of the tub through the long quenchings, the small fine bite at the top of the smell where the oil had been heated and cooled and reheated more times than the oil itself remembered.
Sigurd held the blade above the oil tub with the tongs. The blade was at the cherry that the eye that was not his eye told him the blade wanted to be at for the quench. He let the cherry hold one further beat. Then he brought the blade down into the oil at the angle the oil wanted to receive it.
The oil hissed once, and the hiss had the long even sustained note of a quench going correctly, and the steam came up off the surface of the oil in the small thick rolling cloud the oil produced at this temperature with this kind of piece, and the smell of the rendered fat went sharp at the top of the cloud the way it went sharp when the oil was meeting steel that was meeting it correctly. Sigurd held the blade under the oil at the depth and the orientation his eye that was not his eye was telling him to hold it at, and he held it for the length of breath that the eye told him to hold it for, and he lifted the blade out of the oil.
The blade came out dull.
It came out dull in a way that no blade Sigurd had quenched at this tub had come out before. The dullness was not the dullness of a quench that had failed. The quenches that failed came out at the surface with the wrong color, the off-iron gray of a piece that had not held its temper, or the deep blue of a piece that had taken too much heat back out of the oil. This blade came out dull at the surface in the way a stone came out dull at the surface — the dullness was the dullness of a thing that had been packed solid all the way through, the surface dull because the surface had nothing left in it that wanted to catch the light because the inside of the thing was packed all the way to the surface with itself.
He turned the blade in the tongs. He held it under the secondary bed's heat at a distance to dry the oil off. The oil came off the surface in the small clean sheets it came off a properly quenched piece in. The blade dried.
He set the blade across the secondary anvil's face.
He stood at the secondary anvil for a long beat with the eye that was not his eye reading the dried blade in front of him. He was twelve. He had not yet had any other adult set a piece of finished steel in front of him for comparison. He had been at this forge for two years and Walt had been the only smith he had ever worked with and Walt had been the standard the boy had set his hand against without the boy ever having anything else to set his hand against. But the eye that was not his eye was telling him that the blade on the secondary anvil's face was a kind of steel that Walt had not made at any time Sigurd had been at this forge. The grain was tight in the blade the way grain was tight in steel that had been worked above the level Walt worked at. The cracks the burning of the cities had run through the rebar were not in the blade. The pockets were not in the blade. The blade was a thing that had been built from the inside out by a hand that had been seeing the inside as the hand was building it.
Sigurd put down the tongs.
He laid the smaller hammer across its rest. He laid the iron rod across its rest. He stood at the secondary anvil with the blade on the face of it and he ran his thumb along the flat of the blade above the bevel the way Walt ran his thumb along the flat of every piece Walt finished, the small reading of the grain that good smiths did with the pad of the thumb because the thumb was the part of the hand that read the small differences in iron most reliably. The grain under his thumb ran even and tight from the heel of the blade to the point. The flat had the small slick density along it that good iron had at the surface and that bad iron never had at the surface, and the slick density did not run out at any part of the flat the way the slick density of an ordinary blade ran out at the place the grain weakened.
He thought about Walt's nod at the end of the day.
He thought about Walt saying the four hinge pins were his and that anyone who asked, the four were his.
He thought about Walt putting his hand on his shoulder.
He thought about the blade on the secondary anvil's face.
He stood at the anvil and he was twelve years old and he was tired in the long deep way a boy was tired after a day that had started before first light and had been the day this day had been, and he had taken a piece of bad iron out of the burnt cities and worked it into something that the eye that was not his eye was telling him was something other than Walt could make.
He picked the blade up off the face.
He held it in his hand. The bone of the haft had not been wrapped yet. The bare tang was warm against his palm where the residual heat of the steel ran out of the blade into his skin. The blade had the density in it his eye had been telling him it had. He could feel the density through the haft as a small steady weight that an ordinary blade did not give back.
He stood at the secondary anvil with the blade in his hand and the forge held its evening warmth around him and the cold sat at the floor under the door and the coals on the main bed banked deep behind him, and he did not say anything to the empty forge because there was nobody in the empty forge to say anything to. He set the blade back across the face of the secondary anvil. He laid the coarse rag from the cooling shelf across the blade to hide it from any morning eye that came in before he had decided what he was going to do with it. He banked the secondary bed the way Walt had taught him to bank the secondary bed at the night's last hour, the small careful adjustments that would let the bed hold its low warmth until first light. He took the apron off his neck and hung it on the peg. He took his coat off the peg beside the apron and put the coat on.
He went to the door.
He stood at the door a beat with his hand on the latch. He looked back at the secondary anvil and the coarse rag laid across the face of it and the small low warmth of the secondary bed glowing under the cinder of the banking, and he thought about Gudrun on the crate with the cloth-wrapped bundle and the small unarranged version of her face that nobody in the compound saw, and he thought about Walt's hand on his shoulder, and he thought about the blade he had laid the rag across.
He pulled the door open.
The cold came in.
He went out into it and pulled the door to behind him with the same small soft closure that Walt had pulled it to with and that Gudrun had pulled it to with, and the plains wind off the Black Hills met him at the south edge of the yard and went through his coat in the way the plains wind went through a coat at this hour at this season, and he walked across the gravel toward the lean-to under the south fence at the long unhurried pace of a boy who had a thing in him now that he did not yet have a word for and that he was going to carry inside himself across the gravel for the length of the walk home without examining it, the way a boy carried things he did not yet have words for, until the boy was old enough for the words.
He walked.
The grain elevator at the western horizon held its dark concrete line against the night sky.
The forge behind him held its small low warmth under the cinder of the banking.
The blade on the secondary anvil's face waited under the rag for the morning.