by Andrea Donderi

(image c/o Abbigail Kriebs, inkwellsandimages)

“Museums,” Christabel told Jeremy, “can be about anything.” They were staying at what had been Mrs. Hewitt’s guesthouse in North Carolina. Jeremy was almost eleven.

 “Like a person,” she went on to explain. “Or maybe a war. A single battle of that war. Camping, perhaps. Butterflies, like that black one with turquoise and gold spots. In Sweden there’s a Museum of Sour Herring! If you wanted to, you could set up a museum of this summer. You might start with Barry’s voice.”

You take a nugget of iron, you stick it in the fire, you heat it up. Obviously you can’t pick it up with your hands. You use tongs, long metal tongs. (That’s a good project for a blacksmith, making your own tongs so you can go forth and make more stuff!) You pick it up with those tongs, you hold it to the fire. That’s when it starts to glow and soften.

BARRY

And see, there’s Christabel in that big old truck Mrs. Hewitt used to drive, bumping around the curve down that gravel road, pulling up next to the mailbox, and that’s her boy Jeremy hopping out the passenger side door. The kid needs a haircut and his jeans aren’t long enough. Maybe that’s okay where he goes to school, but Barry reckons his class would have shown no mercy if anyone showed up here looking like that. (Who’s he kidding? This is no hypothetical. Barry did show up here looking exactly like that, twenty-whatever years ago.)

Now Jeremy’s standing up on his toes, tugging the mailbox open. Looks like he’s concentrating fiercely. Barry can’t hear the soft metallic chunk as the latch pulls free, but he can imagine it. Jeremy hauls out a sheaf of papers. He slips a long white envelope into the box and flips the flap shut. Then he hops back up into the truck.

There’s something about how Christabel drives, slow, crouching over the wheel, her foot probably hovering on top of the brake —such a contrast with her crisp city linen clothes and sleek dark hair and that English voice of hers. And the way she and Jeremy keep glancing over at each other, just to check that everything’s okay. What kind of guy stays away all summer from a woman like Christabel and a kid like Jeremy? An English guy, evidently. Name of Adrian.

Barry puts down the binoculars.

Barry’s ankle isn’t quite right yet. He steps unevenly down the porch and around the side of the house. Anymore he’s been all emotional about the damnedest things. And he’d be a fool to deny that ever since folks started talking about turning Mrs. Hewitt’s stuff into a museum, and Christabel showed up to work on it, he’d borne a secret irrational hope that he might somehow get back the thing he thinks of, amorphously, as his proper life.

It’s another thousand feet down to Barry’s drive, and glory hallelujah they’re stopping. Both doors swing open. They’re coming to see him.

“Mind a little company?” Christabel’s voice always makes Barry smile. “I hadn’t intended to run into town today, but that buffoon from the Chamber of Commerce called a bit ago saying he’d just set up a meeting with a couple of the trustees, and I’d better be there to run interference if needed. Jeremy can come with me, of course, but.”

“Sure. I’m not going anywhere. I’m about to fire up the forge.” Barry and Jeremy grin at each other. “Nice to have you around as a third arm, bud.”

You hold it to the fire. That’s when it starts to glow and soften. And that’s when you start whaling on it with your hammer. Even for fussy work you hit hard, precisely. There’s a rhythm, a resonance. It’s satisfying, physically and mentally.

CHRISTABEL

Which is a relief, because Christabel’s been keeping track, and there hasn’t been a peep from the wretched little thugs to whom Jeremy’s been pouring out his tremulous nearly-eleven-year-old heart. Another four or five pages in today’s edition, judging from the envelope. Who knows what he’s telling them. Why he’s scribbling to his so-called friends rather than to Adrian is anyone’s guess. Whatever else one might say about Adrian—Adrian of the thick colorless hair and continent-like forehead, Adrian can write to a deadline. Adrian always writes back.

Meanwhile, there’s probably no better way for Jeremy to spend an afternoon than thwacking away at chunks of red-hot metal with a great scraggly Southerner. Assuming he manages not to crush his own hand.

Christabel stays around long enough to watch the two of them tie on their aprons. Christabel loves seeing Jeremy kitted out like an Appalachian Pip: so earnest, so hardworking in his little leather apron, his gloves, earplugs, safety goggles.

Impulsively, she runs over and hugs him. She surprises herself by hugging Barry too, perhaps because it seems only fair. Then she heads back out to the truck.

Christabel has never met an adult other than Barry who could accurately be described as squishy. He’s muscular, but enveloping. There’s something octopus-like about him: his big head, the way his arms and legs swing and wobble when he walks. His hair isn’t long but it’s utterly flat: it falls straight out of his head. And his skin seems loosely attached, like a hefty overcoat on top of his musculoskeletal structure. (He’s a few years younger than she is. Don’t younger people have tighter skin, usually? Odd.) All of which sounds unpleasant, but it isn’t; he’s an oddly appealing person. Somehow the soul transcends the hum of its parts.

THINGS JEREMY’S LETTERS INCLUDED

• The new museum: How people couldn’t decide whether it should be about local folk art or whether it should be more general, what they call “outsider art,” based on the stuff Mrs. Hewitt had collected from all over the world. And how Christabel has been helping them make plans for both kinds of museums, just in case.
• Barry: How Barry’s dad wanted to quit his engineer job and move to the country and make useful things for people, that’s why he moved way out here and bought the place with the forge. But instead people wanted to buy candlesticks and hooks and fireplace tools, so more and more that’s what he made. Barry is really good at making things out of iron because he’s been doing it since he was Jeremy’s own age. Barry takes his truck to fairs every summer and sells his ironwork and teaches other people how to do it, too. He’s a good teacher. In fact, he’s a teacher during the school year, at a regular school. Right now, Jeremy is helping Barry work on a big order for a hotel. They’re making five chandeliers with scrolls, designed to look like an old one the owner found at an architectural salvage place, which is where you can get interesting parts from torn-down buildings. According to Barry, if civilization ever breaks down, it will be really useful to know how to make things out of metal. In the meantime, any competent blacksmith can get a job at any historical park in the country, so Jeremy will never have to sling fries in the summers. (To “sling fries” means to work at a fast food place. This is not much fun and does not pay well, but it’s a part-time job many people take while they are students.) Jeremy needs to keep making things out of metal, though, so he won’t forget how. Maybe in the fall, Jeremy can convince Mr. Sirico to organize a class excursion to a forge. Or maybe they can come back some other summer. There’s a famous tune, a blacksmith song, originally from an opera: the “Anvil Chorus.” You’ve heard it in a million cartoons. Now that Jeremy is a blacksmith, he hears it all the time in his head.
• Barns: Some of them have crisscross wood lattices up above for drying out tobacco.
• Various animals: black butterflies, rabbits running across dirt roads, and Barry’s goats and chickens, plus the cats in Mrs. Hewitt’s barn. Those cats grew up outside. They mostly don’t trust people. Alfie’s an exception. He’s a huge raggedy orange cat, very sociable. Alfie might come back to California with them, if it seems that’s what he really wants. Jeremy would like that. But Christabel guesses Alfie might prefer to stay here.

CHRISTABEL

Christabel should perhaps have signed Jeremy up for some kind of summer program in town: tennis, karate, swimming at the Y, storytelling or art at the library. That birthday of his is likely to be a soggy mess. It’s only three weeks away and he hasn’t made any friends. Do balloons and a cake make sense without a houseful of guests? But Jeremy insisted he didn’t want organized activities, and who could blame him: a quiet summer in the country with plenty to read and a friendly blacksmith down the road could be perfect, magical, something out of a book.

BARRY

Barry, having heard someone mention Christabel’s book (she’s well-known in the museum world, the person said, which is why the trustees hired her to come down here for the summer), had once asked her what it was about.

“It’s dead simple,” she told him. “Embarrassingly so.” The idea was that museums should recognize that people go there largely to strengthen relationships with the people they go there with. “No matter what kind of museum it was, even if they’d specifically mentioned wanting to learn something, the people I interviewed always ended up talking about the conversations they’d had.”

“That’s it?”

“I added a lot of guff about how you can design a museum with that purpose in mind. When I was a girl, I’d go to museums and they’d all be about the collection. The idea was to preserve and display the treasures of civilization. Later it was all about designing exhibits to teach people things, to put things in context. But even those teaching exhibits are missing something important. I think there’s so much more you can do.”

Barry could see her point. He’d put in plenty of time at historical parks and craft fairs and suchlike, pretty much every summer of his life.

“At every single demonstration, some joker always says: I bet it feels great to pound out all your frustrations. And every time I tell them: No, no, absolutely not. You have to hit hard. Sure, that can feel good, but never if you’re too worked up to be accurate. When you’re frustrated, you need to go punch a bag till you get over it. Then you can go work at the anvil.”

“See? I’ll bet they talk about that on the way home,” Christabel said, grinning.

“Maybe they do.”

It’s satisfying physically and mentally. It takes skill to know the different heats, to sense all the changes in the color of the iron. Hardest of all is to weld two pieces together. For that you want a lighter hammer, so you can be fast and delicate and accurate. You have to get both bars to just the right heat. They have to be really hot, yellow-white hot, but not so hot they’re throwing sparks on their own. Sparks tell you a lot.

CHRISTABEL

Christabel is fairly sure she’s the wrong person for this particular job. They’ve hired her too early in the game to put her expertise to best use, and she’s a beginner at the kind of trustee-wrangling and civic politics that are currently underway. But thanks to common sense, an unusual accent, some acting experience, and decent clothes, she’s getting by. The trustees have abandoned the hare-brained idea of locating the museum up here at the house; they’re working out a deal with the people restoring a big old brick building in the middle of the city. People appear to be taking her seriously.

“You’ll be fine,” her mentor Peg in San Francisco had told her. “Mostly they need an authority to quote, so they can feel okay about their decisions. And face it, you need the dough, and you could use a summer away.”

All true enough. Adrian had just abandoned a book of his own, was going through what he gruffly called a “rough patch,” and had lately been leaking equanimity-threatening volumes of vitriol. A stretch apart might give them both a chance to catch their breath.

(Troubling that Peg had noticed, though. Had it been so obvious? Christabel hadn’t said a word.)

So Christabel and Jeremy flew out as soon as Jeremy’s school was through. At the trustees’ invitation, they settled into what had been Mrs. Hewitt’s guest house, half an hour from the city. Hard to imagine anywhere less like Calcutta, Dar, Cairo, Manchester, Chicago, San Francisco. It’s not just the mountains, blue-teal and hazy in the morning, but the sounds: choruses of birds; horses, cows, chickens; sometimes, at night, coyotes giggling like teenagers. It a car rumbles by, you look out to see who it is.

That’s how they first met Barry: he’s on the road to everywhere they go. They later learn that Barry’s well known to the contingent that prefer a local slant to the museum, being a respected second-generation rural artisan, well-spoken and presentable, with all his teeth. Despite his origins, Barry’s accent is local, and he gives good interviews.

 BARRY

Barry doesn’t tell Jeremy this exactly, but he wishes his family had never left Houston. The normal middle-class suburban life had been pretty sweet, actually, and nothing’s gone quite right since his dad uprooted them and stuck them out here. Though there are compensations. You have to admit it’s beautiful on those shimmering hazy afternoons, looking past the beanfield, across the cove, up at Slattery Bald. And how would he have learned to work iron otherwise?

What Barry does say is that being an engineer is a fine trade. Blacksmiths are proto-engineers. They can make things because they have two traits: special knowledge about how the world is put together, and experience doing it. Barry’s own dad was an engineer first. Then when he moved here he became a blacksmith, which is retrograde, or backwards; Barry’s dad reverted into a historical version of himself.

No doubt Barry’s plenty smart enough to be an engineer but let’s face it, he couldn’t get himself to concentrate in college. He barely scraped through. The teaching certificate was a panicky afterthought. He doesn’t tell Jeremy any of that.

Another thing Barry doesn’t tell Jeremy is that he wonders whether he’ll ever have a family of his own.

Barry is astonished that Jeremy addresses his parents directly by their first names. He’s never met a kid who does that, except in the third person, out of disdain.

“Adrian hates special titles. He won’t even call people Doctor. Anyway, it doesn’t seem that weird to me,” Jeremy says. “Most kids say Mom and Dad, but there are always a few who don’t.”

“Maybe in California. Not here.”

Sparks tell you a lot, especially with salvaged metal. Say you’re using railings from a 19th-century house, those could be wrought iron. Or from a 1950s-era building, that’s more likely mild steel. If it’s deeply rusted, you’ll see something like a woodgrain pattern, because the iron and other impurities oxidize in layers. To find out what you’re dealing with, you do a spark test.

JEREMY

They’ve finished for the afternoon and they’re passing a Coke back and forth in the kitchen when they hear the truck outside. Spock the dog starts barking. He lollops all the way to the corner of the fenced field and puts his paws up on the rail to say hello. Christabel stops right there instead of driving up to the gate. “Hey there, Spock,” she says, and gets out of the truck, scratching him. Jeremy runs over. Barry’s still limping a little—his ankle isn’t quite right yet—but he ambles that way too.

Barry reaches down and hoists Jeremy up so he’s standing on the fence. For a moment, Jeremy’s exactly the same height as Christabel and Barry, right between them. As if he’s an adult too. It’s dizzying. Jeremy brushes a leaf out of Christabel’s hair, which feels like the most grown-up thing he’s ever done.

On Barry’s side: Spock the dog, the shed with the forge, the old house, the reservoir, the bend in the road. On Christabel’s side: the beanfields, the gap in the mountains, the road to town.

Barry has a particular smell: sweet but not dessert-sweet, more like biscuits. His eyes are light, he has lashes. Big arms. Kind of a belly.

“Hey,” Jeremy says while he’s up there, “what about my birthday? On my birthday can we go into the city and walk around the hippie market again?”

“I don’t see why not,” Christabel says.

“Care for a beer?” Barry asks Christabel.

“I don’t see why not.”

Jeremy lets go of Barry’s big warm fingers. Instead of jumping down on Christabel’s side of the fence, he hops back down on the forge side. Christabel puts one foot on the rail. Barry doesn’t hoist her up over the fence; he gives her a hand. She takes both his hands and jumps down too. Barry’s eyes are wide and shining.

BARRY

While they’re sitting there on the porch, Jeremy and Spock side by side, Barry and Christabel in the rocking chairs up top, Barry wants to talk. He’s brought out two beers. He says something tentative about being uprooted, about moving from one world to another, and that’s when he learns that Christabel grew up in Calcutta. She went to school in a buttercream-colored building, she says, with green shutters. She sounds happy, saying buttercream.

And her formative museum, the place where she and her mother and aunties used to go, was the Victoria Memorial. Like a palace, she tells him, making a fish-story gesture. Colossal, ridiculously grandiose, but she loved it. After independence, her family didn’t leave right away. They’d been in India for generations. (Most of Barry’s ancestors came from England too, minus some Germans and the obligatory one-thirty-second Cherokee, but would England be his first choice if he suddenly had to leave the United States?) In fact, once they did leave, Christabel’s family made a few stops: Tanzania for a year and a bit, only it was called Tanganyika then: briefly to Cairo; then to England, where Christabel met and married Adrian. Adrian, English to the core.

“But imperial nostalgia,” Christabel concludes crisply, “gets you nowhere.” She points at a rabbit over by the butterfly bush, his ears straight up.

Later, Barry checks the encyclopedia. It’s embarrassing to know so little about that part of history. Also embarrassing: not knowing accents. He can’t tell Brits from Australians. And there he was about to bellyache about moving here from Houston as a kid. Of all the asinine things.

But it’s all right, no reason to die the thousand deaths of awkwardness. Christabel is an extraordinarily nice person. And apparently she likes him.

To find out what you’re dealing with, you do a spark test. You touch a piece with an angle grinder or a grinding wheel. If it’s wrought iron, you’ll get straight streams of sparks. You won’t get secondary bursts like little fireworks. If it’s steel, you’ll get bursts. Generally, the more carbon it has, the more of those little bursts you get. But that’s just guesswork. You need a collection of known samples to compare the unknown one to. An exhibit, your mom might say. And even then, a spark test doesn’t tell you everything.

CHRISTABEL

The sheaf of mail from this morning is still on the dashboard. Christabel brings it inside.

Later that night, up in the guest house, she’s lying on her stomach. She’s pretty sure Jeremy is still up reading. She’s restless too, especially her calves and feet. She keeps pointing and flexing her ankles, feeling Mrs. Hewitt’s crisp percale sheets along the tops of her toes. Barry’s malty arms, his pale brimming eyes, his dry sunburnt skin, his gray cotton T-shirt.

The thing is, in that sheaf of mail was a letter. Adrian is coming. He’ll be here for Jeremy’s birthday.

Adrian’s dry, wry, compact like her. He’s her own age. He’s caustic, sardonic; he sees through most vanities, including (without invalidating) his own pride in that ridiculous thatch of hair. Adrian knows things; he’s only obtuse when he chooses to be. There’s no denying the sidelong moments of tenderness they share, the solidarity of the nightly debrief, those scratchy elbows and irritable eyebrows, all the layers of their private language. Elliptical. Gnomic.

The house creaks. Jeremy’s padding to the bathroom. She hears a trickle, then a flush, then Jeremy going back to bed. Outside the window it’s quiet, except for a distant meow, probably Alfie the orange barn cat.

Christabel’s ears have been roaring since the afternoon, because she’s made it clear that she likes Barry, and Barry has made it clear that he likes her; and quietly the idea has seeped in that this is actually possible, that this is something people sometimes do. Lots of people, in fact: characters in major works of literature, &c. ad naus. Despite exposure to same, she wonders how, exactly, people get to the point at which it happens. It’s a bad idea, of course; but still, people do it.

(And the answer to Christabel’s question is that these things begin with a conspiracy, not necessarily of intent but of acknowledged possibility; a now-or-never condition, a deadline, might push that possibility, might warm it up like a nugget of iron. Then there might arise a shared breath, a sigh, taking them both by surprise, such that, for example, you might find yourself scratching someone’s head, just a tiny friction of the scalp; and maybe the flesh itself isn’t firmly attached, it’s a little gritty. Which suggests further explorations, then successively less tentative ones, until the next thing might be to nuzzle and burrow and investigate each other’s folds and crevices and exhalations. Eventually both people start to glow and soften. Pulses and rhythms emerge, currents and fluids rise: some of them seeping, trickling in rivulets; others under increasing pressure, escaping with gasps or soundless screams, until they’re in a sticky pool, drenched and surprised. Look, we made a lake.)

BARRY

Barry doesn’t usually come up to the guesthouse, but after what happens on Thursday, he’s itching to talk. He drives all the way up, past the turnaround, and ambles awkwardly up to knock on the door. Maybe it’s not the kind of situation a kid wants to hear about, but Barry’s in a mood. Christabel pours him a beer. They sit out on the guesthouse porch, Barry and Christabel and Jeremy.

“I was coming back from the hardware store,” Barry says, and I figured I’d stop by Cullen Cove to look in on Miss Lucy McSwain.” Miss Lucy is a nice lady who was almost done teaching when he first came here. She’s pretty good at looking after herself: she puts up mason jars the old-fashioned way, stacked on a shelf along the top of the kitchen wall, different colored peppers arranged in rings, tomatoes, fruit, everything glistening. Still, it doesn’t hurt to stop in if you’re over that way.

“When I pulled up, there was a Jeep in the driveway with Ohio plates.” Barry rolled down the window. There was a figure near the porch, poised with what looked like a weapon.

“Then I heard someone yell ‘Son of a bitch’ in a Janis Joplin voice. It took me a few beats to figure out what was going on. It was Julie, Miss Lucy’s niece back from Cincinnati. She’d grabbed a shovel. She was hacking away at a great big snake.”

Barry drains his beer. “There have always been snakes under that porch,” he says. “Black snakes. Completely harmless.”

Julie cried out again. This time the shovel made a thump and something flipped up into the air. It was the snake, or rather part of the snake. It landed on the clothes wire and stuck there.

(Julie’s sturdy: pointy chin, squinty eyes, flat reddish-brown hair. As Barry tells the story it crosses his mind that she’s probably no older than Christabel, but she’s from another planet entirely.)

The snake hung there. It was headless, writhing.

“Jesus, Julie.”

“It’s a snake.” She was panting. Her face was contorted.

“It’s a black snake. They’re completely harmless.”

But Julie was freaking out, and Barry couldn’t help feeling a little spooked by that writhing, so he stumped over. His ankle still wasn’t quite right. He took the shovel from her and calmly, deliberately, pried what remained of the snake off the wire.

“There wasn’t anywhere I had to go in a hurry, so I stayed and dug a hole under the butterfly bush. I buried the snake in it, body and head together.” The bush, true to its name, hosts a flurry of butterflies. Some are huge and speckled. Fritillaries, he remembers someone saying, maybe Miss Lucy herself. And swallowtails, the black ones with turquoise.

“Miss Lucy came out to the porch. I didn’t really want to stay for a Coke, but it was the polite thing to do. Then I drove straight up here, and twice on the way I had to swerve so I didn’t hit a rabbit.”

Barry catches Jeremy looking at his hands—he’s scraped half the label off his beer. Jeremy stands up and stretches.

“We have news too,” Jeremy says. “You’ll get to meet my dad. He’s coming for my birthday.” Barry looks straight at Christabel, who smiles and looks straight back. “His name is Adrian,” Jeremy adds helpfully. “He’s from England and he’s a magazine editor.”

Barry feels the pressure of the air change, almost a whooshing sound in his chest and head. It’s so loud that it seems impossible that Christabel and Jeremy aren’t hearing it too.

A spark test doesn’t tell you everything. Any unknown metal, try cutting into three little strips. Draw them out to about the size of a vanilla wafer. Heat them up to critical, then quench one piece in water, one in canola oil, and the other one just air cool. Scratch them with a file. Snap them in half with a wrench. How easily do they break? How fine is the grain of the metal?

CHRISTABEL

When the birthday itself arrives, there’s cake, courtesy of Miss Lucy, with buttercream and peaches. Balloons, too. Christabel has always wanted to surprise Jeremy with a room that’s knee-deep in balloons, so you have to wade through them. And pop them with hatpins, which she remembers doing at friends’ birthdays in Calcutta. She knows Jeremy’s enjoying this. They all are. Even Adrian, always at his best when faced with the absurd, gets into the spirit of it: crawling through balloons, flopping on the floor, cheering with that braying voice of his, leaving Jeremy to do most of the popping.

JEREMY

As days go, Jeremy reflects as he waits to fall asleep, it was a good one. If Barry had been there too, it would have been perfect. You probably couldn’t get a museum to simulate the taste of the cake, although perhaps you could provide samples. Otherwise:

• You probably could simulate a peaches-and-buttercream scent.
• The balloons—they didn’t just pop them, they made loud rude noises by rubbing an index finger along the side—would be easy enough to arrange. That’d be a great finale to the exhibit.
• The entrance could have huge arrows arching across the sky from California, representing the arrival of Jeremy and Christabel, swooping down to the curve at the bottom of the hill where the mailbox was.
• It’d be nice to have something like a forge for people to bang on.
• Also maybe sample rabbits and fritillaries and swallowtails. Black bees. Models of Spock the dog and Alfie the cat.
• A jukebox with all the records from Mrs. Hewitt’s guest house.
• Obviously the Anvil Chorus playing again as you left, because it’s such a great tune. That would make everyone go home in a good mood.

Years later, pretty much grown up, finished with his engineering degree, nearly done with his master’s and playing drums in a band called the S’Mores, whenever Jeremy thinks of a thing, it’s likely that he’s also thinking about the Museum of That Thing. He can’t help it. It’s the result of having Christabel for a mother. Just as his facial expressions are pure Adrian.

Jeremy’s girlfriend Pen works with Christabel. She’s in the museum business, too, and like Jeremy, she grew up in a museum family. She thinks it’s odd that Jeremy hasn’t followed in the footsteps of either of his parents. In fact, nobody in Jeremy’s known ancestry has ever been an engineer.

What Pen doesn’t realize, and Jeremy himself doesn’t till years later, is that Jeremy’s an engineer and a drummer, and both of those skills were forged in the forge. Jeremy is still alive and anything could happen next, but he does know that if there were a Museum of Jeremy’s Whole Life, there would have to be a gallery, or at least a big bright alcove, dedicated to the summer Jeremy turned eleven.

The thing is, though: even at the time, Jeremy knew there was some adult reason why Barry wasn’t there for that party, and in some nebulous way he knew not to ask about it.

What if there were a Museum of Barry? Or a Museum of Christabel? What would they include from that summer? What would they leave out? Because if you did an overarching Museum of That Summer, Jeremy has no idea what kind of negative-space shenanigans you’d need to get across the absence of Barry on that day.

Andrea Donderi grew up mostly in Montreal. She writes stories, essays, and guts-of-the-Internet manuals, and lives in Alameda, California.