A Book of Days: Books of Furnass

Also by Richard Snodgrass

The Pattern Maker

Holding On

Across the River

All Fall Down

Some Rise

The Building

There’s Something in the Back Yard

An Uncommon Field: The Flight 93

Temporary Memorial

Kitchen Things: An Album of Vintage Utensils and Farm-Kitchen Recipes

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2020 by Richard Snodgrass

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

Published by Calling Crow Press

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Book design by Book Design Templates, LLC

Cover design by Jack Ritchie

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-9997700-9-2

Library of Congress catalog control number: 2020909634

For Ron Arias

and, of course, as with everything,

for Marty

I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later. . . .

Michael Herr, Dispatches

Contents

PRELUDE

THE BOOK OF LOVE  I

IN THE SHADOW OF THE VALLEY I

THE JOURNAL OF THOMAS KEATING

IN THE SHADOW OF THE VALLEY II

THE BOOK OF LOVE II

THE BOOK

—it’s large for an orderly book of the period, 8-inches by 4-and-a-half inches though less than an inch thick, made for use at a garrison or carried in a haversack rather than tucked inside a soldier’s tunic, bound in brown leather and hinged at the top— rests now in the corner of a trunk among old bed linens and blankets where it has been for more than a hundred and fifty years, placed there in the 1850s when it was discovered under a mattress thirty years earlier when a young boy on an iron plantation in Western Pennsylvania knew he should destroy the book or throw it away but couldn’t bring himself to do so, the book forgotten as the boy grew to a man, had replaced his father as ironmaster at the blast furnace and then gone on to found his own company, a steamworks, had started his own family and built his own home on the slope of the valley’s hill above the town, when the book and the trunk and other items from his father’s house that no one knew what else to do with were moved to the new house and then stored in a dark corner of a cellar storeroom, handed down from generation to generation, or rather, forgotten about from generation to generation, until in the 1930s a fire destroyed the house on the hillside and the trunk was discovered in the ruins, still sequestered in the back of the cellar, intact and unscathed, moved again to the new home of the great-great-grandson of the boy who discovered it in its original hiding place, a blockhouse on the edge of the wilderness that was America, placed there in 1776 for safekeeping by a young woman and an ex-soldier without hands, the book placed there initially a decade earlier at the time of what became known as the French and Indian war by an Ensign of the 42nd Royal Regiment of Foot, the Black Watch, who had holed up in the blockhouse to write his story along with that of the mother of the girl and how the ex-soldier came to have his hands chopped off by Indians, the orderly book, a day book, a book of days, the days when it was written and the days when it impacted and changed the lives of those who touched it, all those many years ago, hidden away in the corner of the trunk keeping its silence, waiting to be read to come to life again . . . waiting. . . .

THE BOOK OF LOVE

I

1817

There were crows in the trees, calling, calling. There were crows on the hillside, flying away. The boy and girl ran through the woods, both in their bare feet, the girl leading the way, running up the hill away from the river, the buildings close to the river. As they climbed higher into the woods, the boy, Colin, stopped to look back down the hill. Through the trees he could see the cluster of buildings of the ironworks below. The forge and the rolling and splitting mill along the bank. The stone furnace partially hidden, tucked away in a hollow. The Ironmaster’s House, his house, built of the same fieldstone as the furnace, on a rise above the works. Thick black smoke from the furnace and the mounds to make charcoal plumed above the steep valley. And sitting among the other buildings in the mill yard, the old brick blockhouse. All that remained of some earlier conflict, a long-ago war. The abandoned building where he and his sister had found the Book of Love. The book he carried now, on their way to the secret place.

Come on, Colin, Lydia called to him from farther up the slope. Hurry up! I’ll beat you there!

She turned and ran on. Her long muslin dress like a vision, flitting among the maples and white oaks and hickory, in and out of shadow and sunlight, farther up into the forest. The trees were just beginning to bud in early spring, a frosting of green, like confection. Like something his mother might powder on a cake as a treat. The crows flew startled from the trees as his older sister passed. Then Lydia was gone, out of sight among the brush, beyond the edge of a ravine cut into the hillside. Where the secret place was. His heart racing with anticipation, Colin hurried on, clutching with his free hand for handholds among the low- hanging branches, keeping the book close to his side.

By the time he got to the secret place she was already inside. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled through the entrance. It was a tangle of blackberry bushes, tucked into the side of a dry creek bed, the branches pulled down from their own weight to form a tunnel several feet long. At the end of the tunnel, the interwoven vines formed a natural arbor, a latticework cave tall enough for a child of eleven or fourteen to sit upright. Sunlight filtered down through the vines, a green luminous shell. Lydia was sitting there waiting for him. Impatient. As Colin got situated beside her, Lydia took the Book of Love from him and opened it on her outstretched legs. She waited until Colin was still. Then she intoned, pretending to read the strange words:

"Ba minik do sil Elis abeth so miba brea an sole."

What does it mean? Colin asked.

It says the ways of love are wondrous and strange. That you must become an acolyte of love or it will turn you away.

What’s an acolyte? I thought I had to become a disciple of love.

It’s the same thing. Only an acolyte is more devoted.

Then I’ll be an acolyte. I believe, he said, quivering with excitement. Having played the game before.

His sister took the Book of Love and pressed the spine to his forehead. In response, he made a circle on his breast with two fingers, the way she told him the Book instructed. Then she leafed through the pages until she found another passage. This one seemed to particularly please her.

"An brothar braya reedh riompi, glassara ar gach toby de."

What does it say this time?

It says a brother who is a true acolyte of love is allowed to look at my bare legs.

All the way up?

The Book of Love doesn’t say. I guess it depends on how devoted you are.

Colin knew his heart overflowed with devotion, ached. If not for the Book of Love, at least for his sister. To him they were one and the same. As he scooted down into position beside her legs, Lydia put the Book to one side and leaned back on her elbows. Colin took the edge of her long skirt and started to slide it up.

Slow. It has to be slow, Lydia said. Or the Book of Love won’t allow it.

The boy tried to contain himself. In the distance, below in the valley, he could hear the indistinct rumble and ring of the ironworks. The calls and whistles of the draymen with their loads of coal and ore. The low roar of the furnace in blast. He took the edge of her long skirt and slowly slid it up to expose her knees. Then farther, midway up her thighs. He touched her legs gently as she had instructed him to do according to the Book. Marveling at them, at her. After a moment he looked up at her face. He waited for her to say something but she only smiled. He leaned over and kissed her knee. When she still didn’t say anything, he kissed her other knee. Then her thighs. They were soft, soft as the breasts of ducklings, but firm too. Her skin smooth even with the halo of light blond hair. Mystery of mysteries. She tasted salty, and something he had never tasted before, not at all like the taste when he once licked his own shoulder.

He looked at her again. This time there was something else in her eyes. He slowly lifted her skirt higher to expose the tops of her legs, and when she lifted her bottom so the material could slide under it, her stomach. The thin tangle of blond hairs in her crotch. He leaned forward and rested his check on her small puff belly. Turned his head and kissed it gently. He reached to put his hand between her legs but she sat up abruptly and pushed him away.

That’s enough for now, she said, pulling her dress back down and brushing past him. Crawling hurriedly down the tunnel. He watched her scurrying form fill the entrance, then she was gone. There was only the glimpse of dry creek bed, the slope and the trees and the brighter sunlight outside, though he could hear her, she was laughing to herself, and singing, her voice growing more distant as she called.

Colin. Col-lin! Time to go home. . . .

He picked up the Book of Love and glanced through the pages on his own. But the words meant nothing to him, without her. The Book clutched in his hand, the boy crawled down the tunnel and back into the sunlight. Squinting as he stood again, looking around as if he had just entered a new world. Wondering, What did I do? Why did she run away like that? What did I do wrong?

Colin thought of that day now, on a morning a few months later, as he stood on the front porch of his house. Squinting again, though this time not from the sunlight. The sun was above the ridgeline of the valley’s hills, but it was only a white-hot circle in the morning haze. The butt end of a heated iron bar. Or as if he peered into the tap hole of the furnace. Thick smoke filled the valley, drifting among the buildings of the ironworks, as it did most days when the summer heat or the possibility of rain kept the smoke from rising, kept it contained within the cut of the hills. He had wakened this morning with an idea. He would take the Book of Love to Lydia again, to ask her to interpret what it said again. They hadn’t looked at the Book, or been to the secret place, since that day in early spring. But for the moment his attention was drawn to what was going on in the yard.

His father was standing with several workmen near the old blockhouse. The men were digging two holes close to the rear wall of the structure, and a team of mules was dragging a large log up the hill from the river toward the site. As Colin stood there, scratching one bare foot against the other, trying to figure out what was going on, Margaret, the maid, came from inside the house and stood beside him.

It’s time for your breakfast, young Colin, she said in her thick Scottish brogue. What are you staring at so steady?

What are they doing, Margaret? Down there, by the blockhouse.

Aye, your father, the ironmaster, said ’twould be today. She folded her dumpling-like arms across her tummy and nodded, totally accepting. Her apron and her makeshift cap were cut of the same blue-flowered cloth. Beneath the apron she was wearing her traveling clothes.

What’s today? Tell me. He was starting to feel panicky.

The day your father, the ironmaster, said he was going to tear it down.

But why?

Aye, and why not? It’s too small to store things in and it sits there like a lump in a pudding. Your father, the ironmaster, says he’s going to use the bricks and stone for a new building and use the space to expand his mill, and that’s for sure . . . Young Colin, come back here!

He was away and running. Down the steps and down the hill, his bare feet slapping along the silvery, hard-packed trail, into the mill yard. Circling away from the blockhouse and the men, along the side of the mule and horse barn and past the blacksmith shop, staying close to the buildings to keep from being noticed.

The ironworks was a collection of large wood-frame buildings, positioned close to the river, with channels and watercourses cut from the river to power the waterwheels of the forge, the rolling and slitting mills. The thirty-foot-tall blast furnace sat back in a notch of the hillside against a bluff. Along the top of the bluff was an access road for the wagons of charcoal and limestone and ore; a wood platform extended from the edge of the bluff to the stack of the furnace, so men with wheelbarrows could feed the furnace. The smoke that filled the narrow valley came from the furnace and, from farther off in the forest, the mounds of charring wood for fuel. Colin had grown up on the iron plantation, as some people called it, the yard of the ironworks his playground since the time he could walk. But today, for reasons he didn’t understand, his playground seemed different to him. Threatening somehow. Unyielding. Cruel.

It was a place where day and night changed places, the daytime drained of color and light under the shroud of smoke, while the nights roiled orange and red and yellow as the furnaces flamed and sparked. Standing out of sight near the open doors of the forge, he became aware of the noise around him. Noises that he had heard since birth but never really paid attention to before. The quick relentless flap of the huge bellows. The thud and ring of the power hammer as it fell on the iron being wrought. The splash of the water wheels, the creak of the wooden mechanisms. Inside the semi-darkness, the fires in the finery and chafery hearths burned brightly, the changing colors telling the smiths and forge hands the state of the metal being worked. As he watched, a fiery ball was dragged from a hearth across the floor to the power hammer. Showers of sparks erupted with each blow of the one-ton hammer, a stream of liquid fire suddenly arcing over the workmen’s heads when the hammer hit a cavity in the metal. The men laughed at the near miss that could have vaporized any one of them on the spot, continued working.

Colin shuddered. As the son of the owner and ironmaster, he felt as if he was supposed to know what went on here. But it was all a mystery to him, as much a mystery as everything else seemed in the world. There was so much to learn, about everything. How was anyone supposed to know it all? Know enough to take his place among the men? Maybe the Book of Love could tell him about that too. He had to get the Book to Lydia again, to ask her to interpret more of it for him. Before she went away.

His father was still talking to the workmen, directing the activity along the back wall of the blockhouse. It was a five-sided, two-story structure, with a foundation of fieldstone up to the level of a row of gunports, and red brick above. The story went that it was built before the Revolution, at the end of the French and Indian War during Pontiac’s Rebellion sixty years earlier, at the time Colonel Bouquet lifted the siege at Fort Pitt and drove the Indians into the Ohio wilderness. For a time the site in the valley had carried the famous war hero’s name, Bouquet’s Woods, but since Colin’s father established the ironworks here along the Allehela River, it had come to be known simply as Furnace. Now his father’s workmen were constructing a tripod of heavy logs, almost as tall as the blockhouse itself, from which to hang a battering ram. The first two legs were in place, and a carpenter was shinnying up one of the poles to guide the third log into place and secure it. Colin didn’t have much time.

He ran along the side of the slitting mill, then waited until a wagon carrying ash and cinder crossed the yard, keeping the wagon between himself and his father, until Colin was out of his father’s line of sight around the front of the blockhouse. The door made of heavy timbers was unlocked, as it always had been when he and Lydia came here. Inside it was dark and musty, but he didn’t dare leave the door open. He waited until his eyes got used to the dark. From beyond the wall came the men’s voices. His father’s voice. The sound of hammering and the creak of a block and tackle. Around the perimeter of the single room, at shoulder height for a Scottish soldier, the slits of the gunports glowed like evenly spaced lead bars. When he could see again, he hurried to the back wall, directly opposite the workmen on the other side, and pulled loose a couple boards from the shooting platform. Felt around inside the dark space, creepy with cobwebs—something shell-like scuttled around his fingers; Colin wanted to jerk his hand away but didn’t—until he found the Book wrapped in oilskin. The hiding place of the Book of Love, where he and Lydia had first discovered it—it seemed like forever ago now.

He tucked the Book under his arm, ready to flee. Then stopped. A thrill coursed through him. He found an old crate and dragged it across the floor, onto the shooting platform. Stood on it, raising up slowly, the slit of the gunport descending into his view. Outside the workmen were hoisting the timber they were going to use as a battering ram into position.

Come on, men, put your backs into it, his father commanded behind them.

Colin saw the looks on the workmen’s faces as his father yelled at them, the looks they gave each other. His father moved closer, among the men to adjust the sling, then stood there. Turning his head to look at the wall of the blockhouse. For a moment Colin was on the same level as his father. Stared into his father’s eyes. But there was no recognition from his father. Nothing Colin recognized as having anything to do with himself. The Book clutched under his arm, the boy jumped down from the crate and the platform and ran out the door, back across the yard. Giddy with triumph yet afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his life. Behind him, he heard his father calling Swing! Swing it, men! followed by the heavy thud of the timber hitting the wall once, then again, the first sounds of the wall giving way. Colin ran on, between the buildings and up the hill toward the house. More determined than ever to find an answer.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE VALLEY

I

1776

D’no be afraid.

A black bear stood on its hind legs in the trail in front of her. Otherwise, there was no one in sight, the deep forest around her was still. There were only the songs of the birds, finches and cardinals and thrushes. In the distance, crows. Sunlight seeped down from the branches of the trees far overhead, spilling over the moss and ferns on the floor of the forest. The bear twisted its head, keeping its eyes on her, trying for the scent. The curious thing was, though she knew she should be afraid, she wasn’t.

Are you a talking bear? Did you just speak to me?

Och, the bear did no speak to you, said a voice off to her left. I did.

He was in his late thirties or early forties, though there was something ageless about him, as if he was always very old or would always be very young. He was dressed in frontier muslin, a poorly made shirt, heavy britches, a shapeless hat. As he stepped from between the trees, Sara saw that he had no hands, only stumps at the ends of his arms.

He’s curious about you, ’tis all, he said, nodding toward the bear. He does no ken enough to be afraid, he’s young. He’s probably never seen a woman before. Never seen the shape before, the long skirts and petticoats and bonnet. He’s wondering if you’re a ghost. A spirit.

Would you tell him different? Before he decides I’m real enough to eat?

The man smiled a little, one side of his mouth, wistful. He came closer to them, midway between Sara and the bear, standing among the ferns.

Hold your bundle away from your body. Let him see your hands.

Sara slowly lifted her arms, her cloth bundle dangling from her left hand. The bear followed her movements, looked at the man.

You see? I told you ’tis nothing there to be afraid of. Daft bear.

The bear huffed a couple of times, as if it were indeed feeling foolish, dropped back to all fours and trundled away through the ground cover and clusters of wildflowers, up and over a fallen tree trunk, the fur of its hindquarters shimmying, glancing back at the man and woman as if reproachful.

Is he your bear? Sara asked.

No. The bear belongs to the bear. I’ve just become friends with him, since he included this stretch in his territory. I fear for him, I’ve tried to tell him that no everyone will be so accommodating to share this forest with a bear, but he does no listen. I fear the lesson will kill him. As lessons often do.

He was thoughtful for a moment, looking inward, then, apparently deciding that he’d said too much, or at least enough, turned and started back into the forest.

Wait, Sara said. You’re the Seer.

The man stopped and looked back.

They told me at Fort Pitt you lived in this area.

He considered something for a moment. Aye. Is that what they know me as now? The Seer. He shook his head, smiled to himself, started to leave again.

I’ve come to see you, Sara said hastily. With her free hand she adjusted the brim of her bonnet around her face, tried to smooth the front of her dress. To be more presentable. Then caught herself, afraid she appeared simpleminded. The man regarded her over his shoulder, studied her under his thick brows, heavy forehead. Waited for her to go on, if she would go on.

They said you know magic. That you see things other people can’t. That you know secrets.

Magic. Secrets. I know a few herbs the Indians taught me. I helped a few people with minor ailments. Thus is a reputation born in this world.

They said you have a book.

For a moment the man looked at the dark forest in front of him, as if he longed for its depths, its solitude and solace. Then slowly turned to face her. Resigned that she was here. "What kind of a book do