Jiff bopped down the porch steps a moment later, wearing the same jeans and work boots but now he’d put on a black button-down shirt. Gussied up, Collier thought, redneck-style.
“Ready when you are, Mr. Collier!”
“Okay, Jiff. But if you don’t mind, could you show me that little furnace in the back first?”
“My pleasure, sir. Lotta interesting things ’round here.”
“Yes, there are.” Collier followed him around the side of the main house, where a trail skirted the additional wings. “I guess I’ve lived in L.A. too long, but coming to a place like this really opens your eyes. We take so much for granted these days. Even the displays in the lobby: handmade boots, tools, and even nails that someone hammered out on an anvil, carpet and clothing stitched by hand instead of processed by machinery. It reminds me that this country was built on hard work.”
“Very hard work, sir,” Jiff agreed. “You wanna build a house back then, you had to dig the clay and bake the bricks, cut the clapboards from trees ya chopped down yourself, blow the glass for the windows, you name it. And while you’re doin’ all that hard work, ya gotta eat. So you till the land to grow your food, find a spring or river to water the seeds, and if you want some meat to go with it, you gotta raise the pig yourself, butcher it, and cut more wood to cook it. And while you’re choppin’ that wood you better find the right kind of bark to tan the hide so’s you can make the boots on your feet. But a’course if you’re gonna do that, ya better find some cassiterite to melt down so’s ya can make a tin bucket to do your tannin’ in. That was life back then. Now we just go to the grocery store and The Home Depot.”
Collier chuckled at the parallel. The walk gave him a closer look at the additional four wings of the house. “Why are these wings so differently styled than the main house? It almost—”
“It almost don’t look right.” Jiff got his point. “The wings are all made’a wood while the main house is fancy brick’n stone. It’s ’cos the South was piss-poor for a long time after the war.”
“The War of Northern Aggression—”
“Yes, sir. Harwood Gast had a million in gold when he moved into town, and everyone figured he spent it all on his railroad. He finished the railroad in 1862, ’bout a year after the war started. Then he came home…and you know what he done?”
“What?”
“Killed hisself. Just after that last spike was drove at the very end of the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad, way past the border in a place used to be called Maxon.”
“Why did he kill himself?”
“Aw, who knows?” The younger man seemed to deflect the question. “But folks figured he bankrupted hisself layin’ all that track, but you know what? Turns out he still had a million in gold in his accounts. Like he never spent a dime.”
“Strange,” Collier said, trying to keep the information sorted. “So it wasn’t bankruptcy that urged him to commit suicide. I wonder what it was then?”
Jiff still didn’t comment. “After the fightin’ was finished, Lincoln’s boys seized all Gast’s gold, but they sold the house. Point I’m trying to make is that the new owners—some’a my ma’s kin—could only afford cheaper building materials to do the add-ons.”
It made sense. Collier knew that the South fared about as well as Germany after World War I; the people were kept destitute for a while—punishment for their attempted secession. But Jiff had still evaded the topic he was more interested in. That’s…curious…
“We live in this wing here. Two’a the others are more guest rooms, and the fourth—you gotta see the fourth, Mr. Collier, since you’re interested in this stuff. It’s loaded full up with more things from the old days.”
“I’d love to see all that.”
“And don’t forget the bath closet—that’s the door just to the right of your room. That’s one way rich folks back then showed how well-off they was—by havin’ a bath closet and toilet on the second floor near the bedroom. Plain folks just had outhouses and washin’ sheds outside.”
I guess I even take THAT for granted, Collier reflected. A pot to piss in.
They passed the second wing—through a window Collier spotted the newest guests checking in, Lottie lugging their bags—then followed a path through the garden. A slight breeze shifted countless hundreds of colorful blossoms.
When they arrived at the small clearing, Collier found the old furnace larger than it had looked from his room. Flat rocks fixed by mortar formed the large conical structure, which sported several vents at various heights.
“This is incredible,” Collier said.
“Yes, sir, it is.” Jiff pointed. “That there’s the charcoal chute, and there, the ore drop. That l’il one there is the outflow, and there a’course, is the airway,” he said, pointing to the pipe that extruded from a bellows the size of a refrigerator. “The smith’d yank this chain, to pump the bellows”—he demonstrated, and they could hear the device whistling air—“and the air’d shoot into the bed. It’d get up to 2,300 degrees in there, turn iron ore or damn near anything else into a red-hot puddle.”
Now Collier noticed other features: a cooling barrel, a tool hanger, a grinding wheel and stand. The anvil, which he’d spotted earlier, had a date engraved: 1856. Collier was finding himself staggered by the nostalgia. These weren’t props; they were genuine relics of a longdead way of life. Real people built this thing, he thought. Some guy, in 1856, MADE that anvil with his own two hands.
“Has anyone used it, I mean, recently?”
Jiff scratched at a mortar seam with a penknife. The material was still hard. “For iron forging? Naw. But there’s no reason why it wouldn’t still work. You melt the ore against a wall of charcoal while pumpin’ the bellows. All we use it for now is cookin’ during holiday weekends. Sometimes we’ll hang a couple of pig quarters inside and smoke ’em for twenty-four hours with hickory. But way back when, they even had to make their own charcoal; they’d pile up twenty, thirty cords of wood, light the middle, then cover it all over with sod. See, when the carbon in the charcoal mixes with the pig iron, it becomes steel. They didn’t even know it back then, but that’s what they were makin’. All by hand.”
Smart guy for a hayseed, Collier thought. “This is pretty specified information. How do you know so much about it?”
“Grew up ’round all this stuff, so I asked. Most folks in these parts all have ancestors going back to even before the war. You learn a lot when you ask the right folks.”
“That you do.” Collier was impressed. Behind the charcoal shed he saw a pile of blocks. He picked one up. “Oh, here’s another mold like the one your mother has displayed. A scissor mold.”
“Shears,” Jiff corrected. “Probably took some poor bastard a full day just to chisel one of those things.”
But Collier saw a veritable pile of them. “That’s an awful lot of molds,” he pointed out. “Two blocks for each single pair of shears? There must be enough there for fifteen pair.”
“Yeah, that is strange. Shears were important tools, a’course, but I don’t know why the smith would make so many molds.”
“Almost like a production line. I’ll bet he made hundreds of pairs with these blocks.” Collier thought about it. “I wonder why?”
“Ya got me, Mr. Collier. But the funny thing is there was only one single pair of shears ever found on the property—the one in the display case.”
It was an unimportant question but one that needled him. What the hell did they need all those shears for?