Day 90,
Morning thought: I need to stop procrastinating and start figuring out a story for the equinox festival. Then again, I haven’t heard much tell of anyone else making preparations so maybe I’m alright.
The Village blacksmith retired today. As Archivist, I was asked to come and record the completion of his last work.
A muscular woman about Lin’s age came into the archive a bit before noon, introduced herself as Ka’ena, the blacksmith’s daughter, and informed me of the request. She apologized for the last-minute nature of it. It seems her father had stopped by a few days ago while I was out and was too old fashioned to leave a note but forgot to get around to coming back later.
I assured her that it wasn’t a problem. It’s not like I had any other plans or appointments today. Just so long as she didn’t mind giving me a few minutes to put away the documents I’d been working with (Priscilla’s) and retrieve my notebook for official recordings. Also, if lunch were provided I wouldn’t object to that either. I made a joke of it, but really, I do mostly work for food.
The smithy is down at the bottom of the Village’s hill. Near the water and close to the outer edge of the Village proper. If you think of the Village’s layout as being something like a cone it’d be in the bottom corner. As we traversed the winding streets to get there I tried to make conversation with Ka’ena, partly to be friendly and partly to get more background on the situation for archival purposes.
Her father, Ka’eo, had slowly been growing more frail for a long time now. No particular sickness or disease, just age. In truth Ka’ena had been doing most of the metalwork for years now with her father mostly just reviewing finished pieces, doing minor detail work, and interacting with clients. It seems that Lin’s situation of being an “assistant” for decades until her predecessor officially retires isn’t unique. It seemed a little unfair to me to be doing most of the work and not be the one getting recognized for it. She didn’t see it that way. Said he’d been working longer than she had now far long before she first picked up a hammer, and even on the days when she had to help hold his arm steady she was still learning from him. If people still wanted to see him as the Blacksmith, she wasn’t going to stop them. Especially when he loved his work enough that he kept at it years after no one would have blamed him for stopping. Except maybe his wife who had retired from weaving herself a few years back and the doctor who was concerned about the old man over exerting himself, but even then, only a little bit of blame.
Ka’eo greeted us warmly enough when we arrived, wiry, weathered, and welcoming figure that he was. There may have been a tremor to his arm - once surely bulging but now merely toned - as he extended it, but his calloused grip was as strong as mine as we shook hands. “Frail” is a relative term I suppose.
Lunch was in fact provided. “No good working on an empty stomach. I’ve always kept to that and I don’t intend to break it now.” Or he said something to that effect anyway before admonishing his daughter to keep up that habit in the future.
Over lunch I asked what this last work of his would be. A tradition, he told me. My attention was directed to a spot above the entrance to the workshop that was less sun-faded than its surroundings. Normally, a metal emblem hung there bearing the initials of the Village blacksmith hung there. It had already been taken down, cleaned, and melted. Today he’d be recreating it for the new blacksmith. In this case the initials were still the same so it was perhaps a little redundant, but tradition is a powerful thing, and it would still be new, shiny, and subtly different in style. And redundant initial updating was a more than acceptable tradeoff for having his child as successor. That’s not always the case.
Lunch concluded, work began. Ka’eo would brook no help from either of us, so I spent the day watching, taking notes, and asking Ka’ena to explain the technical details of what I was witnessing. Those have already been committed to the official archival record, so I’ll not be repeating them here.
While the old smith still had strength, it became apparent that what age had really robbed him of was steadiness and stamina. Between the short pauses to breathe deep of the sweltering air and steady his shakes and the longer breaks to step away from the forge altogether to cool down and hydrate outside, what I’m told should have been a quick and easy job took until just past sundown. Ka’eo made more than a few jokes about how angry Huan would be to see him right now. Ka’ena didn’t find these jests to be particularly funny. Indeed, more than once she looked about ready to tie her father down and fetch the doctor herself.
I don’t fancy myself good at reading others, but I got the impression that the whole ordeal was as hard on her emotionally as it was on him physically. Every time the old smith’s hand started to shake, or his breathing grew ragged, or he started to sway a bit on his feet, she’d suddenly break off from whatever explanation she was giving me and take a step in his direction or start to offer help, and every time he’d notice, steady himself, and wave her off with a smile, a thanks, and an insistence that this was something he had to do himself. He wouldn’t even allow water to be brought to him, just put where he could easily get to it. It clearly frustrated her. I can only imagine what it must be like to have to choose between a loved one’s health and pride. And I’m sure all those melancholic thoughts and feelings that come with seeing a thing happen for what you know will be the last time and the marking of an end of a chapter of one’s life must have reached her on some level as well.
But, in the end the emblem was finished. Shiny, new, and bearing characters of that script I’m finally starting to parse individual pieces of without too much of a literal headache. The tradition of hanging it back in its spot was something to be done by the both of them. And a good thing too, seeing as by the end I’m pretty sure Ka’ena was doing all the actual lifting while her father was barely able to lift his arms enough to symbolically keep his hands on it.
What followed was yet another one of those moments of intense, shared emotions for which I was but a contextless voyeur, duty-bound to witness. Honestly though, duty to record or not, as the two of them held one another, looking up at the symbol of transferred continuation, hints of tears in both their eyes and voices, I found myself turning away in a sort of embarrassment. It just seemed wrong to intrude on a moment like that. Does that make me a bad archivist? Should I have taken advantage of the fact they forgot I was there and scrutinized their every vocalization and expression? Committed it to memory and then to paper so that some future peruser of the archives can stumble across the entry of this evening, relive the moment, and feel what I believed the two of them felt? Or is it enough simply to remember that they lived? That they cared for one another and felt a full range of emotions like any other human beings and that in that moment many of those emotions - pride, love, sadness, fear, joy, loss, hope, relief - were all tangled together as one.
I don’t know, but if you’re reading this, I think you just saw for yourself that which I was able to do. And sure, I went and made this about me again, but this is my journal, not the official record.
And speaking of things for me rather than official duties, during some of those breaks - partly to satisfy my own curiosity and partly to change the topic off of worrying about whether Ka’eo would pass out from heat stroke - I asked about where the Village gets all its metal from. The short version is that most of it is just reused/repaired/recycled/reforged over and over again. Most of Ka’eo’s work in his life has been repairing the heads of farming equipment older than he is. I pointed out this still doesn’t explain where it comes from originally. Ka’ena spoke up and said that while it had never happened in either of their lifetimes, she’d heard tales of a very long time ago of metal being brought back from either Cloud Tower or some island far to the north. Not ore (to my surprise I actually had to explain the concept) but broken down finished pieces or hunks of scrap. I’ll need to go digging (mining?) for reference to that in the archives one of these days. Maybe that was Pat’s voyage to the decayed city?
But I digress. Work was finished, emotions were had, the old man was brought back to his home, I was invited (to be able to go run and get help if he collapsed on the way I half suspect), the wife/mother was met (Niobe, nice lady, good cook), dinner was had, promises were made to see the doctor in the morning, and Ka’ena went back to her own home/husband/child while I went returned to the library to compile my official notes, write all this, and now collapse into bed from staying up too late.
