Dust and Sweat

Sophia Gottfried

I love making sparks. The rhythmic clang, clang of my hammer against glowing metal transforms me into a musician, and every beat sends small stars dancing into the sky. The heat of the forge flows from my hammer, to my hand, into my marrow, turning me into an inferno. Even the sweat rolling down my neck cannot extinguish me.

My father taught me how to smith. 

Under the night sky, he used to tell me stories when I asked him about forging.

“Well, daughter, my father taught me that a great God made all men from mud and clay. Man was baked in a kiln before being set free into the world, to bring more things forth from more mud and more clay.”

I used to listen intently to his low voice, which always contained remnants of his own childish wonder, the same he inspired in me.

“But, the early men often broke to pieces. The world tested them with water and stone. Their homes of mud washed away, and their vessels of clay cracked with force. The great Creator noticed this with dismay, and so he made a select few with iron hands, for iron must be forged with iron, to make that which would not break. He gifted all iron kin with a third hand, that which we call hammer.”

He would hoist his hammer high in the air.

“When I rust, with white hair and drooping face, I will give you our hammer, as grandfather gave it to me, and it will become part of you.”   

“Why are my hands not iron yet?” I used to ask, looking at his hard calluses.

“They will be soon,” he used to say.

When the sun rose, my father was a different man. All day he would work at the forge with a scrunched brow and unmoving expression. The sun would beat down upon him, sending small droplets of sweat down into his beard. His chapped lips would stay locked together, and he would grunt when I came to show him my own crude creations, bits of paper folded into hearts and drawings of armor I wished to forge.

In those days, I acted out my bedtime stories. I tried to release dried mud from the sunburnt ground and press it into a rough human doll. They would rest, all stacked up, on the edge of the furnace, to be fired. My father explained to me that they would not survive the firing.

“That furnace only bakes metal. Clay needs a kiln. If we tried to fire them as I fire iron, they would crumble into ash.”

I never tried to bake my people, I returned them back to whence they came at the end of my fantasies.  

Often, my playing was interrupted by visitors. They came on, caravans, camels, wagons, and even occasionally foot. They all pressed tracks into the oft trodden road. The land around us was flat and bare, so we could always watch them grow bigger upon the horizon. They all had different designs. Some were veiled with light silk, some clothed in dyed wool, some even boasted shining steel or a cloak of iron rings. Their dialects were also different. Some had voices mixed with liquid honey and seemed to speak in iambs. Some voices were rough with jagged syllables and breathless sentences. Others said nothing, or very little, they seemed to speak with gestures and always were swift to leave. They came for different products. The ones with weather worn hands hobbled in to buy a scythe or horseshoe. The ones with jewelled wrists and embroidered breasts commissioned iron bands for their beloveds. The tired ones with arms at their belts tossed beaten helmets and armor upon my father’s counter for repairs. I watched from the shadows, hardly believing that they all came from one set of hands. Of course, though, they all were alike being covered in dust and sweat. Thus, I knew of man as the one who sweats. 

My father's creations were thus taken by road to all four corners of the world. His tools reaped many crops, of all colors and types. They must have farmed millet, wheat, bananas, rice, and every other strange food. The rings he forged sanctified many bonds. They must have held lovers together even when they occupied lands pushed apart by the sea. And the armor he repaired embraced dying soldiers. It must have held them as they cried for their mothers and bled out into foreign soil. That is the sacred power of the hammer, the power to enable, make holy, and keep safe. 

I waited eagerly for my day to gain that power. Every day, I would ask my father when it would be my turn to work the forge, my turn to bend the unbreakable. 

“Wait, wait, young child, time flows faster when impatience does not dam it.” 

As I grew and my imagination wanned, I began to feel alone. My father inherited the forge and the large house as the eldest of nine children. Father and I alone struggled to fill that house, so we often slept outside to ignore the creaks and groans of the old wood roof. 

Finally, one night, my father came to me slow and heavy. 

“Tomorrow, tomorrow I will show you how to work the forge. It will finally be your day.” 

“Really! For real? My turn? Finally?” I did little to hide my excitement.

He nodded.

“I’m ready to pass the forge on to the next generation. My father gave this to me, his father gave this to him, and you, you are my only child and will receive it from me.” His voice was laced with a certain melancholy. For a moment, I wondered if he was going to cry, and I was terrified. No one wants to see their father cry, especially not when he taught you all you know about strength and stability. But he didn’t. He just turned, laid down, wrapped himself in his moth-munched sheepskin blanket, and began to snore. As he slept, I noticed how many grey hairs had infiltrated his black head of hair.

That night I barely slept, as I was in a state of in-betweens. I vacillated between dreams and consciousness, excitement and fear, joy and despair. Was I worthy of the forge? Could I make him proud? In sleep I saw armies of clay men marching, outfitted with my metal work. They cracked open each other with small spears and swords and maces and fire. Smoke enveloped the clay man’s battlefield, and then it was all dust. Only the metal remained. It occurred to me that the metal that my father made would outlive him. It then occurred to me that I too would outlive him.

The night gave birth to the sun upon the blood-streaked sky, and the sand under me became hot with morning light. I arose expressionless, already trying to emulate my father. Doubt and childish dreams are for the night, the day is for hard work. The day is for sweating.  

Although, the skip creeped into my step as I neared the forge. The wait was over.

Our forge is alive. The furnace grows up out of the ground like a stone tree. The anvils and the workbench sometimes seem more like flesh than metal.  

I prepared the forge: dumping a bag of charcoal into the furnace and setting it ablaze. The flames whipped and writhed within the stone walls, trying to dance free. Part of me wanted to just see how much it could burn if we let it free. Would it catch onto the roof and burn the house away? Would it spread across the desert sand? Would it burn away the sky? I worked the bellows, keeping the fire cool and controlled until my father awoke. 

He nodded a good morning to me before grabbing a rod of metal.

He dangled the iron over the fire. The dark grey lit up, sparkling with a bright orange, and my father quickly brought it out of the fire and unto the anvil, hammering the top into a tip. 

“Not everything we make as smiths is fantastical. Your most popular item will be a nail. It has to be standardized and strong. Master making these quickly.”

After measuring out the nail size, he broke it off the rod and transferred it to a container, finishing it by hammering down the top into a flat head. 

The newborn nail was still glowing as my father handed the hammer to me. Its handle was clothed with smooth with new leather straps, but the metal underneath was rough with age. It almost starred at me as an old sage might. I could almost hear prophetic whispers coming from the wise aged surfaces. 

I copied my father’s technique. Heat, place, hit, break, hit. My first sparks flew forth as the metal bended bowed the hammer, my hammer. I made soft tips sharp, hard edges round, and imperfections flat. Pride ran through me, it flowed up from my fingers and was sucked into my heart. 

But with every strike, the hammer became heavier. The harsh heat began to remind me of the ever-present sun. As small sweat droplets cascaded over my forehead, wonder was mixed with fatigue. 

Even when I could no longer hold the hammer, the sun still looked down at me from high in the air. I had only been working for an hour or two. I flopped down heaving, as dust stuck to my body. 

My father came over and gazed down at me.

“You have many long hard days ahead of you. You yourself must become hard.” 

I then became aware of how soft I was. My hands lacked calluses, my arms were soft formless blobs, and my mind did not know how to overcome bodily pain. I then doubted, for the first time in my life, whether my father was right that I was born with iron hands.

But I wanted to be a smith, so I had to make myself stronger. That day, I rose from the ground and kept hammering. I had to break, but I did not cease. The pain was maddening, but my incompetence even more so.

It took years for me to become skilled enough to take over the forge. Every morning then on, I would rise before the birth of day and work until its death. When one hand gave out, the other took over. When my fingers bled, cloth strips enveloped them. When my body cried to stop, my mind told it to keep going till the end of time. By this steady, slow process, I molded myself into a blacksmith. My hands grew calluses, my arms became harder, and I learned to enjoy the wonder of creation more than despise the pain of work. My veins seemed to grow out of my skin and burrow under the hammer’s leather skin. I could feel the metal resisting me, but I knew how to overcome it. I gave life to stagnant ores. Lifeless metal was born anew as it danced in the fire. 

My creations grew in complexity. From nails, to horseshoes, to forks, to knives, to hoes, to plows, to bands, to chains, to arms, to armour. My father taught me to temper, shine, engrave, and every other way to manipulate the metal. He displayed my pieces in the shop and showed me how to sell them. They were taken by strange men to strange places for their strange purposes.

They took my tools into their lives. The plow defined the farmer, the gift defined the lover, the armor defines the soldier, just as the hammer defines the blacksmith. I wonder if they also had to adapt to their tools, work to fulfill a purpose. Work to work, sweat to sweat, that is what we all do.

As I became stronger, my father seemed to weaken. Every day his hair would be whiter and whiter, and his body would droop more and more. It was almost as if I leeched off him, stealing his vitality. Each night we spoke less, each day he had less to teach me. He forgot how to use the more complex tools and miscounted his money. No longer was he able to hoist his hammer high in the air and relay fantastical stories to me with gusto.

“Daughter, I am dying. There is a time when all clay returns to the ground, and all rusts. It was my duty to make hard and immutable things for fragile men, but I too am fragile, and no iron can keep us safe forever. My time will come, sometime in the next few moon cycles. I want you to set me on fire. I do not want to be buried whole, I have spent more of my life with fire than with dirt, and that is how I would like to end.”

I just nodded, not sure how to respond.

Then, he died. His heart stopped in his sleep. And my last goodbye was just a “good night.” As I watched him burn away upon a great pyre, I clutched the hammer. The body before me did not seem like my father. I remember him as two separate personae, the animated storyteller and the Stoic smith. As a corpse he looked like neither of these things, and so I did not weep.

I only cried when I broke myself.

Times became hard, as they do. Fewer and fewer people came to buy as less and less coin came to sustain them. Farmers brought in fewer crops, so people lost their work and merchants lost buyers. Wayward souls would walk through my shop, and ask what was on the road ahead. They came both from the East and West, both covered in dust and sweat, so I assumed dust and sweat awaited them ahead. When we don’t work, we wander, whether in dreams or upon windy roads.

But instead of speaking my mind, I would tell them, “I’m just a smith, a poor one at that. I have not walked your roads, and so I can’t tell you what lies ahead. All I can offer is iron or steel, to perhaps make your journey easier.”

Some would purchase my crude maces or spears, but most would walk through without buying.

I went from eating alone to being hungry alone. And so, my frustration grew. It is hard to smith on an empty stomach, knowing that how hard you work will not get you the food you need. The world is hard, and man is fragile, but broken man has no use for a blacksmith’s protection. The people became too hungry to farm, too hungry to propose, too hungry to fight. All growth, all creation seemed to cease.

When I tried to sleep under the desert stars, my stomach growled, and my bones groaned. My iron hands could not feed the hungry, nor could they bring coin into my shop. I could not mold the world into something softer, no matter how hard I worked. Thus, I grew tired.

One morning, all my frustrations reached their apex. I was making a horseshoe no one would buy. Even though sparks flew, I ignored them in favor of a heated internal monologue. Why was the world so unfair? Why did the great Creator test us with famine? Why did he choose something so impossible? Something so unconquerable with iron? Why couldn’t I change it? Why can’t man eat metal instead of fickle living things?

And then, the great hammer collided with flesh and blood. It opened a wound in my hand, spouting rivers of blood and crushing bones beneath. There was a moment of pure shock before the agony. One hand had attacked the other. When the pain flooded in, it pushed me under its surface. I screamed at the sky and saw nothing but red. Then, I cried, then I missed my father, then I again was alone.

But, I knew I could die if such a wound wasn’t treated right. So, I trekked the long road into the nearest town. I thought I would pass out, I thought about just laying down and bleeding out, it would have been easier, but I kept on walking. And walking, and walking. Tears fell from my raw eyes with each step. It hurt, it really hurt. I wondered what my father would have done, how he would have dealt with such a disaster.

I can barely recall stumbling into the local medicinal clinic, but the next morning was one of the clearest in my life. I awoke, in pain, but alive. The medicine man told me that my hand would be forever disfigured, but that I would survive. I would have to stay in bed for weeks, but that I could return home.

As I was forced to stay still, I watched the birth of day each morning, and I wondered how painful it was for the night. What now? I wondered. How shall I proceed? I already knew the answer. There is only one way to proceed: to use my two remaining hands to create. 

Upon the desert ground, I dreamed of my childhood. Of all the sketches of impossible wonders I wanted to create, and now how I ought to try. The hunger, the pain, all seemed to evaporate in my fever dreams of smithing. When my hand scabbed over, and the pain lessened, I went back to the forge. It was hard to work with a damaged hand, but I overcame it all. I learnt how to work around my wound, and soon it turned to scar. The medicine man was correct, it never did fully heal, but it worked for my purposes. I could still make sparks. It was after my injury that I fully began to appreciate the craft. It became more of an art and less of a divine duty. I added small patterns to even the most utilitarian of tools and placed decorative swirls upon breastplates. In every piece of metal I gave life to, I now also gave a piece of my soul.

When the sparks flew, they danced for me; when the fire raged, it performed for me, and finally, when my hands created, they created for me. Hard times remained hard, but work became play. I still sweat, as do all humans, but joy arose from pain as a phoenix might from ashes. All is malleable, I learned-- even myself.

For years little coin rolled in, but when the famine finally lifted, a tide of money enveloped me. I bought more metals to experiment with, coppers and golds, to bring existence to my fantastical fantasies. Figures of humans, animals, and all in between appeared on my shop shelves. Rings that shined like the desert stars and armor that bore familial arms graced my shelves. All possibilities could be achieved, any direction could be taken, my will could bend any metal.

But, I, like my father, am both a smith and a storyteller. I needed a listener. And so, I took on an apprentice. A young boy who looked at the stars as I did. He helped me for many years, working my bellows and cleaning my tools. At nights I would tell him stories about a great God who made men from clay, and those with iron hands who would keep the god’s creations safe. I promised him that this hammer would be his to wield. 

Now my hair grows grey and I can feel the rust creeping unto my iron hand. But I do not fear returning to the Earth, nor do I have any regrets about how I lived. To be human is to work, to be god is to create, and I am a bit of both. My life was the best of both. I was not a slave to coin, nor to fellow man, but to the sparks of passion and beats of my own hammer, and I would have it no other way.