Henry wasn’t tidy. Hammers, screwdrivers, mallets, chisels, clamps, and files lay scattered where their usefulness had ended. Orange, yellow, and black electric cords stretched and coiled across the ceiling and floor, carrying power to Henry’s welders, grinders, saws, work lights, and drills. There were ladders, short, medium, and tall, big fans for ventilation, and motorized hooks for hoisting the heaviest pieces and moving them through the air.
I knew something about machines and tools from waiting for Harlan to quit work at the gas station, and from hanging around the piddling worktables Mama’s friends had set up when they moved in. But this was no two-bit service bay or basement hobby shop; this was an honest-to-God workshop, where Henry worked from morning till night.
A large, unfinished piece that looked like an armored elephant filled one corner of the studio. It wore a coppery turban that whirled in the slightest wind.
“Is that what you’re working on?” I asked him.
“One of the things,” he said.
“Where’d you get all the metal?”
“Scrapyards, mostly. Places that sell all kinds of used metal, acres and acres of it. I take my truck and trailer and see what interests me. A lot of it doesn’t look like much when I first bring it back. See these?” He pointed to a stack of double-decker metal rounds about as big around as dinner plates. “These are old disc brakes.”
“Car brakes?”
“Yep. They make nice bases for sculptures. And these,” he said, picking up two smaller rounds with metal teeth around the outside, “these are sprockets, and this”—he took up a rusty four-pronged thing—“what would you say this was?”
“A pitchfork?”
“Exactly so,” he said, pleased. He carefully picked up a long sharp-edged rectangle with a hole dead center. “And this?”
I studied it. “Give me a hint.”
“Your mother’s friend Charlie would know this,” he said.
“A lawnmower blade!” I said. “I saw him sharpen one of those once. Using …” I looked around for the tool I wanted, and spied the grinding wheels on top of a red stand. “That!”
“A grinder. You’ve been paying attention,” he said.
Henry didn’t talk down to me the way Mama’s friends sometimes had. He showed me the differences between the metals: reddish copper, blackish cast iron (“Cursed brittle,” he said), silvery aluminum, dull carbon steel, and its shinier stainless-steel cousin. He explained that he joined metal by welding, and that the other tools in his shop were used to cut, shape, finish, or move the welded work.
He chose a length of silver metal about twenty feet long and maybe three inches wide from a stack leaning against the wall.
“Watch,” he said. “See how this is square on the outside and hollow on the inside?” He slipped on a pair of work gloves. “I’m going to put it through the bender to round the metal into a big circle.”
The bender looked like a big parking meter with a captain’s wheel attached to the front. Henry worked fast. He fed one end of the tubing into the bender’s left side, then turned the wheel till it came out curved on the right. After that, he took up his welding helmet and handed me one too. He turned a valve on a tank that looked like a scuba diver’s and told me how heat, wire, and gas all worked together to make the silvery welds that fused the pieces of metal.
“Like metal glue,” I said.
“Welds are stronger than glue, as strong as the metal itself. Welds bind the steel of skyscrapers and bridges together. A good weld almost never breaks.”
I thought of Bessie. Too bad a strong weld couldn’t fix her heart.
Henry showed me how to put on my helmet, and with the flip of a switch his welder whirred to life. It was dusty and dark inside the helmet, my breathing loud and strange, and I could barely see through the little window in front. Henry pointed the torch tip where he wanted to weld the two ends of the tubing together to close his circle. His torch crackled and burned a bright, eerie green, shooting sparks like a huge Independence Day sparkler. It was winter and snowing outside, but inside it was the Fourth of July.
My mind eased as I watched Henry work. Our conversation about craziness seemed a long time ago. Henry turned on his grinder to smooth out the welds, making his circle one seamless round. Working calmed Henry, and smoothed out his rough edges too. He took up another piece of tubing and then another, turning them into perfect circles like the first.
I tried to ask more questions, but he was concentrating hard and his machines drowned out talk. That was the way he liked it, I thought. Other people weren’t his thing. His conversation was with whatever he was making. We were only a few feet apart, but he got more distant by the minute, till he was in another place entirely, a world he’d escaped to, population one.
8
Henry’s admirers were always stopping by, people who’d heard about his work and wanted to meet him in person. Other folks came to hire Henry to make something special. A commission, Henry called it. Sometimes the local farmers brought their broken tractors for Henry to weld, which he did, every bit as carefully as he welded his sculptures. Visitors wandered around and looked at the pieces in the yard, and if Henry’s studio door was open, they might duck in to say hey. Now and then someone came to buy one of the sculptures in the yard, or, as Henry called it, “give a sculpture a job.”
When I saw the old lady park her pickup in the drive, get out, and take a long look around, I guessed she’d come to browse or have some welding done. Fred was buying groceries and Henry had gone up the
