“In our house we lived from the belief that the sound of iron on iron was lethal.“ · by John Moriarty
How soft it was, the light of our lamp.
The light of our lamp didn’t drive all darkness from our house.
The light of our lamp didn’t drive all darkness from our minds.
Some nights, as if in séance, our lamp called the darkness to it.
And our minds too. Talking to us the way he did, Jameen Kissane uncovered the bogdeal in our minds. And in school the next morning how almost impossible it was to give serious heed to a teacher talking about prepositions or fractions, how almost impossible it was to sit in a bare desk and give serious heed to a man talking about a golden age, a silver age, a bronze age and an iron age.
No. As if by a kind of fatality, I was already looking another way.
We did have iron in our house of course.
Over our fire we had an iron crane.
At any one time of the day an iron pot or an iron kettle would be hanging from it. We had an iron tongs. The wheels of our ass cart and horse cart were shod in iron. Outside our school wall was Cooney’s forge, and even while we were learning to distinguish a noun from a pronoun we could hear the clear ring of the iron anvil.
So there was iron in our world, there was iron in our house, but we didn’t have a mind to go with.
One night Jameen picked up a boot of mine and saw that it needed a new half sole. He asked me to bring him the hammer, the last, the tack and a strip of leather from the right drawer of the dresser. Instantly and emphatically, my mother said no, pointing to a hen hatching eggs in a wooden butter box under the table. No, she said, that will have to wait for another night. Didn’t we know, she asked, that the sound of hammering might kill the chicks in the eggs. Again, three or four days later, hearing Chris hammering outside in the hayshed, she went to the door and called out to him to stop, at once.
In our house we lived from the belief that the sound of iron on iron was lethal.
In our house the metallurgical ages gave way to a hatching hen.
