The Man Who Guarded the Bomb by Orfalea Gregory;

Author:Orfalea, Gregory;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2021-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Life of a Nail

at the turn of the nineteenth century, in front of the Pyrenees and the wool-producing village of Tarbes, a six-inch black nail was brought into existence by the hands of an old blacksmith named Roux. With hands thick as oak burls—beautiful outcroppings of sickness—Roux hammered and cooked the raw iron. He sang songs of the Revolution, raising the heated shanks as they turned orange to a face charred by years of sparking metal. His thick eyebrows jumped like crows.

One spring day Roux’s eye was taken by something else—a girl from Tarbes walking in the meadow. She was not wearing wool, because sun irradiated her white scarf. Had she been to Paris for silk? Roux couldn’t identify the girl’s face. Her skirt, too, unlike Bernaise woolens, was not impervious to sunlight, which showed the shadow of her legs as she bent to pick jack-in-the-pulpits, buttercups, and small carnations. Roux, eyes gleaming in a way they gleamed over his best-formed nails, hit down with his hammer on his soot-filled thumb.

The shout carried to Lourdes where the old chapel bell shivered, thence to Pau, where Henry IV’s tortoise-shell bassinet was set rocking. One pained glance showed the girl was not on the upland.

Roux examined a nail head poorly hit. It was to have been his last forging smash, but a cleft marred the side of the nail, a crook that made it appear to be—if one squinted—a thin female with one hip against the entrance of a cottage. Roux muttered a Bernaise curse, “Dieu Biban!” Forever it was wedded in his mind with a fingernail that would turn purple and fall off, and with the diaphanous girl of the upland. He washed the crooked nail. As all nails, it cried out at its baptism—a furl of steam from the bucket of water!

A sack of the new nails clinking and nudging each other in a paradise of unknowing was taken the next day to the nearby village of Lourdes. Roux bartered with a carpenter there who was head of the local guild that planned to renovate the old church.

“They are, Monsieur Foualt, the finest nails in all of Navarre,” Roux announced, holding up with bandaged thumb a good one.

“You have tapered them, Roux,” said the guild master. “I am not sure this will work.”

“Monsieur, this is the new style from Paris, and none can equal their force.”

Foualt jumped some in his hand. The others tried to poke through the burlap sack.

Roux grew impatient and massaged the muscles of his chest. “Cinq francs for the lot or nothing!” he announced.

“Cinq francs it is!”

The next day, Foualt strapped the nails to his donkey and was making toward the old church when a small tear opened in the burlap and out tumbled the crooked one, along with one well shaped. They dropped into tall grass by the Gave du Pau rushing indifferently by. Foualt did not hear them fall. Most were saved for his project. Chances are, he would have thrown out the product of Roux’s momentary intoxication anyway.

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