I put the phone down on the table without answering Grant Lowery, and I walked out of the kitchen and across the yard to my forge. The old Amish man was standing in the doorway with his hat in both hands, looking at the empty stump where the anvil used to sit. Up close, he was a tall, stooped man with kind blue eyes, past eighty. “Elijah Hostetler,” he said in a soft Pennsylvania German accent. “I am Amos Yoder. I am the bishop at Strasburg. I came as soon as I had the letter. I hope you will forgive me for not writing first.”
I asked him in. Cody stood in the kitchen door with his phone dangling from his hand and his mouth hanging open. The bishop sat on my nail keg and folded his hands and said, “I have page forty one here, copied. I read it on the train. Mr. Hostetler, I think there has been a great misunderstanding.” He pulled a folded paper from his coat. “My grandfather was Ezra Yoder, who sold your grandfather the farm. I have his own ledger. It says that the note was paid in full in October of 1923.” I stared at him. “Paid how?”
The bishop smiled. “In work,” he said. “Your grandfather shoed my grandfather horses for eleven years, every one in the district, and never sent a bill. He made hinges and plow points for the whole Yoder church, and he rebuilt the bell on the meetinghouse. In the ledger, my grandfather wrote, Jacob has paid the farm three times over. The note is forgiven. He wrote it with his own hand.” He laid the ledger page on the anvil stump. I could read the German script, and I could read the signature. “Your grandfather simply never saw the paper.”
An old Amish bishop walked into a blacksmith forge, and a hundred year old debt turned out to be a gift.
I sat down on a keg of my own. I thought of my father paying ninety seven dollars every January into Box 7 for fifty years, and my own paying it after him, and I thought of the diary page forty one, where my grandfather had written his worry, and then the note beneath it, in the same ink, dated three weeks later: Ezra came by. All is forgiven. I did not believe it, God help me, so I wrote it down to be sure. He had never mailed the note because it was not owed. He had kept the key to the box to remind himself of what grace costs.
Cody was crying quietly in the doorway. He came across the forge floor and knelt in the ashes in front of the bishop, a twenty eight year old man in expensive sneakers. “Sir, I sold the anvil,” he said. “I sold his book. I did not know what I was doing.” The bishop put a hand on his head, as I might once have done to a child. “Young man, you are not the first to sell what he did not understand,” he said. “Nor the last. Ask your grandfather what a forge is for.” Cody looked up at me. I said, “It is for mending.”
We drove to Nashville the next morning, the bishop and Cody and me, in my old Ford, with a lawyer from Millersburg named Beth Troyer in the back seat. Grant Lowery did not expect us. He was in his shop on Fatherland Street, surrounded by antique planes and saws, and he went the color of putty when the bishop walked in. Beth Troyer laid the ledger on his counter next to a photograph of the diary page. She said the word extortion twice, calmly, and the word attorney general once. Lowery handed over the anvil, the diary, the coin and the key without being asked.
It cost him more than that. The Tennessee authorities charged him with attempted extortion and receiving property by fraud, and an antiques magazine ran a short piece on the case that put an end to his trade in three states. I took no pleasure in it. I loaded the anvil into the back of my truck with a chain hoist, set it carefully on the oak stump, and checked the face with my thumb. The little dip was still there. My hammer found it the first strike, and the whole valley rang with it, a true clear note, like a church bell.
The Yoders of Lancaster County have six hundred descendants, and the bishop invited me to a reunion in July. I drove up with Cody in the Ford. We sat under a great white tent with a thousand people on long benches, and I told the story of my grandfather and theirs in my halting voice. Afterward a young girl in a bonnet pressed a small wrapped parcel into my hands. It was a horseshoe nail, bent into a ring, a thing the Amish give to friends. I put it on my little finger and have not taken it off.
Cody quit his phone for a month, then swept the forge floor every morning, then asked me to teach him. I gave him my grandfather apron. At first his hammer bounced off the iron and nearly broke his thumb. By Christmas he had made a pair of hinges that I would have been proud to sell. He wiped his forehead with a sooty wrist, held them up, and asked, “Grandpa, are they straight?” I looked at the line of the iron and said they were honest, which is better than straight. He beamed like the sun.
On the last evening of the year we lit the forge for no reason except that it was cold. I let Cody take the hammer. He stood at the anvil with a glowing bar of iron on the face, in the very dip worn by three generations, and the orange sparks flew up toward the dark roof beams. He raised his arm. He struck. The note rang out across Dutch Ridge Road, over the snowy fields and the farmhouses and the buggies, as clear as the first day. I stood behind him with my hand on his shoulder, and for once I said nothing at all.