I can still see him – grimy, sweaty, pulling the red hot iron out of the glowing coals and then hammering it on his anvil and bending it into the shape of the wagon wheel he was forging. For a child, it was a kind of magic show. I watched every move he made, including the final plunge of the metal into cold water. After more than 70 years, the memory lingers as I smell and hear and feel the hissing, steaming, acrid exchange of heat in the dark confines of Uncle Charlie’s blacksmith shop.
It was a worthy craft then and my uncle was an expert smithy. That craft and its tools are mostly relics of the past now. What I couldn’t see then, of course, was that his life’s labor was a metaphor of the soul – his soul in particular -- being pounded, bent, molded, forged by experience into the shape of a unique human character.
And what a parabolic character emerged from Uncle Charlie’s personal anvil chorus! It was difficult then (and even now) to describe this uncle of mine, an authentic village smithy from the northern Iowa community of Decorah. Different? Yes. Eccentric? Indeed. Erratic? Certainly. Political? More than most of his neighbors. Mean? Yes, sometimes. Loving? Oh, yes! Thoughtful? Almost philosophical. Penitent? Amen. Amen.
He grew up in a small Minnesota community in the last quarter of the 1800’s. Persons who had known him then told me he was a legendary baseball player. Around the turn of the century he was married to my father’s sister. They had no children, but from time to time I and my siblings were permitted to spend some days with them. They had a primitive stone house with only a coal stove and the kitchen wood range as heat. Aunt Maria would spoil us with food and fun and Uncle Charlie would take us fishing – he was a skillful fly fisherman. We loved to watch him work in fashioning metal and wood into carts, wagons and various custom-made machines for both farmers and factories.
I came from a solid Republican home and village and he was the first real Democrat I had ever knowingly encountered. Their privy walls (no inside toilet) were papered with newspaper cartoons lambasting his political enemies. He had strong opinions about what was wrong with the world. But as a result of his absorbing the Chicago Tribune each day, he was an informed objector.
My brother Bill was able to attend college in their town during the early 1930’s years of the Great Depression only because Uncle Charlie and Aunt Maria gave him free board and room. Later he shared with me the bizarre experience that proved to be.
“This was surrealism,” Bill told me in an oral history interview, “because Uncle Charlie had a very great drinking problem. He was raised as a peasant, uneducated, gifted mechanically, a marvelous woodworker. He would make wagons and sell them (these were the days where horses still provided some of the horsepower for farmers.) He wanted to apprentice me. He got me aside a time or two and said, ‘William, I can teach you everything about a blacksmith, I can make you into a good blacksmith.’ And I had to tell Uncle Charlie that I didn’t want to be a blacksmith.
“This was about 1933,” my brother continued. “Uncle Charlie was a craftsman, conscientious, frugal, and careful but some tensions built up in him and he started getting a nervous edge. Aunt Maria sensed this, and I got to the point where I detected danger signs also. Alas, her worst fears were realized! When he didn’t return for supper after an errand up town, we knew what must have happened. He was on a binge and would come reeling home later and get boisterous and ill-natured and they’d have at it verbally. Sometimes he boozed and drank and slobbered around and get into trouble and ended up in jail! They had him in what was called the drying out tank. When he had sobered up and cooled down, then he would return and was utterly filled with remorse.”
By the time I came to attend the same college four years later and would also visit my aunt and uncle, he must have reformed. For he appeared to me on my infrequent visits as a gentle soul, eager to discuss the world situation.
Charlie turned (or returned) to religion. I had never known him to attend church services. But I discovered on random visits during my final days at college that he read the Bible daily and would have religion on his mind. My brother Bill became a pastor and on his visits to their home he was able to encourage Uncle Charlie to open up and share his fear and faith.
“When I moved with my family to Decorah to teach at Luther College, we were in touch with them constantly. Charlie’s health was failing. He had a bad heart by this time and was more or less house-bound.”
He revealed to his nephew, now a minister, his fear of death. That became an invitation for spiritual counsel and Bill prayed with him and also brought communion to them. It appeared that Charlie was finally at peace.
“His twilight years were good years. I tried to repay a little of what he had given to me,” my brother added.
For me the legend lives on -- of Uncle Charlie, the wizardly blacksmith who could forge wagons and wheels and whiffletrees, who was also a wise mentor and a redeemed penitent whose own soul was wrought, bent and hammered into shape by his peculiar experience of life and of love and of grace.
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| Page last modified by Richard Lee on 19 March 2005 |
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