The Blacksmith Shop

Nearby the Chevrolet garage to the west was for awhile the blacksmith shop of “old man Magnusson.” I forget what his first name was. The shop was a really rundown ramshackle building, sadly leaning. It was torn down when I was still quite young, perhaps when the old man stopped working. I seem to recall that he kept on at his trade until shortly before he died. He was short, stopped, gnarled and quite deaf, doubtless from all the noise of the shop — the hammer beating down on iron, etc. The interior of the shop was dim, littered with junk strewn around in seeming total disorder and redolent of the many horses that had passed through the shop over the years to be shod.

I remember the old man coming to the church service on a Sunday morning all alone (his wife had preceded him in death and I have no recollection of her) and using one of the individual earphones because of his deafness. I guess it was at this blacksmith shop that my uncle Reuben had the accident that virtually blinded him in one eye. Evidently an iron chip came sailing and hit him in the eye.