I spent the first ten years of my life learning about the work. I sat by the wood stove in the corner of my grandmother’s shop. This was the big shed, not the small one where the work was done. It was warm in the big shed, but not bright, and my grandmother always left a coffee can full of peanuts on top of the stove to roast. It reminded me of peanut butter, that smell when you open a new jar. There was a bucket for shells by the wall. The second shelf held another bucket for screws and bolts and nails.
Grandma kept a galvanized tin bucket for bleach and water under the sink. The inside of that bucket was crusted red and black.
“For when I do the work, Jake,” Grandma said when she saw me looking at it. She winked, letting me in on a secret.
My mother got irritated when Grandma called me Jake, but I think she kept doing it just on purpose.
“Her name is Jacqueline, mother.” I remember my mother saying that more than anything else. “It skips a generation, Jacqueline,” she explained to me “I know it will be hard for you at first.” Mom said that a lot, too. “God will make you strong.”
A tangle of thick weeds behind the shop almost hid the path to the other shed—it was a narrow passage cut by Grandma’s careful feet over many decades.
“That’s where I keep the material, Jake,” Grandma said. “Those who must pay, made flesh again. They are not people like you and me. No, they had their chance and cheated God. Thought they could be clever.” Before heading to the second shed for the work, Grandma would smile at me, but it was not a happy smile. When she smiled her shed smile, she only stretched her lips thin across her teeth, and any hint of happiness left her eyes.
Before each job, Granda put on a new apron, but the work still ruined her clothes, often as not.
Some nights, I could hear the words that came from the shed behind the weeds.. The voice of our God. I still hear them when I dream, but back when I was ten, I didn’t understand them. The words came from the breeze through the pokeweed and butterfly bushes, and they weren’t meant for me.
Once, my grandmother used a die to cut threads on a shackle bolt. She showed me how to make a ring and attach it to a bolt, too. I remember licking peanut salt from my lips and watching her drill a hole for the pin.
“When you make a deal, Jake, you stick to it. Don’t take the payment if you aren’t willing to follow through. It is our God who lends us her strength, never forget.”
I counted sixteen hammers in the shed, all the handles smooth from use. I could tell which ones Grandma used the most. The steel on the hammers shone black. Sticky. I couldn’t read the symbols, but before she died, Grandma told me what they meant.
“This one is for fleeting happiness, Jake.” She held up the smallest hammer. It had a short handle, but the spike on one side looked sharp. She set down the smaller hammer and hefted a larger one. “And this heavy one is for resentments. Do you know what that means, Jake?”
I shook my head. I’m still not sure even now, even though she told me. I’ve thought about it a lot.
“Resentment is the emotion of justice, Jake,” she said. “Always remember to look them in the eye when you harvest the resentment.”
Grandma always said you have to be careful doing the work because everything has a cost. I learned all about cost when I took over. Grandma died on the winter solstice, just when I turned eleven.
I did my first work finishing a job she started. I was waiting in the shop when I heard her call out. Grandma had fallen down on the little path between the sheds; God had used her all up. Her arms were black and dripping, her eyes puffy and red all the way around. I don’t mean red like she’d been crying, red like bleeding.
“Get your hammer, Jake, and finish the work,” she croaked. Her skin hung loose and by the time I came back with the hammer, she was all shriveled up into herself. I stood over her with my hammer, one side a razor-sharp hatchet inscribed with the rune for joyful remembrance, and felt the voice settle into my mind as Grandma’s breath rattled to a stop. She’d made this one special, just for me.
It is now your time to do my will, Jake, it said. This is your fate, too, but not for many years yet. Come, finish what she started. The deserving soul is summoned, made flesh. Extract my due, so they may rest.
My fate didn’t scare me; God only told me the truth. I pushed through the weeds on my way down the path, opened the shed door, and looked down at the man on the floor. Naked, cowering, trying to crawl away into a corner. Grandma had only just begun and one of his feet was twisted the wrong way around. Her big hammer, the one for resentments, lay in the corner.
“Snälla du … få det att sluta,” he begged, his cuffed hands held up in supplication. My heart filled with pity for him as I bent over and nestled my face into his. I felt his whimper and tasted a hot and salty tear as I sank my bite into his cheek. As my teeth scraped bone and clicked together, he screamed. Screaming sounds the same in any language. The God in my mind exalted and I thrummed with a new, savage strength. Her fever was on me as I dragged his arms up to the peg in the wall, lifted him off the floor, and bit him again. The meat of his arm felt stringy, gristly in my mouth as I chewed and tore. My God’s thoughts were my thoughts as I shook my head and growled.
Absolution will be his, but the price must be paid, she said, urging me on. He was faithless in his first life, but a promise demands payment. Strength demands sacrifice.
I held his shackles to the peg and swung my hammer downward between us like a righteous pendulum, dragging its bladed face just under his navel. Shock would silence him soon enough, but he screamed with pain and then happy laughter as I parted the muscles low in his abdomen. I sawed back and forth until it was done. When my grip on the hammer slipped, I dropped it and reached inside him, twisting my small fist into his roping entrails as they slithered away from my grasp. I tugged, pulled, and finally yanked. His roping, slippery viscera fell to the floor in a wet mass as I reached and pulled, reached and pulled. The work was done and the material was quiet.
“Poor Mom doesn’t know what she’s missing,” I said to our God, and my head echoed with her laughter as I licked my lips.