Tribal back piece across shoulders

The gate for Mr Pascoe's orchard came off the cart this morning with its spikes still hot from the quench, and I stood there with my hammer like a fool, because the old smith had drawn it in chalk on the forge floor and I had never once seen it finished. Every curl turns back on itself, and every spike points the way the wind comes off the Atlantic, so the whole piece looks like it is leaning into weather. Mr Hosken says that is the trick of it. Iron wants to lean, he says, and you only have to persuade it.

The difficulty was the middle, where the bands cross like two currents meeting off the Point. Hosken would not let me touch the bending bar until I had walked the chalk lines with my eyes shut for an hour. I did it, and on the third afternoon I saw it. The spine of the design runs down into one sharp tongue, and if you follow the swell of the top curl round, the letters of his name come up backwards, the way you read a thing from the far side of the fire. Hosken had put his own mark in the iron and never said a word.

I nearly took the file to it. Instead I wrote to the Pascoes to say the gate would be a week late, and I welded every joint myself with the big door open so the light fell across the metal the way it had fallen on his chalk. When the last spike cooled it went black with no sheen at all, and it looked less like a gate than a shadow someone had decided to keep.

Hosken came out wiping his hands and said nothing for a long while. Then he asked if I had found his name, and I said yes, and he said good, now it can stop being his and start being the ground's. Write me when the rain has got into the joints so I know it has settled. Your loving brother, Tom.