Harlan is a broad-shouldered man whose hands look like tools carved their own handles into him. Soot lives in the creases of his knuckles and under his fingernails; a faint silver scar runs from the corner of his mouth down to his jaw, earned from a temperamental bellows. He moves with the slow, purposeful gait of someone who measures distance by strike and breath rather than by time — each step a preparation. When he works, his shoulders hunch forward and his head tilts so his left ear catches the ring of steel. When he speaks to folk he neither likes nor fears, he squints as if judging them against an invisible grain. Unexpectedly, he wears a threadbare blue ribbon tied to the rim of his apron — a fragile, clean thing amid soot and iron that seems to have no practical use and every sentimental one.