The first telephone in the village was installed that year over at the Lindsay-Francis Store on Yonge Street. For a small sum of money, a person could conduct a long-distance telephone conversation with another person as far south as the city of York. It was a miraculous invention. I must admit, I was secretly envious for I’d always wanted to invent a machine just as miraculous in my lifetime. Something like a flying ship. Or a train that could travel underwater. But the long days in the forge didn’t allow much time for inventions. Of course, for my father, the arrival of the telephone was just another fine excuse to grumble about machines and the disastrous advances of science. That man could find the smallest spot in even the rosiest of apples. That summer, I was fourteen and William was sixteen — both of us growing bigger by the hour. Certainly, we weren’t children anymore, but we weren’t quite adults, either. The purgatory of adolescence was upon us. And yet, because we were still so young and naive, neither of us had any idea that we were both careening toward the edge of a precipice.
