Grist

by Linda Little

  The news that Ewan had been whipped at school flew home as though on the wings of birds. Daydreaming. His mother was rendered momentarily motionless at the charge. She had been halfway across the kitchen, a pail of lard in one hand and a bowl of apples in the other, and she had stopped at the news. She had set down her load and this Ewan remembered sharp and clear—her stillness, her emptied hands, her standing stock-still with that look of utter disbelief. He had committed a crime so heinous it had the power to disrupt the progress that was the very essence of his mother.

  “Ewan. Daydreaming,” she said, half a question, half an accusation as though she could not quite comprehend the iniquity of it. “Ten days,” she said when she regained herself. She resumed her work but as though her burdens had taken on the new weight of disappointment. Ewan’s true nature had been revealed. She sent him off to fetch a hardy switch.

  Each day for ten days Ewan’s father applied the rod with calm concentrated dedication to task. On the Sabbath his father had to slip off his Sunday jacket and set it carefully on the back of a chair before taking up the necessary work of the beating. On the tenth day, after the tenth switching, his father made quick kindling of the birch branch and stuffed it into the firebox before he turned to his son. “Now, have I got your attention?” he asked.

  The master stayed only six months at the school. With his leaving, instruction reverted to the hands of the more usual sort of girl. There was no further talk of geometry. Ewan kept what he had gleaned and what little he wrested from his older brother who had been in the upper class, but this information was pocked full of holes and often skewed as Hector had little aptitude and no interest in circles in the sky and fiddling with protractors. But perhaps it was the master’s teaching that prompted their father to return from the merchant’s with a book: The Young MillWright and Miller’s Guide. He handed it to Hector. Had the master taught him how to read this? he asked. It was not long before Hector had tossed the book aside onto the windowsill where Ewan picked it up. Oliver Evans, Engineer. This was where Ewan first saw an industrial drawing. Here geometry was pulled down from the air and used to figure and to design. Water falling to a waterwheel was represented as a tangent. The arc of a cog intersecting with the arc of a gear could be symbolized with circles. All this could be calculated on paper then brought to life through wood and iron. This was how building was thought about. Engineer.

  In the cracks of the day between chores, in the walk to and from school, in the quiet pools of wakefulness before sleep or sometimes waking in the middle of the night, or on Sunday afternoons, young Ewan let the lines and vectors and ratios, the perfect geometry of the mind wash over him. But it was far too easy to be carried away calculating ratios and find himself distracted from work—standing by the wood box with arms half laden, staring idly into space. More than once he narrowly escaped detection. Ewan learned he must always be on guard against his filthy daydreaming nature. He learned to hide his sin and never to let the pace of his work slacken, never allow mathematics to push its way in and allow him to be caught inattentive.

  AND THEN CAME HIS FATHER’S ACCIDENT. There he was being carried in on a stretcher and set up in the room off the kitchen. The doctor. The whispers. The next morning their mother picked Ewan’s schoolbooks off the kitchen table and tossed them on top of the cupboard. “You’re done with these,” she said. Ewan was not sorry to leave behind school’s silly girls and stupid, bullying boys. Since Master left they’d learned nothing of any use anyway. Their mother turned fiery eyes on Sander and Hector. “Go back to the woods and find that tree that fell on your father. Chop it into pieces the size of my shoe—I want to see it burn in the stove. You—” She turned back to Ewan—“there’s a grist of oats to be dried. You mind the kiln.”

  Ewan made his way to the mill. After he spread the oats over the kiln floor and lit the fire he wandered beneath the great spur wheel and stared up into the wooden cogs. At fourteen years old this was the first time he could remember standing here completely alone, no one between him and the machinery of the mill. Although it was not his business to grind, he opened the sluice and set the mill running. Without a soul to discover him or correct him or interrupt him he stood staring up at the gears with his arms dangling, measuring with his eyes, imagining the workings as drawings like those he’d seen in his father’s book. He imagined the drawings as conceptions, his mind ranging, stretching, dancing amid the infinite possibilities of the theoretical world. He stood still while the kiln fire burned low with inattention, with floors awaiting sweeping and a stack of sacks needing stitching. And as he stood idle in the mill with his head in the clouds and his hands hanging empty at his sides, his father, lying up in the house, died.

  THREE SONS FOR THE MILL: SANDER, HECTOR AND EWAN. Three daughters for the house: Mary, Agnes and Catherine. This was God’s will. The girls learned what they needed from their mother. Their business was their own and of no concern to men. They nattered away like hens—if there was meaning in the chatter it was nothing to Ewan. They cooked and cleaned and provided what was needed.

  At the tail end of the family, after a short hiatus, with their mother well into her forties, Charles and then Robert had been born. Their mother had declared three sons were enough for any mill and she would have these two for herself, one for the clergy, one for a doctor. She had set up a table and a shelf for a library in the parlour. She had had the girls light lamps and keep a blaze in the parlour stove so the younger boys could tend to their books in the evenings. Even before they had started school their mother had had them at slates and bought them copybooks to practise their letters. Copybooks! By the time she had sent them off to school they were already reading one-syllable words and reciting, already adding apples and oranges. Robert and Charles had been declared too delicate for the boys’ room and instead had shared the small bedroom at the top of the stairs. Robert and Charles had not been called to the mill. Or the fields. Or the woods. In fact, they were of no account at all as far as Ewan could see.

  But then came the accident. Their father broken and buried. All was disrupted. When the family touched earth again on the far side of the funeral their mother’s resolve was redoubled. Tribulations or no, she would see her two youngest sons properly educated and thrust up into society. She had Sander, Hector and Ewan for the mill. Boys yes, but at nineteen, eighteen and fourteen they had the basics of the trade. From their father they had learned to swing an axe, an adze, a pick. They could repair the dam and dress the stones. They could dry, shell, grind and sift well enough to make a start. They had learned the value of daylight and needed only to develop a devotion to task. This she could provide. Experience would teach the rest. As for the girls, she sent Mary off to the Boston States to send home a monthly pay packet. The younger two girls, when not at their studies, swept, scrubbed and churned until they reached the age where they could be sent out to teach at any school that could send fifty dollars home. She bought another cow, bred the young heifer and expanded her laying flock. She kept bees and sold honey. The back pasture could support a few sheep. She worked beside her sons in the fields wringing out every possible head of grain for flour or meal. She squeezed and hoarded money, kept it trickling in from every possible source. Robert and Charles spent their evenings at their books in the parlour, unmolested by the industry around them.

  AT FIRST THE BOY MILLERS FOUND THEIR WAY BY STEPPING carefully into the footprints their father had left for them. They worked as though under the eye of their father and this gave them courage and direction and the patina of certainty. While their connection with the world of men seemed oddly kinked without their father, their connection with the world of boys had been severed. Sander and Hector enfolded Ewan into their world as their father would have directed. The three of them shovelled and hauled grain and meal and flour and bran. From wagons to the kiln to hoppers to barrels and sacks and back to wagons the three of them inhabited this island all their own. What Ewan remembered of those early days was the smoky
warmth of the kiln, the toasty smell, the mild stinging of his eyes. Three shovels scraping the iron of the kiln floor or the hardwood boards of the mill floor and the whoosh as the kernels ran together. Rhythmic scrape and dump, a river of grain, his brothers there beside him, Hector’s periodic little cough, Sander whistling almost imperceptibly through his teeth.

  Sander greeted the farmers. Hector weighed the grain. Ewan worked the figures and kept the accounts. Every Saturday night Ewan laid the books before his mother for her perusal. She set her hand on his shoulder and nodded her head. “God knew your father’s journey would be short. That’s why He sent you for the mill. That’s why He made you a good worker,” she said. For a quarter of an hour every Saturday evening Ewan sat by his mother basking in her full attention and her approbation. On Sunday mornings he sat with his family in the MacLaughlins’ pew and listened while the world’s workings were elucidated in the immutable laws of God. Neither did we eat any man’s bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you. If any should not work, neither should he eat. On Sunday afternoons Ewan sat with his father’s copy of Oliver Evans’s millwright’s guide. Like God, everything Oliver Evans said was true, and if Ewan did not understand a law or a passage he had only to reread, to attend more closely, and the meaning would become clear. Every body in a state of rest will remain so and every body in motion will continue to move in a right line until a change is effected by the agency of some mechanical force. What he read on Sunday trickled through his bloodstream and was absorbed into his flesh through the week. With quietness they work and eat their own bread. The velocities and powers of spouting fluids, under equal pressures or equal perpendicular heights and equal apertures are equal in all cases. I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day. If a body be struck by two equal forces in contrary directions, it will remain unmoved. And so Ewan’s world was built, law by law, truth by truth, until it ran predictable and straight.

  As the miller boys hauled themselves through one complete cycle of the seasons they grew the confidence of young men. Their father’s voice faded. They naturally slid towards the inclinations of their characters. Perhaps if Ewan had been subtler, less direct, more patient, less exacting, they could have rolled along. Perhaps if Ewan had paid homage of some sort to the superior position of his elder brothers, or perhaps if these two brothers had not been so neatly matched, Ewan could have made himself respected, even indispensable. No one could deny his mechanical prowess. When some piece of machinery needed fixing or replacing Sander and Hector could do only what had been done in the past. They had little ability when it came to solving novel problems. Ewan criticized. Then to counter Ewan’s arrogance, Sander, bolstered by Hector’s loyalty, felt compelled to present some alleged innovation of his own. When Sander put forward his inevitably ridiculous proposal, Ewan said nothing—he simply stood quiet, letting the silliness of the idea fill the space between them. Then Ewan repeated his brother’s words with great care, as if to underline them, looking into the middle distance with impassive eyes. He would turn his back and set about stitching sacks or sweeping, or some other such menial task, leaving his older brothers to institute the ludicrous plans. When the results fell flat Sander and Hector would throw down their tools in humiliation and head to town on some flimsy pretext. Ewan was always careful repeat this pretext word for word to their mother to explain their absence. Then Ewan fixed up their mess, adding some small improvement that the older brothers would ridicule from spite. With every repetition of this cycle Ewan found himself thrust further and further from the brothers he loved but could not touch.

  Ewan kept a close eye on the mill’s power train, the belts, the dam and the wheel. He kept a running tally in his head of the number of hours each stone operated between dressings, monitored their grinds and kept them all sharp. By the time he was seventeen he could dismantle a set of stones in the morning, dress them, reassemble them, and have them balanced and running before dinnertime. Sander stopped objecting to Ewan acting without his say-so in this regard but he did not allow unauthorized tampering with the mill itself. How could he? If he did, soon he would be running a mill he could not repair or understand.

  For the most part Sander and Hector tended to their business under their mother’s watchful eye but occasionally they would cover for each other allowing one of them to sport off to town or down the road to see a girl. From time to time they would risk some caper together setting off “to the woods” and returning with string of trout they would fry up or hang to smoke in the kiln. Or Sander would liberate the clandestine pack of cards from its hiding spot in the buckwheat sifter, blow the bran off it, and tuck it into his shirt pocket. Then he and Hector would head for the blacksmith’s forge. When Ewan frowned, Sander turned on him. “What’s the matter, Sour-pickle-face? We need a new rod for the shaker. It’s gonna be a heavy sonofabitch. Hector’s gotta help heft ’er, right, Hec?” The two of them trotted off laughing, leaving the grinding to Ewan.

  When, up at the house, young Charles and Robert finished at the local school there was money for tuition and board in town, for the school clothes, and books, for violin and elocution lessons, for a Latin tutor. Then on to their professional educations. Finally the matriarch saw Robert inducted into the ministry and the following year Charles established in a medical practice. She died three weeks later, exhausted and utterly content. Sander married almost instantly and brought his new wife to live in the house. Sander’s wife changed things around and put things in the wrong places. She didn’t make oatcakes the way Ewan’s mother had. Hector set off to Boston for long-dreamed-of adventures. Before the summer was over all the girls had married the sweethearts they had kept waiting and Sander’s wife was expecting their first child.

  And there stood Ewan. In the middle of all this upheaval Ewan got up every day as he always had and raised the sluice at first light. Ewan replaced the teeth in the stone nut that Sander had let drop into the spur. Sander’s son was born. The baby bawled all night so no one could sleep. Ewan replaced the over-heating gudgeon Sander had made such a mess of. Sander spoke longingly of Hector and wondered would he return to the mill once he’d had a go at Boston. Ewan said the dam would be due for an overhaul next summer. Sander said no, it was the wheel that needed attention first and he had a great idea for a new wheel. Ewan spat out of the side of his mouth onto the ground, which was more of a response than the idea warranted.

  By mid-morning Ewan was halfway through shelling a grist of oats. Sander was leaning back against the doorframe speaking to a couple of farmers in a voice meant to convey information over the farmers’ heads and straight to Ewan’s ears. When Ewan passed by with a sack of meal for a customer Sander proclaimed they would be building a new waterwheel. He had heard of a twelve-foot wheel in Inverness and he meant to build one of that size here to increase their power. Ewan told him not to be so thick and he turned away to readjust a stone that Sander had just lowered. He had told him half a dozen times already that his waterwheel plan was inane—it was plain, clear mathematics. Perhaps it was the snicker of one of the farmers, perhaps it was lack of sleep or simply the moment the camel’s back snapped. Perhaps Sander had been preparing for the showdown all along. Whatever the case Sander lunged at his brother, hauled him through the door and shoved him into the dirt outside the mill. Ewan, taken by surprise, scrambled to his feet.

  “I own this mill!” Sander backed him up against the wall shouting into his face. “It is mine, not yours. I am the oldest son, not you. It was left to me. Do you need to see the deed?”

  Ewan had never imagined the ownership of the mill, never questioned it, never conceived of the mill being owned at all—no more than he would have conceived of the clouds in the sky being capable of being possessed. He scrabbled to recover from the ambush, taking refuge behind his mask of cold disdain.

  “What are you waiting for?” Again and again his oldest brother yelling, red-faced and spitting, bub
bles dancing at the corners of his mouth. “What are you waiting for? Why are you still here?”

  “Where else would I be? Someone has to run the place.”

  “You think you’re so damned smart but you’re the dullest wit I ever saw. Open your eyes. Who wants you here? Nobody. Mother kept you here until she got the youngsters straightened away. The youngsters are set up. Mother is gone. Look around you! You think I want you here looking down your snotty nose at me all the time? Telling me what to do? What’s the matter with you, little brother? This was Father’s mill, now it’s mine, when the time comes it’ll be John Alex’s. You want me to write that up in the account book for you?”

  “Mother would never have…”

  “Mother is more than a year dead and you’re still running to her like a babe on the tit!”

  “You couldn’t manage a week without me.”

  And that was a mistake because that was when Sander hit him. Sander was taller, quicker, angrier and much more experienced at tussling. Ewan managed to get in a few pokes amid the rain of savage punches. Then everything shifted with a crack to the side of his head. He could hear Sander panting. Small stones pressed themselves into his cheek where he lay on the dirt. A sticky wetness covered his palms that covered his face and he recognized it as blood from the metallic taste in his throat. His body curled in to protect itself. The kick in his back exploded as a visual thing, a yellow star of pain. He smelled earth and blood and a wild sharp tang that may have been fear. One ear roared with blood. The other frantically hunted sound. Sander panting above him, yes, then gathering breath and shouting in gasps and sobs. “Stupid. Little. Shit.” A kick punctuating every word. Sander crying like a boy, like he had cried the time he had drowned Ewan’s cat out of spite. As though he, Sander, was the victim and not the aggressor. As though Ewan had driven him to heights of cruelty he could not possibly have reached on his own.