Grist

by Linda Little

  He spread his bills and picks and quill stick across the floor in preparation. When he looked up his eyes fell on me as though I had only that moment come into being.

  “What?” he said.

  If it was a question I had no answer. I bowed my head and darted down the stairs to gather up the kettle and tea and all the accoutrements of home that I had cluttered around the kiln hearth. When I emerged again he was hunched over his stone, intent, the bill in his hand tap-tapping with a strong, steady rhythm. He seemed a part of the stone. He would dress his stones one at a time progressing from runner stone to bed stone, from French buhr, to the granites, to the fodder stone, to the shelling stone, by daylight and then by lamplight. As he finished each one he set them back together, balancing the runner stone in perfect harmony with its mate. If a stone is inexpertly balanced, if it lies a hair off plumb, the stone wears unevenly, scraping away at the grooves with each rotation. The longer the trouble is left untended the worse it gets until finally the entire stone needs be ground flat and clear and new patterns etched into it. I had never seen evidence of such neglect of course, but Ewan had seen examples. He had been witness to this unconscionable moral blight at other men’s mills.

  When he finished dressing his stones he cut firewood until the frost was gone from the ground. He had fencing to mend then, and spring planting, and the first crop of hay to be made before he could leave again. And he milled through it all. He set himself to his tasks, burrowing through them with the determination of a weasel, stopping only to eat three times a day. Daily I sent Charity to the fields or the woods or the mill with his dinner. “Put a breeze behind you,” I called after her constantly. “Don’t be caught idling where your father can see you.” When the last load of hay was forked into the mow Ewan left as suddenly as he arrived. And we exhaled.

  THEN THE RIVER SWELLED WITH FALL RAIN, FILLED THE POND AND the thunder returned to the waterfall over the dam. Mowers and reapers and wagons were hitched to teams throughout the county calling Ewan home once more. Ewan harvested his crops and cut the firewood for the house and kiln. He ground the fall harvest day and night, rain or shine. By mid-November the first rush of grinding was complete and custom slowed to a steady, manageable flow. He dressed his stones for the winter season and then he was gone until spring when the cycle began again.

  CHARITY GREW TO BE SUCH A HANDSOME GIRL, TALL AND SHAPELY with glossy hair that she brushed out into long tresses at night. One fall evening with Ewan freshly back from refurbishing a mill in Digby County, Charity wandered through the kitchen as I was trying to get Ewan’s supper on the table.

  “Set a cup of tea before your father! Do you want him wasting his good daylight while you lounge around like a groundhog on a warm rock?” My voice was sharp with the change of seasonal routine and it rattled her. She scurried to the teapot but then dropped his overfull mug, sent it crashing to the floor spewing hot tea in all directions and shards of mug with it. I stepped in to prevent any rising drama.

  “Never mind. That old cup was worn thin and ready to crack. I’ll tend to this. You fetch your father a fresh cup.”

  Ewan watched the little scene impassively but throughout his supper he continued to follow her with his eyes, watching her over his plate.

  Before he returned to the mill he paused at the kitchen door. “How old is the girl?”

  “Fourteen,” I said.

  “Aye, fourteen,” he nodded.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1905 I RECEIVED A LETTER FROM MY HUSband. This had become so unusual I tried not to be alarmed. Dear wife, it read in Ewan’s precise hand. I have engaged an apprentice. He will be coming home with me. Set up a room for him. When I return home I intend to stay, attend to my mill, and teach my apprentice for as long as the Lord sees fit to spare me. Your husband, Ewan MacLaughlin.

  I stared at the letter. Ewan had always spurned the idea of an apprentice, turning away any fathers brave enough to approach him on behalf of their growing sons. Despite the twinges and aches that spoke to me on rainy mornings I had never considered that Ewan might feel his own advancing age. I would need a while to consider what his constant presence would mean for Charity. To cap her spirit and hold her to her chores for a few hours a day for half the year was trial enough. Maybe I should look for a position of some sort for her. In town, perhaps. But I couldn’t imagine it; we had not been separated for more than a few hours at a stretch since her birth. Besides, she was too young, not yet fifteen.

  As the days passed I found my thoughts no clearer. I told Charity precisely what Ewan had told me in the letter and said no more about it except that she would need to look smart and pay more attention to her work.

  EWAN AND THE NEW APPRENTICE ARRIVED ON A DIMMING EVENING IN late August, weeks before I expected him. I had locked up the mill only half an hour earlier and had just built up a fire to warm the soup for supper. Ewan came into view first and swung down off his horse. Charity yelped and spun into a tizzy, whipping around the kitchen in a whirlwind, gathering up the flotsam of her varied dramatic lives. I watched, motionless, as a second horse dragged up the lane; a slender straw-haired figure perched like a nervous chipmunk on its back. Ewan stepped forward and took the reins of the second horse. The boy grasped the saddle horn, kicked his feet out of the stirrups, and shifted his weight until he began to slide off the saddle, his legs buckling when they hit solid ground so that he tottered backwards into his mount. The horse skittered and the boy caught himself and struggled to straighten.

  “Run and get those horses. Your father will have had them spent miles ago. Hand me those ridiculous sashes. I’ll put them in the fire where they ought to have gone years ago.”

  She gaped.

  “And close your mouth. The horses will mistake it for the oat bin.”

  Laughlin Wainwright was the boy’s name. From Saint John town. “Set your bag in there,” I told him, indicating the room off the kitchen.

  “He’ll sleep upstairs,” Ewan said.

  Although the boy’s table manners were rather rough and ready he washed well before sitting in to his supper and spoke passably well when addressed, but he was bone weary: too sore to sit and too tired to stand. His jaw had made some fleeting acquaintance with a razor, I guessed, and his chest had begun to broaden. Vestiges of boyhood innocence flitted across his face as he took in his new surroundings. There was no doubting he was a handsome lad, but something in the shape of his face made me want to turn away.

  Charity, enthralled by the idea of a visitor, sat daintily as though in the court of the Queen and engaged in what she imagined to be pleasant conversation with a gentleman as though this were one of her games.

  “That’s a noble mount you have there, I couldn’t help but notice the sheen on his coat. And such a beautiful roan. I do so love a roan.”

  “Mr. MacLaughlin got me that horse in Digby. His name’s Teddy. We rode the whole way.”

  I struggled to stifle my amazement. “Get up and make the tea, Charity.”

  Once Ewan closed our bedroom door that night he stood stiff and still, his legs apart, arms crossed over his chest, staring at me until I felt self-conscious as I changed into my nightdress. “What does my wife think of my new apprentice?”

  The question took me aback. When had he ever asked my opinion?

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “After all this time, and with so many able local boys, you bring a lad from so far away. Is it true you bought him that horse for his own? His people ought to have provided the horse, surely, if they imagined he needed one.”

  “So you want to criticize the way I run my affairs?”

  “You asked what I thought. I’m telling you.”

  His eyes glinted cold. A leer, the essence of an aborted smile perhaps, passed over his face like a shadow over the moon—there then gone. A shiver ran through me and I turned away to brush out my hair, but I could feel his eyes on me. For the first time in my memory Ewan climbed into bed and
slept without kneeling to say his prayers.

  When I awoke the next morning he was stretched out beside me, his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling with a calm I had seldom seen grace his features.

  “Best leave the boy to sleep this morning. You get the fire going.”

  IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS WE CAME TO SEE WHAT YOUNG LAUGHLIN Wainwright was made of. His mother ran a boarding house in Saint John, he said. His father had been grievously injured in an accident at the shipyard and had suffered a great deal before his death ten years ago, he told us over supper.

  “There’s no point in all this chatter,” Ewan interrupted and stared the boy into silence. “There’s no talk at the table here.”

  It was apparent that the boy was accustomed to entertaining company. Easygoing, with a wittingly disarming smile and an all-too-ready wink, he was handy with a story and sang in a honey-smooth tenor voice, which delighted Charity. Ewan had him tending the kiln fire, hauling bags of grist and flour, inspecting and adjusting belts. Ewan had bought a new stone and supposedly was teaching the boy the art of dressing it. We were a long way from seeing Laughlin’s mettle there. In the evenings after supper Ewan seldom returned to work in the dark anymore. Any unfinished custom he simply left for the next day rather than light the lamps. Instead he hauled out his old drawings of the mill and spread them over the kitchen table. I had not clapped eyes on the drawings since the mill’s construction and did not even know he had kept them. He called the boy to him. Laughlin sat at Ewan’s elbow as Ewan pointed here and there at the drawings and spilled out a lifetime’s knowledge. I peeked up from my mending and watched the boy feign attention. If Ewan had ever thought to stop his lectures and ask the boy a question or elicit a comment he might have discovered the boy’s indifference. But Ewan would never think to do such a thing. Disinterest in the mill would never have occurred to him.

  Charity, for the moment, was enthralled with her game of entertaining a “visitor” and the boy was equally taken with the idea of being one. She laughed without restraint whenever Laughlin offered some foolish antic or story. In no time at all she was singing the songs that Laughlin had brought. I grew uneasy at how comfortable he had made himself. He spoke to Charity about the mill as though he were a master miller already and claimed there was very little to it, at least for one as apt as himself. I found my tone with him grew curt and then stern. He answered me with an attitude barely this side of saucy.

  One night after supper when it was too dark to work, Ewan sent the boy down to the mill. “Fetch my chisels and my bill.” Then minutes later to Charity, “Run after him and tell him not the bill but the whetstone. Bring only the chisels and the whetstone.” Then he seemed to forget about both of them, focus his gaze on the angles formed by the corners of the room and wander off in his mind. Meanwhile Charity and the boy were gone long enough to chisel a millstone from a cliff face but Ewan had no comment to make on that.

  The boy had not been with us six weeks when he found a supply of rum who knows where and stumbled in grinning and stinking and leaving his horse untended in the yard. Ewan’s face blackened. He opened his mouth to speak but then did not but rather pushed the boy towards the stairs and then, as it seemed to be necessary, up the stairs. He returned after a short while and resumed his seat.

  “Tend that boy’s horse,” he said to Charity without looking at her. In response to no comment from anyone, he said, “There is nothing wrong with that boy but youthfulness.”

  ONE NIGHT WHEN I HAD PRESSED MY CHEESE AND MARCHED CHARITY off to the parlour with her lessons, away from distracting eyes, Ewan began lecturing over his drawings. The boy sat by him in his posture of engrossment. I began mixing my bread and was trying to distract myself by calculating the price I could expect to get for my fall cheeses. Perhaps Ewan’s voice had faltered; I don’t know what pricked up my ears.

  “The ratio of head stone to power train is running to the crucial down fall…” I swung around to stare. Spouting gibberish. There were no other words for it. Never in my life had I known Ewan to use false information, never mind nonsense. A joke? Not Ewan. A trap? No, he was far too direct a man. I lifted my head, stared at him. Ewan was an old man! The truth of it hit me all at once. His hair had thinned to wisps and his scalp showed through, papery and vulnerable. His shirt hung loosely off his shoulders as his skin hung off his cheekbones. He favoured his left arm as though his right had been weakened or injured. I watched his eyebrow dip in momentary confusion like he had wandered off and just this instant found himself back in familiar surroundings. Then he shut his mouth as though his chin were hinged. So extraordinary was the movement I wondered if I had heard the jaw clapping shut. The boy looked up at him and nodded as though instead of a jumble of meaningless words Ewan had just answered the very question he had been puzzling over. Of course, the boy had never listened to a word in the first place so how could he tell gobbledygook from elementary hydraulics? Ewan rolled up his drawings with too much intent. “That is sufficient for tonight,” he said.

  A STRANGE AND PERVASIVE FEAR CREPT OVER ME. Charity flitted past before the butter was churned in the morning. She pulled a shawl around her shoulders leaving her coat on the peg by the door and declared, “What little rest I find for my poor wretched heart I find upon the moors.”

  The moors indeed! I drew my daughter away, pinched her arm until she squealed. “You are in danger of becoming too familiar with an apprentice boy. Too familiar!” The sound of my voice slapping such orders in front of her astounded me as much as it did her. “I forbid it!”

  I felt her defying me, and when I corrected her, felt her smirk behind my back, more and more in league with the boy whom I now hated. I warned her well and often to mind herself. I called out the danger but she would not hear me. Such is the way with the young. They see what is in front of their eyes at any moment. To them everything is what it seems; the world is an easy place to know.

  Then suddenly she did not smile. One morning she dawdled by the door with the milk pail in her hand. Not that this in itself was unusual but when I looked up her eyes were ringed in darkness and she had pulled her coat in tight around her. She had angered me already that morning and impatient, I barked at her, “What, I suppose the cows bite now, do they? Move along for heaven’s sake!”

  The boy came down the stairs soon afterwards and set off to tend the horses.

  BY NOVEMBER IT WAS CLEAR THAT CHARITY WAS CARRYING A CHILD. No doubt there had been some game, some fantasy that started the play. The young are easy to fool—so easy they can’t help but fool themselves. That boy had nothing to lose and all to gain and once he grasped the trophy he knew he had grasped everything. She had lost all she had.

  My head and heart tumbled over each other like two cats in a fight. But when I clutched Ewan’s arm and tugged him into the privacy of the woodshed to tell him the news he smiled a slow languorous smile that had been years in preparation. The muscles around his eyes and forehead relaxed and his face brightened to such a degree I could hardly recognize him, as though all his cares had been lifted. I could not understand him and shook his forearms with vehemence, repeating myself, afraid the shock had addled his brain.

  “Yes,” he said. “They will marry now. They will live here and the boy will have the mill, and his sons after him.”

  “But your mill? To a prentice boy who is nobody and a daughter who is not…”

  “Yes. And who would question it—my mill handed to my own daughter’s husband? Would you dare question it?” He turned his head towards the window, smiling.

  Dumbfounded, I gaped at him unable to know what I must know. Why had he brought home this unremarkable boy, pandered to him, blinded himself to his faults and handed his entire legacy over to him? Finally, the scales fell from my eyes. I felt like Eve in the garden finding herself face to face with the serpent. Lining the words up to speak them was like hefting cut stones onto a foundation wall—each word so heavy, so dense, it left me breathless with exertion.

/>   “That boy. That Laughlin. MacLaughlin. Of course. That MacLaughlin is your son.”

  He met my eyes and held the gaze for a moment. He did not turn away in shame but in pride. I felt like a slow and stupid child. I shrunk in shame until outrage stepped up to rescue me.

  “Your son was already born! That spring you returned and found me carrying a child. I threw myself and my unborn child on your mercy. I listened to your pompous talk and begged your forgiveness while you had just returned from the birth of your own bastard son! You had seen him, held him, named him, saw him suckling at the breast of some hapless woman!”

  He paid me no heed.

  “The day my Charity was born you knew what use to make of her. Of course you suffered her under your roof! You had already written her fate. You fattened her like a hog for slaughter!”

  He cleared his throat. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “The Lord…!”

  Granddaughter. I would have killed him right there if I had had a weapon at hand. Then what would have become of you? The story would have gone untold, ended there with a wild old woman hanged for murder. Perhaps you would never have been born. But I was left to carry my fury as best I could. What else could I do? I could not even pray. Perhaps it is God that grows the grain; I leave this to you to ponder. But it is man who determines which kernels will be planted as seed and which will be hauled to the mill for grist.