Strange Trades (47 page)

Charley’s mill was not the oldest, nor the youngest, being situated somewhat toward the middle of the whole complex. The youngest mill was still under construction. The oldest was a desolate mass of charred timbers overgrown with bramblevines and fronded at their bases with waterplants through which the Swolebourne rushed at the start of its channeled and tamed subterranean passage beneath the Mill. This progenitor mill had caught fire and burned down in a time beyond Charley’s conceptions, when there had been only three mills. Now there were fifteen. “Many mills make the Mill” was a saying often trotted out when one wished to indicate that there was strength in numbers, or diversity beneath a common facade.

“Aye, that’s what I hear also,” said another man. “And we all knows what that means. A new flood of dodders in from the farms, looking for an easy life. Probably some hellacious towners who’ve gotten one too many gal in trouble and been drummed out. A trapper or three who’s getting too old to walk his lines anymore. Well, they’ll soon learn. They all settle down to Mill life after a while. I reckon we was all dodders back somewhen.”

The men all nodded agreeably at the old wisdom. They knew that after a decade or two the workers at the new mill would be indistinguishable, save for perhaps a slight accent, from those who had lived in the Valley all their lives.

“They’ll not be any challenge in the games at first,” said a man with a missing arm. “Especially not to the Blue Devils.” Everyone smiled at the mention of their own team, as they pictured the frenetic sweaty pleasure of summer twilight games, kicking and passing the scarred lucky leather ball until the moon and stars themselves were inveigled out to watch. It seemed then that the remainder of the talk would center on the upcoming season’s games. But Charley’s father—who had been frowning and staring down into the oily dirt since the first mention of the new mill—diverted the talk with a blustery outburst.

“And why do we even need a new mill, I ask you?”

All the men turned their eyes on Cairncross. Charley felt nervous, worried and defiant for his father’s sake, all three emotions jumbled up together.

“Ain’t life hard enough,” Cairncross continued, “trying to produce the best goods we can, so’s that the Factor will give us a rich weight of gold that will guarantee a fair share for every worker, enough to tide us through the year between his Lord High Muckamuck’s visits?”

Cairncross stopped for breath, glaring intently at the others, who appeared not a little frightened at this mild derogation of the Factor. “Now we’ve got a new set of competitors, more mouths to divide the Factor’s beneficence among. Unless the Factor ups the yardage he’s willing to purchase, well all owe the Company Store our very breaths by the time the new mill is geared up to full production.”

An older man spoke up. “The Factor must know what he’s doing, Roger.” (Here the elder Cairncross mumbled something that only Charley seemed to hear: “He’s only human.”) “He told us nigh twenty years ago to start building the new mill. He must understand his market, wherever he sells the luxcloth, out there among the stars. Could be he’s expecting a big surge of new customers, and needs the new production. You’re too young, but I remember when the last mill started up, almost forty years ago. People were saying the same thing back then. And look, we still earn a good living.”

Cairncross spat. “Aye, a good living, if you call it fair that the sweat of a man and his sons goes for naught but to survive until he dies—and dies too young most times at that—with not an hour or an ounce of energy left for anything but a game of ball. Think what the Factor could do for us and our world if he wished—”

Now the men laughed. Charley winced for his father’s sake.

“Sure,” said one, “he could make us all deathless like hisself and we’d all fly through the air all day and live on moonbeams and calculate how many angels fly ’tween here and the stars. Away with your stuff, Roger! It’s enough for any man to make the cloth and raise his bairns and tussle on the game fields. That’s life for our kind, not some airy-fairy dream.”

It seemed that Cairncross wanted to say more, but, feeling the massed attitudes of his fellows ranked against him, he only stood, pivoted and stalked off back into the mill. The subsequent banter about ballplaying was muted and desultory, under the pall raised by Cairncross’s wild talk, and the men soon shuffled back into the mill, a few unprecedented minutes before the tolling of the bell that signalled the end of their break.

The boys stood amid the benches for a time after the men had gone, idly picking at the weather-splintered bleached wood of the seats or kicking greasy clods of soil. Their mood seemed touched by the dispute that had arisen among the men. A few boys looked curiously but not accusingly at Charley, as if he somehow could explain or account for his father’s untenable position.

Charley could do no such thing. He was too confused by his father’s arguments to explicate them. He had never seen his father act precisely like this before, or spout such unconventional ideas—although there had been times, of course, when his father was quietly sullen or explosively touchy; whose father wasn’t?— and he wondered if his own near-future entry into the Mill had anything to do with his father’s novel mood. Charley returned the boys’ glances boldly (some of his exaltation at conquering the brick heap still lingered like a nimbus around and inside him) and soon they looked away. A few seconds later, their natural exuberance had returned and they raced off back across the flowery strip, toward home and an afternoon’s boisterous roistering.

Charley did not follow. He still felt too confused to abide by his regular schedule of mindless afternoon gameplaying. He had to go off somewhere by himself, to think about things. Swinging his father’s empty pail and jug by their handles of tin and twine, keeping to the strip of waste-sown ground, Charley headed north, the serpentine bulk of the Mill on his left, the massed and brooding houses on his right. When he passed the northernmost house belonging to his own village, with the southernmost houses of the neighboring village still some distance off, he turned east, away from the Mill, across the trackless meadows. The hay-scented, sun-hot layer of air above the chest-high grass was filled with darting midges, the way he imagined the lux-thick air in the Mill to be filled with lux. Charley batted them aside when they swarmed annoyingly about his face.

The land began to slope up: houses fell away, behind, below, to south and north. Slender sapodilla saplings, advance scouts for the forest ahead and uphill, made their appearance in random clumps. Jacarandas and loblollies began to appear. As tree-cast, hard-edged shade blots started to overlap, the grass grew shorter and sparser. The final flowers to remain were the delicate yet hardy lacewings. Eventually, under the full-grown trees, the composition of the floor changed to leafduff and gnarly roots, evergreen needles and pink-spotted mushrooms. Small rills purled downhill at intervals, chuckling in simple-minded complacency, bringing their singly insignificant but jointly meaningful contributions to the Swolebourne.

“It takes many mills to make the Mill.…”

Charley labored up the eastern slope of the Valley, not looking back. The air was cooler under the tall trees, insects less prevalent. Only the isolated thumb-thick bark beetle winged like a noisy sling-shot stone from tree to tree.

In the arboreal somnolence, so reminiscent of Layday services, with the buzzing of the beetles standing in for the droning of Pastor Purbeck, Charley tried to sift through the events of the morning, from his triumph on the brick pile to the confusing conversation among the men. There seemed to be no pattern to the events, no scheme into which he could fit both his joy and his bafflement. So he gave up and tried just to enjoy the hike. At last he came out upon the ridge that marked the border of the Valley, the terminator between familiar and foreign.

Here, high up, there were bald patches among the trees, places where the rocky vertebrae of the hill poked through its skin of topsoil. Walking south along the ridge, Charley came out of the trees into such a spot. Sun-baked stone made the air waver with heat ripples. It felt good after the relative coolness under the trees, like snuggling under the blankets warmed by heated bricks on a midwinter’s night.

Setting his father’s lunchpail down on the grass, Charley climbed upon a big knobby irregular boulder, got his feet beneath him (no one contested this perch with him), and looked around, away from his home. The crowns of the nearest trees were far enough downslope to afford a spectacular vista.

Beyond the Valley, unknown lands stretched green and far to the east, ending in a misty horizon. Sun shouted off a meandering river. Charley suspected it was the Swolebourne on its post-Valley trek, but was not sure. There was no immediate sign of man to be seen, but Charley knew that somewhere a day or so away there were towns and villages and cities and farms, where shoes and meat and the harvested lux came from, in tall-wheeled, barrel-loaded wagons drawn by drowsy wainwalkers, their horns spanning wider than a man’s reach. Those places were too unreal to hold Charley’s interest. He was Valley born. Back toward the rift that held his world he turned.

He could see the entire length of the Valley from this vantage. It was an impressive spectacle. In the north, the Swolebourne tumbled in high frothy falls from over the lip that closed that end of the Valley. There was a legend that claimed that a whole tribe of aborigines had hurled themselves from this precipice to their mass suicide, rather than submit to the presence of the first human colonists. The mournful chortling which at times could be discerned under the falls’ roar was said to be their ghostly lament, and did indeed resemble the noises which the fur-faced natives made, according to those trappers who had actually penetrated to the current-day haunts of the abos.

From its creamy violent pool the river rushed down its man- modified channel, its energy for some small distance untapped by the machinery of the Mill.

Soon enough the water ran among the blackened beams and crumbled fragments of walls that could barely be discerned at this distance and which betokened the original mill that had long ago gone to its destruction as the result of some careless use of fire, a danger each child was warned against daily. The brawling river vanished next beneath the first still-functioning mill, through masonry arches. A gentle susurrus from river and Mill machinery filled the Valley.

Funny, thought Charley, how you only noticed some things when they were remote.… Charley’s eyes followed in one quick swoop the variegated length of the Mill, each of its sections distinguishable by the subtle and unique coloration of its bricks: generational shades of rose, tawny, pumpkin, autumnal leaf. He let his eyes bounce back from the southern end, where the Swolebourne emerged, a pitiful tamed remnant of its upstream proud valorous self, and where the minute figures of hired out-Valley laborers could be seen finishing the upper courses of the new mill.

Starting with the oldest section, Charley recited aloud all the familiar and comforting names of the Mill.

“Silent Sea Warriors, Swift Sparrows, Deeproot Willows, Wild Wainwalkers, South Polar Savages, Red Stalkers, Factor’s Favorites, Longarmed Bruisers, Blue Devils, Lux Jackets, Eighteyed Scorpions, Landfish, Ringtails, Greencats, Blackwater Geysers.”

This litany of mill names was vastly reassuring, a bastion of every child’s daily talk and boasting, source of endless speculation and comparison, during winter idleness and summer game-fever.

Suddenly Charley wondered what the new, sixteenth mill would call their team. How strange it would be to have a new name associated with the other time-hallowed ones. Would such a thing ever happen again in his lifetime, or was this the last mill that would ever be built? It was all up to the Factor, of course, and his motives were beyond fathoming.

Charley’s attention turned to the houses that paralleled the Mill on both its eastern and western sides. A village consisted of the families on both sides of the individual mills. Each section had its mirror-image dwelling places bunched together opposite each other, with the Mill itself intervening. There was a single corridor that ran straight through the width of each mill permitting access over the river and between halves of a village. This corridor had no doors into the mill proper; that privilege of entry was denied both women and underage children.

Gaps—playing fields fringed by wildness—separated each mill’s housing from the rest on the same side, contributing to the team feeling and individual minor differences that marked each small subcommunity.

Charley tried to imagine what life would be like in another community. He felt an uncommon sorrow for girls who had to move out of the villages of their birth if they married a man from another section. Would such a thing happen to his sister Floy? He hoped not, for he would miss her.

Thoughts of Floy made him want to see her, and so he clambered down off his rock, retrieved the lunchpail, and began his descent to the Valley floor. He guessed he felt better for his walk. He chose to disregard his father’s bitter talk about the Mill. The Mill was the only life Charley desired. He wanted to enter more deeply and completely into its ritual-filled activities and complexly articulated duties, not to examine or criticize them. He would not let tomorrow— the day that marked his first steps into such a life—be spoiled.

Back down in the Valley, Charley rushed home. He burst into his house, swinging his father’s lunchpail just like he had seen the men swing their lanterns as they walked in front of the wagons at night that carried people back from far-off games down one end of the Valley or another. He found his mother, Alan, and Floy all in the same room. Alan was playing with a set of wooden blocks while Floy, sitting in a chair, was having her hair braided by her mother. Floy was inordinately proud of having the same honey- colored tresses as her mother, and wore her traditional plaits proudly. Such elaborate, time-consuming hairstyles were a mark of status in the village, showing that mothers could afford to spare time from housekeeping and cooking and washing, and there were few women who would deny their rare daughters such attention.