Legends

  “Hold, stranger!” cried a man behind them. They turned to see a large man on horseback approaching slowly along the road. The people parted to make way for him.

  “Quick, Arthur,” Alvin murmured. “Who do you reckon this is?”

  “The miller,” said Alvin Stuart.

  “Good morning to you, Mr. Miller!” cried Alvin in greeting.

  “How did you know my trade?” asked the miller.

  “The boy here guessed,” said Alvin.

  The miller rode nearer, and turned his gaze to Arthur Stuart. “And how did you guess such a thing?”

  “You spoke with authority,” said Arthur Stuart, “and you’re riding a horse, and people made way for you. In a town this size, that makes you the miller.”

  “And in a bigger town?” asked the miller.

  “You’d be a lawyer or a politician,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “The boy’s a clever one,” said the miller.

  “No, he just runs on at the mouth,” said Alvin. “I used to beat him but I plumb gave out the last time. Only thing I’ve found that shuts him up is a mouthful of food, preferably pancakes, but we’d settle for eggs, boiled, scrambled, poached, or fried.”

  The miller laughed. “Come along to my house, not three rods beyond the commons and down the road toward the river.”

  “You know,” said Alvin, “my father’s a miller.”

  The miller cocked his head. “Then how does it happen you don’t follow his trade?”

  “I’m well down the list of eight boys,” said Alvin. “Can’t all be millers, so I got put out to a smith. I’ve got a ready hand with mill equipment, though, in case you’ll let me help you to earn our breakfast.”

  “Come along and we’ll see how much you know,” said the miller. “As for these folks, never mind them. If some wanderer came through and told them the sun was made of butter, you’d see them all trying to spread it on their bread.” His mirth at this remark was not widely appreciated among the others, but that didn’t faze him. “I’ve got a shoeing shed, too, so if you ain’t above a little farrier work, I reckon there’s horses to be shod.”

  Alvin nodded his agreement.

  “Well, go on up to the house and wait for me,” said the miller. “I won’t be long. I come to pick up my laundry.” He looked at the woman that Alvin had first spoken to. Immediately she ducked back inside the house to fetch the clothes the miller had come for.

  On the road to the mill, once they were out of sight of the villagers, Alvin began to chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Arthur Stuart.

  “That fellow with his pants around his ankles and birdshot dribbling out of his blunderbuss.”

  “I don’t like that miller,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Well, he’s giving us breakfast, so I reckon he can’t be all bad.”

  “He’s just showing up the town folks,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Well, excuse me, but I don’t think that’ll change the flavor of the pancakes.”

  “I don’t like his voice.”

  That made Alvin perk up and pay attention. Voices were part of Arthur Stuart’s knack. “Something wrong with the way he talks?”

  “There’s a meanness in him,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “May well be,” said Alvin. “But his meanness is better than hunting for nuts and berries again, or taking another squirrel out of the trees.”

  “Or another fish.” Arthur made a face.

  “Millers get a name for meanness sometimes,” he said. “People need their grain milled, all right, but they always think the miller takes too much. So millers are used to having folks accuse them. Maybe that’s what you heard in his voice.”

  “Maybe,” said Arthur Stuart. Then he changed the subject. “How’d you hide the plow when you opened your poke?”

  “I kind of opened up a hole in the ground under the poke,” said Alvin, “and the plow sank down out of sight.”

  “You going to teach me how to do things like that?”

  “I’ll do my best to teach,” said Alvin, “if you do your best to learn.”

  “What about making shot spill out of a gun that’s pointed at you?”

  “My knack opened the paper, but his own trousers, that’s what made the barrel dip and spill out the shot.”

  “And you didn’t make his trousers fall?”

  “If he’d pulled up his suspenders, his pants would’ve stayed up just fine,” said Alvin.

  “It’s all Unmaking though, isn’t it?” said Arthur Stuart. “Spilling shot, dropping trousers, making them folks feel guilty for not taking you in.”

  “So I should’ve let them drive us away without breakfast?”

  “I’ve skipped breakfasts before.”

  “Well, aren’t you the prissy one,” said Alvin. “Why are you suddenly so critical of the way I do things?”

  “You’re the one made me dig out a canoe with my own hands,” said Arthur Stuart. “To teach me Making. So I keep looking to see how much Making you do. And all I see is how you Unmake things.”

  Alvin took that a little hard. Didn’t get mad, but he was kind of thoughtful and didn’t speak much the rest of the way to the miller’s house.

  So nearly a week later, there’s Alvin working in a mill for the first time since he left his father’s place in Vigor Church and set out to be a Prentice smith in Hatrack River. At first he was happy, running his hands over the machinery, analyzing how the gears all meshed. Arthur Stuart, watching him, could see how each bit of machinery he touched ran a little smoother—a little less friction, a little tighter fit—so more and more of the power from the water flowing over the wheel made it to the rolling millstone. It ground faster and smoother, less inclined to bind and jerk. Rack Miller, for that was his name, also noticed, but since he hadn’t been watching Alvin work, he assumed that he’d done something with tools and lubricants. “A good can of oil and a keen eye do wonders for machinery,” said Rack, and Alvin had to agree.

  But after those first few days, Alvin’s happiness faded, for he began to see what Arthur Stuart had noticed from the beginning: Rack was one of the reasons why millers had a bad name. It was pretty subtle. Folks would bring in a sack of corn to be ground into meal, and Rack would cast it in handfuls onto the millstone, then brush the corn flour into a tray and back into the same sack they brought it in. That’s how all millers did it. No one bothered with weighing before and after, because everyone knew there was always some corn flour lost on the millstone.

  What made Rack’s practice a little different was the geese he kept. They had free rein in the millhouse, the yard, the millrace, and—some folks said—Rack’s own house at night. Rack called them his daughters, though this was a perverse kind of thing to say, seeing as how only a few laying geese and a gander or two ever lasted out the winter. What Arthur Stuart saw at once, and Alvin finally noticed when he got over his love scene with the machinery, was how those geese were fed. It was expected that a few kernels of corn would drop; couldn’t be helped. But Rack always took the sack and held it, not by the top, but by the shank of the sack, so kernels of corn dribbled out the whole way to the millstone. The geese were on that corn like—well, like geese on corn. And then he’d take big sloppy handfuls of corn to throw onto the millstone. A powerful lot of kernels hit the side of the stone instead of the top, and of course they dropped and ended up in the straw on the floor, where the geese would have them up in a second.

  “Sometimes as much as a quarter of the corn,” Alvin told Arthur Stuart.

  “You counted the kernels? Or are you weighing corn in your head now?” asked Arthur.

  “I can tell. Never less than a tenth.”

  “I reckon he figures he ain’t stealing, it’s the geese doing it,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Miller’s supposed to keep his tithe of the ground corn, not double or triple it or more in gooseflesh.”

  “I don’t reckon it’ll do much good for me to point out to you that this ain’t n
one of our business,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “I’m the adult here, not you,” said Alvin.

  “You keep saying that, but the things you do, I keep wondering,” said Arthur Stuart. “I’m not the one gallivanting all over creation while my pregnant wife is resting up to have the baby back in Hatrack River. I’m not the one keeps getting himself throwed in jail or guns pointed at him.”

  “You’re telling me that when I see a thief I got to keep my mouth shut?”

  “You think these folks are going to thank you?”

  “They might.”

  “Put their miller in jail? Where they going to get their corn ground then?”

  “They don’t put the mill in jail.”

  “Oh, you going to stay here, then? You going to run this mill for them, till you taught the whole works to a prentice? How about me? You can bet they’ll love paying their miller’s tithe to a free half-Black prentice. What are you thinking?”

  Well, that was always the question, wasn’t it? Nobody ever knew, really, what Alvin was thinking. When he talked, he pretty much told the truth, he wasn’t much of a one for fooling folks. But he also knew how to keep his mouth shut so you didn’t know what was in his head. Arthur Stuart knew, though. He might’ve been just a boy, though more like a near-man these days, height coming on him kind of quick, his hands and feet getting big even faster than his legs and arms was getting long, but Arthur Stuart was an expert, he was a bona fide certified scholar on one subject, and that was Alvin, journeyman blacksmith, itinerant all-purpose dowser and doodlebug, and secret maker of golden plows and reshaper of the universe. He knew Alvin had him a plan for putting a stop to this thievery without putting anybody in jail.

  Alvin picked his time. It was a morning getting on toward harvest time, when folks was clearing out a lot of last year’s corn to make room for the new. So a lot of folks, from town and the nearby farms, was queued up to have their grain ground. And Rack Miller, he was downright exuberant in sharing that corn with the geese. But as he was handing the sack of corn flour to the customer, less about a quarter of its weight in goose fodder, Alvin scoops up a fine fat gosling and hands it to the customer right along with the grain.

  The customer and Rack just looks at him like he’s crazy, but Alvin pretends not to notice Rack’s consternation at all. It’s the customer he talks to. “Why, Rack Miller told me it was bothering him how much corn these geese’ve been getting, so this year he was giving out his goslings, one to each regular customer, as long as they last, to make up for it. I think that shows Rack to be a man of real honor, don’t you?”

  Well, it showed something, but what could Rack say after that? He just grinned through clenched teeth and watched as Alvin gave away gosling after gosling, making the same explanation, so everybody, wideeyed and happy as clams, gave profuse thanks to the provider of their Christmas feast about four months off. Them geese would be monsters by then, they were already so big and fat.

  Of course, Arthur Stuart noticed how, as soon as Rack saw how things was going, suddenly he started holding the sacks by the top, and taking smaller handfuls, so most of the time not a kernel fell to the ground. Why, that fellow had just learned himself a marvelous species of efficiency, returning corn to the customer diminished by nought but the true miller’s tithe. It was plain enough that Rack Miller wasn’t about to feed no corn to geese that somebody else was going to be feasting on that winter!

  And when the day’s work ended, with every last gosling gone, and only two ganders and five layers left, Rack faced Alvin square on and said, “I won’t have no liar working for me.”

  “Liar?” asked Alvin.

  “Telling them fools I meant to give them goslings!”

  “Well, when I first said it, it wasn’t true yet, but the minute you didn’t raise your voice to argue with me, it became true, didn’t it?” Alvin grinned, looking for all the world like Davy Crockett grinning him a bear.

  “Don’t chop no logic with me,” said Rack. “You know what you was doing.”

  “I sure do,” said Alvin. “I was making your customers happy with you for the first time since you come here, and making an honest man out of you in the meantime.”

  “I already was an honest man,” said Rack. “I never took but what I was entitled to, living in a godforsaken place like this.”

  “Begging your pardon, my friend, but God ain’t forsaken this place, though now and then a soul around here might have forsaken Him.”

  “I’m done with your help,” said Rack icily. “I think it’s time for you to move on.”

  “But I haven’t even looked at the machinery you use for weighing the corn wagons,” said Alvin. Rack hadn’t been in a hurry for Alvin to check them over—the heavy scales out front was only used at harvest time, when farmers brought in whatever corn they meant to sell. They’d roll the wagons onto the scales, and through a series of levers the scale would be balanced with much lighter weights. Then the wagon would be rolled back on empty and weighed, and the difference between the two weights was the weight of the corn. Later on the buyers would come, roll on their empty wagons and weigh them, then load them up and weigh them again. It was a clever bit of machinery, a scale like that, and it was only natural that Alvin wanted to get his hands on it.

  But Rack wasn’t having none of it. “My scales is my business, stranger,” he says to Alvin.

  “I’ve et at your table and slept in your house,” says Alvin. “How am I a stranger?”

  “Man who gives away my geese, he’s a stranger here forever.”

  “Well, then, I’ll be gone from here.” Still smiling, Alvin turned to his young ward. “Let’s be on our way, Arthur Stuart.”

  “No sir,” says Rack Miller. “You owe me for thirty-six meals these last six days. I didn’t notice this Black boy eating one whit less than you. So you owe me in service.”

  “I gave you due service,” says Alvin. “You said yourself that your machinery was working smooth.”

  “You didn’t do nought but what I could have done myself with an oilcan.”

  “But the fact is I did it, and you didn’t, and that was worth our keep. The boy’s worked, too, sweeping and fixing and cleaning and hefting.”

  “I want six days’ labor out of your boy. Harvest is upon us, and I need an extra pair of hands and a sturdy back. I’ve seen he’s a good worker and he’ll do.”

  “Then take three days’ service from me and the boy. I won’t give away any more geese.”

  “I don’t have any more geese to give, except the layers. Anyway I don’t want no miller’s son, I just want the boy’s labor.”

  “Then we’ll pay you in silver money.”

  “What good is silver money here? Ain’t nothing to spend it on. Nearest city of any size is Carthage, across the Hio, and hardly anybody goes there.”

  “I don’t use Arthur Stuart to discharge my debts. He’s not my—”

  Well, long before those words got to Alvin’s lips, Arthur Stuart knew what he was about to do—he was going to declare that Arthur wasn’t his slave. And that would be about as foolish a thing as Alvin could do. So Arthur Stuart spoke right up before the words could get away. “I’m happy to work off the debt,” he says. “Except I don’t think it’s possible. In six days I’ll eat eighteen more meals and then I’ll owe another three days, and in those three days I’ll eat nine meals and I’ll owe a day and a half, and at that rate I reckon I’ll never pay off that debt.”

  “Ah yes,” says Alvin. “Zeno’s paradox.”

  “And you told me there was never any practical use for that ‘bit of philosophical balderdash,’ as I recall you saying,” says Arthur Stuart. It was an argument from the days they both studied with Miss Larner, before she became Mrs. Alvin Smith.

  “What the Sam Hill you boys talking about?” asked Rack Miller.

  Alvin tried to explain. “Each day that Arthur Stuart works for you, he’ll build up half again the debt that he pays off by his labor. So he only covers ha
lf the distance toward freedom. Half and half and half again, only he never quite gets to the goal.”

  “I don’t get it,” says Rack. “What’s the joke?”

  By this point, though, Arthur Stuart had another idea in mind. Mad as Rack Miller was about the goslings, if he truly needed help at harvest time he’d keep Alvin on for it, unless there was some other reason for getting rid of him. There was something Rack Miller planned to do that he didn’t want Alvin to see. What he didn’t reckon on was that this half-Black “servant” boy was every bit smart enough to figure it out himself. “I’d like to stay and see how we solve the paradox,” says Arthur Stuart.

  Alvin looks at him real close. “Arthur, I got to go see a man about a bear.”

  Well, that tore Arthur Stuart’s resolve a bit. If Alvin was looking for Davy Crockett, to settle things, there might be scenes that Arthur wanted to see. At the same time, there was a mystery here at the millhouse, too, and with Alvin gone Arthur Stuart had a good chance at solving it all by himself. The one temptation was greater than the other. “Good luck,” said Arthur Stuart. “I’ll miss you.”

  Alvin sighed. “I don’t plan to leave you here at the tender mercy of a man with a peculiar fondness for geese.”

  “What does that mean?” Rack said, growing more and more certain that they were making fun of him underneath all their talk.

  “Why, you call them your daughters and then cook them and eat them,” says Alvin. “What woman would ever marry you? She wouldn’t dare leave you alone with the children!”

  “Get out of my millhouse!” Rack bellowed.

  “Come on, Arthur Stuart,” said Alvin.

  “I want to stay,” Arthur Stuart insisted. “It can’t be no worse than the time you left me with that schoolmaster.” (Which is another story, not to be told right here.)

  Alvin looked at Arthur Stuart real steady. He was no Torch, like his wife. He couldn’t look into Arthur’s heartfire and see a blame thing. But somehow he saw something that let him make up his mind the way Arthur Stuart wanted him to. “I’ll go for now. I’ll be back, though, in six days, and I’ll have an accounting with you. You don’t raise a hand or a stick against this boy, and you feed him and treat him proper.”