Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  Straggling alongside Charley in the rear was poor Jemmy Candletree. The boy had six or seven pails to lug. His mother, a widower, supported herself and Jemmy by supplying meals to childless and unmarried men.

  Charley silently took one of Jemmy’s pails; the lad smiled gratefully.

  On the far side of the Mill, Charley knew, this same scene was being mirrored. It gave him a curious sense of twinness to think about it.

  Now the lead boys had begun to circulate among the men, handing out the lunchpails and stone jugs they had ferried from hearth to hand. The men assumed a certain dignity with the arrival of these tin vessels and crocks. Each set his shoulders back somewhat more stiffly beneath his coarse jacket (donned in the morning upon departure, doffed once inside the Mill to allow shirt-sleeved freedom, and re-donned at lunch), as if to say, “My wife and oldest homeson have both done their part once again. Let all see and note this.” Then they fell to disassembling their tripartite pails. A twist unlocked the first section from the second. Removal of the top lid, which was balanced carefully on the knee throughout the meal, always revealed inside this first container an enormous slab of dense waterwheat bread smeared with orange butter, nearly a quarter of a loaf. The container below this held the main course: a hot, fragrant stew of rocklamb and capers, say, or two groatgoat chops, or some kind of meatloaf redolent of greennut shavings. The final sealed container held dessert. Berry cobbler, stuntapple pie, spicebark cookies.

  The sounds of restrained but hearty eating filled the summer air. The men were as yet too intent on sating their Mill-born hunger to engage in conversation.

  Charley shuffled from foot to foot, awaiting the arrival of his father, who worked in roving, some distance away. He examined the lone pail he now carried while he waited. His father’s initials—RC—were awkwardly engraved on cover and bottom. The alphabetic furrows in the tin held ineradicable dirt from a thousand handlings, which, scrub as she would with boar-bristle brush, his mother could never totally remove.

  Suddenly, without warning, Charley experienced a revelation. Tomorrow, he would not be carrying this pail. That task would fall to his little brother, Alan, whose small hands would have to manage two lunches. He—Charley—would have his own lunch-pail. Already it must have been bought at the Company Store, and even this minute was probably sitting on a shelf in the kitchen. Tonight he would have to scratch his initials on it. CC. Tomorrow he would be sitting here with his father, probably famished and more tired than he had ever been before. No more eating at home with his mother and Alan and Floy.…

  CC. See, see. See, see what would come.

  It was all too strange for Charley to really fathom. How could he travel from his temporary yet eternal enshrinement atop the brick heap to the interior depths of the Mill in less than a day? It seemed impossible.…

  Charley lifted his gaze once more to the door. His father was coming through.

  For one brief moment, as the man became visible just within the tenebrous interior of the Mill and yet had not fully emerged, he was dusted with light. All over his bare skin and clothing danced tiny motes and atomies of radiance. He looked dipped in some marvelous powder that did not reflect light, but created it, engendered it of its own miraculous being and nature. Charley’s father wore, for the briefest second, a chatoyant suit of fireflies. It was, of course, only a coating of the airborne fibrous lux particles that were everywhere within the Mill. And as soon as the man came completely into the sun-drenched outside air his suit of lights disappeared, leaving him clothed like the others, in drab utilitarian fustian weave.

  Charley ran to his father and handed over his pail and beer crock. The man nodded wordlessly, tousled Charley’s brown hair, and moved to an empty spot on a bench. He dropped wearily down, as if his bones were lead. The inner containers soon ranged along his leg as on a serving board, Roger Cairncross dug out a spoon from his pocket, polished it on his sleeve (thereby probably depositing as many particles on it as he removed) and began to eat, shoveling stew beneath his droopy mustache like a man filling a ditch.

  Normally Charley would have rejoined his peers in their roughhousing as they waited for the empty pails, which they had to bring home. But today, he wasn’t quite sure who his peers were. So he hung quietly by his father’s elbow while the man and his comrades ate, not venturing to speak.

  His father seemed not to mind. At least he did not gruffly order Charley to move off. Perhaps he too recognized the in-between nature of the day and of Charley’s state of mind. At last, with a final swipe of his bread through the remnant gravy, the elder Cairncross was done. He packed up the assemblage of containers neatly and handed them back to Charley. He brought a pipe out from within his jacket, filled it with smokeweed and began to puff. His fellows were doing likewise, down almost to the youngest. Charley coughed as the acrid smoke reached his nostrils. He vowed then and there never to acquire so inexplicably vile a habit.

  The lofty clock-hands stood at half-past the hour. The first man to speak addressed not his fellows so much as the air in front of him.

  “I hear that the new mill is nigh finished.”

  It was a kind of unmistakable intonation that differentiated “mill” from “Mill.” The latter word, of course, referred to the whole vast multiunit complex that stretched from the northern end of the Valley more than three-quarters of the way to the south, a distance of nearly five miles. Big-em “Mill” meant more than the building and its contents and products, too. It stood for some numinous ideal, a community that included everyone in the Valley, something larger than any individual, and deserving of the ultimate loyalty. Something that stretched ultimately to the stars.

  With a more familiar and less respectful tone, “mill” meant literally the individual production units that made up the Mill. Each small-em “mill” was a collection of men and machines capable of taking the raw lux fibers and producing finished cloth. These mills commanded a more earthly loyalty, a certain fierce pride in the ability of one’s mill to outproduce all the others in quantity and quality, and to field a ball team that would win the annual championship. Each mill was approximately twenty years older than the contiguous one immediately to the south of it.

  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 di
rt 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.