Since the sun was low in the west, they set to laying the fire. Work had kept them warm today, but tonight they'd need the fire to back off the animals and keep the autumn cold at bay.
Miller didn't come down, even at supper, and when Calm got up to carry food up the hill to his father, Taleswapper offered to come along.
“I don't know,” said Calm. “You don't need to.”
“I want to.”
“Pa– he don't like lots of people gathered at the rock face, time like this.” Calm looked a little sheepish. “He's a miller, and it's his stone getting cut there.”
“I'm not a lot of people,” said Taleswapper. Calm didn't say anything more. Taleswapper followed him up among the rocks.
On the way, they passed the sites of two early stonecuttings. The scraps of cut stone had been used to make a smooth ramp from the cliff face to ground level. The cuts were almost perfectly round. Taleswapper had seen plenty of stone cut before, and he'd never seen one cut this way– perfectly round, right in the cliff. Most times it was a whole slab they cut, then rounded it on the ground. There were several good reasons for doing it that way, but the best of all was that there was no way to cut the back of the stone unless you took a whole slab. Calm didn't slow down for him, so Taleswapper didn't have a chance to look closely, but as near as he could tell there was no possible way that the stonecutter in this quarry could have cut the back of the stone.
It looked just the same at the new site, too. Miller was raking chipped rock into a level ramp in front of the millstone. Taleswapper stood back and, in the last specks of daylight, studied the cliff. In a single day, working alone, Al Junior had smoothed the front of the millstone and chipped away the whole circumference. The stone was practically polished, still attached to the cliff face. Not only that, but the center hole had been cut to take the main shaft of the mill machinery. It was fully cut. And there was no way in the world that anybody could get a chisel in position to cut away the back.
“That's some knack the boy has,” said Taleswapper.
Miller grunted assent.
“Hear you plan to spend the night up here,” said Taleswapper.
“Heard right.”
“Mind company?” asked Taleswapper.
Calm rolled his eyes.
But after a little bit, Miller shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Calm looked at Taleswapper with wide eyes and raised eyebrows, as if to say, Miracles never cease.
When Calm had set down Miller's supper, he left. Miller set aside the rake. “You et yet?”
“I'll gather wood for tonight's fire,” said Taleswapper. “While there's still light. You eat.”
“Watch out for snakes,” said Miller. “They're mostly shut in for the winter now, but you never know.”
Taleswapper watched out for snakes, but he never saw any. And soon they had a good fire, laid with a heavy log that would burn all night.
They lay there in the firelight, wrapped in their blankets. It occurred to Taleswapper that Miller might have found softer ground a few yards away from the quarry. But apparently it was more important to keep the millstone in plain sight.
Taleswapper began talking. Quietly, but steadily, he talked about how hard it must be for fathers, to watch their sons grow, so full of hope for the boys, but never knowing when death would come and take the child away. It was the right thing to talk about, because soon it was Alvin Miller doing the talking. He told the story of how his oldest boy Vigor died in the Hatrack River, only a few minutes after Alvin Junior was born. And from there, he turned to the dozens of ways that Al Junior had almost died. “Always water,” Miller said at the end. “Nobody believes me, but it's so. Always water.”
“The question is,” said Taleswapper, “is the water evil, trying to destroy a good boy? Or is it good, trying to destroy an evil power?”
It was a question that might have made some men angry, but Taleswapper had given up trying to guess when Miller's temper would flare. This time it didn't. “I've wondered that myself,” said Miller. “I've watched him close, Taleswapper. Of course, he has a knack for making people love him. Even his sisters. He's tormented them unmerciful since he was old enough to spit in their food. Yet there's not a one of them who doesn't find a way to make him something special, and not just at Christmas. They'll sew his socks shut or smear soot on the privy bench or needle up his nightshirt, but they'd also die for him.”
“I've found,” said Taleswapper, “that some people have a knack for winning love without ever earning it.”
“I feared that, too,” said Miller. “But the boy doesn't know he has that knack. He doesn't trick people into doing what he wants. He lets me punish him when he does wrong. And he could stop me, if he wanted.”
“How?”
“Because he knows that sometimes when I see him, I see my boy Vigor, my firstborn, and then I can't do him any harm, even harm that's for his own good.”
Maybe that reason was partly true, Taleswapper thought. But it certainly wasn't the whole truth.
A bit later, after Taleswapper stirred the fire to make sure the log caught well, Miller told the story that Taleswapper had come for.
“I've got a story,” he said, “that might belong in your book.”
“Give it a try,” said Taleswapper.
“Didn't happen to me, though.”
“Has to be something you saw yourself,” said Taleswapper. “I hear the craziest stories that somebody heard happened to a friend of a friend.”
“Oh, I saw this happen. It's been going on for years now, and I've had some discussions with the fellow. It's one of the Swedes downriver, speaks English good as I do. We helped him put up his cabin and his barn when he first come here, the year after us. And I watched him a little bit even then. See, he has a boy, a blond Swede boy, you know how they get.”
“Hair almost white?”
“Like frost in the first morning sun, white like that, and shiny. A beautiful boy.”
“I can see him in my mind,” said Taleswapper.
“And that boy, his papa loved him. Better than his life. You know that Bible story, about that papa who gave his boy a coat of many colors?”
“I've heard tell of it.”
“He loved his boy like that. But I saw them two walking alongside the river, and the father all of a sudden lurched kind of, just bumped his boy, and sent the lad tumbling down into the Wobbish. Now, it happened that the boy caught onto a log and his father and I helped pull him in, but it was a scary thing to see that the father might have killed his own best-loved child. It wouldn't've been a-purpose, mind you, but that wouldn't make the boy any less dead, or the father any less blameful.”
“I can see the father might never get over such a thing.”
“Well, of course not. Yet not long after that, I seen him a few more times. Chopping wood, and he swung that axe wild, and if the boy hadn't slipped and fell right at that very second, that axe would've bit into the boy's head, and I never seen nobody live after something like that.”
“Nor I.”
"And I tried to imagine what must be happening. What that father must be thinking. So I went to him one day, and I said, 'Nels, you ought to be more careful round that boy. You're likely to take that boy's head off someday, if you keep swinging that axe so free.'
"And Nels, he says to me, 'Mr. Miller, that wasn't no accident.' Well, you could've blowed me down with a baby's burp. What does he mean, no accident? And he says to me, 'You don't know how bad it is. I think maybe a witch cursed me, or the devil takes me, but I'm just working there, thinking how much I love the boy, and suddenly I have this wish to kill him. It came on me first when he was just a baby, and I stood at the top of the stairs, holding him, and it was like a voice inside my head, it said, "Throw him down," and I wanted to do it, even though I also knew it would be the most terrible thing in the world. I was hungry to throw him off, like a boy gets when he wants to smash a bug with a stone. I wanted to see his head break open on the floor.