The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 8 of 40

Chapter 8: Raising the Wheel

Corvin read the serpent letter standing up in the hall.

Then he put two men at the falls that night, and two every night after.

"First of September," he said. "The rye's ready the last week of August."

"Then the wheel turns before the rye's cut," I said. "And we grind it all before their carts get here."

"Can it be done?"

"If nobody sleeps."

Nobody slept much.

For two weeks the falls rang with hammers from dawn to dark.

My father's old rhyme went round and round in my head. Pit, shaft, wheel, stones. Pit, shaft, wheel, stones.

The bed stone had survived under the ash, black on top and sound underneath. We scrubbed it with sand until it was gray again.

My grandfather's runner went down on top of it on a Thursday, lowered by twelve men on a block and tackle while I lay on the floor shouting "Left.

Left.

Your other left."

The wheel went up on the fifteenth of August.

The whole village came down to the falls for it.

Women brought bread and onions.

Somebody brought a fiddle.

Agnes set up a cook pot on the rocks and made a stew out of three rabbits and a great deal of hope.

Twenty-four paddles of new pine, each one carried down from the keep on a soldier's shoulder.

The shaft was an oak trunk as thick as a man.

We raised it on shear legs, with ropes and oxen and everybody shouting at once.

Then somebody had to get into the wheel pit and seat the shaft in its bearing.

"Me," I said.

"You," Corvin said, "and me. It takes two."

The pit was a stone box under the wheel, waist-deep in cold spray, dark and narrow.

We climbed down into it.

Above us, the ropes creaked. The great shaft swung slowly down out of the sky.

"Steady," I called up. "Slow. Slower."

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