A Miller’s Valentine
Photography by Bolling Willse, Sr.
Flour, Please
And, anyway, all she was looking for was a bag of flour and nothing more. It was at the end of the day, and the sun was falling fast. Her horses had gotten impatient.
But the moment she walked in, she felt like she was bothering him. He barely took notice, even with her shutting the door, loudly. She thought she’d just surprise her Auntie, and she didn’t need to be here. And it was 1910! Just like that, the decade had switched.
How could he turn her down? He was the Miller, and she lived on the Estate. Surely, he’d be glad to see a pretty woman like her – and all she needed was flour. But then suddenly, like a gear that gets unlocked prematurely, he turned to her and just said flatly: “Closed”. Like he the person was closed and not Manor Mill.
She waited for him to make an exception but he just turned back to fixing something or another. His arms were rough cut with edges, not curves.
She stormed out. The nerve. She felt marginally triumphant that she slammed the door and made the bells ring extra.
Reaction
He hated that he fell for her from the moment she burst in all pomp thinking he could just fill the storage bin with fresh grain and open the gate and start up the wheel and just fill her a bag with three pounds of flour just like that. As if he could just snap his fingers! It was perfectly rude, and she should have known better.
But his heart skipped. Could have been the breeze that came in with her that scattered the dusty air, or the way one of her boot heels was full of mud. Or when she slammed the door. After he turned away, he watched her climb her horse in a huff, then turned back to what he was doing.
He’d never seen her before, and guessed he’d never see her again. That’s how people worked in Monkton where people lived miles and miles away: those you see every week, and those you see just once.
Register
She came back. And again. And after some time, and a lot of bags of flour (“No more flour!” her Auntie complained, warmly), she touched his hand when he pushed a sack of flour across the counter. He was sweat and dust and noise, but just that touch was enough, for a while.
At that point, they thought about each other constantly, though they pretended their encounters were just incidental. And he took his time at the register, a beautiful machine his father gave him. He’d push buttons and pretend to have to think about it just so she’d stay a little longer. The register became a stalling device. He occasionally complained about it, even though it was working just fine, which made her smile, so sometimes he even smacked the side, gently, like it was an old dog needing a pat. She knew it wasn’t broken.
When he was using the register, she looked at him, and when he was done, she looked at the register. She kept thinking he had better things to do, when all she did was ride horses and keep her Auntie company. She never knew quite how to leave without feeling rude.
[Narrator’s aside: the register featured in this story was the original register at Manor Mill from the early 1900s! Thanks to Beaumont Pottery in Phoenix for sharing! Now, back to our story…]
Tea
He had lost all sleep and then just decided that morning he’d ask her. She came in, and things fell apart in his head. How stupid an idea. And she said something. And then a jumble of words just all fell out of his mouth, like he had just eaten something too hot. “Join me for a cup of tea?”
She said yes and started walking toward the back, like they had been having tea together their entire lives.
He brought her to his nook he referred to as a kitchen and they sat on the bench, and for a moment as the silence around them grew big, he panicked as he suddenly felt like he had nothing interesting to say. Then he started talking about orchids. He liked the garden, but he loved orchids in particular. Admired their sturdy reach. He was relieved that she liked them too, though she didn’t know a thing about flowers.
Confession
When he handed her an orchid, she blushed. No one had given her flowers before, even though everyone probably thought she got flowers every day. It didn’t seem to work like that.
She thanked him, put her hand on his, and kissed him on the cheek. A moment elapsed, and another, and a third that stretched and stretched, their hands held, their eyes mostly toward the ground but bouncing up briefly, as they sat in a kind of timeless bubble made just for them, in which they could just cherish the fragile experience of connecting with someone so deeply.
But then she finally confided that she had to move back to England. Her mouth was dry when she said it, so she had to say it twice. And he just looked at her, astonished and then hurt and then betrayed. He said: well, I guess that’s that, I guess it’s over.
Soon after she shared her news, he asked her to leave him and leave the Mill, and then he turned away, like he did that first day.
Repair
It didn’t take her studies in English literature, or half a brain, to see that the broken millstone wheel was just like her heart. Why he couldn’t see that was beyond her. He had made her apple pudding and that was all he had to say about it.
For his part, while he couldn’t read many words, he did a pretty good job of reading her mind. Because later that week he shaped the millstone pieces into a heart (to make it up to her!), and she melted, all of the sudden, like newly whipped butter on bread.
Orchid
Right there on the millstone, the one he re-assembled and nested into the entryway to Manor Mill was a single orchid. He was carrying a 60 pound bag of rye and almost kicked it over. He had told himself to forget about her, that he was too busy, but he couldn’t. And then this.
He drops the bag with a thud, picks up the orchid. He marvels at its sturdiness, and the delicacy of the flowers casting out.
She is far away now, in England. The ache in his heart mends itself knowing that she may return, then breaks back apart in speculation as to when.
He picks up the bag, and takes the orchid inside and rests it on a windowsill.
Read letters that we found that followed this story.