Saturday arrived with the particular quality of a valley autumn morning that remembered summer—a low mist over the Millcreek water meadows, amber light in the upper air, the smell of leaf-must and turned earth from the fields above the mill weir. Rowan was awake before dawn, as he had been for the past three mornings, positioned in his east rafter notch where he could see both the mill yard through the north window and the sluice gate through the south grating.
The wheel had run through the night without incident. He had tracked its acoustic signature every two hours, waking from light sleep to listen, and had found it steady and true. The delivery lorry arrived at six-fifty, which was early in a way that suggested the driver had been concerned about the week's rumours of mechanical trouble.
He was a heavy-shouldered man in his sixties named Davies, whom Rowan recognised from the previous three autumn deliveries. Davies walked around the wheel for a full minute before he said anything. Then he stood at the entrance and listened to the thum-thum-thum of the working mill and nodded once, in the way of a person who had been worried and was now no longer worried.
'Heard you had bother with the gate,' he said to Thomas. 'Resolved,' Thomas said.
'Good.' Davies didn't ask how.
This was, in Rowan's experience, one of the things he liked about Davies. The delivery took until half-past ten—seven lorry loads of winter wheat grain transferred to the granary bins, each load weighed on the platform scale, the weights recorded in the delivery ledger in Thomas's careful hand.
Eli worked alongside his grandfather the whole time, rolling the grain bags from the lorry bay to the bin chute. By the time the last load was recorded, the flour-dust was so thick on both of them that they were the same pale colour from hat to boot.
When Davies had gone, Thomas stood at the mill yard gate and watched the lorry disappear up the valley lane for a while. Then he turned and looked at the building—the wheel still turning, the mill stone vibration barely audible from outside over the creek sound—and said nothing for a long moment.
'We should fix the gate chain pin before winter,' Eli said eventually. 'I have a new pin ordered,' Thomas said.
'It arrives Tuesday.' They went back inside.
Rowan, from his high vantage in the rafter, watched Thomas walk to the sluice gate mechanism, pull the operating key from his coat pocket, and hang it on the newly fitted stainless ring that had replaced the worn iron one. He pulled the key twice to confirm it was secure.
Then he walked to the north window, looked out at the wheel for a moment, and placed both palms flat against the stone windowsill in a gesture that Rowan had seen Thomas make once before—on the morning three years ago when a storm had taken six slates from the mill roof and Thomas had replaced the last one himself at age seventy-four. The afternoon after the delivery was quiet in the particular way of work completed.
Thomas spent two hours updating the delivery ledger and filing the weight certificates in the oak cabinet beside the office door. Eli cleaned the granary floor and moved the empty sacking to the outer store.
The ordinary domestic economy of the mill resumed its rhythm, and by three in the afternoon the day had settled into something that felt not just normal but solid—the kind of normality that has been tested and held. Rowan used the afternoon to sleep, which was the appropriate response to three days of disrupted rest and one moderately dangerous descent into a flooded intake channel.
He woke for good at four-thirty, when the sun had dropped below the ridge and the mill interior had shifted from amber afternoon light to the cooler, blue-grey quality of early evening. The wheel's sound had not changed.
It ran on in the gathering dusk with the unconcerned steadiness of a machine that has no opinion about time of day or season. Satisfied.
That was the word, Rowan thought. The old man looked satisfied.
The delivery was logged. The wheel was running.
The contract was kept. Gerald Hewitt's business card, with its heel print and its crease, had blown off the mill floor into the gap behind the grain sack bench sometime Thursday evening, and no one had retrieved it.
The great wheel turned freely once more.