Mill Village

Mill Village.

Griselda watched the tiny dots emerge into walking figures as she sat on her porch. The hills into the village were steep and the walk arduous, not many people came to these parts for any reason, so curiosity and foreboding stirred within her as she monitored their approach. In her experience no good ever came into the village with strangers.

Loden was in the alehouse drinking the strongcrop with his cronies as was his custom from midday until he fell unconscious. Griselda sent the child to fetch him when the strangers had neared the half-mile point of the village boundaries. If anybody was ever said to be the authority or headman in Mill Village then Loden was probably him. They didn’t hold much with rules and law making and the small community ambled on as it always had done in total self-sufficiency cut off from the rest of the country. They had always been Plain folk, living the plain way but these past fifteen years God had been cast aside and the men had become lazy, turning from God to worship the strongcrop that they made from grain milled in the village. Their clothes were simple, their lives were simple and nothing much altered from one decade to the next apart form the decline in the men folk these recent years past. .

The strangers were a unit of soldiers dusty and weary after the three-day hike from the last town. They brought word that the country was at war, had been for three years gone and every able man in the land had to fight for his king and country. They carried musket and had pistols visable in the holsters at their side. It was left in no doubt that any man resisting or deserting would be shot.

The men didn’t want to go to war. This war that the soldiers spoke of hadn’t touched them their lives remained unaffected. The village had a well. It sat unused since a new one, closer to the centre of the village, was dug. The men plotted at first to over throw the soldiers disposing of their bodies down the well. But it was reasoned that when the soldiers didn’t return more men would be sent and although murder had never tainted the lives of the plain folk of Mill Village, in the greater world it was still a crime punishable by death. The men were divided half of them wanted to kill and be done, the other half, mainly the younger men who had never seen life on the other side of the mountains wanted to leave what they’d always known and venture wide to fight for their land. Patriotism further swelled in their breasts with every gourd of strongcrop, until high on ale and comradeship the men decided to leave the village and go willingly to war.

The women had no say in the matter and weren’t consulted.

Their orders were to leave the following morning by first light. The soldiers were unaccustomed to the strongcrop and it was a bedraggled band that left the village sometime late in the afternoon. Men from the age of fourteen seasons trooped away down the dirt track while the women watched them leave. Only two men, both old and decrepit, and a simpleton were left. Some of the women wailed, most of them plainly accepted, man here, man gone, it made little difference.

Soon the men were forgotten as the grain had to be brought in for the winter. It was a bountiful harvest and the women had to do the work of all. Production of strongcrop all but ceased that year, only a small hop room and a single distillery remained. Extra grain was fed to the pigs and cattle, they produced many strong and healthy young. The children ate new bread and biscuits and thrived.

One of the two old men became sick the following spring. Griselda tended him and gave him bitter herb infusions. He died. The women dug his grave and gave him a modest funeral.

Griselda called a meeting in the flax room. The prominent women in the village met there in secret. “One day,” began Griselda who had taken the chair, “maybe one day soon, maybe one day many seasons from now the men are going to return to our village.” It was something that they’d all been thinking about, eventually, just as suddenly as they had left, the men might return. The women grumbled and made militant noises.

“Sisters,” incited Griselda, “Are we to return to the old ways? You, Mathilde,” she pointed towards a woman with child at her breast, “ You have grown strong and brown working in the sun. Are you going to return to your pestle and mortar, to sit at your cooking pot and be beaten nightly by your drunken husband? What about you, Fiscine, Are you going to produce baby after baby and lie with your man at his will as you did before? We have gone through a time of change sisters and I propose a different life for us if the men come back.” The women talked of empowerment and of governing themselves as they were currently doing.

Griselda tended the last old man with bitter herbs before he grew ill that year. He was buried, but at this burial no words were spoken nor ceremony undertaken. The simpleton resisted taking the infusion, he was clubbed while he slept and was dead before he had the chance to call out or react. He was still young and fit in body if not in mind. Wrapped in flax he was taken to the disused well before sunrise while the children slept.

The women brought the harvest in three more times before the change came. One day some of the children ran into the granary where Griselda was sorting grain. “Ma, ma, they shouted,” for everybody in the village called Griselda, ma. “Them’s comin` ma,” shouted the dark haired child of Bowlise excitedly, “I sees `em down the hills. Come quick, come quick.”

Thirty-three three men had left, fourteen returned. Some didn’t want to come back; others had been taken and had no say in the matter. They came back bawdy, heralding their return with noise and disruption. They ordered strongcrop that first night and their women served them subservient and obedient as before. Four babies were made in the village that night. Elsewhere the women without men hovered over their prayer books in preparation. The strongcrop served the women well that night and by high moon every man in the village drunk and worn out was asleep.

The women moved silently through the village and did their work diligently. Fourteen lengths of flax lay waiting.

As Griselda had promised them … all will be well.