​The Ides of March

 

     Victor Lewis picked a spot where the shoulder of the dirt road widened just enough for him to park his truck. He turned off his headlights and sat in the truck for a moment with both hands on the wheel, looking through the streaked windshield at the old grist mill below the trees.    
     Illuminated tonight only by the light of a full moon, the place crouched beside the creek, almost hidden beneath the scrub brush and kudzu. One wall sagged inward. The roof dipped in the middle. The broken wheel stood black with rot, and its paddles furred with moss. Recent rain had swollen the creek until it moved fast and brown over the stones, loud enough to sound busy.
     It was March fifteenth.

     Victor got out with his pry bar, flashlight, and canvas tool sack. The evening air rising from the banks of the creek smelled of wet stone, red mud, and leaf rot. Somewhere, hidden in the ferns that lined the creek banks, frogs had been making noise, but when he came down the slope and pushed through the briars toward the mill, the sound thinned and quit. He noticed but told himself that the silence was not out of the ordinary.

     A lot of people in these parts liked to tie stories to anything old enough to cast a shadow. This mill had more than most. Old Caesar Austin had run grain through it. Here he had bought men’s debts cheap, sold them dear, and died bad inside it. Some said it was men who couldn't pay their debts that killed him. Some said he was killed by men he called friends. Victor did not care who had bled there a hundred years ago. Metal was metal. If he could remove the old gearing inside without getting caught, the salvage yard in Hull would not ask where it came from.

     Victor stepped into the mill through a door hanging crooked on a broken hinge. His flashlight moved across cobwebbed rafters, warped planks silvered with age, and the great, round stones of the grinder rising from the floor. The old belts had gone stiff and cracked. Rust coated the metal teeth of the gears. Under it all, he could hear the constant mutter of water slipping beneath the building.

     He focused the beam of his flashlight on a cast-iron bracket bolted near the main shaft and smiled. Good weight. Good money. Enough maybe to keep from having to visit the pawnshop again for a while. Enough to quiet one problem while the next one walked up.

     Victor put a wrench with a long breaker bar on the bolts and pulled.

     Inside the room, something shifted.

    It sounded too heavy for a rat or even a possum. More like a man’s foot easing his weight across a board.

     He straightened and listened.

     At first, he heard only the sounds of the river. 

     Then, from somewhere close, he heard something that sounded like a soft voice whispering, “You dared to come on the ides after dark?”
     Victor turned so fast that the flashlight beam lurched across the walls. Nothing. Just timber, shadow, and the pale seam of the doorway behind him.

     He stood still until his own breathing annoyed him.
     “Ain’t nobody out there,” he muttered. “That wasn’t a voice. It was… it was just noise. Get a grip. Just the dark playing tricks again.”
     To make sure no one else was inside, he looked around the room. Near one support post he saw a warped board that had been nailed up years ago, its paint almost gone. What remained of the lettering read: C. AUSTIN MILLING. He rubbed the dust with his thumb and looked down. The stone floor near the grinder showed an old, dark stain in the grain of it. Oil, maybe. Or something else that had once been wet and dark and thick.
     He remembered what a man at the pawn shop had said when Victor mentioned the mill.
     “March is a bad time for that place; people say strange things happen there in March,” the man said. “The tale that folks around there tell is that Caesar Austin was killed there but did not stay properly dead. They said that the men who knifed him never got caught. They went home rich, but for only a season. Then bad things began to happen. Their corn blackened in the stalk, their cows gave birth to dead calves, and their children woke crying at windows where no one stood. During the second week of the following March, one of the killers told the others that even though the mill had been closed and the wheel had gone still, he had heard the grinding stones turning after midnight. The killers went back with lanterns and discovered an escaped convict hiding inside the room where Caesar died. The story goes that Caesar appeared, words were exchanged, and Caesar watched the men kill the convict. After that the sickness lifted.”
     Victor had laughed then. He laughed now, but quieter.
     He crouched and worked another bolt. The iron gave a little. He heard the broken wheel outside make a sound like a low, slow groan.
     He stopped.
     The creek was running hard, but not hard enough to turn that wheel.
     Then the voices came again.
     Not one this time.
     Several.
     Faint at first, spread around the room in different corners, yet close enough to feel breath against his skin. Then he definitely heard several different voices talking.
     “Hold him,” said the first voice.
     “Do it now,” from one of the others.
     Victor stopped and backed away from the machinery. For an instant, the beam of his flashlight caught a shape near the far side of the grinder. It was a man in a dark coat with his head turned. Then the beam found only shadow and a leaning ladder. The air had changed. It carried a sharper smell beneath the damp wood and creek rot. Metal. Old copper pennies.
     “All right,” Victor said to himself. “I’m leaving.”
     He snatched up the tool sack and pry bar then headed for the front door. He stepped through it and found himself not in the yard facing his truck, but at the rear of the mill near the wheel and the black rush of water below it. He stopped so abruptly that his boot slid in the mud. He stared at the bank, the wheel, the tangle of cane along the creek, then turned and went back inside.
     He saw the front door. It stood where it had been, open to darkness.
     He tried it again.
     Same thing. Rear of the mill. Wheel. Water. Mossed stone slick underfoot.
His mouth went dry. He stood by the wheel listening to the creek running through the race. Beneath that, or within it, he heard something like the low turning complaint of machinery.
     When he went inside the third time, the room had changed.
     Not wholly. The ruin was still there, but the room looked different. Like it was illuminated by lantern light and showing a vision of the room from long ago. Flour hung thin in the air. The beams looked straighter. The floor cleaner.       Four men stood near the grinder.
     One of them was larger than the rest, broad in the shoulders, his hair combed flat, his stance full of ownership. Even before Victor knew, he knew.
     It was Caesar Austin.
     The others faced Caesar with their hats damp from rain. No one raised a voice. That made it worse.
     “You should have listened,” one said.
     Caesar gave a short laugh that held no humor. “To which of you?”
     Another answered, “We did not come as enemies. We came to ask you to stop exploiting the poor in the community just to build your own personal wealth.”
     "I am a miller, not a saint. If they cannot afford it, that is not my problem."
     Then it happened all at once. A hand seized Caesar’s shoulder from behind. Another man drove a blade low and hard under his ribs. Boots scraped. Someone cursed through clenched teeth. Caesar made a sound that Victor knew he would hear for the rest of his life.
     The men pressed Caesar against the stones and stabbed him again, quick now, committed now, the last of hesitation gone out of them. Blood struck the floor in a dark sheet. The grinding stone let out a deep, slow groan, as if the whole mill had taken the wound into itself.
     Victor stumbled backward and hit the wall.
     Outside came the crunch of tires in gravel.
     Truck doors.
     Men’s voices.
     Real voices.
     He could see beams of light moving through the cracks in the boards.
Victor ducked behind a post, heart battering his ribs. He thought the landowner, the sheriff, or maybe some nearby residents had come to take him to jail. Then the door opened, and three men came in carrying lanterns instead of flashlights. That was the first wrong thing. The second was how calm they were.
     One of them, with gray hair, wore a neat clean work jacket. The man looked toward the grind wheel and said, “Something always comes here on this night.”
     Another, younger but with the same hard family look around the mouth, answered, “Blood remembers where to stand.”
     The third man shut the door gently behind them. “My granddaddy stood right there,” he said, pointing within a step of where Victor hid.
     Victor, relieved because the men were not the police, moved even though he had not meant to. A floorboard creaked. All three heads turned.
     “Well,” said the gray-haired man, almost kindly. “There he is.”
     Victor came out with both hands raised. “I’m just taking scrap. That’s all. I’ll go.”
     “Not that easy,” the younger man said.
     “I ain’t got anything to do with whatever business you men have going here.”
The old man lifted the lantern. His face was ordinary. Church face. Feed-store face. The kind of face that nodded at funerals and asked after your mother in the canned goods aisle. “None of us did at first,” he said. “That is how these things begin. One man says it is not his problem. Then the solution belongs to everybody.”
     Victor shook his head. “Please. Just let me go.”
     “You came on the date,” the third man said. “And you crossed the threshold.”
     They moved in with no hurry. That was the worst of it. No rage. No drunkenness. Only practice.
     Victor swung a pry bar and caught the younger man across the shoulder. The man grunted but did not go down. The old man stepped aside and, in that lantern light, Victor saw beyond them the figure of Caesar Austin standing near the grinder, blood black down his shirtfront, watching with grave attention.
Victor ran for the door, but found the men were already there. They grabbed him and dragged him backward across the room toward the stones. He kicked, cussed, and begged.
     At the grinder, the old man leaned close and said, almost sorrowful, "Friends at first, then knives.”
     The blade entered under Victor's ribs.
     At dawn, the mill stood quiet beside the creek. The men drove away one after another without speaking. 
     Inside, beside the grinding stones, a fresh dark stain spread into the old one until the two could not be told apart. In the first thin light of morning, the broken wheel turned once, then settled still.

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