Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 April 1885 — OLD TIME MILLS AND FLAILS. [ARTICLE]

OLD TIME MILLS AND FLAILS.

BY R. G. BURDETTE.

All the world about the mill has gone to sleep. It is hibernating, like the bear. The hills have pulled the sheets of snow up to their chins and over their heads, and sleep so souldly that the restless winds have to do their snoring for them, and go sighing and. Binging and whistling, and sometimes* howling and shrieking through the leafless oaks and the swaying qedars, and through the rocky echoing glens, raging through all the varied gamut of the infinite snore of- slumbering nature. ‘

How patiently wait the cedars for the days of spring and sunshine of June. All the other trees have given up long ago, and ceased to look for anything save snow and sleet and biting frosts and winter rains. How fearfully they moan and wail when the winds come sweeping down from the northwest. They have thrown away every brown leaf, weeks and weeks ago. They will never wear leaves again, they know. The ground dbout their frozen feet is hard as flint. The sap is frost in their veins. Their limbs are stiff. The skies are grey, the hills are white and the meadows are drifted; There will never be any summer again, so the oaks and the maples and the hickories complain. But the patient cedars—bending under the burden of snow that trims their dark green cloaks with white as soft as swan’s down, they look upon the sleeping fields and down at the silent creek, patiently, trustfully waiting for May or June. Never wailing because the snows are deep and the winter is long; when the winds are soft and gentle the cedars whisper, and when the gales are blowing fiercely, they only sigh and shake the snow from their shoulders as they bend and sway. But always they are hopeful, parent, and they stretch their green arms out over the billows of snow, as if to greet the coming spring, which they alone of all the trees can see. And the busy, noisy, prattling, singing creek has gone into a new business. It has formed a co-partnership with the thermometer and gone into the manufacture of protoxide of hydrogen on a large scale. Ice-bound as far as you can see, and in the air holes here

and there, hqpr black and cold the water runs. The dam is bearded with long, venerable icicles, and the shivering spray has coated every branch and twig along the shore with sparkling frostwork. Fairy work it is; June can snake nothing lovelier than this silver lace work, with all her roses. Down below the silent wheel the creek does not murmur and laugh. It chatters and shiver, and just as fast as it can, ruffs under the ice to get out of the biting wind that comes howling down the great ravine and spitefully nips at ripples as it goes sweeping across to the white hills and the moaning oaks. Sow it will twist and bend the knotty old monarchs in its wild, roughrplay. It even catches the old mill by the shoulders and shakes it until its very windows rattle and the pigeons up in the loft coo and murmur soft, musical, frightened protests. The pigeons pass most of their time in the mill loft these days. I wonder if the Tumbler, in these long, stormy winter days of confinement, practices new feats of twisting and tumbling for his summer flights. I think he does, I know he does, indeed. And the Fantail there, is telling that pair of Nuns about a barn he once lived in that was haunted by the restless, cooing ghost of an unhappy Pouter, who loved a great strong Carrier, with such a long neck and beautiful shape. He enlisted in the mail service and went away to war, and carried dispatches from a beleaguered city out over the lines. For many a long, long sunny day, through all the dreadful summer, the poor Pouter waited and pined away and watched for him, and called him all day long. And so, in early November —the squirrels had just had their harvest home, and the blue birds and brown thrushes and meadow larks and so many other families were packing to go south with their children, and they nearly all took their .dinner at the mill that day. An east wind, that had come ail the way over the sea, swept up to the perch just outside the round winflowwhere the pretty Pouter was plaintively calling for Messenger, and laid a •oft feather, broken and stained with

blood, at her feet She died that very afternoon, and the leaves buried her, down by a big grey rock where the maiden-hair fern grew, but always after that, all day long and sometimes in the night, they'could hear her calling, calling, calling for Messenger. If they go to that barn, to-day,—it’s a big sidehill barn, painted red, with a ship for a weathervane, away, way up the creek, where they thresh wheat with the trampling horses and thundering flails yet; he was born in that barn. And the two pretty Nuns—l can hear them sobbing in soft tremulous coos as they listen with me. * How do I know what he said ? My boy, if you will haunt the old mill loft as much as I did whenT was your age, and many years older, too, you will understand every wprd a pigeon says. Why here, come to the window; look up the creek there, see on the side of that bald hill, with just a fringe of oak and maple about the base of the skull, do you see that old barn? That used to be red; a little faded out now; looks like an old fashioned carnation lying in the enow. Well, that is the barn that Fantail was born in. Come to look at him, I believe I knew that fellow when he was a squab. I know the barn all by heart. I knew the minute he said it was the barn where they threshed the wheat with flails. Ah, it’s the last farm in this part of the great Northwest to do that. ; Boom, boom, boom ! Do you hear that ? “For the fitches are not threshed with a threshing instrument,” said Isaiah, ever so long ago, "neither is a carrat wheel turned about upon the cummin; but the fitches are beaten out with a staff, and the cummin with a rod.” Listen again, you cannot help but hear it:

The gray barns, looking from their hazy hills O’er the dim wafers widening In the vales, Send down the atr a greeting to the mills ■ On the dull thunder of alternate flails.” Why, it is a sad thought, it is a solemn fact to contemplate, that there are children born in this republic,who are young men and women now, who came in since the last flail went out; who never saw a flail; never heard one, having no idea why flails should be “alternate.” Do you know, I talked, not two weeks ago, to a young man born and brought up on an Ohio farm, who didn’t know what a flail was ? He looked me in the eye and made the confession without a blush. The first time I met with a flail was down in Stark county, Illinois. You know that country as well as I do. Elder Gross was living in Toulon at the time, turning sinners into Baptists wherever he could find a stream of waist-deep water, and Grandfather Jones’ farm lay just ’outside of Lafayette. Unable to think of any specific mischief I could work out about the farm that morning, pitilessly locked out of the tool house because I had “sharpened” a keyhole saw with a rattail file, and sawed an ox boW in two with an eye to fancy sled runners the next winter, I had climbed up into the barn loft to comfort myself with the pigeons. Boom, boom; boom, boom; down stairs, and down ladder and post and the incline of mountains o[ hay I slid, and scrambled, and rolled, until I found the men threshing on the barn floor.

I had always assisted at threshing heretofore. We had threshed aforetime in the old, old way; we had trodden out the corn with the muzzled ox, and with the tightly checked horses, and I could stand in the middle of the ring and keep the procession moving. But somehow I had always missed this flail business. Often I had heard the noisy, booming din from other faraway barns, on the clear November air, and now I knew what it was. Never did a boy wait so impatiently for the dinner-horn. I thought the men would never go away, that I might dance ope set with the flail myself. How easy it was. How deftly the strong arms swung the great whips of oak, and with graceful sweeps lashed the golden grain from the quivering bearded stray. How I admired the play of the brawny arms, and how I longed to take the contract of threshing out all the rest of that wheat myself. The handmaiden came to the kitchen door at last, and wound her mellow horn, the hungry men went to dinner, and trembling with eagerness I approached the flail, as it leaned against the side of the fanning mill. ' Somehow it looked taller and grimmer than when it was gyrating about in the air, in graceful curves, ellipses and parabolas. I shook hands with the short leg, and the touch chilled me. I felt as I think a man must feel when he steps into the ring and shakes bands with Slugger Sullivan. A flail looks quiet enough. It seems gentle. It is not at all the sort of whip a Christian man would flog the little one with, but in its hours of ease it has a quiet, come - where - my-love-lies dreaming expression that is desperately wicked, and deceitful above all things. A flail is your true patrician. It is cordial and actively useful with the equals, but it resents any familiarity from its inferiors. In the grasp of its master, it is clay in the hands of the potter; gripped by the unwary and swung by the uninitiated, it is a' brick in the hands of a rioter, or a stone thrown by a lovely woman. Some feeling of this kind began to

oppress me as I examined the simple, primitive mechauism of the (Tail. There lias never been any improvement in the construction of this implement. The flail sprang into being, Minervalike, full grown, of mature age, and in complete armor, sound in wind, limb, and condition. The first flail, like the first bird’s nest, was a perfect model for all posterity. A whip of oak or hickory, with the lash a little shorter than the handle, and nearly as heavy; lash and handle loosely swung together with a thong that holds like a mortgage. The sheaves of wheat that look out from the elbows'of the barn where, the last of the load, they are crowded, shiver when they look down and see the flail leaning up against a bin, like a village bully, waiting for a chance to pound something. But nothing scares a boy very Ipng. I picked up the flail. It was heavier than I supposed it could be. I marched out on the barn floor to where the bearded sheaves were lying, ranked along in two eyen rows, head to head, and the line of battle just long enough for the sweep of the "alternate flails.”

I raised the simple implement above my head. I gave the same bold, eyeless swing—l know I did—that uncle Fred used, and right m the midst of the first circling rash, without hesitation, remorse, warning, or Compunction of conscience I was knocked down. First event for the flail. When I got dp the flail lay there on the floor. It had not changed. It was the.same calm, impassive old flail. I rubbed my head, felt carefully of the lump, and decided that I couldn’t wear tny Sunday hat for two weeks, and consequently would not have to go to church, and then I grappled the flail again. I x shrugged my shoulders to protect my head, and led the german. I never saw any quiet thing fly around as that flail did. Twice I saw it go sweeping past my face. Once it smote me in the back with a resounding thump that made me think, then and there, it had broken my heart And all this time I couldn’t get the bulge on it to whang it down on the wheat. I had got it started on its inhuman circuit and I couldn’t stop it. I had raised a demon I could not control. It 'pounded my ribs sore in rapid successive strokes; my arms were twisting out of their sockets; it was all I could do to keep my feet on the floor; the longer I held on the worse it got. At last I let go all “holts,” threw my arms over my head and started to run for my life. It just rained flails, broadside, end on, and cris-cross, down on me all the way across, the big barn, until, with one final mighty crash,, I fell down on the astonished dog Hector, trying to hide himself behind the straw cutter, a limp, inert, hopeless wreck of howling boy, pitiless final and terrifted dog. I began to think I would let out part of that threshing contract I sat up and cried for a minute or two, and made some remarks on the subject of flails, not necessarily for publication, but merely to place myself on record in case a bill for the prohibition of flails as a beverage should ever be called up, and once more I arose and picked my enemy up by the long end. I collared him with both hands, and resolved that if the sacrifice of my poor life was demanded in order that future generations of boys might know how tp dance round dances with a loose-jointed flail with misfit legs, I would die in the cause right there, even though the next time I fell on the dog it killed both of us.

The god-like Hector, comforting his own wounds and bruises with healing tongue, looked at me from a new lurking place behind the fanning mill, saw that I was preparing to enter the lists once more, and with an expression of amazement and disgust, and a rush that scattered the wheat sheaves like leaves in a November blast, shot out of the barn door, and then, with hair erect and every muscle quivering with excitement, turned to look at me. “That boy,” he said to the bay colt, who had come down td that end of the pasture to see what all the row was about, “has gone stark, raving mad and is trying to club himself to death with a pair of pitchfork handles, but I’m out of the game. I’ll pull him out of a mill pond all day long, but if a boy deliberately makes up his mind to hackle himself with a jointed club, I pass. I can get enough showers of broomsticks to satisfy me any day, by scooping a ham-bone off the kitchen table. I’m not sb fond of hickory that I will come to the barn and ask for more.” And the brute fled the scene of confusion, just as I swept the encircling space with the flail in a final effort. In the first and only circuit, the short leg flew straight up in the air, then dropped and tapped me on the head. Then it reached out at right angles and smote a three-gallon jug of ancient cidar from its high perch on the fanning mill, sweeping it into an everlasting temperance revival, then it swooped down with the sweep or a hawk, came around and caqght me behind the knees, dropped me on the floor with a thud that made me sick for a week, and in that humiliating position the men found me. I w’as sitting on the flail,, My enemy was at my feet, but I was not vain-glorious in my triumph. And when grandfather said, severely, “That boy has been at the cidar,” I sighed in bitterness of spirit, because I knew better than he did how energetically I had been at it. ." - And the day never came when I could use a flail. Before the dawn of that triumph, the threshing machine began to break the lees of men with its farreaching tumbling-rod, and the flail went out of business. “In Its crib the babe Is sleeping And the sunshine, from the door, All the afternoon is creeping Slowly ’round upon the floor: And the shadows soon will darken. And the daylight soon must rate. When her heart no more shall harken To the tramping of the flail To the dancing of the flail— Her tond heart no more, shall hearkeri To the foot-fall of the flail.”