They drove in silence for a while, then she said, “It’s for winter.” After a dramatic pause, she intoned, “Now is the winter of our discontent … made summer … by … my new coat.”
“‘April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of —’”
“Discontent. How through the winter of our discontent do lilacs breed?”
“Doesn’t scan,” he declared, counting off the iambs against his leg. “Actually, it does.”
They lapsed into silence again, pleased with themselves. She nurtured bittersweet recollections of the games she used to play with Danny Webster; he tried to recall the name of his girlfriend in Siena. In another life, they agreed, they would be students of literature. Each remembered more from English classes in high school than anything else on the curriculum.
When they came to an unheralded crossroads hamlet, they found a large pond extending from one quadrant, a dilapidated wooden mill in another, an impoverished-looking general store in another, with a nondescript service station to the side, and in the fourth, an unpainted frame house beside a huge old barn with a corrugated steel roof in bad repair. The barn loomed over the water, completing the circle.
Strategically erected against the near side of the mill was a crimson sign inscribed with gold lettering: DETZLER’S LANDING GRIST MILL, 1820–1988. Below, on a separate line, was the word MUSEUM. To the side was a laboriously carved, gold-enhanced rampant gryphon. In a lower corner: R. OXLEY, PROP. 1997. An attachment fixed to the bottom of the sign gave the times of business: THURSDAY THROUGH SUNDAY, 8:30 TO 4:30, MAY 24 TO OCTOBER 1. ONLY.
“Government grant,” said Morgan. “It doesn’t look safe.”
“They just got enough for the signage,” she quipped.
“Want to go in?”
“With great care.”
“It’s supposed to be open. We’d better check it out to justify parking here.”
She had pulled into the three-space parking area in front of an apparently superfluous picket fence. “We could park in the middle of the intersection,” she said. “No one would notice. Have you ever seen such a droopy-looking place?”
“Droopy?”
“Droopy. There’s not even a stop sign.”
“Technically, Miranda, it isn’t a four-way intersection. The road between the barn and the mill over the dammedup part is more like a driveway.”
“There’s a house in behind. Must be the original farmhouse.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m a village girl, Morgan. You wouldn’t build a house behind a mill like that, but you might build a mill in front of the house. Anyway, look at the walls. Those casements are a foot and a half deep. I’ll bet it’s log under the clapboard, a settler’s cabin from the first land grants.”
“The Indians were here thousands of years before you guys.”
“You guys?”
“I’m from the city. Why would anyone settle here, anyway?”
“Rock and swamp and scrub bush,” she said.
“Land was probably given to demobilized cannon fodder after the War of 1812. Authorities wanted it settled so roads could be forced through to connect the better land all around.”
“We burned down Washington.”
“What?”
“In 1813 we burned down James Madison’s White House,” Morgan said.
“The Brits did.”
“Dolley Madison had the table set for forty guests. The invading British troops sat down and had dinner, the officers, I imagine, then burned the place to the ground.”
“Very British.”
“We were the Brits.”
“No, the Brits were us. There’s a difference.”
“We were British.”
“I’m Irish. Quin, remember?”
“Anglican, with one n.”
They walked along the dirt lane that crossed the earthen dam between the mill and the pond until it petered out in front of the old house. Turning back, they stopped on the dam. Miranda moved from the reinforced concrete on the pond side to the mill side and looked down into a deep flume that was empty of water except for leakage trickling through a sluiceway of green boulders at the bottom.
“A perfect place for trolls,” said Miranda.
“Trolls? I haven’t seen trolls since I was a kid.”
“Where?”
“In the Toronto ravines. Under the bridges around Spadina. Under the Bloor Street Viaduct. You know, troll places.”
“I had them under my bed. You were allowed to play in ravines?”
“Yeah, that’s before anyone knew they were dangerous. It was where city kids played if you wanted trees and mud.”
“There were trolls living under my bed for one whole winter,” she said.
“Then I convinced them to move under my sister’s bed, and she was too dumb to notice.”
“Same room?”
“No, we had separate rooms. I put a whole wheat peanut butter sandwich under her bed to lure them away. They liked her dust bunnies better than mine and never came back, even after she found the sandwich and had a conniption because it was mouldy green. Trolls like green sandwiches, but she threw it out.”
“Maybe they moved here,” said Morgan, leaning over to peer into the flume, fascinated by the dark reflections of slime-coated walls, reinforcing rods of rusty iron running criss-cross, draped with dried detritus, fractured reflections of a few rotting boards that might have been the remains of a walkway, and by his own diminutive image in water-shard fragments looking eerily like a creature from another world.
“Where’s Billy Goat Gruff when you need him?” Miranda had forgotten about “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” the Norwegian fairy tale about a trio of goats who overcome a troll. They were an important part of her story, but what she remembered vividly was the presence of trolls under her bed. They had been almost her friends, and sometimes she missed them after they moved in with her sister.
“The secret is unbelief,” she said.
“What secret?” asked Morgan, still trying to comprehend the figure in the depths of the flume that moved when he moved but didn’t resemble him in the crackling water.
“The secret to trolls. If you say ‘Do I believe in trolls?’ I’d have to say no. If you say ‘Do you not believe in trolls?’ I’d have to say no.”
“You have a theory of trolls.”
“It isn’t about believing at all. It’s about knowing. If you know they’re there, then you can enjoy them, or frighten yourself with them. We lose that — the ability to know without understanding. That’s when childhood ends.”
“I see a troll down there,” said Morgan. “Come and look. I’ll bet there are two if we look carefully enough.” He put his arm around her to steady them both so she could lean past and peer into the shimmering darkness.
“Can I help you?” asked a troll.
They both flinched in amazement, nearly tumbling into the flume.
“Can I help you?” asked the voice again through a vertical chink in the side of the mill. “Just a minute. I’ll come around. The mill’s closed for repairs.”
A