Chapter 1
Frank K. Mason was a strongman – one word, not two. Even when he was young, he liked to lift things. If it looked heavy he’d tap it, gently sometimes, as if he didn’t want to lighten it if he touched it the wrong way, or because he didn’t want to expend too much effort. Then, he might circle it as if on the prowl, determining his grip and approach, imagining how his feet might be positioned, and he’d bend his legs and grab it, then lift. Rocks in particular were always good targets of his ambition. They were, after all, heavy, but unpredictably so, and never easy – at least not the ones he liked to pick up. He liked that they were unbalanced, with the center of gravity its own mystery of sorts, a secret, as it careeneed one way or another and Frank’s tree-like legs tightened to manage the shifting weight.
Being a strongman was a hobby not a career, and Frank K. Mason knew that. Which is why working at Manor Mill in the rural countryside of Monkton, Maryland, to help the Old Miller seemed like a good idea. The Mill on Monkton Road was a marvel of heavy things: cast iron axles and gears taller than he was, huge bags of flour and bundles of wheat, massive flows of water spilling over the wheel in its own predictable language of grinding and splashing. And the old Miller, whose name Frank never caught (only because Frank heard it once, forgot, and was too polite to ask again), needed him quite urgently.
But his time at Manor Mill was tragic, and it is with anxious anticipation that we share this story, a cautionary tale in the loosest of definitions.
It’s important to know that Frank’s favorite book was Charlotte’s Web. To him, animals were as sentient and conversational, as sensitive and even as ambitious as humans were, and anthropomorphism was an easy leap for Frank to make, poring over the idea that it was simply a biological twist of fate that the animals couldn’t use words, and that without the blessing of opposable thumbs couldn’t read or write. For Frank’s part, ironically, he never liked his voice and so he didn’t like to talk much, and being so big, despite his boyish face, people also tended to avoid him — his strength almost formed an invisible wall around him. But he had a keen sense of hearing and often felt like while he may not be able to understand the chirpings of birds or pipsqueaks of chipmunks, he heard all of the nuances. Much like one might see a parent chastising a child from a distance and hear without hearing the words coming out of the mother’s mouth, Frank could fill in the conversation himself. In fact, it was the act of imagining the conversation that kept Frank so engaged with animals. As a child, lifting this and that, he’d stop and look out into the pasture at a pair of horses gazing into the field and see them discussing the farmhand, nodding in a perfunctory manner, disdainful of his behavior and treatment of them (which Frank managed to take care of).
Having spent most of his time alone, these imagined conversations grew only more sophisticated, as did the narratives and plots surrounding them. His neighbor had a farm with a sea of black angus cattle, which to most would moan aloud and nothing more. But to Frank, he could hear them discussing the profound illusions of time, the chemistry of a blade of grass, or the bitter taste of an accidentally mawed adult grasshopper. He’d also hear them betray their solidarity of sorts, arguing over bins of feed, taking sides over the height of a pasture fence, defending or attacking the owner’s intent. He was an eavesdropper who was eager to be a part of their family, too.
He never knew whether it was Charlotte’s Web that unlocked the idea of the farm animals talking or if he would have figured it out on his own, but he held E.B. White in such high regard that he imagined one day he’d be able to meet him and wondered regularly whether the author had the same gift as he did, and whether his stories were possibly true (and what stories he hadn’t told yet!). Was Wilbur modeled after a pig he knew? Was he even able to talk to him? He had dreamed of E.B. White walking into the Mill one day (perhaps with Wilbur!) and while Manor Mill was not a heavily trafficked grist mill and frequented just by locals and nearby general store managers from Hereford, Sparks and Parkton, he thought working at the Mill might increase his chances of meeting him, even if E.B. White lived in New York and probably had never heard of Monkton.
Frank’s temporary jobs became more permanent as the Miller went from one mechanical issue to another. And as Manor Mill continued its slow decline, the Miller grew more and more dependent on Frank. The Miller provided the third floor of the barn for Frank to sleep, and having come from a small farm in Pennsylvania, and estranged from his family, he found satisfaction in keeping the Mill operating, even if he was hardly trained at repairs. He recognized his solutions to mechanical failures weren’t always the best ones. And for Frank’s part, limiting his circle of movement to the boundaries created by Monkton, Corbett and York Roads was just fine.
It also didn’t take long for the Miller, who was tired, alone and wrought with the aches and stiffness of a weary, aged body, to ask Frank to handle his small pig farm, a struggling afterthought of an enterprise that the Miller thought might create a new stream of cash flow to supplement the trickle that now made up low grain sales, especially with new owners of the nearby Monkton Mill that had the benefit of traffic on the Baltimore York Railway and Monkton Hotel. Frank was proud when the Miller joked how he could lift two pigs, one under each arm, and move them around like bags of wheat, and he gravitated toward the job at once. The job was also urgent as one of the Miller’s female pigs was pregnant.
It was at that moment, when Frank met the pigs, and when the large mother sow came rushing toward him as if they’d known each other for years, did Frank decide that he didn’t want to live anywhere else, that he would be just fine here, with the Mill and the pigs, caring for them forever. Months later, though, when Frank reflected back on this moment, after the tragedy, this moment that was first etched in nothing but a glow of happiness, was soiled with sounds of a pig’s cry, and despair.
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