Love and Lament by John M. Thompson

when the carriage pulled up and greeted the arrivals with a toothless smile, or what appeared to be. He was wearing a shirt of blue homespun, butternut trousers, and a straw hat. He unhitched the horse and led him to a tree, where he watered him, then curried and brushed and rubbed him down.
    It was a sweltering, hazy July day, but Mary Bet had not brought her bathing costume because she wasn’t sure the bleeding was finished. She might wade in up to her knees, but that would be enough cooling off. They went around the barn and down to the mill house. The wheel was turning, while behind it in the pond ducks dabbled among the lilies and cattails. The miller waved to them from the window of the two-story whitewashed building. He was a new man, Samuel going through a miller every couple of years because he always thought he was being taken advantage of.
    Jacob and his sister took off their shoes and went to dip their feet in the pond, and Jacob found rocks to throw at the ducks. Mary Bet and Siler stayed up under the shade of a willow and helped Myrt and Sallie spread out the picnic.
    They had laid everything out, when they heard, from the direction of the main house, a man speaking. It was Zeke, saying something incomprehensible. Then they saw him, his nearly bald head glistening in the sun, walking alongside Grandpa Samuel, fanninghim with his straw hat, and it was hard to say who was supporting whom. Samuel wore a gleaming white suit and a boater with a baby-blue ribbon. “The vheel,” he said, pointing it out with his long beak of a nose, “it never stops. It just goes around and around and around.” He refused a cane because Captain Billie had used one. He stood there seeming to teeter forward, then backward, Zeke catching him as best he could.
    Myrt sprang up and went to her grandfather. “Grandpa Samuel,” she said. “We were going to come in and say hello. How are you?”
    He nodded, looking at her through filmy, rheum-swollen eyes. “Just fine, dear,” he said. “And how is your mother?”
    Myrt glanced at the others. “It’s me, Myrtle Emma, Grandpa. Cicero’s daughter. Mama died three years ago.”
    “That’s right, she did. I’m sorry to hear it.” He looked away from the group to the mill wheel, its paddles appearing to endlessly channel water down the race. “I’ve finally done it,” he said.
    “Done what?” asked Myrt.
    “Achieved perpetual motion. You see, it vas the vay the Archimedes’ screw ran through the gear that vas the trouble. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you.”
    They got up and moved slowly along with him to the mill house, the smell of ground corn hitting them as soon as they entered. The building hummed and throbbed, the heavy stones churning away upstairs and conveyor belts carrying the meal to the sifting platform. A floury dust covered everything. “I’ve had Roberts build the model, according to my diagrams,” Samuel said. He pointed a bony finger to the upper level. “I’ve already sent the papers off to the patent office in Vashington. Now they vant to see a vorking model, vhich suggests to me that they like vhat they’ve seen. Roberts can’t claim it as his, yah, because I’m one step ahead.” On a workbench along the wall of the stone-floored room stood a model mill wheel. Around it and on the floor beneath were odd pieces of wood, bits ofmetal tubing (some still wedged in a vise), screws, nails, hammers, tin snips, levels, rulers, and a blowpipe.
    Samuel took a ceramic pitcher of water and emptied it into the miniature millrace. The water trickled through the sluice, then down into a twelve-inch-diameter wheel mounted into a vertical framework. The wheel turned, splashing water into a tin basin. A long wooden shaft with spiraled metal piping rose at an angle from the basin and ran up to the end of the millrace where the water had first entered. Samuel gave the shaft a twist. He banged his elbow into Siler, who had been leaning over studying the device