The Bully of Order by Brian Hart Page A

couldn’t.”
    â€œOh, we’ll see about that.”
    Tartan stood and went outside, and in the light from the open door and the pouring rain they fought. Bellhouse did as he said and left Tartan bloody and unconscious in the mud, and in the morning that’s where he woke. He must’ve crawled under the eave, or Hank dragged him there. His head was a ripe melon of pain. Bellhouse and his horses were gone. A note carved in the center of the rotting wood panel of the five-piece door: T RUE S TORY.

Duncan Ellstrom
Fourth of July , 1895
    M other stood straight and ready, looking out over the water. She smiled when she caught me staring and I smiled leaving her smiling. I slid my feet back and forth on the polished nailheads of the wharf. Long and jagged slivers were waiting if I took off my shoes. I’d already gotten in trouble for that on the walk in but I liked the mud on my toes. The nailheads were the size of dimes.
    The ferry was coming special because it was the Fourth of July. Some of the kids from school were there but I stayed apart from them and threw handfuls of sawdust into the water and watched it drift and spiral and sink. Ben and Joseph McCandliss showed up and no one wanted to play with them either. They were orphans now since their father had been sent to the penitentiary in Seattle. I remembered when my father left me and Mother when I was little. He came back but he still wasn’t around very often. Mother sometimes called him the boarder. Ben and I were both eleven years old and would be in the same class if Ben went to school. Joseph was fourteen and had already, more than once, spent the night in jail. Miss Travois had taken them in but I’d heard they didn’t sleep there, they just did whatever they liked. Wharf boys, we’d all been warned against them.
    â€œWe ain’t waitin for the boat,” Ben said to me, climbing up into the lumber cribs to be with his brother. I was too scared to go up there with them so I went back to the water and threw some more sawdust.
    It’d been an hour at least already and everyone had cleared off somewhere to sit among the shingle stock. The mill was shut down for the holiday. I’d never seen it like that, and it was like when I saw the dead horse because I’d never seen that either. The doorway was filled with the smell of my father, grease and kerosene and sawdust. He wouldn’t be here today, off working, always. Didn’t see him much but I’d got used to that.
    My mother called to me but I stopped my ears with my fingers so I couldn’t hear her. I took one step forward, waited, and then kept going. The blood was pumping in my ears against my fingertips like I was underwater. The mill floor had been swept and I could see the broom marks and where they piled and scooped up the dust. It was cool and silent inside and crammed with machinery. I’d heard the mill sounds for as long as I could remember. It was strange, it being so quiet. I thought: I’m a little machine and when I go silent I’ll be silent and I’ll be dead.
    A driveshaft connected to the ceiling followed the main roof beam the length of the building. Attached to it were flywheels of various sizes, all six-spoked. I counted them twice. Drive belts a foot wide stretched like taffy to the machines below. The wheels on the pony rig were caked with resin and didn’t want to spin when I tried them. I touched a steampipe but it was cold. The boiler was far off, all the way on the other side, visible from the road but not from where I was. Someone was moving around in the back of the building, banging on something. There was the weak light of a lantern climbing up the wall behind the edger. I went forward to hide and put my hand on a flywheel that was taller than me and kind of hugged it and put my feet in the spokes and it felt good in my arms, big and solid, heavy and round and perfect. I scraped my fingernails over the belt and