Master Forster, Jim, Forster of all of Donnell's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Jim stood in the doorway of the new sawmill and watched the big blade spin without a hand to guide it. The water wheel turned. The gears bit. Fresh pine logs waited on the rack, and no one knew how to cut them true. Jim was the smith of Donnell, not a forester. He could shape a blade but not read a grain. His father could. His father lived four days' walk north, in a cabin Jim had not seen in six years, and every quiet week made it likelier the old man would die in that chair by the stove. Jim shut the sluice and stopped the wheel. The blade slowed. He had been turning the same problem over for a month. No road ran straight from Donnell to his father's homestead. No rider went that way. The banker took letters south, to trade towns, not north into the cut country. Jim had asked. Jim had asked twice. He walked back through the settlement past the fence line and the sharpened posts. Forty-one roofs now. A doctor's office. A jail. A bank. Everything a town needed except a man who knew how to run the mill his son had built for him. Jim went to the bank and stood at the counter until the banker looked up. He set three silver coins down. "I need a rider," Jim said. "North. Not a letter. A man who will stand in my father's yard and wait for an answer." The banker frowned at the coins. "North's four days each way. No one here will take it for three silvers." Jim added two more. Then his knife. Then the small folded paper he had carried in his vest for a week — a rough drawing of the sawmill, the wheel, the blade, and beside it a chair by a stove with an X through it. "Give him this," Jim said. "Tell him the mill is built. Tell him the axes have proper handles. Tell him his son is asking." The banker studied the drawing. He tapped it once. "I've a cousin who runs furs up that way next week. He'll carry it for the silver and a meal." "Next week is too long." "Next week is what you have." Jim held the counter. He thought of his father's hands, thick and slow now, folded on a blanket. He thought of the blade spinning on nothing. "Next week," he said. "But he leaves at first light that day. And he does not come back without an answer." The banker swept the silver into a drawer and wrote the name of his cousin on a slip. Jim walked out into the yard and looked north at the tree line. The message would go. Seven days from now it would leave his hands entirely. Between then and the answer, he had nothing to do but keep the mill standing and hope the old man still remembered how a good axe felt.