If you want to understand the history of Walnut Bend, you don’t go to the library in Millersville. You go to Earl’s and wait for the "Council of Three" to convene near the kerosene heater. These are the men who have sat in the same mismatched chairs for so long they’ve practically become part of the floorboards.
I was leaning against the counter, nursing a soda that tasted vaguely like the metal cap it came under, when the topic of "The Old Miller Run" came up. To a stranger, it’s just a stretch of washboard gravel that ruins your alignment. To Walnut Bend, it’s a legend with three different beginnings.
Silas spoke first. He was seventy-five, which made him the "kid" of the group. He claimed the name came from a horse race back in the days when a '55 Chevy was still a drawing on a board.
"Old Man Miller had a stallion that was more lightning than muscle," Silas said, staring out the window at the dust. "He bet a man from the city that the horse could outrun a steam engine from the crossing to the silo. The horse won, but his heart gave out right where the gravel turns to dirt. Miller buried him under the road so the horse could keep hearing the ground shake. That’s why it’s the Miller Run. It’s the path of a heart that wouldn't stop."
Arlo, who was eighty-four and had skin like an old baseball glove, let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-cough. He didn't even look at Silas. "Silas, you weren't even a glimmer in your daddy's eye when that road got its name. There wasn't no horse."
Arlo leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. "It was the Prohibition. Miller was a moonshiner with a modified Ford and a lead foot. He had a 'run' he’d do every Friday night, dodging the county sheriff by cutting through the creek bed. One night, the feds set a trap, and Miller drove that Ford straight through a barn to get away. He never got caught, but he left enough tire smoke hanging over that ridge that the name just stuck. It was his personal racetrack."
Then, there was Jebediah. Jebediah was ninety-six, and most days we weren't entirely sure if he was awake or just meditating on the nature of dust. But when he spoke, even Earl stopped sorting the mail.
"Both of you are talking 'bout shadows," Jebediah wheezed, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering on a porch. "It goes back further. Before the cars, before the tracks. There was a Miller who owned the grist mill down by the bend. During the Great Flood, the bridge washed out and the town was starving. Miller spent three days and three nights running sacks of flour on his back through the mud, uphill, to the families trapped on the ridge. He ran 'til his feet bled and the path was carved deep into the earth. The road didn't follow a surveyor's map; it followed the man’s footsteps."
I sat there, looking from Silas to Arlo to Jebediah. I did the math in my head—the dates didn't line up, the geography was impossible, and there wasn't a record of a grist mill within thirty miles of the Bend. Silas’s horse story sounded like a tall tale from a dime novel, Arlo’s moonshine run sounded like a movie he’d seen in Millersville, and Jebediah’s flood story felt more like Sunday School than history.
None of it was true. Not in the way a textbook would care about.
But as I looked at them—three old men guarding a collection of beautiful lies—I realized that the truth was the least important thing in the room. In a place like Walnut Bend, which isn't on any map and doesn't have a single sign to its name, stories are the only thing that keep the gravel from being reclaimed by the weeds.
If we didn't have the "Old Miller Run," we just had a nameless road. If we didn't have the "Red Barn," we just had an empty field. These stories were the invisible bricks that built our town. They were the only reason we weren't just a collection of ghosts and rusted pumps "out past Millersville."
I finished my soda and nodded to them. "Sounds like Miller was quite a man," I said.
"The best," Jebediah whispered, closing his eyes again.
I walked out to my truck, and as I turned onto the gravel, I didn't see a road. I saw a horse's ghost, a cloud of moonshine smoke, and a man carrying the weight of a town on his back. I drove slow, not because of the potholes, but because I didn't want to disturb the history.
Another great post, Bouchard, Another great post.
ReplyDeleteAye, I felt that way rewriting some of the stories we used to publish 'back in the day' that no one but a few knew and fewer remembered as being told. Heard tell one time that memories aren't accurate, moreso if they're repeated by others in their own way; the characters distort, the deeds expand, the placenames change, weather didn't happen (i.e., the snow wasn't as high as the telephone wires 'are' now back when the line poles along the railroad tracks weren't but fifteen feet tall on their best day.) Places like 'Skunk Hollow' a short mile south of Wannaska, on Hwy 89 where my great-uncle Petrus Palm had his pulp-camp shack on wheels, we drive right through at 60 mph, faster if you are a Dunham. Palmville Township has roads named: 'Harvey Hess’; 'Water Town’; Wilson’; 'Earnest Jesme'; a bridge across the Roseau River named 'The Lohre'; metal-clad buildings named 'The Tin Man’s. 'Lang Lake,’ and 'The Hovorka Swamp’ still are floating bogs and wetlands in the woods. All were early to mid-20th century EuroAmerican names, -- and what of all those unknowingly christened by the Ojibwe (except those parcels designated Red Lake Land on Plat books) and the Dakotah people? We were hardly the first that ventured across the landscape here, no matter Walnut Bend or Wannaskaland. But home is home, no matter the language; the memory that lasts a lifetime..
We tell ourselves stories to give meaning to our lives.
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