Bodark Creek - 57. Chapter 57

Soon after I moved back into the house, the town started talking about tearing down the mill. It had been empty for over fifteen years, and the last owners had given up trying to find a new buyer. They tried selling the land, too, but no one was interested. Finally, they stopped paying the taxes, and the property was taken over by the town.

They tried to sell it. They even put the mill up for auction, then took it back when no one made a reasonable offer. “The problem is that no one knows what’s on the land,” Del said. “No one knows if it’s safe to build houses there. Besides, there are already too many houses in town.”

“That’s the truth,” Neal agreed. “You can rent one for nearly nothing.”

“And even if you buy the land,” Del went on, “you have to figure out what you’re going to do with the buildings. From what I hear, they’re all falling apart inside. It’s not even safe to walk.”

“When was the last time anyone was in there?” I asked.

“Oh, there have been inspections,” Neal said.

“And it’s really that bad?”

“Would I lie to you, Mama?”

No, he wouldn’t, but I certainly couldn’t take a look for myself. Still, I was a curious. So soon afterwards, I took a walk over to the front gate. I drove by there all the time. You couldn’t get to town without passing the mill. But I hardly looked in that direction.

Going through the woods, it used to take only few minutes to reach the mill. Walking the long way, by the streets, it still didn’t take long. Just up to the corner, then right a couple of blocks, then left on the road into town. There was never a real gate, just an arch, but now the asphalt was so broken up by weeds, you couldn’t even walk up the front drive. The buildings were grown over, too

And there weren’t a lot of windows. It wasn’t even a matter of finding one with glass. I guess the kids threw rocks through everything they could. But the heat and the wind had knocked out most of the frames as well.

It had been more than fifty years since I’d worked there, and I hadn’t stayed for long. But I still imagined I could find my way around. I remembered the big rooms and the offices. And there were smaller rooms, for storage and supplies. Still, I wasn’t going inside, though I would have liked to.

“Are there any pictures?” I asked Leona and Ruth, when I saw them afterwards.

“There must be,” Leona said. “The mill’s been there all those years.”

But when I asked at the town library, they only had pictures of the machines.

“It’s not that I’m looking for anyone in particular,” I said. “Certainly not anyone I knew. But you’d think someone would have taken pictures.”

“Didn’t Aunt Rosalind have snapshots from work?” Joann asked.

“None that I could find. And we cleaned out the house fairly well.”

The town library said the college might have something. And the college had some papers, but they were mostly bookkeeping records. “The last owners threw out so many things the early ones had stored,” one of the librarians told me.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she disagreed. “You read the history of any one of these mills, and they’re pretty much like all the others.”

“I told that to Del, and he just laughed. “She probably knows what she’s talking about,” he admitted. “But even so...”

And even though the town started talking about the mill, it took them a while to do anything about it. First, they had to vote. Then they had to raise the money for what they voted on. Then they had to vote again.

“And they still haven’t contracted anyone to do the work,” Neal complained.

“Because they’re still not sure of what they want to do with the land,” Del said. “Half the town thinks the property’s safe, so they just want to find a builder. And other half says no one will pay what it’s gonna cost after they clean the place up. So they think the town should turn the land into a park.”

“That would be nice,” I said. “We don’t really have one.”

“That’s ‘cause we don’t need one,” Neal argued. “Almost everyone around here has access to land. If you want to take a walk, you can go out to the fair grounds. Or to the cemetery.”

He had a point. But I still thought a park would be nice.

And once all the voting was finished, and the town hired someone to do the work, the first thing that came down was the main building. It came down surprisingly fast considering how much brick was in it. They hauled all that away to use for new buildings.

“You’d be amazed how much money you can make on old brick,” Neal said. “Not a fortune. But enough to retire on.”

“Are you thinking of retiring?” I joked.

“Not yet,” he said, laughing. He was only fifty-one.

After the main building, they started working further back. They took down the storage sheds and the garages. And an assortment of little buildings that never had names. Then they headed toward the pond.

That had been drained for years, but I didn’t find that out until Joann told me. “I went walking there one afternoon,” she said, “when Aunt Rosalind was still alive. And I was shocked to find the pond was empty. I’m not sure when that happened.”

“Did it happen by itself?” I asked. “Or did the old owners do something?”

“It was the owners,” Susan told us at a Sunday dinner. “Years ago, I remember my father talking about it. They were worried about somebody drowning.”

“They never worried before,” I pointed out. “The boys used to swim in there every summer, without anyone watching.”

“That was before people started suing people all the time,” Neal said. “I’m surprised the town didn’t fence the whole place up, for all the time they spent arguing over it.”

“That would have cost too much,” Marie said. “Besides, they’d have had to vote on it.”

We all laughed at that. This was at Del and Susan’s. We’d been alternating Sundays between their house and Neal and Marie’s.

“Is the stream still there?” I asked.

“It was when the pond was drained,” Joann said. “Though it was just a trickle running along the cement.”

“You’d think it would be bigger.”

“No, not any deeper than a puddle. It must be dammed up somewhere.”

“From what I heard,” Marie said, “they’re going to use that stream as the center of the park.”

“Then it will be a park?” Ruth asked.

“If you listen to the rumors,” Marie told her. “They’re going to thin the trees and plant some grass. And maybe put in some picnic tables.”

“It sounds very pretty,” I said.

Only it didn’t happen, at least not then. Once the town took down the buildings and trucked away all the concrete, it ran out of money. It did the tests to prove that the land was safe, but that was all. So the weeds took over the property again, and the trees got denser instead of thinned out. And the few children who had been playing there just kept on playing. And that was probably fine.