The Blessed Rita by Tommy Wieringa

Author:Tommy Wieringa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

The brook that has twisted its way through the landscape ever since the last ice age has its source miles from here, along the slope of a lateral moraine. Back behind Muldershoek is where it is broadest. Aloïs dumps barrows full of rubble along the bends to keep them from eroding: tree roots tangle together just above the waterline.

As early as 1268, records showed a watermill behind their house, belonging to the Bishops of Utrecht, whose reach extended all the way to Mariënveen. Some six centuries later, in 1813, the first Krüzen became the owner of the mill and the farm at Muldershoek. The family would keep the millwheel turning for more than a hundred years, until that part of the property was expropriated by the water board and the mill was razed.

The mill began its long life as an oil mill and ended milling flour. In the water closet, beside a bit of doggerel by Paul’s grandfather about the hard life of a miller, there is a photograph of the mill — a cosy-looking house with a tiled roof and walls of blackened oak planks. At the side of it you can see the waterwheel. The building tilts forward a bit, tired from years of work. When the millstones are turning, the deep rumbling can be heard in the wide surroundings. Jan Oude Booijink once described the sound as that of approaching thunder. For seven centuries the gears grind and the stones turn on their pivots. And then, thirty-seven years before Paul Krüzen is born, they put an end to its life. In its stead they built a concrete weir, below it the water broadens to a basin at the foot of high banks. Between a double row of poplars, it flows on to the bridge where, on a grey summer day in 1955, Aloïs Krüzen places a bouquet on the paving stones, and on again for miles to empty out into the drainage canal.

In summer, the foliage forms a ceiling of green above the brook and the water slips loudly beneath the overhanging bushes. Close to the concrete waterworks, Paul catches loaches with a net. They have whiskers on their lower jaw, their sensory apparatus in cloudy waters. The scour-hole is not deep, but moves quickly when the water is high.

From the mud there, Paul one day fishes up a coin which his father says is inscribed in Latin. He takes it to the priest, who puts on his spectacles in the doorway of the presbytery and thinks, at a first glance, that it may be a papal commemorative coin. To be certain, he’ll have to leave it with him. Paul puts the coin away quickly and says that’s not necessary. His faith in the benevolence of the infant Jesus and his mother Mary is implicit, but when it comes to the servants of God, one never knows.

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