A Sack of Good Flour

Do you know how to tell a kind person from a merely good one? A kind one is the sort who quarrels with a stone so as not to offend you. An old miller from down by the Sula once came to see me. He told me about his master, old Taras. Whenever a poor widow came to the mill with a little sack of rye, Taras would always quarrel with the millstone. He'd thunder at it, call it a clumsy oaf, and then say: "Well, there you go, you've spilled the flour again.

Sweep it into your sack, no sense letting it go to waste." And he'd pour in another half-sack of his own, the whitest he had. The village, of course, spun its theories the way bees make honey. The blacksmith said Taras's millstone had cracked and this was how he hid the flaw. The old women whispered that the miller had fallen in love with a forest spirit and was buying it off with flour.

And the local lord even sent his scribe to check whether Taras was stealing the state grain. The scribe watched the old man cursing at a stone, waved his hand and wrote down: "Taras, I believe, is not right in the head. No further questions." But then the proud widow Odarka came to the mill. A woman who could straighten a horseshoe with one look. She brought her last handful of grain and said: "Taras, grind it.

But if that millstone of yours starts coughing up flour from your sack again, I'll whack it on the rim with an axe-butt so hard it'll mill true for you ever after. I want nothing that isn't mine." Taras looked at her patched coat, at her hands blue with cold, and understood: this one wouldn't be gotten past so easily. He'd have to work with a fine touch.

He climbed up to the loft, stomped about for a good long while, then came down to pour out the flour. Suddenly the millstone - which he himself had secretly nudged with his foot - gives a thump, and wheat spills from the chute onto the floor. Taras clutched his head: "Cursed thing! Odarka, don't scold it, it's gone deaf today. Sweep it into your sack, or the mice will eat it, and the very sight of their snouts makes my skin itch."

Odarka looked at the miller's calloused hands, then at the stone. She smiled: "Thank you. Tell it that it's forgiven." And that's how we live. The best help isn't the kind thrown down from above, but the kind that sits down beside you and pretends it was just a gust of wind. That's what Taras did: he quarreled with the stone, cursed it for the whole village to hear, and the stone kept quiet and poured flour for the poor. And the whole village knew, and said nothing.

Because sometimes the greatest wisdom is to believe in another man's foolishness at just the right moment. I pour the miller some kvas, and he says: Taras is still up in that loft somewhere. Now nudging the millstone with his foot, now quarreling with it himself.