The Story of Charlotte's Web

by Michael Sims

  The next summer they returned to the area, this time chartering a sailboat in Blue Hill and exploring the coast and islands. In 1933, having fallen in love with the region’s natural beauty and quiet people, they repeated the pattern, and this time they were looking for a place to buy. One day they sailed aboard a thirty-one-foot yacht, anchoring for the night in a small inlet called Allen Cove, around the western curve of the bay and due south of Blue Hill, with Mount Desert looking grand in the east. Next morning, from the water they could see a big, solid-looking barn and some outbuildings, up beyond a decrepit old dock that projected unnaturally straight from the gentle curve of shore. The buildings stood safely back from the water, on a slight rise above the cove. To the left was a gently sloping pasture with a herd of granite boulders.

  The next day Katharine and Andy explored the same region by car. Eventually they found the house that was attached, in traditional cold-region fashion, to the barn they had admired from the water. It was near a village called North Brooklin. Painted white under dark roofs, with its tall firm chimneys and dark shutters, its self-sufficient village of clustered outbuildings, the house looked strong and independent. Out by the road, beyond a yard full of fine tall trees, was a sign that read FOR SALE.

  Part III

  CHARLOTTE

  I knew of several barns

  where I thought the past might lie.

  Chapter 10

  DREAM FARM

  Animals are a weakness with me, and when I got a place in the country I was quite sure animals would appear, and they did.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1933, Andy and Katharine soon learned that the Allen Cove farm belonged to a music professor at Juilliard. He parted with its forty acres—which included three hundred feet of coastline—for eleven thousand dollars. Another immediate expense came from the decision to continue employing the caretaker, Howard Pervear. Both Katharine and Andy had grown up with servants, and Katharine still employed a cook and housekeeper and occasionally other help; adding a caretaker for their country home came naturally to them. In the middle of the worst economic times since before the Civil War, Andy and Katharine were able to buy the farm while maintaining their large, two-floor apartment on Eighth in New York, and later one on Forty-eighth Street in Turtle Bay. With The New Yorker flourishing—in 1934 profits passed six hundred thousand dollars—both writer and editor brought home a good income throughout the Depression. Harold Ross wisely decided that both were indispensable and kept raising their salaries. Earning close to thirty thousand dollars together in the mid-1930s between writing and editing and Katharine’s small inheritance, they continued for years to live half in New York and half in Maine, with the romanticized freedom of farm life calling from behind the urban world’s honking horns and claustrophobic subways.

  Exposed above Allen Cove, the house encountered strong winds, but with its thick walls and broad plank floors—it had been built around 1800—it felt secure even in a snowstorm. They set up ground-floor studies across the hall from each other, his in the northwest front room and hers in the southwest, where he continued to write for and she continued to edit for the magazine that had brought them together. Over the years they developed a companionable routine. Late mornings, after farm chores were done and the rural postman had driven up with their daily array of fat envelopes containing books and manuscripts, both settled down to work. Their facing studies were separated only by the narrow space of the front hall, and neither felt the need to close a door for more privacy. His study was one giant map, the room wallpapered corner to corner in connected survey maps of Penobscot Bay, showing blue inlets and narrows and countless irregular tan island shapes from Rockport to Deer Isle and beyond. The wall to Andy’s left held cabinets below and bookshelves above—a worn thesaurus, an old set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, eventually the fat green 1940 edition of The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, other favorites, oversize bound copies of The New Yorker, various editions of his own books. The shelves fluttered with notes that Andy taped up as reminders to himself.

  He situated his pine desk perpendicular to the window, with the light coming in behind him to the right and his typewriter table forming the left leg of a U in which he worked, seated in an old oak swivel chair. Thus while typing he faced the doorway. He could look up and see Katharine at her desk, wearing a pale sweater over tweeds and girlishly sitting on one leg. Smoke from her cigarette spiraled up around tortoiseshell glasses, which sat halfway down her nose, as her pencil moved along an oversize page of New Yorker galleys. Occasionally one or the other read aloud from a letter received or an article undergoing revision, but seldom from what they were actually writing. Andy wrote Comment and his essays in staccato bursts of typing separated by long, thoughtful silences. At a young age, her son Roger noted how much effort and time Andy invested in these seemingly casual paragraphs.

  An aromatic woodshed linked house and barn, a common adaptation in the north that facilitated animal care and milk-gathering during subzero winters, and there were also a henhouse and a cowshed, an icehouse and a garage. Andy wrote that the connection between house and barn meant that “without stepping out of door you can reach any animal on the place, including the pig. This makes for greater intimacy.” From the first, he found the huge, lovely barn evocative. Its high loft, piled with aromatic clover and timothy hay, sparked memories of the stable behind the house in Mount Vernon, where he had spent so many golden hours as a child. As soon as he closed the lift-latch on the kitchen door and stepped down into the barn, he smelled the tang of straw, cow breath, tack, rubber boots, and manure. Stalls and alcoves testified to the many skills that farming required. They held milk pails and looped rope, rusty rat traps and empty grain sacks, a harness rack here, an old wooden vise there, on one wall a penciled worming calendar and on another an agricultural-service spraying chart for pesticides. Overhead, canoes slept upside down across rafters. Everywhere tools hung on pegs or nails: axes, wooden hay rakes and metal leaf rakes, both round-headed and square-headed hoes, a primordial scythe, a curving, three-tined pitchfork. Angled light from the south windows glittered on the mean gapped teeth of two-handed saws and the metal pneumatic tubes of Crystal Duster pesticide sprayers still mounted to their Mason-jar reservoirs.

  When they moved in, Andy began immediately to envision more occupants to fill his barn and his days. From childhood he had always experienced an urge to care for animals; he had seldom been without a dog, usually supplemented with a canary, a goldfish, or some other pet. He envisioned a farm full of animals before they even found the house. The morning sun shone through these windows and side-lit the nineteenth-century cattle stalls. Their thick handmade stanchions that could still lock with hewn pegs and tumblers, and their hoof scars in the plank floor, conjured like a genie the barn’s own memories of and need for cows. A museum-worthy milking stool all but demanded that Andy sit on it and acquire a cow to complete the picture. Many animals came through this barn and the other buildings—not only cattle but chickens, pigs, ducks, cats, dogs, sheep, the occasional goat. Andy was as self-conscious about farming as he was about everything else. Suspecting that neighboring farmers were skeptically watching this citified newcomer, he was embarrassed to find himself doing such things as walking across the barnyard carrying a paper napkin.

  Andy noted early on that in one year his 148 laying hens produced 5,784 eggs. He still loved eggs, the first glimpse of their not quite roundness and their potent weight in his hand—“a morning jewel, a perfect little thing,” he wrote about finding one in the dawn. He recalled the collection of wild-bird eggs that had graced the attic on Summit Avenue, that hot, close space where he could be alone with Meccano and William J. Long’s animal stories. Now, decades later, the reality of hen and goose fertility never undermined eggs’ symbolic value for him. One goose laid her eggs in a nest she made beside the feed rack in the sheep shed so that when she was off the nest, the lambs would climb in for the cozy straw and incidentally warm her eggs. This was an un
usual burst of imagination. Usually the members of these two groups—sheep in their solemn cliques and yammering klatches of geese—moved together in such a way that they seemed to have little individual identity. Other aspects of his birds’ behavior fascinated him, such as how during the war anxious chickens mistook the silhouettes of patrol planes for hawks.

  A couple of years after Andy bought this place, his mother wrote to him about his new life in the country. She recalled the toy barnyard of her own childhood, with its miniature sheep and pigs and cows and a barn with a painted sky behind it. Quite secular, lacking an infant Jesus and Wise Men, this farm by the Christmas tree nonetheless acquired in young Elwyn’s mind an aura of sacred nativity. His formal, elegant mother had fondly called this toy world her “dream farm.” Here in Maine, one day when Andy was using desk scissors to trim lambs’ wool before entering them at the fair, he realized that he was gently biting his tongue the way he had as a child when performing such a task with one of his pets. When he finished trimming the lambs, he saw that they looked half like the sheep-bulletin photos he had used as a model and half like the little wooden lambs in his mother’s toy farm. To instinctively further the emotional connections between childhood and newfound playground, Andy anchored a metal loop in the beam over the north door of the barn and ran a thick, coarse rope through it. He and Joel would climb up into the loft, grasp the rope with both hands, wrap their legs around it, settle upon the heavy knot at the base, and swing down toward the earth and back up toward the sky. It was a dizzy, joyful sensation he hadn’t experienced since the Strattons’ barn in Mount Vernon.

  Andy was not a gentleman farmer. He didn’t sit on the veranda and direct a subordinate who in turn bossed those who worked the land and tended the animals. He worked the land and tended the animals himself. True, when writing about his tasks on the farm Andy neglected to mention Katharine, Joe, their cook, their housemaid, and the full-time hired man who often employed assistants. (Eventually a Brooklin neighbor, Henry Allen, replaced Howard Pervear.) But even surrounded by help, Andy was always in the midst of the work. When he decided to dynamite boulders in his field, to create a pasture for the ideal cow he envisioned, he hand-drilled holes for dynamite, helped maneuver the blasted rock fragments onto drags with chains, drove a tractor with its Paleolithic burden scraping broad flat furrows in the field, and unloaded each stone for deposit in the edge of the woods. “People have quit calling me an escapist,” he once remarked, “since learning what long hours I put in.” He thought it funny that after moving to Maine and reducing his workload at The New Yorker, he found himself addicted to a venerable weekly farm paper called The Rural New Yorker.

  From the barn the east windows framed the cove where they had first anchored. This stretch of Maine coast resembled Andy’s beloved Belgrade Lakes region farther inland except that here the sea gave the land a hardscrabble air. But bleakness appealed to Andy’s Romantic sensibilities. Sunlit days alternated with sudden fog that could trap a sailor but made the world look mysterious and poetic to a writer safely moored on shore. Fog was always a threat in the back of Andy’s mind when he was out in a boat. On land it could be so thick it smothered a cigarette after a few puffs and would leave forgotten tennis shoes sopping merely from having wicked moisture out of the air. In this damp climate some homes and businesses smelled of mildew.

  Andy considered that the farm extended far beyond its official property lines, into the bay and what he described as “the restless fields of protein.” Always Andy needed to feel self-sufficient. He liked knowing that he could walk past his barn and henhouse, past the garden with its potatoes and asparagus and beets and cucumbers, down the lane of pigweed and thistles, through the pasture where the heifers and calves dodged granite rocks in the soil to nibble wild strawberries, stroll in between the low blueberry bushes and past the ground-hugging cranberry vines heavy with crimson fruit, settle into a boat, and find himself still harvesting from the water itself. In fact, he could start harvesting marine animals even before he got into the boat, in the clam beds that he cautiously prowled barefoot. The tide could vary as much as sixteen feet in a day, and in flood tide the dock’s pilings attracted flounder, with their surreal condition of two eyes clustered together on the flattened body, and hand-size cunner, a notorious bait-stealer so small that most fishermen threw them back into the water. Just beyond the point, lobsters lurked. Every summer, only two miles out into the bay, schools of mackerel lured a regatta of family boats to a local Sunday social event simply called mackereling. “When you have your own boat,” Andy observed, “you have your own world, and the sea is anybody’s front yard.”

  When Katharine and Andy moved in, the farm had no running water. There was, however, a fresh spring in an always damp glade not far away. There, in the shade of tamarack and alder, amid the ethereal calls of woodcock and the splashes of a frog fleeing his approach along the path sprinkled with tiny tamarack cones, Andy often glimpsed an eel that had somehow navigated up the pasture’s brook with blind commitment. Trekking all the way here and back to the house seemed a burden at the time. Later, however, after he had the spring encased in stone and concrete and fitted with an electric pump that drew the water out of a copper pipe, he missed the days of carrying heavy, splashing pails through the woods.

  In the country Andy reveled in the parade of nonhuman neighbors. Flotillas of fat black coots drifted by with their white bills visible from surprisingly far away, and beyond them toured loons, whose elegant motif and pared silhouette made the coots look frumpy. Gulls screamed and seals barked. In the course of a day Andy met deer and porcupines, skunks, squirrels both red and gray. He might spy the tracks of weasel and mink. Chittering squadrons of barn swallows flew in and out through the open barn door, their rich blue wings flashing. Where could he find a greater range of birds than between the red-throated hummingbird hovering at Katharine’s tiger lilies and the great horned owl that dropped silently out of an alder down by the swamp? Whip-poor-wills called and tree toads chirred. The soil itself was populous—chipmunks, snails, moles, snakes, frogs, woodchucks. The margins of Andy’s day were busy with their scurry, their naive surprise at his approach and their predictable rush down a burrow.

  Later, he enjoyed the company of the raccoon that nested in the big, hollow balm of Gilead tree in front of the house. This particular neighbor gave birth to her young thirty-five feet in the air, just outside and slightly above Andy and Katharine’s own bed. Since childhood, especially since the stories of William J. Long about Mooweesuk the raccoon—“a pocket edition” of Mooween the bear—Andy had found raccoons charming. He grew so accustomed to this female’s predictable nocturnal habits that he would get out of bed at three in the morning to watch her shimmy back up the tree trunk to her sleeping kits. He liked to glimpse her silhouette against the sky and he admired the watchful way she sniffed around the door of her home to learn if enemies had trespassed in her absence. During Joe’s early childhood, Andy guarded his own house and family in a similar way, making the rounds every night before bed, locking all the doors, checking the lamps and stoves, and taking a last quiet peek into Joe’s room for a glimpse of his innocent sleep.

  IN 1934, DURING Katharine and Andy’s first summer on the farm, his now white-haired parents—Samuel was eighty and Jessie seventy-six—came to visit. They enjoyed the bracing country air and the rugged coast so close to where the family had summered every year in Andy’s childhood. Married and with a son, happy on a farm, their youngest child seemed to be finally settling into life. The next August, Samuel died at Mount Vernon, and Jessie moved to Washington, D.C., to live with Clara, Andy’s middle sister.

  In April 1936, Christopher Morley, a founder of and now a contributing editor at The Saturday Review of Literature, wrote to invite Andy to become the magazine’s new editor. A decade older than Andy, Morley bridged the generations between one of Andy’s heroes—Don Marquis—and Andy himself. A close friend of Marquis’s, Morley had become, since the publication
of his quirky novels Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, around the end of the World War, one of the more versatile men of letters in the United States. Poet, journalist, essayist, novelist, and editor, Morley had been one of the first judges of the now decade-old Book of the Month Club and had just been asked to edit the eleventh edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Two years earlier, he had cofounded the Baker Street Irregulars, a loose affiliation of Sherlock Holmes fans who met at the Algonquin Hotel, where Morley had also helped launch the informal and unofficial but already legendary Three Hours for Lunch Club. Andy was touched by Morley’s invitation but made clear that he could not seriously consider such an offer. With numerous asides about his congestion and fever—including a reference to “when the Last Great Bronchitis comes”—he protested that he read “so slowly & so infrequently” that he would make a terrible editor, adding, “What a fine, mad bunch of people you must be, anyway, to have cooked up such a notion!”

  As Andy’s fame grew, his past receded. Four days later, before he was even over the bronchitis, an exhausted Andy had to take a train to Washington, where his mother was having gallbladder surgery. The family had been optimistic about the surgery’s ability to cure Jessie’s pain and extend her life. But the surgeon found not only that her gallbladder was clotted with a half dozen acorn-size stones, but also that it, her liver, and parts of her colon were eaten up with cancer so badly that he felt nothing could be done. Surgery itself would kill her. He stitched the incision back together and quietly informed the family that their mother might be able to hang on for a few more months. They didn’t tell Jessie about the cancer, only about the stones. “She is very vague about diseases, anyway,” Andy wrote home to Kay, “and she has never been the sort of person to face facts realistically.”