by Ann Swinfen
‘Easy now, old girl,’ he crooned to Dancer, using a rag to swab away the sticky foam which had dried in gouts around her mouth. He felt twisted up with pity for her. He wondered for the first time what it must be like to be a mare or a woman. To have to go through that agony to give birth. And it might all be for nothing. He reached up above his head and patted Lady’s soft nose where it was poked over the partition.
‘It’s OK, Lady. She’s all right now.’
But Dancer shut her eyes and let her head drop back on to his lap.
‘Come on, none of that,’ he said bracingly in his mother’s tones. ‘Back on your feet with you.’ But Dancer looked so tired, and so old, too. There were hollows around her eyes and jaw that he had never noticed before, and angles of bone that stood out sharply, casting dark shadows in the light from the lamp which hung from the rafters. He ran his hand down her neck and shoulder. She was trembling less now. The mares were both older than he was and were as much a part of his life as his mother and father. He was suddenly afraid for her.
He looked round at his father.
‘Is the foal dead?’ he asked.
Tobias shook his head.
‘Its heart’s beating and it’s breathing, but it’s feeble.’
He lifted the foal gently and set it down near Dancer’s nose. Her nostrils twitched and her eyes flew open, then she began to struggle with her back legs, trying to get them under her. Tobias lifted the foal out of the way, and they all three stood clear as the mare heaved herself wearily to her feet. She shook her head, scattering bits of straw from her mane, and a last shiver ran over her back, then she poked her head forward and sniffed again at the foal. She licked its face. The foal lay still in Tobias’s arms at first, then it moved a little, lifting its heavy head, swaying, on the thin neck. Carefully Tobias put the foal down in the straw beside the mare, trying to set it on its feet. It collapsed, all four legs bending and sprawling in an uncoordinated heap. Tobias stood it up again, and Dancer turned her head to it, blowing softly and licking. Lady, watching still over the partition, whickered again. As Tobias took his supporting hands away, the foal staggered, but remained upright. It shook its head, leaned towards its mother and nuzzled her.
Tobias began to blow through his front teeth, emitting a few faint sounds. Sam gathered up the rags and buckets, and raked the bloody straw out of the stall.
‘Look, Dad,’ said Simon at last, with a sigh of relief, ‘he’s sucking.’
It was a miracle, every time. The stubby tail, brown with a streak of white showing in it now that the hair was dry, began to jerk, marking time. Dancer echoed Simon’s sigh and nosed about in her manger, finding some scraps of the bran mash they had given her during the night.
Tobias gripped Simon’s arm briefly. ‘He’ll do, son. He’ll do.’ As he stepped out of the stall he trumpeted into his handkerchief. ‘Straw dust in my nose,’ he explained to Sam. ‘Heck, it’s past five. Time we got on with the chores.’
Simon walked away from them, out of the barn, across the pasture and into the edge of the pine wood. He began to beat his forehead rhythmically against the rough resinous bark of an old balsam fir while the cold dawn wind dried his cheeks.
More than a week later, the afternoon after Lady’s foal was born – cleanly and without difficulty – Tirza had come up to help with the evening milking because Tobias had driven into Portland to fetch a spare part for the tractor. While they were sitting in the kitchen afterwards, the telephone rang. Tobias had one of the six telephones in Flamboro, along with Flett’s Stores, Hector Swanson, the Penhaligons and two other houses in the township. Nathan had declared that he saw no need for the instrument. On the rare occasions he needed to make a call, he used the public phone at the store.
Harriet lifted the Bakelite earpiece from its cradle and strained upwards to speak into the mouthpiece. The varnished mahogany box with its crank handle had been mounted on the wall inside the back door at the right height for Tobias. Harriet, who took most of the calls, always had to stand on tiptoe to make herself heard.
‘Hello? Helen?... Yes... Yes, I’m sure they can... I’ll call you back tonight.’
As she hung up she was smiling.
‘I thought it felt like a sugar snow, with these warm days and freezing nights. How would you both like to go and help with the sugaring on Uncle Frank’s farm?’
Tirza and Simon both jumped up. This was great news. Harriet’s sister Helen lived just over the state boundary in New Hampshire. Helping with the maple syrup harvest meant at least three weeks off school, a trip to Uncle Frank’s farm and all the fun of sugaring off. It was hard work, of course. Heavy and tiring, and lasting into the night, but their cousins would be there. Some years they weren’t needed, if the sap yield was poor. But this year conditions were ideal, and Uncle Frank wanted every pair of hands he could get. He would pay them, too. Not much, but enough to start Tirza thinking about a proper anchor for Stormy Petrel instead of the sling-stone she used at present. Simon was pining for a new rifle, a proper one of his own, not a hand-down from his father. They looked at each other joyfully.
‘Let’s see,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s Thursday today. If you go to school tomorrow and take excusal notes for Miss Bennett. . . then tomorrow evening, if we do the milking early, we could drive over in the pickup. We’d get there about eleven, say. Your dad and I could stay till Sunday midday. Sam can manage till then. We’ll lend a hand at Helen’s, then we’ll leave the two of you, and come back to fetch you when you’re not needed any more.’
She turned to Tirza. ‘Do you think Abigail will let you go?’
‘Certain sure,’ said Tirza confidently. Her grandmother would never, not under any circumstances, have let her off school for three weeks in the ordinary way of things, but Abigail had been a farmer’s wife on this very farm for thirty-five years, and she knew that when the land demanded it, everything else had to be abandoned.
On Friday evening they set off, about an hour after dusk, with their supper in a big wicker basket entrusted to Tirza and Simon in the back of the truck. Tobias had rigged up metal hoops over the truck bed and lashed a tarpaulin on to them, making a kind of tent. There was straw on the truck bed for warmth and Harriet had packed them around with blankets. The tented space under the tarpaulin gave an illusion of cosiness, but the air still felt bitterly cold on their faces and hands. Temperatures of ten below freezing had been forecast for the night.
Harriet opened the sliding window in the back of the cab as they bounced down the track towards the farm gate.
‘Are you going to be all right? Are you sure now? If you start feeling too cold, just tap on the window and one of you can change places with me for a while.’
‘We’re fine,’ said Tirza.
‘When can we eat?’ said Simon.
‘Not yet awhile. Sakes, son, you just ate a ham sandwich not ten minutes ago.’
The truck turned from the farm track on to the Portland road. They could not see anything from inside their moving tent, but they could tell roughly where they were just from the feel of the road. Tirza buried her hands under the blankets and warmed them between her knees.
‘Tirza,’ Simon said suddenly out of the dark, ‘do you reckon you’ll have any babies?’
‘Babies? I don’t know. I don’t know as I want to get married. Why?’
‘Wouldn’t you be scared?’ He cleared his throat. They did not usually discuss anything so personal. ‘I was thinking, after Dancer’s foal was born... It hurts so much. And all that blood.’
An embarrassed silence lingered in the air. Tirza drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them.
‘Probably I won’t get married, so it won’t happen, will it?’
The next morning Tirza woke stiff from the long journey in the truck. Together with Simon she had spent what was left of the night rolled in blankets on the floor of Aunt Helen’s shuttered porch along with their cousins Sue and Frank Junior, who had given up their bedrooms to
the adult relatives, and Lou, Peggy, Maribell and Sammy, who had arrived the day before with their mother Una and their father Harold, Harriet’s brother. Lou was seventeen and near enough grown up. He was going to college in the fall, unless he was drafted. But the rest of them were all close in age. Helping with the sugaring was one of the rare times they had a chance to meet up.
Tirza rolled over, groaning. She and Simon were the only ones left in the tangle of blankets on the floor. The banging of Aunt Helen’s gong rang out from the kitchen, and she realised she had already half heard it in her sleep. She rose to her feet stiffly, picked up her bundle of clothes and stepped over Simon to reach the door. Everyone else was up and dressed, so she hurried in the bathroom and reached the kitchen as the others were sitting down in rows at the big kitchen table.
Uncle Frank and two of the farmhands came in the back door, stamping the snow off their boots. It was getting light outside and they had already been into the maple woods, drilling more trees.
‘We’d best make a quick breakfast,’ said Frank. ‘I want to get all the drilling finished today. Tirza, you can follow me and hammer in the spiles in the Windy Top orchard.’
After breakfast Tirza collected a big basket of metal spiles from the sugarhouse and followed her uncle through the snow up the hill to the highest orchard of the farm, halfway up the mountainside. The divisions of the rock maple forest were called orchards, but bore no likeness to a fruit orchard on a regular farm. They were simply sections of trees, separated from each other by boundaries visible only to Frank and his hired men, each containing about two hundred trees. The basket was heavy and Tirza was out of breath by the time they reached Windy Top. Yesterday someone had brought a load of galvanised sap buckets up with the tractor and left them in a heap beside the path.
Frank took a brace and bit out of a holster hitched to his belt and ran his hand over the bark of the first maple, like a doctor feeling a patient. The places where sap holes had been drilled healed over with scar tissue and remained dry for the rest of the tree’s life. It would take twenty-five years before the trunk could be drilled even near to an old hole. Frank looked absorbed, running his fingers over a likely spot for a new bore hole. He was the fifth generation to sugar on this land and his knowledge was in his fingertips.
He began to drill, angling the hole slightly upward.
‘Remember when you were first here?’ he said. ‘No more than three or four you’d have been. You were worried the drilling would hurt the tree.’
‘Ayuh.’
‘I recall saying, No more than cutting your fingernails hurts you. These trees are like members of the family. I wouldn’t hurt a one of them any more than I’d hurt you.’
‘And you said that trees are faithful to you if you’re faithful to them.’
‘Well, that’s true. My grandfather’s grandfather tapped these trees, most on ‘em, and we’re still eating their syrup today. If the trees were hurt when we tapped them, they’d not give us the sap, now, would they?’
Frank drew the bit gently out of the tree and went round to the other side to find another likely spot. Tirza pushed a spile in as far as it would go, then tapped it home with a wooden mallet. While her uncle drilled the next hole, she walked back to the path, picked up two buckets and shook the snow out of them. She hooked one bucket below the first spile, then inserted a spile into her uncle’s second drill-hole.
Neither Tirza nor Frank was given to talking unnecessarily. They worked their way through the trees, exchanging occasional remarks but mostly in silence. The maples were all natural-grown, not planted groves, so the trees grew irregularly. Tirza thought she might have missed one on her own, but Frank moved surely from one to the next as if he had a map in his head.
It took them until dinnertime to drill half the orchard, then they walked back down the mountain towards the farmhouse. Tirza went into the sugarhouse to refill her basket with more spiles while Frank checked on the progress of the syruping. The sugarhouse was a long low shed, with a corrugated tin roof and pine shingles on its walls weathered to the colour of maple cream. Inside was the evaporator – a great ramshackle tin-plate construction made by Frank’s father and stretching nearly the length of the sugarhouse. The firebox had to be kept fed with four-foot logs day and night until sugaring was finished. Peggy’s face was flushed with the heat as she lugged a rough pine branch across the floor.
Lou was sitting up on the high evaporator chair, his feet on a level with Frank’s eyes.
‘She’s starting to foam maybe too much, Uncle. Want to look?’
Frank climbed up, checked that the temperature gauge was steady on 219 degrees, and peered in at the boiling sap, which had been run down into the evaporator from the holding tank.
‘Hmm. Yeah. Tirza? Hop along to the kitchen and ask your Aunt Helen for a piece of fatty salt pork.’
Tirza put down her basket and hopped. If the sap started to form too thick a foam coating on top, evaporation slowed down and the risk of burning increased. She came back with a salted pig’s leg and passed it up to her uncle. Then she grabbed the spreaders between the legs of the evaporator chair and climbed up on the other side – it was like a pair of ladders with a chair on top. The smell of the boiling sap, which filled the whole farm, was intense here – sweet yet pungent.
She hung on to Lou’s neck and leaned over as Frank dropped the pig’s leg gently into the evaporator. Almost at once the scum of foam began to recoil from the fatty meat, shrinking away to the sides and gradually disappearing. Frank looked at his watch.
‘Another half-hour, then we’ll run her off. You’re doing fine, boy. I’ll send someone out to relieve you so’s you can get some dinner. Peggy, you girls make up the fire once more, then cut along and have yourselves some food.’
‘I’ll wait till you run off,’ said Lou. ‘I’d like to watch it.’
‘OK. Say, Tirza,’ said Frank, climbing down to the floor again, ‘come over here. I’ve got something I want to show you.’
They went over to the end of the sugarhouse where buckets and spiles were piled and rows of earthenware gallon jugs were lined up on a table. From the floor Frank heaved up a section of tree trunk about three feet across and a foot thick and balanced the weight of it on the edge of the table.
‘Have a look at this.’
Tirza looked where he was pointing. A segment of tree and bark had been sliced off, and on the pale inner wood there was a discoloured mark like a rough V shape.
‘This was an old tree past sapping that we cut down in Windy Top last fall. About where we stopped drilling just now. We were running it through the circular saw for planks when I saw this, so I cut that section out of the trunk to keep.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well now, sometimes we find spiles accidentally left behind in an old tree, where the tree has healed over them. The modern metal ones play hell with the saw.’ He laughed ruefully. ‘The older spiles were carved out of white ash and they don’t do any harm. But this is older still, and I’ve only seen one like it once before, about twenty year ago.’
‘Is it the mark of a spile?’
‘It’s an Indian sap hole. They’d cut a deep V and fix their buckets under. Well, I don’t suppose it’d be a bucket. Some kind of bark cup, maybe, or a gourd. That mark was made two hundred and fifty, three hundred years ago, by the Abenakis sapping these selfsame trees. We learned how to do it from them. Couldn’t really better what the old red men did. Those Abenaki great-grandaddies of yours, they made this.’
Tirza ran her finger along the ancient mark.
‘They maybe used baskets for the sap,’ she said. ‘Girna says their baskets were so fine woven, they would hold water.’
‘Just remember, when you’re pouring syrup over your pancakes,’ said Frank. ‘The Indians were living with these trees and caring for them before a white man ever set foot in New England.’
By the next day all the trees were drilled and running, and apart from those working i
n the sugarhouse everyone was up in the orchards carrying buckets. Tirza was in Three Springs this time, collecting sap near Sue and Frank Junior. They worked their way through the trees from the path to the far end of the orchard where the sugar maples ended at a slide of loose scree as the side of the mountain fell away. Sue was working the trees below Tirza, Frank Junior the ones above, but they moved at about the same pace and could call remarks back and forth to each other. The buckets were not very full this morning, the first day after the trees had been tapped. The two highest orchards, standing in the cold air at the top of the forest, were not yet running as freely as those lower down the mountainside.
Just below them on the path the collection tank had been parked. A big three-hundred-gallon tub on wheels, it had been hauled up here first thing by tractor and would be hauled down again at midday. It was hard work lifting the buckets high enough to tip into the tank.
Waiting for Frank Junior to pour his sap in, Tirza asked, ‘Are you going to stay on the farm when you grow up, Frank? Will you carry on sugaring after your dad?’
Frank looked at her as if she was demented.
‘Of course. What else would I do? My ancestors have been sugaring on this land since before the War of Independence.’
‘So would I, if it was mine,’ said Tirza, thinking of the Abenaki scar in the old maple. ‘I think it’s a great life.’
‘It’s hard too,’ said Frank, watching her pour the clear sap from her buckets. ‘Don’t never know what the weather will do, and sugaring’s all to do with the weather. Get a quick soft spring and the run is over soon as wink. Get a bitter spring and the sap hardly rises, sluggish as a snail. Have a dry summer the year before, the trees don’t make many leaves, then sure thing, next spring the sap will be thin. Still and all, I wouldn’t want to live anywheres else, be anything else.’