by Jeffrey Lent
Silver hair foxed his temples and he’d pause on the landing going up the stairs. He continued to deliver graduation addresses at every possible school in his district. Those inevitably hot early June afternoons and evenings. His country accent returned and thickened on those occasions, leading off each address by intoning, “Boys and girls, parents, teachers, dignified guests. We are gathered here on this lovely afternoon …” And on from there.
She loved him dearly even if he seemed more grandfather than father as the years went by. He kept peppermints or butter-rum Life Savers in his pocket, it seemed just for her. He’d debate her on topics of the day during dinner but listened intently to her raw and juvenile opinions, as if learning some key and new information. He loathed FDR but quietly admired the man for his accomplishments. In later years Ruth understood this seemingly perplexing contradiction prepared her for the twists and turns her own life would take.
Oliver Snow’s story was different yet oddly similar as they both knew and would take delight in probing one certain summer. She already knew much, or thought she did.
Oliver had lost his paternal grandfather at a young age. One difference was her grandfather was dead before she was born while Gideon Snow had died when Oliver was four—his most clear memory was of pulling a wooden duck on wheels that rotated brightly painted red and yellow wooden wings on the porch of the house on Creamery Road while the older man, maddeningly not held in memory but just from sight, sat in one of the wooden rockers that lined the porch in deep shade and clapped his approval. Beyond that, Oliver said, was a keen sense of the man, as if always now just out of reach. Ruth also had a memory of him—his funeral was the first such event she’d attended and for her, the sense of loss all those years later was the absence of any sense of Oliver from that somber afternoon. She recalled a yellow jacket lofting slow and lazy above the mourners and her fear whenever it drifted toward her. Shivers through her when between the backs and shoulders of those seated before her she glimpsed the wooden casket, not certain then exactly what it held. She knew death—only weeks before had been jerked alert at breakfast by a crash against her kitchen windows and gone onto her own porch to find a lifeless oriole that had broken its neck smashing into the glass. She’d carried the bird to her mother who lifted it from her hands into the lace handkerchief she always kept tucked into a sleeve, placed the little package on the table and waited while Ruth washed her hands with castile soap at the kitchen sink and then had walked with her daughter out to the far end of the flower garden and dug a small hole with a pointed spade and allowed Ruth to fill the hole, finding first a small slab of white granite shaped like an arrowhead to set upright at one end of the grave. But the mystery of human death still loomed, unconnected in some vital way to the death of a bird.
The most immediate consequence of his grandfather’s death for Oliver Snow was within the month, his father, Ed, began teaching the boy how to play the fiddle, producing a three-quarter-sized instrument and every evening through that fall and winter after supper the two of them would retire to the parlor and tune their instruments and then work through the simple lessons, the scales, the first attempts at songs, stabs at bits of jigs, reels. They kept at it, Ed now much more so than Oliver, after that winter and part of the next, until the father realized he was pressing the boy in a way he’d once been pressed and so was content to let his son fall away from the lessons. There was no great insight in this, indeed a smack of selfishness: Neither Oliver nor his father had the talent that Gideon Snow and others before him had possessed. But Ed was determined to make himself the best fiddle player he could be. As homage, as knowing a latent talent had been subsumed someway and was determined to see it out. He became satisfactory and was satisfied with that, and smart enough to know only pleasure those times Oliver took his small fiddle from its case and played his own awkward tunes. The father thinking, Time will tell, as it does, as it would.
The Snows were new to the town by the terms of the place and oddly so, though the truth, as it does, would out soon after their arrival. Not even hidden so much as placed before the town as a silent fact, with the shade of a challenge or a threat or both within it. They’d come not north but south, from Canaan up near the border with Canada. Gideon and his young wife arriving already in possession of the deed to what was then little more than a mercantile of second stripe and enough cash money to buy the rundown house on Creamery Road. But his ambitions and pockets were both deeper than first appeared and before Oliver’s father was born the mercantile had been transformed into a drugstore, apothecary, tobacconist, stationer and purveyor of assorted sundries. This against the unmistakable evidence for the move south—Gideon’s wife had the thick dark curls worn long, the snapping eyes, the inflected speech and the pedestrian and utterly foreign name of Marie. He’d married a French-Canadian. Gideon Snow told the tale to any who would listen that first year: “Yuh, my Great-Grandsire was among the first settlers up to Ryegate, come over with a bunch of other Scots, you know it was them first settled up there? Anyways, one of em had a fiddle and played the old reels and ballads and—you know, it’s a fact he was in the midnight raid on Ticonderoga and the story is when the sun rose and the British flag was down he stood out there in the cold and fiddled all them old Revolution ballads; broadsheet songs made up in Boston or Philadelphia and went singing through the air at the time. ‘At Concord Bridge We Stood.’ So I’m a fiddler from my blood and my Da went from Ryegate to Canaan when I was a lad and Canaan was filled right up with the Frenchies but I didn’t know any better except they played a whole raft a tunes and then I got up into my dancing years and met Marie one night—now you fellers seen her, isn’t that so? Well, that was that. I haven’t looked back and never will. It’s a weak man that would, is how I see it. Say, you tried these Indian Maid cigars? Best Havana wrappers rolled around prime New England leaf, right down to the tobacco sheds along the Connecticut. Two for a nickel, four for a dime. That’s how good they are. Gents?”
Marie might’ve been Catholic but she attended the Congregational Church often enough if not every Sunday. Some of the women pursed their lips and narrowed their eyes, hearing her lilting English but the men found her voice sweet as birdsong and not some few admired her slight form through the long dresses and sleeves of the times and their wives knew that in the way women do and Marie for her part never had eyes for any man but Gideon Snow. She worked exquisite lace and could slaughter a hen from the backyard flock neat and swift as any of her neighbors. To church suppers and town meeting she always brought braces of apple tarts, crustless but the apple slices making tight whorls cooked amber with their sugar glaze. She raised three sons, Edward, James, and Merle and buried her only daughter, Mary, from the Spanish Flu. James went off to California with a plan to ranch or build a business and ended up a newspaperman, a journalist in Sacramento. Merle attended Amherst College and developed ideas for educational reform and helped open and close half a dozen schools in a decade around southern New England before taking a job as an English instructor and Latin tutor at Exeter where he eventually gained status as a revered and formidable grand old man. He married late in life and seemed destined to remain childless until he and his wife adopted a young student whose parents had both been killed in an automobile crash—a youth of considerable fortune and only a single maiden great-aunt who was not capable or interested in taking on a rambunctious young boy. When she died the school reaped a windfall and named a set of rooms in the library that held rare collections after not her, but the boy’s parents.
Oliver’s father, Ed, married Jennie Pease when he was twenty-one and she seventeen, the youngest daughter of a great tribe of Peases from up on Kipplin Hill, a great beauty with white-blonde hair that held throughout her life, like their son’s. The Pease family held a large acreage of thin soil, grown-up pastures and ledges, the pastures studded with boulders and rocks where the ledges failed and dotted with low circles of juniper and studded with purple thistle and burdock. Once, almost a centu
ry ago, it had been a prosperous sheep farm but was now like other hill farms, stumbling along from pillar to post and paying taxes with bushels of parsnips or a hog or whatever else might be parted with at the time the final dunning of the year arrived. The people in the village thought he’d been lust-struck by her beauty but in fact she was a gentle soul and deeply intelligent. In the first six years of their marriage she buried three stillborn girls and then came a gap of three years, during which rumors of miscarriage passed among the women of the village, before Oliver was born.
At that time Grandmere Marie still kept her bedroom on the first floor, entered into through a short passageway off the kitchen that led nowhere else. In the years after her husband died she’d gone gray and then had lost her sight but sat her days making lace by feel, the patterns woven into the tips of her fingers as a spider makes webs. When she realized her vision was going she’d sat and written out a dozen of her favorite recipes and without explanation handed them to her daughter-in-law. Who studied the onionskin paper, the thin, arching perfect penmanship, the top of each page labeled with a name she recognized and already knew how to make after those years of sharing a kitchen. The rest was French and incomprehensible to her but Jennie neatly folded them, once, and slid them into her recipe box. She waited two days so as not to be seeming to be either accommodating or dismissive and then turned out a perfect pork pie. Served up and the old woman had finished her portion with applesauce and sipped her black coffee and said, “Yes.”
One morning in early September when the goldenrod and purple asters were blooming, the first spots of color showing on certain maple trees, Marie disappeared. It was mid-morning before anyone knew she was gone. Her dresser drawers were pulled halfway open and the old cracked-black leather valise was missing from her closet. On her dresser was a note in English. “Goodbye my loves. I have taken the boat for home.” The alarm was sounded and neighbors drove the roads, the state police were called in, and packs of volunteers hiked up and down the slender branch of the river that ox-bowed behind the village. Thrashed through the woods, swamps, puckerbrush, up the feeder brooks. Used long poles to probe beaver ponds and cellar holes filled with trash. To no avail. No body, no sign of her was ever found.
The village, township, county and state all weathered the Depression better than many places. Life in most respects was local, food was raised by most all, and if not, their neighbors. A barter economy was a hundred and fifty years strong. For the most part clothing was made, not bought. The harness-maker was a fair cobbler. To make do, to do without, were not signals of poverty but of self-reliance. All families, at one time or another but all in living memory, had suffered setbacks of various sorts. Few banks failed, and those were in Burlington or Bennington, Saint Johnsbury, Rutland. The rest were all local endeavors each to its own town and so avoided runs, panic. If you put your money in the bank it was in the vault, or the safe in smaller banks. The greatest effect was political as not only the newspapers relayed the events of the greater world but also the slowly creeping electric lines and thus radios, a few powered from batteries or small home-jiggered generators run off a small windmill designed to draw water from wells, or older one-lunger gas engines that twenty or thirty years ago had powered milk separators, silage blowers, home-fashioned sawmills. Men would argue Roosevelt’s New Deal, though they saw little of it. A CCC camp had been set up down near Sharon and unemployed young men from New York or Boston were brought in to build trails in the newly minted Green Mountain Forest or help with the spring logging. A few men died on those jobs, lacking, all agreed, the common sense a more local boy would have. A handful of native sons returned home from their failed endeavors in the wider world but for the most part simply put shoulder to the wheel of what they’d thought they’d left behind, now rediscovered and savored. A good ham supper on the table end of day.
The radios proliferated and brought not only news but music, humor, drama. Women first and then men altered daily routines to be in the house at certain times. Children as well. And as the decade churned on, the talk among the men and not a few women turned to Germany, to Hitler and Europe and the general consensus was this was a problem for France, for England. More than a few were uncertain where Poland even was but most agreed Uncle Sam had straightened things up twenty years before and this would not be their fight. Everyone admired Lindbergh and most agreed upon America First. Why not? All knew the butcher Abner Heitmann in Royalton, and knew his grandfather had come from Germany to Connecticut and then north to set up shop and not one of them thought he was an agent for the Nazis. He was an American, almost as much as they were. Just a few generations shy.
December 1941 changed all that. The dirty stinking Japs. Before that day less than half the men in the town were even aware of what was happening in Asia and of those that were, most would be hard pressed to point out the Imperial adventures on a schoolroom world map. But of infamy Roosevelt spoke and they knew it to be true.
On the ceiling above Oliver’s bed were tacked charts that in black silhouette showed front, side and, most importantly, bottom outlines of the Allied and Axis planes, fighters and bombers, sea- and land-based. Learning them all, matching the shapes with the names and countries of origin seemed at first like a school exercise and then became more similar to walking in the woods and knowing the species of each tree he passed regardless of the time of year—knowing not only the easily identified leaf shapes but also how they budded in spring, the bark surface, the distinctive winter spray of stark branches against the sky, a knowledge he’d acquired without knowing he was doing so at a time in his still-young life he could not pinpoint but that resided within him. At a glance the name and model, the branch of service, the country of origin sprang to his tongue. Then as the first year of the war turned and he became active as a plane-spotter, he gave thought to this array of knowledge and unlike trees on the hills, realized that one single false identification could be disastrous. He lay on his bed and mulled this idea, then mulled where he lived and the globe in his mind and tightened focus. The long-range bombers were key, both American, to recognize what he was most likely to see, and German, for highest alert, highest probability. It seemed unlikely the Japanese could fly to Vermont. He also paid close attention to American fighter planes. If the Nazis could fly bombers across the ocean he concluded there would be a good chance at least a few U.S. fighters would have a chance to chase after them. Most of this done with a taped flashlight and blackout curtains snapped tight to his windows. Downstairs the radio was on, news, the big band music his mother liked, a drama, all indistinct. Most nights also the fainter mournful spray of notes from his father’s fiddle, in warm months from the woodshed adjacent to the house, in winter from the cellar. His father no longer played the dance music, the jigs and reels, but a slow beseeching music, tunes that seemed to be trying to find a way home. At least it sounded that way to a boy whose world was on fire.
He’d signed up as a Youth Air Guard. Afternoons when school let out he’d thump down from the high school classrooms with his books and homework and walk through the village, stopping always at his father’s store where he’d drink a Coke and eat a handful of oatmeal cookies made fresh each morning by Gertie Harrington against the bills for pain medication for her husband who was dying slow, confined to his bed, coughing terribly as if he could pump the cancer from his lungs and breathe free again but was mere months from smothering to death. Oliver sitting on the stool and drinking the delicious cold drink from the bottle with its lovely curves he comprehended deep inside but did not understand why it gave him such pleasure, eating the cookies that his father had gently asked that he consume rather than anything else because the cookies were always short of butter and sugar and at best studded with a pair of very old raisins, his father leaning close only once to explain, “If I don’t have to throw them away I can look her in the eye and tell her how much the children love them. If you have to, take a Mounds and eat it if you’re starving up on the hill.” Oliver took
the candy bar a couple of times but then stopped. The cookies weren’t so bad and the Coke made up for them.
He started up Beacon Hill and partway up walked out of the village. Toward the end of the street there was a two-story house with an attached set of sheds that rose and fell in height before ending in a small barn. Not so different from other village houses but for where it was and some other quality he could not name but that he liked the place. An old man lived alone there and time to time he’d come upon Alden Jenks out working in his yard, pruning his apple tree or plucking the fruits, splitting firewood or stacking it neat as a worked puzzle inside one of the sheds, tending his gardens, and he’d pause and chat. Alden Jenks favored layers of sweaters and green wool pants, sturdy boots laced halfway and double-knotted. His hair was white and cut very short all around and his cheeks blushed pink. Always it seemed he was glad to see Oliver turn into his yard but then would stand and look off over the village and say, “You think about it, there’s not one ever sees the same thing the same way but two will always swear they do,” or “It’s always worse than it was, then.” Or, if it was raining, “Damp, ain’t it?” Crusty old Yankee starch but Oliver liked him. The way he’d sway his eyes just to light upon the boy after speaking, as if sharing the humor of his making such comments. Looking away again.
He went on then uphill and the dirt street turned into a rough track through a belt of young second growth: maples and both silver and paper birch, hemlocks and ash, butternuts, all beset by an understory thicket of blackberry canes, sumac, chokecherry and swales of high ferns. He emerged into a steep climb of short-shorn grass studded with outcrops of ledge, a row of ancient sugar maples marking the crest above, trees scarred by lightning strikes, some half-dead but also half-alive and those halves so much greater than most trees he knew, a stone wall jigging between them, the stones some the size of automobiles or doorframes and in other places a careful buildup of smaller stones that could each be carried in a curled hand and worked into place. Trees and walls the remains of something else altogether gone.