Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  I’m not sure where I picked it up, but I had been carrying around the idea of an orchard of my own for a long time. Everything about an orchard appealed to me: planting and caring for the trees, watching their growth, the ripening toward red and yellow, slipping the slender picking ladder into the branches so I could reach the fruit, the abundance of the harvest and the pies and preserves that would follow.

  My favorite food is apple pie and ice cream. I could live on it, I am convinced, and I always feel better after I’ve eaten a piece. Way back, the apple pie and diner passage in Kerouac’s On the Road had given me an immediate flash of self-recognition, and later I committed to memory many of Robert Frost’s lines about apples. My favorite character in American history is Johnny Appleseed. He is our homegrown John the Baptist, walking west with tattered clothes and a tin pot as a hat, spreading fruit trees and love across the countryside and offering salvation not through water but with a jug of cider. Here was a man who lived the Sermon on the Mount. The old varieties that he had scattered across Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana were in themselves a national lyric read aloud—Spys and Winesaps, Pippins, Rhode Island Greenings, Baldwins, Snows and Coppins, Porters, Priestleys and Russets. The names of apples evoke for me our better natures as Americans, and an agrarian past and the sounds of fiddles and dulcimers. Isn’t this the country we still wanted it to be? I resolved to plant some of the antique apples in my orchard, should I ever get to put one in. John Chapman of Leominster, Massachusetts, had lived through nature, and nature had lived through him. That was nothing if not harmony.

  And what was behind the harmony of the apples, of the pink lady’s slippers I found on my farther-ranging walks, or of the yellow mayflies and the trout that sipped them in nearby Great Brook? It seemed to me the result of the inevitable unfolding of laws laid down by the universe and embedded in the elements at hand: air and water, sunshine and earth. It was not by chance that the trees and leaves assumed their unique colors and shapes, or that the small streams flowed into bigger streams, or that the fireflies lit their little lanterns of phosphorescence among the grasses at night. All of this was the consequence of what the universe had commanded. It was chemistry, biology, physics and some inexpressible something else mixed together into one thing, and that thing was inevitability. We respond to the grasses, the trees and the brooks because we sense the deeper truth in them. A brook cannot be false or a tree deceptive, and because we as a species grew up with them, and among them, we are essentially part of them and they of us. By what other means can we be said to be made? What is evolution but the interaction of our potential with the reality of nature? The apples, the leaves, the mayflies, the trout—they express the harmony of nature, as well as the miracle of nature. We are included in this miracle, and the surprise would be that a separation from nature would result in anything but alienation from our deepest and earliest selves, that a reconnection would be anything but a sense of coming home. All of us, it seems to me, seek to recapture the sensations and selves of our childhoods, and nature offers the best way back, to the freshest parts of our true and original essence.

  Spring passed from the hillside. For a week the pine pollen had been so profuse in the air that it left a green skin over the pond’s surface. Lilac blossoms had filled the town’s dooryards and cemeteries. The nighttime frosts were over. Irises followed the lilacs—wonderfully elegant and purple on their stems, they appeared along the roadsides, in ditches and at the granite foundations of the oldest houses.

  We were in the embrace of summer. I spotted a doe in one of the hay fields along the Adams Road. She was as russet as a berry on the bush, and I guessed she was watching over a fawn that she had dropped in the unmowed timothy, hidden from the foxes and coyotes. Fawns are without scent—one of nature’s blessings and safeguards. The best part of the day for me was early in the morning when the wood thrushes filled the hillside with their liquid flutelike song. It was as if the pure eight-syllable melody—tut tup, o-lay-o-lay-o-lee—were being blown through a water whistle, or had bubbled up from some natural spring. The song was both so pure and so deep—with the notes sounded simultaneously and in a haunting harmony—that it seemed to give dimension to the hillside, defining its boundaries and occupying its hollows. The songs filled the spaces among the trees and rocks as if with colored light, and the final high notes lingered in the cool dappled shade of the oaks and beeches. It was for me the distillate of a woodland summer morning, and it never failed to bring me pleasure.

  Even on those days when Paul, Kevin or Billy was unavailable and I worked alone, I was not entirely without company. I was joined by a chipmunk that liked to hop onto the surplus beams we had stacked in front of the cabin, in among the trees. The stack was about four feet high, which seemed to suit my friend. He would climb and sit, working his tail, watch me work for a minute or two, then run off to a pile of rocks in the woods, where I presumed he had a burrow. He was not much bigger than a man’s fist, with two white and brown–bordered stripes on his back and shiny black eyes that glowed like tiny spots of wet paint. He was never still, twitching his tail and looking right and left.

  For me, a chipmunk was an unusual sight in the Maine woods. I had found red squirrels to be far more common. I accounted for the difference by the abundance of oaks and beeches around the cabin. Red squirrels are pine seed eaters, while chipmunks are more likely to eat nuts. Red squirrels are also noisy scolds and aggressively territorial, and they often make me want to do nothing so much as fire a shot and collect their tails for tying trout flies. Not so chipmunks. This chipmunk seemed to be evaluating my progress with a critical eye. I named him Pericles after the builder of ancient Athens, who I suspect did more supervising than building. Occasionally I’d set out a few peanuts for him. He was oddly selective, taking some and leaving others. We grew used to each other, and he would come close to the deck for a look when some important piece of work was under way. Sometimes when I could not see him, I could hear him (or one of his neighbors, or his Aspasia) issuing a hollow chuck-chuck sound framed by sharp clicks. It resounded in the woods like a drummer striking a tomtom followed by a rim shot. On some afternoons, it seemed like the entire percussion section of an orchestra was warming up around the cabin.

  The road I traveled to the cabin each morning took me past the place where the old Adams homestead had stood. It would be hard to imagine a more pleasant setting for a home. There was a gentle swelling of the land, a rising up like a wave at sea, except this wave was grass covered and with a big willow tree near the crest. I guessed the tree must have been dooryard shade at some point in the past, but of course now there was no longer a door nor a yard, though there was a foundation hole lined with rocks and choked with raspberry bushes. The spot offered a lovely prospect, the roll of the meadow, the bend of the tree, the rise and fall of the hills to the west—all of this gave the entire scene a feeling of rhythm and sway. Farther back from the road, to what I assumed would have been the view from the rear of the old house, poplar trees had filled in the meadow and hay fields, and below it to the left—the north—the land sloped toward Cold Brook, which gurgled now as it must have then, cold and clear over smooth stones.

  One hundred years ago—even fifty years ago—the land around the homestead would have been open for a half mile or more in every direction before it hit a line of trees, and a person standing in the yard on a summer day like the ones I was experiencing each morning would have seen nearly a dozen other small houses and farms in the intervale and among the cleared hills. Stone walls would have threaded the open land with sheep grazing the grass-and-rock hillsides. It might as well have been the Cotswolds except for the occasional wolf or moose that wandered down from the north. Back further in time, two hundred years ago, there would have been yet another landscape—dark and unbroken forest except for those places of natural streamside meadows or small patches that had been opened to the light by the earliest settlers, who had come up from the towns around Boston, either directly or by
way of Portland or the towns of New Hampshire’s Merrimac River valley.

  Joseph Adams was one of those early settlers. In 1823, he bought a hundred acres from Mary Batchelder, the widow of Josiah Batchelder of nearby Fryeburg and Boston. Batchelder had received a grant of 28,822 acres from the Massachusetts General Court, for the price of seventeen cents an acre. Batchelder’s grant stretched from the New Hampshire border nearly to Kezar Lake. Massachusetts then was still selling its frontier lands to ease its debts, piled up from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Joseph’s purchase, which required a mortgage from Mrs. Batchelder, included not only the homestead knoll but my hillside across from the pond. If Joseph followed the pattern of other settlers, he would have cleared the land by first setting fire to it, then pulling the stumps with oxen and chains and lugging the piglet-sized stones that came up out of the ground to piles in his fields, or forming them into the walls that bordered them. The work would have been ferociously hard, and Joseph likely added game to his diet of mutton and beans, corn and root vegetables. There would have been an abundance of bear, deer and even woodland caribou in the vast forest of the north country. He undoubtedly planted apple trees so he would eventually have had cider, and, also no doubt, some of that cider would have been encouraged to ferment so Joseph could enjoy a pleasant buzz as the snow piled high outside his windowsills and he rested his tired bones in front of a blazing fire. Surely some of the gnarled old trees I have encountered in my walks among the hills sprouted from seeds produced by Joseph’s trees and carried into the woods in the stomachs of deer and birds.

  By 1830, Joseph was married to Mary Robinson. According to census records, there were seven people in his household: Joseph and Mary, and at least four of the others were their children. The identity of the seventh is not clear; perhaps it was a relative who was taken in, or maybe another child. Andrew Jackson was president in 1830, and the tremors that soon would cleave the nation were already being felt. The debate over a state’s right to nullify federal law emerged in the Senate that year, and Maine had been admitted to the Union as a free state eight years earlier under a compromise that allowed slavery in Missouri. President Jackson was busy then removing the native peoples from the South—the Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole. The native people who had lived on the land around the Adams homestead—and there had been many—had been killed or driven off seventy-five years earlier.

  By the 1830s, Stoneham was a town of subsistence farms and sawmills. There was not a brook in the area that did not have at least one sawmill on it, and its abundance of white and red oak made it a source of staves for the manufacture of wood barrels. Stoneham’s staves, the beveled pieces of wood that formed the sides of the barrels, traveled by wagon to Portland and then by schooner to Cuba and the West Indies, where they were assembled into barrels and filled with molasses and rum. The staves were temporarily assembled into barrels in Stoneham to assure their eventual watertightness, and then broken down and packaged into shooks that took up less space in shipping—in the local vernacular, the staves were “all shook up.”

  There was a sheep and wool boom occurring then, and much of the land in Stoneham and throughout northern New England was sheep pasture. Up to eight thousand sheep a day from Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont arrived at the Boston stockyards, herded along the roads from backcountry farms. The wool was turned into cloth at mills along the major rivers, or at home on spinning wheels.

  In 1847, Joseph, then sixty-nine years old, sold his farm to his son William for a thousand dollars and the promise that William would provide “good suitable support” for his father and mother until their deaths. In the 1860 census, Joseph was still alive, at eighty-three, and so was Mary, at eighty. By then they lived with their grandson Joseph Jr., and there were four Adams households in the intervale, probably all of them carved from the original purchase and all of them within a rifle shot of the place where my cabin would eventually be built. In those four households, there were twenty-five people with the surname Adams. In one of those households there were two young Adams brothers—Hosea, fourteen, and Albion, seventeen. They had about the same age spread as Paul and I.

  Hosea (as his military record would soon indicate) was five feet, eight inches tall, with dark eyes and dark hair. Albion was taller, a six-footer, with hazel eyes and sandy hair. They lived in the home of Sylvester Adams, another one of Joseph’s grandchildren, but they could not have been Sylvester’s sons because Sylvester was only thirty years old in 1860. My guess is that they were Sylvester’s nephews or cousins and Sylvester had taken them in because a brother or uncle (also in the intervale) had been unable to care for them. The moving around of children among an extended family was not unusual in those days. Families took in other family members’ children in hard times. There was no alternative but destitution. Besides, Hosea and Albion would have been welcome hands around Sylvester’s farm, strong boys with strong backs. Sylvester appears to have been unmarried at the time, with no children, and he was living with his mother, Sally.

  The nullification tremors crested on April 12, 1861. With seven states already having declared their secession from the Union, forces of the breakaway Confederacy attacked U.S. troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. President Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the rebellion. Albion enlisted in October 1861. The corn at his uncle’s farm would have been harvested by then, and only the gourds would have been left in the stubble fields. When Albion struck off that fall and made his way past Little Pond and the knob and hillside on the way to Norway, and then down to the coast and Cape Elizabeth, where his regiment would muster, the poplar trees would have already turned gold and the bears in the mountains would have been actively foraging in preparation for winter. Maybe one or two would have visited the Adams’ chicken house. Surely, the mountain ash was ablaze with its fiery red berries.

  Albion’s regiment, the 12th Maine Infantry, gathered at Fort Preble on Casco Bay before departing on a steamer for Boston, where it docked briefly, and then embarked on a winter trip to Ship Island, Mississippi, and then to New Orleans, where it guarded the U.S. mint. Hosea, sixteen, followed his brother into the Union Army in July 1862. Hosea left the farm for Augusta, where his regiment, the 16th Maine, mustered before departing for Washington.

  They each got twenty-five dollars, which if combined would have equaled half the value of Sylvester’s farm. So maybe they joined for the money, or maybe for the Union cause, or maybe for the adventure, or maybe for all of those reasons. What sort of relationship these brothers had is impossible to know—they have left no discoverable letters or other personal records behind. But for sure they worked closely on the farm as brothers—the work would have taken more than one man, rooting up stumps, hauling rocks from the fields, twitching logs out of the woods. Were they confidants or rivals? Did they argue or cooperate? All I know from the scant records available is that they took the same path away from the farm—there was only one road out of the intervale, and it led past the hillside and the pond—and into the great chasm of civil war.

  On the way to New Orleans, a barrel of beef that Albion was loading onto a transport boat rolled and smashed his leg. He was taken out of duty and eventually recovered, though with a cough that had developed while he was recuperating. It steadily worsened and produced blood. Disease took its toll on the Northern boys who came into the South and encountered new germs, and New Orleans—between the malarial mosquitoes and syphilis in the city’s numerous whorehouses—extracted a particularly heavy price. Another local boy, also in the 12th Maine, wrote in a letter to a friend: I have been to as many as a dozen hoar houses and I hant seen but two good stile in the hole lot, but a dirtier damn set of cases you never see.... Portland or Boston is a better chance for a good clean time than New Orleans but if you want a Reckless nasty Damn drunken anything of that kind you can get it here.

  He noted that seventy-five of his comrades in the regiment suffered the clap. Albion reenlisted but never fully recover
ed from his bloody cough and was discharged for disability in August 1865. He died at home, most likely Sylvester’s home, of a lung hemorrhage, in a bed not more than a quarter mile from the cabin. He would have been twenty-two years old.

  Hosea had enlisted with four other young men from town, and fifteen from nearby Lovell. The regiment was drawn mostly from the farm and logging towns of western Maine. It is easy to imagine those men and boys flowing out of the hills onto the dusty winding roads in small but gathering groups until they formed a tattered parade of roughs in gallused trousers, blousy shirts and homemade shoes, shouting “Huzzah and hooray” for the Union. Without much training, the 16th Maine departed for Washington, D.C., and then to the Maryland campaign, which culminated at bloody Antietam (3,650 dead, 17,300 wounded). Then it was on to Burnside’s disaster at Fredericksburg, where the general’s dithering on the wrong side of the Rappahannock ultimately cost the Union Army a victory against General Lee. On the day of battle, December 13, the Union soldiers—with Hosea and the Stoneham boys of Company D—were lined up against Stonewall Jackson on the Rappahannock Plain just outside of the city. At midmorning, with the fog lifting, the 2nd Division and 16th Maine came under heavy fire and were ordered to charge the Confederate troops. Stonewall Jackson had been patiently waiting for the Union troops to come within range of his artillery. He opened fire. It was an awful, bloody mess, and the Union troops were routed. Hosea was wounded slightly in the battle, but soon returned to service.

  Months later, in early May 1863, Hosea experienced another Union debacle, at Chancellorsville. Did Hosea think of the Saco River back home as he crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers in Virginia on the way to Hooker’s defeat in Spotsylvania County? In Stoneham, the brooks and rivers would have been high on their banks and the sucker fish would have been making their way upstream from the lakes. It would have been too early for his uncles and cousins to have planted the first crop of peas in the intervale, but soon, in the woods, the flowers of early spring would make their appearances: blue violet, trillium, blueberry, strawberry, dandelion, meadow rue, jack-in-the-pulpit. Possibly, pleasant memories of the town’s woodland scenes gave Hosea comfort in Virginia.