Best Person Rural

by Noel Perrin

  We even knew some personal details, such as her age. She was forty-seven. (One of our two adult novelists figured this out from one of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s published diaries. Birth of daughter, October 2, 1940.)

  Finally, we knew that Manhattanville was an easy train ride into New York. Stands to reason that she was vanishing into the city, where elegant friends awaited her.

  But the last night of the conference Anne didn’t vanish. She slept in the guesthouse. Almost had to. There was a long evening program, and she couldn’t have slipped off to wherever it was she went much earlier than Cinderella dashed out of the palace.

  I keep Vermont hours. The final morning I was up and out by 6:30, an hour at which the woods behind the Manhattanville campus are cool and fresh, even in late June. The first (and only) person I saw when I stepped out the door was Anne. She obviously was planning a walk, too.

  “Have you seen the ruined chapel?” I asked. She hadn’t.

  “Want to walk down there with me?” She did.

  “Where do you go every night?” I asked after a while. “We’re all dying of curiosity.”

  She laughed. “You’re going to be disappointed. My mother lives in Darien. She’s been sick. I’ve been staying with her.”

  “So where do you live?” I asked presently.

  She laughed again. “The same state you do.” Ha! Clearly she, too, had been reading her colleagues’ books.

  “You live in Vermont?” I said, just to be sure I’d heard right.

  “Yes. I have a little farm near St. Johnsbury – bought it last winter. It’s nothing grand. Just a house, a horse, and a hill.”

  The gods were smiling. St. Johnsbury is less than fifty miles from my farm.

  By now we had reached the ruined chapel, deep in the woods. To get into it, we had to climb through one of the ruined windows. I went first, then offered her what was doubtless a superfluous hand. She hesitated, then took it. Before breakfast, she had agreed to come down some day soon and see my house, my hill, and my animals. (No horse. Just three sheep and eight cows.)

  A few days later she drove down for the promised visit. She was wearing jeans and a blue workman’s shirt. She looked ravishing.

  “Let’s save the house for later,” I said. “I want to walk you around the farm, and then I thought we might go swimming in the river.”

  “I have my bathing suit on under my clothes,” she said happily.

  Anne loved my farm, as well she might. I have ninety acres of woods and pastures, lots of old stone walls plus two new ones, a hilltop with a 360-degree view. The house, when we came in for lunch, seemed to excite her less. She duly noted what a beautiful color the old bricks were – the house was built in 1820. She liked its rustic version of the Federal style. But something was on her mind.

  “How long have you lived here?” she asked.

  “Twenty-five years.”

  “So this is where you and your first wife lived?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your second wife lived here, too?”

  “Part of the time,” I answered guardedly, since it was clear that these ghosts of former wives did not appeal to her.

  I can’t say this surprised me. My second wife had not at all wanted to move into the house, either. She would rather have started fresh. But I had so much work and love invested in the farm itself that I couldn’t bear to leave. One whole hillside was covered with trees that I had planted as seedlings; the hay barn had taken several hundred hours to repair and repaint; the new stone walls were ones I had built myself.

  In the end, my second wife and I had made a deal: Give her a free hand with renovations, and she would agree to live in the house. The renovations were so extensive that we didn’t move in until a year after our marriage, which is why I could answer “part of the time.”

  Anne said nothing more about the house that day, except to comment that the living room (as redecorated) reminded her strongly of a candy box. And she may have said something about the scarcity of flowers in the yard, I having neglected the garden during the eight years since my second divorce. I was too busy with walls and cows and hay.

  We finished lunch. “I should go home. You’ve probably got things to do,” Anne said.

  But was there a trace of reluctance? I thought there was. “Not quite yet,” I pleaded. “There’s a birch wood I want to show you. It’s just up the road.”

  “I’ve got all afternoon,” she said simply.

  When we reached the wood and she found there were many mushrooms growing along one edge, we took all afternoon – and then I persuaded her to stay for a church supper a few miles away in Lyme, New Hampshire.

  “Now it’s your turn,” she said, as she finally got into her car. “Come see my horse and my hill.”

  I would have gone the next day, if I hadn’t been afraid of scaring her. So I went the day after.

  But she was no more afraid than I. We got engaged with astonishing rapidity, and by early fall we were discussing where we would live. Meanwhile, I had of course been up to her farm many times, and it was clear to me that I didn’t want to live there. Quite apart from loving my brick house, I had as many as three or four objections to her place. If I lived there, I’d have a sixty-mile commute to work. Her little farm, only eleven acres, was all on a north slope, and the soil was miserable. The actual house was the modern kind, all wood and windows, with almost no partitions on the ground floor. I like doors.

  I did agree that her house, having all those huge windows, was much lighter than mine. I also liked its informality. But I minded that the sun vanished so early behind her hill – in the winter, about 1:30 P.M. Finally, her little bit of woods was an unholy mess of tenth-growth pines, nearly all crooked. My woods were big and beautiful.

  And Anne had plenty of problems with my place, besides the ghosts of former wives, the too-small windows, etc. Her house was the first place she’d picked and owned independently, and she loved the sense of freedom it gave her. She didn’t like the considerable and steadily growing traffic on my road – a paved road at that, no fun for riding horseback. Her own house was on a dirt road so remote and hard to find that she didn’t even bother giving me directions the first time I came up, but just met me in St. Johnsbury and guided me out. If I would be quadrupling my commute by moving to what we were now calling North Farm, she would be increasing hers just as much by moving to my place, alias South Farm. She’d be increasing the distance from her sister, too, who lived just a couple of miles from North Farm.

  And greater and more unanswerable than any of these, her children were not all grown. The youngest was only eleven. Marek had taken our engagement hard. He had no wish to live in my house, or even to visit it.

  Neither of us was prepared to give a flat no. If necessary, we would have set up housekeeping in a rain barrel in order to be together. During the fall, and before we got married at Christmas, we each set about making changes at the other’s house, just in case. I replaced a particularly hideous wire fence at her place with a small neat stone wall, mostly bringing the stones up from South Farm, where there are more flat ones. She picked and I bought a second horse to keep at her house, so we could ride together. Anne de-candy-boxed my living room. (She was right; it had looked like one.) She began educating me about flowers. As she wrote a cousin who had sent her a huge bouquet for her forty-eighth birthday that October, “Ned was here for the weekend, and I got in a lot of comments about how wonderful your flowers were, and how much I loved flowers, and how seldom I get flowers, and other guilt-making, inspiring things.”

  But along about November we got our good idea – or, rather, the first of our two good ideas. Why should either of us have to move? It was forty-six miles, door to door. We would simply live alternately at North Farm and South Farm. We were the more willing because each of us had two failed marriages, and maybe the inevitable days and nights apart in this third marriage, to be lived in two houses, would help us stay forever in the glorious romantic haze
we now occupied.

  Certainly the fall went well. Our being sometimes apart lent itself to such incidents as the night in November when I couldn’t go up and she couldn’t come down, so naturally I phoned her that evening.

  “You interrupted me,” she said reproachfully. “I was writing you a letter.”

  So we got married – in her house – and for three years we lived a two-house marriage. Then Anne got the second good idea. By now we had both changed our minds about part-time marriage. We weren’t yet at the point we reached later when we realized we would gladly spend eight days a week together, if it were possible to do this in a seven-day week. But the romantic haze was clearing, and what it revealed was a sort of spiritual mountaintop on which we stood and from which we could see a view of marriage more splendid than either of us had ever supposed to be possible.

  Anne’s new good idea was this: What we needed was three houses. The third one would be in the middle, between our places, and we would build it ourselves. At least initially it would be very small: one room, 16 feet by 18, with a sleeping loft. Later we’d add two small writing rooms, one coming out as a wing at each end. As befits the house of a woman so gifted at disappearing, it would be on no maps, have no phone, be inaccessible to people who are fascinated by writers or by Lindberghs. We could go there lots.

  Marek was now away at school (and also friends with me). Any nights I couldn’t get to North Farm or she to South Farm, we would meet at what we inevitably started calling Middle Farm.

  I think Anne had one more reason to want a Middle Farm – but she was too smart to tell me this last reason, and I was too smart to tell her I guessed it. By now she knew that it would be almost impossible for me to decide by a sheer act of will to sell South Farm, which I had owned for twenty-eight years. (And almost as hard for her to give up North Farm.)

  But if we together bought a piece of land and together built a house, my loyalties would gradually shift without my even noticing, and one day I would realize I could let the brick house go and not even care.

  It worked. In 1991 we together bought a piece of land compared to which her eleven acres near St. Johnsbury and my ninety acres near White River Junction are practically urban. It is on no town road. Zero cars a day go by. Long ago it was the farm of a Scottish settler, and then of his descendants, and there are still rows of maples planted two hundred years ago. Ghosts live in the barn, but they are old and Scottish and have nothing to do with anyone either Anne or I was ever married to. The land slopes southward, and there’s a view of three mountain ranges, a view far better than either of us had at North Farm or South. There are old pastures that had almost gone back to woods, and which together we have reclaimed. That was when Anne learned to drive a tractor. That was the year before Anne got sick.

  The one thing we didn’t do was build the little house ourselves. Neither of us was a good enough carpenter. We did all the easy parts – say, half the total – and we hired a friend who’s a master craftsman to do the hard parts. By the early fall of 1993, we could and did spend nights there.

  But this story ends in tragedy. In the spring, Anne had been diagnosed with cancer, the worst kind. Malignant melanoma. What courage and spirit could do, she did. She was still driving nails and finishing a book in September. Between bouts of chemotherapy, that is. But in December she pulled her final disappearing act. Fighting every inch of the way, she died. She was fifty-three. For me all three houses are haunted now. She is a very beautiful ghost.

  [1995]

  The Guardian Angels of Tucker Hill Road

  TUCKER HILL ROAD in Thetford is one of the Upper Valley’s less impressive roads. It’s only 2.3 miles long. It doesn’t have – or doesn’t need – a center line, or any paintwork at all. It averages a little under one streetlight per mile.

  And where does this little road go? Well, if you start at the Thetford Center end and drive west to the T-intersection where it meets Vermont 132, you arrive at a place that doesn’t even exist. It did. Long ago there was a Mr. Rice, and he had a mill. But Rice’s Mills is only a name now.

  On the other hand, for about two hundred years this dinky road has offered a series of wonderful views, most of them created by human endeavor, with some assistance from cows and sheep.

  Turn around and start back to Thetford Center. On the right-hand side it’s all trees for the first mile. Corps of Engineers trees, and not likely to be cut down any time soon. On the left, however, comes one stunning house after another, with wide spaces between them.

  First comes one you hardly notice, but you’d love it if you did. It’s what passes on Tucker Hill Road as a new house. Rob Hunter, an architect who lives about three miles away, designed it in 1968. Jimmy Banker (born and bred in Thetford) and his crew built in ’69. Rob set it at the top end of a little orchard, three hundred feet back from the road, which is why you’re more likely to notice apple trees than you are the house. But if you did take a look, I think you’d be enchanted by the way the roofline, with its faintest suggestion of a classic Japanese country house, tucks the house into the landscape.

  The next house you can’t miss. It’s one of the four brick houses that adorn the left-hand side of the road, and it was there well before Mr. Rice. I don’t know its exact date, but I’m guessing around 1810. It’s in the style called Federal.

  The bricks of House 2 are as local as the builder of House 1, though a good deal older. They came from Hezekiah Porter’s brickyard, about two miles away. There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Mr. Porter, who also ran a tavern and farmed, made bricks only in his spare time, and so took a couple of years to turn out enough for a new house. What’s certain is that all five of the brick houses on Tucker Hill Road (there’s one on the right, later) are made of the kind of rosy bricks that modern brickyards seem to have forgotten how to make.

  I do know the date of House 3, half a mile down the road. Orange Hubbard built it in 1798. Starting about here, the right-hand side of the road shifts from government trees to privately owned fields.

  Another mile and five houses farther on, we come to the third brick house. I don’t know its date, either, which is absurd, because I have been living in it since 1963. I’ll guess 1805. It’s the worst maintained of the five, but still handsome enough so that every year or two someone barges in with a checkbook and tries to buy it. I once considered putting up a sign that would say Not For Sale. But then common sense prevailed. Certain types of buyers would take a sign like that as an interesting challenge.

  From here on, there are houses on both sides, though not very many. All but two are old. Keep going. Quite soon, you come to the covered bridge. It’s only fairly old and only fairly handsome, though the two great timber arches are worth stopping to look at. But it matters for another reason.

  That bridge is one of the four guardian angels that protect Tucker Hill Road. The bridge does its share by providing only eleven-foot clearance. Plenty for a loaded hay wagon, but impassable for the larger kinds of trucks. While it exists we are not going to have the kind of clogged-artery Route 4 Disease that poor Woodstock suffers from.

  Now you are very near the end of Tucker Hill Road. The fourth brick house, a small, elegant cape, is on your right, and so is a pasture containing three horses and a foal. He’s an altogether endearing black foal, who looks like a cross between a seahorse and a chess knight. Not far past this baby and the three grown horses, on the left, is the fifth brick house. It’s the biggest and the handsomest of them all. It sits on a little knoll and gazes placidly out on its own hay fields. If I have the facts straight, Hezekiah Porter made a start on this house in 1806, but didn’t finish it until 1815. It took a lot of bricks.

  There’s just one more parcel of land on the road. This parcel happens to have been blessed by the second guardian angel. “Parcel” is a dull word. It’s actually an unfenced three-acre field occupying the south corner where Tucker Hill Road runs into the main street of Thetford Center. It’s fairly level for a Vermont field, a
nd could easily accommodate a Burger King with attendant parking. Could but won’t. It won’t because a year before he died in 1997, at age ninety-eight, Charles Hughes of Thetford Center gave that field to the town. He put two conditions on it. One, no buildings, ever. Two, “any hay on the Property shall be cut.” Guardian Angel Hughes had in mind a village green, not a thicket.

  As I see it, Mr. Hughes has nailed down one end of Tucker Hill Road, and done so with the willing and nonbureaucratic assistance of local government. “The Thetford selectboard is delighted with your generous offer,” the board wrote him on November 3, 1997, and it instantly accepted.

  So tough luck, Burger King. You’ll have to find another spot. You can’t build here. And it’s no use your zipping down to the other end of Tucker Hill Road, though there’s a nice level corner there, too. That end is also nailed down. Barbara Sorenson teaches at Thetford Academy and lives in the house with the pretty roofline. She owns the corner where Tucker Hill Road connects into Route 132; she owns a few battered foundation stones from Mr. Rice’s mill. But she couldn’t break up her land and sell a couple of acres to Wendy’s even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t. The third guardian angel would intervene. This one is the Upper Valley Land Trust, which protects her land and about two hundred other parcels in Vermont and New Hampshire.

  Barbara could sell the land; she could even sell it to Wendy’s (though our zoning administrator might have something to say about that). It’s just that Wendy couldn’t put up any structure except with a clear agricultural purpose, make any subdivision, etc., etc. What Wendy’s could do would be to graze three or four Angus steers and pick apples.

  So both ends of Tucker Hill Road are nailed down. But what about the rest? What protects that? Well, that third angel has just opened her wings over one of the brick houses – the one that Orange Hubbard built in 1798 and that Matt and Martha Wiencke lived in for thirty-seven years, until Matt died last year. Together Matt and Martha planned the protection of their house and their hundred acres that run on both sides of the road. They reserved the right to split off one two-acre building site, in case one of their children should want to build someday.