Stitch in Time

by John Gould

  There is an elusiveness to folklore—the manners, customs, and legends of a people. It is not something that can be clapped in a can and salted down. It should never get electronic scrutiny, or be “stored.” Folklore floats along calmly and gently with the tide, pleasantly keeping its own place until some busybody picks it up rudely to look at it. Psychology teaches that when you analyze an emotion you lose the emotion, and when a Dr. Dorson “studies” folklore it fades, dissolves, and there he stands with his Ph.D. askew. The Midwest university professors who flock to Maine every summer on government grants to collect our folklore do not know this very well, and easily become the victims of our jolly old folklore characters who have been practicing their eyah’s all winter. They don’t realize that when you break out a tape recorder and ask a Mainer to talk Down East, he ceases to be himself and becomes a Clark Gable. “Eyah,” he says, “Finest kind!” And he playacts with the contrived material meant to entertain folks “from away.” Each Labor Day these professors go home with another ninety-and-nine versions of:

  “Where does this road go?”

  “No place—stays right where we built it.”

  Or:

  “Lived here all your life?”

  “Not yet.”

  I assure everybody with no academic nuances whatever that it is possible to live in Maine without hearing anything like that in the usual flow of normal living, Mainer to Mainer. But you let a professor show up with a clipboard, and he’ll get all the variations from the first ten Mainers he “researches.” This explains how the folklore evidence mounts with every sabbatical that Maine folklore runs 185 percent to saucy rejoinders to tourists—which pleases the tourists. “Think it’ll rain?” “Always has.” (Or, “Be a long dry spell if it don’t.”)

  These professors never take into account that all Maine folklore has two sides. It depends on who tells it. An example: Years ago Wash Libby was haulin’ traps out by Halfway Rock, maybe fifteen miles at sea, and he sees a stinkpot summer-mahogany job coming, clip-topping the swells, and Wash is some horn swoggled when the bo’t fetches up, swings alongside, and speaks him Wash assumes (which turns out to be correct) that he’s caught some Marblehead jokers kiting down to Baw Hawbor for the weekend. “My good man,” says a cockytoo in a yacht bonnet, “might we purchase some lobsters?”

  All right. There’s the situation, and there’s going to be a big splash of Down East folklore.

  Wash had found them crawlin’ that morning and he was guessing at three kentals for the gang, maybe more, so if this fancy wants lobsters, Wash has ’em. With folklore.

  “Boy lobsters or girl lobsters?” says Wash.

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “That depends,” says Wash.

  “Depends on what?”

  “Depends on what you’re going to do with them.”

  “How so?”

  “Boilin’, boys; but for a stew, no.”

  “We plan to have them boiled.”

  “Boys it is, then,” says Wash, and, “how many?”

  Do you see? This folklore is going to depend, in its turn, on whether you hear about it from Wash or from the stinkpot people.

  Wash told me that when it came to paying, he didn’t have any scales aboard, so he guessed at the weight. But price didn’t matter, and the man just said, “How much?”

  “Well,” said Wash, “they’s one-fifteen a pound in at the Cove, but away out here like this I’d have to get one-thirty.”

  When Wash was telling me about this, he said, “Well, what was I to do? They was expecting me to make like Maine, so I felt obliged to make like Maine and give ’em so’thin’ to quote and laugh about, and that’s easy worth fifteen cents a pound Maybe if I’d-a took more time, I could-a got ’em up to a dollar and a half.”

  Dr. Dorson, could be, might like to wait around and see what a computer memory bank will do with a thing like that, but I’ll move along to something else.

  Two Housekeepers

  A gentleman in his eighties who is distant kin to me and a widower of several years writes that his housekeeper is retiring and he hopes to find her replacement. He says his hopes are not high—he would like to find an agreeable woman in her fifties who drives a car (if she hasn’t one, he will provide one), bakes bread, won’t raid his raspberries, will go easy on the lobster, and can play a slide trombone (secondo) by ear. The reason he tells me all this is not with any hope that I can find him such a housekeeper; instead, he wanted me to know that in this enlightened day and age the newspaper wouldn’t print his advertisement.

  The girl behind the classified counter made him cross out everything that might be discriminatory (age, color, sex, tempo) so that when the notice appeared he got an application (amongst others) from a man thirty-one years old who said he’d like to try housekeeping and see if he liked it. My kin was shaken by this when the man telephoned, and said he would have to think things over. My kin was not impressed by a male with that ambition, even if presumptive, and like most Mainers will continue to think of housekeeping in the feminine.

  This set me to thinking that I’ve known two housekeepers—not counting my bride who bakes bread but can’t blow a trombone. I just barely remember the first, who was Lizzy Jordan. She was a vast woman who was otherwise prominent because of a cleft palate and a hare lip—difficulties now covered by “speech impediment.” Only those who had known Lizzy a long time could understand a word she said, and my grandfather, who employed her, had not known her quite long enough so much of the household routine was snagged in faulty communication. After Grandfather was gone and our old farmhouse had burned, Lizzy married, but she was single in my memory and the only instrument she played was the Edison phonograph.

  As a boy, coddled and mothered by Lizzy whenever I visited Gramps, I was not so much awed by her as curious. I never really got accustomed to her, and this was too bad because she took good care of Gramps in his need. She was a good woman. Her cream-tartar biscuits were so light they needed a plate over them to hold them on the table, and she knew how to build a custard pie up to four inches, sill to ridgepole. Lizzy, had I understood what she was saying in those times, was uncouth, a fault of fetchin’ up, and it was well my tender ears didn’t appreciate her when she would bawl at Gramps to take off his muddy barnyard boots before he set foot into her kitchen. The Billingsgate fishwives would have conceded. So let’s just say I had plenty of reason to remember Lizzy Jordan.

  Aunt Hapsy was nothing at all like Lizzy Jordan. Aunt Hapsy, my mother’s sister, is the second housekeeper who came to my notice. She, too, was unmarried and played no instrument. But when I heard that Aunt Hapsy was a housekeeper, Lizzy came to mind, and I was in for a big surprise. She was not to be hefty, she spoke quietly, and her diction was perfect. My mother, holding my small hand, made a call on Aunt Hapsy one afternoon, and we applied at the rear entrance of a considerable mansion in Boston’s suburban Brookline. A young lady in apron and cap led us up some stairs and into an office room with a huge bay window. Aunt Hapsy, trim, was behind a big desk dictating to a secretary. She waved the secretary away to rise and greet us in family fashion and she hugged me as a loving aunt should. I remember my ear pressed something cool on her bosom, and when she released me I saw the beautiful gold watch pinned to her shirt with a fleur-de-lis. I saw her lace collar, too. Aunt Hapsy was as far away from Lizzy Jordan as could be. Aunt Hapsy was an executive housekeeper, managing a ménage with fourteen servants and a full program of social events. The ownership of S. S. Pierce considered Aunt Hapsy a very important customer.

  Aunt Hapsy retired to her native Canada and lived briefly into her second century, still unmarried. On her hundredth birthday she received the traditional congratulatory cablegram from The Queen. Aunt Hapsy, loyalist all the way, was delighted thereby, and this has amused me because to me Aunt Hapsy was always much more regal than Her Majesty. I guess maybe Lizzy Jordan was, too.

  She Starts,—She Moves,—She Seems to Feel the Thrill of Life Along
Her Keel . . .

  Everybody should go to a launch and thrill, too, as a new hull gently, imperceptibly at first, starts down the ways, gaining until, as Poet Longfellow precisely says, she “leaps into the ocean’s arms.” If they don’t have launches today wherever you are, it’s well worth the trip to Maine, where now and then we do. Longfellow knew what he was writing about, as witness his rhyme of “stanch” with “launch.” If you come to Maine for a launch, you must learn to say lanch—it’s the Maine way and Maine was ever the place for lanches. The first craft lofted and lanched in the New World was the pinnace Virginia, 1607 at Popham. At that time the name Virginia was really a localism, and what we now call New England was then North Virginia. Popham is just across the bay from Friendship, and this whole area has been splashing boats into the tide ever since. The other day we all went to see the latest, the Leeman, slide out of the ramshackle Lash Boat Shop into Hatchet Cove. She’s not the prettiest thing the Lashes ever built, but beauty is not essential to work boats. The Leeman is a sturdy and stanch dragger, meant for the deep sea fisheries. Now that she’s overboard, she’ll be fitted with heavy masts and great winches (that’s wenches, you know) to handle the gear for the Deep Ground. She’s a fisherman.

  The Lashes have lanched a great many work boats over the years, a good many of them being the sloop. Back in 1622 when the Pilgrims came from Plymouth to look Maine over, fancying themselves quite alone in a New World, Governor Winslow put in his journal that he was astonished at the great number of sloops flitting about the islands of “the main.” That same summer 132 English vessels took on fish caught mostly by those sloops, and until the perfection of the gasoline marine engine the sloop was the Mainer’s work boat. Loveliest in style was the Friendship sloop, developed here on Muscongus Bay for local purposes. Gaff rigged, the Friendship could be handled by one man, the fish hold was ample, and her lines were equal to the rugged seas she would meet. The basic sloop developed later into the Down East schooners—the Marblehead, the chebacco, the dogbody, the pinkie, the filebottom, and also whalers like the Tancook. The Lash Boat Shop built many Friendship sloops, every one of wood, but the more recent ones have been for recreational sailors. They’ll make you one.

  Winnie and Son Wesley operate the shop now. Some say their sloops respond to spoken orders, like a well-trained horse or dog, and they “sail themselves.” Saying their boat shop is “ramshackle” is not a slur—master boat craftsmen need not be house carpenters, and so long as the shop shelters the hull there is no need for style. Summer artists pass up the Lash Boat Shop as too improbable to paint. This new Leeman has a high house, so the boat shop roof was adjusted and a plastic bubble raised. Now that the Leeman is lanched, the bubble may or may not be removed. We can only wait and see. “Been that way ever since I can remember,” an elderly lobsterman told me, “but you don’t come to a lanch to look at the boat shop.”

  When the Leeman was freed, she daintily, for all her heft, rode down the ways to be cheered in the usual way. When snubbed, she stood high astern, because her ballast and her derricks had not been added. How does a craftsman with a lead pencil and a board to write on lay down a boat so she’ll ride true when, after launching and after finishing, she is ready for sea? I must ask Win Lash some day, not that I need to know, but that I expect his answer will be worth hearing.

  The lanch of the Leeman was a very small event compared to lanches in the bygone days of sail. When the John A. Briggs was lanched at Freeport, in September of 1878, seven thousand people attended, including Governor Alonzo Garcelon and presidential candidate James A. Garfield. Most came by their own means, but the Maine Central Railroad ran special excursion trains, and the island steamers brought folks by water. The launching banquet, a festive luncheon that included beverages as stanch as the John A. Briggs, gave Candidate Garfield a chance to politick, but ’twas said the folks were not in a mood for that, and he cut himself short. The lanch of the John A. Briggs was about average for those days.

  But the lanch of the Leeman had a good crowd, considering. After she was afloat she got the usual visits and inspections, and according to ancient usage Win and his workmen were already laying the keel for another boat. This was good news, because nowadays orders for wooden boats are far apart, and so are lanches. Which is good reason not to miss one if you get a chance. No—Winnie Lash does not spread a traditional lanch banquet for a modern-day boat like the Leeman. But you’ll be glad to know that here in Friendship a lanch is still good for a school holiday. As we started home after the Leeman was tied up, we met the village schoolteachers leading their youngsters down over the banking to the beach. There would be a lanch banquet after all. Each youngster had a picnic basket.

  Gross Lots Only

  He was persistent as an Ontario mosquito, and it took me a good half hour to get rid of him. Perhaps that makes him a good salesman, but he irritated me until curiosity took over and I wondered why he called on me anyway. His “line” was the little giftie the businessman gives to his customers—calendars, thermometers, conversion tables, pens and pencils, pocket diaries. This was my first brush with enticements for the GNP, and while we all know the aggressive merchant gets his thingamajigs somewhere, I never knew that a salesman called and waded right in. He shook my hand so my cap flopped up and down, and indicated he had been waiting for this pleasure for thirty-five years. I was certainly fortunate that now we were in touch and he was at my side to bend every effort. My business, he said, would improve and increase as we dealt together in unity. How many calendars did I think I could use?

  Then I understood. This joker was the latest victim of my several signs, and in all innocence had hoist me on one of them. The last laugh would, as usual, be mine, but I didn’t have it yet and now I would be obliged to say no to all of his proffered business stimulaters, only one of which interested me. That was a ball-point that wrote in five different colors, but not all at once. Everybody has long accepted this man’s wares from hardware stores and insurance agents—yardsticks, pocket calendars—but not everybody has seen the complete line in the man’s sample cases. I succeeded in kicking him out before he got halfway through.

  My home workshop is my temple of dalliance. I putter and I whittle and I scrimshaw, and some days I do nothing. The nearest I ever came to crass commercialization was the time Pouty Pontier came in to have me bore a shearpin hole in his haulin’ shiv. Took but a minute, but it saved Pouty a trip of fifty miles to a machine shop. Pouty said, “How much?” and hauled out his wallet. I laughed, and to pass the matter off and maintain my amateur standing I said, “Bring me a short lobster some day.” Pouty never brought me one. And now this supersalesman of enticers and stimulaters was telling me how to double my income.

  I’ve gone to great trouble over the years to avoid such. Everybody likes to come around and suggest things for me to do, and wants to interrupt my sitting around. I know that I can make five whirligigs about as fast as I can make one, but then I’d have nothing to do for four more times. If I decided to make four more, that is. My philosophy is specialized. The assembly line is not for me. “Tooling up” offends my sensitive niceties. I have been working on a digital steeple clock now for quite some time. I think a digital steeple clock doesn’t need to be finished to engender the chuckles of kindred spirits. The original steeple clock sat on a shelf and the pendulum could be seen wagging through a glass door. A digital clock has no pendulum. So, why a steeple? Good question. I suspect five hundred ball-point pens that write in five colors, but not all at once, are not likely to augment the sales of digital steeple clocks. I do not want to labor in an urgency that forces me to complete my steeple clock while there is yet time. But this salesman heard me not, or wouldn’t, and after five or six no’s I asked him what made him think I wanted any of this junk?

  Every business, large or small, he told me, needs the warmth of pleasant customer relations. A small gift, now and then helps “What business is this?” I asked.

  I have several signs, and I d
idn’t know which had caught his eye. He pointed at the one which says:

  SHIP CHANDLER Since 1708

  It isn’t much fun to have to explain a thing like that. As I tried, he looked at my workbench, my tablesaw, my lathe, my planer, and also at my digital steeple clock. He began packing up his samples, and he said, “Then, just what do you do?”

  Brought to mind the Do-Do store, upstate. The two Michaud brothers carried on an old family store, and became vexed at the outrageous claims of an aggressive competitor across the street who was using newer methods. He’d offer Sunny Monday soap at ten bars for a quarter when he didn’t have a cake of Sunny Monday in the place. He’d tell customers he was sold out, and then they’d come into the Michaud store and want to know why they couldn’t get Sunny Monday ten for a quarter. So the Michaud brothers bought the only newspaper advertisement of their lives, and it came out a full page and it said:

  We Don’t Say We Do Much,

  But What We Say We Do—

  We DO DO!

  Difference with me is that what I say I do, I don’t. This trinket salesman didn’t believe me and wagging his head he walked off. He was looking at another sign:

  Notice to Customers!

  Commencing July 1st

  Bakers Peels in Gross

  Lots Only

  And so maybe I got the last laugh.

  Passive Periphrastic

  There’s a strong loyalty towards Latin by those who have looked into it, but otherwise it goes unendorsed. But I am agreeably surprised that a few faithful linger, and whenever I reveal that I know a genitive from an ablative they like to write and commend me. Not long ago I mentioned my high school toga, as the garb of our Latin Club, and it was amazing to hear from all the old fogeys that ’fessed up to wearing togas. Expecting no such response is hardly complimentary to our public schools, where Latin has been a naughty word for lo. For those who share my thoughts, I have a reward: