by Jeffrey Lent
Some afternoons the sledge was loaded and he knew by the lightfall he was early. As February spread evenly before and after, the cold held but the sun climbed and on this south slope he could pause, warm with work and the false cheer of the sun on his face and sit up on the timbers of the sawpit, his long legs dangling, his trouser cuffs filled with sawdust riding up to the top of his laced boots and there with the danger not so much gone as back up in the woods waiting for the next day his thought would idle and drift. Beyond what was at hand. Sometimes to the house below and sometimes beyond that. Oft to the hope of the child and as many times to his own shortcomings as a man. He felt as if his father was nearby. Just beyond sight in the rump of spruce running uphill one side of the sawpit.
“Father was proud of you, Norman.” His mother’s final words to him before she clamped a hand on the shoulder of the boy driving the rented democrat wagon and told him, “You’re not paid to sit here daydreaming.” The wagon then went clattering smoothly from the dooryard down the track, the back loaded with the chests and sets of drawers and cartons of clothing and personal items of Cora Pelham and daughter Constance, his mother refusing from pride or bitterness or both to allow Norman the same job done for free. As if in her desire to not upset his new life she found the one final way to make clear how badly she wanted to do so. Connie turning to wave at Norman, the boy driving wedged between the two women. Norman raised his hand to his sister and stood the brief moment until the wagon crested the rise of land and dropped from sight. And stood there still with his mother’s benediction or condemnation or both still fresh and seared into him for all time. As if that was what she wanted. One final spring of doubt passed on with final authority from beyond the grave. Who better to know than she. Who better to choose the careful clipped neutral tone that left room for all meaning to fly in and settle on the sear, like crows onto a sown field. So he stood there until he heard Leah come from the house and then he started up and went away from her to the barns, wanting still to be alone. Without blame for her remaining inside while his mother departed but not willing yet to grant that lack by waiting for what words she might add. Went and milked the cows and swore that by the week out they’d be gone save the one fresh heifer for their own use. October home from the war.
Now legs dangling above the sawpit, already in the shade of the spruce the winter evening spreading like inkstain but him with the sun on his face. The team, not restless, slipped weight foot to foot. The sledge full. Chimney smoke rising from the house below in a thin vapor. A cloudless sky. Paused for his father’s voice to come down from the spruce. It never did.
What child remained in him walked side by side with his father. Where affection came from the man in even reprimand tonicked with dried humor. A man with two daughters already, too pleased with a son finally to expect perfection, and so was to know the boy. His eye sharp as a raptor upon Norman’s back always gentled when the boy turned in confusion with the bent nail, the flung tool, the short-sawn board. Never once he could recall praise; something made right was made right. Otherwise, the job remained. At ten he first rode the sledge to the village pond one January to join in cutting ice. They pulled up short and surveyed the men already out, sawing and using great tongs to lift the blocks, the dripping pond water freezing as it fell. After watching a short time his father stepped down, wrapped the lines on the left upright front pole of the sledge and took out the saw and their own tongs and looked up at the boy. “Question is, which of us takes the bottom end of the saw. Flip a coin?”
He believed his father would’ve liked Leah. He liked to think so. As if his father, freed from life, would also be freed to see all of her that Norman saw. Not only the beauty and courage that to him were evident as drawing breath but also the lesser fragments that made the whole: the temper and guileless smile; the pluck beyond even thinking; the decision then, the end product of that same pluck, given over to intense focused scrutiny as if she more than most knew clearly how one step leads inevitably to the next and not some other. Her gentle humor, less prod than tease, and the sudden way her face would bloom as if her skin gave off light when Norman would fumble or misstep. The containment of herself, so ferocious as if her skin were a moist sacking over whirling conflict and contradiction. Just the sight of her walking barefoot in a meadow amongst throngs of buttercups and daisies, black-eyed Susans. Or her face lifted and half buried in a spray of lilac. Or by evening lamplight leaning over the round reading table in the parlor, her elbows holding down the spread pages of the Randolph newspaper as she read the week’s news. Or now filling with his grandchild. Whom Norman intended to name James after him. Norman sat on the timbers of the sawpit and thought his father might know all these things. Might not only approve but applaud. Thinking this because he thought the dead may know all things and not just what each action might mean to them: freed of that concern. For in truth he wondered if his father had been living would he have brought the girl home with him or taken her to some other place, an idea unknowable to the boy who had held the farm against his thin chest over his heart throughout the battles and long deadly pauses of march and tent and march again between the battles like other men carried lockets with the likeness of a wife or sweetheart next to theirs. Even wondered if he might have left her there in Washington and rode the rods home with the others, content with some good deed done, carrying with him always that passion and fear of the what-might-have-been. Because it was all very simple. The farm became his when he married, the parents to make partnership with the son and new wife. At such a time as he was able and all parties willing he might purchase it for market value. The sole clause being in the event of his father’s death Norman must provide either home for his mother or a third share of the market value. As most are the will written with the intent of living decades past the dating and signing. Never dreaming of the mare’s hoof anymore than of a star fragment piercing the night sky and his own head. And so made way for the boy to bring the girl home. And gave to Norman the bitter hidden secret of some relief in his father’s death. As if he was freed by the death. As if his father gave him not only all of his own life but all of Norman’s as well; do as you please. His father became sealed always to what had been and only informed the present by the convenience of recollection. Not only is to recall or not the choice of the living but also how and what to recall. The father became more echo to his own desire than a man full-blown. As a knife lost in the garden over winter loses its edge and the handle rots with the spring. How well it used to cut. As with his mother’s words: Father was proud of you.
Norman let himself down by his hands on the timbers until his boots struck the sawdust in the blueing dusk. He went to the team and lifted their feet, cupping one mitten under each thick hoofwall to hold it against his knee as he scraped out the packed snow and ice with his pocketknife. The horse breath now hot steam in the cold. Stepped the team to the sledge and lifted the pole and hooked the neckyoke to the collars and then down the pole to attach the tugs by trace chains to the doubletree and evener. Then took up the lines and walked to the back of the sledge and stepped up behind the load. The saws and axe already wedged in on top. He gathered the lines in one big double loop in his right hand and held each line taut and looked down the backs of his horses. The evening star was up over the eastern ridgeline. The horse’s nosebags dangled from their outside hames. He was cold now and felt the day’s work in him. The woods were dark behind him and he felt a vicious thing not of the place, an intruder in his own life. Some rot. Some weakness that allowed the woman down the hill to be his reason for all things done and not done. As if he lacked something essential other men had or might have. He did not know. There was no reason to think his father would be proud of him, living or dead. He spoke to the team. “Get up now, boys.”
The last Sunday in February the weather still had not broken and Leah was growing large, settling into and rising from chairs and the bed with effort and strained groans. Connie came back up the hill after church with
Pete trotting hard between the shafts. She had not gone to dinner with her mother at Mrs. Breedlove’s but come straight on. Once in the house she filled the copper boiler and lifted it onto the range and opened the flues. Rushed up the stairs and back down with clean undergarments and a dress over one arm. From his seat in the parlor Norman saw it was the dress she’d traveled home in. He hadn’t seen it since. He glanced to Leah sitting with the family Bible open on her lap, wedged up against her belly and held from beneath by both hands. She would spend an hour over a page. Time to time a noise would issue from her mouth, a sipping sound as if taking something in or a more clear louder chirp of doubt. She met his raised eye and cocked head and only shook her head, a gesture emphatic enough to shame his questions. Connie closed the door to the kitchen and was in there some minutes before she came into the parlor to stand hands on hips and announce, “They make a reservoir now clamps to the side of a range by the firebox and allows for hot water all the time. None of this having to wait. Seems a small luxury in a house with a baby coming.” Then turned and went back into the kitchen, the door sucked to by her passage.
Norman spoke. “Now, what was that.”
Leah raised eyes hooded down like a turtle. “Seems to me she has a point. Those things are cheap. Simple too. Something a man handy could take on I spect. Hot water takes forever. You’d be surprised the difference. That lye soap raises up a nice sud.”
“I recall bathing in hot water one or two times. You want something for the house then speak up. I’ll not deny you, it’s not too dear. But what has her to a boil?”
Leah ran her hand over the open page, her hand flat as if smoothing the thin paper. Then said, “You’re thick in the head, Norman. The woman wants to wash herself and dress up. Likely not for you or me, either.”
Norman was quiet a moment. Then said, “What’re you reading in?”
“Job.”
“Now that was a rare bugger.”
“Nothing more than the rest of us.”
“I can’t see that.”
“I always took it to be the point.”
“That right there is the definition of faith.”
She leveled her eyes now on him. “No. It’s not. I don’t know what is.”
“That’s fair. Tell you what. You find out, let me know.”
She looked long on him. Through the kitchen door they heard the splash of water and small sighs of pleasure. Even with the door closed they could smell the scent of soap and rosewater on the steam runneling through the house. Leah said, “I don’t spect it in this life anymore than you. You know that.”
Connie came into the room, her face flushed with scrubbing, dressed fine and already wrapped for the outside. “We’re going to skate on the river,” she said, “I just hope my christly ankles hold up. Skating, they always fall out on me. Always landing on my bum. It’s not the fall I mind, it’s the being helped up.”
It was the eldest Clifford boy came to claim her. Came in fast with a swept-back sleigh drawn by a fancy pair of black light trotting horses, each with a fine white blaze. Norman was amused and did his best to not be, feeling the smile tic the corners of his mouth. The boy—now young man—whose father owned the livery with teams and single horses to let, along with conveyances. Also a cartage business. The same boy then who five years before drove Norman’s mother and sister away from the farm. Now come calling. Or rather to take the girl skating. Norman wondering how many years his sister had fired in Glen’s mind. How many long Sundays over the fall and winter it had taken him to reach this point. Glen took his hand firm and called Norman sir which pleased him and then went on to lament his being too young to do his part with the late war which Norman was gracious enough to only nod away. Glen promising Connie home not too much after dark, adding the dangerous explanation of a bonfire. Snuggle up to it was what Norman was thinking but only said, “You watch out that team. There’s ice where the road’s packed.” And turned to grin at his sister, not caring if the boy saw this. And Connie then came forward and leaned up tiptoe and kissed his cheek. Glen taking his hand again and then nodding with a great and real gravity to Leah and speaking to her for the first time in taking leave. “Ma’am.” The word ripened like sun-gorged berries with respect.
The two gone, Norman took his chair again. Leah watching him. Norman said, “That just made me feel like old folks.”
Leah smiled, a hand over her belly and said, “Just wait, you.”
The second week of March brought a sudden deep thaw that Norman declared to be brief and was: three days and nights above freezing with the days arching into the mid-forties. Then six inches of wet snow and the wind shifted and all froze hard again. Still that thaw was enough for Norman to carry the stacked sap buckets from the hayloft to the basement where beside the old milk cooling well he filled them in regimental rows, letting them sit with water overnight to swell the staves tight within the hoops. From the sledge he scraped out the layer of ice mixed with bark and sawdust and rolled the gathering tank into place. Set in the gathering yokes and buckets and took the team and sledge once again up the hill past the skidway to the small sugar house, just a roof on poles over a chimney and bricked hearth with a firepit underneath and the heavy boiling kettle set into the bricks. There unhitched the team and roped together the buckets in bundles and hung them over Tommy’s back and let the horse follow him as Norman broke trail on snowshoes through the sugarbush, stopping at each of the rock maples to bore holes and hammer in spouts and hang buckets. Back down at the sugarhouse he shoveled out the drifted snow and pulled canvas tarping from the year-old woodpiles extending off the north side. He filled the boiling kettle halfway with snow and made a fire underneath and waited for the snow to melt and then scrubbed the inside of the kettle with a stout limb with a gobbed head of burlap sacking on the end. The sugarhouse was raw and bleak, more so with the winter snow cast out and the floor bare earth but he could see it already as it would be in a week’s time or two: steam flaring off the kettle, the firebox running day and night with smoke hanging in the limpid air, the sweet scent of the woods rising as each boil-down ended and the kettle was tipped to pour off the syrup into the filters. Connie even now down to the house washing the squares of red flannel and spreading them on racks to dry tight-sided in the kitchen. Then he went down the hill, stopping at the sawpit to load the tools from there. He spent one afternoon in the barn wiping them down with grease and hanging them for the summer. Weather aside, he was done lumbering for the year.
A week later, a gray day, the cold still like toothache but a wind out of the west-northwest and Norman over breakfast stated winter was over. Then with nothing else to do went to the barns to gather eggs and fill the stoves and check the brooder house. Even with the cold lingering the hens were laying with the longer days and steady heat. Near twenty gone broody over fleets of eggs in the boxes in the brooder. No chicks yet. Looked in after his ewes and lambs. Easter dinner for those in Boston who waited for their Son to rise before going home to eat lamb with mint jelly. As if eating spring and resurrection its very self. All this though, for Norman, little more than escaping the house and his own idle hands. He tasted the cold drab air, sniffing deep for the change he was sure was held far down in that wind somewhere. Out over the Great Lakes, Canada, somewhere. Coming.
The women in the kitchen, Connie floured and up to her arms in kneading bread dough, the oven already thumping and crackling with heat waiting the loaves. Leah sat at the table, cutting dried apple rings to quarters and dropping them into a bowl of sugar water for the filling of the pie that would follow the loaves into the oven. She watched Connie’s back and arms, already knowing the bread would be dense and stiff from the hearty pumping and soft thumping sound as she turned the knead over. Finally cleared her throat and watched the back stiffen and the arms pause and then continue, slowed, as she waited and Leah spoke with direct emphasis.
“So?”
Connie darted her face back so her chin grazed her shoulder, looked at Lea
h and turned back to her work. Her voice muffled as if buried in the dough said, “So, what?”
“You’ve been a busy girl.”
“Umm.”
“Having a good time?”
“I am.” Emphatic, snapping her words closed like a box.
“I’m poking my nose.”
“Oh no.” Connie turned and swept back loose curls, leaving flour trails against her forehead. “I didn’t mean that. You are, I don’t mind. I’m having fun. Been back to Randolph six months now and I’m having a good time. I think I’ll keep right on doing that.”
“Sounds good to me. That Glen, he a nice boy or just a convenience?”
“He’s nice enough. Maybe a little young.”
“What, two maybe three years?”
“Two. Two and a half. But you feel the difference.”
“Well, Norman and me, we’re four years apart.”
“It’s different with the woman older.”
“I guess. Does he, does Glen act that way?”
“Not one whit. Always has the right idea.”
“And him younger than you.”
“Exactly.”
“And you been to Manchester and all. Experienced.”
Connie shook her head. “I’ve no interest in a reputation.”
Leah cut the string from another loop of apples and sliced. Watching her work, said, “No reason to think that’d happen.”