USA > New York > Onondaga County > Syracuse > Sixty-odd, a personal history > Part 10
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Finally our tour of rediscovery ended on the stoop, a pre-bed- time haunt. This was a gallery built across the whole western end of the house, where the ground was terraced up from the meadow to be out of reach of spring freshets. The roof of the ell sloped down over it, making a raftered ceiling, and the floor of weathered boards was broad; along the wall ran a narrow wooden bench some fifty feet in length. Here the farm helpers in our father's childhood had eaten their meals in harvest-times when eight yoke of oxen drew the loads of hay and corn from a great acreage. Tables had been spread for thirty or forty, and Father remembered the clatter and the cooking; the old brick oven, from which pies were taken on a long wooden shovel, was still at one end. But in our day the place was used for washing and churning and ice-cream freezing, and at night- fall for watching the sun go down. After a visit to the barn the
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family could be found there, the boys sitting astride the low railing, the older people leaning on it or ranged on the benches. On Thurs- day nights the Hatfield bell sounded across the river for prayer- meeting. After the sun had dropped behind the hills and twilight was descending upon us the frogs began their evening concert, and Father told the story of three mean old deacons, who mixed hay from bog-lands with their better quality, and sold it at too high a . price. He imitated the frogs, who, after the deacons were in bed one night, roused the suspicions of the village by a loud conversa- tion:
"Who sells bog hay? Who sells bog hay?" pipes the first frog.
"Jeremiah Bogue-Jeremiah Bogue," answers the second in a deep and solemn croak.
"Captain Dyer! Captain Dyer!" comes in on a higher key.
"Elderkin too, Elderkin too," squeaks a little fellow, and the old rascals are supposed to shiver in their beds, while the trium- phant frog-chorus keeps on all night with its revelations. We never tired of that recital.
We lingered on the stoop that first happy night, occasionally running into the garden to see if any moths were flying. There were damask roses, spread low, and a yellow rosebush which poured its largess of blossoms across the path. Blue fleur-de-lis stood tall and elegant among the foxgloves; golden June lilies crowded gregariously in a corner where the bees could find them. There was not too much order or clipping of those beds. We could still smell fresh hay and roses, as we dropped asleep in blissful realization that all this summer loveliness was ours to keep for months. We could not have dreamed that after half a century it would all come back to us, preserved during the years of adolescence and maturity, and recalled with a touch of the same enthusiasm.
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There were enough occupations on the farm to keep everyone busy. Even Father, transformed from prelate into farmer, left his parochial or diocesan cares behind him, and threw himself whole- heartedly into the cultivation of the farm.
We began the summer days at five; the boys and men getting up to go for a swim in the Connecticut. Our brothers had the yearly task of putting the boat into shape, painting and calking it and whittling new thole-pins. It was a flat bottomed craft, made ex- pressly for use on the somewhat treacherous Connecticut River. A keel was unsafe because of invisible snags and sand-bars, so we had it shallow and light and too broad to be overturned. The proc- ess of getting it ready for use absorbed the boys for several days, and we hovered about them, occasionally getting a dab of tar or paint on our brown ginghams. Arria, a close comrade of both brothers, could walk or row as many miles as they without fatigue, and shared their outdoor life as well as their literary tastes. I can see her starting for the river in her dark blue flannel boating-dress, a pair of light oars over her shoulder. All three older ones rowed well and taught us, too, to manage a boat.
Our oldest brother George, however, spent many hours in woods and fields, getting botanical specimens or shooting hawks that threatened the chickens. Glorious great birds they were, and in those days natural wings were worn on city hats. He dried and cured them for Arria and the young girls who came to stay with us. He was not only a practised ornithologist, but knew the name and genus of every plant in the county. He had been a pupil and friend of Professor Asa Gray, the well-known botanist at Harvard
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College, and his enthusiasm stimulated us all, so that we were con- stantly on the look-out with him for new varieties of flower and fern. He could find bits of wood of fine grain and color for carving or whittling and was clever with a penknife. His taste was often consulted as to the hanging of a picture or adding to the ornamen- tation of a room. His studies in Italian, Greek and Hebrew were shared by his younger sister and brother and occupied much of his time when indoors. He found chances also to read to us little ones and taught us chess, of which we played many games in the course of our various summers. One particular summer, we had a series of them, two against two, and kept the board on a small table for a week or so, making about one move a day after private conferences over it in the Long Room.
My father enjoyed the companionship of both sons, with a sym- pathy and understanding of their point of view, and the confidence between them was never, so far as I can remember, disturbed by any action or decision of theirs. Whether the three were completely in agreement or not, they discussed with him their educational problems and ambitions, their theories and plans and reading.
There were various tasks for women to perform on summer forenoons, in order that the household and farm should be carried on with that smoothness which can be achieved only through good planning. Men and maids must be provided for. In busy seasons like haying or corn-harvesting our brothers groomed and harnessed horses, and washed the carriages with a mammoth sponge. We little girls helped with the harnessing, buckling straps and joining reins. It was the object of our young lives to get the bit smoothly into a horse's mouth, which was only a knack after all, like feeding him with apples on outstretched palnis.
During our earliest years food was kept cool by lowering it into the well-shaft through a sort of box which stood covered on the kitchen floor. Pails with meat or butter were let down on ropes. But later on my father built an ice-house, and it was then the boys' duty to bring in cakes of ice to the cheese-room, a shady pantry where the milk, in great shallow pans, stood for cream to rise. There was almost always a breeze blowing through the cheese-room be-
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tween the slats of the closed blinds, and by night the sheets of cream would skim off in rolls on the spoon. Butter freshly churned and deposited in wooden bowls was set on the ice to wait till it was ready to make into pats and balls.
Janies was the inventive member of the family, contriving labor-saving devices to help others with their chores. He made playthings for his little sisters also. A primitive wagon of his manu- facture, a box on roller-wheels which we thought remarkably easy- running and speedy, is still used for the babies of the family. He invented a box for the garbage-pails, the cover of which lifted up by means of a pulley-weight, so that it did not have to be held open -the cook blessed him for that. And he gave us the realization of one of our dreams by making a playhouse with two stories in the corn-barn in which we could actually mount a staircase-merely a small ladder, but our imagination was quite equal to that-and look out of the "upstairs" window.
After our noon meal, when the shadows of the huge elms stretched over the farmyard, our mother and sister and their guests rested, while Molly and I repaired to our apple trees with books. During hay-time Father worked steadily at this hour. It was his own particular way of resting. Our brothers often helped, running the hay-rake or turning the morning's mowing into hay-cocks.
There were few books at the farm; we reread old ones every summer. I can still repeat many of the verses learned by heart from an old blue volume, Gleanings from the Poets, which I carried to the apple tree with me on those summer afternoons. In it were Wordsworth's We Are Seven, Pope's Ulysses' Dog, and Shelley's Complaints of the Poor, which impressed me by its relation to my sister Arria's work, and bits from Henry Vaughn, George Herbert, and Chaucer. There was a volume of Milton in which I read L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and dreamed of composing music to both. There were two German fairy tales, The King of the Golden River, and The Goodnatured Bear, which I read long after fairies ceased to populate the elms and the woods around me.
Many times we carried the good news from Ghent to Aix, re- peating Browning's description of the race in rhythmic accord with
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Maggie's leaping motion. Black's Princess of Thule enchanted us with its description of the Hebrides, and Lorna Doone; but it was the Marlitt translations from the German in The Old Mamsell's Secret which provided sentiment and mystery for our romantic young minds. The stolid, brutal Teutonic surgeon fascinated us; to have one's affections captured by storm seemed to us wonderful. We bemoaned the impossibility of finding in America a nobleman like the one in Quits, and we longed to meet the hero in novels of Mary Cecil Hay, the final pages of which were so touching that they were tattered by repeated perusals. Maggie was brought to the door by an imaginary groom, and I galloped through the green wood, expecting Lord Leaholme to be lurking in the shadow, heartbroken from unreciprocated devotion. But when I returned to look in the glass, I saw not the tiny heroine with tendrils of black hair around a calm forehead, but a solid oval countenance topped by a brown bow. surmounting a turned-up plait and an uncompromising bang.
We loved Celia Thaxter's verse because her own history ap- pealed to us. She was the little lighthouse girl on the Isle of Shoals, where her father, defeated candidate for the governorship of New Hampshire, had gone as keeper in bitter reaction. The tutor who came to teach his brilliant little daughter, fell in love with her, and when they were married their house became a meeting place for writers; the romantic circumstances of their life died only when they moved to the mainland, but we never forgot the tender regret in Celia Thaxter's poems.
At four o'clock Mother came downstairs in her cool sprigged lawn and lace cap, when we usually rowed upstream on the shady Hatfield side, or went into the hayfield to "rake after," with the short wooden rakes which Father cut down for us out of old ones. If we worked well we could count on riding triumphantly into the barn on top of the load, high up from the floor on which the horses' hoofs resounded noisily.
But this description of the summer days at Forty Acres might give the impression that we had it wholly to ourselves, when as a matter of fact we were seldom alone. The house was always filled
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with friends of both generations. Distinguished strangers appeared in our midst occasionally; I remember particularly a call from Har- riet Beecher Stowe, because Father had just been reading us Old- town Folks, and the prospect of seeing a living author was very exciting indeed. Guests seemed delighted with the informal, al- most casual entertainment which they were given at our house. They were free to swim, row, drive, or sleep without any incon- venience to the simple living in our household.
My brothers brought their college friends, and Arria her in- timate schoolmates. Together they lived in what seemed to Molly and me a whirl of delight. They were a carefree lot in the summer, boating and tramping, giving theatrical entertainments, and joking with a mutual abandon that we younger ones could only hope to imitate sometime.
At night we and our friends often climbed to the top of the gam- brel roof of the house 'to watch the chimney-swallows put them- selves to bed. Only the chimneys of an old, old house can furnish that entertainment. Ours were full of nests, and the whirring at night and in the early morning sounded like distant thunder. In rainy weather a nest of little birds would occasionally become loosened and fall down into the fireplace, giving frightened cries. Then we had to rescue them, feed them crumbs, re-arrange their queer house of gluey twigs and carry them to the roof to be re- covered by the parent birds, who would fly about anxiously in the meantime. Later in the summer they would sometimes come down themselves, and appear in some room, beating their wings against mirrors and windows, so that they had to be assisted in finding a way out. The maids were alarmed by these apparitions and de- clared that a bird in the house meant death.
The good-night dance of the birds, as we called it, was very curious and fascinating. The whole great family of them from one particular chimney would begin flying over house and garden just after sunset; round and round in circles, now dipping, now soaring -- and as the twilight deepened they would return from these flights, and fly across the opening of the chimney, at which moment just one swallow shot downward into its depths. We always wondered
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how that first bird knew that he must leave his comrades, and go into the dark. They flew around in another big circle, and a second swallow dropped inside, and then another and another, always with their circling regularity, until we could count the number who had gone in and the number left. Sometimes as many as a hundred swallows would pack into a chimney one by one. Finally two birds flew together and came back, and one left his comrade, obedient to some call or law. Then the last solitary swallow, on the edge of dark- ness, soared high, dipped low, flew over meadow, over garden, over the great elms, loath to join his fellows We watched him with tense sympathy until he too succumbed and dropped into the silent chimney. How did he know? What, and where, was the sign given him? We shall never in this life have an answer to that question. Perhaps Browning guessed:
Some time-in His good time-I shall arrive. '
He guides me and the bird: in His good time.
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Conditions of labor in rurai New England were somewhat unique in the sixties. There was a strong tradition of neighborli- ness. People "helped" one another rather than hiring out to an assumed superior. Farmers were so accustomed to payments in kind -exchange of products between themselves rather than dollars- that mention of money was avoided except in occasional reference to tying up or laying away. A tactful bargainer for extra farm-work was wise enough to omit discussions of cost. Nobody was employed by the hour; you paid for day-work, and long hours at that. Mod- estly tendered remuneration was accepted, but it was etiquette to wait for a bill, sent in when the payee was in need of cash and sup- posed to be paid very promptly. Checks, however, were frequently retained for months before presentation at the Bank, a compli- ment to the solvency of their signer. It was interesting to be taken along as our father's companion when he went to negotiate for some special form of assistance required at Forty Acres. Sometimes we called on Mr. Matty, a talented person who owned a "cradle" for cutting rye: a broad scythe to which was attached a convex frame that caught the straw and held it together in small masses, cutting and bundling at once. When our rye-field had grown high, and its golden billows blown by a south wind were lovely against the heaven's blue, Father would remark to John Breckenridge, the tall dignified man who presided over our farm-labor-contingent:
"The rye's getting pretty ripe; I guess we'd better have Matty come over in the morning if it's fair."
"Mebbe we had," would be John's terse answer. So that eve- ning, after supper, the master of Forty Acres would drive over to
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Mr. Matty's, taking a younger child with him. It was always hot at rye-time; a red sun going down in a hazy sky, a motionless air.
Mr. Matty would be standing inside his gate, his elbows on the top rail. He had a long, slanting face and straight light hair. We children thought him inscrutable.
He made no offer to open the gate as his visitors drove up in their old green express wagon, reining in the horse on the grassy space in front.
"Good evening, Mr. Matty," Father said.
"How d'do?" answered Mr. Matty. "Kind o'warm."
"Yes. Pushes things ahead, doesn't it?"
"Tobacco's hangin' back this year."
"Going to have a good crop?"
"I dunno. We was awful slow gettin' it sot."
"Is your wife pretty well this summer?" Father's voice had a cordial ring, but he wasn't hurrying his objective into considera- tion yet awhile.
"She ain't complainin'."
"How did that Jersey heifer turn out?" Mr. Matty had bought her from Forty Acres.
"First-rate. Had a calf last month. Givin' sixteen quarts."
"What did you do with the calf?"
"Kep' it." After this laconic answer there was a pause, both parties to the conversation gazing at the landscape.
In due course of time, from Mr. Matty:
"How'd them tomatses come out?"
"Oh, very well. Yes," after a moment's wait, "Very well indeed."
The child would begin to think the subject of the rye might be introduced now, after this successful prelude. Not too soon, of course, but before long. The horse was bending his head down and cropping grass. The Rector went into a reverie, and Mr. Matty knocked the ashes from his pipe. Presently the dialogue started up again more auspiciously.
"Have you got much rye this year?"
"Yep-over on the side-hill there"; with a backward jerk of Mr. Matty's lean thumb in the direction of Amherst.
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"Cradled it yet?"
"Nope. The edges don't amount to much. Sort o'scatterin'."
"Mine's pretty thick. I've got it on the lower meadow this year."
No reply. Mr. Matty showed by a face devoid of expression that the location of the lower meadow meant nothing to him.
"I thought I'd like to get you to come over and cradle it to- morrow, if it doesn't rain."
More silence, then another question.
"Mr. Matty, who were the people that used to live in the little red house on Porter Pipkin's land? Did they move away?"
"I've heard tell that they did. You know the house was struck by lightnin'."
Then followed a protracted inquiry into the genealogy of the family in the red house. The twilight was gathering; a breath of damp air came across from the river bank. The child was getting sleepy. Was Mr. Matty coming to cradle, or wasn't he?
"There's a nice moon," observed my father, pointing eastward with his whip, at the great clear globe above the Pelham hills. Not a ring round it; no fog or rain in prospect. He gathered up the reins.
"Well, goodnight. See you in the morning." Silence still hov- ered over the top rail of the gate.
"Father," the child urged. "He didn't say whether he would or not. Will he, do you think?"
"Of course. He'll be there by six o'clock most likely. But it would be beneath his dignity to accept a job too hastily, you see. He's just coming over as any neighbor would, to help out."
"And don't you have to pay him?"
"Certainly. I shall hand him the dollar or so that I know he ex- pects, and he'll pocket it; no questions asked. That's the proper procedure."
So it was. And this was a New England bargain. The children had witnessed many such transactions. That was "all there was to it."
By the time the sun was well up next morning, our lovely rye
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lay prone. Matty-the-Conqueror came up from the lower meadow, the scythe-blade of his cradle gleaming.
With all the buildings at Forty Acres, we had shingling-times nearly every summer. We did it in August, after the haying was over, and that lasted into July, for we cut the hay later than they do nowadays, letting it grow dry and ripe. The farmer in me still objects to the modern method of cutting green hay and leaving it two days to dry; we mowed grass at six in the morning, cocked it after noon dinner, and got it into the barn by supper-time, in nor- mal weather. The July sun was powerful.
After the last hay-mow was filled there was a week or ten days of "straightening up," which might mean reinforcing the stable floor or the barnyard fence, or maybe just hoeing corn; and then Mr. Marsh came with his cohorts to repair the roof. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a gray beard and bright eyes which could estimate distances and measurements with unchallenged accuracy. A good citizen too; shrewd but tolerant. They called him Mr. "Ma'sh." There was a delicate shading which in this case could not easily have been imitated; not Marrsh, as enunciated in New York State, nor yet Mash, as indicating the cereal product given to horses; but a soft accent just between the two.
Mr. Ma'sh was a King of Builders. Arriving with his fine tools, his assistant or two or three apprentices, he took command of the roofing-operations, and we all bowed to his authority. The shingles would have been previously hauled and piled in the farmyard; a first-rate quality, Mr. Ma'sh said he could smell the difference be- tween a good shingle and a poor one. The cheap quality, pale in color and full of knot-holes, such as were used for the roofs of pig- sties or manure-sheds, had but little odor, when fresh, whereas the better ones, fine golden pine-wood, absorbed the sunshine and sent it out again rich and pitchy. The work of nailing was delight- ful; stripping off the old rotten shingles not quite so attractive. The farm boys and our brothers, sometimes Harvard men who visited us. helped with that. The discarded heaps lay about on the ground with bits of rusty nails in them, of which our elders were somewhat shy, since rumors of death by lockjaw were prevalent in
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the Valley. As soon as a certain portion of the roof was clear, the nien would go up on long ladders and begin the task of fitting the new overlapping shingles exactly in place, setting the slender, short nails and striking them deftly with the hammer, getting five or six feet of achievement ready in no time. The younger men would bring up fresh bundles and knock off the wooden wythes that bound them together. Mr. Marsh's commanding figure moved about in perfect poise on the risky declivities. When he stood up with bared head on the ridge-pole of the barn, he made us think of Columbus on the prow of his vessel discovering America; when he came down the ladder at the close of the day we felt like natives acknowledging his supremacy. He was friendly with the two little girls who scaled the roofs in stockinged feet, to help by handing nails to fill the men's apron pockets, or passing along the fresh shingles. These men worked for the pride of accomplishment of their job, not merely for the wage. If it took till dark to finish a day's allowance, they stayed on and left a completed job behind them. The family went out to bid them goodby when they were done, and paid visits to the new roof, standing back and looking at it in all lights.
Painting was another process which interested us; buildings had to have fresh garments. Various artisans qualified for this task, but for some time it was "Hen" Tailer who made the most satis- factory bids, though it could hardly be said that he was a brilliant business-manager. He had married a woman twice as old as him- self-a shrew it was said-and had no children. A wisp of a man, al- ways "sickly," but cheerful and sanguine, with the creative instinct; quite unable, however, to stick at his job for any length of time and frequently dropping out without warning, or pottering un- necessarily long among the paint-cans, mixing dreamily, and letting us children peer into them to watch the colors change. He was al- ways a long time eating his lunch, which was untidily wrapped in a bit of old newspaper and thought by observers to be inadequate. So was the fodder of an old white skeleton of a horse which stood all day long tied to a nail in the shed-doorway.
Poor Hen. His artistic sense made life more bearable, but the
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doors of his home were barred against it. He was always in some difficulty; his place was mortgaged and his taxes unpaid, and he would come slinking into the study on a rainy evening, a deprecat- ing little figure, trying to borrow money on his one security, an old four-poster mahogany bed which it was rumored had a deficient leg with its crack varnished over. Nobody knew to how many cred- itors it had been secured already. We always surmised that the Master of Forty Acres did a little gratuitous helping-out on those occasions, for Hen would depart with a more springy gait; but we had nothing to go on; their transactions were strictly private. And our father periodically announced that Henderson Tailer did not drink; he was positive that certain hints of bibulous excesses were merely village calumny. One did not want to be suspicious; there was something so childlike and appealing about Hen.
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