Northern Borders (15 page)

One afternoon when my grandmother's apple orchard in the meadow adjacent to the jammed-up oxbow was just blossoming out, my grandfather was waiting for me in his lumber truck when I got out of school. A hefty coil of new fence wire lay on the floorboards. On the seat beside my grandfather was a long wooden crate with the words “Granite State Blasting Company” stenciled in black letters on the top. Packed inside the box in sawdust, Gramp informed me, were thirty-six sticks of dynamite. The box sat lengthwise on the seat, and stretched all the way from my grandfather, behind the wheel, to the passenger door of the cab.

“Hop up on top,” my grandfather said. “It's stable.”

Winter frost was still thawing out of the Hollow road in sheltered places through the woods. It was full of potholes and washouts, and as bumpy as a road can be and still be passable. All the way home I stole glances at the case of dynamite beneath me, though my grandfather assured me that it couldn't possibly explode until it was lighted or detonated with an electrical current. I was far from persuaded. As we jounced up the Hollow, he told me harrowing stories of his days as a shooter, or dynamite man, on the last big Connecticut River log drives. When we finally pulled into our barnyard, I was so relieved I forgot to ask him, in accordance with our ritual, who lived there. “The meanest old bastard in Kingdom
County,” he said, anyway. “Remember that you heard it first from me.”

Although there was still plenty of snow back in the woods, it was a warm and sunny spring afternoon. Bright yellow cowslips were in blossom near the steep limestone bank of the oxbow, where the logs were jammed up. My grandfather seemed very confident as he walked out onto the ledge in a jaunty, lumberjack gait. With him he had three dark red sticks of the Granite State dynamite, which he lighted from his cigar and tossed into the jumble of logs. He hurried back into my grandmother's orchard as the dynamite went off with three terrific reports, one right after the other. The air was filled with smoke and a gunpowder odor, but the jam didn't shift a foot.

Next Gramp cut a long pole from a brown ash sapling growing near the river. To one end he lashed half a dozen sticks of dynamite. Standing on the ledge, he ignited a fuse and thrust the business end of the pole deep into the tangled logs. He scrambled back up onto the bank, and I hunkered down behind an apple tree full of fragrant blossoms and put my hands over my ears. A second later a tremendous explosion shook the ground under my feet. Chunks of bark and woodchips rose twenty feet in the air. I was sure the jam had broken apart. But as the acrid smoke began to clear, I saw that the towering pile of logs was exactly where it had been for the past week.

My grandfather nodded grimly. He seemed quite satisfied by this turn of events. “It's that limestone ledge, Austen,” he said. “That's what's hanging the logs. It runs out underwater from the bank halfway across the river and blocks off the channel.”

My grandfather tied all but one of the remaining sticks of dynamite together in a single tight bundle, and hitched the free end of the new coil of wire to a detonating cap attached to the explosives. He wedged the package of dynamite down into a crevice in the riverside ledge, and instructed me to unroll the coil of wire back through the apple trees in the meadow, toward the road, while he went to get his truck. In the meantime, I'd spotted my grandmother, watching us from the farmhouse porch through her opera glasses. Their brass fittings gleamed in the mild spring sunshine, somehow accentuating her disapproval.

My grandfather drove the truck partway down the muddy lane
into the apple orchard, shut it off and opened the hood. I handed him the ends of the wire, which he wrapped around the starter coil. “Get inside and start her up,” he told me.

Under my grandfather's supervision, I'd been driving his farm truck around the barnyard and fields for nearly a year. But it was always a great thrill for me to slide in under the big rubber-coated steering wheel with the smooth wooden knob for a handle. I turned on the key and reached for the starter with my foot, stretching as far as I could. It ground twice, and the engine coughed, turned over, and caught. At the same instant, an immense detonation ripped into the spring afternoon. From the oxbow, chunks of ledge rose higher than the barn cupola and came raining out of the sky all over the blossoming orchard. Several hit in the muddy lane near my grandfather, who paid no more attention to them than to a summer hailstorm. Then I was out of the truck and running through the apple trees behind my grandfather.

Ahead of us, beneath a great cloud of smoke, the jam was moving. In a solid mass, it progressed about thirty feet—only to come to a stop in the lower curve of the bow, just above the millpond. Then in the cleared bend above them, a great slab of the limestone ledge where my grandfather had stood to place the dynamite charges suddenly toppled outward into the river, leaving a sheer rock wall plunging from the top of the bank down into the water.

“Yes, sir,” my grandfather said, an expression which, in the Kingdom County of my youth, could signify anything from an amiable salutation to a sarcastic disclaimer to an acknowledgment of the bleak lot of all farmers and loggers everywhere.

I was astonished by the way that huge chunk of rock had leisurely toppled over into the river. It must have weighed several tons, and it looked as if more of the ledge had been dislodged underwater, where we couldn't see it. But no matter. Just downstream, the logs were packed tightly from bank to bank again, in a solid, interlocked, immovable mass.

My grandfather got out the last stick of dynamite and tapped it thoughtfully against his palm. Then he stuck the dynamite stick in his back pocket and headed up the lane toward the barn.

 

For the next few days my grandfather was busy with spring work around the farm. There were fences to repair, sap buckets to collect and rinse out, two fields to plow and harrow and plant. As for the logs, I suspected that he was hoping for a big spring rain to bring up the river and move them along into his millpond. But no big rain came and as the middle of May approached, the logs were still snarled up in the lower bend of the oxbow above the mill, where they were as useless to us as though still standing in the woods upriver.

One evening after supper I wandered down to the sawmill dam, where my grandfather was fishing. It was a simple dam, built by Sojourner Kittredge and replaced twice since, at a spot where the river narrowed to less than twenty yards across. Just above, in the small millpond, was an island about the size of our farmhouse kitchen. The troublesome oxbow was situated one hundred feet or so above the island.

My grandfather, who never fished with anything but flies, and used only one fly, a number ten red-and-white Royal Coachman, made a short, precise cast up beside the island. “What I really ought to do, Austen, is raise this so-called pond another three, four feet and flood out the whole shebang, island and oxbow and all. Back this little puddle clear up to the Idaho woods above and float that Christly jam right on out of there.”

My grandfather stripped in line and cast again. He made that distinctive rasping sound in his throat. “That would show them,” he said.

By “them,” of course, he meant my grandmother. But what did she have to do with this? Nothing, so far as I could see—until I happened to glance up at the towering logjam and the blooming apple trees beside it, scenting the entire meadow all the way down to the dam with their spicy pink and white blossoms.

“Wouldn't that flood out Gram's orchard?” I asked.

My grandfather frowned. “We'd never have a jam there again, Austen. Our problems would be over.”

My grandmother's apple orchard was full of rare, old-fashioned varieties whose names were nearly as alluring as their fruit: Duchess of Oldenburg, Snow Apple, Cox Orange Pippin, Red Astrachan, Summer St. Lawrence, and twenty others. Along with her Buff Orpington laying hens, the old-fashioned apples were Gram's pride and joy. Besides being an important source of her private household income, the early-ripening varieties were blue-ribbon shoo-ins at the fruit and vegetable exhibit at Kingdom Fair.

“What about Gram?” I said again.

My grandfather rounded on me. “Gram!” he said as though referring to some distant interfering relative. “This is between you and me. Not them. Do you understand that?”

I said I did, and he handed me the fly rod. “There's a pretty fair trout just off the right side of that island, Austen. I can't seem to interest him tonight. See if you can get him to take a look.”

My grandfather got out a cigar and lit it and watched me cast for the trout. I couldn't tell whether he approved of my technique or not. After a while he shook his head. “Gram,” he muttered.

 

The next morning was Saturday. Immediately after barn chores and breakfast, my grandfather began work on his new project. According to his calculations, raising the level of the pond just four feet would dislodge the logs. This could be accomplished easily enough by lowering the gate of the dam and decreasing the flow of water through the penstock containing the waterwheel that powered his mill saws. With the additional pressure of the expanded millpond, however, my grandfather would first need to reinforce some of the old dam timbers. Cutting the new timbers was his first order of business.

“Tut, what are you and grandfather sashaying around that dam for?” my grandmother said to me when I went up to the house for a mid-moming snack.

To avoid telling her a direct lie I said, “Gramp says we're doing some repair work.”

My grandmother looked at me with her sharp black eyes. “He said that? Repair work?”

I nodded.

She reached out and gripped my wrist. “Do you know where your grandfather's going to be sashaying next if he drowns out my apple trees, Tut?”

I shook my head, thereby inadvertently acknowledging my grandfather's intention to flood the orchard.

“I shall tell you where,” my grandmother said. “He'll sashay straight to state prison, that's where. I'll send him there, for destroying my property and depriving me of the income from those apples.”

She released my wrist and picked up her brass-bound opera glasses and trained them in on the dam. “Don't stray out of hailing distance, Tut. I'll want you to run a letter down to the mailbox shortly.”

My grandmother finished her letter in ten minutes flat. I was far from surprised to see that it was addressed to Mr. Zachariah Barrows, Esquire, in Kingdom Common; old Zack Barrows was my grandmother's personal attorney and close ally in her ongoing battle for ascendancy over my grandfather.

Our mailbox was located half a mile down the Hollow, next to the one belonging to my Big Aunt Rose, at the mouth of the lane leading up to her place, which was as far as the RFD mail carrier could get up the Hollow road in mud season and bad winter weather. After I returned from posting the letter, I drifted over to the dam again to see how my grandfather was coming. He was still hard at work in his sawmill, cutting out dam braces. Without interrupting his work, he jerked his head down the Hollow in the direction of the mailbox. “Barrows?”

I nodded, and my grandfather continued working and said nothing more.

 

Over the course of the following week, the Farm became a domestic battleground. On Sunday my grandfather moved up to Labrador to sleep and take his meals. Then for the next several days he spent every spare hour reinforcing and repairing his dam. On Wednesday my grandmother wrote again to Attorney Barrows. By then she and my grandfather had ceased speaking to each other entirely, though occasionally one of them would send the other a terse and ominous message through me. I had long ago learned that when the chips were down, neither of my grandparents had the
slightest compunction about recruiting me to their own camp. The newfangled notion put forward by various self-declared experts on family harmony that children should not be drawn into the disputes of their elders would have astonished and outraged them both. It was a cardinal precept of child rearing in the Kittredge household that I, like my little aunts, my Uncle Rob, and my father before me, should be indoctrinated in the divine correctness of all of their respective positions, beliefs, and opinions, large and small, and enlisted on the side of Right.

Thursday evening, as my grandmother and I were eating a grim and silent supper, Gramp having returned to Labrador to eat out of cans, as my grandmother put it, I glanced out the window and saw Sheriff Mason White coming up the Hollow road in his patrol car. My grandmother had been expecting him for two days, and I knew why. Before she had a chance to tell me not to, I ran outside and raced up the ridge to warn my grandfather. Beyond doubt, Sheriff White was here with a court order to prevent Gramp from raising the level of the pond and flooding my grandmother's apple trees.

My grandfather was sitting at the camp table in his red-and-black-checked lumber jacket, smoking a cigar and reading an old
National Geographic.
He glanced up at me over the reading spectacles he'd selected from the eyeglasses bin at the five-and-dime in Kingdom Common, then returned to his magazine.

“Mason White's on his way with a court order!” I blurted out. “I saw him coming up the Hollow.”

“That's all?” my grandfather said. “I thought at the very least you were going to report that the house was afire.”

My grandfather got up and went over to his bunk. He pulled a locker out from underneath it, and got something out of it, I didn't see what clearly. He stuck whatever it was in his lumber jacket pocket. Then he returned to the table and resumed reading.

In the meantime I looked around the camp. It was growing dusky and my grandfather had already lit the kerosene lamp on the table. The antlers of the deer heads mounted on the back wall shone softly in the lamplight. In other circumstances it would have been pleasant to flop down on the rear seat from an old 1938 Packard that my grandfather used as a camp sofa and get him to tell me about going down the Connecticut with big log drives or going to Labrador and out West with the surveying crews. This evening there was no time for such tales. Even now the gangling apparition of Kingdom County's chief lawman, Sheriff Mason White, was heaving into sight in the camp dooryard.