Northern Borders (26 page)

By degrees, as the days grew warmer, the maple buds began to redden and expand. The syrup darkened into an oily fluid known as blackstrap, good only for shipping in metal drums to the Reynolds Tobacco Company in North Carolina, for sweetening chewing tobacco. One night a warm rain would fall. The ice went out of the river above my grandfather's sawmill in two or three rifle-like reports. In the pasture across from the house a few spring peeper frogs began to sing.

During the next several days we'd pick up our three thousand buckets, rinse them out and stack them inside the sugarhouse. School began again and sugaring was over for another year, though in August my grandfather would bring several big tubs of snow out of his icehouse for sugar-on-snow at the annual Kittredge family reunion, and later that month my grandmother would win another blue ribbon at Kingdom Fair for her maple sugar candies, so blond
and delicately sweet that my grandfather never failed to accuse her of lightening them with white cane sugar.

 

March was also Town Meeting month in Lost Nation and throughout Vermont. Town Meeting was held on the first Tuesday of the month at the schoolhouse. My grandfather was among the very few Lost Nation residents who did not attend Town Meeting—the others being shut-ins—but my grandmother and I never missed one, and there was usually still enough hard-packed snow in the road for us to slide down the Hollow to the schoolhouse together on our old travis-sled. No doubt we made an odd sight, my tiny black-clad grandmother sitting in front and steering the sled, and me riding behind her; but there were many odd sights in the Lost Nation of my youth, and I loved gliding fast down the icy road with my grandmother, on our way to Town Meeting.

At the schoolhouse, local government officials were elected: three selectmen, a town road commissioner, a justice of the peace, three school board trustees, a poundkeeper. Proposed budgets were approved or disapproved. Townpersons could and did stand up and say or, as the case often was, shout anything they wanted to. Invariably, Cousin WJ Kittredge delivered a scathing indictment of the rising school costs—$1,348 in 1952, $1,451 in 1953. Several persons rose to their feet and vehemently denounced the state and federal governments. The proposals that Vermont secede from the United States and Kingdom County secede from Vermont were moved and passed, as they had been annually since 1791, when the Green Mountain State first joined the Union. These were the only two measures the people of Lost Nation ever agreed upon unanimously. To me, used to seeing kids squabble every day in the schoolhouse, it was a great treat to see the adults squabble on Town Meeting day. Yet everyone had a say in everything, and anyone with anything to say was listened to. Cousin Clarence Kittredge, in his role as Town Meeting moderator, saw to that.

Always there was a huge noon dinner. Women from up and down the Hollow vied with each other to bring the tastiest casseroles and meat pies. There were fresh rolls, baked beans laced with
maple syrup, desserts of all kinds. During the dinner, neighbors who had been at each other's throats all morning chatted and laughed together. A truce was declared until one o'clock, when the meeting resumed. This was the way democracy worked in Lost Nation, and always had.

In the late afternoon some of the men would adjourn to Cousin Whiskeyjack's barn to drink WJ's moonshine whiskey. This too was a long-standing Town Meeting Day tradition. In March of 1950, however, the year I was eight, Cousin John Wesleyan rose at Town Meeting and denounced these drinking sessions in his brother's barn. “The manufacture and consumption of hard spirits is forbidden in this town,” the old preacher said angrily. “If the justice of the peace had any grit, this would come to a halt.”

Cousin Clarence laid down his moderator's gavel. “Speaking now as town justice,” he said, “what a fella makes to consume on his own property has nothing to do with the law, JW. I can't and won't interfere.”

As usual, Town Meeting that year ended with no action taken on Cousin WJ's moonshining activities. My grandmother stayed on with some other women to wash dishes and set the schoolroom straight. I headed for home to help my grandfather with barn chores.

A mile north of the schoolhouse, Cousin Whiskeyjack's falling-down old farmhouse sat dark in the late-winter twilight; but a light was on in the barn, and a dozen or so vehicles with chains on their tires sat in the frozen mud of the barnyard. Suddenly an idea occurred to me.

I crept up through the cars and trucks and slipped in through the milk house to WJ's disused milking parlor. Just ahead, in the dim light of a couple of kerosene lanterns, twenty or so shadowy figures were peering down into a large barrel. In the meantime, I'd spotted WJ's big yellow-and-gray rat-fighting cat, Lynx Kittredge, the cat that he'd once informed me was as big as a wheel of cheese. Lynx Kittredge was reclining on a pile of feed sacks on the bow of an old power launch WJ had salvaged from the bottom of Lake Memphremagog years ago. Along the waterline of the launch was a row of neady-stitched bullet holes, and just below, the words “
U.S. BORDER
PATROL
,” written in faded black letters. Lynx Kittredge was staring at the barrel in a way that made me glad that I was not a rat.

I edged up to the rear of the crowd, where the men were talking loudly and exchanging money. Suddenly Bumper Stevens spotted me. Instantly Bumper scooped me up like a young pig. “Looky here what I found, boys. It's old Austen Kittredge's grandboy, come to view the rat fights.”

To me he said, “Look down in that barrel, boy. Ain't that a frightful sight? Count 'em.”

Holding me under my arms, he lifted me over the rim of the barrel. Inside, to my horror, swirling round and round the bottom and leaping partway up the slippery metal sides, were half a dozen huge barn rats with long naked gray tails.

Bumper set me up on a beam above the men, where I could look down into the barrel. “I suppose you think you're a man and a half up there,” he said good-naturedly. “Witnessing your first rat fight.”

I thought no such thing. At eight I was frightened by the dark barn full of hard-drinking men. Yet I was also deeply interested in what was about to take place, and my fascination was greater than my fear. Below, in the knot of men exchanging money, I recognized Cousin WJ, and the two Kinneson brothers, Resolved and Welcome, from the Kingdom Gool, and several other local outlaws.

Bumper took a drink out of a brown bottle someone handed him, and offered me one. “Never mind that,” Cousin WJ told him. “That boy don't take ardent spirits yet. I've tried him before.”

“Don't take ardent spirits!” Bumper declared in an outraged voice. “How old be you, boy?”

“Eight,” I said.

“Eight. And don't take ardent spirits. I suppose,” he said to WJ, “that he don't swear or smoke or chase after wild women yet, neither.”

“He don't swear or smoke,” WJ said. “If he chases women, I don't know about it.”

Some of the men laughed.

“You Kittredges up here in the Hollow ain't bringing this boy up right,” Bumper said. He took a large watch out of his overalls pocket and peered at it and then up at me. “Make a bet, boy. How
long will it take WJ's old torn there to dispatch them rats in the barrel? Forty-five seconds? Fifty? Go ahead. Bet. I'll cover it for you.”

I had no idea what to say. As an apprentice Methodist, I had been taught by my grandmother never under any circumstances to bet on anything.

“He don't wager, neither. Leave him be,” WJ said, to my relief. “Bets are in.”

He reached up and grabbed Lynx Kittredge by the back of the double ruff of fur along his thick neck and summarily dropped him into the barrel. Instantly the cat metamorphosed into twenty pounds of pure feline fury. With a great angry hiss and a howl, Lynx Kittredge was on the rats, grabbing them and shaking them and snapping their necks like a terrier dog. From the beam where Bumper had set me I could see everything. The rats squealed and shrieked hideously. Lynx Kittredge hissed like a timber rattler, bayed like his North Woods' namesake. The last surviving rat leaped for him and depended from his notched left ear, and Lynx Kittredge spun over on his back and tore the rat open with his hind claws from neck to tail.

“Thirty-nine seconds,” Bumper said. “By Jesus, that's a new record for six rats, boys.”

Suddenly the milk house door opened. Everyone turned at once to see who had come in. Outlined against the twilight was a small black-clad figure, holding a lighted lantern.

“Oh, Jesus,” WJ said. “It's Mrs. Kittredge.”

I was so surprised by the appearance of my grandmother in this most unlikely of places that I scarcely felt alarmed at all. Taking in the scene at a single glance, she set the lantern down just inside the door, and as she did so its dim rays briefly illuminated her sharp features. Her face looked neither angry nor shocked but simply as determined as ever.

“Uh-oh,” Bumper said, sweeping me down off the beam. “Here's your boy, Mrs. K. We didn't have nothing to do with how he got here.”

My grandmother marched across the barn floor toward the men, many with cash in their hands. She walked by me, stood on her
tiptoes, and looked into the barrel. “Ah,” she said. She reached down in, seized Lynx Kittredge by his double ruff and drew him out.

“What are you doing, Abiah?” WJ said. “Where are you going with Lynx Kittredge?”

“I'm preventing further cruelty to animals,” my grandmother said. “Cats and rats alike. This animal is coming with us. Come along, Tut.”

The men stood openmouthed. But no one, even WJ, protested further. Lynx Kittredge was purring loudly. Evidently he recognized an ally in my grandmother. Outside, under the bright March stars, my grandmother set the cat on the travis, and, taking turns, we pulled Lynx Kittredge up the icy road to the Farm in Lost Nation.

WJ never did try to reclaim his cat. Like everyone else in the Hollow, with the possible exception of my Big Aunt Maiden Rose, he was somewhat afraid of my grandmother, who kept Lynx Kittredge for the next five years, renaming him Pharaoh and showering him with all the attention accorded any royal Egyptian cat. My grandfather encouraged him to patrol the barn for rats during the daytime, though he slept most nights in a basket near the stove in the kitchen. When he died of old age, the year I was thirteen, my grandmother had him mounted by a taxidermist in Kingdom Common, and for the rest of her life she kept the mummified remains of Lynx Kittredge, aka Pharaoh, on a shelf in Egypt, where he fit in nicely with her Doomsday Book and other relics.

 

In late April and well on into May, the Farm was the scene of any number of spring activities: plowing and planting, putting in my grandparents' gardens, mending fences devastated by winter—the list went on and on. Then came June, here before we knew it. June was haying time in Lost Nation. My grandfather waited until a good breeze came out of the northwest, signifying two or three days of clear weather. Then we harnessed up Ralph Waldo and Henry David and cut our fields and Maiden Rose's with a horse-drawn cutter bar, and raked the hay into windrows. The following day we
picked it up with Gramp's tall, old-fashioned hayloader. I drove the horses while my grandfather distributed the hay around the wagon with his pitchfork.

Austen Kittredge was a thorough if perpetually disgruntled farmer, and never failed to scythe off by hand the rough places around hedgerows and stone piles where the cutter bar and hay rake couldn't go. Then we'd back the hay wagon up the high drive leading into the big double lofts of the barn. A pair of huge iron hay forks mounted on rails under the barn ceiling dropped down on thick ropes, grabbed big bunches of the hay off the wagon, and hauled them up into the loft. Although they were wonderfully capable horses, Ralph and Henry were skittish around those hooks, which fell from the ceiling onto the load with a great clatter, and they also hated to back up the wagon. My grandfather had to grasp their bridles and walk them up the ramp, coaxing and gentling them along.

Haying was maddeningly hot work. Chaff got down my shirt collar and up under my pants cuffs and in my mouth and nose, causing my eyes to run steadily. The days were as long as they were hot, and there was always the threat of a summer thunderstorm that could spoil a whole field's cutting. Frequently my grandfather's antiquated equipment broke down. Like maple sugaring, haying a hill farm in the pre-mechanized era was a chancy, nerve-wracking job, in which Gramp's patience with me frequently wore thin, and mine with him, and the horses' with both of us. The highlights of the day were the moments when, after helping to unload the wagon, I could run to the milk house cooling tank for the stone jug of switchel, which my grandmother made up each morning and kept full and cool for us there—the traditional northern New England field hands' drink decocted from pure spring water with a touch of vinegar and a touch of molasses.

But by mid-aftemoon even the miraculous restorative powers of switchel were not enough to make haying anything but a grueling chore. It was a relief for vis all when the bulk-tank law prohibiting the shipping of milk in cans was passed and my grandfather, like many another Vermont hill farmer stranded off on roads no milk truck could possibly negotiate during much of the winter or mud
season, sold his milking cows and concentrated his activities on his lumbering operation.

One of the very real perils of haying with horses was that a horse could at any time step in a woodchuck hole and break its leg. Therefore my grandfather shot all woodchucks on sight, and at the age of nine, I began to hunt these otherwise harmless rodents myself with a light .22 Gramp had given me. Right after the first cutting in June was the best time to spot 'chucks; and I loved to go out in the evening after supper and walk the stubbly summer fields with my grandfather, looking for them. Other regular pests and, for me, fair game on the farm included pigeons, which were terribly messy, and which my grandparents encouraged me to pick off the ridge of the barn and the top of the silo with my .22; porcupines, or hedgehogs, as Gramp called them, which would chew their way through a half-inch plank to get into our woodshed, icehouse, and outbuildings; and, worst of all, a plague of white rats, the descendants of an escaped pair of tame ones my little aunts had given me as pets for my tenth birthday: against which, with traps, poison, and a veritable squadron of scrawny barn cats, not to mention the formidable Lynx Kittredge, my grandfather waged a no-holds-barred war; but we could see no diminution in their numbers, which were now beginning to breed with the indigenous population of brown barn rats to be found on all Vermont hill farms, to produce an especially large, bi-colored, prolific, and intelligent hybrid rodent that even Lynx Kittredge had trouble catching.