If the grapes fail we will try to raise the money for your Harvard
expenses. At the end of 1898, I expect to get much more money from my
books--at least $1,500 a year.
This last was in pencil, a postscript. Evidently Father had the grape
rot in mind, but at this date, July 21st, the die was cast; there was
nothing one could do then. If they had been properly sprayed in May and
June one could laugh at the black rot, but very likely Father had not
attended to it; that is, he had made the hired man spray. He had other
fish to fry, as he often said. To me the marvel of it all is that he had
so many irons in the fire and was always able to write. The different
properties that Father accumulated in his lifetime were alone enough to
take all his time were it not for his happy nature and wonderful faculty
of being able to put them aside when the muse nudged his elbow.
First he had the place here, Riverby, to which he added another nine
acres later, clearing and ditching it all and getting it all out in the
best grapes, the ones that made the most work and trouble: Delawares,
Niagaras, Wordens, and Moore's Early. There were other kinds tried, the
once famous Gaertner, Moore's Diamond, the Green Mountain or Winchell,
and so on. And currants, too, acres of them set under and between the
rows of grapes, and Bartlett pears, and peaches. As I write, a picture
comes to mind of Father up in a peach tree, on a high step-ladder,
picking peaches, and of some girls with cameras taking his picture
and all laughing and the girls exclaiming; "At the mercy of the
Kodakers"--and Father enjoying the joke and picking out soft peaches for
them. He liked to pick peaches. The big handsome fruit in its setting of
glistening green leaves appealed to him, and as he said, "When I come to
one too soft to ship I can eat it." I so vividly remember our carrying
the filled baskets to the dock where they were shipped to town and
Father being ahead with a basket on his shoulder and of his stumbling
and going headlong, his head hanging over the steep ledge of rocks, the
basket bursting in its fall and the peaches going far and wide over the
rocks below. We gathered up the peaches, and Father was not hurt,
though he fell so close to the top of the steep ledge that his head and
shoulder hung over and his face got red in his struggle to hold himself
back.
Then in the early nineties he bought the land and built Slabsides,
clearing up the three acres of celery swamp; and for a while he spent
much time there. "Wild Life About My Cabin" was one of the nature essays
written of Slabsides. The cabin was covered with slabs, and Father
wanted to give it a name that would stick, he said, one that would
be easily associated with the place, and he certainly succeeded, for
everyone knows of Slabsides. Uncle Hiram, Father's oldest brother, spent
much time with him there, the two brothers, worlds apart in their mental
make-up and their outlook, spending many lonely evenings together,
Father reading the best philosophy or essays, Uncle Hiram drumming and
humming under his breath, dreaming his dreams, too, but never looking
at a book or even a magazine. Soon he would be asleep in his chair, and
before the low-burning open fire Father would be dreaming his dreams,
so many of which he made come true, listening to the few night sounds of
the woods. Father tried hard to make Uncle Hiram's dreams come true. He
gave him a home for many years and helped him with his bee-keeping and
sympathized with him fully and understood his hope that "next year" the
bees would pay and return all.
Someone caught a big copperhead, one of the meanest of all poisonous
snakes, and one which is quite rare here, fortunately, and for a time
Father kept it in a barrel near Slabsides. Later he grew tired of it,
but he had not the heart to kill it, his prisoner. "After keeping a
thing shut up and watching it every day I can't go out and kill it in
cold blood," he said in half apology for his act. He told the man who
worked on the swamp to carry the snake, barrel and all, up among the
rocks and let him go. The man, when out of sight, promptly killed the
snake. It seems to me that they were both right and the snake, though
innocent himself, had to suffer.
It was about two miles to Slabsides, a good part of it through the
woods, and some of it up a very steep hill. I can see Father starting
off with his market basket on his arm, the basket as full of provisions
and reading matter as his step was full of vigour. I'll admit he did
often raid Mother's pantry, and he was not averse to taking pie and
cake. In fact, he was brought up on cake largely, and always ate of it
freely until these last years. "His folks," as Mother would say, always
had at least three kinds of cake three times a day, and then more cake
the last thing before going to bed. At Slabsides most of the cooking was
done over the open fire--potatoes and onions baked in the ashes, lamb
chops broiled over the coals, peas fresh from the garden--how Father did
enjoy it all--the sweetness of things! He would hum:
"He lived all alone, close to the bone
Where the meat is sweetest, he constantly eatest,"
and he liked to think of this old rhyme as applying to himself.
The interior of Slabsides was finished in birch and beech poles, with
the bark on them, and much of the furniture he made of natural crooks
and crotches. He always had his "eye peeled," as he said, for some
natural piece of wood that he could use. The bittersweet has a way of
winding itself about some sapling, and as the two grow it puts a mark
about the tree that makes it look as though it were twisted. One such
piece, a small hemlock, is over the fireplace, and Father would tell
how he told the girls who visited Slabsides that he and the hired man
twisted this stick by hand. "We told them we took it when it was green,"
he would laugh, as he told the story, "and twisted it as you see it,
then fastened it and it dried or seasoned that way--and they believed
it!" and he would chuckle over it mightily.
In 1913, Father was able, with the help of a friend, to buy the old
homestead at Roxbury, and then he developed one of the farmhouses
there, one built long ago by his brother Curtis, and thus made the third
landmark in his life, any one of which was enough to occupy the time and
care of one man. He called it Woodchuck Lodge, and the last years of
his life were spent largely there, going out in June and returning in
October.
At the time the following letter was written, Father spent much of his
time at Slabsides and his interest in both the celery and lettuce grown
there, as well as the grapes at Riverby, was most keen. The black duck
referred to was one I had winged and brought home; it was excessively
wild until we put it with the tame ducks, whereupon, as Father expressed
it, "He took his cue from them and became tamer than the tame ones."
Slabsides, July 13, '97.