_Those were lovely days_
My impression is that our carpenter came first, though the exact
sequence is unimportant. He was not exclusively a carpenter, being also
a farmer during a considerable portion of the year. He would have to
knock off, now and then, he said, to look after his corn and potatoes,
while his assistant, it appeared, served in the double capacity of
helper and hired man.
But they were a suitable team for the work in hand--reconstruction on an
old house that had been put up mainly with an ax and a trowel, by thumb
measure, having probably never known anything so prosaic as a
spirit-level and a square. We began on the large room--that is to say,
the old kitchen, which was to be the new living-room, and in a very
little while had the prehistoric pantry and sink ripped out and the big
hole patched in the plaster, for our boss carpenter was a gifted man,
qualified for general repairs.
No, on second thought, we did not rip out quite all the old pantry.
There were some whitewood shelves that had been put there to stay, and
in the century or so of their occupancy appeared to have grown to the
other woodwork. Considering them a little, and the fact that it would
require an ax and perhaps dynamite to dislodge them, I had an
inspiration. Modified a little, they would make excellent bric-à-brac
and book shelves and serve a new and beautiful use through all the
centuries we expected to live there. I feverishly began drawing designs,
and the chief carpenter and I undertook this fine-art and literary
corner at once, so that it might be finished and a surprise for
Elizabeth and the others when they came. It was well that we did so, for
it was no light matter to reduce the width of those shelves. Whitewood
is not hard when fresh, but this had seasoned with the generations until
it was as easy to saw as dried horn--just about--and we took turns at
it, and the sweat got in my eyes, and I would have sent for the ax and
the dynamite if I hadn't passed my word.
Meantime, the helper, whose name was Henry Jones, was hewing an oaken
cross-beam which supported the ceiling, and which I could not pass under
without violently knocking my head. I am satisfied that the original
builders of that house were short people, or they would have planned
the old kitchen a few inches higher. But then I am always knocking my
head nearly off against something. I have left gleanings from it on the
sharp edges of a thousand swinging signs and on the cruel filigree of as
many low-hung chandeliers. My slightly bald spot, due to severe mental
effort, or something, if examined closely would be found to resemble an
old battlefield in France. But this is digression. As I was saying,
Henry Jones was hewing at the big old cross-beam, trying to raise its
lower sky-line a couple of inches with a foot-adz. I had not supposed
that the job would be especially difficult. I did not realize that the
old white-oak beam in a century and a half had petrified. We were having
a pretty toilsome time with our shelves, but I never saw a man sweat and
carry on like Henry Jones. He had to work straight up, with his head
tipped back, and his neck was rather short, with no proper hinge in it.
Besides, it was August, and pretty still and intense, and then some bees
that had taken up residence between the floors did not like the noise
he made, and occasionally came down to see about it. At such times he
made what was in the nature of a spring for the door, explaining later
that he had been to sharpen his adz. During quieter moments I went over,
at his suggestion, to measure up and see if the beam wasn t high enough.
It was on the afternoon of the second day that I told him that if he
would now trim up and round off the corners a little I thought I might
be able to pass under it without butting my remaining brains out. You
never saw a man so relieved. I think he considered me over-particular
about a small matter. As a reward I set him to elevating the beam across
the top of the door leading to the kitchen--quite an easy job. He only
had to put in a few hours of patient overhead sawing and split out the
chunks with wedges and a maul.
Observing Henry Jones though fully, I became convinced that the oaken
frame of our house was nearly indestructible. When I found time I
examined its timbers rather carefully. They were massive as to size,
hand hewn, and held together with big wooden pins. No worm had been
indiscreet enough to tackle those timbers. The entire structure was
anchored in the masonry of the huge chimney, and as a whole was about as
solid as the foundations of the world. There were builders in those
days.
I have mentioned the "ancient mariner" who appeared in the dusk of the
evening to warn me against over-payment for the place--old Nat. It
turned out that he was a farmer, but with artistic leanings in the
direction of whitewash. He appeared one morning in a more substantial
form, and was presently making alabaster of our up-stairs ceilings, for
if ever there was an old master in whitewash it was Nat. Never a streak
or a patchy place, and he knew the secret of somehow making the second
coat gleam like frosting on a wedding-cake.
Things were happening all about. Old Pop, the brush-cutter, had arrived,
with his deadly one-handed ax, and was busy in the lower brook lot--a
desperate place of briers and brush and poison ivy. He was a savage
worker. The thorns stung him to a pitch of fighting madness, and he
went after them, careless of mishap. Each evening he came up out of that
vicious swamp, bleeding at every pore, his massive shoulders hunched
forward, his super-normal arms hanging until his huge hands nearly swept
the ground.
[Illustration]
Pop in action was a fascinating sight. Few things could be finer than to
see him snatch away a barbed-wire entanglement of blackberry-bushes,
clutch a three-inch thorn sapling with his hairy left, and with one
swing of his terrible right cut the taproot through. I had figured that
it would take a month to clear away that mess along the brook, but on
the evening of the fifth day Pop had the last bit of its tangle cut and
piled. Of such stuff were warriors of the olden time. Given armor and a
battle-ax, and nothing could have stood before him. One could imagine
him at Crecy, at Agincourt, at Patay. Joan of Arc would have kept him at
her side.
Pop had another name, but everybody called him "Old Pop" and he seemed
to prefer it. He was seventy years old and a pensioner. There was a week
when his check came that he did no work, but remained dressed up, and I
fear did not always get the worth of his money. Never mind, he had
earned relaxation. An ancient hickory-tree in the brook meadow had been
broken by a March storm. Old Pop and his son Sam had it cut, split, and
sawed into fireplace lengths in a little while. That is, comparatively.
I think they were two or three days at it, while it had taken nature a
full hundred and sixty years to get the old tree ready for them. I
counted the rings. The figures impressed me.
It was--let us say--as old as the old house. It had been a straight
young tree of thirty years or so when the Revolutionary began, and it
saw the recruits of Brook Ridge march by to join Putnam, who had a camp
on a neighboring hill. There were Reeds and Meekers and Burrs and Todds
and Sanfords in that little detachment, and their uniforms were not very
uniform, and their knapsacks none too well filled. There was no rich
government behind them to vote billions for defense, no camps that were
cities sprung up in a night, no swift trains to whirl them to their
destination. Where they went they walked, through dust or mud and over
the stony hills. The old tree saw them pass--in its youth and
theirs--and by and by saw them return--fewer in numbers, and foot-sore,
but triumphant. I mentioned it to Pop. He said:
"Yeah--I was in the Civil War. It wa'n't much fun, but I'm lookin' for
my pension to be increased next year."
When there was no more brush or chopping I set Pop to laying stone wall
and said I would employ him steadily for a year. But that was a
mistake. Old Pop was a free lance, a knight errant. Anything that
savored of permanency smelled to him of vassalage. He laid a rod of
stone wall--solid wall that will be there for Gabriel to stand on when
he plays his last trump--blows it, I mean--in that neighborhood. But
then he collected, one evening, and vanished, and I did not see him any
more. I never carried the wall any farther. As Pop left it, so it
remains to this day.
[Illustration]
My plowman was a young man--a handsome, high-born-looking youth who came
one Sunday evening to arrange terms. He was stylishly dressed, and I
took him for a college lad on vacation. He assured me, however, that his
schooling had been acquired in the neighborhood, that he was a farmer on
his own account, with a team of his own, and that he was accustomed to
plowing rocky land. His name was Luther Merrill, and if I had thought
him handsome in his fine clothes, I considered him really superb when he
arrived next morning in work attire and started his great plow and big
white horses around the furrows. There had been a shower in the night
and the summer foliage was fresh--the leaves shining. Against a gleaming
green background of maple, alder, and wild clematis, Luther Merrill in
shirt and trousers, his collar open, his sleeves turned back, bending to
the plow and calling directions to his sturdy team, was something to
make one's heart leap for joy. I photographed him unobserved. I longed
to paint him.
My admiration grew as I observed the character of his plowing. A Western
boy wouldn't have stood it five minutes. The soil was at least half
stone, and the stones were not all loose. Every other rod the plow
brought up with a jerk that nearly flung the plowman over the top of it.
Then he had to yank and haul it out, lift it over, and start again. He
did not lose his temper, even when he broke one of his plow points, of
which, it seemed, he had brought a supply, in anticipation. He merely
called something encouraging to his horses and went on. I know about
plowing, and I once plowed a small blackberry-patch that was mostly
roots, and nearly swore my teeth loose in the half a day it took me. But
that had been nothing to this, and this was continual. I decided that
nothing could feaze Luther Merrill.
Still, he was not absolute proof against bees. I have mentioned the
swarm between the floors of the old house, and in the course of the
morning Luther's plowing took him near the corner where it seems they
had their entrance. It was a bright, hot day and they were quite busy,
but not busy enough to prevent them from giving prompt attention to us
as we came along.
I was holding one handle of the plow at the moment, pretending to help,
when I noticed a peculiar high-pitched note close to my ear, and a
certain pungent "mad smell" which bees know how to make. Something told
me just then that I had business in the upper corner of the lot and I
set out to attend to it. Two of those bees came along. They hurried a
good deal--they had to, to keep up with me. I discouraged them as much
as possible with an earnest fanning or beating motion and sharp words. I
was not entirely successful. I felt something hot and sudden on the lobe
of one ear just as I dove beneath the bushes that draped the upper wall,
and I had an almost immediate sensation of its becoming hard and
pear-shaped.
I peered out presently to see what had become of Luther Merrill. He had
not basely deserted his team--he was too high-class for that, but he was
moving from the point of attack with as little delay as possible,
grasping the lines with one hand and pawing the air with the other. By
the time I reached him he was plowing in a rather remote corner, and he
had lost some of his beauty--one eye was quite closed. He said he would
plow down there by the house late in the evening, or on the next wet
day.
Luther plowed and harrowed and sowed for us--two fields of rye and
timothy mixed, to insure a future meadow, this on Westbury's advice. A
part of one field had great boulders in it, which he suggested we take
out. I said we would drop the boulders into the brook at intervals to
make the pretty falls it now lacked. Next morning, Luther Merrill came
with a heavy chain and a stone-boat (an immense sled without runners)
and for two happy days we reconstructed the world, dislocating and
hauling boulders that had not stirred since the ice age.
Luther was an expert at chaining out boulders, and he loved the job.
When we got one to the brook, and after great prying and grunting
finally boosted it in with a mighty splash, Luther would wave his arms,
jump about, and laugh like the high-hearted boy that he was. Those were
lovely days.
[Illustration]