CHAPTER V—BY THE ACUSHTICOOK
A smaller river, the Acushticook, tumbles and foams down through the midst of our town, and brings us the wonderfully soft pure water of a chain of over twenty lakes and ponds. It flung the hills apart to join the larger stream which it meets at right angles at the Town Bridge, and the last mile of its course is through a beautiful small gorge, in a succession of falls, now compacted into the eight dams which turn our mills.
Above the falls, though it breaks into occasional rapids, its course is quieter, and as you travel towards the setting sun, your canoe follows a peaceful stream, running for the most part through woods.
The country along the Acushticook is broken and hilly, woods or open pastures full of boulders and junipers. The farms depend on their stock and apple orchards for their prosperity. You see big chicken yards, and the more enterprising farmers send their eggs and broilers to city markets. Pigs do well among the apple trees, and most of the farms have ducks and geese as well as chickens. A well-trodden road follows the crest of the ridge, parallel to the river.
The Baxters, good, silent people, live well out on this road, and handsome Ambrose Baxter has a thriving milk route. Sefami Baxter, his uncle, worked in the paper mill his whole life, and now his son, young Sefami, has built up a good market garden business on the Acushticook road. He started it years ago with a tiny greenhouse, which he built on to his farm kitchen. He raised tomatoes and other seedlings, and early lettuce. It was an innovation in our part of the world, and neighbors shook their heads; but one bit of greenhouse was added to another, and now Sefami has three long stacks of them and is a prosperous man. He has a whole field of rhubarb and a large orchard, where he keeps twenty hives of bees. He had no capital beyond the savings of a plain working family, and he had to find his market for himself.
The Drews, now old people, live beyond Ambrose Baxter, and life has been a more poignant thing for them than for most of the farm neighbors. Their boy, Lawrence, was born for learning. He foamed to it, as a stream rushes down hill, and he had the vision and faithfulness which lead to high and lonely places. The parents were industrious and frugal, and Lawrence was the channel through which everything they had, mind and ambitions as well as savings, poured itself out. As a boy, he was all ardor and eagerness. Now he is a tall careworn man of fifty, unmarried, with hair and beard streaked with gray. He is a man of importance in many ways beside that of his own department in a great Western university. He is a good son, and comes home to the comfortable white farmhouse for every day in the year that it is possible, but his parents, of necessity, have had to grow old without him, and their look, in speaking of him, is one of acceptance, as well as of a high pride.
Acushticook has changed her course from time to time through the centuries, and about five miles from town a stretch of flat land which must once have been either intervale along the river’s course or one of its many small lakes, lies pocketed among the hills. This stretch, which is very fertile, belongs, or belonged, to the Dunnacks, and they were surely a family which will be remembered. They never pretended to be anything more than plain farming people, but they were marked by a personal dignity and refinement, even fastidiousness, by their intelligence, and alas, by their many sorrows. Old Warren Dunnack was a farmer of substance. His son, the Warren Dunnack of our time, was nearly all his life in charge of the “Homestead” (one of the few country places in our neighborhood), during the long absence abroad of its owners. He married a beautiful woman, Sarah Brant. She was a magnificent creature, in a hard, almost animal sort of way, but was a shallow person, with a vain nature, coveting show, fine food and clothes, and she broke Warren’s heart. He took her back again and again after her many flights, for he had an unconquerable chivalry and gentleness for all women, and he let her have everything that he could earn.
INTERVALE ALONG THE RIVER’S COURSE
Lucretia was the beauty of the family, a slip of a girl with eyes like black diamonds. She married a showy business man, who turned out badly. She came home, a handsome and embittered older woman, and made life uncomfortable for herself and everyone else on the farm. Afterwards she became companion to a widow of some means, a fantastic person, and they lived together (unharmoniously) all their days.
Delia, who was so pretty, though not striking like Lucretia, married silly Ephraim Simmons; but her affection for her brother Warren was the abiding thing of her life. When Warren’s wife left him, and Delia was offered the position of housekeeper at the Homestead, she took it, and there she and Warren kept house for fifteen years. Two good-natured slack daughters (they were all Simmons; not a trace of their mother’s fire in them) helped Ephraim with his farm, and he certainly needed the money that their mother earned. He was a poor enough farmer; but his foolish face used to look wistful when he drove the six miles, every other Saturday, to see Delia.
Delia, for her part, never seemed anything but clear as to her duty. She drove over now and then to see Ephraim, and sent her money to him and the girls, or put it in the bank for them, but her heart clave to her brother. She kept the long delightfully rambling house, and he kept the farm, lawns, and gardens, punctiliously in order for the owners who never came; and the honeysuckles blossomed in the corner of the great dark hedges, the lilies opened, and the grapes ripened and dropped on the sunny terraces of the garden as the unmarked years went by. I think that Delia’s life was one of untroubled serenity. Warren was a grave man, and his trouble with his wife underlay all his days, but with Delia he found a rare companionship and understanding. Their sitting-room in the ell of the big house was a gathering place for the farm neighbors. There was a deep fireplace, a table with a big lamp, a sofa, high-backed arm-chairs with worsted-work cushions and tidies, and windows filled with blossoming plants.
Warren died after a lingering illness, which he met with his usual grave cheerfulness, and Delia went back to Ephraim on the Acushticook road. Whatever she thought of the difference between the Homestead and the bare little farm, between Warren and Ephraim, she met the change with the charming, half-whimsical philosophy that was hers through life. She had pretty ways, and an unconquerable sense of fun. She lived to be nearly eighty. She was a fine, fine woman; delicately organized, but of such vigorous fibre that she struck her roots deep into life, and gave out good to everyone who came near her. She was a magnet, drawing people by her warmth and sweetness.
It was to poor, good, hard-working John Dunnack that actual tragedy came. He was a plain dull man, of a far humbler stripe than his brothers. Misfortune came to his only child, a young adopted daughter. He lost his place at the mill not long after, from age. He was eighty years old. It was too much. His mind failed, and he took his own life.
A cheerful family, the Greenleafs, live next beyond the Dunnacks. They keep bees on a large scale, and “Greenleaf Honey,” in pretty-shaped glass jars, with a green beech leaf on the label, has had its established market for two generations. They also grew cherries for market, nearly as large as damsons.
Harvey Greenleaf had luck, and has what our people know as “gumption,” and “git-up-and-git,” and Mrs. Greenleaf, a fair, ample person, is a born woman of business. Once a neighbor, a farm hand, who had been discharged for slackness, planted buckwheat in a small clearing next the Greenleafs’, out of spite. (Buckwheat honey is unmarketable, because of its marked peculiar flavor, and its dark color.) Harvey was away at the County Grange Meeting—he was Master of his Grange that year—at the time it flowered. Two little girls, out picking wild raspberries, brought word of the trouble.
“Mis’ Greenleaf! Mis’ Greenleaf! There’s buckwheat in blow at Jasper Derry’s clearing, an’ it’s full of your bees!”
Mrs. Greenleaf harnessed up the old white mare herself, and drove over to the offender’s house. No one knows how she dealt with him, but the buckwheat was cut before night. Harvey chuckles, and says she swung the scythe herself. Not much harm was done, and only a little of the yield turned out to have been injured by the buckwheat.
There are no rules about the planting of buckwheat near bee-hives. It is a matter of good feeling and neighborliness, and buckwheat is seldom grown where a neighbor keeps bees for profit; but it is impossible to guard against the trouble entirely and I have known a whole season’s yield to be discolored with honey brought from buckwheat, nine miles from the hives.
One early morning this June, as we were at breakfast on the piazza, a boy came round the corner of the house, and asked if we wanted “a quart of wild strawberries, a pint of cream, and a dozen of Mother’s fresh rolls, for forty cents!” We certainly did; and in the driveway we saw “Mother” waiting in the wagon, an alert-looking woman with a friendly face. She told us that she was Harvey Greenleaf’s daughter-in-law, and the boy her eldest son.
“I think there’s lots of small extra business that folks can do on the farms, if they’re spry, that sets things ahead a lot,” she said, à propos of the strawberries.
The rolls were as light as feather, and the cream very thick. We arranged for the same bargain twice a week while the berry season lasted!
In the autumn the same couple came again, this time with vegetables and fruit, nicely arranged, and with small cakes of fresh cream cheese done up in waxed paper in neat packages, each package stamped with S. Greenleaf, Eagle Cliff Farm. This is a new venture in our part of the country.
A mile of beautiful pasture, on a big scale, as smooth as an English down, slopes down from the back of the Greenleafs’ farm, rises in a noble ridge, and slopes again to where the Acushticook sparkles and dances over some thirty yards of rapids. The turf is close cropped and there are boulders and groups of half-sized firs and spruces scattered over the slope. There is a little wood in the upper corner, cool and shadowy, with a brooklet set deep in mosses, trickling through the midst. The pasture road leads through the firs and hemlocks, growing closer and more feathery, then through this wood, where Lady’s Slippers grow.