CHAPTER XII—HARVEST
In late September an errand took us out to Sam Marston’s again. We wanted a quantity of early farm things, sweet cider, Porter apples, and honey.
The woods were in a flame of fiery color as we drove out through the intricacies of the river hills. They glowed like beds of tulips, with only the dark evergreens to set them off, and turned our whole country into a huge flower garden.
The crops had all been very good this season. Hay and grain were both heavy, and the apple trees had to be propped, the branches were so loaded with fruit. Our own grapes bore heavily.
The early apples were just gathering when we reached the farm, amongst all sorts of pleasant orchard sounds, the rumble of apples poured from bushel baskets into barrels, the squeak of the cider mill, and the men talking at work. The large new orchard of Bellefleurs is hand-picked, in the modern method; each apple is wrapped in paper, and the fruit has its special first-rate market; but Sam is not going to take his father’s old miscellaneous orchard in hand until next year, and here he and his men were picking and piling in the old wholesale fashion. The sweet-smelling pyramids stood waist-high under the trees.
Sam scrambled down his ladder, and shouted to Susan, who came out from her baking with her hands white with flour. The last time we came, we had seen only the house and dairy; now we must see the farm, and we strolled together through the sunny orchard and then were taken to the apple cellar, where the filled barrels stood in close ranks already. The cellar was fragrant with them. Susan’s own special apples, Snows, Strawberries, and Porters, were at one side.
“Has to have ’em!” Sam said. “Every farm book tells you how mixed apples can’t pay, and hinder the farm, but come Grange suppers and church suppers, and young folks happening in, and Fair times, if Susan couldn’t have her mixed fruit, she’d think we might full as well be at the Town-Farm.”
The root cellar, smelling earthy, was next the apple cellar, and here Sam had a few beets and carrots, in neat bins, but the greater part of the roots were still undug.
The cider-mill was at the edge of the orchard, with piles of windfall apples beside it; Sam turned a fresh jug-full for us to drink, and then filled our cans.
After this we had to see all Susan’s pets. There were two handsome collies; and a yellow house cat, and a great black barn cat, on stiff terms with each other, came and rubbed against us with arched backs. There were the ducks and geese, and tumbler pigeons, fluttering down in great haste when Susan scattered corn. The newest pet was a raccoon. He was in the tool-room of the barn, nibbling corn. He steadied the ear as he ate, with little hands as careful as a child’s. He looked sly and mischievous, and sidled away as we came in, looking up at us with bright eyes. He wore a little collar, and dragged a short length of chain, so that the pigeons could hear him coming; but he was not confined in any way, and seemed entirely happy and at home about the barn.
“Pretty fellow, then,” said Susan, scratching his handsome fur. “But he’s a scamp, he is. Only to think, what happened to my pies, last baking! I’d made a quantity, both mince and pumpkin, and if this rascal doesn’t slip into the pantry, eat all he can hold, and mark the rest of the pies all over with his little hands, and throw them on the floor!”
She asked if we had ever seen a raccoon with a piece of meat. We had not, and she fetched a bit from the ice chest and gave it to her pet. He took it in his little hands, went to his water dish, and washed the meat thoroughly, sousing it up and down till it was almost a pulp, before he swallowed it. Susan said that raccoons, wild or tame, will always do this, with all animal food; mouse or mole or grasshopper, they will not touch it till they have washed it well, and will go hungry rather than eat unwashed food. Sam, who knows the woods like the back of his hand, confirmed this.
“Souse it in a brook, they will, till they have it soggy. They won’t eat it till then.”
While we were looking, a morose-looking old man drove into the yard. He checked his horse, and sat gazing straight before him with a wooden expression.
“Hullo, Uncle!” said Sam. “Come for apples?”
The old man shook his head, but said nothing.
“Cider?” said Sam.
He shook his head also at this, and at every other suggestion, and never opened his lips. After a while Sam, who seemed to know his ways, nodded cheerfully, said, “Well, tell us when you get ready to!” and turned towards the house.
The old man waited till he had gone twenty feet, and then said grudgingly:
“I come to see that there cow. You finish with your company! I’ll wait.”
“That’s old Ammi Peaslee,” Susan whispered. “He always acts odd. Oh, no, no relation; everyone on the road calls him Uncle: ‘Uncle Batch’ when he’s not round.”
“He didn’t mean to be a batch” (bachelor), she went on reflectively; and then with some shamefacedness, she told us how Mr. Peaselee had once been engaged to be married to Miss Charity Jordan (who lived alone in the big brick Jordan house at the corner) for twenty-five long years. One day the lady’s roof needed shingling, and she called on her suitor to shingle it. (“She never could bear to spend money, nor he either, and it’s a fact that neither one of them had much to spend!”)
He did it, and did a good job; but afterwards, thinking it but right and fair, he brought a set of shirts for his sweetheart to make.
“She made them, and she sent him in a bill; and he paid it, and never spoke to her again from that day to this, and that is fifteen years ago.
“Now hear me gossip! I am fairly ashamed!” Susan cried out.
The barn was sweet with hay. Part of the season’s pumpkins were piled in the grain room, and lit up the dusk with their dark gold. Some of them still lay in golden piles in the barn-yard. The ears of corn, yellow and red, lay in separate heaps.
“I miss Mother!” Susan said (she spoke of Sam’s mother, who had passed on the year before). “She saw to all the pretty things about the farm. She used to hang the corn in patterns on the ceiling-hooks, red and yellow. She’d place the onions in amongst the corn, in ropes or bunches, and contrive all kinds of pretty notions.”
Susan sighed, and called the two collies to her, and patted and fondled their heads. As I said before, she and Sam have no children.
Sam went to get our honey, saying that he should be stung to death, and never mourned for, for nobody missed a left-handed fellar; and Susan took us into the house, and brought out doughnuts, a pumpkin pie, and cream so thick that it could hardly be skimmed.
When Sam came back with the honey there was a to-do, for Susan’s Jersey calf, outside in the orchard, had tangled itself in its rope, and fallen and sprained its shoulder. The little creature was trembling all over. Susan rubbed in fresh goose-oil, while Sam asked if she “didn’t want he should get him up a nice pair of crutches.”
For our cranberries, we were to go on a mile further, to a farm on the slope of the next hill, the Pennys’.
“The old woman’s deaf, but you can make her hear by shouting. Most likely she’ll be the only one of the folks at home. They’re odd folks,” Susan called, shading her eyes to look after us, after Sam had succeeded in packing our purchases in the wagon, laughing and talking about the way Noah filled the ark, and Susan had given my little sister a wistful kiss.
The Pennys’ was an out-of-the-way place. The farm was on the northern slope of a hill, the house a tiny unpainted one, weathered almost to black. The corn was standing among the golden pumpkins in stacks that looked like huddled witches. A wild grapevine grew over the shed, but the grapes were already shriveled.
Old Mrs. Penny was shriveled too, and witch-like, and she was smoking a pipe. It was hard to make her understand what we wanted, but at last she came out, with a checked shawl held over her head, and pointed out a path which led through a thicket and across the flank of the hills, to the cranberry bog in the hollow.
THE CORN WAS STANDING AMONG THE GOLDEN PUMPKINS IN STACKS THAT LOOKED LIKE HUDDLED WITCHES
Mrs. Penny, Jr., was squatted down among the swamp mosses, picking cranberries into sacks. She was a fat Indian-looking woman, and two dark little girls, pretty, and also like Indians, with black hair neatly parted, were at work with her. They were delighted to sell their berries.
The swamp glowed like a Turkey carpet. The cranberry vines and huckleberry bushes were pure crimson, the black alder berries scarlet, and the ferns burnt-orange. Just beyond us, in the velvet of the swamp, was a pond, across which the wind ruffled; living blue, with tawny rushes around it.
As we came back, a hunter, in a leather jacket, with his gun on his shoulder and partridges hanging out of his pockets, stepped out of the woods on the path just ahead of us. This was old Mrs. Penny’s son Jason. The open season had not begun yet, but the farm looked a hard place for a living, and we saw no need of telling, in town, that the Penny family had partridge for supper.
We had a long quiet drive home. It had been so extraordinarily warm, all through early September, that we saw a fine second crop of hay being got in, in a low-lying meadow bordered by thick woods, part of which must have been an old lake-bottom. The grass was heavy, and a good many fresh haycocks were made and standing already, as if in July. The solitary mower rested on his scythe to watch us, and then went on, though the dusk was fast deepening.
We stopped when we came to Height of Land, to look out over the painted woods. They flamed round us to the horizon.
Later the moon rose, in the half-blue, half-dusk, and presently shone on a white mist-lake, over the low land through which we were then passing. The mist was rising, and wreathing the colored woods with white. Next came two more hills, and then another mist-lake in the moonlight.