CHAPTER XIII—WATSON’S HILL
By October of this year the fires of September had sunk to a rich smouldering glow. The rolling woods, as far as the eye could see, were masses of dusky gold and wine-color. There was actual smoke, too, pale blue in the hollows, from many forest fires.
Nearly all of October was Indian Summer. Every day there was a soft golden haze, just veiling the yellow of the woods, and the days were warm and still, like midsummer, but with a kind of mellow peacefulness.
We spent a whole day out on Watson’s Hill, watching the distant smoke of forest fires, and listening to the different Autumn sounds, the ring of axes from the wooded part of the hill, an occasional shot, the tapping of woodpeckers, and the friendly chirruping of chickadees and juncos. The bare hill-top was steeped in sunshine. The checkerberries and beechnuts were just ripe, and very good. We built our fire on a flat-topped, lichened rock, and found water to drink in a little tarn among the russet and tawny ferns and cotton-grasses, fed by a spring which stirred and dimpled the surface.
Driving home, at dusk, we passed field after field of Indian Warriors, corn-stacks, all looking the same way, with golden pumpkins among them; and suddenly, over the eastern ridge, the great round yellow Hunter’s Moon rose.
It was strange, later, to see the oaks and sugar maples, towers of gold, instead of towers of green, in the moonlight.
A few days later we had a three days’ storm of rain and heavy wind, and then the golden harvest lay on the ground. It was heaped and piled along the roadsides in winrows, through which the children scuffed and frolicked.
(The leaves in the town streets are burned, which is a waste, but if we were so thrifty as to keep them we should lose the autumn bonfires. I counted fourteen about the different streets, one evening, each with a glow lighting up the dusk, and giving out an indescribable sweet-and-acrid smell as the smoke poured out in cream-white swirls, almost thick enough to be felt. The men in charge of them looked black against the blaze, and a flock of children were scampering about each fire.) The day after the rain the leaves lay all through the woods like a yellow carpet, and threw up actual light. In some places they had fallen in lines and patterns, and, wet with rain and autumn dew, they gave out fragrance which was as sweet as wine.
Late in October there was sudden illness at a friend’s house. Every nurse in town was busy already, and we drove out to see if we could get Marcia Watson, at Watson’s Hill. Marcia is not a graduate nurse, but she knows what a sick woman wants, and what a sick household, paralyzed by the illness of its head, must have, and can set the whole stricken machinery in order again. She is a tiny creature, as merry as a squirrel, with quick, tranquil ways.
The Watson’s Hill district is six miles east of us. The Hill is a beech-wooded ridge, rocky through its whole length, and curving almost enough to suggest an amphitheatre. A good farming region lies spread out below it, and there is a village nucleus, a store, the Grange Hall, and a meeting-house. The hall was burnt, two years ago, and the whole neighborhood set to work to rebuild it. They had fifteen-cent entertainments and peanut parties, and sales of aprons and cooked food. The men did the building, giving their time, and the women cooked for the men, and this fall the last shingle of the substantial new building was laid.
The only mill for many miles is the corn-cannery. Corn-husking always brings farm neighbors together; sweet corn, for canning, is husked in August, fodder corn in late October. Families come to husk for each other, and the wide barn floors where they sit are piled high with husks; but in the districts near a cannery, as here, the whole community gathers. In good weather the work is all done out of doors, and the laughing and chatting groups, men, women, and children, sit up to their waists in husks. The stoves and kitchens of neighbors are all pre-empted, and the women bake and fry, and come bustling out to the workers with milk, bread and cheese, pies and doughnuts.
Here, at Watson’s Hill, as at nearly every farm village in our part of the world, the neighbors meet for the weekly dance, which is as much a matter of course as church on Sundays. It would be hard to describe adequately the friendliness and complete sociableness of these neighborhood gatherings. Old and middle-aged and young are called by their first names, and everybody dances; not round dances, but the beautiful old country dances, which, transplanted over seas and carried down a century, still show their quality, and keep something of the courtly nature of the great houses in France and England where they had their stately beginnings: a quality that gives a certain true social training. Everyone in the hall is truly in company. Hands must be given and glances met, all round the dance, and awkwardness and shyness are quickly danced out of existence.
We have the Lancers, the Tempest, the Lady of the Lake, and various quadrilles. They cannot now perhaps be called exactly stately.
“Balance to partners!” calls out old Abel Tarbox, master of ceremonies of the Grange Hall, as he fiddles.
“Balance to partner! Swing the same! All sashy!” And then comes the splendid romp of,
“Eight hands round!” and “Eight hands down the middle!”
Besides the old court dances, there are Pop Goes the Weasel, Money Musk, Hull’s Victory, and others, pretty, intricate frolics, which in their day were the dernier cri of fashion, danced by gilded youth in great cities, velvet coat and ruffles, flowered silk petticoat, and spangled fan.
The Chorus Jig is very difficult. It has “contra-corners,” and other mysteries impossible to uninitiated feet.
When money is to be raised for some neighborhood purpose partners for the evening are chosen in what I should think might be a trying, though a most practical fashion. On one Saturday evening the ladies, on the next the gentlemen, are put up for auction as partners, the price paid being in peanuts. A popular partner will sometimes bring as much as a hundred and twenty-five peanuts; and why little Alfred Stoddard, who never did anything in his life but get a musical degree at some tiny college (there are even those who say that he bought the degree), who reads catalogues and nurses his dignity while his wife works the farm, should regularly fetch this fancy price, I never could see.
“Oh, well!” says Sam Marston, “Alfred has them handsome, mournful dark eyes. The ladies can’t resist ’em.”
The three Watson farms lie to the east of the hill, right under its rocky ledges, and are sheltered by it; indeed the whole of the beautiful rounded valley which they occupy is rimmed entirely by low abrupt hills. It must be an old lake bottom, for the last remnant of the lake, a pond a hundred yards or so long, still sparkles bright blue in the midst of it.
Forty years ago Tristam Watson, with his wife and four children, three boys, and Marcia, the youngest, went north two hundred miles, to the Aroostook, when that region still lay under heavy forest. He built his cabin among the first-growth pines, and cleared and planted among the trees, burning and uprooting the stumps gradually, as he could. It was pioneer life, with no roads and almost no neighbors. Bear and moose were common, and deer more than common, and there were wolves in a hard winter; but he was a hardy, vigorous man with hardy children, and he did well.
He had no idea of cutting himself and his family off from their home ties. Nothing of the sort. The railroad ran only a short part of the way, and they could not afford that part, but every year they hitched up and drove home, the whole distance. It took them about five days. They had a little home-made tent, and they built their fire and set up their gipsy housekeeping each night beside the road. If it rained, “why then it rained,” Marcia says. The year was marked by this flight; it was their great adventure, and apparently a perfect frolic, at least for the children. They stayed two or three weeks, saw all the “folks,” and went back to their strenuous forest life.
Tristam died at about sixty, and the family came home, and took up the three beautiful farms left to the sons by their grandparents. The two elder sons married, the third stayed with his mother and sister.
Not long after they came back, Marcia fell ill. There was a badly aggravated strain, and she had measles and bronchitis, and after that, as we say in the country, she “commenced ailing.” She changed in a year from a blooming girl to the little thin, white-faced woman she is now (though her black eyes never stopped twinkling).
A long illness on an isolated farm is a bad thing for more than bodily health. The Rural Free Delivery and Rural Telephone, and the lengthening trolley lines, are bringing the most wholesome stir imaginable after the old colorless days; but in old times the outlying farms too often held pitiful brooding figures of women, sunk in depression. Marcia’s terror was lest she should fall under this shadow. She had seen only too many such cases, and the fear was beginning to realize itself, she often has told me; but from its very danger her mind, fundamentally sane and vigorous, plucked out its salvation. First absorbed in her own ailments, she began to question her doctor about the cure of other diseases. Soon she asked him for books on medicine. She read and studied, and then one day she asked him to take her to see a suffering neighbor. To humor her, he did, and almost at once, ill as she still was, she began to help nursing patients on the neighboring farms. Once her mind took hold of work, it cleared itself as the sky clears of clouds when the wind blows. It was like a slender but vigorous-fibred little tree reaching out and finding life-giving soil for itself. I do not believe she has an ounce of extra strength, even now, and she is by no means always free from pain, but she can do her work, and for five years she has been the most sought-after nurse in half the county.
She has an imp’s fun (and had, even when she was most ill) and can make a groaning patient laugh, as she lays on hot compresses. As we drove home that day in October, she told me how she had been outwitting her brother. (He is a handsome blond-bearded fellow, with what is rare on the farms, a carriage as erect as a soldier’s. He is far slower-natured than Marcia.)
“He’s been real tardy, this year, in getting the hams smoked, and he put off building a smoke-house. He was all for hauling his lumber. Nothing would do but that lumber must be hauled first, whether the pigs were smoked, or whether they flew; and there were Mother and I in want of our bacon.”
He started out with the lumber. The moment his back was turned Marcia pounced on his brand-new chicken coop (“he fusses like a woman buying a bonnet, over his chicken coops”), which was just finished and right, and smoked the meat for herself.
“That man was fairly annoyed!” she told me demurely.
Last spring the brother and sister shingled the barn roof together. Leonard, the brother, was deliberate and painstaking, and Marcia in triumph nailed his coat-tails to the roof, according to the time-honored privilege of the shingle-nailer, if the shingle-layer lets himself get caught up with.
It was from Marcia and her brother that I first heard the expression “var,” for balsam fir. This is our general country term; but I do not know whether this is a survival of some older form, or a corruption. Here in the Watson Hill neighborhood I have also heard the old-fashioned word “suent,” meaning convenient, suitable, so familiar in dialect stories of Somersetshire and Devon.
It was well past the fall of the year before we drove Marcia home again, and a wild autumn storm of wind and heavy rain had carried away all but the last of the hanging leaves. The shores of the ponds and rivers showed clear ashes-and-slate colors, and clear dark grays, but the fields were the pale russet which lasts all winter under the snow. Beech leaves were still hanging, a beautiful tender fawn color, and, of course, oak leaves, and the gray birches were like puffs of pale yellow smoke in among the purple and ashen woods. Crab-apples still hung, withered red, on the trees, and the hips of the wild roses and haws of the hawthorns, and the black alder berries, made little blurs of scarlet in the swamps. Here and there the road dipped through small copses, bare of leaves, where there were masses of clematis, carrying its tufts of soft gray fluff, entwined among the bushes, and milkweed pods, just letting out their shining silver-white silk. Witch-hazel was in flower all through the woods.
The evergreens showed up everywhere, in delicate vigorous beauty, and we counted unguessed masses of pine among the hills. I think we always expect a little sadness with the fall of the leaves, but instead there is a sense of elation, with the greater spread of light and the wider views opening everywhere. The wood roads showed more plainly than in summer, and paths stood out green across the fields. The tender unveiling of autumn had revealed the hidden topography of the forest, and countless small ravines and slopes were suddenly made plain. There were smaller, friendly revelations, too, for we came here and there, on large and small nests, and saw where the vireos and warblers had had their tiny housekeeping.
Late ploughing was over, and hauling had begun. We passed a good many loads of potatoes and apples, on their way to the railroad, and then a load of wood, and one of balsam fir boughs, for banking the houses. The wood was drawn by a pair of handsome black and cream-white oxen, and the boughs by a pair of “old natives,” plain red brown. The potatoes and fruit must all be hauled before the cold is too great.
For the last three miles before the land opens out into the Watson farms, the hills are covered with low woods, above which rises the pointed head of Rattlesnake Hill, the only high land in sight. The woods were like purplish fur over the hillsides, and nearer showed countless perfect rounded gray rods and wands, like fine strokes of a brush. There was a great shining of wet rocks and mossy places. It was one of those still late-autumn mornings, perfectly clear after the rain, when the air is as fragrant and full of life as in spring.
Longfellow Pond lies in a hollow of the woods, three miles from anywhere, a beautiful little wild wooded place, three-quarters of a mile long, where wild duck come. Alas! when we came near, a portable saw-mill was at work close to the shore! A high pile of warm-colored sawdust rose already in the beautiful green of the pine wood. They had just felled three big pines, and the new-cut butts showed white among the masses of lopped branches.
LONGFELLOW POND LIES IN THE HOLLOW OF THE WOODS
The stretch of wooded country about the pond lies in a belt or fold between two prosperous farming districts, and has its own population, a gipsy-looking set, living in the woods in little shacks, half-farmhouse, half-shanty, with a few straggling chickens. The men of this place were working for the operator of the saw-mill. It was dinner-time when we came by, and half a dozen lithe dark young men were sitting about on the log ends, eating their dinner, which some little dusky children had brought them in pails and odd dishes.
We walked down between the stacks of fragrant new-cut lumber to the edge of the pond, which lay between its wooded shores, as blue as the sky, sparkling in the sunshine. We could make out three duck at the farther end of it. It is a pity to have the fine growth of pine cut, but it grows fast again with us. Nobody cares for the lesser hard wood growths in such an over-forested State as ours, and once the saw-mill is gone, the pond will probably stay its wild lonely self, perhaps for ages.
The last day that Marcia was with us she wanted to see the river, and we went down and found the flood tide making strongly, two or three gulls sailing peacefully about, and a late coal barge being towed down against the tide. We had three days of still deep frost after this, and the next day when I went down to a hill overlooking one of the most beautiful reaches of the river, there it lay, a transparent gray mirror, not to move again until April. All the colors of the banks were pearl and ashen. Though it lay so still, it whispered and talked to itself incessantly. There were little ringing gurgles, like the sound of a glass water-hammer; now tinklings, now the fall of a tiny crystal avalanche; with occasional deeper soft boomings and resoundings, and all the time a whispered swish-swish along the banks, the sound of the soft breaking and fall of the shell ice as the tide ebbed.