Dwellers in Arcady: The Story of an Abandoned Farm

by Albert Bigelow Paine

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.

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.