The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

That was four days ago, and since then, all day long, the deliberate, unworried oxen had wallowed belly deep through the melting snow, only approximately responsive to excited shouts of "jee" and "haw," dragging on the rough low sledges the hogsheads into which the men emptied the buckets of sap from the trees. Night and day the great brick furnace that ran full length down the middle of the sugar house had roared. Jimmie and Augusta had kept open fire in the front of it during the bitterest of the winter, and Jimmie had many times complained that his back was broken carrying wood for it. But where he had carried armfuls, the furnace now demanded cords. It raced and danced and panted in a furious race with the running sap, for the sap must be boiled down to syrup almost as fast as it ran.

Already they had seen the dark, thick syrup poured into the cans and sealed. And having eaten of it, Jimmie and Augusta, used to the article that is sold in bottles in our cities as pure maple syrup, wondered what must become of this kind which they had now tasted. For certainly nobody that they had ever known had been rich enough to buy any of it.

But they had seen what they were told were the best batches of the syrup put aside for the "sugaring off." The term meant nothing to either of them, for they had never heard of it before. But the constant reference to it and the careful timing of everything that went on in the camp with a sole regard for this event soon made them look towards it as eagerly as if they had been a sugar hungry boy and girl in the camp waiting for nothing but the great day.

Today McQuade had come for the event. And with him had come Fan McQuade, his wife. She was a tall, slender woman, unmistakably a daughter of women who a hundred years ago and more trailed from Vermont over into our North Country. There was strength and unspent beauty in her face, and in spite of the argument of her three mighty sons she seemed entirely too young to be a mate for John McQuade. Her face was grave and there was a thrifty tidiness about her person and her speech that made you wonder how she had ever come to marry a man like McQuade.

Of course, twenty years after the fact, you have the same wonder as to why almost any woman married her particular man. And most of them will tell you, in what they think are moments of truth telling, that they quarreled with the right man, and just took this one for spite. All of which is probably just as true—and no more so—as it is true that distant fields are greener than the ones we are treading now.

But Augusta did wonder, on sight, how this grave faced woman had given herself to the happy-go-lucky young greenhorn that John McQuade probably had been twenty-five years ago. She wondered, until she heard Fan McQuade laugh. It was a surprised, and surprising, burst of pure merriment, beginning with a startled chuckle and ringing out into a clear peal of sheer joy in fun. Then Augusta understood it all. This girl of a sober race was not herself a fun maker, but she loved to be made laugh. McQuade had made her laugh. And he had then blarneyed his way into her heart, past religious and racial and temperamental differences and barriers that would have stopped a thoughtful man.

However, Augusta reflected, it must have been well with them, for McQuade was still able to make his Fan laugh. She laughed now as she overheard the unfolding of McQuade's tale to Jimmie.

"The Divil was lookin' for a man by the name of Barney McGonigle," McQuade stated gravely, while Wardwell listened with the professional interest and envy of a brother artist.

"Now, this man McGonigle, as I understand it, was a man with a weakness. 'Twas known that he tasted spirits. He had been drunk for two weeks. At the latter end of that time, as luck would have it, he was a little bit wide of his bearings. He wandered into an Orange Lodge.

"The stairway going up to the Lodge room was guarded with a drawn sword, of course. But McGonigle came down. He'd been resting on the roof of the place.