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.
