XXVII

TOM SHERMAN and his helper, Henry Hunter, have been working at the farm. At the end of winter every house needs a carpenter as it might need a doctor, and early summer is a good time to get things done. The skylight leaked. The piazza steps had succumbed to fifteen years of snow and would have to be scrapped and replaced. There was an ominous water stain on the ceiling of the east bedroom by the outer wall, and upstairs a screen had lost its neatly-fitted runners, and mosquitoes had discovered the gap in the defense.

Every spring we have such a list, and every spring, if we can, we get hold of Tom and ask him to put us down for some “time.” We do not fuss too much over the property, for any good house is as much a living and growing thing as a tomato plant or a calf, and a stability of perfection is neither wise to seek nor possible to find. So Tom puts us down as needing carpenter work, and says he will come just as soon as he has finished one or two more jobs. This understanding arrived at, we forget all about it, and go on with our usual round of things to do. We know that Tom will come when he can.

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I didn’t hear him drive up this morning, but I heard the almost simultaneous slam of two automobile doors. Looking out the kitchen window, I saw two figures walking across the grass towards the shed, one of them carrying a carpenter’s box by its slot-handle. Tom had come, and on a pleasant summer day.

It was good to see him, not only because of the help he would give us, but because he is one of my oldest friends. In time of life, he stands between my generation of War I and the so-different generation of War II, a man still young, slight, wiry, and of about middle height, and dressed, that morning, in covert-cloth grey. When I first knew him, years ago, he had been working in the village shipyard which used to turn out both fishing schooners and pleasure yachts, and it was his hand which used to cut and fit the beautiful seasoned wood when the blueprint called for judgment and the craftsman’s skill.

The house is full of Tom’s work, and there is something else that is a part of it—a memory. Some years ago when I happened to be here alone in a forlorn spring and making a rather grim best of it, Tom—who was doing some carpentering for me—brought me a grand cake which Mrs. Sherman had been kind enough to make and send up. The thoughtful and neighborly gesture gave me just the human cheering-up I needed, for I was indeed getting rather blue.

After a morning welcome and some consulting, nobody wasted any time. The shed became a workshop, and presently sent forth the sound of sawing and hammering and an occasional discussion, the light breeze, meanwhile, blowing the curls of the shavings down the passage towards the kitchen door. The new step began to take shape, and a little later, by a certain change of sound in the use of the hammer, I guessed that Tom was working on the screens. I myself came and went to the small field and the garden patch.

At noon, Tom and Henry Hunter knocked off work and sat down and had their dinner under a tree which makes a glorious umbrella of country shade. Seeing me coming from the garden, Tom hailed me over to their side. “Do you want a swarm of bees?” he said. “I can let you have a swarm. This would be a good place to keep bees.” The talk went on about bees. Henry Hunter said that his family had always had bees, and that when he was a boy the bees his father had kept were not the kind they have now “but the black bees. They used to sting like anything.”

Tom told us of his adventures with wild honey, and of the old hollow hemlocks the wild swarms so often choose when they establish themselves in these vast woods. He had seen such trees raided for their store, and he remembered a giant hemlock whose hollow was a funnel of the masterless wild honey, there being such a richness and a wealth of it that “two or three wash tubs” were filled with the brown comb and the slow, dark, golden flood.

It was good talk—talk as honest, friendly, and pleasant as good bread.

FARM DIARY

Strolling groups of “cowboy” singers and “instrumentalists” are again a feature of our summer life. The troupers wear cowboy clothes of the theatrical kind with braid pipings and fancy pockets, and, to judge by their accents, come from our own New England manufacturing towns. All are rather young, and have only recently emerged from the services. The sight of one of these “cowboys” “dressed-up regardless” and walking down the street through our population of townspeople, farmers, lobstermen, clam-diggers, summer people, and craftsmen, is something for the musing observer. We go to the shows once in awhile, and always wish the youngsters well. / Sixth consecutive hot day, and we need rain badly, the farm gardens looking weighed down and frowsty with the blazing heat, and scorched spots begin to appear on the lawn. / The grass now standing high and the insect population of the fields having increased, the barn swallows are skimming the slopes, coasting the air down to the pond. / Every day, now, the children along our road go swimming in the pond, the little boys kicking up the dust and swinging their bathing trunks cheerfully as they pass; the little girls very cheerful, too, but more sedate. / Elizabeth says that a pair of redstarts are nesting somewhere near the house.

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Years ago, while on a sea voyage in northern waters, I picked up a novel which some fellow passenger had abandoned under a deck chair and found myself reading it. It had to do with the efforts of two very evil men to break open the sealed and magical gate which separated the created earth and the shaped and created universe from primeval and shapeless chaos somehow lying mystically to one side. I remember a fine, last, and epic tussle between the wickedest being and the servant of man in the caves beneath a castle rooted in the sea.

There are moments in which melodrama becomes life, and this is one of them. It is not a struggle now between “good” and “bad,” it is a battle between creation and chaos, between human existence and meaningless, inhuman nothingness. Perhaps there is still time to take a stand for the Kingdom of Life; it needs defenders. Perhaps, mighty as its enemies may be, allies will come who are even mightier.