All in all, just under two hundred acres, and as a girl, Beatrice Schade, Bea, had roamed the farm freely, especially in summer when school let out. In corn season, huge wings of irrigated water pumped in from the river wheeled over a sea of tassels, the heavy horses, heads festooned with oak-leaf sprays to keep off the flies, ready at the market wagons in the yard, men with blades and balsa baskets for packing. Later, trucks for all this. A tractor. Harrows. Tin cup on a chain at the trough, the water icy and tasting of scallions. Then the peaches coming on in full August attar, the packing shed a din, men’s voices rising over the hulking green Niagara sorter, its felted chutes and rollers churning all day, even into some evenings, the imperfect fruit, stones and all, flung into crimson carnage through open back doors, scarves of bees thrumming there. Ladders leaning into tossing bladed tops of trees, rows and rows of them. Men’s voices from these treetops. Italians from Philadelphia and elsewhere, who came on trucks each day, seasonally, to help with the picking. A whistle coming from them sometimes as she passed, on through the fields and orchards smelling of ginger, the soil so fine they called it “sugar sand.”
Along the river was how she usually went, past the smokehouse, out-house privy (bags of fertilizer stored in there by then), the apple copse with its hives of bees and waxy screens of honey, dog pen, houses on stilts, some with skiffs or rafts tied up outside, strung-up trousers of the squatters who’d come in off the rails before, during, and after the Depression, mostly men, all named Bill, it seemed to Beatrice, Windy Bill, Bad Bill, Pleasant Bill, and Bill Elmer, whose shack had caught on fire, dying when the drifter went back in for something valuable, the extensive acreage of Paradise Close bristling with such shacks and lean-tos, where hobos and travelers came and went over the decades, especially during hard times, thanks to the leniency or indifference of the Schades.
To get to Ida’s, Bea had to pass through a dark patch of woods on a rough lane everyone called “the little bridge,” grateful for the cool cover of tall oaks, locusts, maples. If she squinted, she could see into and beyond them to the golden slopes of the small vineyard, her grandfather’s passion and his folly, gone mostly fallow later, during Prohibition, though the canes and wires were still tangled with vines. The woodsy path was fragrant, edged with fox grape and the honeysuckle trumpets she plucked and nipped at the tips to sip the nectar.
As a child, Bea spent hours with Ida while Ida’s husband, Brut, who kept a little marina—mostly men from Philadelphia coming over to fish and cool off in the summer, or to go gunning for small game in the winter—worked and loafed outside. Ida served the men meals and sometimes a little rye whiskey (“Your grandfather tried to get me to serve his wine when he was still alive,” Ida once said to Bea. “Know why not? Vinegar is why not”). And while Ida stewed tomatoes or gutted fish, fried eels (all jittery in the pan, even dead and skinned), jiggled clams open with a quick, sharp blade, Bea would wander out among chicken-wire pens of animals, a kind of sanctuary back there. A box turtle, round as a sapling and missing a foot, that Ida said was older than Bea’s father and would likely outlive even Beatrice and any children she might have. Always a succession of injured hawks. Once a flying squirrel that swung freely about the kitchen, curtains to wire-dropped light bulb to doorjamb. A fox was kept in its own pen, far from the chickens. A series of owls. Sometimes Ida let Bea make the chicken mash—clam and oyster shells thrown into a grinder with field-corn cobs—silky in her hands, the hens flocking at her feet in a cobble of pecks and nerves.
On inclement or overcast days, Ida, a young wife then, though she had no children of her own, would sit and talk, making observations about the men who visited the marina or offering bits of news about the Bills and some of the other people, like herself and Brut, who lived on or about the Close—Olive Brick from up the crick, who had just been diagnosed with the cancer, like Beatrice’s father, or the old German umbrella-maker and his nephew Otto (both confirmed bachelors, she winked, though Beatrice failed to understand), who shared a cabin up beyond the vineyard.
“Who buys them from them,” Beatrice had asked. “The umbrellas.” Beatrice had an umbrella that she carried on rainy days, but she was quite sure it came from Strawbridge & Clothier or John Wanamaker’s. “Can’t say,” said Ida. “Mostly it’s got to be just repairs they do now, I guess. Anybody wants one can get an umberella at a store.” Ida said it that way, “umberella.” “I guess some people are more thrifty than others, want to keep the old ones going. Me and Brut wear oil coats in the rain. Got hoods on them, you see. Keeps hands free. Got no need for a umberella.”
Bea’s favorite was the story Ida told about how one afternoon Bea’s grandfather was walking the property when he came upon the poet Walt Whitman, naked as a baby, sitting up to his neck in the Rancocas among the splatter-docks, rubbing himself down with clay-like mud from the creek bottom and slapping his shoulders with a willow switch. “Are you sure it was Walt Whitman?” Bea asked Ida. By then she knew of the poet and had even recited, standing beside her desk in her grade school classroom, “O Captain, My Captain.” “Oh, sure, sure as you’re born it was him, your grandfather knew of him from some farm people down at Laurel Springs,” Ida said. “White Horse, they called it then. The old poet had been sick and sometimes came on from Camden to stay at the Laurel Springs place, set along a crick, Timber, I believe it was, but he came on up this way one day, running an errand with some boy in a wagon, and took a notion to swim since the afternoon was warmish. Your grandfather himself stripped down and took a bath too, and then sent the poet and his wagon friend off back to Laurel Springs with some bottles of his terrible wine.”