Friends and Neighbors
When school got out, Mom and Evvie and I packed up and we and Robbie drove up to Bethel for the whole summer. Dad could only come up on the bus for weekends until his vacation started, but we were going up early to try to make that decrepit old house livable.
Our Farm was just as beautiful as before, only greener. So green! Ed had already cut and put in the hay from the west meadow, leaving palomino colored stubble behind. Field corn had sprouted in the east meadow that had been only plowed earth before. The heifers were still in the pasture, but—I traipsed everywhere looking—there was no p__y.
Mom and Evvie and I started fixing up the house. We painted the walls and hung curtains in the windows and bought a gas range. Mom hired Ed’s nephew Steve Murphy to replace some rotten window frames and missing panes. He installed a better water pump so we could flush the toilet. Then Steve put in the toilet. The people before us had only had the outhouse, and we used it too until Steve came: it stank to high heaven and there were flies.
The phone man came and put in a phone and Mom called Ed Pilcher’s wife Beatrice, to make her acquaintance. Beatrice talked so loud on the phone we could hear everything she said to Mom. Beatrice said that we should drive “over Colby Valley way” and take her pickup truck and go buy second-hand furniture “over to Carney’s,” so we did. The farmer’s wife greeted us like old friends; we squeezed into the pickup’s cab and listened while Beatrice talked, at the top of her lungs.
“Carney is a junk dealer,” shouted Beatrice. “He buys up farmers’ stuff at auctions when folks hit bottom and have to sell out. Business is booming for Carney these days,” yelled Beatrice, “so many farmers are going under and leaving for the city.
“The Goodenows, they were the folks who farmed your place before your Dad bought it. They owed everybody so much money they had to sneak out of town at night and leave all their stuff behind,” Beatrice said. “People came and took whatever they wanted from the house. Who woulda wanted it I don’t know, it’d been through Carney’s three times before the Goodenows dog-robbed it from the town dump.”
Carney’s yard was crowded with tin-roofed sheds chuck-full of beds, dressers, sofas, rocking chairs, clothes, family bibles, photo albums, you name it. Lots of stuff was too worn out for even Carney to sell, so he just let it sit out in the open, rotting away. Picking over other people’s things made me feel like we were vultures. Or rats.
Mom bought some oak bedsteads, mattresses and springs; some rockers for the porch, and what Beatrice called a Living Room Suit, plus kitchen chairs and table, all for rock bottom prices. We bought some enamel pots and a big iron skillet too.
Dad came up Friday night and we picked him up at the bus station in Briggsboro. Saturday we watched him and Steve jack up the house foundation so the roof didn’t sag so much. Sunday they ripped out the old front stoop and built a brand new one all in one afternoon.
Next weekend they put in a bathtub and built a fine picnic table out of some old boards stored in the barn, that Steve called “silo staves.” “Silo blew over in a windstorm,” Steve told us. “Them Goodenows never bothered to put it back up.
“The barn is solid though,” said Steve. “Them beams is hand hewn and a foot square.”
The barn was beautiful even though part of the floor was caked with old manure. There was a twelve-stanchion milking aisle and a huge haymow half full of haybales, and half full of dusty sunbeams and swallows swooping in and out feeding their babies. Evvie and I climbed into the mow and sat on the bales and planned where we’d build a stall and maybe a tack room. Being in a real barn made me feel like the p__y was really coming.
Evvie and I and our trusty dog got to know every inch of the Farm. A brook ran through the pasture and under a culvert in the road, then plunged over big rocks in a waterfall right near the house. I loved the sound of it. We found a magic ring of big beech trees on a hilltop behind the haymeadow, perfect for reading books. There was a spring below the cornfield that somebody had dug out and lined it with rocks to make a forest pool. It was clear as crystal and the water was sweet. Deer came to this pool, as well as song birds and game birds and raccoons and bunnies and fishercats and skunks. If we sat quiet at sunset we could watch them drinking. Hawks soared over the mountain by day; owls and coyotes made their eerie music by night. We loved the orchard in its little dell best of all; it was green now, and ringed all around its rim by tall white birches.
I loved being on the farm with all my heart; but I never stopped thinking about the p__y. I wondered if I should speak up and remind Beatrice to remind Ed about it; maybe he thought because I kept quiet that I didn’t really care about having one. Or maybe he’d yell at me if I pestered him. Or maybe he was just kidding about the p__y all along.
Mom and Evvie and I paid social calls: the folks in the pillar mansion were away, but we met the Connors, who farmed the hollow below ours. We got down there by a shortcut—a pretty lane running through maple woods from our road to theirs. Mr. Connor showed us his barn; it was enormous, four times as big as ours, and stuffed to the roof with thousands of hay bales. There were stanchions for 50 dairy cows, and a pen for a pig; but there were no stalls for that other sort of animal. After we had admired the barn, Mrs. Connor and her mother-in-law gave us coffee and fresh made donuts in their kitchen. Grandma Connor was blind, like the Grandmother in Heidi, but she could read from blind books, and besides that she had the Second Sight. She told me I would get my heart’s desire, she could see it as plain as day.
Evvie and I walked down the hollow and visited our nearest neighbor, the one who lived in the trailer next to the burned house. His name was Byron Westford. Byron Westford had come up to our house the first weekend when we were cleaning, just to say welcome to the Hollow and ask was there anything he could help us with.
Dad said Byron Westford was “a ne’er do-well.” Mom said he was “a character.”
Byron started every sentence with the words “Boy Jeez,” which was, our Mom warned us, “an oath.”
“Boy Jeez is swearing, it means…” Mom turned her voice down to a whisper, “‘By Jesus,’ and I don’t want to hear either of you saying it.” But when we were visiting at Byron’s place, we said “Boy Jeez” anyhow. It was hard not to.
“Boy Jeez, I used to farm, but I lost m’ shirt,” Byron said. “I sold my herd to Glen James, that’s his dairy barn down at the head of the hollow. Now, Boy Jeez, I’m a gentleman of leisure, living on the Dole.”
Byron had a wife named She and twin girls named Daphne and Delilah. They lived in the trailer after their regular house burned down one night. But Byron was all alone this spring.
“She’s poorly. She’s down to the hospital again,” he told us. “Haven’t seen the girls in some toime. Living over at their cousin’s, getting into some koind of trouble, Boy Jeez. So you gals are always welcome to visit. I loike the company.” Byron had a funny accent.
Byron kept a pig and a flock of sheep.
“To eat,” he said. “But Boy Jeez them sheep do look kind of sweet out in the medder.”
But the real excitement down at Byron’s was—a kind of animal with manes and tails. Byron ran a whole herd of that particular animal in his back pasture. Maybe he’d sell us one. The first time we arrived at his barnyard he had two of them tied to the paddock fence and he was harnessing them up.
“You gals want to see them work?” Byron asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Do they pull a cart?”
“Stone boat. Them’s competition pulling ponies.”
We tried to pet them, but they swung their heads away. They weren’t the nuzzling velvet-nosed kind of animal. Their eyes looked past you, and their muscles were all knobby and their manes had been mowed down to a bristly crew cut.
“Boy Jeez they won’t offer to kick nor bite, but they ain’t pets,” said Byron. “they’re workin’ animals.”
He wasn’t kidding. When the harness was buckled the little beasts knew they were going to work and they got all snorty and prancy. The instant Byron made the hitch to the sledge loaded with cinder blocks, they lunged forward, jerking the load into motion. They dug their toes in the dirt and scrabbled and sweated and grunted across the yard. Byron called out to them: “Dandy! King!” and they pulled even harder.
“Why don’t you have Belgians or Percherons, Boy Jeez, they’re stronger,” I asked him.
“Boy Jeez, I used to farm with big hosses! I didn’t have no tractor. Can’t afford to feed hosses now. Ponies is cheap to buy and they keep easy. Us old teamsters get up the pony pulls just for the hell of it. The team that pulls the heaviest load the farthest gets a cash proize, and if his woife don’t take it Boy Jeez he goes over to Kennedy’s Auction Barn and buys another damn pony.”
I asked him Boy Jeez did he win prizes and he said Boy Jeez he did because he knew all the old-time training secrets.
“Boy Jeez, both a them ponies got to go at the same time or else they pull soideways. These Boys is crazy and knot headed, but they go good for me. I don’t use the lectric like some do.”
We didn’t know what the lectric was, but Byron was asking us to go root for him at the next pull and of course we said Boy Jeez you bet we’ll be there.
“Ed Pilcher told me he’d ask around about a…a…. pony.” There. I had said the Forbidden Word out loud, to Byron. “But I think he forgot.”
“Boy Jeez, he moight have, he’s busy getting in his hay. Tell you what, if Ed don’t find you a pony, you and me’ll go to the Auction Barn and get you a noice koind one, not like these fellas. Boy Jeez, the sweetest sight I know is a young gal canterin’ her pony acrost the hilltop up there in my pasture.”
I really, really liked Byron.