“CANDLEMAS DAY, Candlemas Day. Half your wood and half your hay.”
It was February 2, and a gale was blowing out of Canada. As usual on Candlemas Day, Old Bill had come up to the house from his trailer to recite the ancient adage to the effect that by early February a farmer should have used up no more than half of his supply of firewood and hay, with half left to see him through the balance of the winter.
It was winter, all right. Through the blizzard, E.A. couldn’t even see Fenway Park. Bill, who loved sayings of all kinds, particularly if they reassured him that his decision to do no work that day was unquestionably right, peered out the window.
“How do you like this Canadian thaw, E.A.?”
“What’s a Canadian thaw, Bill?” E.A. said, feeding a couple of split floorboards from the back bedroom and a piece of a cow stanchion into Gran’s Glenwood.
With considerable satisfaction, Bill said, “Two foot of snow and a hang of a blow. We won’t be able to get out and do much today.” Then, “Candlemas Day, Candlemas Day. Half your wood and half your hay. What a winter!”
As far as E.A. was concerned, this winter had been like any other. Cold and long and no baseball, except throwing to his swinging tire inside the empty hayloft. He stayed busy with his homeschooling, Gran read the Weekly World News, Gypsy sang on weekends and put on shows at home for her regulars, Earl and Moonface and the Reverend and Sergeant Preston and a few others. The escort business always fell off in the winter. Sometimes, for fun, Gypsy and E.A. slid down the hill behind the house on flattened-out cardboard boxes.
A few days before Christmas they had taken the bucksaw up through the snowy woods to their special place to select a balsam fir for their Christmas tree. Gypsy could never find one that suited her. The balsams were all full on the side facing the clearing, sparse and ragged on the woods side. If she’d let E.A. climb up and take the top off a taller tree, the way he wanted to, they could have had their pick. But Gypsy couldn’t bear the idea of topping a tree. She said that was the sort of thing Devil Dan would do, except that Dan did not believe in Christmas any more than he believed in the environment.
So as usual they’d bucked down a scraggly little fir, and as they were dragging it back toward the sugar orchard and Gypsy was composing a song called “The One-Sided Christmas Tree,” which wasn’t going anyplace, she said, “Oh, Ethan. Look at this, hon.”
In the snowy meadow, on the protected east side of their sitting rock dropped by the Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet, was the perfect imprint of an owl’s wings. It was probably a big white Canadian owl. The bird had dived into the snow after a mouse, most likely the night before, and the print of every wing feather stood out as if in a photographic negative. The owl’s wingspan was wider than E.A.’s arms when he stretched them straight out from his shoulders. And right there was Gypsy’s next great song, “The Snow Owl,” which she didn’t even know she’d been looking for. She finished it two weeks later, and everybody at the hotel barroom loved it. That also happened to be her twenty-ninth birthday. For a present, E.A. had gotten her new guitar strings out of a mail-order catalog.
In January the State Environmental Board had found Devil Dan in violation of one hundred and forty-six separate regulations. But the state had no funds to take him to court. The day the indictment was handed down, during a midwinter thaw, Dan dozered five more junk cars over the bank along the river.
By the Candlemas Day blizzard, the Allens were not only out of firewood, they were close to out of food. The deer Gypsy had jacked last December was nearly gone, and they were low on maple sugar for table sweetening. Gypsy’s escort service was suffering more than usual this winter; Earl was away on a haul, Moonface was in jail for three months for “tumultuous conduct,” meaning bar fighting, and she’d had to shut off a couple of the other regulars—the Reverend and the spindly little social services man from Memphremagog—because their requests were getting too outlandish. That was what a hard Vermont winter could do to people, Gypsy Lee said.
One sunny day in March Gypsy and E.A. took a geology field trip to their special place through hip-high snow. Bill had announced the day before that water had begun to run down the ditches. “When the spring water runs down the ditches, the sap runs up the trees,” he intoned. “Sugaring time’s coming.”
The snow had melted on top of their boulder, and as E.A. and Gypsy perched on it, looking out over the Kingdom, she told him again how the ice sheet had come inching down from the north, gouging out the trenches where Lake Memphremagog and Lake Willoughby now lay, clipping off the tops of the Green and White Mountains, depositing sand and gravel on the meadow, dropping huge boulders like theirs in its retreating path. She told about the Arctic char that swam down the rivers from the north when the glacier melted and by degrees over the eons transformed into brook trout. “Our own little Galapagos,” she said. “Charles Darwin should have come to Kingdom County, Ethan. He’d have had a field day.”
E.A. wasn’t sure who Charles Darwin was. Maybe a country singer, though Darwin sounded more like a country singer’s first name.
“Look, hon.” Gypsy pointed at a red squirrel in the top of a sugar maple, biting off twigs and sucking on the fresh sap. “Bill’s right. It’s sugaring time.”
They tapped the trees the old-fashioned way, with wooden buckets and wooden spouts, no plastic pipeline running straight from tree to sugarhouse for the WYSOTT Allens, thank you anyway. No sugarhouse, for that matter. The Allens boiled sap on the kitchen stove. On the kitchen wall hung the new Vermont Life calendar depicting children coasting downhill on gleaming new sleds, ice fishermen gathered around a miniature city of colorfully painted fishing shanties, steam rising at twilight from hillside maple-sugar houses, sleigh rides and hay rides and multicolored fall hillsides.
How about a calendar showing the Allens burning their house and barn for stove wood to boil sap? E.A. wondered. Gypsy entertaining her gentlemen callers? Gran reading Nostradamus’s latest prophecy in the Weekly World News, with an out-of-season buck hanging in the otherwise empty woodshed to get them through until May, when they could shoot woodchucks, catch trout, forage for cowslips and watercress and leeks?
Now they were burning boards from the big bays in the hayloft. “If Davis is going to dozer down our place, he better do it soon,” Gran said. “Otherwise, we’ll have it all burned up.”