7

Lost Nation Calendar

By the early 1950s, my grandparents’ way of life in Lost Nation was already long outmoded, even by rural standards elsewhere. With few exceptions farms throughout the rest of Vermont and the nation had already been mechanized for two or three decades, though in Lost Nation we still used horses instead of tractors. For some years after electricity arrived in the Hollow we continued to milk our cows by hand and light the house and barn with kerosene lanterns, and we pumped our washing water by hand throughout my youth on the Farm.

We weren’t cut off entirely from the rest of the world; we took our milk to the cheese factory on the edge of the Common three times a week, and our mail was delivered daily to our mailbox just down the Hollow at the end of the lane leading up to my Aunt Maiden Rose’s place. But my grandfather’s daily paper from St. Johnsbury, forty miles to the south, arrived a day late, so we were usually twenty-four hours behind the news from the rest of the state and nation, as if we lived in an altogether different time zone. Not that it mattered much since most of the natives of Lost Nation and the Kingdom tended to regard themselves as belonging to a separate entity, anyway. Our lives and work were linked much less to Montpelier and Washington than to the harsh yet lovely cycles of the natural world around us.

Spring began each year in Lost Nation with the first strong run of maple sap. Sometime at the end of March or the beginning of April, when the snow still lay deep under my grandfather’s eleven hundred maples, there would be two or three sunny days in a row when the temperature would soar into the high thirties, followed by clear, sub-freezing nights. The narrow dirt road connecting us to the outside world thawed into a river of mud. The pond behind the sawmill dam began to thaw, and snowbanks melted, sending dozens of sparkling rivulets rushing down the hillside gullies.

“When the water runs down the hills, the sap runs up the trees,” my grandfather would announce. He and I would then pay a visit to his sugar bush, wading up the ridge behind the house through the deep snow to see if the red squirrels had come out to clip off the tender twigs at the ends of the maple branches to drink the new sap. “The squirrels are hanging out their sap buckets, Austen,” my grandfather liked to say. This was the sign that it was time for us to tap the maples, and hang our buckets, too.

Like showing our cattle at the fair, maple sugaring more than doubled our regular daily work on the Farm. At the peak of sugaring in the Hollow, school closed for a week or ten days. Everyone helped out. My Big Aunt Maiden Rose, who owned half of the family sugar bush and shared the proceeds with my grandfather, presided over the operation. My little aunts and Uncle Rob helped gather sap. My grandmother’s jolly younger sister, my Great Aunt Helen, visited from Boston to help Gram cook for the extra people needing to be fed, including our old cousins, Whiskeyjack and John Wesleyan Kittredge.

Gathering sap was a backbreaking job, and during a big run we gathered all day and sometimes far on into the night. Maiden Rose’s matched Morgan team, Henry David and Ralph Waldo, pulled the huge gathering vat on a sledge with wooden runners up and down the steep, snowy slope through the trees. The horses stopped and started on voice commands, but I often had to thrash a hundred yards or more up to my chest in snow to carry the full sap buckets to the vat on the sledge. Snow got down my felt boots, down my wool pants, down my neck. My woolen gloves were sopping wet within an hour. By mid-morning my back ached and by late afternoon my legs felt like lead and I silently cursed the deep snow and the fast-flowing sap and all maple sugaring operations everywhere.

After evening chores and a quick supper, I’d go back to the sugarhouse at the foot of the ridge, where a white plume of steam rose up through the twilit maple branches, and my grandfather and I would hard-boil eggs in the sap and scoop up dippers of snow to eat with fresh hot maple syrup dribbled over it. Then Gramp, who loved sugaring time better than any other part of the year, would tell me stories about the big spring log drives on the Connecticut River of his youth, when he’d run away from Maiden Rose’s school to help take one hundred and fifty million feet of logs all the way from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, and stories about his days as a chainman on crews surveying the American-Canadian Line in the Rocky Mountains, and surveying the border between Labrador and Ungava Quebec.

By degrees, as the days grew warmer, the maple buds began to redden and expand. The syrup darkened into an oily fluid known as blackstrap, good only for shipping in metal drums to the Reynolds Tobacco Company in North Carolina, for sweetening chewing tobacco. One night a warm rain would fall. The ice went out of the river above my grandfather’s sawmill in two or three rifle-like reports. In the pasture across from the house a few spring peeper frogs began to sing.

During the next several days we’d pick up our three thousand buckets, rinse them out and stack them inside the sugarhouse. School began again and sugaring was over for another year, though in August my grandfather would bring several big tubs of snow out of his icehouse for sugar-on-snow at the annual Kittredge family reunion, and later that month my grandmother would win another blue ribbon at Kingdom Fair for her maple sugar candies, so blond and delicately sweet that my grandfather never failed to accuse her of lightening them with white cane sugar.

 

March was also Town Meeting month in Lost Nation and throughout Vermont. Town Meeting was held on the first Tuesday of the month at the schoolhouse. My grandfather was among the very few Lost Nation residents who did not attend Town Meeting—the others being shut-ins—but my grandmother and I never missed one, and there was usually still enough hard-packed snow in the road for us to slide down the Hollow to the schoolhouse together on our old travis-sled. No doubt we made an odd sight, my tiny black-clad grandmother sitting in front and steering the sled, and me riding behind her; but there were many odd sights in the Lost Nation of my youth, and I loved gliding fast down the icy road with my grandmother, on our way to Town Meeting.

At the schoolhouse, local government officials were elected: three selectmen, a town road commissioner, a justice of the peace, three school board trustees, a poundkeeper. Proposed budgets were approved or disapproved. Townpersons could and did stand up and say or, as the case often was, shout anything they wanted to. Invariably, Cousin WJ Kittredge delivered a scathing indictment of the rising school costs—$1,348 in 1952, $1,451 in 1953. Several persons rose to their feet and vehemently denounced the state and federal governments. The proposals that Vermont secede from the United States and Kingdom County secede from Vermont were moved and passed, as they had been annually since 1791, when the Green Mountain State first joined the Union. These were the only two measures the people of Lost Nation ever agreed upon unanimously. To me, used to seeing kids squabble every day in the schoolhouse, it was a great treat to see the adults squabble on Town Meeting day. Yet everyone had a say in everything, and anyone with anything to say was listened to. Cousin Clarence Kittredge, in his role as Town Meeting moderator, saw to that.

Always there was a huge noon dinner. Women from up and down the Hollow vied with each other to bring the tastiest casseroles and meat pies. There were fresh rolls, baked beans laced with maple syrup, desserts of all kinds. During the dinner, neighbors who had been at each other’s throats all morning chatted and laughed together. A truce was declared until one o’clock, when the meeting resumed. This was the way democracy worked in Lost Nation, and always had.

In the late afternoon some of the men would adjourn to Cousin Whiskeyjack’s barn to drink WJ’s moonshine whiskey. This too was a long-standing Town Meeting Day tradition. In March of 1950, however, the year I was eight, Cousin John Wesleyan rose at Town Meeting and denounced these drinking sessions in his brother’s barn. “The manufacture and consumption of hard spirits is forbidden in this town,” the old preacher said angrily. “If the justice of the peace had any grit, this would come to a halt.”

Cousin Clarence laid down his moderator’s gavel. “Speaking now as town justice,” he said, “what a fella makes to consume on his own property has nothing to do with the law, JW. I can’t and won’t interfere.”

As usual, Town Meeting that year ended with no action taken on Cousin WJ’s moonshining activities. My grandmother stayed on with some other women to wash dishes and set the schoolroom straight. I headed for home to help my grandfather with barn chores.

A mile north of the schoolhouse, Cousin Whiskeyjack’s falling-down old farmhouse sat dark in the late-winter twilight; but a light was on in the barn, and a dozen or so vehicles with chains on their tires sat in the frozen mud of the barnyard. Suddenly an idea occurred to me.

I crept up through the cars and trucks and slipped in through the milk house to WJ’s disused milking parlor. Just ahead, in the dim light of a couple of kerosene lanterns, twenty or so shadowy figures were peering down into a large barrel. In the meantime, I’d spotted WJ’s big yellow-and-gray rat-fighting cat, Lynx Kittredge, the cat that he’d once informed me was as big as a wheel of cheese. Lynx Kittredge was reclining on a pile of feed sacks on the bow of an old power launch WJ had salvaged from the bottom of Lake Memphremagog years ago. Along the waterline of the launch was a row of neady-stitched bullet holes, and just below, the words “U.S. BORDER PATROL,” written in faded black letters. Lynx Kittredge was staring at the barrel in a way that made me glad that I was not a rat.

I edged up to the rear of the crowd, where the men were talking loudly and exchanging money. Suddenly Bumper Stevens spotted me. Instantly Bumper scooped me up like a young pig. “Looky here what I found, boys. It’s old Austen Kittredge’s grandboy, come to view the rat fights.”

To me he said, “Look down in that barrel, boy. Ain’t that a frightful sight? Count ’em.”

Holding me under my arms, he lifted me over the rim of the barrel. Inside, to my horror, swirling round and round the bottom and leaping partway up the slippery metal sides, were half a dozen huge barn rats with long naked gray tails.

Bumper set me up on a beam above the men, where I could look down into the barrel. “I suppose you think you’re a man and a half up there,” he said good-naturedly. “Witnessing your first rat fight.”

I thought no such thing. At eight I was frightened by the dark barn full of hard-drinking men. Yet I was also deeply interested in what was about to take place, and my fascination was greater than my fear. Below, in the knot of men exchanging money, I recognized Cousin WJ, and the two Kinneson brothers, Resolved and Welcome, from the Kingdom Gool, and several other local outlaws.

Bumper took a drink out of a brown bottle someone handed him, and offered me one. “Never mind that,” Cousin WJ told him. “That boy don’t take ardent spirits yet. I’ve tried him before.”

“Don’t take ardent spirits!” Bumper declared in an outraged voice. “How old be you, boy?”

“Eight,” I said.

“Eight. And don’t take ardent spirits. I suppose,” he said to WJ, “that he don’t swear or smoke or chase after wild women yet, neither.”

“He don’t swear or smoke,” WJ said. “If he chases women, I don’t know about it.”

Some of the men laughed.

“You Kittredges up here in the Hollow ain’t bringing this boy up right,” Bumper said. He took a large watch out of his overalls pocket and peered at it and then up at me. “Make a bet, boy. How long will it take WJ’s old torn there to dispatch them rats in the barrel? Forty-five seconds? Fifty? Go ahead. Bet. I’ll cover it for you.”

I had no idea what to say. As an apprentice Methodist, I had been taught by my grandmother never under any circumstances to bet on anything.

“He don’t wager, neither. Leave him be,” WJ said, to my relief. “Bets are in.”

He reached up and grabbed Lynx Kittredge by the back of the double ruff of fur along his thick neck and summarily dropped him into the barrel. Instantly the cat metamorphosed into twenty pounds of pure feline fury. With a great angry hiss and a howl, Lynx Kittredge was on the rats, grabbing them and shaking them and snapping their necks like a terrier dog. From the beam where Bumper had set me I could see everything. The rats squealed and shrieked hideously. Lynx Kittredge hissed like a timber rattler, bayed like his North Woods’ namesake. The last surviving rat leaped for him and depended from his notched left ear, and Lynx Kittredge spun over on his back and tore the rat open with his hind claws from neck to tail.

“Thirty-nine seconds,” Bumper said. “By Jesus, that’s a new record for six rats, boys.”

Suddenly the milk house door opened. Everyone turned at once to see who had come in. Outlined against the twilight was a small black-clad figure, holding a lighted lantern.

“Oh, Jesus,” WJ said. “It’s Mrs. Kittredge.”

I was so surprised by the appearance of my grandmother in this most unlikely of places that I scarcely felt alarmed at all. Taking in the scene at a single glance, she set the lantern down just inside the door, and as she did so its dim rays briefly illuminated her sharp features. Her face looked neither angry nor shocked but simply as determined as ever.

“Uh-oh,” Bumper said, sweeping me down off the beam. “Here’s your boy, Mrs. K. We didn’t have nothing to do with how he got here.”

My grandmother marched across the barn floor toward the men, many with cash in their hands. She walked by me, stood on her tiptoes, and looked into the barrel. “Ah,” she said. She reached down in, seized Lynx Kittredge by his double ruff and drew him out.

“What are you doing, Abiah?” WJ said. “Where are you going with Lynx Kittredge?”

“I’m preventing further cruelty to animals,” my grandmother said. “Cats and rats alike. This animal is coming with us. Come along, Tut.”

The men stood openmouthed. But no one, even WJ, protested further. Lynx Kittredge was purring loudly. Evidently he recognized an ally in my grandmother. Outside, under the bright March stars, my grandmother set the cat on the travis, and, taking turns, we pulled Lynx Kittredge up the icy road to the Farm in Lost Nation.

WJ never did try to reclaim his cat. Like everyone else in the Hollow, with the possible exception of my Big Aunt Maiden Rose, he was somewhat afraid of my grandmother, who kept Lynx Kittredge for the next five years, renaming him Pharaoh and showering him with all the attention accorded any royal Egyptian cat. My grandfather encouraged him to patrol the barn for rats during the daytime, though he slept most nights in a basket near the stove in the kitchen. When he died of old age, the year I was thirteen, my grandmother had him mounted by a taxidermist in Kingdom Common, and for the rest of her life she kept the mummified remains of Lynx Kittredge, aka Pharaoh, on a shelf in Egypt, where he fit in nicely with her Doomsday Book and other relics.

 

In late April and well on into May, the Farm was the scene of any number of spring activities: plowing and planting, putting in my grandparents’ gardens, mending fences devastated by winter—the list went on and on. Then came June, here before we knew it. June was haying time in Lost Nation. My grandfather waited until a good breeze came out of the northwest, signifying two or three days of clear weather. Then we harnessed up Ralph Waldo and Henry David and cut our fields and Maiden Rose’s with a horse-drawn cutter bar, and raked the hay into windrows. The following day we picked it up with Gramp’s tall, old-fashioned hayloader. I drove the horses while my grandfather distributed the hay around the wagon with his pitchfork.

Austen Kittredge was a thorough if perpetually disgruntled farmer, and never failed to scythe off by hand the rough places around hedgerows and stone piles where the cutter bar and hay rake couldn’t go. Then we’d back the hay wagon up the high drive leading into the big double lofts of the barn. A pair of huge iron hay forks mounted on rails under the barn ceiling dropped down on thick ropes, grabbed big bunches of the hay off the wagon, and hauled them up into the loft. Although they were wonderfully capable horses, Ralph and Henry were skittish around those hooks, which fell from the ceiling onto the load with a great clatter, and they also hated to back up the wagon. My grandfather had to grasp their bridles and walk them up the ramp, coaxing and gentling them along.

Haying was maddeningly hot work. Chaff got down my shirt collar and up under my pants cuffs and in my mouth and nose, causing my eyes to run steadily. The days were as long as they were hot, and there was always the threat of a summer thunderstorm that could spoil a whole field’s cutting. Frequently my grandfather’s antiquated equipment broke down. Like maple sugaring, haying a hill farm in the pre-mechanized era was a chancy, nerve-wracking job, in which Gramp’s patience with me frequently wore thin, and mine with him, and the horses’ with both of us. The highlights of the day were the moments when, after helping to unload the wagon, I could run to the milk house cooling tank for the stone jug of switchel, which my grandmother made up each morning and kept full and cool for us there—the traditional northern New England field hands’ drink decocted from pure spring water with a touch of vinegar and a touch of molasses.

But by mid-aftemoon even the miraculous restorative powers of switchel were not enough to make haying anything but a grueling chore. It was a relief for vis all when the bulk-tank law prohibiting the shipping of milk in cans was passed and my grandfather, like many another Vermont hill farmer stranded off on roads no milk truck could possibly negotiate during much of the winter or mud season, sold his milking cows and concentrated his activities on his lumbering operation.

One of the very real perils of haying with horses was that a horse could at any time step in a woodchuck hole and break its leg. Therefore my grandfather shot all woodchucks on sight, and at the age of nine, I began to hunt these otherwise harmless rodents myself with a light .22 Gramp had given me. Right after the first cutting in June was the best time to spot ’chucks; and I loved to go out in the evening after supper and walk the stubbly summer fields with my grandfather, looking for them. Other regular pests and, for me, fair game on the farm included pigeons, which were terribly messy, and which my grandparents encouraged me to pick off the ridge of the barn and the top of the silo with my .22; porcupines, or hedgehogs, as Gramp called them, which would chew their way through a half-inch plank to get into our woodshed, icehouse, and outbuildings; and, worst of all, a plague of white rats, the descendants of an escaped pair of tame ones my little aunts had given me as pets for my tenth birthday: against which, with traps, poison, and a veritable squadron of scrawny barn cats, not to mention the formidable Lynx Kittredge, my grandfather waged a no-holds-barred war; but we could see no diminution in their numbers, which were now beginning to breed with the indigenous population of brown barn rats to be found on all Vermont hill farms, to produce an especially large, bi-colored, prolific, and intelligent hybrid rodent that even Lynx Kittredge had trouble catching.

Finally, in the summer of 1952, my grandfather sent away for a pair of very lively, six-foot-long Kentucky blacksnakes, which he promptly christened Cole and Bob Younger and released in the barn. Not only did the Younger Boys all but eradicate the hybridized rats; they served the unanticipated function of scaring the daylights out of uninvited and unwanted visitors to my grandfather’s barn. One of their favorite basking spots was the lintel shelf just inside the milk house door. From here the Boys would casually lower the front third or so of their thick, jet-black bodies, and flick their split tongues inquisitively in the faces of astonished and terror-stricken milk inspectors, tax assessors, border patrol agents searching for illegal aliens, and other undesirable guests, who rarely tarried longer than the time it took them to reach their parked vehicles at a dead run. “They went back down the Hollow quicker than they came up,” my grandfather liked to say about these visitors. Of course the introduction of Cole and Bob to the Farm in Lost Nation also enhanced my grandfather’s local reputation for misanthropy, though in fact the Younger Boys were perfectly harmless and actually quite amicable—unless, of course, you were a rat.

I, for my part, didn’t mind the blacksnakes at all. I don’t know that one could call them affectionate; but they were tame enough, and allowed me to lug them around the barn draped over my neck and arms for hours on end. I did notice that the barn cat litters seemed to fall off at about the time of the snakes’ arrival, but we never actually saw one of the Boys go after a kitten, and very probably most of the adult cats just exercised the better part of feline valor and moved down the road to another barn.

Now, as my grandfather very well knew at the time he ordered the snakes, my grandmother had a great hatred and loathing for serpents of any stripe. Woe betide the garter snakes—more commonly known in the Kingdom County of my youth as “gardener” snakes—she came across in her flowerbeds or pea patch if her hoe was handy; and she had more than once instructed me, in great seriousness, that when I became a famous archaeologist like Mr. Howard Carter, I must never neglect to wear snake boots when poking around the pyramids. Many times during my boyhood Gram reminded me that it was a poisonous asp with which the love-lorn Egyptian princess Cleopatra had taken her own life; and one of the most horrifying clippings in her Doomsday Book of catastrophic local newspaper accounts described, in lurid detail, the horrible death by snakebite of a young man known as “Lucky” LaPorte, who, while unloading a bunch of green bananas from a freight car in Kingdom Common in 1921, was bitten on the neck and killed nearly instantly by a fer-de-lance hidden in with the fruit.

After the advent on the Farm of the Younger Boys, my grandmother assiduously avoided the barn. During haying time, instead of setting the switchel jug inside the cooling tank in the milk house, she left it outside the door in the shade of her hollyhocks. And when my grandfather teased her one evening, by threatening to bring the Boys into the kitchen for a fireside chat, she declared that if the blacksnakes ever appeared within one hundred feet of the house, their remaining minutes would be as numbered as Lucky LaPorte’s after his sad encounter with the fer-de-lance.

“If those vipers come sashaying in here, Mr. Kittredge, their sashaying days will end on the spot,” my grandmother said. “You may inform them I said so.”

“Why don’t you inform them yourself?” my grandfather said. “That way they’d know you meant it.”

My grandmother gave a sigh, and did not reply.

“I guess Grandma’s afraid to go down to the barn,” my grandfather said.

“Don’t call me Grandma,” my grandmother said. “I’m a mother and a grandmother. Not a grandma.”

But I noticed that she did not deny being afraid of the Kentucky blacksnakes. It was hard for me to believe that my grandmother feared anything on earth; but I understood that some people seemed to be born with an aversion to snakes; perhaps my grandmother was one of these persons.

The next morning when I came around from the hayloft to get the jug of switchel, my grandmother met me in the barnyard. “Tut,” she said, “do you think your grandmother is afraid of those reptiles?”

“No,” I said doubtfully. “Of course not. You’re not afraid of anything, Gram.”

“Come,” she said, seizing my wrist.

She led me across the barnyard and into the milk house.

Sure enough, one of the Younger Boys—I could never tell Cole from Bob—was reposing on the lintel shelf. With that effortless gliding motion peculiar to snakes when they are unalarmed, he shifted himself and depended over the shelf a couple of feet to examine this new interloper. He flicked out his double tongue and as he did so my grandmother grasped him behind the head. “Get behind me, Satan!” she said, looking him right full in the face from less than a foot away.

She released him unharmed and we returned to the barnyard. Only then did she give a little shudder.

“I knew you weren’t scared of those old snakes, Gram,” I said with tremendous relief. I couldn’t wait to tell my grandfather what had happened.

But again my grandmother reached out and took my wrist. She fixed her dark, kind eyes on me, and with another small shudder she said, “Yes, I am, Tut. I’m terrified half to death by the creatures.”

I didn’t understand. “But, Gram, you were braver than the milk inspectors, the tax men—any of them.”

“Ah,” my grandmother said. “Then you’ve learned an important lesson.”

“What lesson, Gram?”

“That being brave has nothing to do with being unafraid,” she said, heading up for the house. “Never forget that, Tut.”

 

For three or four weeks each year, in what we called high summer, between the first and second cuttings of hay, my grandfather subcontracted from the International Boundary Commission in Washington, D.C., the job of clearing the sector of the American-Canadian border running between Kingdom County and southern Quebec. The Vista, as the Canadian Line was sometimes called, was a thirty-foot-wide strip of unfenced and unguarded no-man’s-land which, in Vermont, happens to coincide with the Forty-fifth Parallel circling the globe exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. For many years, my grandfather had been responsible for clearing the stretch from the Upper Connecticut River separating Vermont’s eastern boundary from New Hampshire, all the way to the Green Mountain Range, just north of Jay Peak, to the west: a total distance of about seventy miles. Each summer he cleared a segment of approximately ten miles.

In addition to cutting down the ever-encroaching brush and trees, and repairing any damage to the granite monuments set a mile apart along the Vista, my grandfather sometimes had to resurvey the boundary where it followed a changing streambed or river. Using survey chains and his theodolite, which he referred to as the instrument, and taking most of his sightings several times, he prided himself on registering some of the most precise latitudinal recordings along the entire thirty-five-hundred-mile border from eastern Maine to western Washington.

From my first summer on the Farm, I’d worked with Gramp on this annual project. We’d leave home in the lumber truck each morning as soon as we finished our barn chores and return in time for evening chores and supper, after a long day in the woods. Much of the border country between Vermont and Quebec was still quite wild in those days, accessible only by single-lane, corduroy lumbering traces, and clearing the remote terrain was ideal work for a boy. I liked learning how to use a one-man bucksaw and an ax, and as I grew older, I mastered the technique of reading the theodolite as well. Sometimes, too, under my grandfather’s stem direction, I reset missing brass monument plates in the granite obelisks along the Vista.

Over the huge noon dinners my grandmother packed for us, my grandfather told me stories of his travels, and as we looked off along the Vista while eating, I liked thinking that it stretched all the way across the country. It seemed somehow to link me with the fabulous places it bisected: Niagara Falls, the Great Lakes, and the Great High Plains. Someday I would see those places for myself. In the meantime, I was content to work in the Vermont woods with the man I most admired of all the men in the world, my grandfather and namesake, Austen Kittredge.

Not all of the exotic places along the Line were as faraway as the Rockies or even Niagara Falls. There was, for instance, the enclave of collapsing wooden frame buildings just south of the border and less than a mile west of my grandfather’s hunting camp known as Fort Kittredge. Fort Kittredge had originally been just that, a tiny stockade where, according to my grandfather, our Loyalist forebears had stockpiled muskets and ammunition in anticipation of that glorious day when the British Red Coats would march south to retake Vermont and the United States. Later, the place had been used as a lumber camp, a hideout for Chinese alien smugglers, and, during Prohibition, a rendezvous for whiskey runners. To me, it was a spooky yet fascinating spot. I liked exploring it—in the daylight, with my grandfather.

Quite frequently, my grandfather hired his two old cousins, Whiskeyjack Kittredge and his brother, Preacher John Wesley an Kittredge, to help us with our work. Like my grandfather, who despite his alleged antisocial behavior had the greatest relish for eccentric and unusual characters, I loved to get my two ancient cousins going, as we called it. In fact, this was never very hard to do.

Cousin WJ began each working day like a house afire, hacking away at the encroaching brush like a man possessed. By mid-morning, he invariably ran out of steam and slipped off to fish a nearby brook or nap in the sun with his slouch hat pulled down over his eyes. Still, he was fond of drawing me aside and inveighing against the low wages paid to him by my grandfather. And he filled my head with all kinds of wild, unlikely tales, which I was always ready to listen to.

“Have you ever bedded down two women to once, boy?” he inquired of me one afternoon when I was eight or nine. “I did one time, in a whorehouse up to Montreal.” Under Cousin WJ’s tutelage I became intimately acquainted by the ripe old age of ten with the delectations of Montreal whorehouses, which he had no doubt learned about from his endless stock of F•U•C•K Books, since my grandfather confided to me that WJ had never been to Montreal in his life.

Preacher John Wesleyan seemed equally determined to enlighten me in matters at the spiritual end of the spectrum. JW refused to work within earshot of WJ and my grandfather, whom he characterized as blasphemers and heretics. This charge seemed especially unfair in the light of my grandfather’s very genuine concern for Preacher JW’s safety and welfare. At eighty, our sanctimonious old cousin the lay preacher was rather stiff and tottery. Each morning, my grandfather carried JW’s ax, saw, and lunch to the section of the Line where he would be working, half a mile or so from the rest of us, blasphemers that we were. As the day progressed, Gramp dispatched me several times to “check up on the pious old son of a bitch and make sure he was all right.” But Gramp’s charitable solicitude did nothing to soften Cousin John Wesleyan’s condemnations of my grandfather’s soul to eternal perdition.

“Ain’t that a lovely prospect, boy?” JW said to me one noon when I was checking up on him for my grandfather. He pointed off over a typical Kingdom County landscape of distant, dark green mountains, with lighter green farms running up into their foothills. It was as various and beautiful a view, no doubt, as nearly any in the world. But without waiting for me to reply, the preacher declared, “Vermont’s beauty is as nothing compared to the splendor of God’s Paradise. And do you know what I anticipate most about dwelling there? Do you, boy?

“I’ll tell you,” he continued. “What I most look forward to in Paradise is the prospect of being there alone, without my scofflaw brother or your grandfather to trouble me.”

“Where will they be, Cousin JW?”

“Oh, we won’t talk about that now,” he said in a merry voice, crinkling up his eyes with glee. “We won’t ruin our day by going into that, boy.”

Quite often, the black flies and mosquitoes along the Line were fierce, and their numbers legion. In places the brush we cut was so thick that you couldn’t have fallen down if you had tried. I did not always relish being the butt of Whiskeyjack’s ribald jokes and John Wesleyan’s tirades. Still, I learned things working up in the woods on the border with those hard old men that I would not have been apt to learn anywhere else; and I am nearly as grateful for that experience as I am for my free education at the state university. For I think that the likes of Cousin Whiskeyjack, Cousin John Wesleyan, and my Grandfather Austen Kittredge himself will not soon be seen again, in Vermont or elsewhere.

 

In the middle of September, the hills of Kingdom County shone gloriously red and yellow and gold. Then at the peak of the fall foliage season, my grandfather began going to the woods again, now to cut timber for his sawmill. On weekends I accompanied him.

As I grew older, my job was to skid the logs down to the mill with Maiden Rose’s horses, Henry David and Ralph Waldo, which my grandfather used in exchange for helping Rose with her maple sugaring and haying. Later on in the fall, I worked Saturdays and after school sweeping up sawdust or tailing one of the saws in Gramp’s mill below the pond.

The sawmill, with its big whirling log-saw, its several razor-sharp smaller saws and its shrieking planer, was a dangerous and fascinating place. What I liked best about it was my grandfather’s cramped office, jutting out over the penstock. Gramp’s office contained a pot-belly stove, a rolltop desk, and two or three straightback chairs. It was cluttered with bills and order forms, antique saw-files, worn-out gears, wooden boxes full of drill bits and nails of all sizes, chalklines and measuring tapes. Best of all was an ancient, battery-operated Stromberg Carlson radio as large as a big bread-box, on which my grandfather listened to the news and weather from Montreal.

On certain clear fall and winter evenings, when the reception was good, my grandfather and I convened around the pot-belly stove in his sawmill office to listen to our favorite programs. We especially loved Lowell Thomas’s travelogues. Two programs my grandfather heartily despised yet rarely missed were Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and Our Miss Brooks. Gramp regarded Sergeant Preston as a bold-faced imposter, a deep-voiced charlatan who knew nothing about the Far North. And he disliked Miss Brooks for the singular reason that in it, Eve Arden played the part of a schoolteacher.

Gramp loved Jack Benny and detested a detective thriller called The Shadow. Many times he declared that if Lamont Cranston, aka the Shadow, ever came slinking around the Farm in Lost Nation with his wild laugh, he’d be a shadow, all right—a shadow of his former self.

I loved listening to the Stromberg Carlson with my grandfather. The big red and green tubes winked and flashed like Christmas lights. My grandfather scowled. And I sat enthralled by the crackling old radio, magically bringing the outside world up over the rugged hills and mountains to Lost Nation Hollow, where electricity was still years away.

 

My grandfather was one of the few remaining hunters in Kingdom County who, each November, still ventured up to the high hardwood ridges, far from roads and road hunters, and shot one big buck each year. And although he refused to shoot a bear, which, he pointed out, after it has been skinned has an uncanny resemblance to a human being, Austen Kittredge was a lightning-quick wing-shot with his old double-barreled twelve-gauge. Frequently when I got home from school on October afternoons we went up to the overgrown apple orchard behind the house and Gramp filled the game pocket of his red-and-black wool hunting jacket with a limit of four partridges. And he was pure hell on ducks and geese, though you’d never catch Austen Kittredge holed up in a heated duck blind with a steaming jug of coffee. Instead, my grandfather loved to walk the marshy riverbanks below his sawmill on sleeting gray fall mornings and jump-shoot male mallards with their brilliant emerald heads and big black ducks with blue epaulets on their wings, not to mention the little wood ducks, colorful as tropical parrots—though he wouldn’t shoot a merganser, or allow me to shoot one after I started to hunt ducks with him, because mergansers tasted fishy, like their diet, and my grandfather did not hold with shooting any game that he did not intend to eat.

Of course my Uncle Rob Roy and my father were both expert hunters, and fishermen, too, having been taught at a very early age by my grandfather, who, for all his prejudices against schools and schoolteaching, was himself a superb instructor.

“Cast short and straight,” he’d say, showing me how to cast a wet fly with his limber bamboo rod, as we stood by the sawmill pond after supper. “I won’t fish with a fancy-dan caster, Austen.”

“Don’t ever be in a hurry in the woods. Take one step and look around. That way you’ll always have seen something, whether you get anything or not.”

Again it is October of my sixth year. It is late afternoon, and my grandfather and I are sitting on his homemade deer-stand platform, fifteen feet up in a butternut tree on the Canadian Line a mile west of Labrador. Although deer season is still a month away, and I am still several years away from the time when I will be ready to handle a rifle myself, my grandfather wants me to see a deer from the stand. He wants me to have that experience with him. So we sit waiting, as the fall evening fast descends, hoping that one will appear to feed on the grass in the Vista. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a great homed owl flies into the butternut tree and alights on a nearby branch. He cranes his head down at the fallen butternuts below, no doubt looking for mice, then spots us. In total silence he swoops off the limb and into the woods. No deer comes that evening, but over the years that moment when my grandfather and I and the huge owl all sat silently in the tree together will become a nearly mystical memory for me.

Four years pass. By now I have seen plenty of deer from my grandfather’s stand in the butternut tree, and other remarkable things as well. Together my grandfather and I sat on the platform and watched a bobcat stalk a porcupine. We’ve seen a flock of angry crows mob a barred owl, sitting imperturbable in the top of a big black spruce as they dive-bomb it. We’ve watched a full-grown bull moose saunter unconcerned straight down the middle of the Line.

Today is a chilly November dawn in deer season, my first season to hunt from the stand alone. I know that my grandfather and Cousin Clarence and Rob Roy and my father are hunting along the ridge somewhere to the south of where I am waiting. Cousins WJ and JW are hunting the ridge to the west. All of them are trying to push a buck my way, though if one crosses their sights they will of course shoot it themselves.

Shortly after dawn I hear the short bark of Rob’s .30-30, once, from the big beaver swamp behind Maiden Rose’s Home Place, and I am quite certain that he has killed his deer. My grandfather has taught me that a single shot in deer season usually means a clean kill. A couple of hours later, I hear three louder shots—probably Cousin WJ’s .30-06. This is a maybe. Maybe he got his deer on the second or third shot, maybe not. Near noon, another single shot. This sounds like my father’s .278, from a couple of miles to the west. So I know that regardless of whether I get my deer today, by evening there will very probably be at least two bucks hanging from the beam extending out from the woodshed attached to the side of Labrador. I sit in the stand all afternoon, hearing one more shot, another .30-30 from far off in the mountains. No deer comes out onto the Line. At dusk my grandfather appears to walk back to the camp with me, where three big deer are hanging from the beam.

The following November I shoot my first buck from the stand, a six-pointer. Back at Labrador, I eat some of the liver, broiled over hardwood coals in the camp stove, and don’t like it but don’t say so. From now on I will shoot a deer each fall during my boyhood in Lost Nation including a ten-pointer weighing two hundred and thirty pounds, which Cousin Clarence will photograph with me standing beside it. Clarence tacks the snapshot up on the camp wall beside a couple of dozen others of my grandfather and Rob and Dad and my other uncles and cousins, with their trophy deer, where the snapshot remains to this day.

 

Much of December on the Farm in Lost Nation was devoted to Christmas. Although my grandmother accused my grandfather of not keeping Christmas at all, this was not precisely the case. Always, Gramp cut the Christmas tree, taking me along with him. He picked a big, handsome, blue-green balsam fir, which he’d usually selected two or three years earlier, pruning it carefully and keeping it clear of other encroaching trees and brush. At six, seven, and eight years old, I rode the tree home, like a horse, while my grandfather skidded it along over the snow. When I was too big to ride the Christmas tree I helped my grandfather pull it.

My grandmother put the tall fir in the best parlor. Without electricity, we had no Christmas lights, and Gram wouldn’t dream of using candles because of the fire hazard. Instead we trimmed the tree with gold and silver tinsel and lovely colored glass balls, some as large as baseballs and more than one hundred years old.

With the exception of my grandfather, the whole family convened at the Farm on Christmas Eve, including my strict old Big Aunt Maiden Rose, the ex-schoolteacher; my grandmother’s younger sister from Boston, my Great Aunt Helen, who made fun of everyone and everything; my father and little aunts; Rob Roy—even my old cousins, Whiskeyjack and John Wesleyan. Gramp, for his part, repaired to Labrador immediately after Christmas Eve evening chores. His absence hung over me like a snow cloud as we opened our presents Christmas morning and ate our festive meal at noon; but after dinner I was allowed to take a big plateful of turkey and trimmings up to the camp, and to keep Christmas there with him for the rest of the day.

“You and your grandfather are as like as two peas in a pod,” my grandmother said with a sigh. And it is true that I would much rather be off at Labrador with Gramp than socializing with the family below.

“What’s this?” he invariably demanded when I handed him the heaping platter, which he set aside on a shelf. Then he’d fry us a big slab of venison smothered with onions, lace it with plenty of salt and pepper, and we’d eat the deer steak together at the camp table with the greatest satisfaction in the world.

When we finished the venison my grandfather got down the pint of cherry brandy he kept on a shelf below his maps of Labrador and the Far North and poured himself a generous Christmas cordial in his tin tea mug.

“Well,” he said, “what are the rest of them up to down below, Austen?”

“Eating, mainly. After breakfast we exchanged Christmas presents.”

“I never exchanged presents with anybody in my life,” my grandfather said. He fixed his pale blue eyes on me. “Do you think I did?”

I did not, and said so, though I knew that my grandfather was in no way an ungenerous man. It was just that one of his many peculiarities was his inability to receive a gift of any kind.

“Have they been talking about me? Hashing over my shortcomings?”

“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t dare.”

He frowned and looked somewhat disappointed.

“Last night we read Christmas stories out of the Bible,” I ventured.

My grandfather snorted and poured himself another jolt of brandy. “I’ll read them something if they aren’t cleared out of the house by morning. And it won’t be a Christmas story.”

My grandfather turned down the lantern on the table, and blew it out. He got into his lined sheep coat, opened the camp door and we stepped out into the cold December dusk. “Chore time,” he said.

Then he looked at me in the fading light of the holiday afternoon, and in a voice so harshly ironic it was nearly cheery, he said, “Merry Christmas, Austen.”