JED KING SAT at the card table in his sugar shack drinking beer. He studied the map of Canaan, the map peppered with X’s of red pencil.
The heat from the woodstove warmed his face. Nothing like the roaring heat of an ash-wood fire. Ash burned hot and clean. Its grain lay true and you could cleave it cleanly with a single blow of the axe. He refused to operate a hydraulic wood splitter. If a man used the correct wood, ash, and dried it right, it was no big yank to split ten cord to make a few bucks off those too lazy or too inept to do it themselves. A man only had problems when he used inferior wood, or he hurried to split the wood while it was still green and not seasoned properly. Doing things the right way, living right, made life easy, because you were always sure in what you were doing.
The woodstove sat in the center of the sugar shack, where the boiler pan used for reducing maple sap into maple syrup had been gutted a decade previous.
Jed had built the new shack up in the middle of his twelve-hundred-tree sugarbush. State-of-the-art equipment, gravity and vacuum fed. Reverse osmosis. All its guts and components American made. Most sugaring operations used crap equipment out of Ontario, or worse: fucking Japan. King paid for the American-made quality. Bet your ass. There were those who resented his treating a romantic tradition with such a business acumen, or spited him for not joining up with the co-op. But running a tight ship didn’t lessen his love for the feel of evaporator steam on his face, the faintest sweet taste of sap on the tongue. He boiled near to four hundred gallons of Grade A each spring. Seven hundred gallons of Grade B.
He made the finest maple butter and confections, too. Never use the tired mold shapes of a maple leaf or a mom-and-pop puritan couple other operations used, but crafted his candies in the shape of chainsaws and pickup trucks, bikini-clad girls and sexpot milkmaids. His candies were the best, and his Kingdom Sugarworks operation had been written up in the Boston Globe, New Yorker, Yankee magazine, and New York Times.
The urbanites lapped up his old-timer, salty act, bought into his gnarled wit as much as they gobbled up his maple products and shoved fistfuls of money at him. They’d heard about him and each spoke of him to other flatlanders as though they had discovered him themselves. They knew not to expect the usual homage to maple sugaring history at his operation. No old tin sap buckets hung out for posterity. No black-and-white photos of horse-drawn wagons in heavy snows or old awls and taps and maple-sugar canisters lining the window ledges. Just like in this old sugar shack, the new shack’s walls were pasted with cheesecake calendars of big-busted women in swimsuits stroking power tools and transmission shifters. Boy, did the flatlanders get a kick out of that stupid ass ploy.
King finished his beer and nodded to nobody.
Time.
It was time, again.
KING EASED HIS pickup behind the recreation park and killed the lights. He fished a pack of Pall Malls from his shirt pocket and punched the lighter into the dash. He’d paid an extra $220 to get that lighter, and had to get the truck out of fucking New Jersey. Never thought he’d see the day a lighter cost extra in a working man’s truck. But there it was.
A phosphorescent lamp lit a bank of mist that crawled along the ball field. The cold November air poured into the cab and bit at him. The lighter clicked. King touched it to his cigarette, inhaled deeply and exhaled a thread of smoke out the window. He smoked slowly, savoring it. He stepped out of the truck. Mist curled around his work boots. He grabbed a small plastic grocery bag from the truck bed.
He sneaked across the lot and worked his way down a grassy bank to the baseball field. As he moved away, out of the range of the lamppost, he dissolved into inky blackness
He stood on the pitcher’s mound. He’d never played sports. Never watched them. Neither had his old man. The old man never understood how a working man could sit around on weekend afternoons and watch other men play. From the age twelve on, King had spent his weekends operating chainsaws and brush hogs to improve the property. There was always work to be done.
King unzipped his pants and pissed on the pitcher’s mound, then headed off through the dark cedar trees.
Not too far off, a dog barked.