Temple Stream

by Bill Roorbach

  Pierce is trenchant on the subject, harsh on his neighbors:

  When it becomes the established trend decade after decade for the more alert, more intelligent, and more ambitious young men and women to abandon their home town and move westward or cityward, the resultant effect upon the local community becomes obvious. Evolution is predicated on the survival of the fittest; the survival of the unfittest explains in large measure the appalling decadence evident in so many of the back towns of New England.

  The rural towns of New England over an extended period lost their radical aggressive blood to the west and to the urban centers and they have become so preponderantly conservative and fearful of change that the result has encouraged cultural and social stagnation.

  Who can resist a bitter historian?

  The population of Temple peaked around 1840, never quite reaching a thousand. The decline from there is swift. The 1850 census records seven hundred eighty-five, the 1860 census, seven hundred twenty-six. The Civil War was a factor, of course. In Temple, as everywhere in the North, there was much public discussion of the issues of that conflict: slavery, oppression, patriotism. President Lincoln called for one thou-sand Maine men to volunteer. Pierce observes that the pressures in such a small town were tremendous: “Slackers were scorned and volunteers were cheered.” And more important, the army was “an open door to the outside world.” In the end, forty-five men who might otherwise never have left Maine in their lives marched from Temple to muster in Farmington for the trip south. Thirteen were killed.

  Temple’s population in 1870 was six hundred forty.

  Soon after that, farm machinery arrived—expensive behemoths that would have worked much better on flat fields. Farmers took loans they couldn’t hope to pay, bought tractors to work on land that simply couldn’t compete with that freely available in Ohio.

  By 1880, the population of Temple is recorded as five hundred eighty.

  Those who stayed bought farms on the cheap from those who left, consolidating fields and buildings into huge, ungainly holdings. Clearing land was no longer an issue, and in any case, all that building in the treeless prairies out west had made the price of lumber peak. Suddenly a woodlot was of more value than a hayfield. So the fields were let go, one by one, acre by acre (a process that is still going on, as local farmers give up on haying or even farming and homeowners give up on hobby fields), became untended pasture, then scrub, then forest once again. The old homesteads—clapboard capes and federals fitted out with hard-won windows, field-stone basements, granite sills, large barns, hand-dug wells, stables, corrals, stone walls, orchards—went unoccupied, collapsed to rot in mere decades, or burned. Old barns were torn down and used to repair and enlarge the few remaining.

  By 1890, the population was four hundred seventy. By 1900, a mere three hundred ninety-four. Then there was a spurt of growth, fueled by the resurgence of the mills in the village. The 1910 census shows four-hundred-five souls. The 1920 census shows twenty more than that. According to Pierce, the growth was the result of the vision of one man: Charles T. Hodgkins, who bought the Thurston Mill in the village and with borrowed money built it up. Soon, everyone in Temple was connected to the mill in one way or another—farmers sold their trees, employed their oxen and horses. Miller Hodgkins purchased the local store, and was “paymaster to most of town,” eventually, in fact, owning many if not most of the dwellings in the village, using them for worker housing.

  But, of course, the stock market crash of 1929 brought the price of lumber down so dismally far that Hodgkins couldn’t meet his debt. He crept downstream and out of town in 1930, leaving Temple devastated—his taxes unpaid, his workers destitute. There was a brief breath of hope when a local named Mark Mosher bought the mill, but by then the internal combustion engine had arrived. Roving loggers using portable mills loaded lumber onto the new diesel trucks and drove all the jobs right out of town on Hodgkins’s heels.

  In 1930, the population was three hundred fifteen.

  In 1940, it was a disheartening two hundred fifty-two.

  Grumpy Pierce felt he knew them all: “A shifting population which has learned the habit of living on in one place just so long as the rental can be evaded has taken over. Probably one third of the population in 1940 was of this class.” Another one third, in his estimation, was the hopelessly aging old stock, the last third, woodsmen (always a disreputable bunch, warns Pierce) and benighted newcomers trying to make a go of farming.

  “The future of towns like Temple, situated far back in the hills without resources and with a depleted population, seem to have no immediate prospect of a revival of prosperity or restoration of cultural integrity.”

  Footnote

  1. Tom Weddle, a geologist from the Maine State Geological Survey who happened to be in the midst of making a surficial materials map of Temple Stream, told me on a hike that the yellow erratics are from significantly west (and a little south). “Quite a trip under a mile of ice.” He was interested in the light-gray clay at the end of our road, too: “Here’s the ocean bed. Glacial Marine mud. Presumscot Pleistocene!” Upstream, he pointed out a house under construction: “When they were digging the foundation a few months ago I happened to be driving by and stopped and told ’em what I was doing and I got to look in the excavation. A basement hole is like a window on the history of the planet.”

  Upstream Seven

  Temple Village to the End of the Pavement

  DERSU WAS A GIRL, THE LATEST SONOGRAM HAD REVEALED. The time had come for me to clear out of her room. My plan was to build a studio in the sugar shack, which was the smallest of our outbuildings, a junky old place with a short door and a deep sag in the roof. I made a few flyers and posted them at the university: “Summer Work, Good Pay, Jolly Demeanor Required.” I got just a single call, from one Cherry Edwards, whose boyfriend needed work. The thing was, she said, he wasn’t very jolly. No choice: I hired Pit Marcus.

  Mr. Marcus came to work the following Monday, tall and grim, bursting with muscles, amateurish tattoos on every extremity. His face was set gloomy, his eyes dark, his chin a little weak. He focused on a spot just above my eyes as I outlined our work.

  The first job I’d planned was a dump run. Ms. Bollocks had used the sugar shack to store rubbish: a couch, seven bags of cement gone hard, four broken chain saws, a defunct mini-refrigerator complete with mysterious biotic mass in the freezer compartment. I, too, had stored some things: drafting table, several windows, all my fishing gear, boxes of nails, scavenged baseboard heaters. You couldn’t get in there. I stood at the entrance with my new helper five full minutes. He smelled like strong soap. Eventually I came up with an opening move. Pit watched me take the door off its hinges, watched me carry it to the truck.

  Then he watched me start pulling out junk. I suggested that he help, perhaps by transporting what I pulled out of the shack to the truck. The suggestion didn’t seem to suit him, but even so, as there was nothing better to do, he went ahead and took it, gradually warming to the work, finding an unspoken competition to make it interesting—could he get back in place at the door before I was there with the next load? That sped things up for both of us. As we worked, I tried questions, like “Why the Merchant Marine Academy?”

  And got answers like, “No idea, chief.”

  Or, “How does a guy named Pit find a woman named Cherry?”

  “Tits, boss.”

  Quickly I stopped trying for conversation, and we just unloaded the shack into my pickup. The couch, when we pulled the cushions, jumped in our faces and skittered across the floor and into a dozen holes and gone. I gave a shout, cried “Mice!” But Pit was unimpressed: more silence. We piled the pickup high, climbed in, creaked off together toward the dump, not a word to say. After lunch, we ripped the old siding off the emptied shack. Along with the miniature door and miscellaneous detritus, that made another load, not ten words between Pit and me as we drove.

  He said, “Windows go?”

  I said, “No, we’re goin
g to keep those.”

  He said, “Stupid.”

  But the windows were from the Millinocket High School (built in the 1850s, demolished in the 1970s), which I knew be-cause our dairying neighbor, who had a number of the same on his barn, had told me so. I pointed across the way so Pit could see. And I showed him how the windows were in remarkable shape, four sashes simply nailed across the stained old studs side-by-side to make a sixteen-foot-long vista. And I scratched off some paint to show him the wood: American chestnut (I knew this from having worked old beams as a college kid laboring for a contractor, knew the grain and fragrance the way I knew the grain and fragrance of white pine, for example, or red oak, or cedar). American chestnut may be almost extinct in life, but it’s common to find it in old windows and barn beams, where it was used for its toughness and resistance to rot.

  Pit: “I’d get new.”

  Late in the afternoon we put the crowbar carefully to the window sashes, hefted them into the shop, laid them out on a dusty worktable I’d set up on sawhorses. Back in the sugar shack, we stood looking at our work: bare sheathing planks, bare studs, adequate tin roof nailed to more sheathing on adequate rafters, ridge pole to be replaced, no windows, no door. Pit cocked his head, seemed to hear something. He took a step, cocked his head again, leapt suddenly to knock on the pair of thick old studs that made the corner post of the building.

  “Listen,” he said, and knocked again.

  I thought he was teasing me at first, but I did listen. The post distinctly buzzed.

  “Ants,” he said, delighted.

  I was nonplussed, tapped at the post, heard the buzz again, shuffle of ten thousand sets of legs, I knocked the lip of the wrecking bar under some of the sheathing and pulled a board free. Carpenter ants poked their heads out of each nail hole.

  “Deep shit,” quoth Pit.

  I got the big crowbar and several hammers and together we wailed on the comer of the building, pulled that chunk of wood free just as quickly as we could work, five feet of old farm lumber bristling with nails. Pit gave it the last yank, hugged it to his chest heroically, ran all the way across the yard, far from any of my buildings, flung the post and the ant colony into the forest. I brushed enraged ants by the hundreds off the floor. The sheathing planks hung loose—the corner of the building was air. And then came Pit Marcus, walking slowly, impassively brushing ants from his neck.

  “You best hope we got the queen,” he said.

  “Where else would she be?” I said.

  “In the ground,” said Pit, pointing.

  We dug awhile, taking turns, but found no further ants, swept up the mess we’d made, and that was it for the day, except ten minutes of staring at the skeleton of my future office.

  After that, Pit came three days a week, and if I insulted him in just the right measure, he worked hard. This, apparently, was how his dad treated him, and certainly how he was treated as a student swabbie on the scows the Merchant Marine Academy used for training. My impulse is to be kind, but the swaggering culture of boys mistakes kindness for weakness every time, and Pit was a man of his culture. He smashed his finger with the wrecking bar one morning and I stopped everything to have a look, took his hand in mine, brushed off the bloody crumbs of sawdust, suggested he go wash it off, get a bandage.

  He tugged his hand away from me. “Homo,” he said, with only the barest trace of humor.

  Later that afternoon I planned to go write for a while, which meant finding a self-contained task for my man. When it was time, I said, “I’ve got to go to my Man-Boy Love Society Meeting.”

  Pit didn’t seem sure I was kidding.

  I took my tool belt off, brushed the dust out of my hair, and said, “I know you said you were anxious to learn some electrician skills.”

  “I didn’t say ’anxious,’” he said, again with that bare glimmer of humor.

  “Well, whatever—I’ve got a job fit for a man of your intelligence.”

  Outside, between the shack and the shed, I set him up with our garden spade and showed him where the trench for the underground feeder cable would go.

  “A ditch,” said Pit.

  “A ditch,” said I.

  And at that he gave me a big, warm smile.

  Thereafter, we maintained a laconic banter. He developed and refined the homosexual theme in his references to me; I developed the troglodyte theme in mine to him. I was a fern, he was an ox. To our mail carrier, Pam Dodge, I introduced him cheerfully as my “submental helper,” and never saw him laugh so hard. Pam laughed too.

  Pit introduced me to busty Cherry Edwards as his “transgender boss.”

  “I think he’s cute,” she said, twitting us both.

  We thought we were pretty funny, and the joke about our not getting along helped us get along pretty well.

  One afternoon I went off to work in my soon-to-be decommissioned study, leaving him to scrape windows—a horrible job, dragging the hardened old putty out of thirty-two small panes in the ungainly old Millinocket School sashes. “High-precision work,” I said. ’You can handle it.”

  When I came out a couple of hours later he’d barely started in, had scraped one pane, and poorly. I pondered my response. I could yell at him, which is what he was courting, clearly. I could make fun of him, which would have gotten him moving at least. But instead I just shook my head and started scraping. He watched me a minute, started in on the other end of the sash.

  “You’re so fucking slow,” he said, and we were off, scraping and bantering, in hot competition. An hour later it was quitting time and we’d finished all thirty-two lights.

  The next morning we roughed out the electric, which both of us liked—it was pleasing, rapid work, and I was good at it from having worked in the trade back during college summers. I taught him as much as I could, given the limited application we were working on, and felt his respect grow. I called him stupid and lunkhead when he made mistakes, to get him to smile, but praised him too, and the pleasure of the praise went much deeper inside him, came out at the very corners of his studied frown.

  That afternoon we worked back at the windows, the less pleasant job, starting in with the careful puttying, at which he was terrible. I got to call him more names and we had a good time even with the radio, switching back and forth in mock battle between the twang of his so-called country station and what he saw as the blah-blah of Maine Public Radio.

  I knocked off to go write and left him at it. In the house, I was daydreaming over the keyboard when I heard a horrendous squealing of tires up the road—not so unusual, but this one ended with a thump so loud I felt it in my gut. I trotted out front, looked up the road, and saw there had been an accident—a car off to one side, a dazed man milling around. Still, I wasn’t in a hurry. I went back in the house, called the police station. The clerk said she’d already had calls from several of my neighbors, who’d heard the crash too.

  Outside, I thought I’d better go see if I could help, walked toward the scene, then ran, then sprinted: there was a mangled bicycle under the stop sign on the old traffic island. The new neighbors from the corner house—he with a biker’s beard, she with long braids—held the unrecognizable boy who’d been hit across their two laps. They looked up at me thinking I was the father. The boy was bent, his legs twisted four ways, his back arched, his head cocked weirdly, his face smashed, every nerve firing, causing jerking and jactitation of his whole frame. His T-shirt had been torn off such that just the collar stayed on him like a necklace. You could see the harmed places, you could see his heart beat up out of his chest. This was the awful thump I’d heard: a boy. My estimate was that he was not going to make it. “He’s hanging on,” the man holding him said. “Guy there brought a blanket.” Pointing breathlessly to the neighbor’s house up the hill. Suddenly I recognized the child: he lived down around the comer. He was a lively thirteen. I felt furious: there was a kid gone unprotected here. In front of me I saw how fragile.

  Pit stormed up the hill. In the past I’d made
fun of the local ambulance for running its siren on empty country roads, but never again: I could hear it coming the entire way and the noise was deeply reassuring. The police arrived, and I moved away, stood by my helper, watched the EMTs go about their work.

  Pit said, “He’s toast.”

  I began to weep, at first just tears in my eyes, but then hard. Pit stepped away, poked along the side of the road, retrieved the bicycle seat and handle bars—he was close enough to a kid to have noticed them—put them on the stone wall there, anything but look at me.

  THOSE LATE DAYS OF AUGUST WERE TOE DAYS THAT A BABY might come at any time. She wasn’t due until September twenty-first, but whenever I left the house I found myself hurrying at my tasks, wanting to get back home. Marnie, our mid-wife, gave me a long look as I explained my worries, said, ’You take a break, buster.”

  She even offered to spend a morning with Juliet. So on the Monday after Pit had to leave to go back to the Merchant Marine Academy, I left the two of them sitting on couch cushions on the living room floor facing each other counting breaths, and drove to the Temple Intervale in my truck—a little more than a mile up the road—parked in a turnout past the village at an oxbow in the stream, dumped the canoe unceremoniously in the water, turned in time to wave to a full logging truck roaring past, got an air-horn toot back. In the boat I floated downstream a little to have a look—nice bedrock, deeply sculpted, dramatic corkscrew vortex halves, assorted potholes, “nail head” striations, ripples. In the bend there were boulders, one of them sporting a huge naked maple stump, heavy roots broken off in every direction and flood-decorated with round rocks jammed in crevices, the whole balanced up-side down like a sculpture on a pedestal.