“And you, lady, what do you want? I’m sure we have it.”
It was embarrassing to be so suddenly the very center of attention.
“A bed,” I said and blushed.
His whole face was one expression of condolence.
“Oh, but we have no beds. But I have something for you, lady, I have a horse.”
“But I don’t want a horse,” I said, horrified. “I need a bed!”
“Lady,” and his voice grew stern, “I told you once already, I have no bed. But look at this horse,” and he came down from his throne leading a brown horse over to me. The horse was shy and bony and very big. “This is the horse for you, lady,” and that tone of voice didn’t allow any contradiction. “Topsy is twelve years old, and exactly what you need. In all your life you haven’t met such a bargain,” and he whispered in my ear: “You can have her for forty dollars.”
I was absolutely inexperienced in horse prices, but forty dollars sounded even to me very little. Taking my hesitation—I was desperately thinking how I could make it clear to him without hurting his feelings that I absolutely did not want a horse—for an assent, his jubilant voice rang through the air:
“One brown horse sold—forty dollars!”
Merely to collect myself, I bought a few other items: a few chains for a quarter, a bag of salt for a dime, loads of rope for a nickel, two more crowbars for another dime. Slowly I drove home. The family was sitting at supper.
“Did you get the bed?” Georg asked me.
“N-no.”
“Did you buy anthing else—antique furniture?”
“Yes—I mean, no,” and a little too hastily and too exuberantly for the occasion, I told about my bargains in rope, chains, and salt.
It made Georg suspicious; he put down fork and knife, looked at me straight, and said:
“And what else did you buy?”
“A horse.”
“A what?”
“A horse, Topsy. The best horse on the market for forty dollars. Twelve years old.”
“And Aunt Bea? Are you going to put her on Topsy, or whatever the name is?”
Now everybody laughed, and I felt better.
“Aunt Bea can have my bed,” Martina came to my rescue. “I’ll gladly sleep on a cot.”
A few days later we got Aunt Bea from the station in Waterbury.
We also got Topsy and put her in the stall next to Prince and Lady. I had taken over the horse barn, and jealously I cared for “my” horse now, giving her double portions of oats, grooming her morning and night a little more than Prince and Lady, the team, and very soon Topsy became fat and round and strong.
After all the remains of the old house had been cleared away, we started one bright summer morning with the new one. Alfred had made a beautiful plan of a Swiss chalet, the very looks of which made us intoxicated.
First we had to dig the cellar. The old one was much too small. Again Mr. Sears advised what to do. We needed a scraper and a man who would handle it with the team. The scraper we found on a neighboring farm for ten dollars, and the man we found, too: Cliff. He was helping his old father on the farm, but he had time to spare. Cliff knew all about horses. When he saw my interest, he showed me how to harness them, explaining the different parts of the harness and reins. After a few days he encouraged me to get a harness for Topsy and a second scraper. From then on Cliff worked with the team, and I with Topsy, who was ambitious and jealous, and wanted to be as good as the team. For a little while things went fine. The scrapers went into the loose soil as if it were butter, and the slope in front of the house vanished rapidly, until the topsoil was gone. Then came hard-pan, and it was hard hard-pan. The scrapers only scratched it. Mr. Sears sighed deeply two or three times, produced picks the next day, and from then on, all of us had to work with picks until the loosened dirt could be scraped away. That was a slow process and a backbreaking one. The summer days grew hotter, and often we were interrupted by heavy thunderstorms. There was no bulldozer anywhere near, and for eight hot weeks Georg, Father Wasner, the girls, Mr. Sears, Cliff, and I worked our way deeper and deeper until the hole for the cellar was finished.
At another auction we had brought home three lovely little pigs, as Aunt Bea had cried out about so much good garbage going to waste. These pigs grew fast into pets. They were called Petunia, Violet, and Suzy. Aunt Bea and Martina had completely lost their hearts to them, and the piglets grew almost while we watched them. The skunk family had left, as there was too much commotion around the house, but we had two cats and a dog and, on the lower farm, another team and fifty-two head of cattle.
Besides a skunk and a sugar maple, we had made the acquaintance of another American character: a stone boat, the like of which we had never seen in Europe; and nobody knows why, because it is hard to understand how anyone can live on a farm without a stone boat. You can move practically everything with it. We needed ours to move all the stones in the old cellar foundation.
Haying time was in full swing when the scraping was over, and Ovila was very glad to get the other horses to help. Now Topsy and I mounted the one-horse rake or the hay tedder, and Topsy acted very intelligently on the large meadow behind the horse barn. She worked very slowly the long stretch across to the other side, but the very moment we turned, she almost galloped back to the barn, only to be turned around and mourningly wind her way in the other direction. What a feeling that was on the rake, surrounded by the sweet-scented hay, the shiny body of “my” horse in front of me, reins in hand, happy as a lark, freer than a queen!
Meanwhile, the Trapp Family had completely dropped out of newspapers and magazines, and they had begun to wonder why. But one beautiful summer day two reporters came up Luce Hill, a lady and a gentleman. She was the writer, and he, the photographer. They wanted a story on what the Trapps were now doing.
“Come and see,” I said. “We have no time for posing, but you can take pictures of everything you see.” So they took pictures of the building, of Martina with the pigs, and Agathe with her beehives, and Maria in the new vegetable garden, and Hedwig in her out-of-door laundry under the apple trees, and Johanna on the tractor, and me with the horses. After we had spent a hot day haying and they had followed us patiently around up and down a sloping meadow, we all finally rested in the shade and drank cider.
Then the lady asked: “Baroness, how do you get all that hay up here?”
I was sure she was only teasing, and said: “Well, we always buy it from Sears Roebuck.”
“No, not really! How do you get it up here?”
“Oh,” I chuckled, “you buy that in powder form. In the evening you sprinkle it over the meadow, and the next morning you have the best hay.”
Thoughtfully she looked into her cider, and I began to doubt—but no, it can’t be!
“What do you do next with it?” she asked.
Truthfully I answered: “We feed it to the cows.”
“Oh, how interesting! And how do the cows eat it?”
That was too much for me.
“You know,” I said, “that is their cereal. They eat it with sugar and cream!”
When everybody laughed, she found out my joke.
“Well,” she defended herself, “you see, in our zoos you find anything from elephants or lions or kangaroos down to a guinea pig, but you never find a cow.”
The very same couple was to come a few years later in January to take pictures (posed) of a sugar bush in action.
While we were riding over on the sled, I remembered the cow story, and that terrific urge to find out how much she would believe took hold of me again.
“You know,” I began, “it is really silly to take these old-fashioned pictures. Don’t you know that nowadays one doesn’t make maple sugar the old way?”
“No,” she said quite innocently, “I didn’t. How do they do it now?”
“Well,” I said, “now they graft the trees for any shape of candy they want—a maple leaf, or little bears, or hearts; and then they simply
go and pick them from the trees the way you pick apples or cherries.”
“Why didn’t you…” she wanted to say, “tell me before,” but our grinning faces gave us away, and she almost pushed us off the sled.
Mr. Sears had gotten himself two helpers besides Georg, Maria, and Hedwig, and they were working on what they called “forms.” They looked to me like huge wooden walls. Then these forms were put up in the cellar hole and pressed and counter-pressed by a whole forest of two-by-fours.
Then one day Mr. Sears didn’t come. He didn’t feel well. He never returned. From his sick bed he still gave us advice as to what to do next. When he died, we stopped all work. We were mourning for our first and best friend in Stowe, the one who had guided our beginnings in the country with an almost paternal love. In our Sunday best we accompanied him to his last rest, and sang once more his favorite song: Brahms’ “Lullaby.”
Now the going was hard. We missed Mr. Sears all over the place. As if to make up for Mr. Sears’ absence, Alfred was around more than before, and one day the forms were ready.
A runway was built, and Alfred said:
“Now we need a cement mixer.”
We rented one from a man in Waterbury Center. Then we needed wheelbarrows. We borrowed some from the town. Then we telephoned for sand, gravel, and cement. We found we needed another carpenter who knew exactly what, when, and how to mix. The last was the hardest of all, but finally we persuaded Mr. R. In the beginning he came in the evening until he had finished another job; then he came a few days a week, and finally, he took over. Trucks came with gravel, and others with sand, and a hundred bags of cement were piled up in the horse barn. In the middle of it all stood the cement mixer, and on a bright and shining morning in August Cliff started the motor, and the mixer began to turn. Mr. R. had given us the recipe: one shovel cement, two shovels gravel, and three sand, and enough water—and he showed how much is enough; then you turn the wheel and the mixture empties into the wheelbarrow, and you start all over again. One cement, two gravel, three sand. I was at the mixer, and somehow I got the fixed idea that if you put in more cement, the cellar wall will be harder and better. So I secretly put in more cement. Whenever I look at the cracks in the cellar wall now, I know who is responsible for them. Each visiting guest was put into overalls, adorned with a shovel, and told “two gravel, three sand,” while I took care of the cement.
Guests did come, and they were all wonderful helpers. Everything would have been just fine if it hadn’t been for the cement mixer. When all was lined up: four wheelbarrows and three men (or girls) with shovels, one would hear all of a sudden a stuttering noise from the motor, and then silence. One cry, “Cliff!” and Cliff would come and try to persuade that temperamental mixer to run; take it apart, put it together, kick it finally with his heel, and all of a sudden, without any special reason, it was on the go again. So it went off and on many times a day, and there was nothing anyone could do about it, as this was the only cement mixer available at the moment. There was no miserable death we would not have wished on that piece of machinery. We would have liked to hang it, shoot it, drown it, poison it. But even so, the walls grew, and on one of those days the cornerstone of the new house was solemnly placed by Father Wasner and sunk into the wall, together with a Latin inscription on parchment and a bottle of holy water.
Meanwhile, many letters had gone back and forth between the boys and us, and great was our joy when they came home for their first furlough, two privates, looking very handsome in their uniforms. They came just at the time when the cement was dry enough for the forms to be taken off, taken apart, and used again for the rough floor. The whole family hammered along on that rough floor, and then it was finished. There was a big party with singing and folk dancing on that new floor of our new house. We were singing in four parts again. From now on we marveled at American speed in building a house. In no time the studs were up, and the rough floor of the second floor was laid and the studs were up for the third floor; and the skeleton of the roof was going up before the boys had to leave again for Camp Hale in Colorado—they had volunteered for the mountain troops—so they got an idea of what the house would look like eventually. It was very hard to see them go again.
A real fever for work had taken hold of all of us. We were either hammering along or boarding up the walls or laying a floor, or we were in the hay or on the other side of the hill in the berry patches. There was such an abundance of berries that summer as never since. We had found an old sugaring pan. This we put up under the old apple trees beside the house. On Mondays it was used for heating water; it was laundry day under the old apple trees. On the other days it was used for canning. Guests could now choose whether they wanted to help on the building or in the hay or in the berry-picking or canning. Besides all this, the large vegetable garden needed pickers for peas and beans, and the first apples, those delicious Duchesses, were ripening.
Try as we might, we couldn’t get any more men to help us. All the young men were gone, it seemed, and the older ones were already busy. The true reason, however, we would learn much later. The people in this remote mountain valley had read stories in the newspapers of fifth columnists coming as tourists into Holland or Denmark, and starting to build something, anything; a tennis court, for instance. Then at the moment of invasion these innocent-looking buildings were equipped with guns and these innocent-looking tourists were Hitler’s helpers. There had come into this Stowe valley a group of foreigners, dressed quaintly, talking queerly, and they had started to build. Of course they said it was a house, but who knew whether they wouldn’t one day open fire and start shooting down the valley. We were always glad and grateful that we didn’t hear that story at the time when it was still believed. At that time it would have hurt us bitterly. Years later when we learned it from a laughing neighbor, we tried to picture what we could possibly have shot at, and still don’t know to this day.
It was just as well that we didn’t get more help, as we really didn’t have any money left. The scanty amounts which we had brought along had been swallowed long since by lumber bills and cement. What we had to meet now was the weekly bill for the few men on Saturdays. That was the time when from Thursday on, one dissolved into a continuous prayer: “Dear Lord, please help!” And He always did, and we never once failed to meet the payroll. But sometimes it went just short of a miracle; like that one week when we were asked whether we could quick—quick—step in for another artist who had fallen sick, and give a concert on Friday. Yes, we could. That took care of three Saturdays. Or that other week when we were asked by people who wanted to invest money whether we would take a few thousand dollars at four per cent interest. We almost cried with joy. That took care of the rest of the Saturdays.
All of a sudden, time seemed to fly. The days grew shorter as September came around. We had to cut out several hours a day for rehearsals again. In a few weeks the concerts would start, and the roof was still not boarded up, not to speak of the shingles.
One morning Mr. R. mentioned that the people in Stowe were in trouble. The roof of the schoolhouse was leaking, and there were no funds.
“Do you think a concert by us would bring enough?”
His face lit up.
“I guess it would.”
By now we had learned that a true Vermonter will hardly ever say flatly “yes” or “no.” He’ll say “why not?” or, “it seems so to me,” or “I guess it would.” It had to be done quickly because the roof should be mended before school began. A few nights later we were standing on the stage of the Town Hall and singing our new program—the program without the boys. The concert had been sold out on the first evening after it was announced. The tourist season was over, and there were only townspeople and farmers from the neighborhood. And now something happened which will always remain unforgettable to us. After the last encore, one of the selectmen sitting in the first row got up and started to come up the stairs to the stage, and everybody else followed. The whole audience. They passed by a
nd everyone shook hands with us in a sincere and heartfelt way, as if to say: “Now you are one of us. Welcome home!”
This was on a Wednesday. The next Saturday two pickup trucks drove up to our place filled with young boys, each one with a hammer, led by Mr. Page, the teacher of carpentry and handicrafts in the high school.
“We have come to help you out now,” said Mr. Page, and that was all the explanation he gave.
In the next moment he and his boys were all over the roof, and a furious hammering could be heard for the next hours. On Sunday they came again, and some more cars with townspeople with hammers, too, and next Saturday and Sunday again. At the end of each visit we served coffee, cocoa and doughnuts, and we began to believe in the old fairy tale which tells of those little dwarfs who finished a half-completed work secretly by night. Three days before we had to leave on our tour the roof was shingled, the windows and doors were in, the outside of the house was covered with tarpaper—we were ready for the winter.
While this most cruel of all wars was inflicting deeper and deeper wounds upon humanity, a group of people in a forlorn corner of the mountains had discovered how to create that good will to which is promised peace on earth: by giving and not counting; each one giving all he has; his time, his skill, his effort, leaving behind a wake of that feeling about which there is so much talked and written, but so little experienced: the feeling of true brotherhood.
XV Concerts in Wartime
A FEW DAYS before we had to leave on our concert trip I went down to Stowe to the drug store. Casually I opened the latest issue of Life magazine and—stared myself in the face. There I was, really and truly, with Prince and Lady, and there was Georg, and there was Martina decorating the shrine of Our Lady with flowers; and there were haying pictures, and I had a vision of a hot summer day and a couple from New York, hot and exhausted, following us all over the place; and we had had no idea that this was for Life magazine.
The Story of the Trapp Family Singers Page 26
