Stitch in Time
Page 13
Which, no doubt, is the whole point. In my radio days some county agent somewhere said that playing radio music in a dairy barn had a soothing effect on bossy, and in relaxation she produced more milk. Mood music, I suppose. Well, our radio station played music except for my fifteen minutes of patter and cocky-doodle. So I got a letter from some farmer upstate who said that he had taken a poll, and while his cows certainly liked the music on the station, they all stopped chewing the minute I came on to catch every word I said.
I’ve seen nothing about the results of that Oriental poll. The rooster? I went off the air and we ate him. What good did 78 percent of the listening audience do him?
Not All Pure
T was either Kin Hubbard or Abe Martin who said February makes a dandy month to stay in the house and trace ancestors. If, like me, you’re not that much of a family tree buff, February is still a good month to stay in the house. Tracing ancestry has certain surprises, I think, that confirmed ancestry tracers suppress. Long ago I told the story of Bill Goff, who walked down from Maine at the news of the Revolution and took part in the Battle of Lexington and Concord. During the excitement a Minuteman officer noticed him, and since he was not in uniform the officer asked him what company he was with. Bill, fired up with zeal, said, “I ain’t with no company, I’m fighting alone!” The story is reasonably true, and Bill Goff was a real person.
Then I got a letter from a lady in the Far West who was making the most of February, and she was grateful to me. She had been filling out the family tree, and there was a vacant limb. She had searched and searched, but she had been unable to find anything about her great-grandfather, William Goff. But there she was, reading my little story, and up leaped her great-grandfather before her very eyes. Bill Goff! At the Battle of Concord! She couldn’t begin to tell me of the fruitless hours she had spent in libraries trying to find Bill Goff. And thanks to me, she now had her lineage complete, and Bill Goff was in place as the father of her very own dear grandmother! Since she had enclosed postage for reply, I felt I owed this lady an answer, and I didn’t know what else to tell her except the truth. That is, that Bill Goff didn’t marry until he was a very old man, and he died without legal issue.
My beloved maiden aunt, who was our family’s ancestry bug, found a couple of scoundrels that she soft-pedaled. One doesn’t seem such a scalawag nowadays because he was merely drummed out of church for refusing to pay his pew rent. But in the 1600s this was very wicked, and he must have been a brave man to stand up to the authorities. I used to remind my aunt that Henry David Thoreau became something of a hero for not paying his tax, but Thoreau wasn’t one of us, and that made some difference. Then there was a scoundrel who absconded from a bank with a boodle and went to Canada where he turned good and did well. But my aunt would change the subject. She felt only the good were worthy.
I used to think it would be fun to introduce that aunt to Captain Will Harding of East Brunswick. Captain Will used to take visitors through the old Harding mansion and show them the framed oil portraits of the Harding ancestors. Will was proudest of one that hung in the kitchen. It showed a fine-looking man in maybe his forties, pinky-cheeked, bright eyes, robust enough, and an expression of good chraracter and upright morals. He wore a velvet frock with silver buttons, with lace at the cuffs and at the throat. Captain Will would linger at this portrait, and then would say, “Remarkable man—pirate, you know.”
Which he was.
So I would wonder if my maiden aunt, prompted by Captain Will’s pride in his pirate, might break down and brag about her ancestor who robbed a bank. If that didn’t bring her off one up, she had the pew rent heretic in reserve.
This aunt did suppress the word about Uncle Henry for a good many years. She was undone by a near-nephew who was closer to old Henry than she was, and who didn’t share her distaste for the wicked. He, browsing, chanced upon a random reference to Uncle Henry and pursued that gentleman on his own. In time, he came to realize that this maiden aunt had known about old Henry all along, and had kept him under wraps. So this near-nephew quietly researched Uncle Henry in detail, and in time produced a monograph on the rascal that elevated him into family prominence. Uncle Henry, it seemed, had been a tippler of note, the operator of a saloon with questionable reputation, and an entrepreneur of numerous things too sticky to mention. He was also agent for the Maine Mutual Accident Insurance Company. It was his custom, now and then, to collect the premium on a policy and neglect to forward it to the main office. So long as there was no claim, there was no great cry, but one day a man had an accident and put in a claim. Uncle Henry’s luck had run out on him.
This near-nephew did a thorough job. He came up with photocopies of the charges, the indictments, the sentencing, and the papers remanding Uncle Henry to the State’s at Thomaston. Henry succumbed while still an inmate of that institution in 1885, with several years of his time yet to go. His death certificate completes the monograph. Uncle Henry died in February.
Indian Massacre
Back in 1925 Mr. Whetstone of Worcester, Massachusetts, was rudely abused, although innocently, by some State o’ Mainers, and it is time his story be told so belated apologies may be made. It was a terrifying experience, even though Mr. Whetstone was a meek little man who took a fright easily. Nobody in town, then, knew much about him. He had appeared with a brass-fronted Model T Ford a few years back, and had applied to Ashley M. Pinkham, our real estate man, saying he would like to buy a remote piece of land with tidal frontage where he could be alone and indulge his hobby, which was painting pictures. He said he was connected with an abrasives firm, which is why we called him Mr. Whetstone. Coastal scenery was easy to come by in those days, and it wasn’t priced too high, so Ashley soon had Mr. Whetstone fixed up with ten acres on Oyster Point. Oyster Point was remote enough, at the end of the road, a hairbrush of spruce trees that stuck out into Sebooksis Bay, and there was a house. It was a good house which had been built by an artist, so it had a studio with northerly light, big window, and Mr. Whetstone was delighted. He became a seasonal resident.
He didn’t socialize, and only two people in town every got to know him: Ashley Pinkham, and John Wadleigh. Old John lived on the Oyster Point road, about a quarter-mile towards town from the Whetstone place, and Mr. Whetstone had asked him to keep an eye on his property in his absence and to stand by if any help were needed. He made it clear he was timid about being alone so far from town, and of course anxious about the house when he was in Worcester. So Old John became sort of a caretaker, doing some errands now and then but mostly watching on. He told people Mr. Whetstone was a fine man.
On this particular occasion, when Mr. Whetstone was abused, he had arrived from Worcester about two o’clock in the morning. This was about right for a Model T, leaving after supper, so he arrived late and planned to rise early to do some painting in the morning light. That he had a short sleep is important, since he might have been tired and on edge, unready to face what was about to occur. He had been painting several hours and the morning was well advanced when he became aware of a disturbance. There was the sound of firearms, guns blazing away.
In season, gunfire at Oyster Point is not strange; the duck gunners like the place. But this was in the waning days of June, and Mr. Whetstone couldn’t imagine what was going on. He paused, brush dripping, to look out his big window, and while he could not yet see anything, the gunfire was followed by the rude, rough, and uncouth shouts of many people, as if in the excitement of panic, commotion, and disaster. Electrified by such in this remote and idyllic situation, stood bewildered Mr. Whetstone by his easel, and as he stood thus there unfolded before his very eyes as if in a theater, the following:
Six Indians in breechclouts and paint came into view on his beach, dragging with them three non-Indians, to wit: an elderly gentleman in a Pilgrim stovepipe hat, a lady who was screaming wildly, and a small child best described as a toddler. Just as this group came bounding from the woods onto the sand, another shot rang out and
the No. 6 Indian let go a cry of agony and fell kicking to the beach, where he expired in full view of Mr. Whetstone.
Indian No. 1 now pulled a canoe from the bushes, thrust it into the tide, and Indian No. 2 slammed the toddler down into it and steadied the craft while Indians No. 3 and No. 4 subdued the screaming female by winding a blanket around her head. Then they hove her, too, into the canoe. Meantime, Indian No. 5 tomahawked the elderly gentleman, scalped him, and came running along behind with his bloody trophy to push the canoe off and jump in the stern. This all happened so swiftly that the canoe was beyond the scope of the window before Mr. Whetstone could bring himself to believe anything like this was happening. He realized that it was all most unusual for Maine in 1925.
He steadied himself against the studio wall for a catch-of-breath, rubbed his eyes, and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. He looked again at the two corpses on the beach, fled, and came through the woods to the highway and the house of Old John Wadleigh, where he reported what he had seen.
That’s about it. Had Mr. Whetstone not fled so soon, but had lingered at his studio window a bit longer, he would have seen Indian No. 6 arise from the sand in good health, laughing, to go over and assist the elderly gentleman in the Pilgrim hat to his feet. He would have seen the canoe return to the ken of the window and then come ashore. And seen Indian No. 5 return the scalp to the elderly gentleman, who then put it back on his head. And he would have seen Mrs. Delia Whittaker, with a clipboard, come from the spruces and walk down to the beach, talking to the group as she came, because Mrs. Whittaker was the author and director of the Fourth of July pageant. This pageant was an annual effort of the Bunganuc Historical Society. This year they were doing the Oyster Point Indian Raid and Massacre of 1625, just three hundred years ago. The elderly gentleman was the pastor of the Growstown Methodist Church, and the screaming woman was my math teacher.
I tell this story not only because it is amusing, but because it teaches that History, when it repeats itself, should be careful not to scare people. Mr. Whetstone remained jumpy for years.
Beauty Aid
That television commercial that shows the lovely hands of Mrs. Jones of Schenectady, which are just like those of her sixteen-year-old daughter, had me mixed up the first two or three hundred times it invaded my privacy. I thought it was selling a beauty aid; not so—soap! You, too, can have lovely hands if you use Joopy, or Naxim, or whatever it is in the dishpan. When I realized it was soap, I had pleasant thoughts about the commercial whimsy of combining household detergent and hand lotion in the same handy, family-size, bottle. The thurible, therapeutic, and cosmetic qualities of the dishpan require some thought.
I bought my emancipation long ago. When dishwashing machines were first offered, the gimmick was that the drudge (housewife, homemaker) would be released from a sordid task and could spend more time at cultural things. Nothing was said about the gentlemanperson concerned, who was I. From our first meal in our newlywed nest, I had stepped to the sink when she began to lave, and there would be a wiper laid out for me. I was the assistant. We would stand there hip by jowl, looking out the sink window at petunias now and snowdrifts then. By the time she dumped the dishwater in the sink, I would have the dried dishes stacked in the cupboard. In those barbarous times, I recall, there was a soap shaker. It was a little wire cage on a handle, and when any kind of soap became too small for easy handling, she would tuck the residue into this soap shaker. When the soap shaker was whipped about briskly in the warm water in the dishpan, it set up a sud of a sort, and that was how dishes got cleaned. Nothing wasted. After the soap shaker came flakes and powders and the era of Beauty at the Sink was upon us. So I told her that a dishwashing machine would free both of us for cultural pursuits, and I wrote a check. After that, I didn’t touch a dishwiper for many years, and only when a bolt of lightning took our kitchen apart and shorted our dishwashing machine beyond recall. The insurance company took quite some time to decide if I had had the lightning come on purpose, and until a new dishwashing machine was installed we stood at the sink again, she washing and I wiping. When I stepped up the first time, there was the wiper laid out, and again we looked at the petunias. And since then, we haven’t washed and wiped again, dishpanwise.
It wasn’t until our son matured and married that I went back to wiping. His pa-in-law and I, expecting to become grandfathers together, began a series of July fishing trips into the Maine wilderness, and the great amount of gear that we carried to keep us in comfort and content included a bottle of dishwashing detergent. We have been privileged to use a good camp owned by one of the timberland companies, and it has a sink with a window to peer from, but little else in the way of urban refinements. After every meal, Bill and I wash and dry, Bill washing. We faithfully make the dishes ready for the next time, and as supper is our most plentiful feast we make more of a ceremony at evensong.
Supper, perhaps, has been a fresh, split salmon, taken just previously from the adjacent stream, fetchingly roasted over glowing coals, basted freely, and garnished lightly to be served on native watercress. We don’t have a strawberry shortcake with every supper, but we do like to have one with salmon. It goes good. As we prepare this modest sustenance, the swallows are skimming the lake, the redwings are flashing in the rushes, a hooty-tooter is hooty-tooting to his mate in younder pine, and we see that a doe has brought her two fawns down to drink. The sun is about to set over the mountain, and peace is on every hand. From a distance, the waterfalls at the outlet dam rumbles background music. Beauty and serenity—there is not cark nor care. Bill frequently remarks, “Think of the millions and millions of people in this world who have no idea where we are!” The shadows have lengthened when the biscuits are browned, and the salmon has attained his ultimate perfection. After nourishment, we meditate and contemplate quite a while, and then we do the dishes.
Bill sets the dishpan in the sink and squirts in a squeeze from the plastic bottle of liquefied and saponified delight—Joy, or Dove, or Whoppo, or Swipe, or Whatever. They all seem about the same when squirted. We scrape the orts onto a stump to please the moosebirds, we lay the dirties in the pan, and then Bill dumps in a pailful of hot pondwater. Instantly, the Great North Woods smell just like any kitchen sink in any civilized household, and our illusion of being alone in a remote place is burst apart by something that rudely suggests Schenectady. The hoot owl has ceased, the swallows and redwings have perched. The sun has set. That soap has taken over, and the pleasant flavor and the unguent benefits so liberally advertised have become an evil and obscene menace in a sacred place.
But with the pretty pinkies of Mother and Daughter Jones in Schenectady in mind, I must admit that Bill does have the loveliest dishpan hands in Township 14, Range 6, West of the Eastern Line of the State of Maine.
BOOKS BY JOHN GOULD
New England Town Meeting
Pre-natal Care for Fathers
Farmer Takes a Wife
The House That Jacob Built
And One to Grow On
Neither Hay nor Grass
Monstrous Depravity
The Parables of Peter Partout
You Should Start Sooner
Last One In
Europe on Saturday Night
The Jonesport Raffle
Twelve Grindstones
The Shag Bag
Glass Eyes by the Bottle
This Trifling Distinction
Next Time Around
No Other Place
Stitch in Time
With F. Wenderoth Saunders
The Fastest Hound Dog in the State of Maine
With Lillian Ross
Maine Lingo
Stitch in Time
John Gould
In these observations on the inhabitants of his Maine seacoast village, Mr. Gould addresses important matters. For example, there is the question of why there were two churches in a town of 800 souls, some of whom were atheists. It seems that the split between the two congregations was a matter of bot
h free will and logic. The devotional division was caused by the question of whether Balaam’s ass spoke or whether Balaam just said his ass spoke. There is more, wonderfully much more, in this joyful journey into the mind and memory of John Gould: how giving a child a calf to raise provides “top-notch instruction in agronomy, economics, subsistence, and merchandising,” as well as milk in the shoes; how lobstermen can communicate without uttering a word; or his comment on women’s yearning for equality: “If lovely woman stoops to the folly of equalizing herself with man, God’s great mistake, she deserves what she gets.”
John Gould, as everyone knows, lives in Friendship, Maine. He is the author of twenty books, most recently his first novel, No Other Place. A Maine writer, he is a national treasure.
Copyright © 1985 by John Gould
All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Penguin Books Canada Ltd.
2801 John Street, Markham, Ontaro L3R 1B4.
The text of this book is composed in Palatino,
with display type set in Palatino.
The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group.
First Edition
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Gould, John, 1908–
Stitch in time.
1. Gould, John, 1908– —Biography. 2. Authors,
American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PS3513.0852Z474 1985 818’ 5209 [B] 84–22599
ISBN: 978-0-393-33648-1 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-0-393-28583-3 (e-book)