Part 11

They went on pilgrimage once to her father’s (The house one story high in front, three stories On the side it presented to the road) To see if there was not some special tree She might have overlooked. They could find none, Not so much as a single tree for shade, Let alone grove of trees for sugar orchard. She told him of the bookmark maple leaf In the big Bible, and all she remembered Of the place marked with it--‘Wave offering, Something about wave offering, it said.’

‘You’ve never asked your father outright, have you?’

‘I have, and been put off sometime, I think.’ (This was her faded memory of the way Once long ago her father had put himself off.)

‘Because no telling but it may have been Something between your father and your mother Not meant for us at all.’

‘Not meant for me? Where would the fairness be in giving me A name to carry for life, and never know The secret of?’

‘And then it may have been Something a father couldn’t tell a daughter As well as could a mother. And again It may have been their one lapse into fancy ’Twould be too bad to make him sorry for By bringing it up to him when he was too old. Your father feels us round him with our questing, And holds us off unnecessarily, As if he didn’t know what little thing Might lead us on to a discovery. It was as personal as he could be About the way he saw it was with you To say your mother, had she lived, would be As far again as from being born to bearing.’

‘Just one look more with what you say in mind. And I give up’; which last look came to nothing. But, though they now gave up the search forever, They clung to what one had seen in the other By inspiration. It proved there was something. They kept their thoughts away from when the maples Stood uniform in buckets, and the steam Of sap and snow rolled off the sugar house. When they made her related to the maples, It was the tree the autumn fire ran through And swept of leathern leaves, but left the bark Unscorched, unblackened, even, by any smoke. They always took their holidays in autumn. Once they came on a maple in a glade, Standing alone with smooth arms lifted up, And every leaf of foliage she’d worn Laid scarlet and pale pink about her feet. But its age kept them from considering this one. Twenty-five years ago at Maple’s naming It hardly could have been a two-leaved seedling The next cow might have licked up out at pasture. Could it have been another maple like it? They hovered for a moment near discovery, Figurative enough to see the symbol, But lacking faith in anything to mean The same at different times to different people. Perhaps a filial diffidence partly kept them From thinking it could be a thing so bridal. And anyway it came too late for Maple. She used her hands to cover up her eyes. ‘We would not see the secret if we could now: We are not looking for it any more.’

Thus had a name with meaning, given in death, Made a girl’s marriage, and ruled in her life. No matter that the meaning was not clear. A name with meaning could bring up a child, Taking the child out of the parents’ hands. Better a meaningless name, I should say, As leaving more to nature and happy chance. Name children some names and see what you do.

_The Axe-Helve_

I’ve known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted axe behind me. But that was in the woods, to hold my hand From striking at another alder’s roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch. This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day Behind me on the snow in my own yard Where I was working at the chopping-block, And cutting nothing not cut down already. He caught my axe expertly on the rise, When all my strength put forth was in his favor, Held it a moment where it was, to calm me, Then took it from me--and I let him take it. I didn’t know him well enough to know What it was all about. There might be something He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor He might prefer to say to him disarmed. But all he had to tell me in French-English Was what he thought of--not me, but my axe; Me only as I took my axe to heart. It was the bad axe-helve some one had sold me-- ‘Made on machine,’ he said, ploughing the grain With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran Across the handle’s long drawn serpentine, Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. ‘You give her one good crack, she’s snap raght off. Den where’s your hax-ead flying t’rough de hair?’ Admitted; and yet, what was that to him?

‘Come on my house and I put you one in What’s las’ awhile--good hick’ry what’s grow crooked, De second growt’ I cut myself--tough, tough!’

Something to sell? That wasn’t how it sounded.

‘Den when you say you come? It’s cost you nothing. To-naght?’

As well to-night as any night.

Beyond an over-warmth of kitchen stove My welcome differed from no other welcome. Baptiste knew best why I was where I was. So long as he would leave enough unsaid, I shouldn’t mind his being overjoyed (If overjoyed he was) at having got me Where I must judge if what he knew about an axe That not everybody else knew was to count For nothing in the measure of a neighbor. Hard if, though cast away for life with Yankees, A Frenchman couldn’t get his human rating!

Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair That had as many motions as the world: One back and forward, in and out of shadow, That got her nowhere; one more gradual, Sideways, that would have run her on the stove In time, had she not realized her danger And caught herself up bodily, chair and all, And set herself back where she started from. ‘She ain’t spick too much Henglish--dat’s too bad.’

I was afraid, in brightening first on me, Then on Baptiste, as if she understood What passed between us, she was only feigning. Baptiste was anxious for her; but no more Than for himself, so placed he couldn’t hope To keep his bargain of the morning with me In time to keep me from suspecting him Of really never having meant to keep it.

Needlessly soon he had his axe-helves out, A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me To have the best he had, or had to spare-- Not for me to ask which, when what he took Had beauties he had to point me out at length To insure their not being wasted on me. He liked to have it slender as a whipstock, Free from the least knot, equal to the strain Of bending like a sword across the knee. He showed me that the lines of a good helve Were native to the grain before the knife Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves Put on it from without. And there its strength lay For the hard work. He chafed its long white body From end to end with his rough hand shut round it. He tried it at the eye-hole in the axe-head. ‘Hahn, hahn,’ he mused, ‘don’t need much taking down.’ Baptiste knew how to make a short job long For love of it, and yet not waste time either.

Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge? Baptiste on his defence about the children He kept from school, or did his best to keep-- Whatever school and children and our doubts Of laid-on education had to do With the curves of his axe-helves and his having Used these unscrupulously to bring me To see for once the inside of his house. Was I desired in friendship, partly as some one To leave it to, whether the right to hold Such doubts of education should depend Upon the education of those who held them?

But now he brushed the shavings from his knee And stood the axe there on its horse’s hoof, Erect, but not without its waves, as when The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,-- Top-heavy with a heaviness his short, Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down And in a little--a French touch in that. Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased; ‘See how she’s cock her head!’

_The Grindstone_

Having a wheel and four legs of its own Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone To get it anywhere that I can see. These hands have helped it go, and even race; Not all the motion, though, they ever lent, Not all the miles it may have thought it went, Have got it one step from the starting place. It stands beside the same old apple tree. The shadow of the apple tree is thin Upon it now, its feet are fast in snow. All other farm machinery’s gone in, And some of it on no more legs and wheel Than the grindstone can boast to stand or go. (I’m thinking chiefly of the wheelbarrow.) For months it hasn’t known the taste of steel, Washed down with rusty water in a tin. But standing outdoors hungry, in the cold, Except in towns at night, is not a sin. And, anyway, its standing in the yard Under a ruinous live apple tree Has nothing any more to do with me, Except that I remember how of old One summer day, all day I drove it hard, And someone mounted on it rode it hard, And he and I between us ground a blade.

I gave it the preliminary spin, And poured on water (tears it might have been); And when it almost gayly jumped and flowed, A Father-Time-like man got on and rode, Armed with a scythe and spectacles that glowed. He turned on will-power to increase the load And slow me down--and I abruptly slowed, Like coming to a sudden railroad station. I changed from hand to hand in desperation. I wondered what machine of ages gone This represented an improvement on. For all I knew it may have sharpened spears And arrowheads itself. Much use for years Had gradually worn it an oblate Spheroid that kicked and struggled in its gait, Appearing to return me hate for hate; (But I forgive it now as easily As any other boyhood enemy Whose pride has failed to get him anywhere). I wondered who it was the man thought ground-- The one who held the wheel back or the one Who gave his life to keep it going round? I wondered if he really thought it fair For him to have the say when we were done. Such were the bitter thoughts to which I turned.

Not for myself was I so much concerned. Oh no!--although, of course, I could have found A better way to pass the afternoon Than grinding discord out of a grindstone, And beating insects at their gritty tune. Nor was I for the man so much concerned. Once when the grindstone almost jumped its bearing It looked as if he might be badly thrown And wounded on his blade. So far from caring, I laughed inside, and only cranked the faster, (It ran as if it wasn’t greased but glued); I’d welcome any moderate disaster That might be calculated to postpone What evidently nothing could conclude. The thing that made me more and more afraid Was that we’d ground it sharp and hadn’t known, And now were only wasting precious blade. And when he raised it dripping once and tried The creepy edge of it with wary touch, And viewed it over his glasses funny-eyed, Only disinterestedly to decide It needed a turn more, I could have cried Wasn’t there danger of a turn too much? Mightn’t we make it worse instead of better? I was for leaving something to the whetter. What if it wasn’t all it should be? I’d Be satisfied if he’d be satisfied.

_Paul’s Wife_

To drive Paul out of any lumber camp All that was needed was to say to him, ‘How is the wife, Paul?’--and he’d disappear. Some said it was because he had no wife, And hated to be twitted on the subject. Others because he’d come within a day Or so of having one, and then been jilted. Others because he’d had one once, a good one, Who’d run away with some one else and left him. And others still because he had one now He only had to be reminded of,-- He was all duty to her in a minute: He had to run right off to look her up, As if to say, ‘That’s so, how is my wife? I hope she isn’t getting into mischief.’ No one was anxious to get rid of Paul. He’d been the hero of the mountain camps Ever since, just to show them, he had slipped The bark of a whole tamarack off whole, As clean as boys do off a willow twig To make a willow whistle on a Sunday In April by subsiding meadow brooks. They seemed to ask him just to see him go, ‘How is the wife, Paul?’ and he always went. He never stopped to murder anyone Who asked the question. He just disappeared-- Nobody knew in what direction, Although it wasn’t usually long Before they heard of him in some new camp, The same Paul at the same old feats of logging. The question everywhere was why should Paul Object to being asked a civil question-- A man you could say almost anything to Short of a fighting word. You have the answers. And there was one more not so fair to Paul: That Paul had married a wife not his equal. Paul was ashamed of her. To match a hero, She would have had to be a heroine; Instead of which she was some half-breed squaw. But if the story Murphy told was true, She wasn’t anything to be ashamed of.

You know Paul could do wonders. Everyone’s Heard how he thrashed the horses on a load That wouldn’t budge until they simply stretched Their rawhide harness from the load to camp. Paul told the boss the load would be all right, ‘The sun will bring your load in’--and it did-- By shrinking the rawhide to natural length. That’s what is called a stretcher. But I guess The one about his jumping so’s to land With both his feet at once against the ceiling, And then land safely right side up again, Back on the floor, is fact or pretty near fact. Well this is such a yarn. Paul sawed his wife Out of a white-pine log. Murphy was there, And, as you might say, saw the lady born. Paul worked at anything in lumbering. He’d been hard at it taking boards away For--I forget--the last ambitious sawyer To want to find out if he couldn’t pile The lumber on Paul till Paul begged for mercy. They’d sliced the first slab off a big butt log, And the sawyer had slammed the carriage back To slam end on again against the saw teeth. To judge them by the way they caught themselves When they saw what had happened to the log, They must have had a guilty expectation Something was going to go with their slambanging. Something had left a broad black streak of grease On the new wood the whole length of the log Except, perhaps, a foot at either end. But when Paul put his finger in the grease, It wasn’t grease at all, but a long slot. The log was hollow. They were sawing pine. ‘First time I ever saw a hollow pine. That comes of having Paul around the place. Take it to hell for me,’ the sawyer said. Everyone had to have a look at it, And tell Paul what he ought to do about it. (They treated it as his.) ‘You take a jack-knife, And spread the opening, and you’ve got a dug-out All dug to go a-fishing in.’ To Paul The hollow looked too sound and clean and empty Ever to have housed birds or beasts or bees. There was no entrance for them to get in by. It looked to him like some new kind of hollow He thought he’d _better_ take his jack-knife to. So after work that evening he came back And let enough light into it by cutting To see if it was empty. He made out in there A slender length of pith, or was it pith? It might have been the skin a snake had cast And left stood up on end inside the tree The hundred years the tree must have been growing. More cutting and he had this in both hands, And, looking from it to the pond near by, Paul wondered how it would respond to water. Not a breeze stirred, but just the breath of air He made in walking slowly to the beach Blew it once off his hands and almost broke it. He laid it at the edge where it could drink. At the first drink it rustled and grew limp. At the next drink it grew invisible. Paul dragged the shallows for it with his fingers, And thought it must have melted. It was gone. And then beyond the open water, dim with midges, Where the log drive lay pressed against the boom, It slowly rose a person, rose a girl, Her wet hair heavy, on her like a helmet, Who, leaning on a log looked back at Paul. And that made Paul in turn look back To see if it was anyone behind him That she was looking at instead of him. Murphy had been there watching all the time, But from a shed where neither of them could see him. There was a moment of suspense in birth When the girl seemed too water-logged to live, Before she caught her first breath with a gasp And laughed. Then she climbed slowly to her feet, And walked off talking to herself or Paul Across the logs like backs of alligators, Paul taking after her around the pond.

Next evening Murphy and some other fellows Got drunk, and tracked the pair up Catamount, From the bare top of which there is a view To other hills across a kettle valley. And there, well after dark, let Murphy tell it, They saw Paul and his creature keeping house. It was the only glimpse that anyone Has had of Paul and her since Murphy saw them Falling in love across the twilight mill-pond. More than a mile across the wilderness They sat together half-way up a cliff In a small niche let into it, the girl Brightly, as if a star played on the place, Paul darkly, like her shadow. All the light Was from the girl herself, though, not from a star, As was apparent from what happened next. All those great ruffians put their throats together, And let out a loud yell, and threw a bottle, As a brute tribute of respect to beauty. Of course the bottle fell short by a mile, But the shout reached the girl and put her light out. She went out like a firefly, and that was all.

So there were witnesses that Paul was married, And not to anyone to be ashamed of. Everyone had been wrong in judging Paul. Murphy told me Paul put on all those airs About his wife to keep her to himself. Paul was what’s called a terrible possessor. Owning a wife with him meant owning her. She wasn’t anybody else’s business, Either to praise her, or so much as name her, And he’d thank people not to think of her. Murphy’s idea was that a man like Paul Wouldn’t be spoken to about a wife In any way the world knew how to speak.

_Wild Grapes_

What tree may not the fig be gathered from? The grape may not be gathered from the birch? It’s all you know the grape, or know the birch. As a girl gathered from the birch myself Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn, I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of. I was born, I suppose, like anyone, And grew to be a little boyish girl My brother could not always leave at home. But that beginning was wiped out in fear The day I swung suspended with the grapes, And was come after like Eurydice And brought down safely from the upper regions; And the life I live now’s an extra life I can waste as I please on whom I please. So if you see me celebrate two birthdays, And give myself out as two different ages, One of them five years younger than I look--

One day my brother led me to a glade Where a white birch he knew of stood alone, Wearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves, And heavy on her heavy hair behind, Against her neck, an ornament of grapes. Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year. One bunch of them, and there began to be Bunches all round me growing in white birches, The way they grew round Lief the Lucky’s German; Mostly as much beyond my lifted hands, though, As the moon used to seem when I was younger, And only freely to be had for climbing. My brother did the climbing; and at first Threw me down grapes to miss and scatter And have to hunt for in sweet fern and hardhack; Which gave him some time to himself to eat, But not so much, perhaps, as a boy needed. So then, to make me wholly self-supporting, He climbed still higher and bent the tree to earth, And put it in my hands to pick my own grapes. ‘Here, take a tree-top, I’ll get down another. Hold on with all your might when I let go.’ I said I had the tree. It wasn’t true. The opposite was true. The tree had me. The minute it was left with me alone It caught me up as if I were the fish And it the fishpole. So I was translated To loud cries from my brother of ‘Let go! Don’t you know anything, you girl? Let go!’ But I, with something of the baby grip Acquired ancestrally in just such trees When wilder mothers than our wildest now Hung babies out on branches by the hands To dry or wash or tan, I don’t know which (You’ll have to ask an evolutionist)-- I held on uncomplainingly for life. My brother tried to make me laugh to help me. ‘What are you doing up there in those grapes? Don’t be afraid. A few of them won’t hurt you. I mean, they won’t pick you if you don’t them.’ Much danger of my picking anything! By that time I was pretty well reduced To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang. ‘Now you know how it feels,’ my brother said, ‘To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call them, That when it thinks it has escaped the fox By growing where it shouldn’t--on a birch, Where a fox wouldn’t think to look for it-- And if he looked, and found it, couldn’t reach it-- Just then come you and I to gather it. Only you have the advantage of the grapes In one way: you have one more stem to cling by, And promise more resistance to the picker.’

One by one I lost off my hat and shoes, And still I clung. I let my head fall back, And shut my eyes against the sun, my ears Against my brother’s nonsense; ‘Drop,’ he said, ‘I’ll catch you in my arms. It isn’t far.’ (Stated in lengths of him it might not be.) ‘Drop or I’ll shake the tree and shake you down.’ Grim silence on my part as I sank lower, My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo ‘Why, if she isn’t serious about it! Hold tight awhile till I think what to do. I’ll bend the tree down and let you down by it.’ I don’t know much about the letting down; But once I felt ground with my stocking feet And the world came revolving back to me, I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers, Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off. My brother said: ‘Don’t you weigh anything? Try to weigh something next time, so you won’t Be run off with by birch trees into space.’