Chapter 3: The world they kept
In the summer of 1923, my dad became a partner on the farm in East Andover with Grandfather Howard. It was a cultural shock to return to Maine after Massachusetts. We came back to a farmhouse that was probably fifty years old, nicely painted and well kept–the same house where my mother had been born and where my brother Guy had been born. It was a good house. But it was still a shock.
In Massachusetts we had had electricity to run things like a meat grinder and coffee maker. There were barn lights and outdoor lights that stayed on all night. Miss Blanchard had a small greenhouse that she kept heated all winter. We had running water. We lived close enough to Boston so we had semi-fresh fruit and vegetables coming through the port and being sold at Faneuil Hall Market.
In Maine we had kerosene lamps with glass chimneys for lights. These lamps had to be taken care of daily, the globe needed to be washed, the wick trimmed and kept in good condition so when it got dark we had light. We heated our water on the wood stove. To me the loss of our ability to turn things on with a switch was humiliating.
Water for all purposes was first heated in the stove well — a section of the stove — or in heavy pots. When you needed a bath, the adults filled a round galvanized washtub with water for the weekly bath. The clothes were washed in a galvanized tub, which might have been the bathtub, then squeezed through a wringer, or my mother had to wring them by hand. I did a lot of turning of the wringer helping my grandmother and Mother.
We had a two-holer bathroom in Maine that needed to be cleaned out frequently. The men hated the job of moving human waste. Mother and Grandmother had their own toilet paper rolls that they had ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. The rest of us used that catalog for paper. I learned a lot about ladies’ underclothes because of this experience.
But if the house lacked certain conveniences, it made up for them with people. In Maine we had two sets of grandparents, a great-grandfather, and innumerable aunts and uncles.
Grandmother Howard — my mother’s mother, Mary Abigail Glover Howard — probably never weighed more than a hundred pounds in her life. She had lost two children before they grew to adulthood, and the three who survived — Henry, Lucetta, and Gladys — learned early that she was not a woman to be crossed. She was apparently quite strict with her children. But when it came to her grandchildren she wanted to hold them and feed them and spoil them.
She ran that house the way my grandfather ran the farm — without stopping and without sitting down. At seventy she was still doing the wash for all the men who worked for my grandfather, hauling their heavy clothes through the tub and the wringer, hanging them in the yard, and going back for the next load. The men came in from the woods and the barn and the fields, and she washed what they wore. It was the hardest work in the house and she did not hand it off.
She was a small woman in a house that was not built for small women. The doorways were narrow, the stairs were steep, and half of what the kitchen needed was stored in the attic or the cellar. She moved through it all day long, and the house got the better of her now and then. She made molds from eggs — screened the shells out, poured the eggs into molds, stored them in a cool place. One time she slipped and dropped a batch down the heating register onto the hot furnace. Even six months later you could smell them on the heating unit.
One time she was up in the attic — getting something, putting something away, I don’t know what — and she backed into a big cardboard carton that had held cornflakes. She was so small that once she was in it she could not get herself out. She had to wait there, stuck in the box, until someone came home to pull her free.
She taught me a great deal during those years, though neither of us planned it that way. My brother Guy liked to work outside with the men, but I had to stay inside until my chores were done. My grandfather always asked whether the chores were finished before he would let me out. So while Guy was in the barn or the field, I was in the kitchen with my grandmother, turning the wringer, keeping the woodbox full, and listening to her talk. She used to tell me the names of the people in her family back as far as she could remember.
Grandfather Howard — Marshall Hazen Abbott Howard — was over six feet tall. As a boy he ran into the branch of an apple tree and damaged one of his eyes. The next winter he got hit in the same eye with a snowball and that finished it off. He never had a glass eye put in, but he always seemed to be a happy man.
He farmed potatoes, corn, and oats. He kept a large herd of cattle and supplied milk and butter for the village of East Andover. He sold wood from his woodlot. He taught school for a couple of years. None of it made him rich, and he lost a good deal of what he had in the Depression. He was a frustrated farmer — it cost a lot of money to get a farm going, and he wanted us to know that.
He had supper at six o’clock and he never called it dinner. Woe be it to the man who was late.
There was also my mother’s cousin Howard Glover, who was part of the household for most of my grandparents’ lives. His mother had contracted tuberculosis and he was very young when he came to live with Grandmother and Grandfather Howard. My grandfather did not really want to bring up another child, but he felt that it was the right thing to do for family. Howard spent his childhood with them — about fifteen years — and then moved back to Rumford to finish high school. When my grandfather got sick at the end of his life, Howard was the one he counted on to help him.
Across town in Andover we had the Akers grandparents. Grandmother Akers — Annie Andrews Akers — was about five foot ten, which was tall for a woman in her time. She loved being a farmer’s wife. She made good sauerkraut. She grew her own beans for baked beans and would have me come up for the weekend when the beans were dried to use the flail to remove them. There was a certain rhythm needed to get the beans out, and she expected you to find it.
She had a very good attitude towards cooking. When she cooked she made several of the same thing, so that she had enough for several meals. She would cook the brook trout that I would catch for her and put them in the ice box. When she cooked on the wood stove she kept her eye on the food. The best way to do this was to sit and rock and watch. Then she would put it away in the cool room and think about that food until she was ready to serve it.
Grandfather Akers — Lewis Crockett Akers — got hurt in an accident on the farm and injured his spine, so he was bent over from that. He probably lost a lot of his height. He was devoted to his wife. No one could say anything bad about her or her care of him. He was a member of the Knights of Pythias along with my father.
My grandfather had a collie dog named Pal who was his constant companion. My grandmother felt that Pal was undernourished, so she baked a loaf pan full of Johnny cake made out of crushed corn. Grandfather, not to be outdone, boiled off some syrup and poured it into the snow and invited the dog to lick it up. It was great until his jaws stuck together and then he started to howl. He howled until his jaws came unstuck and then he hurried back for more.
Great-grandfather Loring Glover was Grandmother Howard’s father. He was a mill wright and a very private man. He and my dad got on well, as they were both people who did not need conversation to be comfortable in a room together. I don’t remember my dad ever sitting for the evening with the family. He would rather sit in the kitchen smoking his pipe. He would come into the parlor when we had visitors and he would enter into the conversation usually with just a yes and a no.
Great-grandfather also smoked a pipe and singed his beard more often than not. Grandfather Howard did not approve of smoking, but Great-grandfather Glover and my dad held their position on the subject and Grandfather Howard held his.
People in Maine had a good understanding of planning for the future with food, lodging, and heat. They saw to it that there was money to buy their supplies and their chewing tobacco. Grandmother Howard always ordered Black BL chewing tobacco when she ordered store supplies. She had a plug cutter up in the attic for cutting the squares into plugs. This gave me a chance to show my skills with the cutter. I took a couple of her strips of tobacco and cut them into what I thought were appropriate sizes. Some of them were. Some of them were not. She didn’t let me forget that incident for a long time after that.
In Maine we had fresh fish — cod, sardines, and smelts — and meat, but no fresh vegetables and fruit. What we had was what could be caught, what could be preserved, and what could be kept cold. Grandfather Howard had an icehouse built to keep meat fresh. My grandmother said it needed to be at the edge of the pasture because she did not want to have her yard littered with abandoned equipment and the like. So the icehouse went where Grandmother said it should go.
It was about twelve by twelve and about fifteen feet tall, made out of raw lumber. It had two sets of walls, and the space between them was filled with the driest possible sawdust from the mills — not just any sawdust, but the driest they could find, because damp sawdust will not hold the cold. In the wintertime the men of the farm would wait for the coldest stretch of days and then go down to the millpond to cut ice. All of it was cut by hand with long saws. The ice was usually twelve to twenty-two inches thick, depending on the winter, and every block had to be sawn clean so it would stack. They loaded the blocks onto a hayrack and dragged them up to the icehouse. Then the real work began. Each block was set into place and packed around with sawdust — sawdust on the bottom, sawdust on every side, sawdust between every block so that no two pieces of ice touched each other. Then another layer of blocks on top, and more sawdust, and another layer, and more sawdust. This would be repeated as many times as Grandfather had the patience to do. A well-packed icehouse would hold ice through August.
Guy took a header into the millpond while we were cutting ice one time. We fished him out and sent him home to my mother.
We went to church every Sunday in the snow season. Grandfather Howard was very active in the Congregational Church in Andover, and Mother taught in the Sunday School and had other duties there. Grandfather and Mother would ride in the one-horse shay in the single seat, wrapped up in robes that were tailored from buffalo hides. They were as warm as anything you could own. Guy and I were well dressed for warmth but we did not have buffalo robes. We rode on the back runners and held onto the seat. The horse would trot almost all the way up to Andover and back, and from the runners you felt every step of it — the packed snow under the shay, the cold air coming at you, your grandfather and your mother up ahead in the seat bundled so thick they looked like one person. The horse’s trotting was impeded only by the big hill that came up by the Souter place, and on the downhill side he would pick it up again.
Grandmother Howard usually stayed home on Sundays to make the breakfast for the various people who were at the house. She was busy with household chores and did not have much patience for sitting still. I remember her going to church at Christmas time. When she did come, if she didn’t like the sermon, she would turn her hearing aid off.
One winter morning Grandmother Howard came into the kitchen and said, “Guy, you’ve got to go to Frye to the station and get some molasses. I have run out of molasses and that means that Saturday night in Andover there won’t be any beans.”
Now, you have to understand what that meant. In East Andover, Saturday night was baked bean night. That was not a custom or a preference. That was the way things were done, and my grandmother was not a woman who would allow a thing like an empty molasses jug to interfere with the way things were done. She had probably known for a day or two that she was running low, and she had probably thought about it quite a bit before she said anything, because my grandmother thought about food the way other people thought about money — she kept a running account of what was on hand and what was needed and how long everything would last. But when she made up her mind that the situation required a trip to Frye, that was the end of the discussion.
My dad got me out of bed and bundled me up. It was still dark. I can remember the cold hitting my face when we stepped outside, and the sound the horses made when Dad brought them around — they knew what the harness meant, even at that hour. We had the sleigh, not the wagon, as the roads were rolled for winter travel.
I should explain about the rolled roads. Instead of plowing the snow off the roads, which would have been impossible with the equipment they had, the town had built or purchased large rollers about eight feet in diameter. Originally they were pulled by oxen. By the time we lived in Maine the rollers were pulled by teams of horses, two pairs to a team depending on the depth of the snow. The rollers packed the snow down solid and smooth, so you could drive a sleigh on it safely. It was a very good system. When the roads were rolled well they were as reliable as any summer road, and in some ways better, as the ruts and mud holes were buried under two or three feet of hard-packed snow.
We went up the Farmer’s Hill valley and cut across the south side of the mountains on the rolled road to the settlement called Byron, then down the other side of the mountain to Frye. It was one of those winter trips that was beautiful and not often enjoyed. I don’t mean that we talked about it being beautiful. We didn’t talk about much of anything. My dad was not a great conversationalist under any circumstances, and on a winter morning with the horses to manage and the road to watch, he had no need of conversation and neither did I. But the trip over the mountains in the early morning was something I have never forgotten.
The road went up through the valley and then along the ridge where the trees thinned out. You could see a long way from up there when the weather was clear, which it was that morning. The snow was blue in the early light before the sun got to it. The horses’ breathing was the loudest sound there was. Dad kept them to a steady pace going up — you don’t want to wind the horses on a climb when you’ve got the return trip to think about, and Dad always thought about the return trip.
My grandmother was very frugal in most things, but not when it came to buying supplies. When we got to Frye she had us load up with considerably more than a jug of molasses. We had cartons of cereal, coffee, margarine (uncolored and unsalted), kerosene as the truck had not come for the fill, dark brown sugar and molasses, salt pork, chewing tobacco. Grandmother Howard always ordered Black BL chewing tobacco when she ordered store supplies. She had a plug cutter up in the attic for cutting the squares into plugs, and she did not like to run short. Dad always got a small carton of Prince Albert tobacco for his pipe. I don’t remember him trading anything for the supplies on that particular trip, but as a general rule Dad traded maple syrup for his tobacco. He and my grandfather made their own syrup in the springtime, and it was good enough that the storekeepers were glad to take it.
We got our load of groceries and wrapped up the things that would freeze — the margarine and anything in glass — in the blankets and burlap we had brought for the purpose. Anything left out in the environs too long on a day like that would be ruined by the time we got home.
On the way home we had to retrace our steps over the mountain. By then the sun was down and the temperature was dropping, which meant the road surface was tightening up. A freshly rolled road in cold weather is about as good a surface as you could ask for, but the edges are not to be trusted. Where the roller stopped and the unrolled snow began there was a lip, and if the horses drifted over that lip we would be stuck in snow up to the axles with no way to get out except to unhitch and dig. Dad had to keep at the horses to keep them away from the edge. They wanted to drift toward the downhill side, which is what horses will do, and Dad corrected them steadily without making a fuss about it. He was good with horses. He didn’t fight them and he didn’t let them have their way.
From the top of the mountain on the way back we could see the isolated yellow lights of Andover below us. There were not many of them — East Andover did not have electricity, and the lights we saw were kerosene lamps in the windows of the houses along the road, the ones that were close enough to the village to be visible. They were small and warm-looking from that distance. The stars were just as bright as they could be.
Filling the woodshed at Grandmother Howard’s took us several days every summer. Guy and I helped Grandfather Howard with the job, and the job started long before our part. During the winter he would cut the large limbs out of the birch trees in the woods — fourteen inches in diameter, some of them — and haul them out to the back pasture by the barnyard. They sat there and weathered through the mud season and into spring. By summer the wood was ready to be worked.
We cut the weathered limbs into twelve-inch lengths and then split them. Splitting birch is good work when the wood has had time to dry — the maul goes in clean and the round falls apart. We stacked the split pieces in neat pyramids to dry further, and as we finished a batch we threw them into the dump cart for the trip to the woodshed. Several days and several trips to fill the area for cooking. The larger hunks — logs with the bark still on — went to the furnace for heating. Two kinds of wood for two kinds of fire.
Every summer, we worked until there was enough dried wood to last all winter. Guy and I got so good at it that my grandfather had to find another task for us.
He decided that we should paint the barn.
My mother was there at the time and refused to let us paint until she found different clothes for us. She found someone to take her down to Rumford and she bought clothes for the boys so we would be well dressed while painting. This was my mother — she knew perfectly well that we were about to spend a week covered in paint, and she was not going to have us do it dressed in our clothes.
The paint job took about a whole week. We used earth pigment paint mixed with linseed oil, which does not wash out of clothes. It does not wash out of anything. The only way to remove it was kerosene, and my grandfather would sputter about the boys wasting the kerosene. No one ever attempted to clean the clothes, as the paint hardened as soon as it got on them. We kept them out on the line at night so the paint would not heat up and spontaneously combust.
Little things became major events in East Andover, and Christmas was the biggest of them.
We did not have electric decorations on our Christmas tree. Everything was homemade. We strung popcorn into long garlands and draped them over the branches. We blew eggs out through pinholes and painted them for ornaments. The candles were real — raw candles set into small holders and clipped to the branches of the tree. There was nothing on that tree that had been bought in a store.
On Christmas Eve, Grandfather Howard allowed us to have one lighting of the Christmas tree. One lighting, and that was all. You have to understand what it meant to light real candles on a dry tree in a house with no electricity. The room went dark first. Then the candles were lit, one by one, and the tree came alive with it — the light moving on the popcorn, the painted eggs catching color, the whole tree flickering. Everyone watched. No one left the room. You did not light those candles and go do something else. You stood there and looked at the tree, because in a few minutes the candles would be put out and that was your Christmas tree for the year.
We hung large woolen stockings for Santa. On Christmas morning we would take them down and look inside. We usually got an orange and a coin. You could not buy an orange in East Andover in December. Fresh fruit did not exist there in the winter — what we had was what could be preserved, canned, or dried. An orange was something that had come a very long way to be in that stocking, and we knew it.
Grandmother Howard would always knit us a new pair of mittens and a pair of winter socks to be worn under our boots. She knit them while we were at school, so we would be surprised. I don’t know when she found the time, between the wash and the cooking and the woodstove and everything else she did in that house, but every Christmas there they were — new mittens and new socks, waiting in the stockings as though they had made themselves.
We had a pipe organ in the front parlor, and on Christmas Eve we would gather around it and sing carols. Then we would go out caroling — house to house through the dark, in the cold. At each place we were given hard cider, donuts, and sometimes fudge. It was expected that we would eat and drink right on the spot. You did not take it home. You stood in someone’s doorway and ate your donut and drank your cider and then you went on to the next house. By the end of the evening you had been in and out of half the homes in East Andover.
Guy and I both got a pair of skates one year. Another year we each got a pair of skis. And most years we received heavy underwear, the kind that is usually sewn on.
Family reunions were another special event in Maine. Each year the family elders voted on the next reunion — sometimes planning two years ahead. There were three: the Howard reunion, which was the biggest, the Glover reunion, which was the most interesting, and the Akers reunion, which was an on-again-off-again affair. The Akers were not much for family reunions.
The highlight of the Howard reunion was always the food, served picnic style. There was more food leftover than was probably brought in. The acceptable drink was Moxie and cider. When the ladies were present it was a dry affair, but I think other drinks were served behind the barn. There was usually a baseball game which featured the young unmarried men against the elder statesmen. This was usually won by the young men, as they had more elasticity to their joints.
Family came from everywhere. Aunt Sarah came all the way from Nebraska. An old man came from far away — perhaps Arizona — wearing western boots and a hat with a rattlesnake band and talking with a twang. No one seemed to know exactly how he was related but no one questioned his right to be there. Grandfather Howard appointed himself the director of the proceedings. He made sure every new addition to the family from the previous year or two was accounted for and properly introduced.
The Glover reunion was the most interesting because of the oxen. Great-grandfather Glover’s chief interest in holding the reunion was to let the young people see the importance of shoeing oxen. His whole farm on the Rumford isthmus had been cleared with oxen. He and his son, Uncle John, always had teams of them, and Great-grandfather Glover felt that if the young people didn’t see the work done they would forget that it could be done at all. The technique was to drive the ox into a super strong slatted cage and tie him up with a strap. Then you tied his feet, one at a time. You need eight shoes for an ox because they have cloven hooves. It was something to watch — the size of the animal in the cage, the smith working one foot at a time, and the ox standing for it because he had no choice.
The last reunion I attended there were no oxen left on the farm to be shod.