Typical Vermonters

SOMEWHERE, on some little back farm far from our little back farms, in some little Vermont village far from our village, the typical Vermonter is lurking. There must be such a person, for many speak of him; but though I have looked for him long and patiently, I have never found him. He does not live on our street, nor gossip at our post office. He does not drive in to our grange meetings, nor bring his typical Vermont family to our chicken-pie suppers; he does not bid at our auctions.

There is only one quality that could be called ‘typical’ of the Vermonters I know. That is their extraordinarily irritating way of not conforming to any type. Each of them is an original. Born on the same hills, fed on the same beans, educated in the same schools, they have just one common denominator: they are all rare birds. If you doubt it after meeting the live neighbors whose likenesses I shall sketch for you — come and see the rest of us for yourself.

I

Horace has a farm about six miles out of Gilead Four Corners, on what we call the ‘hill road,’ though to strangers this might seem a distinction without a difference. The first time I met him was when I went out to his place to see if I could hire him and his boys to do some work on the house I had bought in the village.

Our talk followed the usual devious course — weather, crops, neighbors, and the weather again. After the third or fourth exchange of ‘Wal, it’s a good hay day, don’t you call it?’ answered by ‘Yes, it’s real good weather for haying,’ I introduced, as was right and proper, the business at hand. I wanted my roof shingled, and some plastering done, and I wanted a bridge built across the little stream that cut us off from the road. I was quite explicit about the amount of work involved, and the time I figured it would take.

Horace put his hands in his suspenders and spat beneath the fringe of his drooping walrus moustache. He looked round at the hills, then back again at me, out of his shrewd, twinkling little eyes. ‘You want we should shingle?’ he inquired, as though introducing an entirely new idea. I very definitely wanted just that.

‘You want we should plaster?’ I did.

‘You want we should build a bridge cross stream?’ I still did.

He took another look round at the hills and the sky before he spoke again. Finally he said, ‘It’s a good hay day, don’t you call it?’

With what I felt was a ruthless breach of etiquette, I asked Horace a direct question: ‘Do you think, Mr. Flint, that you and your boys could undertake the job?’

He studied for a long time before he answered. ‘I dunno,’ he said at last, ‘I dunno but what we kin.’

That was as near to an affirmative as I ever heard from Horace, and I was surprised and pleased the next morning when he and his three sons appeared at my old house ready for work. ‘We cal’late to stayrt on the bridge,’ he told me, and went into a huddle with his boys. After a while I heard an axe ringing and came out to investigate. Four or five hundred yards away, at the top of a rise of land, one of Horace’s sons was chopping down a stout hemlock. When it had crashed to the earth and the branches had been lopped off, the four of them began to drag it to the edge of the stream, where the water cuts across the front yard of the house.

Halfway to the bank, Horace straightened up and called me.

‘Stringer,’ he said when I came up. He grinned at me, and speculatively eyed the hemlock, then the stream. So far as one could tell, it was the first time he had thought of comparing them with each other. ‘I dunno but what it’s ’bout long enough to go cross,’ he said to the boys. He put his hands deep into his overall pockets, set his feet wide apart, and measured again with his eye, first the hemlock, then the stream. ‘Dunno but what it ain’t more’n half long enough,’ he added.

Horace and his boys worked for me five or six weeks that summer. Every evening, as they left, I called out, ‘You’ll be here again to-morrow, won’t you?’ and Horace always answered, ‘Try to.’ His tone clearly implied his belief that an unwise Providence would interfere, and indeed it often did.

We became good friends while the shingling and plastering were in progress. Horace liked to joke. He was casual and humorous, and had an easy way with the boys. He never went to church, he worked on Sundays as well as week days, and he never hurried about anything. Easy-going — that is what the village calls him. But, for all that, he did what I asked of him in a workmanlike and efficient manner. He charged me a fair price for it. He never made any promises, but he stuck to his job till it was finished.

And Horace is a good neighbor. After the house was in repair, I lived there alone with my nine-year-old son. One night we had a terrible storm. The thunder crashed, the lightning struck again and again in the woods around us, the rain came down in sheets. The little stream swelled to a torrent, and I expected every minute that Horace’s bridge would be carried out. But it held.

In the morning, while I was doing up the breakfast things, I looked out of the kitchen window and there was Horace himself, standing beside the bridge, meditatively poking the stringer with his foot. I went out to ask what had brought him.

‘Quite a storm, wa’n’t it?’ he said, still trying the stringer to make sure it was fast in the softened bank. I agreed.

‘Said to the woman last night,’ he continued, ‘I said I dinno but what you and Johnnie might hev been washed right away. Thought I better come over-’long this mornin’ — see if they was suthin’ left.’

I told him we were all right, and we talked of this and that. When he was leaving, I thanked him for looking after us so kindly.

‘Wal,’ he said, in his slow, twinkling way, ‘folks is kinda scayrce in these parts. Dunno as we like to lose many.'

II

A dangerous-looking character, such as one might find between the covers of an old dime novel, Perley, when he is at home, disturbs the harmony of our quiet street. His lean brown cheeks are deeply hollowed at the corners of a toothless mouth. His black eyes are impudent in the shadow of his broadbrimmed felt hat. His hoarse voice, croaking profanities, his slouching walk, the aggressive hunch of his shoulders — everything about him is reminiscent of the story-book buccaneer. If you were to accuse him of being, in fact, a pirate, he would be flattered, and would probably reply that he was a kind of ‘se-mi mawdern’ one, thus introducing you to his favorite expression.

The village disapproves of Perley, as it would disapprove of a real pirate if it knew one, and tempers the disapproval with the grudging respect which is its homage to success of whatever kind. Yet Perley and Perley’s calling are indigenous to our soil, as piracy is not; indeed, we should not be a proper Vermont village without him. He is our Antique Man.

We have a store, and a post office, and a gasoline station; but we have no charming white cottage with bluegreen shutters and a weathered sign giving notice to all comers that genuine antiques may be had within. We have only Perley. His house is dilapidated rather than quaint, and the barn behind it has fallen into a decay more authentic than picturesque. Piled up in the barn and spilling out into the yard are the tables, the ladder-back chairs, the bow-front bureaus, the blanket chests that Perley brought home from the last auction, and from the auction before the last, and from innumerable other auctions that stretch back over the years. Outside, too, are the wood scrapers, and the steel wool (red with rust), and the lard pails full of linseed oil (and rain water), with which Perley plans, some day, to restore these treasures to a pristine and salable beauty.

Until the day when Perley’s high resolve matures into action (and the village says that the Day of Judgment will come first) Perley will continue to rove the countryside in search of more chairs and tables and chests. Such lack of thrift and industry in the care of his possessions irritates the village, but that is not the real thorn in the side of his neighbors. It is that Perley is shiftless and shrewd, shiftless and rich.

It was not always so. About nine years ago, the first Early American Ballyhoo reached our backwoods hill and became the instrument of Perley’s salvation. Up to that time, when he first learned that the things we call old-fashioned could be turned into cash and adventure, Perley was our ne’er-do-well. In those days he hunted and fished, and occasionally he farmed in a bored and dreamy fashion. He harrowed a little less of his twenty acres than he ploughed, sowed a little less than he harrowed, and harvested nothing. He never married.

In spite of his dreaminess, Perley learns quickly, especially when the lesson is congenial and the rewards tangible. Eight years ago he sold pewter spoons for a quarter apiece, and his patter was unconvincing. But Perley can read, and he got him a book. Reading, and watching the buyers at dealer’s auctions in more sophisticated communities, he has picked up a good deal, and he has never been too proud to accept instruction from his customers, counting the humiliation of a poor trade a valuable lesson, and charging his loss to the next purchaser. Now, when he whangs a specimen of Sandwich glass with his bony hand, inclining his head to listen delicately to its ringing; when he tells you that a piece of Bristol is ‘goodish,’ or that the Hitchcock chairs are ‘the best I have ever seen’ — you almost believe him. From his trips of acquisition he still brings home an occasional stuffed owl, a sample of Mr. Woolworth’s best majolica, and a tatted tidy or two. Nevertheless, and in spite of these lapses, he has learned enough to excite the awe and envy of his neighbors.

Perley’s wisdom and shrewdness have become legendary in the village. This is his hard luck, for the villagers will sell him nothing; they would rather split up the family heirlooms for kindling than see Perley profit by them. His mere presence at a local auction is enough to send the prices soaring. Once, before I had been initiated into the mysteries of neighborhood gossip, I showed Perley a table I had bought from our storekeeper, remarking that he had refused to take more than fifty cents for ‘the wuthless old thing,’ and I advised Perley to look around for treasures at home, instead of seeking them so far afield.

‘The derned fool!’ Perley replied without malice. ‘I offered him five dollars for that table. He said he presumed that if it was wuth five to me it was wuth ten to somebody else, and he would n’t sell it.’ Neither to Perley nor to the storekeeper was there anything odd in his selling it to me for fifty cents, since it was obvious that I wanted it for use and not for profit.

But the village, though it will not sell to Perley, delights in his prowess as a trader. If you come to Gilead Four Corners in search of bargains, and if by chance Perley is at home, you will be directed to his door. He is really an amiable old cutthroat, in spite of appearances. He will deal fairly with you, and, though his information is sometimes misleading, his prices are modest. But whatever you pay, the village will be certain that you have paid too much — and, secretly, it will expand in pride of Perley.

III

Mrs. Martin is a young woman — about thirty-five, I should think. In a farming community it is rare for a woman to look as young as her years, and it is one of Mrs. Martin’s distinctions that she does. She is tall and slender, with a free, graceful carriage. She wears her straight black hair parted in the middle and drawn back smoothly from her fine brow. Her green-gray eyes look out at you in a calm, intelligent gaze from under straight eyebrows. Somebody must give her her clothes. She would never bother to make them, even if she knew how, and she surely lacks the money to buy them. Still, she wears other people’s clothes with an air that none of us quite manage in the garments we purchase or make for ourselves. It is an air that matches her gracious manner, her talent for saying the pertinent thing pleasantly.

Mrs. Martin knows a great deal that the rest of us do not know. She can tell you the names of all the birds, and when they come in the spring, and where they nest. She knows what trees and flowers and ferns can be found in the state. An omnivorous reader, she can construe the hardest, sentences in Vergil and Cicero. She can solve any crossword puzzle. When we play games at club meetings or church sociables, she wins the prizes.

But there is no use mincing words: Mrs. Martin has the dirtiest house I have ever seen anywhere. It looks dirty from a long way off — dirty windows, dirty lace curtains, litter in the yard. Inside it is topsy-turvy — food, unwashed dishes, refuse all over the kitchen; soiled clothes, unmade beds, disorder all over the parlor. Nor is this all. Any one of us, her neighbors, would know the smell of Mrs. Martin’s house if we got a sniff of it in Jericho.

Out of the filth and squalor of this house have come the seven smartest children who ever went to school on the hill. The oldest is making a brilliant record in college. The youngest, Tillie, started school this year. During her first day at class Tillie burst into loud and stormy weeping. When she was calm enough to answer questions, she said, with the tears of shame at such an exhibition still coursing down her pink cheeks: ‘I can’t help it. I know too much for this school.’

They are also the seven healthiest children to be met with anywhere. They never sniffle in the winter, never catch a contagious disease, always look as sleek as cats fed on cream. Somehow they manage to step out of that pigsty of a house appearing as crisp as if they had just come from the hands of a German governess.

If this paradox puzzles you Mrs. Martin will resolve the riddle with a characteristically frank statement. ‘ I hate housework!’ she says. ‘I was sixteen when I married. If I had tried to do the housework properly, and have my babies and look after them as they grew up, it would have killed me. We don’t eat things that require much cooking — milk and potatoes mostly. In the summer we’re out all the time, in the woods and fields, the children and I. Sometimes we stay out all night, if we want to. Henry does for himself when he comes home from work. And in the winter the children go to school, and I read and study their lessons with them.’

Mrs. Martin has very little regard for property, being possessed of none and unambitious to burden herself with the care of things. But she has a deep feeling for books. She is fiercely indignant against the librarian in a near-by town where one of her children goes to high school. ' A shiftless, sloppy woman,’ she said to me, fondling a dog-eared book with the sympathy that some people reserve for mistreated stray kittens. ‘Ruth brought this home from the library, but I would n’t let her read it until I had fixed it up some. I always have to clean up the books from that library with an eraser, and I keep some gummed tape for patching them; then I make them new clean paper covers.’

The book in her hand testified to her skill and patience. Behind her, as she talked, I could look through the open door of her house and see the dirt, ugliness, and jumbled disorder from which she manages to escape by the simple but determined gesture of turning her back.

IV

If Horace is not altogether old-fashioned, in our sense of the word, at least he belongs to the old order of things. And Perley, as he himself will tell you, is romantically ‘semi-modern.’ But Dana is of to-day. Although he is only a few years younger than Perley, although the land he farms came to his family in a pre-Revolutionary grant, although he says ‘daown street’ and ‘caow’ and asks visitors if they ‘like here,’ Dana is no quainter than the Empire State Building.

He is a farmer, and he looks the part — a rather handsome farmer, to be sure, with blue eyes, a wide smile, and an alert expression on his mobile face. Stocky and well-built, there is still something boyishly awkward about his body, something in his walk that suggests chores. Made for the land, he walks on it with power and assurance rather than with grace. If you met him in a drawing-room, you would smell the hayfields and look to see if the barn dirt still clung to his shoes.

Yet Dana would be mentally at home in any drawing-room. He is a ready listener wherever talk is good, a shrewd commentator on affairs. Like his four brothers, he is a college graduate. In Vermont, a child’s labor belongs to his parents until his majority. Dana attended college from harvest to spring harrowing; from spring harrowing to harvest he worked on the farm, making up his studies at night. His brothers are products of the same system, but after graduation they left Vermont to win their fortunes in New York. Only Dana remains to till the home acres, wresting from them a modest living for himself, his wife, and his four lovely children.

He is content with farming, for he likes being his own boss. He loves to look out over the blue hills in the evening, to chop alone in his wood lot on early winter days, to sniff the fragrance of sap boiling in the early spring. He is not sentimental about these things, but now and then he mentions them when he writes an article for one of the agricultural journals. For him, these are important elements which go to make farming not merely a means to earn a living, but a way of life.

He has a great curiosity about modern problems. There is nothing in it of the nostalgic curiosity of the adolescent, rebelling against his isolation in the hills. Dana is content to study and observe from a distance, but he is always eager for news from beyond. So he subscribes to the leading magazines, and when he goes to the nearest big town to have his grain ground at the mill he spends his idle hours in the library. Now and then his brothers send him books, and when he can afford it he buys some volume that he has seen provocatively reviewed. Such books are Red Bread and New Russia’s Primer, because he is deeply interested in the Communistic experiment; or Why We Behave Like Human Beings and Education and the Good Life, because he is deeply concerned about the training of his children.

When he ‘looks off,’ his vision is hemmed in by the high peaks of Killington and Pico, but he can see that old standards are crumbling, old hopes failing. He will tell you, in his quiet tones, that the capitalistic system belongs to the past, that a new day is at hand. If he cannot look beyond the mountains, he can see farther than his neighbors, with their milk problem and their sheds full of rotting potatoes that they cannot sell. He, too, suffers from a dwindling cream check, but it is not this personal suffering that is his chief concern. ‘It is all a part,’ he says, ‘of the general breakdown of our institutions. And the change is coming, sooner than I thought to see it come.'

When we have our first agricultural commune at the Four Corners, Dana will be a fine leader — our interpreter of the new order.

V

If you were to sit in the comb-backed Windsor that faces my parlor window and look out into our wide street, the chances are that you would see Miss Callie Pember. On a muddy day she picks her way between the puddles as delicately as if her high rubber boots were silver dancing slippers. If the day is fair, and the road firm and clean, she skims over it with long, flat-footed strides, clutching a net carryall that is almost as tall as herself.

But no matter about the weather. If once you clapped your eyes on her, you would be certain to exclaim that I wickedly deceived you in the opening paragraphs of this article, for Miss Callie Pember is the living embodiment of the idea you have always held of the New England spinster. If you concede any virtue at all in my contention that nature has peopled these hills with individual characters, you would point to her as the exception that proves the rule, and put her down as our one typical Vermonter.

Is it not typical of her, in the first place, to be a spinster? If Miss Callie ever had a romance, I have not heard of it. It must have been a very nice romance, for it took nothing from the fresh innocence of her mind and her emotions. At seventy, she is not an old lady; she is, rather, a very proper virgin of long ago, exquisitely preserved. In the shy deference of her presence, you meet again the little girl with the sampler, coming bashfully out of her corner, mindful of her manners, to greet her mother’s guests.

Of course it was her mother who was responsible for Miss Callie’s spinsterhood — that mother who, grimly determined to live for a hundred years, did through a dominating will hang on for ninety-nine. It was this same mother who warned Miss Callie to be careful not to muddy her rubber boots, and taught her to skim over the ground, hurrying from store or post office so that she might get back home as quickly as possible.

Miss Callie Pember has mousy gray hair, drawn taut from her high forehead and twisted in back into what she calls ‘a pug.’ Her skin is the color of an old stoneware pie plate; much honest scrubbing has shrunken it tight across her high cheek bones, but not too tight for it to be cracked with many fine lines, like the old plate. She is always dressed in a long black alpaca that hangs in straight box pleats from a small square yoke, and under it she wears black woolen tights, which bulge a little over the tops of her high lace boots. She is an immaculate housekeeper, and a beautiful gardener. Her greatest prides are her white hardwood kitchen floor, her steamed brown bread, and her gladioli.

She is so very true to type in every particular that I hesitate to shatter the illusion which sight of her always creates in the mind of strangers by adding the one detail which sets her apart from her neighbors — from Horace, Perley, Mrs. Martin, and Dana. A capricious Fate ordained that Miss Callie Pember should be born in India, be educated in Paris, and for twenty years teach needlework and the Christian Gospel to the natives of Dutch Guiana. It was only ten years ago that Miss Callie came to live in Gilead Four Corners, where she so gracefully fulfills her destiny of a typical Vermonter.