Vermont Speaking
IN a season that brings forth a plague of cutworms we ask a neighborhood farmer how these underground pests are treating his kitchen garden. He snaps: ‘They’ve overreached themselves. They’ve got every last row so thinned out that, by Christopher, they starve to death getting from one plant to the next.’
At an auction on the River Road a woman in the crowd asks whether the crock being displayed for bids is clean inside. The auctioneer — another neighbor — freezes in a dramatic pose and tells her with hauteur: ‘Madam, that crock is as sweet and clean as a schoolmarm’s ear.’
One of the summer residents whose roadside was stripped by the Big Blow of 1938 asks a permanent resident how long it takes to season that incombustible wood, elm. The answer, in a quiet drawl: ‘Oh, about two-three years — if you keep it in the fireplace.’ And a householder working up a two-hundred-year-old rock maple in the wake of the same disaster, with many a moan about how hard the ancient trunk splits, is instantly told in the proverbial wisdom of the region: ‘All the better wood; it warms you twice.’
Our village plumber, being asked whether a notoriously miserly landlord has complained about the size of the bill for thawing a tenant’s frozen drain, replies: ‘Yes, the old fellow came around, rusting and creaking.’ And the old stock joke about the dilatoriness of plumbers and other artisans long ago got itself translated into another regional semiproverb: ‘It’s a mean man that wouldn’t even promise.’
A young mother, after driving her threeyear-old at a cautious crawl down an icy hill road, speeds up on the main turnpike and, when the child wants to know why the difference, explains: —
‘This road is used by people going to Barre, and, as you can see, it has been carefully sanded. The hill road is only used by people going home, and I dare say nothing will be done to it for days. You must understand, my child, that it is considered pretty important that people shall get to Barre, but not at all important that people shall get home.’
One of our farmers, hag-ridden by back taxes, goes in for raising hogs on a scale, only to find at butchering time that the prices obtainable for dressed pork will not begin to square the cost of producing it. He raves and splutters bitterly, but humor comes out on top, as ever, and he ends: ‘Why, it’d be cheaper to sit up nights and eat the stuff.’
Even the small rascalities of the region are entertaining to the bystander, sometimes even to the victim, for they are generally conducted with picturesque and ingenious verbal genuflections toward the ways of probity. The seller of a cow so cantankerous that five men could not milk her — not if they used block-and-tackle and an anæsthetic — will brag to the customer: ‘Man, you’ll never be able to get all of her milk into one pail.’ The town drunk, devoid of both cash and credit, negotiates the daily exchange of a chicken for his gallon of hard cider. After a week or so it comes over the seller that his flock shows no increase, and he correctly deduces that old Naaman has been borrowing the chicken from it nightly in order to return her with a flourish by daylight. Taxed with his barefaced mendacities, the son of Belial protests with hurt dignity: ‘No, sir, I never told you a single lie. Every time I was good and careful to say, “Well, sir, there’s your chicken.”And’ — the crow of triumphant virtue and superior verbal resources — ‘she was your chicken, wasn’t she?’
The fact is, the preëminent indoor and outdoor sport hereabout is talk. It is the universal amusement — and not entirely, be sure, because a majority of us are too poor to go in for diversions that require a little cash outlay. Some of us had rather, as the saying goes, talk than eat; and most of us, including all the good talkers, had rather listen. Our ears are sharpened for the unexpected twist of speech, the disarming fillip, and almost every casual exchange produces it. We wait for it, seize upon and repeat it far and wide.
Half the profit and all the pleasure of the dickering, hoss-swapping technique for which we are famous — or notorious — derive from the whetting of wits in dialogue; and, unlike those whose minutes are money, we never begrudge the highly educational hours expended on a deal that falls through. One of the most mournful valedictories I have ever heard was pronounced upon a widely respected personage with whom no one had ever succeeded in chaffering, though all had tried. (For that very reason he seemed like an outlander throughout his lifetime in our midst.) He was a man who silently made up his mind just what he would give for a thing he wanted, offered that outright once for all, and, if it were refused, forthwith shoved the whole matter out of his thoughts. ‘He was,’said my informant, ‘a fine man, and everybody thought the world of him. But it never took any time at all to trade with him.’
A highway such as ours, twisting up one narrow river valley and over a bleak heightof-land to twist down another, is ‘uphill all the way both ways.’ If we have our hands full for the moment, we are ‘busier than a cat with two mice.’ Something so near as to make no difference is ‘within a frog’s eyelash.’ The cosmopolitan visitor who patronizes us for our rustic crudity and narrow outlook is ‘spitting on us to see if we can swim.'
Subtleties of intonation also retain among us an importance that they have largely lost where language is more an affair of print, or oral exchange among persons who have not known each other intimately for years. There is, for instance, the simple word ‘housekeeper.’ It signifies the woman of either of two radically different kinds of establishment: that in which the work is merely done for hire, and that in which the man has a deputy (or auxiliary) wife outside technical wedlock. No one ever pays any overt attention to the difference, but the word has faintly contrasted inflections for the two meanings. Hearing either, we know instantly what the speaker means, though no outsider would ever guess.
WILSON FOLLETT