Our Prize Product
As we lie in our hammocks and look upward, our gaze is arrested by something more precious than the sky. Extrinsically, it is only an apple; intrinsically, it represents the sole product of three years of pruning and spraying our apple trees. Furthermore, it is the only apple we know of on a stretch of road four miles long. Some day, when it has got heavy, but before it ceases to be hard, we shall momentarily forget it while dozing off in our hammocks; and that apple will fall, knocking into our heads the indubitable truth that our corner of New England is not a flourishing fruit country.
It is not a flourishing vegetable country, either; but every section has some crop of which it can be justly proud; and we are justly proud of our crop of old men. They dignify the old houses; they animate the old farms; they redeem the old roads from incursions of the modern motor-car. With old men so ubiquitous, it would seem easy to find the recipe for old age; but it is not as easy as it seems.
Some of our old men ascribe their longevity to unremitting toil; others, according to their neighbors, have been preserved by lives of unadulterated idleness; several consider temperate living their panacea; but an equal number are religious in their conviction that the Fountain of Youth is nothing more nor less than New England rum. Our halest patriarchs, who have buried as many wives as monogamy allows, have suffered from old-fashioned consumption all their lives long; and at last we thought we had found the sovereign cure for untimely death. But where can one catch old-fashioned consumption nowadays?
In the end, the reason for our crop of old men remains as inexplicable as the potato crop of Maine or the peach crop of Delaware. Instead of wondering about causes, we are grateful for the crop.
Almost every morning, Giles, well past threescore and ten, hails us in his hearty voice as he goes by with his ox-load of seaweed, doing what only the most reckless youth would dare to do — riding on the tongue. Often we visit ancient Calvin over the hill, now the mildest of men, who in his adolescence committed a couple of murders, mere peccadilloes of the blood, venial as compared with a sin of the spirit, such as insincerity. Everywhere are magnificent specimens of old men; but if we were to select our prize specimen to send to the Brockton Fair, I feel sure that the unanimous choice of the community would fall on Preservèd Fletcher.
Preservèd was not always so popular in the community. He was not sagacious enough to select our village for his birthplace; and if a person be not born among us, he remains an outlander all his days. Besides, as a young man, after a brief period of teaching school in our village, Preservèd incontinently wandered away into parts unknown, so that it was difficult even to identify him on his return. Worst of all, it looked for a time as if he might become a charge on the community. Our town has no poorfarm; and it looked as if we should have to treat Preservèd the way we treat all our sporadic paupers: go to the expense of hiring a carriage to take him over the line, there to abandon him to the bewildered mercies of the next town, which has a poor-farm.
It soon transpired, however, that Preservèd, during his wander-years, had borne arms in defense of his country. Gentle Calvin’s two unauthorized murders had been to him a source of inconvenience; from an authorized, unlimited slaughter by the equally gentle Preservèd, there accrued a slender remuneration that was sufficient for his needs. He was living on the interest of his investment in the dead.
I once asked him how many rebels he thought he had killed in the war; and he answered, ‘Not over five hundred with my musket, and not over three hundred with my pistol and sword.’ This, I imagine, was an estimate rather than an actual count. The legalized, respectable massacre of eight hundred men was far less romant ic than the slaying of a couple of individuals in private warfare by my old friend Calvin. I could only wish, for the sake of his heightened repute and possibly an increased pension from a grateful government, that Preservèd had killed thousands with his bare hands.
There is still something remotely warlike in his appearance. With his long hair, aquiline profile, moustache, and imperial, he resembles a benign replica of Buffalo Bill, in miniature. He’s as spry as a cricket, and with his whisking step and high-pitched, eager voice is somewhat suggestive of that insect. If any of our villagers think that age has affected him as it does poplar trees, at the top, they mistake his simplicity for simpleness.
It was probably the slight tie of his youthful school-teaching days in our village that brought him back to it in his age. The youngsters he had taught, and corrected were now as old as he; after fifty years teacher and pupils met again under the elms that flourished in the same green antiquity that threw its cool shade over them when they all were young. A strange meeting, full of the dramatic possibilities that did n’t take place! The rudiments of education that Preservèd had given his pupils had sufficed them in carrying on their business, and in partaking of their pleasures — such as they were. They had married the girls of their choice, or, at worst, the girls of their second choice; they had begotten children, and lost the due proportion of them; and there was nothing to be said about it. Besides, it is from the traveler that one expects tales; but Preservèd, unlike most old men, was not given to reminiscences. His face was turned toward the future, and not toward the past.
For an infinitesimal sum, he bought an infinitesimal plot of ground by the roadside, with just room enough in which to plant his foot and a little garden; and on this plot, the youth of almost eighty built a new home. The house Preservèd built would have been called a wattled hut if it had been built in Old England instead of New England. We called it a shanty, and were scandalized by the sight of such a shiftless-looking dwelling, right on the public road. It is undoubtedly the most noticed, if not the most admired, of our structures. Preservèd had selected one of the best building-sites in the village, a site no one had thought of building on since the village was settled over two hundred years ago.
His hut, simply a lean-to against a hillside, roofed with sods, supported by bean-poles, and entirely open to the east, so that Preservèd, like Memnon, can be greeted by the rising sun, offers a wide prospect of the upper reaches of the river, which here dwindles to a blue creek, meandering in vast, mysterious marshes, succulently green, fretted with a thousand unsuspected pools and runnels, enlivened by a million grotesqueries of vegetable and animal life. Beyond the marsh, the solid shore rises in a rounded bluff, covered with a grove of safe, sane oak trees; and, to the northward, one can see the white houses of the village, as safe as the oak trees and possibly as sane. A stone’s throw southward are a wharf and storehouse, the latter fallen into a desuetude which is not innocuous, as the smell of fertilizer testifies when the wind blows from the right, or rather, from the wrong direction.
Sometimes a tiny schooner creeps up the winding channel, stubbed out with oak saplings that look dispirited in their alien element. The arrival in New York Harbor of the Lusitania is less of an event. With the swiftness of the rural telephone, the electrifying intelligence goes all through the countryside that the coal has come. In every kind of vehicle, with all kinds of implements except coal-shovels, the farmers assemble in a frenzy of happy haste.
There must be something cabalistic in coal, for I have never seen the farmers so animated on any other occasion. Coal and persiflage are cast, about with a quick, metropolitan dexterity; sweat makes white channels in the rural cheek; coal-dust endows the rural eye with something of the bigness and brightness of the eye of a professional beauty; and, dominating all, presides the skipper, traditionally bustling and big of oath, lording it alike over the farmers and his crew of a single individual, who constitutes in himself as many official entities as if he were the survivor of the wreck of the Nancy Bell.
I never could understand why coal called for so much hurry. The tide is given as the excuse; but I have known schooners, after unloading, to remain weeks at the wharf. Perhaps the value of the cargo is what engenders haste; probably the skipper feels anxious, like the bearer of a Rajah’s diamond which has been the cause of many crimes. After he has delivered the precious jewel, he can loaf, doffing his fierce responsibility as a garment. The schooner becomes familiar at the wharf, then almost a landmark. Smoke curls from the galley-chimney as peacefully and hospitably as if the schooner were a house, as if it were some friendly, amphibious vessel, as much at home on shore as on the sea.
Alone of the villagers, Preservèd takes no part in the harvest festival of coal. He is too contemporaneous to burn fossilized ferns from the Carboniferous period; he is too busy to join the idle group of spectators who greet with a loud laugh the empty jest. Where most men of his age and antecedents would smoke the pipe of indolence, or fleet the time carelessly with the surreptitious glass, Preservèd is indomitably active from morning till night; working in his garden; gathering for its sustenance the scant manuring of the public road; fraternizing, outdoors or in his hut, with the hens that thoroughly understand him, and probably regard him as a sort of super-rooster.
His vegetables understand him as well as his hens do; no one has such early peas. Most men selfishly forswear tree-planting after fifty; but Preservèd has surrounded his house with a grove of miniature junipers and maples that thrive as lustily as his pea-vines. I confess that in sowing his vegetables and planting his trees, Preservèd has used a system of landscape-gardening entirely his own. All things grow for his delightful use with an irregular, picturesque profusion, as they may have grown in Eden.
He is not an insipid mass of monotonous virtues. He has pride; he has prejudices. Nothing could change his abhorrence of male cats, female dogs, and stewed tomatoes. I hesitate to mention his sole vice. It is so unusual that it may be new; and I should hate to spread the knowledge of a new vice in a world so full of vital old ones. Preservèd is a debauchee of butter. As always happens, the ravages of excess are apparent to the most casual observer. There is an unctuous precipitation of butter all over his person; and this, in the wood-smoke from his open fire, has coagulated, so that in appearance he is suggestive of a golden statue and a sugar-cured ham.
This patine of butter and woodsmoke is very serviceable when he goes swimming. No swan’s neck or fabled dolphin’s back was ever more impervious to moisture. Swimming is one of the things in which Preservèd takes pride; and surely no man ever swam as he does. His method of propulsion is mysteriously invisible; unexpected portions of his body project from the water; a stranger, after a hasty glance at him, might fancy that our river had been invaded by a submarine, with a conning-tower forward and another amidships.
If Preservèd is at home on land and water, in his garden, and among his hens, he is equally at home in the world of men. Welcome and unabashed, he mingles in the social life of the village; and I have even known him, at a public gathering, to recite a poem of his own composition in which he achieved a rhyme with the word Roosevelt, almost as difficult a feat as getting a rhyme for Timbuctoo.
On Sunday afternoons, in a cutaway coat a world too wide for him, with a short staff in his hand as full of life as himself, Preservèd makes a short journey of the four-mile walk to our nonsectarian chapel. None so learned as he in the law and the prophets; and by some sort of miracle, his buttery, woodsmoke, earthy smell has disappeared. The only odor he exhales in the chapel is the odor of sanctity. After the service, fresher than ever for the walk home, he reappears with his staff, a queer, tripedal figure seeming, in its activity, to spurn stone walls.
I do not know his creed, but I do know that it embraces works as well as faith. Early last spring, a neighbor of Preservèd’s, a man with all of life before him, was stricken to death by one of those strokes of fate that remain inexplicable even in the light of the most revealed religion. His widow was left with a family of young children; and to her host of household chores, she was forced to add the host, of her husband’s outdoor chores. Already the garden he had planted showed sad lack of the husbandman’s care. While the village was still debating the widow’s case, trying to make out who could help her in a community where labor is scarce and high, and each man has his own work to do, Preservèd stepped in and flung the burden on his own shoulders. It was not long before the widow’s hens and vegetables were flourishing in friendly rivalry with his own. He performs this supererogatory duty as if it were the greatest pleasure in the world; he says he understands at last why the Lord sent, him to our village.
Although Preservèd has not given us the recipe for old age, he has taught us by example rather than precept what to do with old age when we attain it. We should not be purse-proud of our years; one’s age should be as imperceptible as one’s manners, or the setting of a jewel.
Last Independence Day, an inexorable time-table caused us to rise as early as many of our neighbors rise habitually. Dawn was just breaking as we reached Preservèd’s hut on the outskirts of the village. From the ridgepole, a cheap, printed flag of our country stood out in the still air, proud and stiff with patriotism and sizing. Beyond the rounded bluff of oak trees, the saffron of the sunrise ran up into luminous blue; wisps of vapor hung on the face of the water as if the river itself were celebrating Independence Day. Preservèd stood in his grove of miniature junipers and maples, presenting his delicate profile, while he took careful aim along the barrel of a musket as venerable as himself. An instant later, a sonorous roar woke the echoes of the valley and ushered the Fourth into our village before the youngest boy had fired the smallest cracker.