When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

  [ September 1941 ]

  FALL

  There were eight deaths in the town last year (four males and four females) and eight births (four males and four females), so we are right where we started—which is good enough for most of us. Of the deaths, one was between 90 and 100, three were between 80 and 90, two were between 70 and 80, and two were between 60 and 70. This is a different story from the old days, when every other grave was a child’s grave. Nowadays it is mostly the old people who die; the children live to grow up, fight in the wars, marry, work, raise children, and draw a pension.

  Eighteen young men have gone into the service from here, which is high for a town of this size.

  Potatoes have done well this year and we will get about thirty-eight bushels, enough for two families. Today I should be digging them, but another fellow is digging them for me and I am staying indoors to earn some money to pay him with. In that way a man gets not much closer to a potato than if he were living in town and harvesting his crop through the A. & P.

  When a gentleman came to adjust a compass for me the other day he noticed how good the potatoes looked and asked me what date they were planted. I had to admit that I didn’t remember the date, and he seemed surprised and mystified, and wondered what sort of disorderly place he had got into.

  There are many days in the autumn when the sky is a solid, heavy gray, and the woods stir uneasily in the raw wind. This is such a time. They call it the fall overcast. Sailing becomes more adventurous—the wind seems to have a great deal more weight to it and puts a bigger strain on rigging and man. The bay is rough and the lobstermen leave earlier and get home later. They have their traps off in deeper water now and are making good catches, but at greater effort. Some of them are bringing in a hundred pounds a day, and are getting twenty-two cents. Partridge shooting will begin soon, and when a man goes off to work in the morning he will take along his shotgun—just in case.

  The flies have come indoors and are in an angry and turbulent state. I have a Flit gun beside my typewriter and open fire at them as they come over. The floor at my feet is strewn with raiders I have brought down, still twitching. In another couple of weeks the rats will come up from the shore into the barn, and the clan will be gathered together under one roof for the approaching cold.

  I read the other day that rats on a farm of average size do a yearly damage of around thirty-five dollars. I believe this, and am surprised that farmers are not more concerned about rat depredations. I shot twelve or thirteen rats last winter and poisoned as many more, and my ex-cat brought in about a dozen. Three dozen rats would be a conservative estimate of the rat colony here, and each rat is a big consumer. Poisoning is by far the most effective procedure although less sporting than trapping or shooting. The rat has only one thing to be said for him: he supplies you with a tangible enemy on whom to vent your hate. I can take out a good deal on rats. If I were to save it all up for the real enemy I might bust. It is a source of relief, after listening to a radio broadcast, to take my .22 and go out to the barn and shoot a rat.

  The hardest thing about the war, for many of us, is to maintain a decent pitch of indignation. I become quite frightened, sometimes, when I realize how accustomed I have become to the phrase “Occupied France”—as though there could be such a place.

  When a glass of wine is poured a wine fly appears promptly—but I never see him at any other time and wonder where he keeps himself in the meanwhile and what he does for a drink.

  It’s seven days since the Fair ended, but in my head I still keep hearing the enormous sound of the waltz that accompanied the swings. And every once in a while I hear too the gigantic summons, that somebody is wanted at the main gate, or will the owner of Maine license 3261 please move his car, it is blocking the highway. (And the hasty search through my pockets to see if my car bears that number.)

  Anything can happen at a county agricultural fair. It is the perfect human occasion, the harvest of the fields and of the emotions. To the fair come the man and his cow, the boy and his girl, the wife and her green tomato pickle, each anticipating victory and the excitement of being separated from his money by familiar devices. It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune. I had expected to see more of the Fair than usual this year, because I had some sheep entered, and had to be around to tend them. But I found that I saw less, rather than more, because of being there in a responsible capacity instead of carefree. My sheep won two first premiums, which I think they would have done even if they had not been the only ones in their class.

  In the clerk’s office, on the first day, I waited my turn while a small boy reported the entry of a cage of ducks. The clerk asked what breed they were, and held his pencil ready.

  “White ones,” replied the boy.

  “Yes, but what breed?” persisted the man.

  “I dunno,” said the boy scornfully, “they’re white.”

  The clerk considered this carefully. Then he nodded wisely and wrote down: “Three white ducks.”

  A fair is good at any hour of the twenty-four. I love it early on a rainy morning when the Ferris wheel is wearing its tarpaulins and the phrenologist is just brushing her teeth. You climb a wet ladder into the loft of the cattle barn for a forkful of hay and find a fellow asleep heavily, his shoes folded across his breast like a lily.

  Fitting my lambs for the Fair, I used desk scissors, and found that I still chewed my tongue as I snipped—a childish reflex for a childish occasion. When I got through, the lambs looked a little like some pictures I had studied in a sheep bulletin and a little like some wooden lambs that had come with a toy barnyard set in another period of American history.

  The theme song of the Fair this fall was Irving Berlin’s song “Any Bonds Today?” It took the place of the “Indian Love Call.” Among the juggling acts and the sound of the horses going into the stretch, the question of bonds went almost unnoticed by the throngs, I am sure—the sound of it inescapable, the significance of it virtually lost. No one was thinking about the mechanics of liberty; people were just enjoying the fact of it. I think there has never been a song quite like “Any Bonds Today?” so innocently combining patriotic fervor with a definite rate of interest. When I first heard the line “Here comes that freedom man,” I thought it was a fishbone I had in my throat.

  [ October 1941 ]

  MEMORANDUM

  Today I should carry the pumpkins and squash from the back porch to the attic. The nights are too frosty to leave them outdoors any longer. And as long as I am making some trips to the attic I should also take up the boat cushions and the charts and the stuff from the galley and also a fishing rod that belongs up in the attic. Today I should finish filling in the trench we dug for the water pipe and should haul two loads of beach gravel from the Naskeag bar to spread on top of the clay fill. And I should stop in and pay the Reverend Mr. Smith for the gravel I got a month or two ago and ask him if he has seen a bear.

  I ought to finish husking the corn and wheel the old stalks out and dump them on the compost pile, and while I am out there I should take a fork and pitch over the weeds that were thrown at the edge of the field last August and rake the little windfalls from under the apple tree and pitch them on to the heap too. I ought to go down to the shore at dead low water and hook on to the mooring with a chain and make the chain fast to the float, so that the tide will pick up the mooring rock and I can tow the whole thing ashore six hours later. I ought to knock the wedges out from the frames of the pier, put a line on the frames, and tow them in on the high water. First, though, I would have to find a line long enough to tie every frame. If I’m to do any work at the shore I ought first to put a cement patch on the leak in my right boot. After the frames are on the beach another fellow and myself ought to carry them up and stack them. And there is probably enough rockweed on the beach now so that I ought to bring up a load or two for the sheep shed. I ought to find out who it is that is shooting coot down in the cove today, just to satisfy my own curiosity. He was out before daybreak with his decoys, but I do not think he has got any birds.

  I ought to take up the wire fence round the chicken range today, roll it up in bundles, tie them with six-thread, and store them at the edge of the woods. Then I ought to move the range houses off the field and into the corner of the woods and set them up on blocks for the winter, but I ought to sweep them out first and clean the roosts with a wire brush. It would be a good idea to have a putty knife in my pocket, for scraping. I ought to add a bag of phosphate to the piles of hen dressing that have accumulated under the range houses and spread the mixture on the field, to get it ready for plowing. And I ought to decide whether to plow just the range itself or to turn over a little more on the eastern end. On my way in from the range I ought to stop at the henhouse long enough to climb up and saw off an overhanging branch from the apple tree—it might tear the paper roof in the first big wind storm. I shall have to get a ladder of course and a saw.

  Today I certainly ought to go over to the mill and get four twelve-inch boards, twelve feet long and half an inch thick, to use in building three new hoppers for dry mash feeding to my pullets. They are now laying seventy-eight per cent and giving me about eighty dozen eggs a week. I should also get one board that would be an inch thick, for the end pieces and for making the ends of the reels. I shouldn’t need anything for the stands because I have enough stuff round the place to build the stands—which I had better make twenty-three inches high from floor to perch. If I were to make them less than that, the birds on the floor would pick at the vents of the birds feeding.

  I ought to get some shingle nails and some spikes while I am at it, as we are out of those things. And I ought to sharpen the blade of my plane if I am going to build some hoppers. I ought to take the cutting-off saw and have it filed, as long as I am going over to the mill anyway. On the way back I ought to stop in at Frank Hamilton’s house and put in my application for government lime and super, because I shall be passing his house and might just as, well take advantage of it. Frank will ask me to sit down and talk a while, I imagine.

  It is high time I raked up the bayberry brush which has been lying in the pasture since the August mowing. This would be a good chance to burn it today because we have had a rain and it is safe to burn. But before burning it I ought to find out whether it is really better for the pasture to burn stuff like that or to let it rot for dressing. I suppose there is so much wood in it it wouldn’t rot up quickly and should be burned. Besides, I was once told in high-school chemistry that no energy is ever lost to the world, and presumably the ashes from the fires will strengthen my pasture in their own way.

  I ought to take the buck lamb out of the flock of lambs today, before he gets to work on the ewe lambs, because I don’t want them to get bred. I don’t know just where to put him, but I ought to decide that today, and put him there. I should send away today for some phenothiazine so that I can drench my sheep next week. It would probably be a good idea to try phenothiazine this time instead of copper sulphate, which just gets the stomach worms and doesn’t touch the nodular worms or the large-mouth bowel worms. And I ought to close the big doors on the north side of the barn cellar and board them up and bank them, so that the place won’t be draughty down there at night when the sheep come in, as they are beginning to do. I have been thinking I ought to enlarge the south door so that I won’t lose any lambs next spring from the ewes jamming through the narrow single opening, and this would be the time to do that.

  Today I ought to start rebuilding the racks in the sheep shed, to fix them so the sheep can’t pull hay out and waste it. There is a way to do this, and I know the way. So I am all set. Also I ought to fix up the pigpen down there in the barn cellar too and sweeten it up with a coat of whitening, so that I can get the pig indoors, because the nights are pretty cold now. The trough will probably not have to be rebuilt this year because last year I put a zinc binding all around the edges of it. (But if I shouldn’t get round to fixing up the pen I should at least carry a forkful of straw down to the house where the pig now is—I should at least do that.)

  This would be a good day to put in a new light in the window in the woodshed, and also there is one broken in the shop and one in the henhouse, so the sensible thing would be to do them all at once, as long as I have the putty all worked up and the glass cutter out. I ought to hook up the stove in the shop today, and get it ready for winter use. And I ought to run up the road and see Bert and find out why he hasn’t delivered the cord of slabwood he said he was going to bring me. At any rate, I ought to make a place in the cellar for it today, which will mean cleaning house down there a little and neating up, and finding a better place to keep my flats and fillers for my egg cases. Incidentally, I ought to collect eggs right now, so there won’t be any breakage in the nests.

  It just occurred to me that if I’m going to the mill today I ought to measure the truck and figure out what I shall need in the way of hardwood boards to build a set of sideboards and a headboard and a tailboard for my stakes. I ought to bring these boards back with me along with the pine for the hoppers. I shall need two bolts for the ends of each sideboard, and one bolt for the cleat in the middle, and two bolts for the ends of each of the head- and tailboards, and there will be three each of them, so that makes fifty-four bolts I shall need, and the stakes are about an inch and a half through and the boards will be three-quarters, so that makes two inches and a quarter, and allow another half inch for washer and nut. About a three-inch bolt would do it. I better get them today.

  Another thing I ought to do is take that grass seed that the mice have been getting into in the barn and store it in a wash boiler or some pails or something. I ought to set some mousetraps tonight, I mustn’t forget. I ought to set one upstairs, I guess, in the little northeast chamber where the pipe comes through from the set tubs in the back kitchen, because this is the Mouse Fifth Avenue, and it would be a good chance for a kill. I ought to gather together some old clothes and stuff for the rummage sale to raise money to buy books for the town library, and I ought to rake the barnyard and wheel the dressing down into the barn cellar where it will be out of the weather, because there is a lot of good dressing there right now. I ought to note down on the calendar in my room that I saw the ewe named Galbreath go to buck day before yesterday, so I can have her lambing date. Hers will be the first lamb next spring, and it will be twins because she is a twinner. Which reminds me I ought to write Mike Galbreath a letter. I have been owing him one since before Roosevelt was elected for the third term. I certainly should do that, it has been such a long time. I should do it today while it is in my mind.

  One thing I ought to do today is to take a small Stillson wrench and go down cellar and tighten the packing nut on the water pump so it won’t drip. I could do that when I am down there making a place for the slabwood—it would save steps to combine the two things. I also ought to stir the litter in the henpen in the barn where the Barred Rocks are, and in the henhouse where the crossbred birds are; and then fill some bushel baskets with shavings and add them to the litter in the places where it needs deepening. The dropping boards under the broody coops need cleaning and I should do that at the same time, since I will be out there anyway. As far as litter is concerned, a man could take and rake the lawn under the maples where there is such an accumulation of leaves and add these dry leaves to the litter in the houses for the birds to scratch around in. Anything to keep their minds occupied in healthy channels.

  Today I intend to pull the young alders in the field on the north side, as they are beginning to get ahead of me. I must do that today, probably later on this afternoon. A bush hook would be a good tool for that. I should also clean up the remaining garden trash and add it to the compost, saving out whatever the sheep might eat, and should remove the pipe from the well under the apple tree and store it down below in the barn.

  I also think I had better call up a buyer and get rid of my ten old hens, since we have canned all we are going to need. After the hens are gone I shall no longer need the borrowed range house that they are living in, and I can get two long poles, lash them on behind the truck, and load the house on and drag it up to Kenneth’s house. But it will be necessary to take an ax and flatten the ends of the poles so they won’t dig into the highway, although the tar is so cold now they probably wouldn’t dig in much anyway. Still, the thing to do is do it right.

  Another thing I should try to manage to do today is to earmark the two pure-bred lambs. That will be easy enough—it just means finding the ear tags that I put away in a drawer or some place last spring and finding the special pliers that you have to use in squeezing a tag into a sheep’s ear. I think I know where those pliers are, I think they are right in my cabinet next to that jar of rubber cement. I shall have to get the lambs up, but they will come without much trouble now because they are hungry. I could take the buck away at the same time if I could think of a place to put him.

  Today I want to get word to Walter about the plowing of the garden pieces, and I had also better arrange down cellar about a bin for the roots, because on account of the extra amount of potatoes we have it will mean a little rearranging down there in order to get everything in. But I can do that when I am down tightening the nut on the pump. I ought to take the car into the village today to get an inspection sticker put on it; however, on second thought if I am going to the mill I guess it would be better to go in the truck and have a sticker put on that while I am seeing about the lumber, and then I can bring the boards back with me. But I mustn’t be away at low water, otherwise I won’t be able to hook on to the mooring.