In a quiet country village stood a maple on the hill
Where I sat with my Geneva long ago,
As the stars were shining brightly we could hear the whippoorwill
As we sat beneath the maple on the hill.
~ G.L. Davis
“There’s the woodpile,” said Evelyn.
“I think,” said Patrick, “that it’s the same woodpile that was there when we were kids. I always thought it was too far from the house to be any use.”
Evelyn smiled a little as the three of them walked down into the little hollow at the base of the hill. The old woodpile had settled a few inches into the soil, the blackened ends of the logs moldered a little around the edges, the top thatched with a fresh layer of colored leaves. Above it the huge old sugar maple raised a hundred dignified arms toward the sky, its flame-orange leaves already a little sparse at the top against the October blue. The sunlight came through it with a wild, eager brilliancy, like a young and overzealous stained-glass window, with a jumbled choir of more muted reds and yellows and browns clothing the side of the hill beyond.
Judy sat down on the flat, irregular-edged slab of gray slate stone by the end of the woodpile. “This was the table,” she said, “and it used to be big enough for a banquet.”
“With pieces of bark for plates, cakes made out of mud—and the oak leaves were meat,” said Evelyn, leaning her shoulder against a sturdy young tree that had been a slender sapling when they had played there. She glanced around at the spare, arched brown lacework of the leafless wild-rose bushes that crowded round the hollow, enlivened by the sparks of tiny red rosehips.
“And this was the bedroom,” said Patrick, glancing behind the woodpile. He grinned at the tangle of old wood and rotted leaves. “I don’t think we ever did much sleeping there.”
“No, we just sort of stepped in and stood there for a minute, and then nighttime was over. Night and sleeping don’t have much place in child’s play—we got enough of that in real life,” laughed Evelyn.
“We played a lot of imaginary people when we were really little,” said Judy, “and then later on it was mostly the Lost Boys.”
“Nobody ever wanted to be Wendy—I was the only one willing to be her once in a while,” said Evelyn. “I was always kind of the literary guiding spirit of the bunch, making sure our play had some sense of story to it. How dull I must have been to the rest of you!”
“No, I don’t think you were,” said Patrick. He came to a stop in the middle of the hollow, his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets. “There was a whole lot of high drama in our play when we were little—fire, flood, famine and what have you. Later on it was more like a constant madcap comedy. We almost never stopped laughing.”
“Well, I can understand that,” said Evelyn, folding her arms against the crisp chill and leaning back against the tree. “When you’re little everything is equally serious, and you think everybody is the same way. When you get older your—well, your sense of drama becomes more important to you, but you kind of want to hide it, in case someone else should laugh at it. Comedy’s easier because it’s not meant to be taken seriously.”
Judy, seated on the flat stone with one foot out in front of her, glanced up at each of her cousins. Evelyn saw the look, with its slight puzzled quirk of an eyebrow; and in the pause she felt that she and Patrick must be thinking the same thing. It was never quite the same discussing anything philosophical with Judy around. From a small child she had always been the most flatly literal of the cousins, taking every statement at its face value, which made her one of the challenges of their shared play. It was always a risk teasing Judy. Any flights of irony or fancy in her presence could mean long efforts at trying to explain—and if the explanation wasn’t done right, away went Judy across the autumn-dried field and up the creaking, chipped gray-painted steps of the screened-in porch to the assembled mothers with a jumbled complaint that bore little resemblance to what anybody had actually said.
“Let’s go up the hill,” said Evelyn energetically, coming away from her tree trunk. Patrick helped Judy up and they climbed up the hill through the younger trees, shuffling in the slippery carpet of fallen leaves. At the top they turned left along the ridge, and followed it until the trees gave way to an open gap that looked down over a long expanse of fields and woods—the shorn hayfields divided by straight electric fences with each post a mass of wild grapevines, their still-green leaves speckled with yellow and brown, and white-feathered dry goldenrod leaning against the wires.
Evelyn drew a deep breath, gazing away over the landscape. “I don’t know how they ever gave it up,” she said.
“What?”
She put her hands in her coat pockets and gestured to the fields with an elbow. “It all used to be ours. Our great-grandparents owned all of this land, and more on the other side of the train tracks. Just think, if it hadn’t all been sold off over the years, it could have belonged to one of us.”
“I doubt any of us would know what to do with it,” said Judy.
“We would have, if it had stayed in the family. Our parents would have been taught, and we’d have been taught,” said Patrick. “But the chain was broken somewhere along the line.”
“What I don’t understand is how a link gets broken in one particular generation,” said Evelyn, kicking a half-embedded walnut out of the tangle of loose soil and twigs underfoot. “All the great-aunts and uncles talk about how wonderful it was growing up on a farm, but there’s a kind of mocking in it too, like they’re a little contemptuous of themselves for ever having lived that way.”
“At some point, somebody convinced them that something else was better,” said Patrick.
“Well, that’s what I find hard to understand,” said Evelyn; “how someone can be so loosely rooted as to just change along with the times.”
Patrick cleared his throat a little, and glanced sidelong at Judy. Evelyn, her hands still in her pockets, turned and wandered further along the ridge, her head still turned toward the yellow and green spread of fields below.
“Let’s go on up to the tracks,” said Patrick. “I want to see that old depot you told me about, Evelyn, before I go.”
“All right. It’s only a little ways up here. I can’t believe I never found it before last week,” said Evelyn, jumping up to the half-buried ledge of granite at the crest of the ridge. Her cousins followed her, and in a few minutes they had arrived at the graveled railway embankment, where the burnished surface of the rust-brown rails showed they were still in use, but the leaning old telephone poles without wires betrayed the insignificance the track had fallen into from what it used to be.
“Here’s where the last generation used to play,” said Evelyn. “Mom told me they used to play house here at the bottom of the embankment, and the top of it was the upstairs.”
Judy smiled. “They got to go a little further afield. We had to stay in sight of the house—they just stayed in shouting distance.”
“There’s the station,” said Evelyn, and they quickened their pace. Across the tracks, half-buried in weeds, the abandoned railway depot, with peaked roof, low eaves and wood-shingled gable ends, as blackened as the old woodpile, stood surrounded by a gradually encroaching thicket of young box elders and maples. They walked across the tracks, to where the platform must once have been.
“Did they use this station still when our parents visited here, do you think?” said Judy.
“I don’t know. Mom couldn’t remember anything about it, so I doubt it.” Evelyn looked down the tracks. “I’ll bet here’s where Great-Grandpa and his brothers used to pick coal off the tracks during the Depression. They lived across the river in the village, so they didn’t have wood to cut.”
“Maybe that’s why they didn’t stay here,” said Judy. “They’d seen plenty of hard times, so an easier life in the city looked even better to them.”
“Well—I don’t know,” said Patrick slowly. “When you’ve come through something hard, sure you want to relax and enjoy yourself a little when it’s done. But you don’t always let something in yourself go soft, so that you’re never the same as you were before.”
Judy said nothing. They walked on past the station, looking at the boarded-up windows, and then crossed the tracks again and followed the embankment homeward, on gravel scattered with leaves. The wind blew a twinkling, fluttering flock of yellow aspen leaves from the tops of the trees and around them as they walked. When they had gone back far enough in the direction from which they had come, they slid down the embankment through a grove of fiery maples, and walked back through the woods toward the house.
Evelyn tipped her head back to look at the bright latticework of maple against the sky. “Well,” she said to Patrick, “it may not be ours anymore. But at this time of year, on days like this, I feel like everything, whether it’s that old station, or these trees, or the fields…I feel like it all belongs to me.”
Read previous Chatterboxes here.
Mom says
Love this!
Emily Ann Putzke says
Oooh this is awesome!! I love your descriptions! =)
Emily Ann Putzke says
Oooh this is awesome!! I love your descriptions! =)