Before marrying, Wesley had been a storekeeper in Andover and Potter Place, managing for an owner. Gregarious by nature, he enjoyed working in these stores that sold everything: barrels of staples like sugar and flour, bulk raisins and coffee, yard goods and nails. He loved sitting with drummers after work on the porch of the Hotel Potter, smoking a cigar and listening to stories the salesmen told. Every day’s work was dense with incident and talk, so different from the decades of largely solitary farming that lay ahead of him. Recently Maurice Pinard told me a story remembered by his Uncle John, who died thirty years ago in the VA hospital up to Lebanon. When John was a boy in the 1890s he lived on Kearsarge, a remote homestead, but from time to time he visited the village of Potter Place, which seemed a metropolis with its two inns, two stores, railway depot, fishmonger’s, butcher’s, and livery stable. Some twelve-year-old Potter Place gangsters bullied the ten-year-old stranger—Uncle John told young Maurice in the 1930s—and John expected a thrashing until the tall young storekeeper picked up a horsewhip from a bucket full of whips on sale, and approached the group, which scattered. John doubted that Wesley would have used the horsewhip.
Earlier, Wesley worked in the hameshop in Andover, his first job away from home. Hames are the wooden frames of horsecollars, preferably made of ash. Wesley worked there less than a year, quitting because breathing fine sawdust all day made him cough all night. When he told me about the hameshop, fifty years later, he sounded as if he enjoyed the factory work; but it was his temperament to enjoy things. The work week was six days, 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., and apparently the farmboys who worked there could hardly believe their good fortune: no work on Sunday, and only twelve hours on weekdays! Around 1900 the bosses, overcome by benignity, cut Saturday afternoons so that the shop’s saws ran only from 6:00 A.M. until noon on the sixth day. Old timers muttered, “That’s not a week’s wuk!”
By 1900 Wesley worked in a store; by 1902 he farmed with his father-in-law, doing a week’s wuk without a doubt; then for many years he farmed alone. I helped him out for a decade of summers, 1940 to 1950, and I must write about his work-work-work, as I have written before; my recollection of Wesley Wells shines at the center of my life. I will write about him later, saving the best for last.
When I hear talk about “the work ethic” I puke. CEOs talk about it, whose annual salaries average one hundred and thirty times their workers’ wages. Whatever the phrase purports to describe, it is not an ethic; it is not an idea of work’s value or a moral dictate but a feeling or tone connected to work, and it is temperamental and cultural. Studs Terkel’s stonemason has it, and his line-worker does not; instead, the line-worker has a work anger, or a work malevolence, which is entirely appropriate. Mind you, the stonemason works alone with his hands solving problems that change with every stone. He does something that he can look at and put his name to. He can measure what he has done in walls and buildings not in units of the same thing, like so many Chevrolet Impalas or so many distributor cap linings. Shades of John Ruskin. I no more have a work ethic than I have self-discipline. I have so many pages a day, so many books and essays.