Meantime when I dash to the Wilmot library to return books, a neighbor is brave enough to meet my eyes. Angelo at the post office turns pale. Oh, it’s a burden for us morituri, the way we frighten everybody! Jane has the best story. In Franklin she bumped into Herbert Buckingham the lawyer, as I will call him, who gossips about ideas whenever we meet but who is possibly (in the argot of Carlton Fisk) “dumb as a stick.” Herbert casually asks Jane after our health; Jane answers him. With a musing, faraway look in his eyes, he mumbles to Jane, “I never did get to know Don, the way I wanted to.”

In the winter Wesley chopped cordwood on the mountain.

It is two and a half weeks later, and I have been home from the hospital for a week. Dr. Sutton removed the big half of my liver, the right lobe, containing all discernible carcinoma. Two days in ICU, two days on the respirator, eight tubes or shunts or IVs or catheters dribbling me away or dripping into me; twelve days in the hospital. When I came home I slept fourteen hours. After three days I started glancing at poems again; I began to answer my mail; today, I pick up Life Work.

In my vision, I see Wesley working alone for decades. (I feel calm as I watch him, in my mind’s eye, go about his quiet and methodical business.) My mother born in 1903 was followed by Caroline in 1905 and Nan in 1911; Kate wanted for no companionship in the kitchen until Nan went off to college, but Wesley worked mostly alone. Cutting wood in January was the hardest chore of the year. He milked early, ate breakfast, and climbed Ragged with an axe and a lunchpail. All day his axe wedged chunks of hardwood onto snow—ash and maple, oak and elm—the shock and shudder of steel blows aching along his forearms into his shoulders. Because this work was routine, it was endurable though strenuous; keeping a steady pace, he worked past soreness. Sweat froze on his forehead when he stopped to catch his breath. When he chopped down a tree he cut off the branches and cut the burnable trunk and the greater branches into four-foot lengths for transport. He took one break, to eat his lunch, and finished as the afternoon finished. Then he walked down Ragged’s icy hill to the relative warmth of milking wedged between Holstein bodies.

When I was twelve and thirteen I heard these stories while we hayed together. Incessantly he remembered things to tell me, often tales of the prodigies or pains of work, told without a whining noise. Over the years, I have often testified to the pleasure I took in his company; as I turn old I think of the pleasure he took in mine—a young male of the family for whom he could describe the journey of a long life, telling about climbing Ragged before dawn in January with an axe and a lunchpail. Later in the winter he drove an ox up hill pulling a sledge, loaded up the cordwood and brought it down for sawing, splitting, drying, and stacking in the woodshed next summer for the winter to follow. After woodchopping, probably the next most difficult task of the year was carting ice from Eagle Pond to store in the icehouse behind the tie-up’s watering trough. Neighbors worked together taking ice from the pond, often in February when the ice was two feet thick. First, they scraped snow off, then with horse-drawn cutters scraped long lines onto ice, back and forth, making a checkerboard of ruts, then split the ice into great oblong chunks, then floated ice-slabs to shore, making watery channels for more slabs. Ice-farming, hazards were the cold and the wet, slipping into the freezing water, even drowning dragged down by heavy winter clothes.