Oxen sledged the great oblongs to each farmer’s ice-shed—Charley Whittemore was one who worked with Wesley at Eagle Pond—where they packed the slabs under sawdust to last through summer and Indian summer. Every day all summer Wesley brought a new chunk down for the icebox in the shed—Kate’s territory—a luminous cube of Eagle Pond slung over his shoulder grappled by iron tongs. Every night another slab floated in a tank beside the milk can from the afternoon milking, keeping milk fresh overnight for the truck that came at dawn.

Everything Wesley did fit into the economy of the farm’s year, and most of his work like ice-farming existed for the production of milk. Yet milk paid poorly: Often the monthly milkcheck from H. P. Hood & Sons was less than twenty dollars, and it was good that there were other sources of income. In March, he tapped the sugar maple trees, walking all day in the woods to pound little spigots into the trunks, and to set sapbuckets to catch the drips. Every day he walked through his sweet forest wearing a wooden yoke, like an ox’s only smaller, that dangled great pails from each end. He filled the pails with drips from every tree, then emptied them into a tank that an ox pulled to a pipe that gravity-fed downhill to the holding tank of the saphouse.

For making syrup and sugar Wesley needed help, and when he needed help Freeman Morrison supplied it. Freeman—I call him Washington Woodward in String too Short to be Saved; in The Man Who Lived Alone he lacks a name—lived alone in his hermit’s shack, as dark and cramped as a cave, off New Canada Road three miles north on Ragged. He was my grandmother’s cousin, who grew up with her almost like an older brother when Freeman’s family was burned out. Freeman loved Wesley as much as he loved Kate. Because he was a night owl, his task in sugaring time was to boil the sap all night, or day and night since he wasn’t partial to sleep if there was work to do.

In the farm’s year spring was busy, not painful like winter but varied in its chores and lengthy. Lambs and calves were born, increase of Jacob’s flock, and the farmer played midwife. In April Wesley sheared the sheep, sometimes with vagrant professional help. The sale of wool and lambs paid the farm’s taxes. Some years my grandfather like many citizens paid part of his taxes in kind by working on town roads. Freeman, who practiced an almost-cashless economy, hauled hardpan by oxcart and wheelbarrow to fill washed-out places on dirt roads. Wesley rolled snow on the road that passes the farm. The snow roller, pulled by horses or oxen, looked like the fat wheel at the front of a steamroller, a cart’s width; it packed the snow down so that horses could draw their sleighs across it.

In spring Wesley manured his fields, carting the sweet deep accumulation of Holstein manure to spread where the garden grew and where the cattle’s fieldcorn would grow eight feet tall by late August. Anything left over went on the home hayfields that rotated with cornfields. Twice a day all year long he hoed the manure out of the tie-up, lifting with his hoe a leather-hinged board that opened a long aperture to the manure pile underneath. Now he loaded five or eight times a day the manure cart that he used only two weeks a year—it was otherwise parked unused in the barn beside its source—shoveling it full and spreading the manure by tilting the cart’s bed. Then he planted fieldcorn and vegetables, harrowed, and weeded. Then he hayed.