Pitching, loading, and raking after. I can see the three of us working in 1942—fifty years gone, as I write—a classic frieze: My grandfather at sixty-seven—dark-skinned with sun, strong and tall, vigorous in his overalls and blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wearing a blue cloth cap—stands by the haystack and plunges his pitchfork in, turns it slightly to catch as if setting the hook in a pickerel’s mouth, lifts, balances, and swings it over his head to land at Anson’s feet. Halfwit or not, Anson knew about loading hay; he tucked and treaded, tucked and treaded. Meantime I pulled the great rake—four feet wide with tines a foot long and a gracefully curved handle—gathering fugitive strands of hay, taking care to avoid catching a tine in a woodchuck hole and snapping it off. Pitchforks and bullrakes were the antique implements of haying that the Director of the Historical Museum of Hokkaido outside Sapporo showed us behind glass cases in 1986.

When he hayed alone Wesley heaved forkfuls in, then climbed up to load, then climbed down to rake and lead Riley to another haymow. When the two of us hayed we traded off, one of us loading and the other doubling to pitch on and rake after. Usually I loaded, standing on top of the hay in a good sweat, catching the breeze, watching my grandfather’s practiced rhythm with the fork: plunge in, turn, heave, swing, shake loose, and back for more.

Each day is a little longer and lighter, but there are setbacks: a night I cannot sleep; or a new pain in a new place, bringing back the fear of imminent death: I live at the point of anxiety, familiar enough, when a toe cramp fosters speculation about toe cancer. Every day is a seesaw of hope and despair. When I am sore and tired discouragement settles over me like smog over Los Angeles. I suppose I will get better; but then I will be sick again, then die. Once a day I weep and Jane joins me, hugging and weeping. Once a day she rubs down my thin slack body, willing health to it with her strong and benignant fingers.

Freeman Morrison was a free-lancer, one of so many independent old men who holed up in shacks all over New England. As I remember the story, during the Great War he worked in a factory for a salary; I cannot accommodate the notion that he kept regular hours for a regular stipend because in the years I knew him he was the ultimate antinomian. He was a good roofer and a night owl: He set lanterns in trees and on ridgepoles and roofed by night. He canned huge quantities of peas and beans, corn and tomatoes, beets and carrots—and ate one deer and one woodchuck every year. He lived almost entirely without cash, contriving work to please himself by moving rocks from place to place, by grafting apple trees, by raising an ox for a pet. He worked on the road to pay his taxes. When my mother and Caroline attended Bates College in the 1920s, occasionally they received a note from Freeman with a nickel wrapped up inside. Have a treat.