Freeman was intelligent, garrulous, diligent, conservative, inventive, and eccentric. He hated to feel beholden, but worked with (not for) Wesley and Kate because he loved them. He worked with assiduousness compounded by shrewdness. In 1938 the hurricane left the gravity-well—that watered not only the kitchen but the troughs for cattle and sheep—thick with debris, too sluggish to flow and too riley to drink. My grandfather could not handle it himself, with everything else he had to do after the hurricane, so he hired McIndoe the plumber to come up from Andover with two handpumps and some strong backs. They worked all day and couldn’t get rid of the riley sludge; runoff from the deluge kept ahead of them. So Kate suggested Freeman, sent him a penny postcard to his camp on Ragged, and the next evening Freeman walked down to the farm. Then he climbed up hill with a lantern, two boiled eggs, a shovel, and three sapbuckets. When Wesley ascended in the dawn with a bacon sandwich, Freeman was clambering out of the clean well, clear water filling it, his lantern still lit in the brightening dawn.

Upstairs in this house, the south bedroom of the original Cape is “Freeman’s room,” where he stayed as a boy. He paneled the room, and arranged a pulley for the trapdoor in the ceiling that went up-attic. In Freeman’s room we still keep some of the things he collected and kept there in his old age (Kate outlived him) because his camp was so crowded: clocks, calendars, a hornets’ nest, and his old trunk, round-topped like a pirate’s chest: Here we find slates that Freeman used at school, chalk, fancy mittens and socks he never wore, a cube of dried purple ink, an inkwell, a pen, and diaries from the 1880s well into the twentieth century; here Freeman kept his financial records, receipts for twenty-five cents and half a dollar—and notes of work done:

worked in stable all day, went down and got my stove in evening, put part of it upstairs in my room and the rest of it up to the shop … worked in woods all day chopping wood and cutting brush … put up eight quart cans of pears in evening.

… worked on plants a while then worked in shop repairing stoves in forenoon; worked in woods in afternoon chopping wood. There was a prayer meeting at Ben’s tonight. Fred Peasley leader.

… worked in woods chopping all day …

… worked in well forenoon and got in four loads of corn in afternoon. Put rest of wood into the schoolhouse shed.

… worked in well all day laying stone. Jammed my finger badly.

… worked in well all day, laying stone.

… took care of the corn then filed saw. Went down and set up stove for S. Dudley. Fixed the boards on the end of barn. Then went over and done Ed Downes chores. (Washed out gun at noontime.)

… stayed over to Ed’s last night. This morning done all of his chores, then went out through Gales Woods and looked it over. Then came home …