Henry expanded, Henry prospered, and Henry knew exactly how he did it. He was a man of few words but, like E. B. White’s William Strunk, he said his words three times: “Woik-woik-woik,” I heard him say in his eighties—retired from management, working long days in his garden and as volunteer caretaker in the Whitneyville Cemetery where Augusta lay. The southern New Englander’s old-fashioned accent pronounced vowels as Brooklyn did. (Walt Whitman’s accent, who said “pome” not “poem,” must have resembled Henry Hall’s.) “Keep your health,” he said in one of his longer sentences, “keep your health—and woik-woik-woik.”

Henry passed to his grandson, as he approached and passed ninety, the secret of life.

My New Hampshire grandmother Kate’s mother, Lucy Buck Keneston, died young at sixty, and the narrative of her illness describes a burst appendix and peritonitis. Lucy Buck’s mother Nancy—married to a coachman in Andover—had been known as the best of spinners, and daughter followed mother: Lucy’s own spinning wheel for sheep’s wool tilts in our attic now. In this house where nothing was ever discarded some old braided rugs must include products of Nancy’s and Lucy’s spinning.

Lucy’s husband Ben Keneston was my maternal great-grandfather, born in John Quincy Adams’s presidency and dead in Woodrow Wilson’s. Although he died fifteen years before I was born, I speak of him as if I knew him; this house is full of him. He bought the Cape, built onto it, and settled here in 1865—where my grandmother was born thirteen years later. She was the baby and the favorite and never stopped talking about him, even when she was old. Ben was born in Andover, half a mile from coachman Buck, where his Keniston grandfather (Ben changed the spelling) had migrated north from Cambridge after fighting in the Revolution. The first Keniston of Andover lies in the old cemetery. When he was young Ben bought land high on the north end of Ragged Mountain and raised sheep. In our storage place which we call the back chamber there is an old box of wool with a legend in a fragile hand: “Wool was from B. C. Keneston’s sheep carded at Otterville 1848.” I figure he saved it because it was his first crop.

When Ben Keneston accumulated any money, he put it into land: no cash, many acres. After he made money selling wool during the war, he bought this house—beside the Grafton Turnpike and the railroad line in a narrow valley west of Ragged Mountain halfway between Danbury and Andover. For his growing family he added rooms, extending it back into the foot of Ragged with a toolshed, a milkroom, a woodshed, and an outhouse. Detached and up hill because of the hazard of fire, his great barn rises where he kept his cows, horses, oxen, and pigs; the barn stands as the house does. Across the narrow turnpike he built the sheepbarn, with open sheds alongside to shelter hayrack and rake, and next to the sheds the henyard. In the months they went without pasture, fences penned the sheep where sheds and barn stopped. Fronting the Grafton Turnpike Ben Keneston made a watering trough, fence running over the middle of it: Sheep could drink from the barnyard side, turnpike-traveling teams from the other.