The cowbarn lay along Ragged’s incline, the west side dropping down, manure pile underneath tie-up and pigpen beside manure pile. The east wall underneath the barn is huge slabs of granite wedged against Ragged’s earth.

John Wells, my New Hampshire grandfather Wesley’s father, was a blacksmith who fought in the Civil War, all four years unlike his Connecticut counterpart Charlie Hall. John Wells never talked about the war, which frustrated my grandfather when he could not answer my questions about his father’s soldiering. I call John Wells a blacksmith, which he was, but like everyone in the country his work was a thousand things. Every man outside the city was a farmer—be he lawyer, minister, doctor, or blacksmith—because without refrigeration (except for the icebox, using transparent blocks sawed from the winter ponds and preserved in sawdust) every family kept a cow, and keeping a cow fresh meant a heifer every year or two and meant borrowing or hiring the services of a bull; it meant haying in summer. And every family kept chickens for eggs. And every family grew a huge garden and canned vegetables and fruit, the woodstove burning red in hottest summer with kettles of blueberries or tomatoes; and the root cellar filled with apples, potatoes, squash, beets, carrots, and cabbages.

Someone like John Wells blacksmithed for cash, shoeing the neighborhood horses and repairing or forging ironware, hinges, and tools. Doubtless he tapped trees to make maple syrup and sugar; certainly he kept bees for honey. The house where he lived, where my grandfather Wesley grew up, stands only two and a half miles from this house, handsome and solitary and still cared for. I love to imagine the Wellses there a century ago. Once a year when the trout stream behind his house ran fast with end-of-winter melt, John Wells used water power to saw up boards enough to build one carriage, and blacksmith turned wheelwright. He didn’t require storing much ice, because he didn’t sell milk to H. P. Hood as the cow-farmers did. He required timber not only for the carriage but for the cookstove’s heat and for the twenty-four-hour fire that turned maplesap to syrup and sugar. Also, on clear nights when the moon was full, John Wells chopped firewood for his neighbor at a dollar a cord, stacked and ready for transport. Until I heard this story I never understood how “moonlighting” meant what it meant.

He was frugal. His wife Martha made cakes without vanilla—maple or honey gave flavor—because a bottle of vanilla cost cash money. Did he work on the road to pay his town taxes? Many did, carting hardpan to fill a washout, repairing bridges, rolling the road after snowstorms so that sleighs could slide over packed snow. When he received his veteran’s pension he would not spend it; it went into a savings account, and before he died he gave each of his seven children a thousand dollars.

It is evident, in the accent of New Hampshire, that “John Wells never was afraid of wuk.” Woik for Connecticut, wuk for New Hampshire. Among my four sets of great-grandparents—Hall, Wuestefeld, Keneston, Wells; two Civil War veterans, two farmers, one farmhand, one cabinetmaker; three Yankees and one German—there was little in common except a proclivity for hard work.