The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

“Careless?” I said. “Dad, he cut them down.”

“I know what he did.”

He buttered a piece of bread.

“But I’ll tell you something, Kristen,” he said. “Corbin leased the hill. He never put a spout in the road row. Not one. His tubing stops at the stone wall.”

I looked at him.

“Those trees are still mine to tap,” he said. “The ones he left.”

My husband Merritt looked up from his plate. Merritt drives plow for the town in the winter and runs a little logging operation the rest of the year, and he is not a man who talks much at supper. He set his fork down.

“How many are left on the road row, Lyman?”

“Ninety-one,” Dad said. “I counted them from the window.”

Of course he had.

“Some of them will take two,” Merritt said. “The big ones.”

“Some will take three,” Dad said. “Not anymore, though. I don’t hang three on an old tree. You take what a tree can give and you leave the rest.”

And that was how it started. Nobody made a speech. Nobody pounded the table. Dad finished his bread and Merritt finished his potatoes, and I sat there feeling something in my chest that I had not felt since Mom died, something like the floor coming back under my feet.

The next Saturday morning, the sky was so clear you could see Burke Mountain plain as anything from the barn door. Merritt went up the ladder into the barn loft first, then me, and Dad stood at the bottom with his hand on the rail and called directions up to us like a foreman.

“Back left,” he said. “Under the old horse collars. They’re stacked in nests of ten.”

They were exactly where he said. Galvanized sap buckets, gray and dull with age, the old kind with the rolled rim and the little hole near the top for the hook. Two hundred of them, with their peaked lids stacked separate beside them like little tin roofs.

Some of them were older than me. Some of them were older than Dad. One had the initials of his grandfather punched into the bottom with a nail, so faint you had to tip it to the light to read them.

Merritt handed them down to me and I handed them down to Dad, and he stacked them on the barn floor in towers, ten high, the way he always had. He touched every one. He would take a bucket and run his thumb around the inside of the rim before he set it down, checking for rust, or maybe just saying hello.

It took most of the morning to get them all down. Then we hauled the big wash tub out into the dooryard where the sun was strongest, and Merritt ran a hose from the cellar, and I heated water on Mom’s old canning stove in the summer kitchen and carried it out by the kettle.

We scrubbed every one. No soap that would leave a taste, just hot water and a stiff brush and a little baking soda for the worst of the stain. Dad sat on an overturned bucket with a brush and did the lids, and he hummed while he worked. “Bringing in the Sheaves,” mostly, the way he used to in church.

By two in the afternoon there were two hundred clean buckets drying upside down on the snowbank in rows, catching the sun. From the road they looked like a field of little gray hats.