The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

Abigail from down the road slowed her car going by and rolled her window down. She is 70 if she is a day, and she has been on my route since before I carried it.

“Lyman Aldrich,” she called. “Are you sugaring?”

“Looks that way,” Dad said.

She looked at the buckets, and then she looked down the slope at the fourteen stumps, and she did not say anything about them. She just nodded once, slow, and rolled her window back up and drove on.

The stumps did the talking. They did it every day after that, to every car that came by.

We tapped on the last day of February. It was cold enough to freeze hard at night and warm enough by ten in the morning to set the eaves dripping. Dad stood at the kitchen window at breakfast with his coffee and watched the icicles on the woodshed, and when the first drop fell he set his cup down.

“Today,” he said.

Merritt had the hand brace ready. Dad would not let us use the cordless drill, not on those trees. He said a brace and bit makes a cleaner hole, and you can feel the wood tell you when you’re deep enough. Seven-sixteenths of an inch, about two inches in, with a little tilt up so the sap runs out instead of sitting.

He drilled the first one himself. He had to stand with his weight on his good leg and his shoulder against the trunk, and it took him a long time. Merritt did not offer to take over. He knew better.

When the bit came out, the hole wept clear sap right away. A bead ran down the bark and caught the sun.

“There she is,” Dad said, quiet.

He tapped the spout in with the back of the hammer, three light taps, and then he turned and held his hand out behind him without looking. I put a bucket in it. He hooked it on the spout, and then he held his hand out again, and I put a lid in it.

That became how we worked. Merritt went ahead with the brace on the trees Dad could not reach. Dad set the spouts. I hung the buckets. He would hand me the lid and I would set it on, and we went down the road row like that, tree by tree, all that day and part of the next.

“Two on this one,” he would say, standing back to look at a big trunk. “She’s big enough.”

So I would hang a second bucket on the far side.

“Just the one here. She’s had a hard life.”

He knew every one of those trees. He knew which one the lightning hit in 1962. He told me about each of them while I hung the buckets, and I listened the way you listen when you know you are being handed something.

When we got near the stumps, he went quiet.

He stopped at the first one and looked down at it a long while. It was bigger around than a kitchen table. You could count the rings if you had the patience, and some of them were thin as thread, the drought years, and some were wide as your thumb.

Dad went back up to the barn without saying anything. I thought he had gone in to sit down. But he came back with a coffee can of old cut nails and his hammer, and he went from stump to stump and drove one nail into the side of each of them, about a hand’s width down from the cut.