The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

“What’s that for?” I asked him.

“I’ll know when I know,” he said.

By the end of the second day, every maple left on the road row had a bucket on it. One hundred and ninety-eight buckets on ninety-one trees, and two left over on the porch in case one sprang a leak.

That afternoon I stood with Dad at the top of the slope and we just listened.

You have to understand that a sugarbush on tubing makes no sound at all. The sap runs silent through the lines and down to a tank somewhere. But a sugarbush on buckets talks to you. On a good run you can hear it from the road.

Plink. Plink. Plink, plink.

Ninety-one trees, all of them dripping into the tin at their own speed, like a church full of people all saying the same prayer a little out of time with each other.

Dad stood there in his tan barn coat with a bucket lid still in his hand, and he did not move. His white beard was wet at the corners of his mouth. I don’t think he knew it.

“That’s the sound I missed,” he said.

I put my arm through his and we stood there until the sun started going behind the hill and the run slowed down.

We gathered for the first time two days later. Merritt brought the gathering tank up on the stone boat behind his old tractor, a round galvanized thing that holds about two hundred gallons. I carried the gathering pails, and Dad rode on the tractor fender, which he was not supposed to do at 88, and nobody was going to tell him.

Royal Bixby showed up at nine in the morning without being asked.

Royal is 79. He sugared with Dad from the time they were boys. The two of them ran the road row together every spring for most of fifty years, and when Royal’s wife passed he spent a whole season in our sugarhouse more than his own house, and Dad never once asked him to go home.

He pulled his truck onto the shoulder and got out with two gathering pails of his own. He did not say good morning. He walked down to the first stump and stood there with his pails in his hands for a long time. He looked at the nail Dad drove into it.

Then he walked to the next tree with a bucket on it, unhooked it, and dumped it into his pail, and walked it up to the gathering tank.

“Pretty good run,” he said to Dad.

“Better tomorrow,” Dad said. “It’ll be warmer.”

That was all. Fifty years of friendship, and that was the whole conversation. I think it was the most loving thing I ever heard two men say.

We boiled for the first time on the first Saturday in March.

Merritt and I were up at the sugarhouse by seven in the morning. It is a little weathered building down the slope from the house, weathered board and batten with a tin roof and a cupola vent on top, and it had not had a fire in it in three years. Corbin boiled his sap at the big outfit’s plant. He never used Dad’s sugarhouse once.

We swept the mouse nests out of the corners. Merritt checked the stovepipe and the arch, and I scrubbed the evaporator pans with hot water until they shone. Dad came down at eight with his thermometer and his hydrometer in a coffee can, and his old felt filters folded in a clean flour sack, and he set them on the shelf the way a doctor lays out his instruments.