The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

Merritt lit the arch with birch kindling and dry maple slab wood he had been saving. It took a while to draw. Then it caught, and the fire roared, and the sap in the back pan started to tick and pop.

Within half an hour the steam was rising.

The steam comes up off the pans so thick you cannot see across the room. It fills the cupola and pours out the roof vent in a white column that bends with the wind, and on a cold bright morning it goes up a hundred feet before it thins out.

That Saturday there was a light breeze from the west, and the steam rolled out of the vent and down the slope and right across the town road like fog.

You could see it for a mile. Everybody in the valley knew what it meant.

The first car stopped at a little after nine. It was a young couple I did not know, probably from one of the new houses up on the ridge, with a little boy about four years old in the back seat. They pulled onto the shoulder and the boy got out and stood there with his mouth open, looking up at the steam.

“Can we watch?” the father asked me. I was carrying gathering pails up from the road row.

“Come on up,” I said. “Mind the ice by the door.”

Then Abigail came, and her sister. Then two old men from my route who had sugared themselves years ago and could not walk past a boiling sugarhouse any more than a dog can walk past a dropped sandwich.

Then the Grange ladies. I do not know who told them. I suspect Abigail. Two of them came with a cooler full of plain cake doughnuts and a jar of dill pickles, which is how you know they meant business.

By ten-thirty there were more than twenty people in the dooryard and along the road.

Royal and the two older men went straight to the road row without being asked. So did three teenage boys from the farm across the river, who had heard about it from somebody’s mother. They took pails and started gathering, and every time a pail came up to the tank, somebody else took it down empty.

Somebody packed a cake pan with clean snow from behind the barn. One of the Grange ladies set it on a sawhorse table outside the sugarhouse door. Dad sent Merritt in for the small pan, and they boiled down a quart of the first syrup past where you would stop for bottling, up to about 234 degrees, where it gets thick enough to set.

Then Dad came out carrying the pan in both hands with a pot holder, and he poured the hot syrup in thin lines across the snow.

It set right there in the cold into soft amber ribbons. The little boy from the ridge stood on his toes to watch.

“You wind it up on a fork,” Dad told him, and showed him how. “Then you eat a pickle in between, so you can eat more.”

The boy looked at the pickle like Dad had told him to eat a stone. Then he tried it, and his face changed, and he held his fork out for more.