The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

“I know what you figured.”

Dad did not raise his voice. He never has. He just looked at Corbin across the wall, and the steam rolled across the road between them and thinned out, and rolled again.

“My grandfather tapped those trees in 1890,” Dad said. “My father tapped them. I tapped them sixty years. I leased you my sap, son. I never sold you my trees.”

Corbin did not say anything.

“I shook your hand on three seasons,” Dad said. “This is the third. I’ll keep my word, the hill is yours to tap till the sap’s done this spring. You’ll get your $900 worth.” He paused. “After that the hill comes home to me. And the road row stays on buckets as long as I’m alive to listen to it.”

That was it. That was the whole consequence. He did not shame Corbin in front of anybody. He did not call him a name. He just said it plain, on his own side of the wall, with half the valley standing on the slope behind him holding gathering pails and pickles.

Corbin stood there a long time. He looked up the hill at all of us. I think it was the worst thing that ever happened to him, standing in the road in front of all those people he knew, every one of them with sap on their gloves for an old man’s trees.

Nobody jeered. Nobody said a word. I think that was worse for him than any word could have been.

Then the passenger door of his truck opened.

I had not even known Jana was in there. She had been sitting low in the seat. She got out, and she did not look at Corbin. She went around to the back of the truck and reached into the bed and came out with a white plastic pail, an old drywall bucket they kept for feeding the chickens.

She climbed over the stone wall beside Dad. She kissed him on the cheek. Then she walked up the slope to the nearest tree with a bucket on it, unhooked it, poured the sap into her pail, and hung the bucket back on its spout.

She carried it up the hill to the gathering tank.

When she got to the top, she set it down and looked at me. Her eyes were wet. I took the pail from her and handed it to Royal, and I put my arms around my little sister right there in front of everybody, and I did not say one word, because there was not one word that needed saying.

She stayed. She stayed all afternoon. She gathered until her arms gave out, and then she went into the sugarhouse and fed the arch with Merritt, and her cheeks went red from the heat.

When I looked down at the road again, Corbin’s truck was gone.

Dad was still standing at the stone wall. Royal went down and stood beside him, and after a while the two of them came back up the slope together, Royal’s hand under Dad’s elbow on the slippery part, neither of them saying anything.

At about three in the afternoon, the syrup in the front pan was getting close.

You know it is close when the boil changes. The bubbles get smaller and tighter, and the steam off the front pan smells different, sweeter and darker, almost like caramel. Dad had been standing beside the evaporator for an hour with his thermometer in the pan and his hydrometer cup ready on the shelf.