The Buckets on Dad’s Road Row

Water boils at about 212 degrees, depending on the weather, and maple syrup is done at seven degrees above whatever water boils at that day. Dad had checked water that morning, the way he always did. Two hundred and eleven and a half. So he was waiting for two hundred and eighteen and a half.

The needle crept.

For sixty years, Dad drew off his own syrup. Every first batch, every last batch, every one in between. When Mom was alive she bottled it, and Royal fed the arch, and I gathered, and my sister skimmed the pans, but Dad was the only one who ever opened that valve. That was his job. Nobody else ever touched it.

The needle hit two eighteen and a half.

Dad looked at it. Then he looked at me.

“Kristen,” he said. “Come here.”

I wiped my hands on my jeans and went over. He was standing beside the draw-off valve with the felt filter already set over the stainless pail. He took my hand, my right hand, and he put it on the handle of the valve, and he put his own hand over mine.

“Slow,” he said. “Don’t rush it. Let it come.”

I turned it.

The syrup came out of the spout and into the filter in a thick golden ribbon, steaming, so clear you could see the light through it. The whole sugarhouse smelled like every March of my life.

Dad took his hand away. I kept turning. He stepped back and let me do it alone.

I did not cry until the pail was half full. Then I could not stop. I stood there drawing off my father’s syrup from my great-grandfather’s trees with the tears running into my collar, and Jana came up behind me and held my shoulders, and Dad stood beside the arch with his cap in his hand and did not say anything at all.

When it was done, he dipped a little enamel cup in the pail and tasted it. He held it in his mouth a long time.

“That’s a good grade,” he said. “That’s a very good grade.”

Then he handed the cup to me.

We made five gallons that first Saturday, near enough. A little more than five, Royal said, and Royal is never wrong about syrup. The run held all that week and into the next, and the neighbors kept coming. Not every day, and not as many as that Saturday, but somebody came every single afternoon to help gather.

We made forty-one gallons off the road row that spring. Off ninety-one trees and one hundred and ninety-eight buckets.

Dad gave most of it away. A quart to everybody who carried a pail. A gallon to the Grange for the supper. A pint to the little boy from the ridge, with his name written on the label in Dad’s shaky hand.

Corbin came back the second week of April, the Tuesday after the sap went buddy and the season ended. It was a cold bright morning and I was on my route. Dad told me about it at supper.

Corbin pulled into the dooryard by himself and came up on the porch and knocked, which he had never done in his life. He was always one to just walk in.

He had an envelope. There was $3,800 in it. That was every cent the firewood man paid him for the fourteen trees.

“I can’t put them back,” he said. “But I can give you this.”