Mabel lived in the house by the side of the road. Because this is the important element in the narrative, we must note that houses by the side of the road are the exclusive domain of dreamers and poets. If you have ever been in such a place, you are one of the blessed few.
Mabel’s house was classic “side of the road.” there was a welcome mat on the wide-board front porch, a well-worn mat that gave substantial evidence of coming and going of unnumbered feet. No noisy dog leapt at you to police your arrival and departure. Instead, a tail-wagging pooch with clearly peaceable intentions let you know he was glad to see you — and that folks were home. You didn’t have to sound an alarm to get attention. Mabel was in the open doorway by the time your foot was on the first step.
All the years Mabel lived there with her father, we never thought of the place as the Whitcomb place, but only and always as Mabel’s home. There was good reason for this. Everything there was beautiful, kind and attractive, warm and loving — all the result of Mabel’s care. She was the poet whose rustic genius had elevated her bare-bones box of a house into the golden realm of fantasia.
In summer, flowers were everywhere. They grew around the porch, along the margins of stone walls, softening the lines of out-croppins that would have shown this hard-scrabble farm for what it was. When fall and coming winter made the tending of her garden flowers unproductive, Mabel filled up pots and boxes, decorating doorways and window frames. If there were no Persian rugs to color and warm her rooms, she imported more than a little blossoming Oriental splendor to make up for it.
It was these rugless floors that served as bottom-line on the Whitcomb statement. There was nothing there. Mabel had scrubbed her boards until the soft parts had been worn away, leaving long cellulose patterns the length of them, like the veins along the arms of an emaciated hungry man. An observer soon saw that beyond wealth of flower color and scrupulous neatness, there were no excesses in the Whitcomb homestead.
I think of Mabel and her father in early spring each year — mud season along dirt roads in southern New Hampshire. When winter frost finally rises up and out of its bed under a warming sun, the much that results becomes bottomless ooze. It was that that trapped me and brought me to stop in front of Mabel’s home the first time.
The Model A I was driving during that fateful moment was a vehicle of considerable experience, having persevered over hundreds of miles of Granite State back roads. Unfortunately, it was unable to share its knowledge with me. I had not yet earned my license to drive. What with the Ford’s inability to tell me how to keep out of trouble — and with my inexperience — we came to a halt, hub deep, in Whitcomb road mud.
The grinding of gears soon had the old man standing on the running board. He calmly suggested I try backing up. Thanks to his weight on the car’s rear end, and his country man’s feel for survival, we had the car turned around on firm ground quickly enough.
I paid for his advice. I wish I could pay for it again! He compelled me to his house, sat me down on his porch and talked my ear off. He talked like a man who’d never be done with talking. Like a man who’d never had a listener. Whose stories and anecdotes and little histories poured out in released torrents. And all the while he talked, he handed me, in an incidental way, a succession of neatly carved maple canes, saying as a marginal note, “Here, try this one. See if it fits right.”
The day wore on, the sun drew a fair arc and time passed. Finally, he stood up.
“You like that one? Good? That’ll be a quarter,” he said.
I had a quarter — one quarter. I paid it, took my cane and went home.
I was just a young boy, then. I saw Mabel and her father off and on for several years. When I went for a visit after that great void known as World War II, the old man was dead and Mabel was living there alone. The dog, too, was gone, but the flowers were there and hospitality was as evident and graceful as ever.
Mabel told me she was always embarrassed about the maple canes. Her father made them to sell to passersby as a way of chipping in to the family fortune. Sometimes, she confided, if people didn’t stop, she’d run out on the front yard and wave a cane to flag them down. Inflation had no influence on the old man’s enterprise. For 25 years, his whittled staves went for a quarter each. I suppose every home in Cheshire County had one.
Mabel was as straight and plain and strong as any of the maple sticks her father carved for people to lean on. Non of the passersby ever came on a white horse to carry her off, though.
On my last visit, she told me that in his final years, her father was increasingly burdened by what is commonly known as “widow’s hump” – a back bent from hard work and old age. In a good-humored way, he joked that his cane didn’t fit him any longer. It was too long. For all the assortment, he had stuck out on the front porch in a barrel, he poked around, leaning on the cane that had served him a lifetime.
In the evening, when the aged parent was asleep, Mabel began surreptitiously cutting off the end of his cane, bit by bit, grinding it into the dirt to hide her carpentry. Once, after she had reduced its length a couple of inches, the old man reported that his back was straightening — his cane fit him again. Whether he was on to her deception he didn’t say.
So, the mud season has come and nearly gone again this year. The old Troy Road is almost passable to a good and cautious driver. The Whitcombs are gone — their house by the side of the road reduced to a cellar hole with blackberry bushes in charge, now. Little Monadnock mulls over the changes ground out in the human mills at its feet.
In our Gill house, we had a Whitcomb cane. For years, it served to poke at wood in the fireplace. Now, it is much too short for the service it was meant to provide. It is retired — except to bring back bittersweet recollections of a house by the side of the road where Mabel created an illusion to help her father look Time straight in the eyes.