Sam Smith - Walter
Stowe had been the caretaker of the Stone House when my parents bought
it. He had worked for many years for the highway department of
Massachusetts and was short, stubborn and funny. He believed that
Packards were the best car ever made, though the disjunction between his
stature and his vehicular tastes often made it appear that his car was
being driven by the perennial dirty green baseball hat on his bald head.
Mr. Stowe appreciated having
someone to instruct. He had to make do with gruffly telling me to fetch
his paper bag of nails, move a board a little to the left and so forth.
It wasn't the Massachusetts Highway Department but he made do and I
didn't mind at all.
Besides,
he never got poison ivy and would eat it to prove it to me. He had a
stock of sayings of which he never tired. He could recite a blasphemous
version of the Lord's Prayer at breakneck speed and when you asked him
how much something cost, he always replied, "25 cents, two bits, two
dimes and a nickel, one quartah of a dollah." When you picked up your
end of a plank, the instructions also never varied: "Head her
southeast!" When you said goodbye he said, "Keep her under 60 on the
curves." And he offered this assessment of a suddenly departed
brother-in-law: "That fella never was any good. Now he's upped and died
right in the middle of hay season."
When
he needed to stall while thinking of a reply, he would go into a brief
shuffle, observe his feet intently, pick up his dirty baseball hat and
scratch his bald head, finally declaring, "Well now!" with the
occasional addendum "Ain't that somethin?"
When
I introduced my future wife to Mr. Stowe and told him we were engaged,
he did his shuffle and his head scratching, glanced at Kathy and then
looked up at me over his little round glasses and said, "Pretty good for
a girl."
" . . . Er, Mr. Stowe, Kathy's from Wisconsin."
Shuffle. Hat back on.
"Glad to meet you anyway."
Behind
his back, we called Mr. Stowe 'Waltah,' just like his wife did. Mrs.
Stowe would have made a fine mother, but she and Walter never had any
children. I know she would have made a fine mother because I would
regularly drop by their house at the end of the point just to talk,
knowing that there would always be fresh baked cookies before the
talking was over.
By
the time Kathy met Mr. Stowe he was very old and his upper torso had a
permanent forward rake. George White says he would occasionally see Mr.
Stowe, while working in his garden, lean over too far to pick something,
pushing his new center of gravity beyond its limits. Mr. Stowe would
just disappear among the tomatoes.
He
made do to the end. When Mrs. Stowe forbade him to repair the roof on
the grounds that a ninetysomething shouldn't do such things, Mr. Stowe
reluctantly called a roofer, then donned his carpenter's apron and
climbed to the ridgeline where, like an aged great blue heron, he sat
and supervised the operation.
Carolyn
White recalls the season-end ritual in which her parents would instruct
her to "go over and say goodbye to Mr. Stowe, because he may not be
here when we come back next year." Mr. Stowe lived long enough for
Carolyn to repeat the ritual with her children.