a reminiscence by Dan Lorber
My old neighbor, Arthur Roberts, died Thanksgiving morning, alone in his house. He was my portal into a time gone by, a time where frugality was the reigning ethic and the country life was the only life a man ever knew. Arthur was a 19th century man living into the 21st century. He was 86, could barely walk at the end, and he was tough as nails.
[private]I moved into the old farmhouse across the street from Arthur and his wife Katherine 26 years ago where I opened up a used and rare bookstore in a wing which used to be an old general store. We immediately got to know each other for no other reason than proximity and that I needed wood to feed my woodstove – and it just so happened that cutting and splitting wood was what he did in his retirement.
I was a Jewish guy who grew up in the suburbs of Long Island with a Masters Degree in writing and literature. He was a back country Baptist who grew up on a farm in the woods less than 3 miles from where he now lived and who literally couldn’t read a lick more than his name. In the beginning he kept trying to get me to go to church with him on Sunday mornings. I told him it wasn’t my thing. “You know Christ was a Jew,” he said. When he found out I had a bookstore, he said, “You know, I got Saco Peter. Maybe you could sell ’em for me.” I thought, ‘Saco Peter, Saco Peter….. never heard of that author.’ It was a little while before I realized he had an “encyclopedia” he wanted me to sell. To Art, binoculars were “knocklers,” a poplar tree was a “popple,” a computer was a “’puter” and that was as much understanding he had of the machine that had taken over the world.
A child of the Great Depression, Arthur didn’t make it past the third grade in the little schoolhouse that had sat right across from my old farmhouse – he was badly needed to work on the farm so his large family could make ends meet, even at the tender age of 9. But by the age of 17 he had worked enough to purchase the house he died in 70 years later. Just a few years ago I had occasion to buy books from an old-timer up the road named Wyatt Haley. “You live across the street from Art Roberts, doncha? You know, he bought that house from my ma when he was just a teenager. There wasn’t no contract, no lawyers. It was a handshake deal. And you know what? Art came to the house the first day of every month for 30 years to pay her. Never missed a payment, never was late.”
Besides his lack of education, Arthur barely traveled anywhere in all his long life. He never set foot on an airplane. Hell, I’m pretty much certain he’d barely set foot out of Rennselaer or Berkshire County in the last 20 years I knew him – and, if he had, it was a quick foray to Albany or to deliver wood just over the line in Columbia County. I believe he only left the upstate region once – to visit a relative of Katherine’s in Virginia. Hauling a rickety old RV behind his pick-up truck they made their way, tentatively, south. The way he told it, they made a wrong turn and found themselves on the West Side Highway in Manhattan. While Katherine cowered and prayed in the RV, Art did his best to contend with the incredible rush of cars, horns blaring, whipping by this country bumpkin going 40 in a 60. He never did anything remotely like it again. His view and understanding of the world was as narrow as I thought possible in this country, in this day and age. One occasion when this was most apparent to me was when, on the eve of the first Gulf War in January 1990, he came over at dawn and pulled me into the field. He pointed to the red sunrise in the east and said in all seriousness, “That’s the Americans bombing Iraq.”
Art was the epitome of the line in Sixteen Tons – “A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong.” Lacking virtually any education, he labored his whole life, first on the farm as a kid, then as a young man for the railroad, in middle age and until retirement working on the roads for the highway department (he told of brutally cold days on the back of a truck shoveling sand by hand onto slick roads for 8 hours at a time, winter in, winter out), and finally – and ironically – in “retirement” as a woodcutter. From the age of 60 until just a year before he died, he split, cut and delivered firewood to neighbors and their neighbors, friends and acquaintances. Through only word of mouth, he cut upwards of 175 cords of wood a year for 18 years with only an old woman from the neighborhood named Bessie 8 years his senior as a helper, who also grew up on a farm in the backwoods. Anyone who’s done it knows cutting, splitting and delivering wood is backbreaking work, and these two oldsters did it most days for nearly two decades Besides wood, he mowed lawns in the neighborhood, made hundreds of wreaths each year when the snow hit, plowed our driveways and tapped maple trees every February and March with handmade wooden taps to boil maple syrup for us, which he sold for $28 a gallon. It wasn’t as if he needed to work; he got by quite well on his state pension and social security. It was just that work was all he’d ever known. Arthur was a slight man and of relatively small stature, but his hands were the hands of a giant – a testament to how he spent his life.
Eventually, in his last two years, he was diagnosed with cancer. Bessie had died three years before that and Katherine just a year before his diagnosis. As he got sicker, his world narrowed even more. He stopped driving. For the most part he stopped cutting wood except for his own use and, besides contact with a few neighbors and relatives who occasionally stopped in to drop off meals and spend a little time with him, he spent his days alone. He never mentioned the undeniable pain as the cancer spread unless you asked him how he felt. This past September and October he canned his tomatoes and his corn for the coming winter as he had for so many winters gone by. His gait had slowed to a virtual crawl, and he used an old gnarled branch as a cane so he looked like a man out of a fairy tale illustrated by Arthur Rackham. It didn’t stop him from somehow putting up a string of Christmas lights on ten foot handmade wooden poles in November. The day before he died he asked me to go down and fill his gas cans for his snowblower. I brought them back, brought three wheelbarrows of firewood into his house, then sat with him for a few moments in front of the woodstove, making small talk. My wife, Dale, and I would be off in a few days to spend the winter in warmer climes as we had for the past seven years. As I got up to leave, I said, “So I guess I’ll see you in the spring.” He didn’t answer, as if he really didn’t know if that could be possible. “I’ll see you in the spring, Arthur, OK?” And he assented.
Dale and Arthur’s brother found him the next day lying on the living room floor. All the evidence said that he’d gotten up on Thanksgiving morning, dressed and then went to get a few chunks of wood for the parlor stove. I saw the ambulance and hurried over. Fittingly, the two logs he’d been carrying lay near him on the floor. The EMTs had put a blanket over him. I pulled it back and there he was, my old neighbor Arthur, staring at nothing. I stroked his head a few times, then covered him again with the blanket.
And that was the end of me and Arthur.[/private]