In fact, he'd put his fishing tackle into the Kissel and told Mary, his wife, he was delivering a puppy to a man he'd met on his last trip. But when autumn was on the horizon, something happened - no one knew just what - and he took a meager early harvest, auctioned off his livestock and farm implements, and moved away, all in the space of a few weeks.Īt the time, John Sawtelle was traveling up north with no thought or intention of buying a farm.
During his last summer on the farm he even hired two men from town. In the south field he planted hay, and in the west, corn, because the west field was wet and the corn would grow faster there.
He mixed milk and linseed oil and rust and blood and used the concoction to paint the barn and outhouse red. He managed to build a small stone-and-concrete silo taller than the barn, but he never got around to capping it. He stacked rocks at the edges of the fields in long humped piles and burned stumps in bonfires that could be seen all the way from Popcorn Corners - the closest town, if you called that a town - and even Mellen. That first year he raked and harrowed the south field a dozen times until even his ponies seemed tired of it. He helped raise barns all the way from Tannery Town to Park Falls so there'd be plenty of help when his time came.Īnd day and night he pulled stumps. So that he wouldn't need to go outside to tote water, he dug his well in the hole that would become the basement of the house. In the five years he worked the land, he cleared one twenty-five-acre field and drained another, and he used the lumber from the trees he cut to build an out-house, a barn, and a house, in that order.
He tried his best to make a living there as a dairy farmer. For the first few months he and the ponies slept side by side in the pole shed and quite often in his dreams Schultz heard the snap when the chains on that load of maple broke. The next day he fetched the other pony and filled a yoked cart with supplies and the three of them walked back to his crude homestead, Schultz on foot, reins in hand, and the ponies in harness behind as they drew the cart along and listened to the creak of the dry axle. The morning he signed the papers he rode one of his ponies along the logging road to his new property and picked out a spot in a clearing below a hill and by nightfall a workable pole stable stood on that ground. As he helped unpile logs to extract the wretched man's remains, Schultz remembered a pretty parcel of land he'd spied north and west of Mellen. Twenty tons of rolling maple buried a man where Schultz had stood the moment before. In the year 1919, Edgar's grandfather, who was born with an extra share of whimsy, bought their land and all the buildings on it from a man he'd never met, a man named Schultz, who in his turn had walked away from a logging team half a decade earlier after seeing the chains on a fully loaded timber sled let go.
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