Mr. Desrochers held the envelope in both of his big weathered hands, and for a moment he did not open it. Steam from the evaporator rolled around him, sweet and heavy, and the pancake griddle hissed in the corner of the barn. “Phil,” he said, in his slow Vermont voice, “I have thought about your offer for two years. Seven hundred thousand dollars for my sugar bush. I came here today to give you my answer, and I want you to hear one thing first.” He turned his weathered face toward my son. “Two winters ago, in the ice storm, I was seventy nine years old and I thought I was going to lose my herd.”
“My generator quit on the second night,” he said. “Sixty cows. My wife is gone, and my boys moved to Boston, and I milked by hand until my fingers would not close. At eleven at night a truck came up the road with its lights off, because the lines were down and he did not want to wake me. It was Luke.” The barn went still. Nobody was eating. “He had worked nineteen days straight on those poles, and on his only night off he came to my barn. He fixed the generator in an hour. Then he sat down on a milking stool beside me and stayed until four in the morning, and we finished all sixty together.”
I could hear the wind in the sugar bush outside. Luke stood by the door in his flannel jacket, cap in his hands, looking at the sawdust. “He never told me his name,” said Mr. Desrochers. “He said he was with the power company and he was just glad the cows were comfortable. I had to ask three people at the hardware store to learn who he was.” He tapped the envelope against his palm. “Then, a week ago, I heard that his uncle was the man who has been after my trees. And I heard, secondhand, what that uncle has been saying about him at parties.”
An envelope pulled from a wool coat in a maple barn answered the offer of Phil and showed what Luke did on his night off.
Phil had climbed down from the sap tank with his hot toddy and was standing there with the same grin on his face, though by now it looked painted on. His wool vest was spotless. His boots had never touched a drop of mud. “Now, Gaston,” he said, “you must have misheard. I adore Luke. We joke around. It is a family tradition.” “It is a poor tradition,” said Mr. Desrochers. “My father taught me that the ones who climb the poles in the dark are the ones who keep the light on in the barn. I will not sell two hundred acres of trees that my grandfather tapped to a man who laughs at them.”
He handed Phil the envelope. Phil opened it with fingers that were not quite steady and read the single page inside. I watched his face. He is my little brother, three years younger, and I have known every one of his faces since the day he was born. This was a new one. It was the face of a boy who has been told, for the first time in his life, that the door is closed. “It is no,” he said, hoarsely. “Gaston, I offered you a fair price.” “You offered me a high price,” said Mr. Desrochers. “That is a different thing.”
The barn waited. Somewhere a child laughed and was hushed. Phil looked up at the beams, and at the plaid jackets of two hundred relatives, and finally at my son. “Luke,” he said, and then stopped, and tried again. “I climbed on that tank today so that you would all look at me. I never wanted to look at you.” He took a long breath. “You hold up this whole state with a pair of climbing spikes, and I made a joke of it for a laugh. I am so sorry, nephew. I would give back every one of those laughs.”
Luke put on his cap. He is a quiet man, and not one to hold a grudge, and I saw him weigh it, standing there by the door with the cold air coming in. Then he crossed the sawdust and held out his hand. “Uncle Phil,” he said, “you can make it up to me by learning to tap a tree. It is March. The sap is running, and the buckets are heavy.” Phil took the hand in both of his. A ripple of warm, relieved laughter went across the barn, and somebody started clapping, and in a moment the whole room was on its feet, and the wife of Luke wiped her eyes with the back of her glove.
Then Mr. Desrochers did the thing I will remember all my days. He took a second envelope from his coat. “This one is for Luke. I have no son who wants the trees. I will sell the two hundred acres to you for the assessed value, which is a third of what your uncle offered, and I will carry the note myself, at no interest, for as long as it takes.” Luke stared at the envelope. “All I ask,” the old man went on, “is that you keep tapping the old way, with buckets on the oldest trees, and that you let a hired boy help on weekends.”
Luke bought the sugar bush that spring. He set nineteen hundred taps, and he boiled sap in the evenings after his shift on the lines, and the first gallon of syrup he gave to Mr. Desrochers in a glass jar tied with twine. The old man tasted it standing in his kitchen and said it was almost as good as the syrup of his grandfather. Almost. It took him a minute to stop shaking his head. Then he said, with his eyes shut, that it was better.
On the next March Saturday I drove up to Stowe and found my brother Phil standing knee deep in snow behind the sugar house, in borrowed rubber boots, with a pair of buckets on a wooden yoke across his shoulders. He was soaked to the skin, red faced and gasping. Luke walked ahead of him up the hill. “Watch your feet, Uncle Phil,” he said, “and do not spill.” Phil did not spill. He did not say a word. He only glanced at me with a look I had not seen on him since we were children, a look of simple, honest, bone deep happiness, and plodded on.
