I took the telephone from Gerard hand and put it to my ear. “This is Amos Thibodeau,” I said. A man answered in French and then in careful English. “Monsieur Thibodeau, my name is Henri Beaulieu. I am from Sherbrooke. My great grandmother was Marie Claire Thibodeau. I have read the old deed. I think there has been a mistake about who owns your sugarbush.” I looked at Tammy, who stood by the sink with her arms wrapped around herself. “Monsieur Beaulieu, I think you had better come to Vermont,” I said. “I will make breakfast.”
He arrived the next afternoon, a tall gentle man of sixty in a gray cap, with a leather satchel and a daughter who had driven him across the border. He sat at my kitchen table. I put out coffee and a plate of French toast, with real syrup, and I watched his face while he ate. He closed his eyes at the first bite. “Monsieur, this is the taste of my childhood,” he said. “My grandmother made it in a little shack in the woods, when I was a boy. She said it was the sweetest syrup in the world, and that it came from stolen land.”
I told him that nothing in my family was stolen. Then Tammy, very quietly, put down the canvas bag she had carried for six months, and untied the red ribbon around the letters. “Amos, I have not read them all,” she said. “I was afraid to.” We read them together at the table, the three of us, Beaulieu, Gerard and I, with the light going gold in the windows. They were letters from Lucille. Thirty years of them. Lucille had written to Henri Beaulieu grandmother, in French, every year since 1991, and she had sent a jar of syrup with every one.
A pink button in a sugar shack, a deed from 1911, and a wife who kept one last promise to a stranger.
It was an odd and lovely story, and it took the whole evening to piece together. In 1911 my grandfather had bought the sugarbush from a widow, Marie Claire, but the deed had passed through a clerk error to her son Pierre in Quebec, and for eighty years nobody noticed. Lucille found the gap in 1990, while she was researching our family tree. She did not tell me, because she knew I would be ashamed. She wrote to Pierre granddaughter, drove to Sherbrooke, and sat in a parlor for two days, until the old woman, Therese Beaulieu, signed a quitclaim for one dollar and a promise.
The promise was a simple one. Every spring, from the first boil of the season, Lucille would send a barrel of the best Grade A syrup to the Beaulieu family in Sherbrooke. She had kept it for twenty eight years. When she passed, she asked Tammy, in the hospital, to see that the promise was kept, and to make sure Gerard knew where the papers were. Tammy, who had always been jealous of the Thibodeau name, had taken it as a deathbed secret and misread it as a prize. She wept openly at my table. “Amos, I wanted to be the one who found it,” she whispered.
I forgave her. I am too old to carry a grudge, and the truth was almost funny: a woman who had stolen into an old shack at night to find a treasure had found the single best proof of her mother in law love. Henri Beaulieu held up the quitclaim, signed in 1991, with Lucille careful signature as a witness. “Monsieur, my family has never had any quarrel with yours,” he said. “We only wanted what was promised. The syrup came every year. My grandmother wept when it stopped, in 2019.” I said that I would send it myself.
The Quebec company that had bought my sugarbush was not pleased about the mix up. Its lawyers called three times. But the quitclaim stood, and Henri Beaulieu made a statement in front of a notary that his family had no interest in the land, and the sale went through clean. Then he and I walked down to the old shack, where my grandfather evaporator was still pushed against the wall. He looked at the iron pan, at the hole in the floor lined with fieldstone. “This is where she hid the original deed,” he said, “in 1911. For safekeeping.”
Gerard stood in the doorway with his big hands hanging. He had not said a word all afternoon. When Henri and his daughter left, he stayed behind, and he looked at the old evaporator for a long while. “Pa, I thought you were a weak old man,” he said. “I was ashamed to be your son.” I said I had been ashamed myself, of how little I had told him. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Come in the spring,” I said. “I will teach you to boil. It is not complicated. It is only patient.”
The next March I went out at four in the morning to the old shack and lit a fire under my grandfather pan. Gerard was already there, in his work boots, with a bucket of sap on each arm and a quiet look I had never seen. He stoked the fire. He skimmed the foam. By noon the first golden syrup of the season ran off the pan, clear as light, and we poured it into a glass jar and held it up to the window. “It is perfect,” he said. I said it was, and that Lucille would have loved the color.
At Easter that year I sat at the head of my own table, with the whole family, twenty of us, around the pancakes. Gerard set a bottle in front of me, a little plastic one, from a dollar store. He had kept it since the year before. “Pop, I bought it,” he said. “It is the worst syrup I have ever tasted.” Everybody laughed, but kindly this time. I put the plastic bottle in the middle of the table, right in the center, like a trophy. “Real is better,” I said. “But it is good to remember what you were laughing at.”
