The Sugar Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

we were looking down at the deep hole in the ground, at what would be a storage area for syrup, and I asked, “So will this put you in the first tier?”
    “Oh yeah,” he said.
    They started clearing the site for the new building the week before Bruce was inducted into the Hall of Fame. The trees were in Ken’s Lot, and because Bruce often talked about the difficult relationship he had with his dad, who was a tyrant to work for, there was a shade of symbolism hanging in the air that week. Once, when Bruce saw me coming from Ken’s Lot, he leveled a look at me and said, “You’ve probably been over there watching them cut those trees.” They were trees that Bruce knew very well, having grown up in the house that stood next to them. When Bruce returned from college he and Peter Rhoades inspected those trees and tested the sugar content of their sap, writing the percentages on the trunks and thinning the orchard to leave the sweetest trees.
    “Did it work?” I asked.
    “We’ll never know,” he answered. They conducted that experiment before reverse-osmosis machines came along and made high-sugar content redundant.
    Some of the trees would be cut for firewood. Others would be shipped to a mill in Brattleboro, to be marketed as “taphole maple.” Taphole maple could be an appealing wood, with its holes suggesting another time and the work of the sugarmaker. The equipment store was paneled with taphole maple.
    George Hodskins cut the trees in Ken’s Lot. George had been working at Bascom’s from the time he was nineteen, more than twenty years ago. His primary function was as a logger, and he owned a log skidder, a tractor designed to work in the woods, that he leased to Bruce. As the maples on the flatter part of the ground were removed, the others on the steep bank stood out in relief. They looked beautiful to me, perched alone on the hillside, and I pointed them out to George. He thought they didn’t look so great. Their crowns were too thin, he said. From a producer’s standpoint, the crowns of trees produce leaves and the leaves make carbohydrates, which are then converted into sugar once the thaw begins. Good maples need golden crowns.
    George started working after Ken Bascom transferred the business to Bruce and went into semiretirement. Ken wanted to fire George, but Bruce wouldn’t do it. Ken Bascom was quick to fire people, I had been told. He couldn’t manage help, as Bruce had told me many times. George placed Ken Bascom in that generation of farmers who had a lot to teach but who yelled a lot. “He shouted like all these farmers around here. You could learn from them, but you learned at high volume.”
    Ken was a hard guy to figure out. “A very nice guy, very charming, put on sugar parties for the kids, have lots of people up to the sugarhouse, but to work for him, he was a driver.He would yell about the oddest things,” George said. “You could let a truck roll across the parking lot and he wouldn’t say anything. But if you did something like leave a door open, he’d yell at you. He said to me once, ‘If I was running things around here I’d fire you.’ Eventually I just ignored him and did my own thing. He complained about that too.”
    The excavating crew came in, dug a deep hole, removed the sand, and crushed the big rocks. The concrete workers followed and built walls fourteen feet high, with a basement floor canted toward the middle, with drains in the event of a syrup spill. They installed girders and laid concrete planks to build the upper floor, then poured concrete over the planks and buffed the floor to a glassy smoothness. The construction workers assembled supports for the walls and arches for the roof, and as winter approached they covered the sides with steel panels painted the red color of the barns in New England. Bruce was pleased with that color. They built four loading docks for semis, three opening into the second floor warehouse and the fourth into the basement.