Chapter One

When Peter Brissy bought the side of Turret Mountain some sixty years ago, he had pretty much his own choice of boundaries. And he had wanted his land to reach as far as the east slope because along that slope for a mile or more lay a cascading of stone. White, gleaming, jagged stone.

He could see as far as the stone and no further. So he had bought, and now his farm land, some clear and some forested, lay from the top most stone of the cascade to the pine darkened valley below.

Peter Brissy had been in his twenties then, made of the same material as the mountain, staunch and rugged.

First off he had mixed himself a mess of whitewash, then, stepping off his line, he washed a tree bole now and then. He began at the foot of the slope and worked along the bottom flat and up the west slope. When he had come to the summit of the cascade he set down his pail of whitewash and wiped his hands upon the seat of his pants.

Next Peter had taken his new ax, shiny, and keen as a hound dog for his breakfast, and he laid low a great many of the oak and pine, together with wild cherry and maple.

It had taken him nearly a year to build the road from the valley to where his house would stand; but it was a good road, with a stone base and stretches of log cleating.

Peter had driven his bride Selma, over the newly finished road in the light wagon to the big clearing.

Selma had cried because the road was so beautiful and Peter, big mountain lummox, had not understood her tears and so she had cried the harder. He had showed her, aside from the foundation of the big square house, the barn site and the spring, over which he would build the milk house. He had promised to make a heavy white trough to hold her milk crocks, neat and cold, in the spring water.

All this, Peter explained, would take him near another year and would she consider coming from her father's house in the valley and live in a one room cabin if he would be hasty and put one together.

Selma had considered that and so they had moved their belongings to the little shed-like place and set up housekeeping.

Selma's father had helped him make it snug and warm for winter and fitten for a woman to abide in. And she had cried again, this time over the cupboards built in the kitchen end, and over the poster bed stead Peter had turned upon his father's foot lathe, and again over the rich dark walnut stain he had made for the inside of the cabin.

But Peter was used to women's ways by now and her tears bothered him not at all. He had a new philosophy which was developed with his marriage and he reasoned that if God almighty had made women so crosswise that the cried when they were happy, then who was he, Peter Brissy, to question?

Things were as he had promised Selma and the house had been built and the barn, and in time, the wagon shed and milk house. The first winter Peter spent his spare time from feeding and clearing walks through the snow, in carving white wood butter bowls and a fancy mold in which Selma made out the little pats of yellow butter. He carved stirring spoons and a pin of maple wood with which to roll pie dough. He pegged together two maple crickets and waxed them with wax from the bees at his father's place. Winter evenings sometimes he and Selma would sit upon these low stools before their fire. Their faces would turn spotted from the heat and Selma would lay her skirts clear up to her knees, toasting her woolen covered legs.

And the evening which would seem late because of its early beginning, would pass. Together they slept. Patterns made by the low fire spread themselves out uncertainly here and there upon the low brown ceiling.

Years followed years like beads upon a rosary.

Close the end now, Peter might have looked backward thus: The year we moved into the shed house. The next year when we moved into the big house, and the next when James Benjamin, named for his grandfather Shelton, was born. The year the big west field was cleared, the next when Waite, the second son, was born.

Some years were... just years. Peter could not recall anything in particular, and then there was the year Carlotta was born.

And the year Carlotta had died. Her death, needless and shocking, had struck silver through Peter's hair and had broken her mother's heart.

Carlotta had been a bright dart of a child. That morning she had gone to the sow's pen with Peter and stood upon the bottom plank with her eyes which were the color of flax flowers, peering between the top planks, the while she had chattered in her gay little way.

Suddenly Carlotta's voice had stopped, and Peter, looking up from the slop he was pouring, had seen that her feet had slipped from the plank.

She had poked her head, with its starched blue sunbonnet, through the space between the fencing, and now she hung there helpless.

Peter's tongue had turned to stone as he released her limp form and his feet, too, had turned to stone as he neared the kitchen where Selma was busy with the breakfast dishes.

........ It had thawed him a little to have Selma say she did not hold the accident against him.

That had been more than fifty years ago now, and Selma still kept the little sunbonnet laid away in the top drawer of the highboy. Always when Peter came across the bonnet he would remember the shocked look up Carlotta's face as she dangled from the fence boards. And it had taken Peter a long time to reconcile himself.

So he had grown old and no longer wanted to tussle with his steep flung acres of clearing, nor the tall wind bent timbers that hemmed them in. He split his farm, as he said, plumb in the middle sideways. He gave the bottom part to James Benjamin whose name had been shortened to JaBen. To Waite he deeded the upper place.

Waite and Elsie had lived with Peter and Selma and would always do so. They were childless and Elsie turned her thwarted womanhood upon her husband's mother and upon old Peter Brissy whom she spoiled shamefully and satisfyingly.

Peter had helped JaBen build himself a good house down on the valley road. After the building was done Pa helped the boys lay a fence of rails on the exact line that he, himself, stepped off.

When they had laid the fence as far as the road which ran from the valley bed to the homestead, they stopped and set a stout gatepost. Opposite this post, across the narrow road, the set another post then they left Pa with the building of a gate while JaBen and Waite continued around the mountain with the rails.

Pa had ordered paint from the mailorder catalog, a surprising bright blue paint, and had painted the gate.

Upon the topmost board he had lettered in white paint "Upper Brissy Place". The gate stood open as he lettered, then he swung it to and made lettering on the other side... "Lower Brissy Place."

With the drying of the paint there were two farms upon the fertile but stony unrelenting slope of Turret, where before there had been but one.