I was sitting at my kitchen table waiting for two Americans to arrive when Walt came round the corner into the yard, followed by his friend. ‘Hi’ said Walt. ‘I’m Walt. I’m a poet’. He gestured to his friend and said ‘He’s a poet too’. No need to tell me he was from the USA – I’d pretty much worked that out.
They stayed with me for three days, and they each wrote me a haiku when they left. And Walt left me a story that I don’t expect to forget.
There are several sub-species of poets in the US of A, as far as I can see. One kind lives in Vermont, in the woods. Probably has a woodlot and some sugar maples, and a boiler for turning the sap into maple syrup. Spends time splitting logs and trying to build fires where the wood smoke spirals up just-so, and in the spring he listens to the loons on the pond and the woodchucks down along the holler. Walt was one of those. I’m not scoffing, I’m just telling it like it was, and by the way, though I liked both these poets I liked Walt the best. That’s why I can’t remember the other poet’s name.
So Walt lives on his woodlot in a trailer. He hasn’t got much money, so a trailer is all he can afford. He’s a poet, after all. Down along the holler or maybe on the river flats there’s an Amish community, and if you don’t know what that is you can just look it up on Wikipedia. So one day one of the movers and shakers of the Amish community comes to see him. He sits down, puts his claw hammer on the table and his thumbs behind his braces, and says ‘Walt, when are you goin’ to fix yourself a house?
‘Well’, says Walt, ‘I’m not making much money at the poetry, so I’m fixing to stay in the trailer for a while… Ain’t no way I could afford to build a house’.
‘Well’, says the Amish guy, ‘me and the boys was talking at the Meeting and we’ve got a proposition’.
‘See that big ‘ol stand of Yellow Pine down there? I reckon if we felled that and took the saw-logs down the lumber mill we’d get a tidy sum for it’.
‘Up the other end of the lot there’s some Spruce and some Lodgepole pine. We’ve got one of them portable mills and we could rip joists out of the Lodgepole and mill joinery timber from the Spruce. We reckon by the time we’d been to the store, and got all the fixins we can’t fix ourselves with the money from the saw logs, we figure we could raise you a fine big house for $30,000’. (Which back then was worth about $30,000).
‘Well’, says Walt, ‘That’s fine and dandy but I ain’t got $30,000 dollars’.
The Amish fella says ‘Well, we don’t set that much store by cash anyways. We’all got pretty much all we need and if we haint we mostly fix it up ourselves. So I reckon you could pay it in instalments?’
‘Will y’all trust me to pay you?’ says Walt, somewhat overcome.
‘We reckon it’s a bad situation if you can’t trust a poet’, says the Amish. ‘And we know where you live, or leastways we will do when we’ve fixed you a house’.
So after a month or two the whole Amish community turns up with all the frames of the house ready to assemble like a proper Amish barn-raising, and they bring nails and ladders and claw hammers and probably apple pie and hard cider, and they raise Walt’s house in no time.
He moves in, leaving his mobile home deserted and mouldering under the maple trees, and as he lives there and writes poems and splits logs and the wild geese honk overhead the house grows warm and the woodwork gets several kinds of golden glow all according to whether it is fashioned out of spruce or tamarack or lodgepole pine. And Walt drives out in the evenings to read his poems to anyone who values them, and life is sweet.
Then one evening as he’s driving home from the launch of his latest slim book of poems somewhere down in New York State, there’s a nasty red glow quietly building roughly where his house should be, and the nearer he gets the brighter the glow. He dismisses his worries, thinking that your house burning down is always such an utter shock that worrying about it in advance stops it being a shock. If it has to be a shock, worrying about it stops it being a shock and if it can’t be a shock maybe it won’t happen. But this superstitious thinking doesn’t work for Walt. There’s a pile of glowing ashes where his house had stood that morning.
Walt moves back into the mobile home. It’s damp and musty. Telling me about it, he doesn’t dwell on how he felt. I guess he guesses that I can pretty well guess how he felt. Some of the neighbours came round with pumpkin pie and pecan pie and suchlike, but that didn’t really butter Walt’s parsnips, and he was finding it hard to see a way ahead when the Amish fella came to see him again. After a bit of commiseration and thoughtful beard-stroking (their own beards, not each other’s, I’m guessing) the Amish fella says ‘Well, Walt, we wuz talkin’ about your situation down at the Meeting the other day, and me and the boys reckoned your house was still under guarantee.’
And so they fixed him up another one, just like the first.
I’m not sure myself how Amish communities work. But by a sort of backwards reasoning, I’m wondering if they don’t set much store by owning property. Maybe they don’t aim to have more buggies in the driveway than the Amish next door. Maybe their wealth is in working the land communally and sharing the produce according to need rather than greed, and they like raising barns just for the fun of making useful buildings from the trees growing round about, and the joy of the white shavings flying as you shape the rafters using sharp and simple tools.Look it up on Wikipedia maybe, see if I’m right?
No reason not to believe it, though I've added a few things just for fun or to create a bit of atmosphere., like the beard stroking.
wonderful story and yes, I'll believe every word.