George and Barbara Perkins

STONES STAND, WATERS FLOW is a memoir and history, a story of change and endurance. The Perkins farm in Burlington, Massachusetts, where the author spent his boyhood, stood as a silent monument to history. John Hancock and Samuel Adams had fled to that farm from Lexington, assisted in their escape by a widow, a minister, and a slave. The barn where they stabled their horses stood still in use in the 1930s, sheltering the horse, cow, feed, and farm implements that helped sustain the family in the Great Depression. The historic flight continued through woods that a century and a half later remained a logging trail and a favorite childhood playground. Perkins family lives were colored by history and enriched by legends of English, Scottish, Welsh, French, and Indian ancestors. The period from 1930 to 1950 spanned economic depression, wartime, and a mother's breakdown as the slow seasons of the past hastened toward the swift transformations of the future.

Chapter one: THE MUDHOLE

At the western side of the Mudhole a clump of soft grass hangs over the edge where a boy can lie with his head and shoulders over the water and tickle a pickerel. The bank is vertical and the reeds that grow a few feet downstream do not intrude. Two feet below the surface the bottom consists of soft, white sand, scantily overlaid with a silt of decaying black vegetable matter that scatters in wisps under the legs of tadpoles, the probings of minnows, the flickering tails of brook trout, or the feathery fins of pickerel as they hover motionless in the shadow of the shore. Small children fish here with gauze nets attached to wire handles. The silt swirls around bare toes and heels and settles to leave no mark of their passing.
On the opposite shore, a clump of shrubbery shades deep water and conceals a four-foot blacksnake that slithers forth, head erect and eyes shining, leaving a wake of v-shaped ripples as he disappears under the branches again. Swimmers avoid the shrubs, and the snake does not expose himself for long or travel far when their bodies disturb the nearby water. A granite boulder rises a couple of feet above the water not far from the snake shrubs to provide a platform for fishing or diving. Away from the boulder the water deepens quickly as it slopes toward the bottomless part of the hole, where divers try but always fail to touch bottom. This is not the bottomless swimming hole on the Middlesex Turnpike where we were told that gangsters sank a murdered man in the nineteen-twenties. On that occasion the Middlesex Turnpike swimming place turned out not to be bottomless when the police raised the bloated body, still wired to the engine block.
At the Mudhole in the nineteen-forties, I am one of the children who thrill to the thought of endless water beneath their thrashing arms and legs. We hold our noses in our left hands, raise our right arms, and plunge feet downward to where probing toes feel only water and then rise to burst through the surface, gasping for air, proud and pleased that we have found neither mud nor sand, nor human remains. There is a war on, but that is far away.
After the hay is in or the barn swept out or the chicken houses cleaned, there is nothing better than to stand waist-deep, soaping off the sweat and dust and flecks of straw, and then dive, breast-stoking underwater to the bottomless center and to rise with eyes open through ever-lightening water, shake the suds from the hair, brush it back from the eyes, and circle back to shore, avoiding the snake.
“Did you hear what they’re doing to the chicken houses on State Road?”
“What chicken houses?”
“Near the Civic Club, along the hillside.”
“Hillside?”
“Facing the road there.”
“There’s no chickens in them. They’ve been empty for years.”
“They’re turning them into houses.”
“Houses? What kind of houses?”
“People houses.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No joke. People are going to live in them.”
Live in chicken houses? At that the rest of us break into the mockingbird refrain, “Listen to the bullshit fly. Listen to the bullshit fly.” The bearer of the news turns red, but in his certainty he slits his eyes, thrusts out his chin, and issues a challenge. “How much do you want to bet?”
None of us has much change to bet. One turns his back on the question and takes a flying cannonball leap off the roadside into the deepest part of the pool. The rest stand quietly. Memories flood over us. Chickens have been part of our lives. We have kept chickens in small houses in our back yards. We have severed more heads with axes at woodpile chopping blocks than we can number. We have watched as the Italian woman twists living heads to break the spinal cord and draws a knife across their necks to drain the blood. We have scalded and plucked both hens and roosters. We have pulled out pink and purple entrails and dropped the inedible parts into garbage pails. We know them by name and color, white Leghorns, buff Rhode Island Reds, and we have braved sitting hens’ beaks to take warm eggs for breakfast.
We have seen a chicken hypnotized by placing its head under its wing until it turns immobile with sleep.
We have turned eggs daily in incubators and watched the cracking shells and emerging beaks and wondered which balls of fluff would turn into hens and which into roosters, and we know the excitement of opening packages of mail-order new-born chicks, all carefully sexed. We have kept baby chicks apart from the adults in low wooden frames with chicken wire on sides and top, moving the frames to new places when the ground becomes fouled and grassless.
We know the rank weeds that quickly outstrip the grass in empty chicken runs and have played in and out of the multiple chambers of abandoned henhouses with whitewashed walls and decaying support timbers where dust-motes dance in the light that slants from broken windows.
We know that chickens are the dumbest creatures on God’s green earth.

Things change after wars. Two decades earlier, in the nineteen-twenties, my father was one of those who swam at the Mudhole. Among those who swam with him was a slightly older man, a veteran of the War to End All Wars, who was descended from a Minuteman who fought at the Battle of Lexington. My father’s great, great grandfather had died at Lexington. So they had that in common. And swept up in the enthusiasm of youth and patriotism, in the fall of 1918, on his seventeenth birthday, Dad had dropped out of college to enroll in the Marines, not knowing that less than a week later the sexton of the Congregational Church would be tugging at the rope, throwing his body upward, and tugging and tugging again to arouse the steeple bell into celebratory clangor for the Armistice Day promise of universal peace.
Burton Perkins swam at the Mudhole to remove dusty, dried specks of feces and litter that clung to his body when he had been cleaning out the henhouse or pushing horse and cow dung from stalls in the barn through trap doors into piles that accumulated in the cellar and later were taken from there to be spread on the fields. He swam there when his hands were hard and scored with dirt from handling the stones of the new cellar hole, crinkly with the concrete that held the stones together, slivered with the timbers of the house that was rising on the old foundation after the fire of 1921. These were necessary reasons for escape from the farm. But his swimming was also part of a regimen designed to rebuild health shattered by malaria and yellow fever contracted in the Dominican Republic.
The two men coughed together, spat out lungers in amused and ironic competition, and swapped war stories.
“The Belgians and the French. The women. You never saw such women.”
“The Senoritas in Santo Domingo. Oh, my.”
“You couldn’t understand a word they said. Except ‘Yank.’ That was a word they knew. Jesus, did they know that word. It helped make sense out of everything else. And thankful? You never saw such commodities of thanks.”
“Commodities? Commodities of thanks?”
Laughter and slaps on the back and deep, retching coughing.
“Caramba. Santo Domingo. Nombre de Dios.”
“It never paid for the deaths, though.”
“Never.”
“And the near deaths. The walking wounded.”
Their clothes lay nearby on the grass. They reached into pockets for pipes and plug tobacco, which they cut and silently stuffed into bowls. A match flared and was drawn down twice, first into one bowl and then into the other. Then the burnt head snapped off as the match was shaken to extinguish it and fell on exposed flesh close to pubic hairs.
“Jesus.”
“You don’t want to start a fire there.”
“No, youngster, as a matter of fact I don’t.” He rubbed at the sore place. “Thanks for the advice. You are possessed of a wisdom beyond your years. You should run for Congress. Damn, that hurts. If I did start a fire there, though, I could probably spit it out before it reached the tall trees.”
“Did you see many die?”
“A few. You?”
“Just a peasant hanging on a barbed wire fence.” He let the words hang for awhile, coughing. He remembered the bandolier trampled in the mud, the ragged clothing, the bearded face, swollen and fly-infested. “He was already dead,” he said, “and pigs had torn his belly open and were eating in it. His intestines trailed on the ground.”
“Shit.”
“His hat was on the ground beside him, a straw sombrero about a yard wide, but the pigs left it alone.”
“Didn’t like straw?”
“I guess not.”
“When men die from gas they bubble at the mouth. Their eyes roll back and they bubble. It’s all bloody and it rolls down their chins.”
“Did you see much of that?”
“Enough. But I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been back a while. You can tell stories too often. Tell some of yours.”
He told of tarantulas so big you could hardly cover them with a hat.
“Maybe that’s why the pigs left the sombrero alone.”
“Maybe. They have a bite that will stun a horse.”
“The pigs or the sombreros? Or the women?”
“The tarantulas.”
He told of swimming away from burning white sand and the shade of green palm trees into the jewel-like blue of the Caribbean in water as warm as a bath. He told of being swept from shore by a rip tide that thrust him under and carried him so fast he was a mile out to sea and far out of breath before he realized that the way to escape the pull was to swim a parallel course to the shoreline into calmer water that allowed him to swim back in. He didn’t tell what happened to others swept out on the same tide.

A millwheel once turned where Terrace Hall Avenue crossed Vine Brook. For decades it whirled on its axle, powering millstones that turned their grooved surfaces one on top of another to grind the grain of the neighborhood. The miller never thrived, but he got by. When the mill was gone, the timbers of the building and the wheel were carted off for reuse in barns and cowsheds. The iron that bound the shaft ends to keep them from splitting went to the forge and emerged as cut nails and horseshoes. The millstones, halved with star drills and wedges, found continued use as doorsteps. Muddy shoes scraped but did not come clean on the scored grinding lines that ran from the axle holes outward to the rim. By 1922 almost nothing was left to tell that there had been a mill at the Mudhole, or before that a low and muddy crossing in the neck of a swamp where deer stopped to drink and bears ranged the surrounding woods.
Early in the crossing’s history, townspeople placed logs on other logs to form a bridge that allowed the water to flow below. More logs formed a corduroy road on the mud on both sides until the road reached higher ground. When the millrace was built, cut stones rose in the place where the bridge had been to support the millwheel. Cuff Trot helped with this project, built to last longer than logs. He took pride in his work, and did not hurry. When he was hot, he threw his clothes aside and splashed in the water with the trout and the pickerel. Superstitious, he did not take off the charm that circled his left arm. Its rattles came from a six-foot timber rattlesnake he killed with a shovel as it slid from between boulders disturbed with the runners of a stone-laden sledge. He was urging the ox forward, when he heard the whisper of the rattles and sprang into action at the sound of the Old Enemy. It was spring and there was snow on the ground and the snake should not have been there, but the sun was hot, the snow was melting and running in little rivulets, and there it was. Venus plaited the rattles into an armband of jet-black horsehair. She was a wondrous weaver, and it was the luck of the band that got him safely through the Revolutionary war. Cuff was a free man, now, working for wages, and a free man needed his free time. So he splashed in the Mudhole, but he wore the band and he stayed well away from the blacksnake that sometimes shimmered out of the darkness and into the sunshine on the other side. He had been a slave. He had fought in two wars. There were things he needed to forget, things he wanted to remember, and things he needed to think about. Meanwhile, he worked with stones, shaping and piling them so that they would last.
In the time of the mill, farmers brought their grain and stayed to talk. They watched the wheel drop its spent waters in bright cascades into the bottomless pit by the boulder. In that deep dark, the waters turned on themselves and swam into sunlight at the lip of the hole before wandering through meadows that emptied into the Shawsheen River. The farmers talked with a kind of wonder of how other impoundments and spills turned more wheels. A few miles to the north, the Concord River drove bigger mills until it met the Merrimac, whose fearsome power turned the wheels of the Boott Mills, where Lowell mill girls captivated the imaginations of nineteenth-century social reformers.

Burton Perkins was to marry one of the last of the Lowell mill girls, but in 1922, as he lazed in sunshine on the grass or plunged into the water to probe for a bottom he never could reach, he did not see into the future. Overhead the breezes whispered to him, and in their soundings he could almost hear the voices of miller and farmer marveling at the abundance and strength of the waters of the earth, the wonders of the canals that engineers built to channel and level the flow and to bridge lesser waters that were of no use to them, and the displacements that began with the laying of iron rails to move commerce more quickly than could the waters that nevertheless endured to continue their flow, as they did here between stones set in place by Cuff Trot over a century before the Great War.

The way to tickle a pickerel is to lie over the bank when the sky is hazy or the sun slanted so that it does not throw your shadow directly into the water beneath you. Arrange yourself so that a hand and arm can be insinuated into the water without causing ripples or disturbing the pool to roil the silt on the sandy bottom. The pickerel will be holding motionless in the stillness with a fanning motion of his pectoral fins, much as a dragonfly employs his wings to hover in apparent weightlessness near a reed or flower stalk. If you scare him he will dart away before you know that you have moved. But you must move, move your hand and arm only, very slowly, with index finger extended. If you are successful, you will touch his side and stroke it gently. He may quiver briefly, to let you know he can dart away when he wants to, but he won’t want to and you may stroke him until he does, when his decision will be quick and he will disappear like summer lightning.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, adult swimmers at the Mudhole became few as it turned into a resort mostly of children and teenagers. Men seldom came in dusty from hayfields, for the hay was not needed on farms where draft horses gave way to tractors and milk cows ceased their relevance in a town where Bustead’s Dairy delivered milk daily by the bottle. War workers carpooled to shipyards in Boston, South Boston, or Quincy, or were bussed to Raytheon in Waltham. As part of the Victory effort, children were released from school to squat, weeding ineffectively, in rows of vegetables so immature they didn’t know what they were, though they smelled like parsnips. In summers in the wartime nineteen-forties, Fred Graham hired young teens to pick green beans and heft crates of iceberg lettuce in and out of concrete washing tanks at two dollars for a day of nine and a half hours. That was much better than the dollar a day such work paid in the nineteen-thirties, if you could get it. Older teens took the Boston and Maine Railroad in the mornings from Woburn into Boston to join the shape-ups of broken men seeking work on the docks as stevedores while the months and years rolled them toward their time.
At the Mudhole in the nineteen-forties, boys and girls played chasing and capturing games, “Ringalevio” and “Blacksmith, Blacksmith, All Drop Hands,” both in and out of the water, laughing and slapping. When enthusiasms waned, they soaked up the sun, spreading towels with wartime carelessness on the surface of the macadam road. A boy would emerge dripping from the water to bend sidewise and pick a three-inch bloodsucker off his leg. He would impale it on a stick, turn it inside out, the black outer skin replaced by the pink inner alimentary tract, and leave it on the macadam to die and dry in the sun. Another would drop his swimming trunks to display a pale, white moon, creased between its cheeks, as he ran his tanned figure across the road to dive from the bridge, heaving the moon upward and then down from view in an elaborate arc that ended with a splash beyond the stone pilings. He would turn on his back in the water and yell “Lighthouse Island” as he thrust his white, erect penis upward, while the water lapped around his pubic hair. Girls looked elaborately elsewhere.
Families continued to keep chickens until war work made them unnecessary for the Sunday table, unprofitable to sell, impossible to care for or to hire others to care for.

Only those who have tried it can tell how long a couple of boys will work at scraping a three-inch accumulation of shit and straw from the floor of an airless henhouse. Twenty-five cents for each of a dozen such houses sounds like easy money to a twelve-year old, but the shovels are blunt and the shit and straw stick like concrete to the wooden floor. A hoe works no better than a shovel. Dynamite might help. An enterprising fellow might cut it into blocks, stain it red, and start a brickyard. Dust and feces swirl in the light that filters through the oilcloth window. No air enters through the nine by ten inch chicken door because its closing panel has been lowered to keep the hens outside in the yard. The boys will prop open the shed door that let them in and grow increasingly envious of each load of shit that they fling with shovels through that narrow rectangle of light and air. Grit and determination will push them toward the earning of at least their first twenty-five cents. They will work until lunchtime or until they finish the first house, but then they will collect their money and go swimming. They won’t be back.
A day worker in a hen yard has been known to pick up a fat Rhode Island Red by its feet and fling it squawking over the wire fence and into the woods on the other side. If a cousin happens to be passing through the woods with his twelve-gauge shotgun, he will blast it into a mess of blood and flying feathers and take it home. “I thought it was a pheasant, Ma.” No questions will be asked. It will make good eating if the eaters watch out for the lead pellets.

“A chicken house for people? You must be kidding.”
“It’s Paddy O’Brien that’s doing it.”
“Even so . . . ”
“He is, I tell you. I swear to God.”
“Listen to the bullshit fly.”
“Bullshit, my ass. How much do you want to bet?”