The Woodcutter’s Daughter

For as long as I can remember, my mother wanted to get back home.

She delighted in many things (Elvis Presley, migrating birds, black raspberry ice cream, figures of women and birds sculpted from stone) but for eighty of the eighty-three years she walked this earth, my mother was best defined by her desire to be somewhere else.

The White Mountains of New Hampshire were all she talked about—to friends, strangers at bus stops, and our teachers at annual parent-teacher conferences. “You daughter is a gifted speller,” the teacher would say, to which my mother would nod and reply, “Have you ever seen Mount Washington on a clear day?”

She’d lived in those mountains for the first thirteen years of her life, but the years were disproportionately outsized and formed the backbone for the seventy that followed. Her early home was the foundation for who she was and, because she was separated from it, she had to speak it to keep it alive. She might be a woman with seven children who sprayed down post-surgical trays in the bowels of the hospital where she and other invisible people worked, she might rely on food stamps, struggle with an extra forty pounds, and some mornings have trouble getting out of bed to face the day, but once upon a time, she was a girl who lived in a piney woods. Snow frosted the branches in winter. In spring, woodferns unfurled along the forest floor. Her mother was the best seamstress for miles; her father was a lumberjack who whistled as he cut trees. Like this, life went on. The seasons changed from fall to winter and back to spring.

If her mother’s nature was of the severe variety, her father was kind-hearted, at least—a humble sort, as accommodating as her mother was prickly. The only time she saw her father angry was when he returned home after a long day to find a priest on the porch. He chased the cassocked man from the house. Besides proselytizing priests, Everett Barker did not abide complaining, lying, or gossip. Apart from these minor gripes, he was defined by a quiet steadiness which rendered their lives serene. Snow capped the mountains. Bear cubs ambled up to the windows. The air was drenched with the scent of balsam and spruce.

My grandfather built their house by hand, cutting each of the planks and raising the beams himself. A simple structure—little more than a cabin, really—their house had no electricity or running water but was so perfect to my mother, she made a model of it from memory when she was in her sixties. She fashioned each small-scale room from clay, adding a stove and kitchen cupboards and keeping the replica by her side until she died.

Born in 1907 in the wilds of northern Maine, Everett Willard Barker was from Swedish stock, well-built with a cleft chin and a head of red-brown hair.

He was a child when his mother died after a hard labor. The girl she birthed was handed off to a neighbor and Everett became a little man at the age of nine. His father was a shingle sawyer from New Brunswick named John who called himself William once he crossed the border into Maine. Who knows why. A new start, I guess. He came from a long line of lumberjacks and millmen whose lives were all about movement and trees. Every place was a new beginning and the same old thing.

Hard work, Yankee stoicism, and religious strictures ruled my grandfather’s early days. Houlton, Maine was Free Will Baptists, sawmills, and potato fields. Farming and timber work were the only options—and farming relied on a man having a bit of land. Most were hired as laborers in mills and logging camps, doing the work the rapidly expanding culture relied upon but did not see. Everett began working and smoking while still a boy. He left school as soon as he could and began logging the year he turned sixteen. Like the rest of the timber industry, he pushed west for work, toward new stands of trees. He worked the White Mountains of New Hampshire, along the Androscoggin, and in the woods of Coös County, just as the legendary lumberjack Jigger Johnson had done before him. Everett Barker did not catch wildcats with his bare hands nor drink himself into fits. Instead, he was rugged, hard-working, good-natured—everything a man in 1930s upper New England should be. In New Hampshire, he met and married a woman twelve years his junior and had three children, including my mother, the only girl. He settled west of Mount Washington along the Ammonoosuc River in a place called Twin Mountain. Twin Mountain. Words my mother would speak like an incantation the rest of her life. Once he settled, Everett became a day worker—harvesting trees for those who wanted timber or their land cleared, working on reforestation projects for the government, including for Roosevelts’s Civilian Conservation Corp during the Depression.

The only chink in the armor of my grandfather’s mythical status was the nagging unease my mother felt when he visited his family in Maine. He never included his wife or children on those trips—leaving them completely disconnected from her grandparents, aunts, or cousins on his side. But even in this, my mother allowed nothing but uprightness on her father’s part—and assumed the problem was with herself.

I wondered if he was ashamed of us, she said and though I was a kid rooted in shame, the thought of a father being ashamed of his own child turned my head to flame. “Why would he be ashamed of you?” I asked, indignant on her behalf. Was my grandfather’s family of Canadian loggers so rarified, a child’s presence could have offended them in any way? The rest of the world might judge you and lord knows family could be cruel, but the possibility that my mother’s father—hero and saint—might be ashamed of her made no sense. But it made sense to her somehow; shadows of fear flickered in her face. He was not ashamed, it turns out. Or, if he was, the shame was of his own making and began long before my mother was born.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essayist Joan Didion famously wrote.

In this way, human beings are like little gods, imposing order on chaos, excavating the various threads of our lives for meaning, highlighting here and overlooking there to make our lives bearable and worthwhile. As children, we squint our eyes, transmuting harsh outlines into fuzzier shapes in which it is possible for hope to reside. All children are capable of such alchemy, but lonely and frightened children are masters of the craft. Like the miller’s daughter from the fairy tale, such children find ways to spin the straw set before us into strands of gold.

The miller’s daughter is an apt analogy because my mother’s childhood stories employed the tone and tenor of fairy tales. They featured an enchanted setting, an observant girl-child—even a distant mother for a villain. Just as Hansel and Gretel’s lumberjack father balanced out their mercenary stepmother, and Red Riding Hood’s kindly woodsman saved her from the wolf’s snare, my mother’s stories featured an honest woodcutter at their core. Her father rose with the sun to work all day and returned with a sack of hard candy at night—something sweet for the girl when her stony mother had nothing to give. All was well until her father became sick and could work no more.

My grandfather’s limbs began to tingle and ache—symptoms he ignored until he could no longer hoist his axe. Eventually, he became bound to his bed. Too proud to have his wife work outside the house to support the family, too proud for government relief and the charity of neighbors, who stacked blankets on the porch when they ran out of wood to heat the house. My mother shivered while her father moaned in pain in the room next door. Her mother, who’d been secretly nipping at the bottle for years, began to nip some more.

My grandmother eventually defied her husband and took a job at a shoe factory in the nearest town. Here the story gets murky but amounts to my grandmother leaving her broken, over-proud husband and their mountain home. The more my grandmother drank, the more she thirsted. The more she drove, the more she needed to grip the wheel. They arrived at a cousin’s farm in Ticonderoga, New York. My grandmother was wild by then. She left her kids there, saying she’d be back in a week but aimed her car west and did not return for a year.

Here is where the fairy tale breaks down. If my mother’s story followed the expected formula, she’d have followed a trail of white stones back to her father, who would have learned a lesson about accepting help and whose body would have been miraculously restored. But instead of accompanying her younger brother, who picked his way back home, my mother, startled and shamed by their abandonment, locked onto the place where she’d landed. Stuck in the Adirondacks, she worked at her cousins’ inn, finished high school, eventually married, and never saw her father again.

When we’re young, our parents’ stories are as real to us as the flesh. To question them is to question the body itself.

It was not until my mother was an old woman that I began to wonder why she simply did not return home. When her mother abandoned her—and any time after—shocked and hurt as she was, why didn’t she go back to her father lying in bed? Wouldn’t she have wanted to care for him? Or, at least, see him? Was the home her father built already lost by then—seized for back taxes? Had he already lost a leg, been turned over to the county home, the disease that felled him creeping slowly inward toward his heart? It’s true my mother was still a high schooler at first—but later, when she had become a young bride, then a single mother, only 424 miles separated her from her mountain home. She never had money, but trains were cheap, and for long stretches of our childhood, she had a car, and wasn’t it as easy to be poor in New Hampshire as in western New York? In all the years since her mother had torn her away, she hadn’t made a visit to her father—nor did I ever hear of letters or phone calls.

In fact, it turns out that her younger brother visited in those early days and offered to take her back to New Hampshire—and all us kids with her. He’d help convey us from our dismal city neighborhood to my mother’s beloved mountains and provide support to get us set up. My mother refused. The pining for her father and home, while undoubtedly heartfelt, was not as straightforward as it seemed. Why do we lie to ourselves about what we want? Why is it easier to wrap ourselves in a protective wrap of longing than to grab hold of something real and live?

The fact is, my mother seems to have preferred to worship her father and home from afar. Maybe she was as eager to leave the more complicated version of her father behind as her mother had been, even if she could not admit it, or perhaps those early years were too precious to hold up against realty’s glare. Better to enshrine that lost world then to stand close enough to see it crack at the seams.

“How tall was your father?” I asked my mother few years back.

“Oh,” she said. “5’ 10” or so.”

It was less a question than a test. I’d recently discovered her father’s WWII draft card, filled out in 1940, the year she was born. Everett Willard Barker was 5’8” and a hundred and fifty pounds. Not exactly strapping, but a not a discrepancy worth fretting over, and I do not think my mother lied. Instead, the man who appeared larger than life to his only daughter was relatively small to the rest of the world.

More significant contradictions appeared. The barest bit of research revealed that my grandfather’s family was not Swedish, but a mix of Scottish, Irish, and English settlers who’d ventured inland from the Canadian coast. The Swedish claim was likely aspirational. Unlike the Irish Catholics on his mother’s side, Swedes were ideal immigrants (blond, Protestant, hard-working). They were so highly regarded as loggers, they were recruited by timber companies and formed American settlements—including near Caribou, not far from my grandfather, in Maine.

My grandfather’s claim of Swedish blood left me with a Scandinavian first name—but this is a minor fallout. Further research into his past revealed that Old Everett harbored secrets more problematic than height or ethnic identity.

In May of 1938, Everett Barker answered “No,” when the clerk in Whitefield, New Hampshire asked if he and his fiancée, Anna May, had been married before.

It was, in fact, Everett’s second marriage—though his new bride did not seem to know. He also shaved two years off his age while standing there in the town hall. Lies are funny that way. The first may be clumsy, but the second and third roll off the tongue.

In fact, my grandfather tied the knot for the first time in 1928 when he was twenty-one. The bride was a girl named Addie from the next town over. Addie’s father was a postman in Houghton who would have delivered the mail to Everett’s family for years. The young couple married in late July. On August 3^rd of the following year, Addie gave birth to a son (named Everett, after his father); she promptly falls away from the historic record for eight years. She appeared again in June of 1937, in the Belfast, Maine newspaper.

On the 17^th day of August, 1929, wrote Addie’s attorney in an ad trying to locate my grandfather to file for divorce, he utterly deserted the libellant without reasonable cause and has continued that desertion for three consecutive years.

The 17th of August, 1929. Two weeks after his son was born, the honest woodcutter and family hero absconded. A divorce decree was granted in January, 1938, a few months before he married my grandmother. Utter desertion is repeated in the decree in which Addie was awarded custody of Everett Jr.—a technicality, since my grandfather had wholly abandoned the boy years before.

My grandfather was clearly not the hero my mother painted him to be, I slowly realized, as little by little, a new story overlaid the old. Still, I had been so thoroughly programmed by my mother’s stories, I somehow held out hope (and still do to this day) that there must be some misunderstanding, and Everett’s desire to hide his first marriage and its outcome cannot be as bad as they seem.

It’s possible Addie betrayed him. She might have taken up with someone else and he found out, or perhaps the infant with his name resembled his best friend and not himself. But I remember my mother saying she worried he was ashamed of them when he did not take them to meet his family. Given his furtiveness on visits home—leaving his wife and children behind—and how quickly he abandoned the child, it’s likely my grandfather grabbed hold of his pouch of tobacco and his axe and walked out on his young wife and infant son for no reason that will ever make sense.

Never meet your heroes, people say.

There was no chance of that. My grandfather lived two states away and died when I was three. I still have the scar on the third finger of my right hand from falling off a teeter-totter while my mother was on a train to his funeral. I knew him only as a character in my mother’s stories. Just as she had never met his family, none of her children ever met him. If anyone ever took his photograph, it is long gone. Such absence only contributed to his legend.

My mother did not learn about her father’s first wife and her half-brother until all involved were long gone. Not one to let reality destroy a good story, my mother seemed to take the information in stride—just a bit of ancient trivia and the satisfaction of an itch scratched—so that’s why he didn’t ever bring us to Maine! Who knows what shifted under the surface, where she may have mourned in some way that was undetectable even to her.

Never meet your heroes, they say—not because a hero is bad, but because, despite what books and movies would have us believe, no human being can remain a fairy tale for very long.

I’m sitting with my mother at the McDonald’s in Gorham, New Hampshire.

It would be false to claim that she is anywhere close to a traditional mother. Our early years were marked by empty cupboards and a new apartment every few years. Once we were mostly grown, she’d thrown herself into another marriage and a new life, successfully avoiding her children for the last thirty-five years. Still, my mother is an agreeable person—remarkably good-natured for someone who wants nothing to do with her kids. When I corner her in a McDonald’s booth, she dips her french fries in a paper cup of ketchup and laughs while telling stories from long ago. Her favorite subject remains her father, the mountains, their little woods. When he wasn’t cutting down trees, she’s saying, he was volunteering to help protect the woods from fire.

“What kind of trees did he cut?”

“Pine,” she says. “Spruce and hemlock.”

Outside, a family parks their truck and kids drop from the cab one at a time. Just twenty-six miles from where she grew up, the other side of Mount Washington, both places sit within the Presidential Range. The town is surrounded by mountains that become purple when the sun goes down. Evergreens and exposed rock provide a spare, almost harsh, landscape while simultaneously being majestic. These are poor towns that boomed a century ago and survive on tourism and through-hikers on the Appalachian trail. It’s taken sixty-five years, but my mother has made it home.

“What kind of work did your father do when he settled down?”

“Cleared land for houses,” she says. “Hewed timber, cut it into planks and fence posts.”

Though parts of her story sidestep or outright contradict the record, and her father was not the honest woodsman of a fairy tale, she still speaks a sort of truth. Her father was a hero to her—perhaps the only one she ever had. I listen to her describe his way with an axe, the way he knew the woods near their house like the back of his hand. I see him as a boy, cigarettes staining his fingers, counting the days till he can quit school—his tobacco habit eventually leading to the disease that blocked his vessels, cut the flow of blood to his hands and feet, knocked him over like the pines he felled. I think of the trees he cut, from the time he was a boy until his body gave out. How many, I wonder, but my mother’s talking again.

“He was very strong,” she says. “Gentle, too.”

She’s smiling now, tumbling backward in time. I think of her falling asleep tonight, an old woman back in the state where she was born—hand resting on the model of her childhood house on her nightstand, reaching and reaching toward home.