Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [122]
He had good reason to wonder; the early loss of his younger brother, Henry, seemed only a hint of those he suffered through in his last years. Perhaps the worst came in 1896. By that year a series of horrendous investment decisions (especially the famous disaster of the Paige typesetting machine, which cost him what would be millions of today’s dollars) left him bankrupt. Desperate to pay off his debts, he left on a round-the-world lecture and writing tour.
Then, while still in England, he received word that Susy—by all accounts his favorite child—was desperately ill with spinal meningitis. She died before he could return home. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature,” he later wrote, “that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.”
MAPLE SUGAR FROSTING
1 lb. soft maple sugar.
½ cup boiling water.
Whites 2 eggs.
Break sugar in small pieces, put in saucepan with boiling water, and stir occasionally until sugar is dissolved. Boil without stirring until syrup will thread when dropped from tip of spoon.
Pour syrup gradually on beaten whites, beating mixture constantly, and continue beating until of right consistency to spread.
—FANNIE MERRITT FARMER, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896
When Erik and I reach Jim Dina’s house in Windsor, he already has a fire going. Windsor is just north of Hartford, on the Connecticut River’s far bank, and Jim and his wife live in the kind of old New England house I’d want to live in myself if I’d stayed in the state: a weathered, even beaten old building, probably once a farmhouse, probably a bit drafty on cold nights, but well loved and lived in for more than three decades. The only thing that makes the house stand out is the fact that the fire isn’t in a fireplace—it’s burning between a pair of snow-covered wigwams toward the rear of a wide backyard.
Jim is tall and thin, with long, graying hair pulled back into a ponytail. He has the air of an enthusiastic art teacher who could easily fall into a project and happily stay there all day, and, in fact, he does teach classical guitar, though he has an engineering degree from MIT. We follow him into his workroom, the one place his wife lets him fill to the ceiling with his music and crafts and projects; along with his guitars are a pair of homemade lutes, a set of recorders, panpipes, and a music stand holding a classical arrangement of “Here Comes the Sun.”
But most of the room is given over to what Jim calls, with a disarming mix of guilelessness and self-deprecation, “playing Indian.” By this he means experimenting with technologies reflected in the New England archaeological record. He chips arrowheads and spearheads and harpoons from flint, sets knives in deer-horn handles, sews beaver-skin pouches, folds birch bark and seals it with pitch to make mocuck baskets. He decorates home-fired pottery by pressing homemade cords into the still-wet clay. Jim bow-hunts deer, turkey, and pheasant; the pelts of fisher cats and otters hang on the wall.
I know before I arrive that Jim takes all this very seriously; some twenty years ago, he told me, he built himself a birch-bark canoe and paddled it up the Connecticut River to Canada. He grows the traditional Three Sisters on two separate plots; in a few years, he’ll know whether corn, squash, and beans grow better on dry bluffs or on bottomland annually fertilized by Connecticut River silt (he’s nailed a deer skull to a tree near his lower garden to mark the last flood’s highwater). But it’s when he shows me a buckskin he tanned using the brains of a deer he killed with a homemade bow and arrow that I realize how serious he really is. The room speaks to a questing curiosity, a real, searching need to know with the hands as well as with the mind.
Getting Erik out of the house isn’t easy—Jim is generous about letting