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believed—as surely at least as he believed in Resurrection—in Daniel Webster, who’d spoken to four thousand people once in a natural theater, a great swoop of valley walled in by green mountains, now a forested stretch on John McCullough’s estate. He believed as surely in Samuel Adams, that angry, crafty old son of a bot, embarrassment to Franklin and the Continental Congress, indispensable as Death to the Sons of Liberty, and not much more welcome at an Easter party—believed in him as surely as he did in Peg Ellis of Monument Avenue in the village of Old Bennington, who had, by way of her late husband George, who had them from his grandfather, who had them direct from the addressee, faded copies of Sam Adams’ letters, the few he’d been unable to get back, at the time of the Burr scare, and put to the torch.
    But it wasn’t mere myth or mere history-as-myth—exalted figures to stir the imagination, teach the poor weighted-down spirit to vault—it wasn’t mere New England vinegar and piss that made the old man fierce. Though he was wrong in some matters, an objective observer would be forced to admit—cracked as old pottery, no question about it—it was true that he had, off and on, real, first-class opinions. He knew the world dark and dangerous. Blame it on the weather. “Most people believe,” he liked to say, “that any problem in the world can be solved if you know enough; most Vermonters know better.” He’d seen herds of sheep die suddenly for no reason, or no reason you could learn until too late. He’d seen houses burn, seen war and the effects of war: had a neighbor, it was nearly thirty years ago now, who’d hunted his wife and five children like rabbits and shot ’em all dead—he’d been a flame-thrower man, earned a medal for his killings in Germany. He, James Page, had been one of the neighbors, along with Sam Frost and two others now gone on, who’d walked the man’s pastures and woodlots, looking for the bodies. He’d seen a child killed falling off a banister once, and a hired man sucked into a corn-chopper. He’d seen friends die of heart attack, cancer, and drink; he’d seen marriages fail, and churches, and stores. He’d had one son killed by a fall from the barn roof, another—his first-born and chief disappointment—by suicide. He’d lost, not long after that, his wife. He was not, for all this, a pessimist or (usually) a thoroughgoing misanthrope; on the contrary, having seen so much of death—right now, in fact, there was the corpse of a black and white calf on his manure pile—he was better than most men at taking it in stride; better, anyway, than the man sealed off in his clean green suburb in Florida. But he understood what with stony-faced wit he called “life’s gravity,” understood the importance of admitting it, confronting it head on, with the eyes locked open and spectacles in place.
    He was a man who worked with objects, lifting things, setting them down again—bales of hay, feedbags, milkcans, calves—and one of his first-class opinions was this: All life—man, animal, bird, or flower—is a brief and hopeless struggle against the pull of the earth. The creature gets sick, his weight grows heavier, he has moments when he finds himself too weary to go on; yet on he goes, as long as he lives, on until the end—and it is a bitter one, for no matter how gallantly the poor beast struggles, it’s a tragic and hopeless task. The body bends lower, wilting like a daisy, and finally the pull of the earth is the beast’s sunken grave.
    James Page was never a man of many words, but words were by no means without interest for him. They too were objects to be turned in the hand like stones for a wall, or sighted down, like a shotgun barrel, or savored like the honey in a timothy stalk. He wrote no poems—except one once, a