So You Say

Denizens of the AYUH world, that is, Yankees (born, bred or just naturally inclined) can be skeptical.

For example, two neighbors stand on the roadside looking across the way at the barn on the hill. One remarks to the other, “Looks like Mr. Staines has painted his barn.” 

“Ayuh,” the other replies, “the front of it anyways.”

Maybe it’s not skepticism exactly, but an ingrained tendency to see possibilities. All of them. In his charming 1927 collection of country anecdotes, “Folks is Folks,” John Henry Bartlett tells of “Daniel Webster and the School Ferule.” A ferule, if you’re wondering, is the wooden ruler used by school masters and mistresses to dole out the punishment known as feruling, a smack across the palm. 

Daniel Webster, just a small boy, had somehow earned a feruling. The teacher ordered him to hold out his right hand, palm up, which he did. 

“That’s the dirtiest, filthiest, nastiest hand I ever saw,” she said. “Don’t you ever wash? If you can show me one hand in the WHOLE school as dirty as that one, I won’t ferule you. This time.” 

The clever future statesman thrust out his left hand.

John Henry Bartlett — a Dartmouth graduate, governor of New Hampshire and descendant of Josiah Bartlett (who signed the Declaration of Independence) — condemned the practice of feruling as “barbarous,” and lauded Webster for having the wit, even as a small boy, to extricate himself from a dicey situation. 

Canny, I call it: the ability to assess a situation quickly and act accordingly. It’s also the ability to know what you know, as well as what you don’t. 

A confused driver on a backroad off a scenic byway spots a woman pulling a child’s red wagon loaded with buckets of blackberries. “Excuse me, ma’am,” the driver says, “can you tell me where this road goes?” 

“About a mile along,” she says, “you’ll see an abandoned house and an apple orchard on the right.” 

“And if I keep going?”

“You’ll see a hayfield.”

“And if I continue past the hayfield?”

“You come to a steep hill and, on the other side, a swale.”

Frustrated, he says: “And if I go past the orchard, the hayfield, the steep hill and swale, where does the road go then?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never been that far.”

My father, half Irish, believed everything anybody said, pretty much — especially when it came out of his own mouth. My mother, on the other hand, was real skeptical. I take from both of them. (Imagine the inner turmoil.) One time, as my dad and I walked along an old logging road in search of what used to be a sugarbush with sap house, he pointed out various animal scat and tracks — fox, deer, bear, bobcat, rabbit. I channeled my inner skeptic. “You could be making this up as you go,” I said. “You could call a divot a Bigfoot track. I wouldn’t know the difference.” (He claimed to have seen Bigfoot tracks in the woods; took pictures as proof in case anybody doubted him.)

“Those are moose tracks,” he said to me, pointing to dents in mud. “Big fella!”

“Right,” I said.

We rounded a bend and sure enough: four more moose tracks with a moose standing in them. Big fella!

“Dad,” I said, “I’ll never doubt you again.” Maybe I didn’t speak it; maybe I just thunk it. But by gosh, when it came to animal signs, Dad knew what he knew, and in that moment, I knew it too.

Thanks to Fred Anderson of South Hampton for the gift of “Folks is Folks.”  Much appreciated.