SUGAR MAKING SEASON

            Nobody knows what started the Liles-Plummer feud (though ownership of a spotted calf is thought to have been involved), but it ended for Larkin Liles the moment he saw Polly Plummer tap a sugar maple tree and the sap began to flow.

            Everyone in Lewis County calls me “Uncle Buck,” but my proper name is William Beverly Parker. When I became Sheriff in 1806, I was confronted with serious issues of villainy and lawlessness. I was not soft-spoken, can’t really say I had nerves of steel, but I was a good judge of character and handy with a sidearm. Even in my bowler hat, vest, and thick handlebar mustache I suppose I looked the part, “a bull moose of a man,” some said, and standing six-feet-six. I never trusted a prisoner because nine out of ten had no honor.

            The Maple Syrup Festival took place during the last weekend of February, when snow still carpeted this part of eastern Kentucky. Using techniques learned from the Indians, farmers made maple syrup sugar for several days or even weeks in the seasonal lull before spring planting. It was a social affair marking the end of winter, as well as a truce when neighboring families pitched in to help, and everyone in the little river town of Vanceburg could mix without having weapons in hand. It was one of the few times a year when I had peace and quiet, except when the hills and narrow valleys along the Ohio River rang with laughter and good old English Ballads.

             When Polly Plummer appeared at the festival, she was wearing an old work dress made from a coarse cloth of mixed linen and wool, an apron, a white bonnet, and a dark brown fur coat of pelted beaver. Up till then Larkin, who was twenty-eight and a favorite with the ladies, had barely glanced at her; first, because Polly was only a kid, having just turned sixteen, and second, because all Liles steered clear of all Plummers. But after seeing her pale skin and freshly washed honey blond hair, Larkin Liles forgot all about the feud.

            He told me later that he thought she was about the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. He wasn’t the only one who thought so, either, judging by the looks other men were giving her as she gashed a giant maple at least three feet in diameter, then pounded wooden troughs into the tap holes and hung cedar buckets from each one to catch the dripping sap. Still under their gaze, she boiled the sap in an iron kettle over a bonfire until the dark brown syrup could be skimmed off with a ladle. Larkin badly wanted to talk to her, but held back, knowing that collecting and processing the sap had to come first because maple sugar was of substantial value to frontier farmers, who had little cash. It was considered legal tender like good bootleg whiskey. Every farmer had his sugar camp open as soon as the season would permit and sold maple sugar by the pound to local merchants.

            So, Larkin delayed his declaration of interest in Polly until she took a break. When she was off by herself, he approached her and, while sticking to a few polite pleasantries, offered her a taste of chewy candy he’d made by pouring boiling sap onto the snow to cool.

            What Larkin did not know was that the moment she saw him, Polly recognized him. She had sent a friend to find out if the tall young man in the fringed and beaded buckskin jacket was married. Larkin was not, but the younger women of the county seemed intent on changing that. Polly also knew Larkin was a hated Liles, and if that wasn’t bad enough, exotically handsome. I knew that Larkin, like me, was part Indian from his high Cherokee cheekbones and dark hair. The Indian Wars were still raging east of the Mississippi and settlers like the Plummers were desperately fearful of the Red Man, whom they considered blood-thirsty savages, so Larkin was doubly off-limits.

            But Polly was a bit of a rebel. She liked Larkin’s smile, and swore his candy was the best she’d ever tasted.

            “We should talk,” Larkin said

            “Talk about what?” Polly asked.

            “Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not …”

            “Let me guess. The feud?”

*

            Thanks to their timber operation, the Plummers were wealthier and better-connected politically than the Liles. Nelson Plummer, Polly’s widowed father, traced their ancestry back to Scotland. They lived on the riverfront in a big frame house with fancy trim and a white picket fence. The Liles were English, but Larkin’s father had married a woman in North Carolina who looked Cherokee. They’d settled down to farm here along the emerald Kinniconick Creek, bordered by shale and sandstone cliffs. The Liles never spoke publicly of their Indian blood, but others noted and remarked upon it, and their children understood that the part-Indian kid was fair game.

            Years ago, when Larkin was about ten, I caught three town boys beating him up in a clearing in the woods. Just as I got there, young Larkin, his nose bloody and his left eye swollen, pulled out a large-bladed sheath knife with a clipped point. I had one just like it in a scabbard on my belt. While useful for many purposes, it was a knife meant for fighting.

            “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” I said and broke it up.

            “He started it, Sheriff,” said Edward Campbell, the biggest of the three.

            “That right, Larkin?”

            “No.”

            “He’s lyin’,” Campbell said.

            “I do not lie,” Larkin said.

            “Put your knife away.” From his fighting stance and the way he held the blade, I feared for the other boys’ lives. “What do you think your folks will say when I tell them about this?” I asked the others.

            “That this stinking half-breed Liles was getting his ass whupped till you come along.”

            “But that’s not true, is it? From where I’m standing, it looks like the three of you bit off more than you could chew. You just better hope I don’t tell about the ass-whuppin’ you three were about to get.”

            “Aw, Uncle Buck—”

            “Now git.” I told Larkin to stay while the others cleared out. “This is not the first time this has happened, is it?” He said nothing. “Well, it better not happen again, because if you kill one of them, their families will hang you from the nearest tree.”

            “I have a right to defend myself.”

            “Sure, you do, son. But listen to old Uncle Buck, who has survived this long by walking a fine line between being understanding and enforcing the law. Try to avoid trouble. It will find you soon enough on its own. You get me?” Noting the squirrel gun on the ground where they must’ve knocked it out of his hands, I said, “You like to hunt? Me, too. Lots of game around my hunting lodge on the creek overlooking the salt licks. Come on up. Maybe get you a sixteen-point buck.”

            Larkin remained impassive.

            “Can you keep a secret? I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never trusted anyone else with before. Here it is. I’m just like you, boy, a half-breed, though more precisely I guess it would be a one-eighth breed, since my grandmother was half Cherokee.”

            He stared at me with what appeared to be profound skepticism.

            “What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?”

            Larkin gave me a searching look, as if trying to see the color of my soul.

            “My Cherokee name is Red Buck,” I said.

            Larkin nodded. “I believe you.” He told me that his great grandmother, Rising Fawn Moytoy, was the daughter of a legendary Cherokee chief. From that day on, we became great friends, often hunting and fishing together. Larkin never revealed my secret.

*

            For three months after the Maple Syrup Festival, Polly Plummer kept her distance from Larkin Liles. Several times, passing her on the street, he doffed his coonskin cap. But she continued to treat him as embargoed goods. I felt bad for him, knowing how smitten he was.

            When summer finally arrived, Polly and Larkin met again at a church social. After exchanging nods and flirtatious banter, Larkin invited her to go fishing with him up at the hunting lodge I’d built.

            “I’ll bait your hooks for you,” he said.

            “What, you don’t think a town girl like me knows how to fish? I’ve been fishing since I was a tadpole, so don’t you worry about it,” Polly said.

            Larkin was surprised when she accepted. Telling her parents she was going horseback riding with a girlfriend who lived outside of town, Polly instead met Larkin secretly and they rode together through first-growth forest to my lodge, where Larkin launched my canoe down the slow-moving stream. They floated along, soaking up the beauty and wild nature of the stream, until a bend opened a new pool of water where eddies held fish against the bank. There, they put their lines in.

            The fish—smallmouth and largemouth bass, bluegill, red eye—started biting. Polly, who proved every bit as good at fishing as she’d boasted, hooked something that nearly yanked her out of the canoe before Larkin could cut it loose. They both watched sadly as the monster with the dark vertical stripes swam out of sight. Tired of angling, Larkin let the canoe drift silently along with the current until he found a spot to pull ashore, where he could console Polly over losing her fish while hidden by underbrush and tall grasses.

            Days later, Larkin told me all about this expedition, including the part about losing what sounded like a giant muskie, though I wouldn’t have credited such a fish tale if it weren’t coming from Larkin.

            After that secret adventure, Larkin started seeing Polly regularly on the sly, waiting in the dark under her second-floor bedroom window until she climbed down to him. “I wish you’d recite me a poem,” Polly said one night, “so I’ll know you really love me.” Larkin, like most frontiersmen, was illiterate. But he told her the only poem he knew, a song his grandmother had taught him when he was a baby about the proud Cherokee people, mother earth, rain on the wind, and the sadness of the forest. When he finished, Polly told him it was beautiful and that she wished she could have met his Cherokee relatives.

             While they courted under the Plummers’ very noses, the danger they were in was extreme for, as I reminded Larkin, once the sugar making season ended, feuding resumed. But that danger only whetted their passion, and Larkin continued meeting Polly outside her window for perhaps a week—until the night her pa caught her climbing back into her room.

            Later, Polly told me he’d lit a candle as she scrambled over the sill and was sitting there in the wicker rocker, wearing his night cap and a ratty old night shirt that barely covered his knobby knees.

            “Where have you been, Polly? Out traipsin’ through the night with some lazy, shiftless backwoodsman?” Nelson Plummer said.

            But Polly, who was in love with Larkin, said, “He does not lack ambition, Father. Not only is he a trapper and hunter, he’s already got his own land where he grows corn to feed the hogs.”

            “Who are we talking about?”

            Polly put her hand over her mouth, knowing she’d almost spilled the very secret she must keep from her father.

            “I see how it is,” Plummer said. “Well, I’ve dreamed of far better for you than that. Have you been intimate with this man?”

            “Oh, Pa,” Polly said, aggrieved.

            “Answer me, girl.”

            But nothing he said made sense to Polly anymore. She began to cry.

            “Damn it,” Plummer spluttered. “Time to marry you off to the right man.”

             But in Polly’s eyes, Larkin was the right man.

            The only thing that kept her pa from hunting down Larkin Liles right then and there was that Plummer, a pompous man used to getting his way, didn’t know who his daughter’s suitor was.

            When Polly appealed to him on the basis of being in love, he said, “I’m the one who loves you, Polly. You shall wed your cousin, Edward Campbell.”

            Polly was just as headstrong as her father was pig-headed, and when Campbell, a squinting sneering fellow who was going to be a banker, came-a-courting, she told him that he was not the man of her dreams. Campbell demanded to know who was, but of course Polly wouldn’t say. Despite his professed love for her, Polly’s father responded harshly to her disobedience. “Then get out of my sight,” he said. “Go.”

            Leaving her family in Vanceburg was a huge step for Polly to take. She knew no other life than the one she led in the fine house on the river, which up to now had been devoted mainly to hating the Liles. But she packed her bags and went straight to Larkin’s place on the Kinniconick. They both begged me to marry them, which made me tremble, but I finally did in a secret ceremony attended only by the three of us and God’s woodland creatures.

            It took place in a glen in the middle of the woods with a runner of rose petals. Larkin was in his finest and Polly wore a dress she’d made. Music was provided by the birds. The way Polly and Larkin looked at each other made me wish I had such a love of my own. They promised to give each other their hearts, to walk together, hand in hand, wherever life might lead them. They vowed all their devotion and to be true forever. Larkin, having no ring, presented Polly with a beautiful bouquet of wildflowers and promised someday to get her a fancy wedding ring. I pronounced them man and wife. They kissed. It was the simplest, most romantic service I ever performed.

*

            One Saturday afternoon three months later, Larkin came into town to buy provisions. By then, his marriage to Polly Plummer was common knowledge. After riding fifteen miles through the mountain passes, Larkin wanted a drink. He’d already had a few when who but Edward Campbell came into the tavern, spoiling for a fight and despoiling Polly’s reputation. The resultant brawl between Larkin and Campbell spilled out onto Main Street, where a crowd of idlers formed a ring around them. The fight was no-holds-barred, with biting and gouging, until one of my deputies arrested and brought them both before the justice of the peace.

            Despite my efforts to convince the Lewis County prosecutor not to proceed against Larkin, who had bitten off a chunk of Campbell’s lower lip during the fight, Larkin was charged with mayhem “committed on the body of Edward Campbell.” Campbell was not charged, reflecting the Plummers’ superior political connections. Larkin pleaded not guilty and made his $500 bail, thanks to me and a property bond on my hunting land—something I’d never done before or since—and waited for the course of justice to proceed, which it did at the customary snail’s pace. Finally in September, he was found guilty and sentenced by Circuit Judge Walker Reid to one year in the state penitentiary in Frankfort, which meant I would have to take him.

            When Polly heard his sentence, she sobbed, “Oh Larkin, why did you do it?”

            “I had no choice,” he said.

            “But you knew he was just spreading a pack of lies.”

            “That’s why,” Larkin said. “Otherwise, I’d have had to kill him.”

            “But what will I do without you for a whole year?”

            “You’ll be fine, Polly,” Larkin said. “Believe me, I’ll dream of you every night, and come back to you the first day I can.”

            Before leaving the courtroom, Larkin asked me if he could go home first and get in the winter wood and prepare to gather the corn crop to fatten his hogs. Then he would be ready to go with me to the penitentiary. When I asked how long this would take, he said, “About two weeks,” so I told him to go ahead and do it. We made a date to meet for the journey to the state capital and I turned him loose, fully confident Larkin would keep his word, as he always had.

*

            Larkin had about thirteen acres of yellow field corn, the basic feed grain for hogs, to husk, and six cords of firewood to chop. Both were tremendous tasks that usually required months to complete. But even if Larkin worked from dusk to dawn, taking time off only for a noon meal, he’d never get it all done in time by himself.

            Knowing he needed help, I rode up there early one morning. The path to Larkin’s farm on Kinniconick Creek ran through heavily wooded and mountainous terrain. In these higher elevations, the leaves begin to change in September, and this trip the fall foliage proved spectacular, with red dogwoods, purple sumacs, orange maples, and yellow poplars all competing for my attention. In places where the forest had been cleared, I passed cabins and fields planted with pumpkins, potatoes, and gourds.

            At Larkin’s cabin, I found his father, Henry Liles, a small but powerfully built man who had to be in his middle fifties but managed to look ageless, sharpening an axe out front.

            “Looks like you’re fixing to do some lumberjacking,” I said, tipping my bowler.

            The elder Liles, a hardy man of few words, merely nodded as he ran a whispering whetstone against one side of the axe blade with long smooth circular strokes.

            Larkin opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. His elder brother, Jaybird, who had a long face and a shaggy black moustache, followed. Neither of the brothers looked much like their father, being tall and lean with irregularly trimmed black hair. But in Jaybird I saw no other sign of Cherokee blood. Polly was standing in the shadows of the doorway behind them looking out at me. We shook hands, and Larkin thanked me for coming.

            As the four of us began bringing in enough firewood for the winter by scouting the nearby woods for dead branches and limbs, clouds were slipping across the face of the sun and the wind was blowing dust through the cornstalks. Testing his blade’s sharpness, Henry said, “Better get a move on before the rain muddies things up.”

            But it did not rain, though the skies turned the color of lead, while we piled wood up in a horse cart. We picked trees that looked ready to come down, knocking on their trunks with an axe to see if it made a hollow thud. If it did, then we knew that tree was rotten. We stayed away from those trees for fear they’d fall on us. After finding a suitable tree, Henry read which way it wanted to fall by the lean of its limbs. Larkin swung his axe, cutting the first notch. Then Jaybird did the same on the opposite side of the tree. We continued taking turns chopping until the tree fell.

            Perspiration was running into my eyes by the time we brought that first one down, but Henry Liles still seemed fresh as his sons. We reduced the log to five-foot lengths. Then Larkin’s horse, Coal Dust, dragged it back to the wood pile near the cabin.

            Then we started on the next one.

            By late afternoon, Larkin decided we had enough wood to get Polly through the winter. By early evening, we had it all split. As I was leaving, half deaf and generally worn out, Larkin invited me to a corn husking bee. I told him I’d be glad to come.

*

            When I returned three nights later, Larkin’s elder sisters, Harriet and Martha, and their five children were carrying boxes of supplies into the cabin.

            “Hope you brought your appetite with you, Uncle Buck,” said Harriet, as I tipped my hat and bid them good evening. She was taller than her sister, and more angular.

            “Oh, it’s never far behind me,” I said. “Food for the coming feast, I take it?”

            “Cakes and apples and cider,” Martha said.

            I reached into my saddle bag and produced a jar of mountain dew. “Add this to the cider. But you didn’t get it from me, hear?”

            “For a lawman, you are one bad influence, Uncle Buck,” Harriet said, as I handed down the hooch to her. But she said it with a smile.

            The men were already in the barn, including a dozen family members and neighbors. The dry corn stalks lay on the dirt floor, cut and bound into shocks earlier. Now the hard job of husking a year’s corn harvest for winter storage began. I joined in, strapping a razor-sharp corn hook to my hand, and started tearing the shucks open. We worked by the light of lanterns until ten o’clock.

             With all the corn husked and the barn floor cleared, the grownup women brought out the cake and apples and cider. At the same time, the younger ladies tried to find the red ear of corn, which meant getting kissed by the best-looking man present. Since I wasn’t expecting any kisses, I listened to Jaybird tune his fiddle and sipped the cider, which thanks to me proved as smooth as the corn we’d just husked. Polly found the red ear and kissed Larkin in front of everyone as if it was their last. Then we danced until midnight, shadow people keeping up with us on the barn walls.

            When the party broke up, Larkin asked me to keep an eye on Polly while he was in the penitentiary, and I said I would.

            “Everybody had a fine time tonight, didn’t they, Uncle Buck?”

            “They sure did, Larkin.”

            “Would’ve been even better if you weren’t off to prison,” Polly said, and began to cry.

            His only answer was to take her in his arms.

*

            When Larkin was ready to leave for Frankfort, he came to me.

            “Polly promised to wait for me,” he said.

            “She’s a mighty fine woman, Larkin.”

            “Yes, she is.”

            I explained that we’d catch a steamer from Vanceburg to Maysville and take the stagecoach the rest of the way.

            “Why don’t you go on by stage, Uncle Buck,” Larkin said. “Let me take my gun and hunt my way through the mountains, and I’ll meet you in Frankfort on any day you choose.”

            I knew Larkin did not want to be seen in disgrace as a prisoner. Still, it was a highly unusual request. I estimated that he would need about ten days to hike through one-hundred miles of remote and unforgiving wilderness. But September was the perfect time for it, since the rest of the year it would’ve been too cold or wet. His route would be challenging, but also offer many views of jagged ridges, lowlands, and lakes. He’d need food, water, and shelter, but an experienced woodsman like him could manage. I agreed on one condition: that when Larkin got to Frankfort, he’d go straight to the governor’s office and meet me there.

*

            On the agreed day, that’s where I found him waiting.
            Since Frankfort was building up so fast, I’d worried that Larkin might have a hard time finding his way through those big columns of the new capitol building, where city folk gabbed in their finery. But that hadn’t stopped him any more than the wild animals or the wilderness. I could tell Larkin was anxious to get our meeting with the governor over with and start serving his jail time.

            But first, the dark-haired, rotund man who’d organized the Whig Party in Kentucky, led me into his inner sanctum for a private conversation. Seems Gov. Clark’s servant had heard from Larkin about our unorthodox arrangement, and now Clark wanted me to verify it. I told him that Larkin’s story was accurate. Gov. Clark asked why I had allowed such a thing. I said I knew that if Larkin told me he would be here this morning, he would.

            “Is he out of his mind? Why didn’t he escape?”

            “Larkin’s not crazy, Governor, just honest.”

            “Remarkable.”

            Back in his office, Gov. Clark said, “Mr. Liles, a man of your sterling character does not belong behind bars. Not while I’m governor. Now go on home to your family.”

            After bidding the governor farewell, Larkin accepted a ride back to Lewis County with me. First, though, he said he needed to find a jewelry store where he could spend some of the fur pelt money he’d made over the winter.

            On our way home, he told me about his walk in the woods. He said he’d hiked through every kind of terrain from valleys to forest-covered mountains to rolling hills. The whole time, he said all he could think about was missing Polly for the next year and how foolish he’d been for putting himself in this predicament by brawling.

            “Thought some about you, too, Uncle Buck,” he said, “your kindness and how good you’ve been to me.”

            “Nobody but Edward Campbell and the Plummers wanted you in jail, Larkin,” I said, “and now Gov. Clark doesn’t, either.”

            Tramping through ferns and grasses, Larkin told me he’d savored the musky, moldy smells of the forest. He found plenty of water to top up his water skin, crossing two streams the first day before camping on the bank of a large creek hedged with laurel. He ate hoe cakes and ham that Polly had prepared for him. Once that was gone, he chewed jerky and lived off the land, hunting rabbits and wild turkeys and fishing for trout.

            Entering the mountains, he followed traces laid down by buffalo to find the trails used by the Cherokee. “I believe Rising Fawn’s spirit was watching over me, Uncle Buck, keeping me safe.”

            I agreed that the spirit of the Cherokee was strong in the mountains. But with tribes being forced off their ancestral homelands by the white man, it was better for him not to encounter any braves.

            “I hate to think what might’ve happened if I had,” he said.

            Even without human conflict, the rocks and ravines became steeper and more forbidding the deeper Larkin climbed into the aromatic pine forests, where he saw piles of dung and muddy paw prints, and once nearly tripped over a three-foot-long Copperhead camouflaged by leaves. After that, he cut a sapling for a walking stick and made more noise.

            As the days went by, he discovered rhododendron tunnels and waterfalls. Enjoyed the whippoorwill’s cries and the woodpecker’s thumping. Three times, the slap of fat rain drops on leaves led him to shelter under rocking outcroppings. At night under starry skies, he heard owls hooting, wolves howling, and leaves rustling. Once, he heard twigs snapping nearby and what he thought was the snorting of a black bear. But Larkin did not fear bears or wolves, not when he had a good campfire going. 

            When he came out of the mountains, he made better time through rolling hills and pastureland, knowing the end of his journey was near.

*

            On my next visit to their farm, I found Polly with a smile on her face and a wedding band glinting on her finger. Larkin had bought the ring with fur-trapping money. Though she’d already heard it from her husband, Polly was no less delighted by my account of the governor’s pardon and having Larkin home so unexpectedly soon.

            She had bad news. Her pa had tried to get her to sue for divorce as soon as Larkin left for Frankfort. Plummer had also threatened Larkin, who quickly filed a suit against him and twelve other Plummers for threatening “to beat, wound, kill, and burn up the said Larkin Liles.” Even though all thirteen had been placed under a peace bond, I knew there was nothing I could do to protect Larkin from Polly’s family if they were determined to get him. But instead of surrounding himself with fellow Liles, as I recommended, Larkin fearlessly continued living alone with Polly.

*

            A week later while out hunting, Larkin spotted his father-in-law lurking on the hillside beneath him. Even though he knew it was too long a distance for his squirrel rifle to do much damage, Larkin took a potshot that knocked Plummer down. Unharmed but humiliated, Polly’s father demanded a “fist and skull” court to settle the matter by fighting it out. But Larkin preferred to shoot it out, provided no grudges would be held against the winner.

            When Plummer agreed, I allowed the shootout to proceed, hoping Larkin’s dead-eye marksmanship could put an end to the bad blood between them without making Plummer a fatality. It wasn’t strictly legal, of course, but sometimes we did things our own way in Lewis County. I was on hand to keep everything above board when they met in the woods on a fine day when the sun had burned off the clouds and there was no wind—perfect conditions for shooting each other. At my signal, they both began firing at will, dodging from tree to tree and trying to line up a shot. Plummer got Larkin in his sights, but before he could pull the trigger, Larkin ducked and came up firing. His bullet wounded Plummer in the hip, ending the contest.

            My plan had seemed to work, but when I saw the expression on Nelson Plummer’s face after being shot, I warned Larkin not to let his guard down for I believed his father-in-law would always hold a grudge against him and seek revenge.

            “Never trust a Plummer, Uncle Buck,” Larkin said.

            Over the next eight weeks, I checked on Polly and Larkin regularly, and Larkin and I hunted together three times. But then late one afternoon in December, a fisherman came to me, saying he’d seen a dead body lying on the Kinniconick up near Larkin’s land. With my heart aflutter, I went out there for a look and near burst into tears when I found it was my friend.

            He’d been shot in the back by some cowardly assailant who’d sneaked up behind him while Larkin was sitting on the creek bank fishing. When I told Polly that Larkin was gone, she fell to her knees and wept. I tried to comfort her as best I could and finally left her in the care of his sisters. I buried him myself near the place where he was shot. Over the following months, I investigated the shooting thoroughly, including rumors that Nelson Plummer had hired someone to ambush Larkin, but no charges were ever brought against anyone for his murder.   

            Polly remained in mourning and wasn’t seen again for months.      

*

            I caught sight of her in February. Finding her at the Maple Sugar Festival, I recalled that the raw sap was only three-percent sugar, and that it took fifty gallons of boiled-down sap to make one gallon of maple sugar. I wondered then if that same ratio would apply to human desire and happiness.

            Polly was wearing the same work dress and beaver coat as before, but this time she also wore her wedding band and was working side by side with Liles instead of Plummers. And when she got an opportunity, I saw her pour a measure of boiling sap onto the snow to cool and make some of Larkin’s chewy candy.

© 2025 Rick Neumayer

“Sugar Making Season” will appear in the forthcoming THREE FOGGY MORNINGS: Collected Short Stories by Rick Neumayer. If you like this one, I’d love to hear from you.

Historical Note

According to Ancestry.com, Larkin Liles (1829-1849) was my late wife’s fourth great granduncle. For this fictional version of Larkin’s true story, I’m indebted to the work of the late Dr. William M. Talley, who wrote in The Lewis County Herald in the 1970s.

A much earlier version of Larkin’s tale, “A Queer Case,” appeared 20 December 1892 in The Roanoke Va. Times (https://www.newspapers.com/image/77813728).

 More recently (10 January 2011), blogger Ken Lobitz tells Larkin’s story in Ch. 18 of “Kinniconick: A Collection of Good Memories and a History of Kinniconick Creek”

(https://kinniconickreverie.blogspot.com/2011/01/time-and-kentucky-creek.html).