Jack Wax

It’s the first of March and perfect sugaring weather. Outside the snow is still over two feet deep, the nights are cold enough to freeze the bird bath solid but the morning sky is as blue and clear as Marion’s eyes. The frost on the maple twigs starts to melt with a steady drip, drip, drip as they flit through the trees on Glynn’s skidoo and trailer. Tom would rather be skiing and is looking forward to a week in the mountains, but this trip is Tom’s generous present to Marion as a celebration for her fortieth birthday, and Marion knows that he’s staying to make sure she’s settled and happy at Glynn and Sue’s farm before he leaves.
In fact, she thinks, he could leave right now. She doesn’t believe that she has ever been this happy. For nearly all her life, Marion has dreamed of the North Woods. From the moment she discovered a book about North America and the people who lived there before the settlers came, the Longfellow poems she learned at school as clear and precise as birdsong and her first wondering taste of maple syrup, she has longed to see the sugar bush and to try the sweet toffee-like confection that is simply maple syrup on fresh snow, and called Jack Wax. Today, on this bright, clean morning, she feels as if she’s found the place she was meant to be; where her soul fits as snug as a bung in a brandy barrel. These people with their twanging accents, their leathery faces and wide smiles feel as familiar as her own parents; the dry, crisp air is what she was born to breathe, the temperature is designed for the perfect working of her body. She can’t understand why she has never been before.
When they leave the skidoo they walk in amongst the sugar maples and look for trees to tap. Anything with a trunk diameter of over twelve inches is suitable, Glynn tells Marion. He gives her a cordless drill and guides her hand as she makes her first hole, a couple of inches into the bark and slanted upwards towards the middle of the tree. Then he shows her how to push a metal tap into the hole and attach a line of plastic tubing which snakes along the ground like translucent veins connecting each tree, gathering all the sap into a holding tank outside the sugar house.
It is all so very different from the pictures on the maple syrup tin that her mother brought back — at Marion’s insistence — from Vancouver last autumn, despite knowing that all grades of maple syrup are available from every supermarket in Britain. She had carefully washed the tin clean and placed it on the mantelpiece of the room where she stores her files. She keeps the accounts for a dozen local, muddy farms and likes to take the tin into her hands and gaze at the tiny scenes depicted on the outside when she returns at the end of the day. A sugar shack sits beside a group of trees, standing tall and straight in a field of snow; in front a horse-drawn sledge pulls a group of happy, waving people on their way to collect syrup. A plate of pancakes sits steaming waiting for a stream of syrup to be poured from a glass jug. And in the corner, Marion’s favourite part of the picture, two men dressed in skins and furs tramp knee-deep through the snow, swinging wooden buckets from their arms with smiles as wide as the sky above them.
‘It’s clear, like water,’ Marion says in surprise as the first drops of sap run over her hand. She licks it and can detect only the faintest hint of sweetness, a tingle of energy, like gulping the air near the sugar beet factory back home in East Anglia during the autumn.
‘Not what you expected, huh?’ says Glynn, smiling at her down-turned mouth. ‘Never you mind. It’ll soon be the best maple syrup you ever tasted.’ He drills another hole further up and on the other side of the tree. The sap starts to drip after a second or two. He leaves his finger under the tap and then runs it around the inside of his cheek. ‘About two and a half percent sugar, I reckon. Not much, you’ll be thinking, but that’s good for a tree this size.’ He pushes on the tubing with a twist and stands back, unrolling the reel towards the next tree. ‘Guess how many gallons of sap it takes to make one gallon of syrup?’
Marion squints up through the branches of the tree towards the hard, lemon-sherbet sun above her. That sugar will have to feed all the leaves that’ll grow on this tree, she thinks.
‘Ten or fifteen gallons, maybe?’ Tom says from behind her shoulder. For a moment she’d forgotten that he was with her.
‘Nope!’ says Glynn with a laugh. ‘You tell ‘em, Sue.’
‘It takes about forty gallons to make one itty-bitty gallon of syrup. And we have to do it real quick. This stuff spoils fast.’
By the end of the afternoon they’ve met up with the rest of the tapping crew and Marion’s arms are aching from drilling trees. Tom returned to the farmhouse with Sue an hour or two before, but Marion wanted to stay out in the sugar bush until the last minute. As the sky fades to white and the temperature starts to drop, Glynn packs the equipment back into the trailer and the little procession of skidoos hiss across the snow back into the valley. Marion wraps her arms tightly around Glynn’s waist as she looks back over her shoulder, the sugar bush rising up the hillside for almost as far as she can see. Deep into the dark shape of the woods, she notices a tree taller than the rest, with an almost perfectly symmetrical shape.
Glynn turns his head and shouts, ‘The Indians called it Sinzibukwud.’ Marion tries the word on her tongue like trying a new wine. ‘It means sugar,’ Glynn says into the wind. ‘They taught the settlers how to make sugar from maple using hot stones. Franklin wanted to make us self-sufficient in sugar just by using maple trees.’ He wheels the skidoo around and she can feel him laugh through his parka. She thinks of the acres of sugar beet fields back home, ugly and brown but, nevertheless, having helped save a nation from slavery in the sugarcane fields. These trees, she thinks, these beautiful trees could have been America’s beet fields. The sun has almost completely gone now but she turns her head to catch sight of the tree that reaches its branches higher than the others. With an unsurpressible urge she releases one hand to trace its outline. She moves her body away from Glynn’s and feels her knees begin to release their grip, then the skidoo jumps and jerks on some uneven snow and Glynn grabs her arm to bring her close to him again. Her head whips around to the front, and the moment is gone.
At breakfast the next day— the last Marion will have with Tom for a couple of weeks — they eat a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, just like the picture on her tin. Tom has brought Glyn and Sue a jar of Norfolk honey as a present and they all try some. At home he eats toast and honey every morning before leaving for work. Marion passes the jar back to Tom. It’s sticky and Marion licks her fingers, then makes a face. This floral, scented paste made by a crowd of noisy insects is a poor substitute for maple syrup, she thinks. She imagines the trees her mother saw in the Canadian fall, leaf-peeping with her friends last year. Trees as tall and straight as monuments, their canopies emerald, peridot, ruby, carnelian and amber against a sapphire sky; where the forest earth crumbles beneath her feet and the smell of leaf mould and moss rises around her and lets her breathe. It’s those colours she tastes when she eats maple syrup; the centre of a tree’s existence, it’s pure, concentrated sap, manufactured in secret by the plant itself once the leaves have fallen during the stillness of winter. With every spoonful, she imagines she is taking in the life force that is at the heart of the sugar maple.

*

The weather stays cold at night and warm in the daytime. Marion thrills at the feel of snow crunching beneath her boots and the warmth of the sun on her back. The tappers work in their shirts. Tom has gone skiing and Marion has spent one day in the heat of the sugar house with Sue, finishing the syrup at temperatures above two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. For the last hour, they cranked the temperature up another thirty degrees to make maple candy. The heat crept up and up until Marion felt she might actually evaporate herself and join the droplets of steam escaping the heat of the sugar shack into the clear winter air beyond, where the billows of steam could be seen for miles. Sue said she liked the warmth and the urgency, but as Marion fed logs into the arch under the stove pipe, she began to imagine she was feeding a speeding steam train with piles and piles of fuel just to keep it happy. The next day she asked if she could rejoin the men and the tapping team to spend the days outside amongst the trees again. The further she goes into the sugar bush in the cold, clear air, the happier she is. Glynn had showed his teeth in a wide American smile and said, ‘Sure. No problem. Got the sugar tree bug, have you? Don’t blame you; I don’t like being cooped up in that hothouse like a turkey on Thanksgiving.’
Each morning, Marion looks at her airline ticket and checks the date of return. With her blessing and another wide smile from Glynn, Tom has stayed another few days in the mountains instead of coming back for a week of more sightseeing as they planned, but in two days’ time he’ll come by to collect her. She can’t believe the time has gone so fast. Her face and hands have lost their English pallor and she is looking sun-browned and healthy. Her limbs feel strong and toned and she has more energy than she can remember since being a child. Marion does not want to go home. She is not homesick for her rows of accounting figures and grey, military-drab skies above the Victorian farm labourers’ cottages opposite, or her forsythia hedge — bravely in flower — with its yellow trumpets muddied by the constant splatter of passing sugar beet trucks trundling through puddles on the uneven road.
There are probably another four weeks of sugaring still to go before the New England spring will be too warm for good quality syrup, but to thank Marion for all the work she has put in, Glynn and Sue have arranged the sugaring-off party, which usually happens at the end of the sugar season, to be held earlier, so that she can feel she has experienced every aspect of the production process.
The sugar house has been draped in coloured streamers, a bonfire has been alight outside for most of the evening, and tables and benches have been brought and set up in the snow so that the visitors can sit outside. Marion’s excitement is tinged with sadness. Even the jack wax that Glynn is making on freshly compacted snow has failed to lift her spirits. All around her, children dressed in padded all-in-ones and bright woollen hats with ear flaps in red, green and blue are tearing at the soft taffy with their teeth, eating doughnuts and popping sour pickles into their mouths when the sweetness makes their mouths pucker. The fudgy, brown smell of maple syrup and the sounds of chat and soft laughter fill the air but Marion feels suddenly apart from the crowd. Its as though they are pressed flat against the sides of her maple syrup tin; what she hears in her ears seems far away across the white mountain and all she can detect is an echo. She slips out of her place on the bench and moves away from the flickering light of the fire and into the shade of the first of the trees that mark the beginning of the sugar bush.
She knows her way around the hillside, can just make out the silhouettes of branches and the brightness of stars in the night sky. She is careful not to trip on the tubing that runs along the ground, illuminated to a silvery sheen by the light of the moon. As her eyes become accustomed to the dark, she begins to see more clearly.
Marion tracks deep into the woods following the skidoo trails until they give out and even then she keeps on walking through the thick, powdery snow. It is freezing now and the temperature is still dropping. Marion tucks her hands into her pockets and carries on walking. Only the gentle sound of her feet brushing through the snow disturbs the profound quiet of the night.
This is not aimless walking. Although she set out on a straight course from the moment she left the party, it is only now that she appreciates that she has a target and that she could not set a foot wrong if she tried. Almost from the minute she stepped off the plane — maybe even before — she has been moving towards this moment. Ahead of her is the tree. It is a black maple — Marion knows this because Glynn has pointed out the differences in the bark patterns — and it has been calling her since she saw it from a sideways glance on that first day.
It is set at the very edge of the maple groves and, with the snow lying flat and unmarked right up to its base, it stands apart from the rest of the trees as though they had taken a step back out of respect. The topmost branches stretch tall and clear, way above the height of the surrounding trees. Marion is not sure if she is even still on Glynn and Sue’s farm but she walks towards the tree anyway, and puts her arms around the trunk. She can’t make her fingers meet even when she tries. The tree could be two hundred years old, maybe more.
She slips off her gloves and drops them soundlessly on the ground. With her finger and thumb, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a tap. Beside her feet, as she knew there would be, there is a short length of branch. She picks it up. She looks for the side facing south where the run of sap will be the strongest. Then she stands on tiptoe while holding the tap in her left hand against the bark of the tree and, reaching as high above her head as she can manage, she uses the branch to hammer the silver metal firmly into the trunk. She checks the angle. It’s between five and ten degrees, just as it should be. Marion drops the branch on the snow and stands beneath the little metal spout. The moon has climbed out of the branches of the tree and hangs, brilliant and sharp as a discus, a night sun. Soon, although it is the middle of the night, the sap begins to run.
She collects some on her fingers and tastes it. It is thick and syrupy. This must be fifty, even sixty percent sugar, almost perfect maple syrup straight from the tree. She looks at her fingers and they show a dark stain in the moonlight. She sucks the flavours over her teeth and breathes out through her nose detecting forest smells, the tang of wilderness and the scents of mountains. All the hidden life of pure maple sap that she has longed for, which is killed by the long boiling in the evaporator. Then Marion hears the whispering.
It starts so low at first that she thinks it must be nothing but the branches moving in a breeze coming up off the river. Then she hears words, soft as a breath, sweet as the scent of blossom, fresh as dill and cold as the Arctic circle. Iroquois, Abenaki, Pennacook and Micmac, she thinks she hears. She moves to lift her face to the sap trickle and feels the syrup spill onto her forehead and run down into her eyes, over her cheeks and into her ears. The whispering turns to a drumming which fills her head and burns in her blood. She shrugs out of her coat and lets it fall. She kicks off her boots and, without moving away from the comfort of the tree, she slips from the rest of her clothes until she is standing naked, feeling the rough bark on her breasts and stomach. She moves her hands above her head and stretches her fingers to lie flat along the trunk above the level of the tap, pressing her body harder against the tree so as to make patterns on her thighs. The chanting fills her head, the moon grows larger above the latticework of leafless branches and begins to glow like an ember in an indigo sky. Her feet grow cold under the snow and the syrup starts to turn waxy on her skin.
Marion opens her mouth and lets the sap drip steadily, drop by sugary drop. She feels it fill her body, turn into jack wax as it meets the cold of her legs, take hold of her heart and granulate it to a sweet fudge, solidify her lungs to a maple candy and turn her blood to a glaze.
When the sun comes up and the temperature rises, the sap runs freely. It soaks through Marion's hair and covers her shoulders; it glides between her breasts and smoothes the contours of her body, filling the spaces between flesh and bark, turning her long, toned muscles to amber.
By nightfall, the black maple has grown in stature, its girth even more majestic. As the sun goes down beyond the mountains, it stands noble, sublime and solitary. In a few weeks, as always, it will be the first of the sugar trees to burst into leaf.

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