The Vagabonds by Nicholas DelBanco

ceased to speak, or ceased to say what Edison could hear.
That girl there. . . .
    As a signal of his good intentions and soon-to-follow arrival, Ford had sent his man ahead: the Japanese cook Yukio, with hatchet and honed knives. It was delightful and informative to watch the fellow work. Since carrot and beef shank and onion cannot be rendered uniform—retaining in their very nature that irregularity which some say is the spice of life—he cut and chopped and trimmed. Variety of size and shape, although intrinsic to the provender, did not deter the cook; the rate at which he diced those irregular foodstuffs before him proved more rapid and less wasteful than would have been a machine. Last trip Henry had proposed a wager; he’d said, take these fifty-weight potatoes and divide them equally and give my half to Yukio and yours to this shaped cutting box. Then let’s see which peels and slices them with greater yield.
    Why not five hundred, Edison had countered, or, come to that, five thousand? Because, said Ford—the sponsor of interchangeable parts and a massed assembly line—we are not feeding multitudes. Our party this night numbers thirty, or at the most thirty-five. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, Edison had teased him, but Henry shook his head. No, no, it’s mere indulgence; I think of Yukio as expert in the culinary arts and not as a factory worker; there is only one of him here.
    And yet he did seem multiple, so rapid with cleaver and chop-block that his hands were but a blur. His shaved head gleamed, his hairless forearms too where he rolled back his sleeves. There were assistants to help him (fetching water from the nearby spring, straining it through cheesecloth and thereafter boiling it, and a sous-chef for the sauces and another for the pastry) but the fellow gave no vocal instruction, or no orders that proved audible—a nod of the head here, a shake of it there—assembling the repast alone. He mounded fruit and legumes and the dressed birds on the serving trays with lightninglike celerity, seeming never once to need to buttress what in other hands might, wobbling, topple or from other platters fall. Such expertise, thought Edison, is worthy of you, Ford . . .
    The vagabonds gathered to table and settled themselves to the meal. Having said a heartfelt grace, the men raised their tumblers and drank. These excursions were intended to remind those who conjoined in them of simple pleasures, early times, and that one need not be archaic to reside in Arcady. John Burroughs in particular said his old bones required motion or they’d seize up and grow immobile as though calcified by dew; the exercise I take, he said, is more necessity than choice. But it has been my habit now for decades and I could no sooner cease such bodily exertion than cease breathing altogether; indeed, the two are one.
    “We have a home nearby,” the elder Dancey announced to his hosts. “A farmhouse you’d be welcome to, should you prefer its rustic comfort to the fields.”
    “How so?” inquired Firestone.
    “We keep it furnished now for guests. It is my mother-in-law’s.”
    “And how near do you mean by ‘nearby’?”
    “It
was
my mother’s,” said the lady. “But she has grown infirm and lives in our house nowadays and will not relinquish the farm.”
    “How so?” asked Firestone again. “And where?”
    “It is abandoned of necessity,” Mrs. Dancey explained. “She cannot climb the stairs.”
    Beyond the tent flap darkness fell, and as it descended so too did the level of grog in the glass, the lowering soft-lidded glance of the girl.
    “A farm”—the elder Dancey embroidered the theme—“that serves us now for grazing just behind that stand of split-leaf maple. And fields we keep planted for sentiment’s sake. The skies are good to Saratoga,” he concluded. “They look down on us benignly, do they not?”
    His remark, as it was intended to, furnished a new topic for discussion. It is