Doris Beaumont’s house on School Street is a compact white bungalow with a porch swing that she has been meaning to repaint for — she pauses to calculate — “about twelve years now.” The paint is peeling in long, graceful curls. She does not seem troubled by this.
“I’ll get to it,” she says, settling into a chair on the porch with a glass of iced tea. “I’ve got time. I’m only 96.”
Beaumont was born in Willow Creek in 1930, the same year the town got its first paved road. She has lived in the same house on School Street since 1954. But the address that defines her place in the town’s memory is the Willow Creek Hardwood Flooring Company on River Road, where she worked in the front office from 1951 until the mill closed its doors in 1972 — a span of 22 years that placed her at the administrative center of the town’s largest employer through its final, difficult decades.
“It was a good job,” she says. “I typed the orders, I answered the phone, I made the coffee. That last one was the most important, because if the coffee was bad, the foremen were unbearable. Leo Cormier — he was the head sawyer — he would drink anything. But Harold Peller, the planing mill foreman, was a connoisseur. He taught me how to make it properly. Three scoops for a twelve-cup pot, never let it boil, and pour it through a strainer if it’s been sitting more than twenty minutes.”
She remembers every detail of the final week of November 1972. The dry kilns emptied on Monday. The planer ran its last batch on Tuesday. The molder was greased and shut down on Wednesday. By Thursday, only the saw carriage was still running, cutting the last of the logs pulled from the pond.
“I was in the office on Friday,” she says. “I didn’t have to be — there was nothing to order, nothing to invoice — but I went anyway. I thought someone should be there. Someone who had been there the whole time.”
She watched Leo Cormier sit in the sawyer’s seat after the final whistle, long after the other men had walked to their cars. She watched from the office window. She did not go out to speak to him.
“What would I have said?” she asks. “‘Good job on the last log?’ He knew it was the last log. Everyone knew. Some things don’t need words.”
After the mill closed, Beaumont went to work at the Aroostook County clerk’s office in Houlton — a 35-mile round trip that she drove every day until she retired in 1995. She has been retired for 31 years now, longer than she worked at either job.
“It’s strange to outlive your own working life by that much,” she says. “But I’m not complaining. I’ve seen things change. I’ve seen the mill close and reopen. I’ve seen the tourists come. I’ve seen houses sit empty for years and then suddenly someone from away buys them and paints them a colour that doesn’t belong in Maine.”
She is distantly related to Iris Beaumont, the retired art teacher whose watercolor exhibition is currently on display at the library — “a cousin twice removed or something, I lose track” — but says she cannot draw a straight line with a ruler. “I appreciate that she can. I’m glad someone in the family got those genes.”
Does she ever go back to the mill?
“I drive past it sometimes,” she says. “The new owners — the Peller boy, Stu, who reopened it in 1990 — they’ve done nice work. It looks like a mill again, not a ruin. But I don’t go inside. I don’t need to. I have it in here.”
She taps her temple with a finger that is still steady.
“The sound of it, mostly. The planer had a certain pitch when it was running at full speed — a high whine, almost musical. The saw carriage was lower, a growl. The band saw was a scream. When all three were going at once, the whole building hummed. You could feel it in your teeth.”
She pauses.
“I haven’t felt that in 54 years. But I can still feel it if I close my eyes.”
On the porch swing, the peeling paint curls in the late-afternoon light. Doris Beaumont takes a sip of her iced tea and looks out at School Street, which is quiet, as it usually is.
“I’ll get to the paint,” she says again. “Maybe next week. Or maybe I’ll just let it peel. At 96, I’ve earned the right to let a few things peel.”