There’ll be a funeral for old Jessie from the poor farm in the morning. I reckon the whole family will go over to pay our respects.

The Pray family, that is. I can’t speak for those shiftless members of the Waters family.

We heard about Jessie from Mercy Lovejoy, the old woman from the town farm who always seems to show up at dinner time. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.

We Prays are charitable folks, though, so we invited her in for a bowl of boiled pot and some cornbread. Mercy hadn’t even broke off a piece of bread before she told us the bad news.

“Old Jessie crossed the dark waters,” she said, and we knew what that meant.

It’s sad news and all, but then Mercy told us a funny story about how Jessie went all stiff and kept wanting to sit up in his coffin. You don’t want to laugh at a thing like that, but when Mercy gets to blabbering the way she does, it’s hard not to.

“He looked good,” she said. “I just couldn’t get him to lay flat.”

Dinner passed too fast, but p’haps that’s just as well. There were animals to feed and weeds to pull and all that wood wasn’t going to stack itself. T’would be nice if the young’uns didn’t need to be in school eight hours a day, but what are you going to do? Young folk need their book learning if they’re going to become quality people like the Washburns. Let them get lazy or stupid and they’ll end up on the poor farm with Mercy Lovejoy and poor dead Jessie.

But look at me getting ahead of myself. Where are my manners?

The name is Albert Pray. I live on a farm just down the road a sneeze from the Washburn place. The year is 1870. The War of Rebellion is over and here in Livermore, we’re pulling ourselves together again. There’s a railroad now that goes all the way from the Livermore Depot to the Pacific Ocean. Plenty of folks are hauling up stakes and heading west.

There’s a lot going on in the world. So, what am I doing in the wee hours of April 27? I’m sitting in my moonlit bed and struggling with the biggest question of them all. Should I use the chamber pot? Or throw on shoes and walk all the way to the outhouse?

Those were simpler times, but the choices were still hard.

For a 24-hour period between April 26 and 27, if you had asked for my life story, you would have heard all about Albert Pray, not Mark LaFlamme. For those 24 hours, I was the beefy Civil War veteran, a farmer with a part-time career as a singer. And also a man with a glorious mustache and a slight reputation as a player.

Mark LaFlamme? Who in blazes is that?

At the Norlands Living History Center in Livermore, they take their overnight live-in program seriously. There were 16 of us living together in the big house at the top of the hill. There were the members of the Pray family (I like to think of them as the Good Guys), there was the Waters family (a bunch of grubby layabouts), and there was a small team of housekeepers, cooks and a farmhand.

We gathered in mid-afternoon and were told to say goodbye to our identities and all the comforts of modern living. It wasn’t hard to do: Everything on the Washburn property, from the one-room schoolhouse to the icebox, is right out of the 1800s. There are things like smoke detectors and bottles of hand sanitizers here and there, but after a while, you don’t notice them. Those things are from the future. You just don’t see ’em.

“You can look for things that aren’t authentic,” the widow Clara Howard told us at the beginning. “Or you can use your imaginations.”

I was developing a powerful crush on the widow, but that’s a story for another time.

You best set your mind to workin’

We guests at Norlands ranged in age from 11 years old all the way up to 73. Going in, there was a kind of reality-show feel to it. It also felt like one of those B horror movies where stupid people keep going into the woodshed and getting themselves killed. But to the best of my knowledge, nobody died during the overnight. Frankly, there just isn’t time for that kind of nonsense on the farm.

My first chore was picking beet greens, which was just dandy with me. I like getting my hands dirty. The problem? I had absolutely no clue what a beet green looked like.

Enter the lovely Emmaline, who in the real world is Beth Chamberlain. For the first hour of my visit, I clung to Emmaline like a burdock. As one of the caretakers, she knew where everything was. She knew exactly what needed to be done and when it needed doing.

We picked beet greens, Emmaline and I, and then went inside to clean them. The Pray family was busy at work, whipping up things like cornbread and applesauce and boiled pot, which was another name for stew back in the day. In the 1800s, people were too damn busy to come up with clever names for things. You know what they called the spiffy gadget used to scrub pots? They called it a pot scrubber.

The kitchen is where I found myself most frequently tripping over the technological chasm between modern times and the 1800s. Washing a dirty pan, you want a simple faucet. But of course, there are no such conveniences. You have to pump your water from a well, and it comes out cold. If you want hot water, you have to heat it atop the wood-burning stove.

Forget about things like microwaves and electric burners. Those miracles are still a hundred years off.

On the farm, preparing meals goes on pretty much around the clock. You finish one meal and start working on the next. Everybody chips in during this process whether they want to or not.

Or as caretaker Ann Gibbs (played by Anne Feith) put it: “If you don’t help prepare the meals, you don’t eat.”

So while the food is cooking, let me tell you something about the farmhouse of that time. There were things like outhouses, animals and their poo, and a lot of work, but little bathing. I can’t imagine the world smelled so great back then. But inside the house, it wasn’t a problem. The sweet scent of wood burning in the stove mingled with the fragrance of cooking food and the result was nothing short of heavenly. It’s the kind of smell that goes straight for the stomach. The kind that could end a hunger strike in one stroke.

So, it’s mealtime. The Waterses came in from the fields (or from gambling – you just can’t trust those Waterses) and we all set around two long tables to eat. Mealtime for farm folk was a by-God event. It’s ceremonial, with a proper delivery of grace and then Pa passing dishes around the table.

Pa was my hero. I’ll tell you all about him momentarily.

We had just gotten our elbows into the meal when there’s a knock at the door. In walks Mercy Lovejoy in her kerchief and dusty shawl.

The grumbling begins at once.

“The poor farm!” mutters Clarendon Waters, who happens to be my bunk mate. “They’re supposed to take care of themselves up there, but they don’t. They sit around doing nothing and I pay taxes for that. All you got up there are a bunch of lazy old ladies and dim-witted kids.”

Mercy Lovejoy hears his complaints. She squints at him but mostly shrugs it off. She’s a woman who describes herself as “ugly as an old iron pot,” and for the next 20 minutes she regales us with stories about how she ended up on the poor farm to begin with. They used to put poor folks out for bid, did you know that? Neither did the rest of the guests. If you were poor, the town could split up your family and send you off to work at different farms.

Mercy told us all about it, and isn’t it funny how much she looks like the Widow Howard? Turns out they’re one in the same. The fact that I didn’t make the connection for a full day is a testament to either my own stupidity or to the acting skills of one Willi Irish, a woman who has been educating people at Norlands since the 1970s.

Not a creature was stirring

There was more choring to do before the day was done, but there was also story time. We learned about the Washburn family which – let’s face it – kind of makes the Bush clan look like deadbeats. The short version goes like this: There once was a humble farmer named Israel Washburn who married a lass named Martha Benjamin. Together, they had 11 children who left the farm to become governors, senators, publishers, ambassadors and very successful businessmen.

“The Washburns,” said my Pa, Otis Pray, “were like the Kennedys without the curse.”

A brilliant observation, but that’s my Pa. He’s a millwright, you know. Pa’s a tough old goat, but he also teaches dance. We learned that while exploring town records to find out more about ourselves. Old Pa was a dance instructor. I giggled so heartily at that, I thought I was going to get a whoopin’.

So, night came down. On the farm, there’s no staying up late, and no real reason to. The chores are done and we retired to our rooms, carrying kerosene lanterns if we wanted to do anything exotic like reading.

This is a trouble area for Albert Pray (yours truly). A longtime night owl, he hasn’t gone to bed at 9:30 p.m. since he was 7. Albert Pray, at least my version of him, thought he would never get to sleep. But miracles happen when you’ve spent a whole day choring in the sweet-smelling air. I was out within minutes and by the time I opened my eyes again, the room was filled with the silver light of morning.

Or something that looked like morning.

I sat up in my bed. The house was so still and so quiet, I briefly wondered if I had gone deaf in the night. I didn’t wonder for long – there were other matters to consider.

Chamber pot? Or outhouse?

I tell you, I really wanted to use that chamber pot, if for no other reason than because I had never used one before. I mean, convenient? It doesn’t get any more convenient than peeing without leaving your bed. And I gave it serious thought, too, turning the pot over and over in my hands. Ultimately, I put it away dry. My bunk mate Clarendon was a light sleeper, as it turned out. And I couldn’t imagine anything noisier than whizzing into a metal pot.

So I pulled on my shoes and stumbled to the outhouse. I tripped over a stick on the way there and had a mini-freak-out, thinking a chicken might come to peck out my eyes. It happens, you know, on the farm. But I survived the spill with my eyes intact and by the time I was done in the outhouse, the gloomy facts revealed themselves – it wasn’t daylight out there on the farm, but moonlight. Dawn? Not quite. It was 3:30 a.m. and I was up for good.

It was a blessing, as it turned out. For half an hour, I stood in the shadow of the old church, looking over the misty fields where not a creature was stirring. Not a human was stirring, either. The silence was so deep, it was heavy. For that half an hour, I got a glimpse of what the world was like before the advent of cars and airplanes and all-night convenience stores. The quiet was peaceful, the smell of the farm sweet, instead of strange. For that half-hour or so, I was in the zone. I was Albert Pray in a moment of quiet introspection.

And then the house started to stir and it was time to work again.

Could I get that coffee to go?

You know me. I like to start my day with a couple cups of coffee. I can’t so much as blink properly without it. So, I went sniffing around the kitchen to find out where it was at. Emmaline greeted my plight with a shy smile. Or maybe it was the Gibbs woman. I don’t know. I hadn’t had caffeine yet.

“Coffee,” she said, “is served with breakfast.”

And breakfast, my friend, doesn’t happen until after the chores are done.

When it’s time for outdoor chores at Norlands, Israel Martel is your man. He’s the farmhand and he doesn’t tolerate idlers. He starts his day early and expects others to do the same.

“It’s funny how people tend to disappear,” Martel kind of growled, “when it’s time to work.”

But not the Pray family. Pa and I, along with little Rosetta, filled buckets with water for the sheep. No problem there. Cute little guys, sheep. Not scary at all.

Next we had to feed the oxen, which I learned are just bulls without certain dangly parts. And when I learned that to feed the oxen, you had to actually walk among them, I thought I just might quit the farm business. Maybe I could go away and join a circus somewhere.

But Martel insisted, and Martel is a man who doesn’t cotton to sissy behavior. He sent me in there with buckets of feed, and within seconds the horned beasts were all over me, sniffing and poking and trying to get at the grub.

“Don’t let ’em have any!” Martel advised.

I thought about telling Martel that if the bulls asked for my wallet, I’d hand it over without question. Credit cards, too, with PIN numbers.

After feeding, it was time to stack wood. As we got about it, we could smell the eggs and bread cooking in the kitchen. It makes you work faster, which only causes your stomach to rumble that much louder.

Martel, whose 2013 name is Ray Fleury, was peeved.

“Go into that house,” he told Pa, “and you tell that Waters family that if they can stand there at the window watching us, they might as well be out here helping.”

Layabouts, I tell you. Martel has no use for them.

A little something about grunt labor. Nobody worked harder than Rosetta, an 11-year-old lass who goes by Annika Carey in the year 2013. If anyone worked as hard as she, it might have been Eliza, a 70-something whose name in the real world is Judy Hurst. An Old Orchard woman, she came with a group of five.

“All of this,” Eliza told me between armloads of chopped wood, “makes you appreciate how comfortable we have it in our ordinary lives.”

True that. Although, in our group were two teenagers, a boy and a girl. Throughout the experience, both looked rather dazed. All we do is toil, they seemed to be thinking. When is somebody going to put a stop to this?

At breakfast, the girl touched on that very thing.

“What happens if the kids won’t work,” she asked as she scooped up scrambled eggs with a slice of toast.

Martel was all over that: If the kids won’t work, they’ll starve. He recalled a time that he and his brother skipped out on their chores back in the day. When they got to the dinner table that night, they found everything unprepared: eggs still in their shells, potatoes raw and still wearing their skins. It was a night of rumbling stomachs for the brothers and the lesson was learned.

After breakfast, the Pray family finished stacking wood, grabbed hoes and began weeding. Thirsty work, weeding. When Martel brought out a pail of water with a scoop, we gulped it like dogs.

My Pa had another moment of reflection. Although this time, I suppose it was his real-world persona talking – history teacher Erik Carey, father to Annika, from Embden, Maine.

“We have a little garden at home,” he said. “If things don’t go well, whoop-dee-doo. So what? But back in the 1800s, if you couldn’t get it going, you were gonna die.”

He leaned over his hoe as he said it, staring off across the acreage. Pa was a very wise man, but Erik Carey is no dummy, either.

Make your manners

So, here’s the thing. If you were a kid in 1870, you started your day by hauling grub for the animals, stacking wood and hoeing in the hot sun. You’d think a lad would relish the chance to skip out of grunt labor and go to school, right?

I’m not so sure. School was eight hours a day under the watchful eye of the Widow Howard. And the Widow Howard wouldn’t abide tomfoolery. That’s eight hours a day and six days a week, and when you think of that awesome expanse of time spent inside, dragging a rake or stacking wood doesn’t seem so bad.

“If you’re very, very, very good all week,” the Widow told me, “if you are very well-behaved and you do your lessons, I might let you go early on Saturday. Maybe.”

The Widow Howard is a sweet woman and a learned one. But I tell you, walking into that tiny, one-room schoolhouse was enough to fill me with the kind of terror that made me want to crawl into my chamber pot.

We lined up, boys on one side, girls on the other. When you enter the schoolhouse, you don’t just go scurrying in, laughing and joking like kids of the modern age. Oh, nossir. You go in and give your teacher the respect she warrants. You bow if you’re a boy, curtsy if you’re a lass.

And God help you if you don’t look at the teacher while you’re doing it.

“Albert Pray!” the Widow Howard scolded me. “I’m over here, not way over there. Look at me while you’re making your manners.”

I’d never heard of making manners. Frankly, I think they should bring it back.

School in the 1800s was a rigid affair. You didn’t just jot answers to a math problem on your paper. You stood up (take your hands out of your pockets, dolt) and addressed the teacher directly.

“If John has two cows and Jacob has one cow, and since two and one make three, therefore, they both have three cows, ma’am.”

That’s probably wrong. In any case, I couldn’t say it properly in class because I had the jitters. When I went up to the front of the room to recite a poem I had memorized, I froze up completely.

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,” was all I had to say, but I couldn’t come up with even the first word.

While the Widow Howard waited patiently for me to begin, I stood before her turning redder by the second, that first word proving as elusive as a greased hen. The other kids snickered. When I turned around, crimson and quivering, Pa had scrawled “Albert + Widow Howard” on his slate.

He got scolded for it, though, so that was OK.

By the time we got sprung from school, we were happy to go back to our rakes. Martel told us stories about the olden days and kept his eyes peeled for loafers. We worked like bulls without their dangly parts, and sooner or later it would be dinner time. After that, more chores, a quick scrub at the basin and then it would be time for bed.

Here’s what struck me more than anything else: You take a family like the Washburns, simple folk who spent their hours this way. They worked, they went to school, they ate together, they slept. Every minute was used up in some way, and yet each of them went on to do great things.

I ruminated on it, thinking of all the time I waste when I’m Mark LaFlamme instead of Albert Pray. Long hours watching mindless television or playing on Facebook. I mean LONG HOURS doing nothing at all when our great forebears would have been working on the land or on themselves.

I reckon Pa was a smidge troubled by it, too. As Erik Carey, he found this an important lesson to pass on.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that I’ll be bringing my whole class down here.”

And then there’s Annika, that pre-teen who put away her video games and other toys to spend 24 hours in the year 1870. She worked nonstop from sun to sun, getting dirty and turning young muscles sore. Out in the garden, she paused a moment over her rake. She wiped sweat from her forehead and looked up at Pa with a gleam in her eyes.

“I want to come back,” she said. “For a week next time.”

Kind of makes you think that her generation just might be all right.

Leaving the farm

At the end of our live-in, we sat around in a circle, shedding our farm identities and introducing ourselves for the first time in the year 2013. We discussed what we learned and what surprised us.

The womenfolk couldn’t say enough about the hell of laundry. They use wringers, you know, and giant wash buckets.

Renee Bonin (a dirty double agent who turned out to be the Norlands education director) did the wash for the first time as Emeratta Waters and she couldn’t believe the labor involved.

“It serves as a symbol for everything else they did,” the dirty double agent said. “It was all so difficult and so time-consuming.”

Clarendon, who so loudly bemoaned the waste of his tax dollars at the poor farm, is Dennis Picard, a museum curator from western Massachusetts. We all thought he might be a dirty double agent like Bonin, but no. He’s just very good at getting into character and staying there.

That being said, I still wish I’d used that chamber pot and let him wake to the sweet sound of that action.

So, when it was over, we all said goodbye. I said farewell to the sweet Emmaline, and Pa gave me a powerful ribbing over that. He thinks I was sweet on her during my stay, but Pa should know better.

I reckon everybody knows that I only have eyes for the Widow Howard.

Stuff I learned in 1870

If you’re thinking about doing the live-in program at Norlands – and you should, you lousy layabout – maybe you should skip this part. You’ll want to learn things on your own, rather than stealing from me. That said, here are things I knew coming out of Norlands that I didn’t know going in.

* The difference between bulls and oxen is grisly. I mean, they’re the same animal at first glance. But a bull has certain manly parts whereas an ox has been relieved of them. By the way, if you’re close enough to tell the difference, you’re probably going to die.

* What’s the difference between a privy and an outhouse? It’s not the smell — that’s a fact no matter where you set it up. An outhouse is apart from the main house while a privy is attached. Remember to bring a lantern and don’t forget to wash your hands.

* Did you know that if you were sent to a poor farm in the 1800s, you could be put out to bid as a worker for area farmers? You might be sent to one place, your children to another. I know this because Mercy Lovejoy told me and she’s just as sharp as a quill pen.

* Those weeds scattered all over my backyard? Dandelion greens. I had no idea. You pick ’em with a simple knife, boil ’em up and eat them with vinegar, butter and salt.

* Inside the one-room schoolhouse, I looked through a math book that would have been commonly used in the day. Are you freakin’ kidding me? The problems were (to me) impossibly hard, and you didn’t just need to work them out on paper, you had to speak your answers aloud. Pretty sure I wouldn’t have made it out of the second grade.

* Quill pens look cool in the old movies, but if you have to write with them, it might send chills up your spine. The tip of a hen’s feather squeaks something fierce when you dip it in ink and drag it across paper. Like Styrofoam or a fork dragged across a sheet of glass. If I had been around back in the day, I would have refused to sign the Declaration of Independence because the noise bothered me.

* Feather pens are also terribly difficult to work with for left-handed freaks. If you were left handed, you’d end up dragging your hand behind the ink and smearing it all over the place. This is why they sometimes beat you until you learned to use your right hand like a quality human being.

* So, when booze was abolished, there were still bottles of spirits kicking around. To get your hands on some, you had to go to the liquor agent and try to convince him you had a medical condition. They say on Friday nights, there would be a line outside the agent’s house. Lots of people with sudden headaches and back problems. Clarendon Waters, that weasel, was a liquor agent in Livermore around 1870.

* Inside the Washburn’s mansion at Norlands are many impressive paintings of the family. Each staring face is somber and gloomy. They looked like their dogs just died, every one of them. The reason? You didn’t smile for the cameras back then because the photographic process took so long, your face would crack in two.

* Chickens will eat eggs. Cannibalism!

* The old-fashioned ice box was pretty cool.

* In the post-Civil War era, being fat was cool. Albert Pray was a member of the Fat Man’s Club.

* You can’t milk a bull. Who knew?

* Norlands has a modern kitchen with real coffee, but if you try to sneak in there, you’ll get whacked. If you want coffee, you have to wait for breakfast. After chores. Might as well just stay in bed.

Coming up at Norlands

* Norlands is now accepting registrations for its next Public Live-In on Sept. 27 and 28th.

* Groups — such as Scouts, school classes, youth groups, etc. — may schedule Live-Ins at Norlands any time by contacting Norlands.

* The “Rally for Norlands” Civil War Re-enactment Weekend will take place June 8 and 9. Gates open at 9 a.m. Living history demonstrations, exhibits, fashion show, music and more.

* Norlands offers Living History Tours from July 2 through Aug. 29. Visitors can meet people from the 1870 Livermore community in the Washburn mansion, schoolhouse and farmer’s cottage. Tours are Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Call Norlands or go to the website for prices and details.

Norlands is located at 290 Norlands Road, Livermore, Maine.

Website: www.norlands.org

Phone: 207-897-4366

Fax: 207-897-4963

Email: Norlands@norlands.org

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