Issues → July/August 2007 → Interact → 10 Things to Do →

Classic: An Allagash Love Story

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(page 6 of 6)

"It was a Thursday, his 75th birthday," she says. "I was frying molasses doughnuts that morning. Nuge was hauling wood and he came back in for some doughnuts. They were his favorite. We talked awhile, then he went back out. After a bit I realized I couldn't hear his tractor anymore. We found him sitting right there in the tractor. It was a massive heart attacked. Nuge never had a chance to call for help.

"They didn't want me to fly out with the body," she says, her eyes taking on the memory, "but I said, 'I am flying with Nuge.'"

It was the biggest funeral they ever had in the church in East Millinocket. Patty wore the otter coat to the funeral, and when it was over, she took it off, put it back in her closet, and hasn't worn it since. People from way downriver and up in Aroostook come to look at the stone Patty got, and as she says, "to call on Nuge." There's a tree-lined pond on the front and a lone fisherman and both their names, one on each side, and their nicknames, and in the middle the words, "JUST RIGHT"...

"Everywhere I go people tell me I'm a legend," she says. "A movie man wanted to come and make a movie of me. It don't make me feel any different. It's just my home. You know something," she says, stepping out onto the ice for the first time that week, "I'd give everything back in a minute for just one night to do over, the night me and Nuge pushed off and floated so slow up this lake, and in the dawn I looked across and saw that little green knoll."