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Pam Boyd can’t recall whether she met her high school sweetheart turned husband Leon at a ball game or a dance nearly a half-century ago. But the longtime southern Vermont cafeteria cook will never forget the moment she saw him for the last time this particularly cruel April.
Leon, a usually smiling equipment operator, was struggling to breathe at the start of the month with simultaneous chills and a 104.2-degree fever. Pam didn’t know much about the suspected cause, Covid-19, other than “we all thought it was bogus” — until Leon’s twin brother Cleon tested positive and wound up at the Bennington hospital where the two were born 64 years ago.
Pam traveled with Leon from their West Dover home to a doctor in nearby Townshend. There, Leon was placed in a wheelchair, put on oxygen and pushed toward an ambulance headed to a medical center an hour away in Keene, New Hampshire.
“They said I wouldn’t be able to go,” Pam recalls. “He waved and said, ‘I love you.’”
And so she said goodbye while physical distancing in the parking lot, not knowing she’d never see her husband of 40 years again.
Neither Pam nor any other family member could be bedside when Cleon died the next day and Leon, born shortly after his twin, followed a week later. That’s because too many Boyds have been quarantined at home after they also caught the coronavirus.
“One day I folded laundry and was totally exhausted and had to nap for two hours,” says Pam, who wrestled a fever, fatigue, headaches, swollen throat and a digestive system that “felt like it was going to explode.”
“I figured at that point I had it,” she says. “I stayed in the same bed next to Leon, putting ice packs on his head to get his temperature down. I knew.”
Over at the century-old Boyd Family Farm in Wilmington, Cleon and Leon’s younger brother Buck thought he and wife Janet had colds, perhaps from working in the fluctuating freeze and steamy thaw of the sugarhouse. Then his stomach and muscles began to ache.
“For two and a half weeks, that just zapped the hell out of me,” says Buck, who nonetheless woke nightly to stoke the wood furnace that heats the farm’s germination room and greenhouse.
Ask any Boyd who lives along the border of Bennington and Windham counties and they’ll tell you the family is close — in this case, tragically so. About one of every 1,000 Vermonters has tested positive for Covid-19 so far this year, the Health Department reports. In comparison, so many Boyds have fallen sick — between 10 and 12, depending on how one counts confirmed and suspected cases — that their town’s per capita rate is more than four times the state average.
“This virus definitely has a mind of its own in terms of how it’s going to affect you,” says Buck’s wife Janet, noting each of them has suffered different symptoms ranging from stuffy nostrils to loss of smell or taste.
But as they recuperate separately, all are united in the need to tell their story.
“It’s been heartbreaking,” says Cleon’s daughter Meghan, who just this week became the latest Boyd to test positive. “But it’s helping people understand what this really can do.”
‘That was the hardest thing I ever did‘
If Cleon and Leon’s great-grandparents were alive, they’d pinpoint the start of their family’s resilience to 1923, when construction of a hydroelectric dam forced them to relocate their farm from what’s now Lake Whitingham to the higher hills of Wilmington’s East Dover Road.
There, the twins and siblings Buck, Theresa, Carol and Tammy grew up watching “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” in black and white, let their own children camp out in the hay truck and hosted Thanksgiving dinners until the brood grew so big the meal moved a decade ago to the Dover Town Hall.
That said, Meghan begins the family history this past St. Patrick’s Day, just after she saw her father for the last time. A freak March snowstorm had fallen the first day of spring, but Cleon was home rather than at his ski grooming job after Gov. Phil Scott, confirming Vermont’s first Covid-19 case March 7, declared a state of emergency March 13.
Cleon lived a schedule opposite most people, working deep in the night, then joining Leon for coffee shortly after sunrise before returning home to sleep. But that didn’t stop him from calling Meghan and siblings Christopher, Naomi and Zach daily.
“Dad was coughing a bit,” Meghan recalls of their most recent conversations, “but he had COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) so that was his norm.”
Still, Cleon was breathing hard enough March 24 — the day Vermont issued its current stay-home order — that Meghan told him to call an ambulance. He soon arrived at his birthplace, Bennington’s old Putnam Memorial Hospital turned Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, where he tested positive for Covid-19 and was placed in isolation.
When Meghan woke three days later, the state announced school closings for the rest of the academic year and anticipated federal aid of $2 billion. But for her, the bigger news came when her father called to say he was about to be placed on a ventilator.
“He sounded really scared,” she says. “He wanted me to know he loved us.”
Meghan said the same for what unknowingly would be the last time.
Leon, for his part, was home feeling lethargic. He figured he still needed to recuperate from receiving a heart stent in February. Then his temperature spiked and his appetite shriveled.
“My husband ate,” Pam says. “When he wouldn’t eat a spoonful of applesauce, you knew something was wrong.”
Leon was diagnosed with Covid-19 just before his worsening symptoms landed him in New Hampshire’s Cheshire Medical Center on April 2. After Pam and daughter Jenny said goodbye to him in the parking lot — “That was the hardest thing I ever did,” his wife says — they were tested, too. Returning home to await the results, they heard the phone ring.
Leon wasn’t one to reach out when in the hospital. This time was different.
“He wanted to know if we got home OK,” Pam recalls, “and kept saying ‘I just want you all to know how much I love you.’”
Pam could hear the “scaredness” in his voice.
“He said, ‘I’ll see you soon,’” she says, “but I think he knew he was never coming home.”
‘From where? We all know we don’t know‘
Hanging up, Leon learned he needed a ventilator that would fit his face only if aides shaved his nearly foot-long beard.
“The last time he shaved was the day we got married,” says Pam of their 1979 wedding. “He used to play Santa Claus at school and around town. I would say to him, ‘Can’t you at least trim it?’”
Leon usually declined, knowing its long length helped people tell him apart from Cleon.
“Cleon would always say he was the oldest,” Leon’s son Justin recalls, “but Dad would say they saved the best for last.”
But by the time the brothers fell asleep April 2, they found themselves full circle: Seemingly identical clean-cheeked twins in the hospital, only this time at the end rather than the beginning of their lives.
Cleon died April 3 as two nurses held his hands and voiced the love of his children.
“The doctor said Dad had taken a turn for the worse,” Meghan says, “and we didn’t want him to suffer. It was time to let go.”
Two days later, hundreds of neighbors lowered flags to half-staff before climbing into cars, fire and highway trucks, police cruisers, motorcycles and tractors for a Palm Sunday procession that included Cleon’s snow groomer.
Leon, still sedated and needing kidney dialysis, wasn’t conscious enough to be told of his brother’s death. Then again, family and friends believe he knew. Pam rewinds back to the call she received the Thursday morning before Easter.
“The doctor said they were doing everything possible,” she recalls, “but Leon’s lungs had filled up and he wasn’t going to make it.”
Pam waited and worried for hours before wandering into the kitchen midafternoon to warm some tea.
“As I was walking back into the living room, I had this feeling.”
She stopped.
“I looked at my daughter and said, ‘What time is it?’”
That’s when the phone rang to report Leon had died.
“I knew,” Pam says. “It’s like I felt it in my heart. They were two inseparable boys. They had to go on this journey together.”
[Read more remembrances of Vermonters lost to the coronavirus.]
The death of a loved one usually spurs people to arrive with casseroles and condolences. But Pam and her daughter had to remain in quarantine another week, so everyone returned to their vehicles for a second procession on Easter Sunday, this time featuring the roadside mower Leon drove for the town.
Today the Boyds can count as many as a dozen family members confirmed or suspected to have Covid-19. Pam wonders if they caught it at the sugarhouse next to the maple tagged “Gramp’s tree.”
“We’re a very, very close-knit family,” she says. “They start the sugaring and take their guitars and banjos and people come on their snowmobiles and listen to the singing.”
But Janet knows everyone also frequents the same coffee counters, watering holes and community landmarks visited by townspeople and tourists alike.
“We’re assuming paths crossed and germs were shared,” she says. “But from where? We all know we don’t know.”
And so the family, like spring, is lumbering forward.
“Being a farmer is not for the faint of heart,” Janet says. “You’ve got to be pretty hardy stock and have perseverance even in the worst of times.”
To the end, for example, Cleon mowed and Leon hayed.
“They all have their footprints and their hearts here,” Janet says of the family she married into. “Everybody does their thing and it’s supported by the whole.”
And so sprouts the source of their strength: Each other.
Leon Boyd, left, and Cleon Boyd.
“All of us were raised that family is always there, no matter what,” Meghan says.
Perhaps that’s why Pam noticed a strange comfort after retrieving and returning with Leon’s ashes.
“I had such a warm feeling,” she says, “knowing that he’s home.”
The family, sharing obituaries for Cleon and Leon, will schedule a joint remembrance when the public can gather.
“They came into this world together,” Meghan says. “I think we need to do this together.”
Not just for the twins, but for the rest of the family whose current connection is limited to a phone line.
“It’s been a comfort to at least be able to hear everybody’s voice, although we don’t need to say anything — we just know we’re there for each other,” Meghan says. “When we can be together, we’re going to hug a little longer and a little tighter. This whole thing has really bonded us even more. It brings new meaning to the words ‘Boyd Strong.’”
