Vermont’s Down-Home Barbecue Drives Customers to Hit the Road : Food: Curtis Tuff’s chickens and ribs are famous for miles around. Some of his customers come from 30 miles away, just to get a taste of the South in New England.

PUTNEY, Vt. —  You’d be hard-pressed to tell that the symbol painted on Curtis Tuff’s bright blue school bus was a map of America if it weren’t for the marker pointing to Putney.

The map seems wildly out of scale--the marker is the size of Australia--but it isn’t, not really.

Putney, population 2,188, looms just as large to Curtis Tuff. It was here, 25 years ago, that he rediscovered kindness and decency. It was here that he settled out of the life of a migrant farm worker and made his home. And it was here that he found a calling: dispensing chicken and ribs through a bus window at a rustic barbecue stand that his customers have dubbed “The Ninth Wonder of the World.”

Before that, “it hadn’t been a very nice life,” Curtis, 51, said. “I never had the opportunity to know my father. My mother was killed in a car wreck when I was 15 or 16. My oldest brother, in Tampa, Fla., took care of me until I got big enough to go out on my own.”

But the world had little to offer a teen-ager with a ninth-grade education, so, he said, “I followed the season. That way there was enough work to last all year.”

In 1961, a Putney apple orchard was the last stop on his annual migration from the citrus groves of Florida to the peach trees of North Carolina, the potato fields of Virginia and the cherry orchards of New York.

At 23, Curtis already had an old man’s knowledge of how hard life can be. As a migrant worker, “You don’t get what you should be paid, and you get treated bad,” he said.

“I’ve been there and lived through it. It’s awful to see. You can’t stop ‘cause you don’t ever make enough to settle down.”

Putney was different. At Green Mountain Orchard, “they always treated the men nice. The people in town were nice too.”

The kindness of the people and the decency of his bosses were memories that Curtis carried with him over the next few years. The white clapboard houses and rolling hills of Putney would come to him as he dug potatoes. While picking peaches, he would find himself daydreaming about apples.

Eventually, rather than follow the seasons, Curtis Tuff followed his heart. Green Mountain Orchard got a new full-time employee, and a perennial wanderer got a home.

Putney got something too: “The best barbecue north of Georgia,” said Joe Delio of East Swanzey, N. H., who has been known to belly up to the bus twice in a day.

It’s a 60-mile round trip between Curtis’ Barbecue and Delio’s driveway, child’s play to Delio, a drug- and alcohol-abuse counselor whose hunger for authentic barbecue has taken him as far as Texas.

Before Curtis came to Vermont, barbecue had been nothing more than a vague memory of a happier time. “I’d been to one barbecue in my life as a kid. A man in Georgia cooked hams on a grill. He cooked them over a wood fire, and I watched him do it. ‘Course, I also watched his daughter, which is why I was there.”

Oddly enough, he found the hams more compelling. “I said: ‘How’s he gonna get those done?’ He said: ‘You just watch.’ It took six hours, but that ham had a really good taste to it.

“I was 12 years old, and I never forgot it.”

Years later, still haunted by the taste, he built a brick pit, paid $1.50 for a license and began cooking chickens beside Route 5, just off the Interstate 91 exit for Putney.

From his post by the pit he is in the perfect position to catch an oft-heard refrain: “Barbecue? In Vermont??”

“That’s why it’s called the ‘Ninth Wonder,’ ” he said.

Tuff’s reputation grew along with his operation.

Over the years, the pit and a tin shack have been joined by picnic tables--23 at last count--the school bus, a badminton net, an outdoor sink, a portable toilet and a fenced-in playground with a swing set, sandbox and toys.

This year’s improvements are a border of marigolds, gladioli and pansies, and a second school bus painted the same signature blue and equipped with freezers stocked with ice cream. Business cards, postcards and T-shirts also are available.

Eventually, Curtis left the orchard to devote himself to what passes for full-time barbecuing in southern Vermont: April to November, Thursday to Sunday, snow, sleet, hail, rain or shine.

In the clearing behind Rod’s Car Care Center, where the smoke is thickest, is where you’ll find Curtis, presiding over the assemblage that replaced the brick pit. It is fashioned from two large oil drums turned on their sides, tops sawed off and bellies blazing with chunks of seasoned hardwood. The whole thing is sheltered by a tin roof and mounted on an old hay wagon.

Its architect is a tall, robust man in two shirts and a cap, cheerful despite the arthritis in his knees that makes prolonged standing painful. He does so against doctor’s orders; sitting down would mean turning his back on the flames.

From 7 a.m. until 9 p.m., he stokes and coaxes the fire, paying close attention to its moods. After 25 years, it can still fool him with sudden flare-ups that send him scrambling to snatch the food away until the flames die down.

“It’s different every day. The wind changes it.” What doesn’t change is the relentless smoke and searing heat that invade his clothes and permeate his skin. “When it’s 90 degrees in the shade, it’ll be 200 degrees over here.”

The two shirts protect his arms as he reaches across the hot grill to spear chickens or slather sauce on ribs with a homemade mop, a stick festooned with strips of cheesecloth.

The source of the meaty pork ribs is a trade secret. “They don’t sell them in stores,” Curtis says proudly. “It took me half these 25 years to find these good ribs.”

It took even longer--15 years--to perfect his 25-ingredient sauce, a blend of fiery, tangy and sweet.

“If you care about your people and the food you serve, you want to do a good job. I like my people and I like to give them very good merchandise.”

Curtis won’t share the recipe for the concoction he hopes one day to bottle. But he will tie a spare apron around anyone who shows interest in learning his grilling technique.

He is resolute on the merits of wood over charcoal and spends much of the winter chopping the 10 cords of rock maple, cherry, oak, ash and black birch that he burns each season.

“Charcoal is unhealthy. If people’d just break off branches from a tree, it would make their food taste so much better.”

It’s his considered opinion that the majority of back-yard chefs would do well to learn some patience. “They cook too fast, too close to the fire. Raise the grill. Take the meat off the fire and let it die down a little bit if it gets too hot.

“Start your chicken with the skin side down and it won’t stick. And put on the sauce 10 minutes before it’s done. If not, you’re just blocking the grease. The sauce’ll burn. You’ll think the meat’s done, but it’ll be raw on the inside.”

Curtis cooks his half-chickens for 90 minutes, 10 more than he allows for his ribs. In addition to juicy, tender meat with a sweet, smoky taste, slow cooking has another advantage: plenty of time to monitor customers’ reactions and accept their accolades.

Today, his watchful eye rests on Steve Smith and Delio, hard at work on their third order of ribs at their regular table under the trees.

“My record is three times in one day,” said Smith, a psychotherapist from Keene, N. H., resplendent in a blue Curtis’ Barbecue T-shirt.

Smith comes for the atmosphere as well as the food: “Where else can you sit outside under the trees and let the dust drift down on your food?”

Several times a year, Smith leaves a package at the Federal Express office, for overnight delivery to Sarah Morton at the Old Stone Trust Co. of Providence, R. I.

“I got spoiled living in Kansas City,” Morton, a portfolio manager, said.