BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Scenes of Childhood and Summertime on a Vermont Farm : STAY HERE WITH ME: A Memoir by Robert Olmstead; Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt $23, 207 pages

A fifth-generation Vermont farmer, the grandfather in Robert Olmstead’s memoir had put in 14-hour days all his life on the endless practical tasks demanded by his flourishing dairy spread. Now, near 70 and stricken with a cancer that would prove fatal, he was spending less time on the chores and more time giving orders and, like his 200 Holsteins, ruminating.

“He was ready to sit down in his rocker again,” Olmstead portrays him on one summer evening, “and go back to enjoying his mind. He enjoyed his mind better than anyone I ever knew.”

The enjoyment engendered a project: an aerial photograph of the farm. Fifty years of plowing, sowing, haying, fencing and feeding; of predawn milking and mucking out; of midges and manure, midnight calvings, bawling sick beasts and steaming well ones--all this muddy reality would be lifted up. It would become the Vermont farm of the imagination and the wall calendars: plump green hills, white barns, lowing herds, immaculate white barns gilded in a golden afternoon light.

Dailiness was to be transmuted into a timeless burnished image, and young Robert, his two buddies--Bill and Tucker--and the half a dozen other hands were put to work to prepare it. Brush was cleared, fences repaired, outbuildings repainted, a rusty silo taken down. Even the farm roads were to be oiled so as to show up as neat black ribbons. Fading life would become unchanging art.

It is the keynote, the central image of Olmstead’s loving reconstruction of the summers he spent on the Vermont farm. Like his grandfather’s aerial photo, the author’s memoir seeks to burnish transience into permanence. Sometimes he tries too hard. The figure of Afton, a bookish flower child neighbor, is over-gilded. Their calf love that turns into a real love affair is depicted poignantly, but he robes her in preciousness. “When you become a writer, always write about me. Make me blue and fiery and lunar,” she tells him, and stays away one night because “someone should be attending the moon and the stars.”

Such a fraught state is real enough but, like some wine, doesn’t travel. Everything else in the book does. Olmstead writes a vivid set of scenes from the summer. There are the cows, “great ponderous ships of milk, their movements languorous and elegant like bishops and holy women.” There are the heat-sodden days, the grueling work, the desperate need for sleep. There are the moments in the shade, huge farm breakfasts, the taste of a cold watermelon, a quiet afternoon listening to baseball on the radio.

The narrator and his two buddies move through the summer days like Huck and Jim on their raft. The riverbanks have dark stretches. Tucker cuts off his sleeping brother’s beard with a circular saw; later the brother turns up and beats him savagely. One of the hired hands goes gradually mad. And the narrator’s father, a decent, kind man who would take him fishing and build waterwheels with him, loses his job and sinks into an alcoholism that will kill him. His mother, surrounded by impending death--her father’s and her husband’s--keeps her courage and calm dignity.

Toward the end, the author advances to look back. His father and grandfather are dead. Tucker, after a wild spell, has mellowed and settled down, but a girlfriend shoots him dead. Driving home to his family, Bill is killed by a speeding trailer rig. Olmstead writes in the spirit of Ecclesiastes and of transience, but he also stands for a moment against it.

Partway through his account of the summer days and summer companions, he writes: “I am trying to get it right, all because I’m trying to say: ‘This is me too.’ ” Olmstead’s memory is gilded in retrospective view, but it is authentic nonetheless. The late afternoon light tells as much truth as the glare of high noon.