The boys stand at the bows of their skiffs with raised darts and watch for the bulges of flounders' eyes on the sunshot mud. The first flounder of the year fries and fills the house with hunger. Now the brown pasture burns with a dozen tall fires, the sons drag the cut junipers starred with emerald stones, and the father burns them on the ledge. Under a sky spilling windy stars, the small boy sleeps rolled up in the blanket with his father, and they keep warm all night from the heat in the ledge where they burned the junipers. The Indians' soapstone, the father calls this warm bed of rock; it has been handed on down to him from the ancient Abenakis.
Diapers flap from the back doorstep to the shed's end, clothespins let go in the gale, and diapers lie like patches of snow among the spruces.
Next to the lingering snowdrift, under the hot dead leaves, the small boy smells out the first Mayflowers. He uncovers a score of pink and white stars. He goes with skipping heart and leaves them, hot with the heat of his hand, in a bunch at the door of the little girl who one day will bear him his fairhaired sons. The big boy snorts at girls and makes him a clam-rocker out of his father's laths, when his father is not looking. But the boy in a man's pants picks a bunch of Mayflowers, when no one is watching, and he lays the blossoms down with his heart at the feet of the island girl. She takes up both with deep blushes.
The winds fall, the nights turn mild. And March goes out like a woolly ewelamb.
Pinterest
