Comes in fogs. Lost Atlantis comes unmoored on the Banks, sweeps in, and erases all land. The baby cries all night, but in the morning he has his first tooth. Boats pick their way between continents of fog, a sail comes out of nothing and towers close over the reach boat. Foghorns bellow through the nights; they wake the baby, he cries. The lobsters are now through with sprouting new shells at midsummer an are at the blush of new flavor; they are brought home by boatloads. Dogfish are dogging the cod, the fisherman pulls up a fish that is only a head. Sculpins alone come in whole, thorny and growling. But clams are a brisk commodity, and the young man makes enough on the flats to furnish his parlor. Grandma finishes a crazy quilt for the cottage.
This month's feast is an outdoors one, baked clams, Abenaki style. In the cove Father digs two bushels of long blue clams, and the boys fall to and gather mountains of driftwood and fresh rockweed. They make a quick series of fires, put rockweed on the coals, then clams, an cover all in with more seaweed. They sit, hungry, and smell the savor of hissing shellfish. On the edge of starvation they roll back the blankets of seaweed on several fires, and boys, girls, women, babies, and men fall on the opened clams, tear them out, burn themselves to the bone, swallow the smoky tidbits whole, tears in their eyes, and all cry for more. One fire finished, they all move on to new uncovered ones, and they feast again. They eat the hot sun down the sky. The flood tide puts out their embers near the high-water mark.
Salt hay is now in season, the men cut it with scythes and carry it on birch poles up out of the tide's way. The black flies sting the boy's eyes shut as he bends to turn the grindstone. They make the hay on the beaver dams, and a horse must have his sea legs on to pull the rack along the crest of the dams without sinking to his ears in the mire. Sandpeeps whiten the sky as they wheel by hundreds over the salt ponds. The small boy shoots his first shotgun. It is a muzzle-loader and longer than he is. He rams in five fingers of powder and shot, takes aim at the spoonbill, pulls the trigger. The earth comes up and hits him at the back of his head, and he sees many stars. But his brothers praise his shooting. An the spoonbill gasps and dies.
Horse-mackerel day, and the boy holds his breath far out at sea watching his father hold one end of a line with seven hundred pounds of mad fish on the other. A vast tail beats the boat's side, but the fish dies of a dart in the water and dyes the sea red. Blackberries load the pasture, but it takes a boy in iron pants to pick them. The boy walks barefoot to church, carrying the new shoes earned out of blackberries in his hand. He sits down by the road, puts them on, and goes squeaking and proud into church with no blemish on them.
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