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.
Grandpa teaches the boy where to look for the hazelnuts, two by two, in their prickly pods. Goldenrod sets the world on fire. Grandpa is sad to see it. One more year gone. The men split the hake and haddock and dry them in the sun on the fish flakes. Eel skins are dried for the hinges to flails. The dog catches a woodchuck at last, but it is only an up-country cousin of John Henry's and won't be missed. New potatoes come from the garden. The boy sleeps little at night on account of the mercury leaves he has waded in.
Now bays are goosefleshed by mackerel, and they take them by boatloads, the nets groan with them. They salt them down by the barrel. The boy dreams of the chevroned tinker mackerel, he tastes the fish in his dreaming.
Virgo's the sign. The boy sees Molasses-Curls in her father's boat, passing, and he loves her now more than ever. The boat is black with gold stripe, an longer and faster than Father's. She is the only child, and maybe the boat will come with her! He is promised a trip to the city, but fogs set in again. August means fogs, the Old Farmer's Almanac says so: He knew how Roman legions looked, for he Had seen the Maine coast fogs march in from sea For many years now, in August days.
Winds are forever south, south, south.
All at once, the wind falls. The arrow of the vane hangs still, then it leaps and points at the Pole. The north win rises like a shout, trees turn white under it. That night the Dead Men dance, as Grandpa said they would, hand in hand, circle over circle, millions of them, faint and flickering, over the northern spruces. They make the night like day, and a boy holds in his breath to see these ol ghosts of the Indians making holiday late at night. The grandfather sighs: the year's backbone is broken, it is goodbye summer. An old man has not so many summers left to him, and he is sorry to see one go.
It is the month of hoes and high weeds, a hazy month, and a tired one. But it fills the bins, it fills the barrels, it fills the jars and cellars, and men have much to thank it for.