Comes in a morning all opals and turquoises and dewdrops strung like pearls on the Queen Anne's lace. The path the early fisherman takes to his boat shows dark in the watery grass. The crickets fiddle faster and faster in the dusty weeds, for they know their time grows short. There is a feeling of something about to happen, in the woods, on the water. But the days come in golden and blue, as though they would always last. The sign is the leveled Scales, and the year hangs at a delicate balance. Frostflowers follow the goldenrod, they star the ledges with mauve stars. The jay screams in the sumac.
Fried eels make a good dish for the time, for they take but little fire, and they taste their best at this season, the horseshoe crabs being in high flavor. The small boy provides a large family, cracking up the crabs, baiting the traps with them, and stoppling up the wood bottle with the pine cover. He pulls up knots of them, holds them by the heads, smears himself with the gurry. But he skins them to a clean azure and runs to the house. Mother fries them, with chevrons slashed in their sides, in deep pork fat in the spider. It is the feast of eels.
One day, all at once, the birds flock up by hundreds, they wheel higher and higher, turn, and are gone for good to the sea and the south. Grandma starts her fall knitting and shoes, the whole clan in the thickest of wool. The woods of a sudden fall quiet. Only the partridge sounds, beating a faraway thunder. Now it is school once again. The bell rings loud at the window. Boys in unfamiliar shoes walk the deep dusty roads with good manners. Butter would not melt in their mouths. The little boy squeaks at his shoes, he walks with woebegone face. The small dog mourns on the headland, howling his heart out north, towards him. Fringed gentians unroll lace bluer than sky in the yellowed grass of the swales. The fisherman tars his seine, drags it glistening out of the kettle, and stretches it out black on the heads of the late red clover.
The small boy walks again with his girl. He entices her back of the stone wall and kisses her. She kisses back two for one. They go with their arms around each other, and their feet feel nothing but clouds. There comes a yell, a grinning boy hid in the alders has seen them. “Girl-boy!” he cries. The small boy puts down his Arithmetic in the ruts. He is calm as an adder. He hits the boy square on the nose. The other boy is a good head taller. The blood pours out of the taunter. They clinch, they roll in the road. The girl sees her love from the oddest angles. He is all breeches and bulges. He curves like an eel in his clothes, fights and says nothing. They stand, they fall; the little boy is now under. But he gets to his feet and lets go with both fists. His belly shows through his torn blouse. The bigger boy breaks and runs for it. The small boy dusts off his seat. A tooth is gone in the middle of his smile. But it's a first one, there'll be another. The girl kisses him unabashed and helps him dust off his breeches. It is for life now. Both of them know it. The afterglow comes, the woods run pure gold, an the twilight is flutes of crickets. A small boy and small girl go home through a vast glory.
One sudden day a maple stands in flames, and there is white on the north side of all things. The crickets are hushed for good. Next morning the frost is white over all the fields.
Now it is smelt, at the ebb low an flood low they net them. The older man stands at the dory's stern and pays out the seine, corks one way, leads the other; the younger man rows with braced feet; they cut off the flow of the channel. They leave the net quiet, it loops with the tide. They loosen one end from its stake and row fast across to the other. They draw the loop smaller and smaller; it comes in a boatful of silver. The small boy dances for joy in dancing bluefish, in herring, in capelins, in smelt, up to his crotch. There are eels, and he catches a pipefish. By daylight, by lantern light, and by moonlight, they sort the fish over on the wharf. Big smelt in one box, small in the other. There is every kind of fish hissing in the spider up at the house. The men cart their fish to the town and the train for Boston and brains.
The boy makes torches of the cattails by dipping them in kerosene; he lights up the night and burns four holes in his breeches. The baby goes into a standing stool his father has made. Grandpa looks at the squirrel's fur, after the big boy has stripped it off; it is thick, it will be a har winter. The small boy finds fractions hard, but geography is right up his alley.
A night comes when the house shakes, a gale blows the elm trees double. It is here. The farmer knows it even in his sleep, and groans. The small boy wakes up and wonders at it. It is the sun crossing the far-off equator.
Three things there are which never fail: Taxes, death, and the Line Gale.
It is the end of green and growing. In the morning the air is snowed with all the maple leaves of the world, they fly off and away like sparks of red an yellow fire.
Now the catch is herring. The reach boat goes far up the hill of the Atlantic and comes home down to the water's edge with the slim fish. Now the boy must lug popple wood down to the smokehouse and blow up the coals to make smoke till his eyes are as red as the herring's.
It is the month of turning corners on time and all things. Yet the month means a full smokehouse, a full cellar, and a fat belly.
Pinterest
