Comes in fresh gales and leaves miles high in the sky. All the leaf trees have caught afire now, and the red and golden flames of them fill the woods with vast light. Grandpa can read his newspaper without his spectacles by the July sunlight coming out of an October tree as he sits under the boughs at twilight. The air runs wine, the earth runs amber cider, and the sea is a fairyland of whitecaps. Surf booms on the reefs, an Easter lilies stand up at the ocean's edge. The days are like the insides of Sandwich-glass plates and all beaded with light.
Now apples drum the world, and the small son shakes down a heavy rain on the big son's back and Grandfather's bald head. He gets his breeches smacked on their blind side for his trouble. The big one catches the small one bending and stings him hot on his seat with a nodhead.
The apple now has its day in the kitchen, and the month's feast is the deep pork-apple pie. Mother peels the Northern Spies and covers the floor with fragrant S's and C's and O's. She pares the white fruit and gets out her deepest iron skillet. First a cushion of piecrust, then a layer of apples, a lacing of fat salt pork in strips, then apples, then pork, then apples. She sprinkles on brown sugar and cinnamon thick, dashes in a splash of molasses from the old flowered jug, and laces all with quick strings of honey. She claps on the thick top crust, notches a flock of flying geese across it, and sprinkles on cold water, to make it flaky. She claps the pie into a hot oven. Apple juice, pork fat, honey, sugar, and cinnamon fuse. Mother takes out one of the Delectable Mountains, sets it before the menfolks at table, and they carve deep in glory!
The sign is Scorpio, the Secrets. The small boy broods over the picture and the place the arrow points to on the Naked Man in the Old Farmer's Almanac; he closes the book and feels guilty when his grandsire comes into the kitchen to read about the coming weather. But Scorpio, too, on this coast is the big-clawed lobster. He sculls the bay at his tastiest now, he comes home by hundreds in the reach boat, with his dangerous jaws made fast with wedges of white pine. The fisherman moves his hand among living shears, he picks the lobster up with finger and thumb just back of his stickpin eyes. The big boy handles the reach boat as well as his father.
Now nights are full of shooting stars. The northern lights burn below the Great Dipper. Never so many stars as now; they dust the heavens deep from the north to the south. The baby cuts his third tooth. Grandma dreams of a friend, dust these fifty years in the graveyard. There will be news. The father leaves clamming and opens the land with his clam hoe; the potatoes dot the furrows for miles, and a small boy has a cricke back from so much bending and picking up the big ones. The farmer brings his dory home filled with apples to the gunwales, and the boy sits on the top of them and sings. The cider press pours out a dark silk cloth of running honey.
The yellow dog digs for woodchucks on the edge of the garden. Yellow pumpkins and squashes appear everywhere now the potatoes and bean vines are torn up. The hired man piles up a pyramid of hot suns at the garden's center. A pumpkin that a boy cannot get from the ground, that is twice the size he is through the butts, the man balances on one wide palm as though it were an apple.
The rabbits are taking to the swamp where the grass is still green and tender. The crows are falling quiet and are taking to the deeper woods. Grandpa is hugging the stove closer mornings. For there is an edge on the air, and the frost is white on all hills at sunup. The last golden eyes of the frostflowers close even in the shelter of the briars. The rose apples begin to shine everywhere, now the rose leaves are withering. The white alder puts on her berries for Christmas.
On the marsh the ivory cranberries blush deep red on both cheeks because of the heavy frost-fall. The small boy goes deep into the bog in his rubber boots to get the largest and best of the berries. Mother and the girls bring them home by the basketful, and Grandma puts them into the tub of water to pick out the floaters. The fattening geese will have a good sauce to go with their meat. The small boy mashes up the small tur nips that are boiled in the outdoors kettle, and the geese eat till their crops make them one-sided.
Bees make no sound now on the meadows. The earth smells of frost of a morning and of dying leaves of a night. The smoke of great burning lingers through all the afternoons. The little dog comes home early to his place under the warm cookstove.
When the vast sun rolls behind the spruces, the cock partridge swells on his lichened stump with a ruff of burnishe bronze. He bathes in the dying fire of the sun, his feathers run with their own fire. His eyes gleam like sparks. He will take the sun's place, he vows, and his speckled fat spouse and their offspring believe him. Then a twig snaps, the cock's ruff falls, he grows slim as a serpent. All the partridges freeze, and they hear the stealthy steps coming. Then the fox that goes on his hind legs and carries the lightning in a black bough comes in sight, and a standing small fox and a tame yellow fox behind him. The cock turns to thunder, roars into the sky, keeping a birch between him an the hunter. The lightning stabs, but he whirls away safe. Then the hen goes up in her thunder, but the lightning stick is double, fire blazes red, and she falls in blood and torn feathers. And the sun goes into the earth.
Ducks fill the bay. The farmer gets up at the crack of day, his shotgun booms from the blind he and the boys have built, and the winged coot falls plumb to the water. The small boy's eyes are like two holes burned in a blanket with his being up most of the night, but he loves it. His father lets him shoot the twelve-gauge, the sheldrake takes off in a great squawking. The boy is proud of his black-and-blue shoulder. The big boy has three black duck for his day's work. Mother picks pin feathers out with tweezers; there are new feathers for her featherbed.
Brush fires gleam. The nuts are falling for the frost. The small boy comes home twice his regular size through his breeches. The butternuts take hours to get out whole, but the beechnuts come out easy from their triangles of brown. The beans are stacked for the threshing. The popcorn is hung up braided by its husks for a winter's feasting.
Water's frozen in the pail, Heap the corncrib, swing the flail!
The fall plowing opens the land to the healing of frost, the days grow solemn still, smoke stands straight up to heaven. Little pools wrinkle with thin ice of a morning.
The small boy sets his traps now, an he reeks of skunk when he sits by the hot stove at school. The teacher sends the boys out to drive the skunk away from the schoolhouse. The bees fall quiet in the hive. The boy carries a pumpkin almost as large as he is through the hazel dusk, he puts a head all fiery eyes at the window of the Molasses Girl. She shrieks, but she comes out smiling an takes the boy in to a loaf of spice gingerbread. Little ghosts in short pants and Mother's sheets troop the spruces with jack-o'-lanterns grinning with triangular teeth and square eyes. The ol man shivers in his lean coat, for more than the cold. He brings home the last ear of corn the gleaners missed in the gloaming.
It is October, and the harvest house and home.