By the way, we had a hired man once on Lost Paradise who looked very much like a halibut. He was flat and broad and dragged low on the earth in his prodigious pants; his mouth was definitely off-center; and his eyes, my father always said, were much too close together and bulged. He wasn't a very good hired man and he wasn't with us long. We couldn't trust him; he was too lazy. Maybe halibuts in their hefty maturity grow lazy and untrustworthy, too, for all I know. But I often wondered, when the man was still with us, if he didn't maybe have concealed about him somewhere a miraculous tenderness like that of a baked halibut, or didn't at least have peachstones carved into baskets somewhere in his voluminous pants that he might like to give to small boys. He wasn't with us long enough for me to find out. But maybe he was like that interesting toad which, like adversity itself, “... ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”
Anyway, the halibut does. He is as sweet as adversity all right. And he wears in that plug-ugly, flat head of his a meat whose taste defies accurate description but is a cross between the tenderest lean and the most opulent fat, between milk and honey, and better than both combined. It is one more instance of the ugly-duckling motif in a world where one should never judge by appearances.
People prize the toothsomeness of halibut. But the parts of him they cat are the parts of his gross body, laminated layers of lean tissue that taste about as much like the lean fat marvel of his head as white-pine shavings taste like the breast of a this-year's plover. People eat the southern hemisphere of a fish that wears an Eden for the apex of his northern. They eat plain stalk, pure lumber. The flower of this fish is his triangular headpiece.
So, whenever January winds blow and the driven show heaps up its vast wind roses around the walls of my house. I am back instantly to my boyhood on that old island farm where I was raised. I am sitting in the kitchen in the middle of the odor of the roasted heads of my father's halibut. And my vigor and youth return to me.
Those midwinter nights are among the sweetest nights I remember. I knew well what delight was a-making. For in the afternoon my mother had sent me out to the woodshed to spear up for her with a pitchfork three-four halibut heads from the hogshead they were frozen in.
My father bought the heads by the hogshead wholesale from Boston, and he left them out there in the woodshed to freeze up solid and keep through the winter. Five hogsheads were his margin of safety. A hard winter should have more. My father got the heads cheap. For even that early, degeneration in eating had set in; people had begun to shy away from the fish heads of their fathers and to eat only the bodies, on the downward way to their present complete obsession with vitamins and fondness far electrocuted pulpwoods. So, for a song almost, my sire was able to lay in enough barrels of heads to keep a big and growing family in muscle and mirth all winter long. Then was lift by the barrel there in our woodshed.
I knew what was up those bright January days. I brought in the halibut heads, stiff as planks with crystals of frost, and my mother thawed them out in running water, dug out their salt, cold eyes, trimmed off their gills, scaled the skin with the carving knife, put them into her deep bake-pan greased over with pork fat and with just enough water to cover their lowest levels, and clapped them into hex hot oven in the midafternoon. She crisscrossed the fish heads with long strips of salt pork, the touchstone of all fine New England cookery. The Plymouth Rock of salt pig was the foundation of this roasted meat of Eden. It put the salt sea back into the fish, and it brought out and pointed up the flavor of wisdom in those deep-sea heads. My mother ran up to go with them a bag of stuffing made of stale cracker crumbs mixed in milk with chopped onion, salt and pepper, sage, and bayberry leaves. She painted the heads of the fish with a paste of flour and corn meal and salt.
Then my mother crowded the stove full of beechwood and sat back in her rocker and let pork and ocean and nature have their way in the soft, fierce radiation of beech. All through the afternoon, the heady aroma of halibut spread through the iron door of the oven, through the plaster and laths of the kitchen walls, through the zero air on Lost Paradise Farm, through the thick spruces of Back Cove, and into our marrow as we slid down Old Orchard Hill on our sleds. I swear we could smell that halibut savor way off there in the January afternoon that blazed like an old Sandwich plate. I know I could, for I smell it yet, through all these fifty years!
When the sun's golden cartwheel rolled low on earth and slanted down through the spruces, we came home all hollow with hunger. The stars were beginning to come out over us. our feet crunched on the snow, the lamplight came out the farmhouse windows to meet us, and we trooped into the kitchen, breathing clouds of frost from our quivering noses. The halibut heads were brought smoking from the oven, we boys and girls fell into our phalanxes on each side of the table, and my mother ladled out the meat.
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