The meat had to be ladled. For lo! a miracle had happened. The three-four fish heads had melted together, flesh had slid from bone, and there was a brown pudding to be spooned into our plates. a pudding with the smell of holiday upon it. What we bit into was not fat. lean, gristle, or gravy. It was all these at once, and all these transfigured. It was hot. and it was heaven. There was a tacky white substance, like powdered milk, all shot through the mess. Even the bones were edible and delicious. They had softened, and we took them up in our fingers and crunched and chewed deep into them to get the honey of the sea out of their every pore. The smaller children greased their faces and noses and bodies till they looked like infant Eskimos at a Bering Sea picnic. And there was not one of us who finished the meal without a glistening chin.
When we had got down to the last bones of our feast, we had enough fire of life in us to take us through the next day. stacking up the cordwood in the beethwoods or coasting down Misery Hill and out across the bay a hundred times. We were full of hear and heartiness which not even a twemy-belowzero day could make a dent in. We were pure liquid lire.
Suppose now you catch fire from this boyhood flame I write about It will be next to impossible for you nowadays to match that old feast we had. I know. I have tried. You go down to the fish market and say you want to buy a halibut bead. The man there will smile and shake his head. He will tell you that halibut heads are no longer on the market. Good reason why. They are all bought up instantly in Boston or in Gloucester on their arrival there from the sea. The minute the catch comes in, agents of the makers of vitamin pills or of cod-liver oil and cod emulsions for babies and old folks snatch up every head. The rich oil in the halibut's headpiece goes into bottled sunshine and potions and pills that keep dark winter days full of sunshine.
But when I was a boy, I wallowed in that sunshine openly and directly and smacked my lips over that sunlight from twenty fathoms down in the Atlantic, over the roasted halibut heads that came to our salt-water farm table with gaiety and lights around them like the majestic boar's heads of the medieval manor hall.
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