Our log opens with the farm locked up with the bolts and hinges of winter's ice and snow, locked up hard and white. Some of its acres are sealed under the bay ice. The crows have buried themselves deep in the frosted hemlocks, and the gulls are hibernating along the frozen furrows of plowland. digging for roots and drowsy snails. The farm has shrunken and dwindled in size. The boats are all under boards or brush at the coves, and the farm's lanterns go no more to sea at night. Cut off from the tides under the bay ice. this farm, you would swear, has become just a usual farm, with boys bedding down big-eyed cows or piling up cordwood their father has cut in the echoing woods, with his axe sounding like four axes in the deep quiet of the afternoons. You would swear this farm is an ordinary farm with lights at its windows at four o'clock and girls of the ordinary farm kind playing with dolls or learning to crinkle up the crust at the edge of a pie under mother's watchful eye. So you would swear.
Yet you would he swearing a lot of lies, For this little farm is lots bigger than its breeches even when the year is bitter cold and blinding white. You look again, you look sharp, and you will see that there are more farmhouses than just the single old white one, hardly to be told from the drifted snow, on the hill.
There is housekeeping going on warmly elsewhere on this farm. There are two tiny houses full of life down on the wide creek where it empties into the sea. Uncle Timothy is in one house, and he fills it full with his vast body and his vast cloud of pipe smoke. The other house holds the well built father of this farm and four well-built boys, named after older but not keener fishermen than they are—Peter. Andrew, James, and John. The house is small, the man is large, and the four plump boys have hard work fitting into into it, but they do fit, as small excited boys can fit in together, when they have to.
Inside the house housekeeping is going full steam ahead—crackling twigs of spruce sending out sparkling heat, stories that bring the deep blue into a boy's eyes and make his wide ears wag, a bottle of bourbon that brings summer to .a stout man's cheeks and good nature to his mind in spite of small boys' knees and elbows in his back and sides, and acrid adventure is cooking on the tiny stove which is cooking the lot of them on only one side at a time.
The floor of the house is a funny one. One floorboard is up, five to six fishlines are hanging on a stick there, and lines go down into the deep green gloom of the cellar. That cellar is water, sweet at the ebb, salt at the flood, and good provisions are down there if you can hook them.
Every so often Peter straightens up like a spring, his arm goes up, and into the cozy twilight of the small house comes a silver sliver, curling and rankling with life. The father twitches at his mustache and twinkles with his eyes, and greases up the frying pan with a hunk of salt pork. Andrew bobs up with another smelt puffed out with golden spawn that shows through the delicate scales of the slender fish. James bobs up, another smelt. John bobs up, another. Like clockwork. Peter, Andrew, James, and John.
Don't think a farmer on such a lean little farm as this is incapable of four such spry sons so close together. He is often capable of six or seven. This farmer has still another son, just crawling, up at the house, and three daughters that fit fair in between the four young fishermen here. For this man is fed by a good portion of the ocean as well as by seven acres of corn and beans and potatoes and ten to twelve acres of hay.
The boys bob up continuously. The man tosses the smelts alive and curling in crescents into his hot fat, eyes. fins, innards, and all. The farmer smiles and tosses each son a smelt singed brown in pork fat. Peter. Andrew, James, and J0I1 Eanch boy downs his fish, head first, and returns to his line.
These male housekeepers are feasting themselves on the first fresh fish of the new year, caught through the ice, plump with the eggs of millions of would-be citizens of the sea Hut they are generous males; they take a basket full of the most delicate of all ocean's harvests to mother, the girls, at Uncle Timothy. For Uncle Timothy comes home with , his smelts in him. fried, and two hours before father and the boys. For Uncle Timothy, the uncle of January, is much too heavy for such light work as hand-lining fish that are only the length and breadth of his middle finger for anybody but himself. He is the hogshead of uncles, not much given motion in the winter save with his jaws. He is the hibernating, house uncle, and goes out only on the fairest of days when smelts are running or when he scents eels. He is the perennial bachelor among uncles, though widowed Aunt Ell has been hoping for years and has worried about Uncle Timothy's loneliness.
Pinterest
