Mother makes a Scottish plaid of these fish that father and the boys bring home, crisscrossing them with strips of fat pork and baking them in a hot oven forty minutes till they come out in sheets and no one can say where land-nectar of pork leaves off and sea-nectar of fish begins. Uncle Timothy has to have one spiderful done in , butter for himself, as baking aggravates his loneliness, and he delicately downs each lost mother of smelts, holding her aloft by her tail and swallowing her down, head first, fins, guts, and all, until he has the whole spiderful safe under his generous belt—which he wears for looks only, since his voluminous pants are held up in the ancient tradition, by purple silk galluses with tucks in them.
Crops of fire arc being gathered outdoors on this white farm so seemingly quiet. Each morning the high woods ring with axes. White birches shiver and totter, spruces and popples thunder down. Piles of cord wood line the wood road, and the woodshed loses its light as the tiers rise above the windows, The back of the small boy John aches, and his mind grows blisters as he thinks of filling the wood box under the Old Farmer's Almanac, and under Uncle Timothy, all winter long. For the wood box is Untie Timothy's throne.
Inside, the kitchen hums. Mother is roasting the venison that ran among the family's hills last fall, battening the wild lean meat with blankets of salt pork as she turns it on the spit in the fireplace great-great-great-grind father built out of the farm's own clay. Ann and Jane and Molly, the girls of the house, are molding popcorn into balls, with hot butter and hot molasses, balls large enough to keep Uncle Timothy quiet for a half hour as he works them over under his awning of a mustache, tawny with molasses and the sunshine of fifty years and whitened by fifty January snows.
Every kind of fish is laid down in the cellar. This ice-locked, landbound, boatless farm still lives out of the deep cupboard of the sea. Folios of slack-salted cod and hake arc brought up now, soaked, steamed, boiled, and garnished with the traditional Coast white sauce, made of ten tablespoons of (lour worked into a half pound of melted butter, thickened with a quart of milk, sprinkled full of sections of three hard-boiled eggs. The soft ivory sauce is poured over the transfigured fish. Or folios of salt cod arc shredded up fine and chopped into equal parts of cold, boiled potatoes to make the Sabbath morning fish cakes, fried in pork fat, which are one of the foundations of New England virtue and an iron shield against the cold.
Down-cellar, too, there are big crocks of potted herring, laid down with cloves in vinegar, after being baked in a slow oven half a September day last year. And mackerel are salted away by the barrel, to come upstairs now, be soaked out, and make a fine meal.
Peter and Andrew make fine feather-stitching on the deep snow as they go to the smokehouse and bring back long sticks of smoked red herring, fitted open mouth to open mouth and spawny belly to belly, backtracking to the kitchen. Uncle Timothy dangles these “Kennebec turkeys” by their dried tails pinched under the stove cover, and pulls them out all aflame and filling the night with festive odors of herring flesh and popple wood, and he starts eating their filets with the fire and smoke still on them. and ignites his patriarchal mustache and has to extinguish it with his hands. And the scent of Uncle Timothy mingles with the scent of herring in the smoky room.
Out in the barn, between the high mows of hay, the keel of this year's Hampton dory is gleaming, and every minute the menfolks can spare from their eating they are fining the oak ribs to this backbone. Peter runs with the latest rib steaming hot from his mother's kettle and plumps it in Uncle Timothy's surprised lap, and his uncle has to do a Highland fling to cool his mid-section off.
Of course, a small farm like this one. so large in boys and girls, cannot be kept in by the snow that has drifted deep. Children run over the hills with their sleds hugged to them, thump down bellybunt on the crust, and go flashing down their steep farm and out a whole mile On the while Atlantic. They take their play hard, as country children do, they slide and skate serious-eyed and breathe out their breaths like pale scarves about their cheeks. They tunnel the drift back of the barn, make an igloo of it, build a fire under the translucent dome, and the smoke goes out over the white world and the smooth white sea.
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