The oldest boy gets up starry-eyed and has to be coaxed to cat his fried mush with maple sugar at breakfast, for he has fallen head over heels into his first love affair, and such things COOK hard at twelve. She is the daughter of the neighboring seagoing farm. Her name is Lucy. Peter has to haul her sled, with her on it, up all the hills on the coast and steer her down on all of them. He has callouses on his bands and where he sits. for his corduroys have scorched him there from miles on miles of tugging and walking.
School days, Peter has to go ahead over the reach of the Atlantic Ocean with his axe and try the ice to see if it is safe. The rest of the school children come after him, Indian file, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, in sequence of age, the pint sized youngest scholar at the tail, on their way to culture and the country school. All the children carry poles twice their height, to hold them up in the dark Atlantic in case they break through. And they all use the poles to vault over the evil, dark tide-rips of open water when they come to the edge of the mainland.
And for all the salt and smoked and frozen fish and flesh of deer, pig, and sreer, there is another fresh meat from the ocean. Uncle Timothy leads the boys out on the marsh that slants towards the deep. He is master magician at this harvesting. The boys follow the convex importance of his swinging seat. Timothy is outfitted like old Neptune himself, not only with the nine-inch mustache that rattles with icicles under his red nose, but with Neptune's trident, and one longer than the Greek god bore, with seven tines, nut three, and each barbed. Mow he knows where to poke his spear into the soggy, frozen mud is a mystery only he and Clod understand. He makes one or two trial pokes, but two are enough. At the second he trembles as he rams his barbed pole home and hisses through his fringe of icicles. “That feels good!” And when he comes up with his spear, two cels, surprised in an underground summer, squirm like mad in the cold air. The boys open the sack, and Uncle Timothy just pours aggrieved eels into it, thrust after thrust, until the sack bulges.
That night the supper is a fresh piece of the kingdom of heaven. It is the supper of the month and a supper in a million. Mother runs up both a kettleful of eels smothered in thick pork gravy and a frying pan of them, cut into sections and browned in deep pork fat, showing creamy at all their hatch marks. Uncle Timothy presides at the table and stows away seven of the biggest eels, section by section, with one of mother's cream o' tartar biscuits making a buffer between the sections of chevroned eel in his ample interior. The lengths of smothered eels suspended in the rich cream of pork gravy melt away in the boys' mouths, and they have only to blow out the bones. And the light of great joy outshines the evening's high lamp.
So under a small roof, the great crops of ocean, meats that run wild on the coast mountains, join the tame staples of potatoes and turnips and corn and pork and veal. Peter lies his young length and reads his book of January, Andersen's Tales, and loves the wind that mourns around the eaves of the house. The goose hangs high. Uncle Timothy sings fragile love songs to his sturdy guitar. Father bursts into stories that are like something out of Homer, for seagoing farmers are often this world's best storytellers. Boys sun their backs to the fire on the hearth where the birchwood crackles and explodes. Girls drift off to sleep in mother's arms. The windows are spattered all over with panting January stars.
And Uncle Timothy, between love songs and eels, rocks right across the room, brings up at the wall in surprise, gets up with his chair clasped CO bis person, goes back to his point of origin, spanks himself down, and starts right over again.
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