The uncle of this month of Pisces is Cephus. And the feasts of far oceans — porpoises' livers from off Pernambuco and flying fish dipped up off the equator, as well as home haddock, cod, and mackerel—have made him twelve roundings of the Horn, five roundings of Good Hope, and familiarity and friendships in all the ports of Christendom. Even though the bay ice were three feet thick, even though the drifts of winter had walled the farmhouse up to the eaves. Uncle Cephus would he enough to keep this farm nautical. For Cephus is of the rare genus of deep-sea men who used to be so numerous along this coast that they were the only men you met. Though he might be sailing a sloop and fishing for lobsters, a deep-sea man was as much at home in Batavia and Rio as he was in Bethel Foreside or Prince' Gut. He was a round-world citizen, and his knees were sprung and bent from years of taking the seas of the South Pacific or the Gulf of the Lion. His habitat was a house that floated around the globe.
Cephus still does float, come ice, come snow—at least every high tide. For this last of the old genus lives on the last schooner he once sailed in far waters. A ship's bunk is the only bed he knows, and he has never closed his eyes on land for seventy years. He brought his last vessel right home with him and holed up forever right in her. So, though he is frozen right into bay ice three months of the twelve, he still travels on his own deck. Not horizontally but perpendicularly. When flood tide lifts the white surface of the bay, Uncle Cephus and his schooner rise with it, and when the tide goes down, they go down with it, too. His life has sea-motion still, and the magic of moving water is his foundation. He cannot exist on a thing that stays still like a farm. So he lives off the farm, within hail of it, in a home that is a house on waves.
Having an Uncle Cephus is like having an uncle named Eternity,
Time has ruined Cephus' calling. The goods of the earth go on oceans by steam now. Sails have vanished. But old sea captains stay sea captains to the end of the story. And this man with the mustache blown wide to port and starboard by all the winds on both sides of the equator keeps the boys of this seagoing farm from becoming soft landlubbers. He has pounced on the oldest and brightest eyed of all the farm's boys, Peter. Peter spends as many nights and days of winter on board his uncle's old three-master as he spends in the dormered room where four brothers sleep packed together like sardines in a can. This land boy goes to sea ever)' other night.
On the schooner Peter has a bunk all to himself, the top one, and far into the night he lies on the mystery of living water and recites—to his uncle who lies alert below, with an old man's alertness and sense of the shortness of time—long lessons of the sea this sea uncle has drilled into him. He boxes the thirty-two stations of the compass for his captain below. He declaims all the catalogues of sailing craft—bark, barkentine, brig, brig-antine, hermaphrodite brig—up to the three-masted, square-rigged proper ship. He runs through the wilderness of names of sails, of the lines and spars and yards of a vessel. His uncle below takes him around the world with him, into every strait and Inlet and port. And the tired twelve-year-old drops off to sleep at last, feeling the world as a vast sailing thing, breasting the rollers of lime, with all the stars hung like lanterns on yardarms too wide to see. Peter goes to dreams, feeling the lovely rise and fall of the planet as if drifts along the whitecaps of remote nebulae.
The masts of the schooner above the farm boy are bare now. All the sails once on them have rotted away and down to the four winds. But Peter can bend and belly them out in his mind, and he knows what each last bit of canvas has to do.
So, as long as Peter lives, this little farm, where most of the work is done by hand and for love rather than tonnage, will still have roots in the vast, roots in Java and the Spice Isles of the remote Pacific. and it will go to sea around the globe still; the day of its travels will not be done. Thanks to his Uncle Cephus, Peter will be his own ancestor, and there will always be in his walk the lilt and sway of the walk of a sailor, for he is sailing a schooner that stands still but still moves to the tune of the tides and the winds. Old sea terms will come out in his speech to his life's end, to link him wherever he goes, whatever he does, to the maker of men and the mother of civilization, the sea.
Pinterest
