This is the month of weather. The weather acts up, as February has always acted up from the beginning of time. Aizzard howls through the bare poles of the “Mary Louise” over the head of her captain and her crew of one, who is Peter, in short, stout breeches. The ship' company feel, without straining their imagination, that they are in the Horn gales and that the Horn ice gnaws at the hull outside. It snows and snows and snows and snows, with squalls of rain for variety. But every rime it snows, Cap'n Cephus whitens his pants with his ship's flour and stacks up a high pile of spider-sized flapjacks for his hungry and bottomless crew, who eats his way to the bottom of the stack, lubricating the layers of hot flapjacks in him with pork fat and slow, cold molasses. And the boy goes on learning how to sail a craft whose sailing days are done.
Peter has to do some chores besides keeping Uncle Cephus' cabin shipshape and Bristol-fashion. He has pigs to feed and calves to water and wean, when he cannot bribe younger brothers to do these chores for him. But Peter handles his calves and pigs as if they were e-bodied seamen, and he allows for the roll of a ship when he puts on his breeches in the morning and slips them off at night in his landlocked, rigid home.
And even in the depths of winter this whole farm still goes to sea. Peter's father, this farmer who catches lobsters and herring, goes out with his horse sled and his boys at the ebb of the tide and harvests the best fertilizer in the world for his turnips and his beans, the mussel mud of the bay's bottom. He drives out his smoking team by lantern light, deep in the night, when all his neighbors are asleep. For this is the man's one agricultural secret he will not share with friends. He and his short-trousered company glide out on the quiet bay. He cuts out cakes of the salt ice, and he and Peter, Andrew, James, and John lake their shovels and dredge up the butterflies of millions of defunct mussels, the rich clay, and heap the horse sled high with it. They go home over the frozen ocean, with the horses breathing hard in the lantern light, and spread the sea dressing over the snow on their gardens.
Later snows and the spring rains will sweeten this muck and wash its salt away. And where this ocean fatness seeps into the soil there will emerge flawless globes of rutabagas, purple in their northern hemispheres, ivory in their southern, and bright, varnished kidney beans of a size and flavor they would never have achieved had they been land vegetables merely. It will be one more marriage of the soil and the sea. of the salt and the sweet, that this farm is famous for. The sea gets into its beans as the sea gets into its deep and fragrant wild briar roses that make flower gardens of all its waste places in the month of July.
The farmer lets his oldest son Peter navigate the fiery horses to land on this winter night of the farm's fertility rite, and the boy walks with feet as wide as his father's as he brings his horses and his load over the humps of the title rifts, and slants up the slanting farm like the master mariner he has been trained to be.
It is lucky for young Peter that he docs have the music and the wisdom of the sea in his golden head this cold, second month. He needs it for consolation. For the girl he wore out his corduroys for last month, pulling her up all the hills of two farms, forsakes him now for his bitter rival in love, the black-haired Ben Boody. It happens on St. Valentine's Day. At the school party-Ben gives the light Lucy a valentine which has a heart on it twice the size of the heart on Peter's valentine. It is as big as a beef heart. And looks about like one, thinks Peter. As if the size of hearts had anything to do with the love in them!
But the fickle Lucy drinks in the vast organ of affection Ben has sent her, and her smiles are all for him now. And the beef heart does have nice paper lacework around it. No better than Peter could have got his sister Ann to cut out for him, if he had guessed Ben was going to play unfair and get his sister to help him in his love life. But there it is. The fat is in the fire. The beef heart is in the saddle. Peter' love cools off in him, as he sits and thinks how feather-minded all women are—except his mother.
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