To be sure, there are ham dumplings the night after that tragedy at school Over the big heart. Ham is the dish of this month. Home-grown Coast hams that have the salt and sparkle of the Atlantic in them somehow and the sweetness of the farm' own popple trees worked right into their dusky meat. Peter put the popple taste there. He cured his eyes till they were like two burnt holes in aanket, lying on his belly andowing up the popplewood embers in the smokehouse last fall, He has had ham slices an inch thick, fried and eaten with flapjacks sweetened with the dark sea honey gathered by their Own bees from the marsh rosemary growing in the flood tide's way. He has eaten ham with hot slabs of his mother's cruy johnnycake. But this dark night of lost love Peter comes home to his mother's ham-bone soup. The bones and marrow and gristles of many hams have been saved up by mother. Now they come smoking to the table with the family dumplings wrapping them round like cloths of cream-colored velvet. The dumplings are only three cupfuls of flour seasoned by a spoonful of sale and mixed up with water, rolled out thin on the breadboard and cooked for twenty minutes with the thick brown ham butts, bones, and skins of the Lord knows how many hams. The dumplings have soaked up all the heartiest flavors of the smoked meat and marrow. The tough ham rinds come out as something that melts in the mouth and slips down into a man's sense of prosperity. They arc of the quintessence of pig.
Peter keeps abreast of Uncle Timothy over these velvet family heirlooms of pastry, he keeps a weather eye on the last one in the bottom of the tureen. He wins out by a hair and gets it for his own, to heal his love hurts. But once he has it on his plate, he decides his eyes are bigger than his belly and magnanimously slashes it in two and gives half to his uncle. Sinewed and stiffened with ham dumplings, Peter goes with the lilt back in his stride out over the white bay to hear Uncle Cephus tell the story of the ghost ship of Falmouth, Lying tingling in his upper bunk and shaken by the vibrations of old Cephus' bass voice below, he forgets love completely and sails into sleep and ten times around the Horn before dawn.
That isn't the last of the ham, either. Peter's mother has other tricks up her sleeve for the debris of it. She has saved up some of the most marrowful of the leg bones for her pea soup. She simmers the bones for hours with split peas on the back of the Wood-Bishop-Bangor stove, she simmers them for days. And when the soup is poured out, so thick a soupspoon will stand upright in it, the ham bones have united with the peas, and marrow fat has transformed mere legumes into something from a novel by Dickens.
Pease porridge hot
Pease porridge cold!
And cold is even better than hot, as Feter and his brethren discover when mother takes them by surprise and serves them with her pea soup three nights later. For their mother's very told pea soup, solidified by the gelatinous nectar in old ham rinds and stoutened by rich marrow from the hind leg bones of the family's pigs, can be sliced just like so much green cheese, and revetted by golden slabs of hot johnnycake, it is even tastier than when it was so hot it brought tears to the eyes. Now it brings upward curves to the mouth and sunlight to the mind.
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old!
Aunt Ella, who is the month's well-upholstered aunt, is too stiff with her February rheumatism again this year to do more than a mere token of her knitting. She has to limit herself to two pairs of socks apiece for Father William and the four walking boys. But she tops off her four pairs of socks for Uncle Timothy with crocheted pink, ruffled arm bands to hold his shin cuffs out of the gravy. Uncle Timothy shows no token of weakening, though, in his celibacy.
Out of the barn the dory has grown wide enough now in her ribs to be chafing the dwindling walls of hay both to port and starboard. They are planking her in now, and Aunt Ella can't get a word in edgewise between theows of hammers and Uncle Timothy' singing. He always sings when at a boat, and always the same tunc, “What's the use of shingling when it don't rain.” Love makes no headway against the boat in the barn.
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