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.
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.
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.
This is the month, too, of maple sugar. Peter goes with his brothers to the trees they have tapped and spouted in the swamp, and they empty the pails in their bucket through the thin February sunshine. Later on, when there is enough of the syrup, the night stars are joined by the bursts of quick stars of spruce brush burning, and the small boy John for once sits up as late as he wants to, feeding the bonfire under the sap kettle, plays with fire all he-wants to and burns so many holes through his breeches that they look like a sieve.
Peter. Ann, Andrew. Molly. James, and Jane watch the thin liquid thicken brown, Each sits with a pan of new snow on his lap. and father pours out the red-hot maple syrup on the pan of Snow, it hardens into a brittle, and the children eat it by the light of the wavering bonfire and the dim stars overhead until they can hardly see out of their eyes for sweetness and sleepiness. Small John gets so covered with the candy he sticks to everything. He falls asleep and does not wake up even when the Arctic owl, scandalized by all these goings-on, inquires, with two echo-owls helping him to inquire in the deep, still woods, who is the plump little boy who has to be pulled home on a sled, cemented fast to it by maple syrup, with the red tassel of his stocking-leg Cap trailing on the starlit snow.
The book of this month for Peter is Robinson Crusoe. For Peter is the bookman of this family and of the peculiar kind of farm he lives on, this seagoing one, and his house has always had high bookcases in it, many of them bought in Europe. And Peter is reading his way through these shelves of books as fast as he can. He has permission from his father to burn the lamp as late into the night as he feels like burning it. The old Arctic owl always has to comment on the lateness of the light in the windows of this odd farmhouse.
Robinson Crusoe fits February very well. For Peter and his family are really marooned away from life this season. for all the fresh smelts and the surprised eels on Uncle Timothy's trident. They are marooned on the island of Winter, They have to make their way on their own resources and suck such comfort as they can out of solitude. For the world around them is a lonely desert now. They are Robinson Crusoes all right.
So Peter on his homemade skis follows all the tracks in the quiet woods, half expecting to see heel mark and toe prints going on into the spruces. Of course, a cannibal would find it rather cold underfoot and get chiains worse than Uncle Timothy's. But the old cannibal loneliness does stalk these dark woods when Peter stops at twilight time and listens to an axe chopping in company with another ghostly one that is not really there. Peter can shout and have his own shout come thinly back to him, too, but he doesn't feel like doing it. The silence makes him cautious and thoughtful. So he turns at last and goes creaking quietly home on his skis.
The boy learns a lot, though, before he gets too lonely, from the lacework of the different tracks on the snow in these woods. Featherstitching means mice. Cuneiform wedges mean crows. Here is a three-leaf clover and four leaf, too, where a rabbit has sat in different moods. And there the dot-dot-dash of a smart up-and-coming fox curves away over the hillocks of white. There is a lot of fine reading in the white books of the woods in the month of February, and Peter reads these books of the woods as eagerly as he reads the ones on his father's bookcase. Every hill and dell is a new page. Every creature leaves its history on the snow.
In the summer you would never know a thing about what was going on here among the hemlocks and spruces. But now it is different. Nothing can be done here but a smart boy knows it. Murder will out, and you can see murder where it took place by the rotten hemlock stump by the dark spots and strewn feathers. You know who the murderer is. Mis wings have left two wide, deep fans on the white. You know his wings are quiet and white as the snow. That inquisitive old asker of embarrassing questions in the night, the great Arctic owl, is the red-footed one.
The stillness of this part of the year goes well with Peter's thoughts of his lost love. Peter feels friends with trees that have nothing to say, and bare boughs of the maples. He even feels friends with poor Aunt Ella, who, for all her buttresses of good flesh, suffers the pangs of unrequited love. It is a sad, dead time all around and winter holds everything in thrall.
But under the ice and the snow the buds ate swelling at the end of this month of house imprisonment. All at once the willows in the marsh have turned a bright green. You think it is a small snow squall beside the road. But it isn't. It is the year's first pussy willows speckling the air with hope, clinging like drops of snow to the willow withes.
And deep in the dead woods a woodpecker is knocking loud at the door of spring, for February is nearly gone.