Log of a Seagoing Farm

The first wild geese honk over northwards with their heads floating on ahead of them almost independent of their bodies, and behind them a gale tears the coming night to tatters. The bay booms like cannon through the dark. But there is a glint in old Cephus' chinaue eyes. He scents the clams under the keel of the “Mary Louise” through all the heaving ice. He and Peter knock knees as their cabin dips and rises with them, and Peter gets a portion of himself pinched in the sheathing of the walls when he leans too long in one spot. The schooner heaves up her bow. heaves up her stern in the midst of the ice, for she has become very much alive. Peter rides our the early March gales with his deep-sea uncle and learns how to tic all the knots that his life on a seagoing farm may depend on some day

And one Venetian-glass morning Peter goes on deck to feel of the weather and make his report to his uncle; the wind bellies out his breeches and sweeps the cobwebs from his mind. The boy comes down nearly bursting at his seams and tells Cap'n Cephus they are free of the ice and the bay is all wild, darkue around them. Cap'n Cephus breaks out his clam rocker and his hoe, his quahaug hook, and his pants that can stand by themselves, they are so thick, and he slides into his hip boots.

It is the day of jubilee. The steep little farm has once more joined the vast Atlantic after three months of white divorce. The high waves that come straight across from far Spain wash in crested with whitecaps and splinter into diamonds against the farm's ledges. Gulls pour down the hills to the sea's edges again. Ice cakes bob along the bays, but there arc emerald mud flats between them at the ebb of the tide. All the men and boys bob along the mud. The shore at low tide is covered with the living croquet wickets of bent-over clam diggers. Even Uncle Timothy is there, for all his vast bulk, turning up acres of flats, though he commandeers Andrew and James and John to follow in his wake and pick up the clams he leaves squirting out diamonds in the furrows of the overturned clay. He is too portly to pick up his shellfish. That's what small boys are for. The small boys pant after him dragging the slatted baskets through the soft mud. Father manages his two bushel baskets by himself and digs circles around Uncle Timothy. Uncle Timothy accuses father of trespassing on his best beds. He snorts like a porpoise in the wind.

Peter, as the crew of the “Mary Louise, ” tags Cap'n Cephus out on the deeper, softer flats. He slides his baskets along on Cephus' port side and fills them with the plump quahaugs his sea captain uncle dredges out of their winter quarters. Cephus is after the little young fellows, the size of a silver dollar, with rims to their blue-green shells.

Then under the lee of a ledge, our of the sturdy March wind snowed with mewing gulls, Cap'n Cephus and his seagoing nephew sit on granite, back to back for mutual warmth. Peter feeds his uncle the quahaugs, Cephus catches them in his horny palm, slips in the smallade of his jackknife so quick no eye can follow it, lays the ivory and purple interior of the treing quahaug open to the March sun, tips the bottom shell into his mouth to catch the juice, slashes the clam free of its upper and lower hinges, and tosses it into his mouth or into Peter's. Cephus, Peter, Cephus. Peter—evenhanded justice, man and boy, man and boy—regular as clockwork. And boy keeps right up with man, for he is all emptiness within his growing outs ides. After a peck of the quahaugs the two eaters begin to show signs of filling up. but these arc the year's first shellfish, so they make a start on their second peek. and sigh when they can eat no more. When they rise, they can hardly walk. And Uncle Cephus has much to do, to bend and mine himself a peek of the oval clams, the cookers, to take back with him aboard the “Mary Louise” for his first clam chowder of the season.

His crew, Peter, spends this night on land. For his mother will fry the clams his father and brothers have brought up, dipping them first in her egg yolk batter, in her deepest skillet, the one she uses for her donuts, dropping each yellowed clam to the bottom of the seething fat from the family pig, and dredge it up puffed like a donut and as brown and crisp as the crust on a pie. Peter would not miss that meal of all meals of the round year. And he will go to bed stuffed with two kinds of clams, and dream of his great-grandmother.