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.
Clams are the dish of March month. They are like new love, and they taste of the spring. The family will have them steamed and washed in their own scalding water, soused in the family melted butter, and dropped delicately into the tipped-back family gullet. The family will have them stewed, with nothing added to them but a foundation of a few salt pork scraps and half a cup of new butter. a quart of milk to each pint of shellfish, and a dozen Boston crackers as frosting on the hot stew's top. The family will have them Stoutly chowdered. And the clamshell walk from the porticoed front door to the Greek temple of a back door, now that the dirty last snow has melted, will get a new glory, a new layer of the snow from the bottom of the northern sea. The little boys and girls will crunch down the thin shells with feet full of the spring.
There's nothing so good to keep sharp March winds out of a body as the old-fashioned Coast clam chowder. It stands, as most fine northern chowders do, on pig. Dice of fat salt pork arc fried in the bottom of the iron kettle till they squirm and hiss deep brown. Then sliced onions arc fried brown on top of the pork scraps. Then the clams go in, in their own savory water, then some dice of potatoes shaven thin as moonbeams. Milk is poured in slowly and stirred constantly once the dish has come to a boil, and this stirring is done on the back of the stove to keep the milk from curdling. The whole is allowed to set till the milk begins to crinkle. More stirring, a bit of salt and pepper is added, and it is left to crust up again. When the dish browns at its surface for the richness of the pork at its base, mother puts in her last and crowning touch: She drops in her Boston crackers—common crackers to the outside world—and they float dry on their upper decks and soft on their lower, for they sop up the delectable liquid of transfigured clams under their keels.
Peter scalds his mouth, as he always does, in his haste to get outside of three bowls of this March chowder, keeping one bowl ahead of his brothers, and tears in his eyes for the goodness of this hot mess of sea pottage. Uncle Timothy is good for five straight bowk. He likes to have a little of the chowder left to eat cold, but he almost never does.
Now the farm really begins to go to sea. Never such a noise of hammers as now down at the green boathouse. Never such fragrances of hot coal tar and white lead and varnish. All who wear pans and two of the older girls are there, up to their eyes in paint and tar. They scour and scrape and refurbish the metalwork, scrape and sandpaper the planking of boats, and give all the family craft this year's coat of paint. Young John has two white eyes on his hind side where he sat down to rest himself on the plank his father and brothers and sisters have tried out their brushes on Everybody jokes about the eyes in John's breeches. Even the baby is there. William the Younger. Though he can't walk, young William can get around all right; he skitters around on all fours as quick as a crab. So to keep him from upsetting their paint pails, the workers have thrown a shad net over him. Me can still go and come, but not as far as the pails. He waves his arms and shouts, laps up a little paint wherever he can. and he thinks he is doing a lot even though he is anchored down a bit and his fat cheeks and fists are crisscrossed with the net.
And the new daughter of this seagoing farm comes out through the wide main barn doors, opened only in March and July for new daughters or loaded hayracks, and she rides on her rollers behind the farm's chestnut horses to the bayside. There she gets her COM of paint, and on the full-moon tide of Easter she will go into the ocean with her young nose high and handsome and eager to buck the whole weight of the Atlantic as she follows the long strings of the farm's lobster traps in wider and wider circles (ill the land is only a low cloud on the rolling horizons of the restless open set.
In the fishing shack, lobster traps are being rehabilitated, the slats that have been vermiculated by toredo worms are replaced with sound new yellow ones. The woven heads are being mended and tarred Uncle Timothy sits on his broad foundations and weaves tarred twine into new funnels to welcome in lobsters to a free lunch that may prove their last. Bait strings are rigged. Scores of new traps are being run up from bundles of laths. The laths are nailed to the half circles of spruce bows. New warps, smelling of the Philippines and Manila, me being tied on, with father's bourbon bottles put on with a half hitch halfway down their length—Maine lobsters respect nothing except bourbon—as lug buoys to keep the warps alive in the water. And wooden buoys, with long spindles stuck in them to pick them out of the sea by, painted in the family colors, green on white, are drying in the wicked bright March sun.
Out under the Atlantic the twin antennaed armored knights of the shellfish kingdom are creeping up from the indigo deep waters to the wanning emerald, shallower ones, with greed for high-smelling dead fish in their stickpin eyes, Lobster stew is in the offing, and new greenbacks for the family roll, for lobsters are going to fetch a good price this year, thanks to the summer colonists who are running up shingled bungalows on this farm's shores and on most of the others along the twenty-five hundred miles of this continuous Rio de Janeiro of a coastline.
Aunt Ella's rheumatism goes, with the first robin redbreast. Her spry old lingers shake the winter from their joints, and she finishes the hooked rug for the front staircase. A hen stiff as a cigar-store Indian is on ever)' tread, leading a happy family up to bed and dreams of traps chock-full of lobsters. Love lights Aunt Ella's eyes as she thinks how Timothy's big feet will travel over her art. But nothing lights up Timothy's eyes but the pink light of a kettle of steamed lobsters.
And Aunt Emmaows in from upcountry. Aunt Emma alway sows in at the crucial turning points of the year—the autumnal and vernal equinoxes. For she is the master of medicine and morals for her brother William's family, which, because of its preponderance of he-ones, needs, she believes, stern herbal and moral mini-station twice a year.
So pennyroyal and yarrow, sage and sulphur and tansy scent up the house like a drugstore now. Peter gets painted with goose grease and camphor and gets taught such lessons of boys being seen but not heard at the te that he creaks with politeness. And Uncle Cephus is completely chapfallen when a strangely decorous crew comes out in a skiff to call on him and eat the Dundee pudding he has made in his ship's big kettle. He has to smack Peter a. dozen times on the fullness of his breeches aft before he can undo the work of his moral half-sister and get the sparkle and dueness back in his nephew's eyes. He has to reteach Peter all the colorful sea oaths he has schooled him in all winter long. It takes his vast Dundee pudding of corn meal cooked in molasses and numerous thick slabs of salted cod and a half night's length of his saltiest tales to get the stout little crew back in shape again. But he sends the boy back rejuvenated and full of strong and colorful speech again to the farmhouse in the morning, to the scandalization of his Aunt Emma.
Uncle Timothy goes into hiding in his open-chamber fortress most of the time Aunt Emma is here. He creeps down only for meals. And even then he sits in his kitchen chair as though he didn't wear pants but a skirt.
Whether it is the result of Aunt Emma's goose grease and spring tonics of bitter herbs, or Cop'n Cephus' jovial hand that warmed Peter out of the dol-drums of dosages of spring morals and snuffles, Peter takes a sudden spurt in his love affairs, and he ups and wins back Lucy from that purveyor of beef hearts,black-haired Ben.
And to cap the climax of this spring, coming in like a flock of bluebirds in the bare hackmatacks and Mayflowers all over the ledges like snowdrifts. Uncle Timothy, who has never done such a thing since he joined the Masons thirty years ago, goes to town and buys himself a light-colored suit of clothes with checks! Aunt Ella grows all aflutter with hope, and she goes to town and buys herself a spring bonnet with fifteen kinds of (lowers on it and two white dove's wings just about to take off and bear the whole artificial flower garden off to heaven.
But not a thing cornea of the hat with the dove's wings and the rich flowers on it. The checked suit was a false hope after all. And Aunt Ella, the same day that the moral Aunt Emma announces that she thinks it her bounden duty to stay on into April, packs up her belongings and departs from the farm.