April comes in with rain. The barn springs a leak, the woodshed, the house. The cellar fills half up, and Peter, Andrew, James, and John go boating on a raft down there and ferry mother's preserves and jams to the drier end of the cellar.
The snow in the woods is melting fast. Green snakes of water twist down all the hills into the sea. The brooks become yellow rivers, and Peter bears Undine crying her cry under his windows all night long. For Uridine is the book of April month, and Peter reads himself into its watery depths. He fancies he sees Uncle Kübleborn's white beard shining in every twilit waterfall.
Aunt Emma rejoices that she is still with the family. since this is a time of floods and disasters. She reads the story of Noah and his ark to the family at night. In his dreams, Peter tries to get bis bull-calf, John Bull, into his father's gunlow with him, along with Lucy, as the farm goes under water, but it is no go, and they have to sail away without him.
Next morning the first sun seen so far in this April shines for a moment or two, but clouds close in. and it showers until night. Then the Bible story concerns true, a high double rainbow bridges the whole Atlantic from Ram Island to Jenny's Neck. and Uncle Cephus' schooner is right at the center of it. looking like Noah's ark. and powdered all Over with golden dust. The promise is kept, next day is clear as a box of beads. The sun cones out for good. A million peepers are calling in the marsh by broad daylight. Uncle Cephus comes ashore and fetches Peter to spend the night afloat with him. Peter hears the peepers even away out there on the sea. halfway to Spain.
The rainbow comes true the following day also. For Aunt Emma packs up her bag and gets father to drive her to town to visit other nephews needing regimentation and disciplining in morals, Peter runs over with relief. He doesn't even mind having to carry lime-dipped shingles every night after school to his father and brothers mending the farm's roofs. And Uncle Cephus tells him that old Noah his Aunt Emma read so much about wasn't so strong on the moral virtues as you might think, at least when he was in his cups, after bis seafaring days were over and there was a whole earth needing to be filled up quick with boys and girls.
The hangover March aunt having gone, the real aunt of April comes in, She comes in a soft veil and hat like a lovely April shower falling over all the flowers in the world. She is Peter's beautiful Aunt Susan, who went to the Chicago World's Fair and got cultivated and never has been the same since. She talks as if her mouth were full of pearls, she eats her steamed clams with a knife and fork, and she never gets a drop of butter on her delicate chin. She teaches Ann and Molly and Jane how to hemstitch handkerchiefs and how to say please in Fundi. But Peter likes her best when she plays the parlor melodeon and sings the pretty song from Mignon about the land where the oranges grow. He practically dissolves in tenderness in his private place under the parlor sofa. Peter likes being under that sofa better than on it, for the haircloth on it docs its best to slide him off, and its prickles make him itch.
Now the farm really begins to spread itself out over the ocean. Peter and James go spearing flounders in James' skiff. James is generous for once and does the pushing along the mud flats at the stern seat. He lets Peter use bis long twelve-foot dart with the fierce barbed point. Peter stands balanced at the bow of the boat, one foot on the port and the other on starboard gunwale. They slide over the green mud of low ride in a foot of water. The shallow waves are shot through with rays of sunlight like endless rainbows.
Peter keeps his blue eyes wide open. He stands as taut and tall as a stocky boy can, arms up and spear across the sky. He sees the telltale triangle in the mud, raises his dart's point, and drives it down with all he has in him. A row of golden puffs of cloudy water going off to the horizon tells him he has missed. The flounder goes away to the safe mid-ocean. James swears Peter is a butter-fingers and ought to wear skins. But Peter sees another triangle with an arrow-point of a nose with two wide eyes behind, and he sends bis long iron home into the mud just at the triangle's base. There is a commotion in the shallow water. Peter twists to port, brings up his spear with an ivory-bellied first flounder of the year flapping and squirming on the barb. He drops the fish into the boat's bottom, where it flaps diamonds all over the two boys.
After that, Peter lands a dozen more beauties in the skiff James takes his turn and irons ten more. He is on his way to break bis brother's record, but Peter, in his excitement over a big skate bis brother brings in with mouth turned down for woe and a hundred barbs bristling in flapping fins and tail, gets a cramp on his oar in the mud, tries to pull it out, and gets a cramp on the skiff, turns her suddenly short around, and dumps the poised young Neptune in blue overalls into the tide. James is back in the boat quick as an eel, for the water is ice-cold still. Me blows out bubbles and grown-up words that they never say when she-folks are around. He smacks his brother with the pole of his spear. Peter smacks him back with his oar. The light boat rocks under the embattled brothers. They get the heat our of them at last. and James has the last blow, as he should. And they turn to their fishing again.
James stands in the bow again. He sees the granddaddy of all the flounders sunning himself in the April sun on the mud. He lifts aloft his spear. But the hoy is all pimples for the cold clothes on him, and he is shaking so. his point wabbles. He lets go, but it is a miss, and the grandpa flounder bounces off over the flats to kingdom come. Peter jeers. James up and splashes half the Atlantic over him with a sideswipe of his heavy pole. One boy is as damp US the other now. And they both have pimples.
Peter takes the oars and Starrs rowing for home. They both are bitter that the biggest fish got away. James will never let his brother forget that it was all his fault, and Peter will always declare that James is wearing pants under false pretenses and should wear a skirt. James purposely drags his spear to make the rowing harder. But the two bitter fishermen finally reach home.
When the skiff's nose grates on the pebbles, Peter gets out indignantly and drags out the boat's painter by the killock and yanks the skiff up so hard, the standing James is almost knocked flat. James sits down suddenly on the boat's bow seat and says more of the forbidden words. The boys are even Stephen when they leave the boat. James strings the flounders through the mouth and gills on a stick, washes them in the water of the bay, and follows the shivering Peter, with his own teeth rattling in his jaws, up the steep path through the bayberry bushes to the farmhouse.
Mother scolds both boys for being boys, and she peels them out of their wet clothes like two young eels. She makes them stand back of the hot stove and warm up and make friends again as they use the hot towels she has brought them. But Peter snaps James with his new weapon, James snaps him back, and they coalesce into one wild double-backed thing. But mother steps in now. and with her bare hands she warms them both up as she separates them and banishes each to an opposite corner of the wide kitchen to dress and meditate on his sins.
The duty done, mother scrapes the scales off the boys' fish, the gray upper scales and the green bottom ones. She cuts off their triangular heads expertly, then uses her big shears on their fins and tails, cutting deep enough into their sides to get allthe vexing small flange bones out with their fins. She washes the flounders. With a sharp knife she makes slashes across their backs and bellies.
Meantime she has been getting her frying pan ready by frying pork scraps in it. She fills a platter with corn meal from the cupboard shelf. She salts the meal and rolls each big triangle of a flounder in the platter. She throws the still crinkling flounders into the hot fat. She fries them beautifully brown and crisp. The smell of the first flounders of the year goes out over the universe.
There are a few other occasions in life to match this of the first of the year's flounders. But not many. Not more than you can count on the fingers of one hand. The day a man falls in love. The day he gets married. The day that be holds his first son. Maybe one or two more. But that's the lot.
Nobody says much. The eaters can't. Their mouths are too busy, and their tongues are sorting the bones from the white flesh. Their hearts are too big. They scrape off the ivory flesh from the underside—these are New Englanders and so cat the thinner side of the flounder first—turn the plane tree of the skeleton over and burrow into the thicker upper side. The meat shows white through the yawning cross-hatchings in the brown skin. They rake off forkfuls and carry them to their mouths.
Outside, the dusk of April is beginning to deepen over the woods and the ocean. The peepers are coming out clearer and louder with the soft April stars. Aunt Susan forgets to wield her fork like the baton of an orchestra leader, and she gets butter on her chin. The flounders come to an end. Uncle Timothy stares at the bare platter incredulously, and his mustache begins to droop. The flame and the glory begin to ebb from him. When nobody is looking, he runs a biscuit over the moist surface of the platter and collects the last golden crumbs of corn meal flavored with the delicacy of the sliders of the sea's bottom. Everybody sighs. But Uncle Timothy sighs deepest of all.
The feast of the first flounders of the spring is over. It is a memory: Ah, there will be plenty more flounders day after tomorrow when brothers have buried the hatchet of their hate and go nut in the skiff and spear new ones, or sit in the warm spring sun, with fat clam bellies for bait, and hand-line the flat fish up from deeper water. And mother will gel out her corn meal and fry them just as crisp and brown. Yes, later springs will come, just as they have been in the habit of doing for these millions of years. But it won't be the same thing. Not ever again. Not this year, anyway. Maybe not in a lifetime.
And Peter and James, who have provided this red-letter supper, forget their cold bath for the moment and swell so much in their clothes that they daren't move much for fear they will burst at all their seams.
As the month grows older and warmer, and the farm begins to green all over, the noise at the cove and around the new daughter of the farm grows and grows. The near-by spruce woods ring with the blows of hammers and the shouts of the men and boys. Father shines on his neck as he screws home the last screws. Uncle Timothy looks wide as the world as he sandpapers the curving timbers, and he vibrates all over from love as well as from the vibrations of the rough sandpaper he rubs.
And on a sun-drenched day near mid-April, when the Easter moon has filled out her girth, when the air runs silver and wine, the menfolks put the rollers under the new beauty at the tiptop moment of high tide, and the queen of glory goes into the sea. She sweeps down and cuts the Atlantic apart, rises high and lovely in the water. She rides on even keel, her tail perks up, her delicate nose lifts more archly than Aunt Susan's when she talks of culture and music, the Chicago Art Institute and the World's Fair that made her into the new being that she is.
The new Hampton is so white and beautiful, they do not make her work for some time. They do not soil her with lobster traps. She is company. They let her ride high, handsome, and holidayish for weeks among the loaded and muddy craft in the farm's busy harbor.
Now comes great work on the farm's other half, the green and land half. For the plows and harrows are taken our, harness is overhauled and oiled up. Hoes and shovels are made ready. For soon agriculture will join lushing on this farm, and seed potatoes and seed corn will be as important as lobsters and herring are now.
Peter is kept so busy he doesn't have time to go out for a single night with Uncle Cephus on the “Mary Louise.” The schooner floats out there as far away as the Delectable Mountains in Pilgrim's Progress, which is another book this month for Peter. Peter has to neglect his schoolbooks to tend out on his father and uncle. He has to neglect his love.
And disaster strikes. The last night of April comes, and most coast boys whose voices are starting to deepen think of love and go with paper baskets of pastel shades and hang them, full of gumdrops, on the doorknobs of the houses of girls, knock and run—but not so fast but what the girls can overtake them and kiss them, with blushes on both sides of the kiss. And the last night of this April finds a bigger basket than Peter's handmade one hanging on the Brown front door, and the kiss already planted on a boy with dark and sinister hair, a boy named Ben.
Peter comes too late. And in a fury he eats all the gumdrops and chocolates in his basket on the way home and vows he will never look at anyone in skirts again. Peter is through with love.
When the boy gets home, he finds that the uncle he has neglected has not neglected him. Cephus has been ashore and gone again, and he has left Peter a full-rigged ship, which his uncle has been secretly working on (or him for half a year, a ship no longer than Peter's little finger but perfectly rigged down to the last cobweb of a shroud, all perfect inside a bottle! Peter sleeps April out with that jewel under his heart, for he falls asleep with it there, falls asleep across the bottle of beauty Cap'n Cephus has brought him.
And Peter's lost love is clean forgotten in his new love for this perfect little vessel, this perfect small jewel from the man who has sailed all the seas and who loves him like a son.