And now the whole world is green again. The buds are leaves, and the beams of sunlight grow narrower each day in the woods. The woods grow dark. The flowers that are half light, hepaticas and anemones, go out one by one like lights, and only the deep blue, long-stemmed wood violets are left. The sea grows dark under the high sunshine, and the uneasiness of its serrated edge on the horizon tautens like a bowstring.
The May book for Peter is The Water Babies, and he sits by the waves leaning in and wonders if he, too, might not creep down to live among the azure cunners that swim among the swaying kelps and grow gills to breathe through now that he has no Lucy to keep him on the dry land.
This amphibious farm grows and glows busy as the beehives back of the tool shed, for both the blue and the green halves of it must be cultivated. Men and boys run from a green chore to a blue, from a dung fork to a clam hoe and a fishline and back again to a spade from sunup to sundown. Never so many flowers, never so little rime to look at them. The heavy feet of the workers and iron hooves of horses crush and flatten the bluets which carpel half the earth. They swing the plow and trip its point in beds of flowers at the furrow's upper end by the spruces, and the team jingles with buckles that flash like spurts of flame as the plow comes downhill, tipping open the earth. Right down to the flowers of the ocean's froth on high-water waves come the horses. At the furrow's lower end the horses wade into the Atlantic up to their fetlocks, and the plow is salted by the sea.
A bluebird's snug home in a hollow post goes down. and the billow of brown earth makes a grave for the young hopefuls that would have feathered out half earth and half sky. For the plow is a ruthless thing in the spring of the year, and man's foot lays low flowers that will never be married by the honey-hungry bees.
They let Peter drive the team for one furrow, but he gets one horse over the whiffletree and the other over a tug of the harness. The reins get a turn around Peter's port leg, and Uncle Timothy keeps his curses under his wide mustache because Peter's father is by. Father has much to do to get his son unsnarled from the tangle, but he straightens things out at last. And he lets Peter hold the plow handles for the furrow uphill. And when he looks back downhill, there is his furrow running true as a die, and Peter stands with both muddy feet on the pavements of heaven.
But the tide that waits for no man falls before the corn patch is half plowed, and they unhitch the horses, leave the plow's point in the furrow, and hurry off to fish the farm's lobster traps from the new reach boat while the ocean is low.
They pick up the first family buoy, the beginning of a series of long loops of buoys festooned around the islands and far out on the open sea. Father leans over the gunwale so far he is only the curve of pants, but he comes up with his bourbon bottle and loops in the free warp above it till the red-and-white buoy bounces into the boar. Uncle Timothy cuts the engine, and Peter puts her over to port and swings his father to windward for the pull. Father widens his feet and starts taking the warp in, hand over hand. The festoons of the rope wet his pants. Like music he keeps at it, the rope coming in taut. The trap brings up at the boat's side with a bump. Up goes father's leg. and he plants his foot on the gunwale, leans over, and seizes the trap's oozy bow in his wide brown hands. The trap breaks water, Richer slats the long green ribbons of kelp from the trap, brings the dripping cage in by i(s bottom, and balances it on the boat's rail. The latticed house of laths comes alive with the surprise of thin air. Peter's eyes bug out with anticipation. Rut his fattier shakes his head no.
In a sound of great flapping and showers of water drops, Father unbuttons the trap's door. The whole house from the sea bottom is a tangle of crazed crabs. Uncle Timothy explodes with a cuss, “Crab convention, by damn!” and spits into the ocean. Without paying the slightest attention to his quick hands, Peter's father takes the crabs out, each crazy ten-legger by his small last leg, drops him overboard if he is small, into the boar if he is large. It is like clockwork. A bushel of crabs thumps into the boat. Father rips each thorny starfish carefully apart into its five points and throws the legs into the sea. Death is the sentence of these eaters of hair and murderers of quahaugs and clams. Father tosses each chunky crab-midget that he takes out. golden and placid, tenderly into the ocean, for the she-crabs are precious.
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