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.
There is one dark lobster at the bottom of the trap. Hut Father catches him just back of his wide-flung big claws and sawing “smellers” and throws him far out in the waves, The lobster is a shade too short to “go.” Father would know it by the lobster's heft even in the pitch dark. He doesn' t need to pull out the measuring iron that bulges out the port pocket in his rear pants. He wears that iron for looks and the law. He never has to wet it. That is what it is to have a father who is an artist, and Peter swells with pride.
They bait up the trap. Uncle Timothy hands Father the rotting fish the lobsters love. Father strings them through their middles near the backbone and makes a loop in them by threading his needle through their wide mouths. When his string is heavy with the fish, he threads his iron needle up through the top slats, takes two quick turns around the bait-button, slams the latticed door of the trap to, buttons it with the two wooden buttons, douses the trap back with a smack into the sea. He seizes the buoy by its standing stick, throws it out a good way, paying the line through his left fist as the line sings out after the buoy, he catches up the loops of warp, each just where he has laid it coming in, and slats each loop overboard, clears the rail with his bourbon bottle, douses over the last loop of warp. He nods to Timothy, Timothy tickles the carburetor, straddles a big straddle in his vast pants, spins the flywheel in his huge hands. The engine “catches” and coughs, begins to chug in a blue fog, works up to its rhythm, levels out to work, and they putt-putt off to the next spindle wabbling in the air on the next buoy.
The second trap has three “counts” in it, and not a single crab. That's the way life runs, famine or a feast. And two kinds of horny sea-crawlers do not like to keep company. One of the lobsters is a five-pound dragon of the deep, with a paper-hanger's big shears waving the air and opening and shutting fiercely. Without bothering to look Father puts his hand right down between the living shears and picks the big fellow up with thumb and first finger on each side of his back shell just behind its dimples. The green dragon tries his best to arch his claws back and cut Father's wrists off, his clubbed clam-crusher and the sharp and thin clam-digger try to get home in the man, but they miss by a split hair each chop they make at Father. Father's fingers deftly shove home the white-pine plug from his pants pocket right at the base of each open claw, the claws close for good, and the lobster's biting days are done. He drops harmlessly from Father's hand into the boat and spanks the planking with his flanged tail with belated hate, and scares the wits out of the clustered crabs and semis them scattering bow and aft.
They pick up every last one of the three hundred traps and bring up opposite home at half flood tide, stepping out in the same tracks they left when they got into the boat on the half ebb, with the sun just on the tips, of the dark spruces back of their house and the peepers beginning to tune up for their night-long shouts of love in the darkening marsh. The new boat's bottom is dark with plugged dragons. The lobstermen stand ankle-deep in them without breaking as much as the smallest claw. They load their baskets up. And they are all for home and the stew kettle.
The dish of May is lobster stew. After the family lobster-cars are tilled with the hundreds of captives that mean, each last one of them, a new dollar in the family till, Father takes the two dozen lusty chicken lobsters he has saved out up to the house in a pail half full of their own Atlantic. He takes them up before their spunk has gone out of them, unplugged and temperamental as wrestling boys. And Peter beats him into the kitchen and has the kettle on the open lid of the stove by the time Father gets in. Mother has already breezed up a fire with spruce twigs and bitch chips the minute she heard the male voices, which carry a long way on a clear May night, down at the farm's port. Father pours in the young dragons, all stitched together by their claws, with just a cupful of their Atlantic to start the steam, and claps the kettle cover on before the lobsters know what is up. In an instant hell begins to break loose in this kettle on this brisk fire. The lobsters leave off biting one another and smite the iron walls of their new prison with flapping tails. But their agony is brief. Peace and steam fill the kettle.
In fifteen minutes Mother turns the lobsters out, red as old-fashioned winter underwear. The family fall to with hammers and forks and fingers to get the meat out of the deep shells. That is, the she-folks fall to with all those irons. Not Peter, not Andrew, not James. Not Father or Uncle Timothy. They fall to with their own pickers and stealers. They use their own bare hands. Their hands know just where to find the right joint and the crucial spots to press with the thumbs to crack the stoutest shells across. The males of the farm crush the tails and the claws in their cupped hands. They put their palms together in the attitude of prayer and out plops the pink meat. The menfolk yield to temptation, but they leave enough meat to fill the ten-quart bowl.
Mother melts two squares of the farms newest butter in the stew kettle's bottom, pours in the sweet Niagara of meat and juice. She sautés the mess five, six, seven minutes, till the petals of meat begin to crinkle up at their edges. Then she pours in six to seven quarts of new milk and a whole quart of half-soured cream from milk that has stood down in the cellarway two days, and she stirs like mad with her iron spoon to keep the milk from curdling. She brings the whole mess just to a fierce boil. The stew begins to “ scum” and turn saffron at its surface. Uncle Timothy's mustaches are quivering like poppy trees in a strong east wind.
The mother of the house ladles the lobster out into her biggest bowls, sends James hot-foot down cellar for the dill pickles, passes out cartwheels of pilot bread and bowls of the best sea chowder known to sinful man to all the farm's hungry crew. They dish op their bellyfuls of fat of the Promised Land. Uncle Timothy's nose glows like the ten lobster tails he has just eaten. Uncle Cephus comes in, on the scent of the lobster stew on the May wind, just in time to clean out the last pint or two.
On the wings of this stew, Peter, who couldn' t be dragged by a yoke of young oxen to dig dandelion greens for his mother, goes straight over to Lucy Brown's farm. In the deep after glow of this day at the high-water mark of dandelion week, guided by the glowing lanterns of dandelions in the grass, Peter digs up enough octopi of edible iron to make a mess for the whole Brown family, including the unfillable twins of eight, Roger and Robin. He takes them to Lucy's mother and turns them out on her pantry shelf. Mrs. Brown is delighted and talks to him as if he were a man as she picks the greens over. This is her first chance of the year to put iron into her small husband. She starts the greens in her iron kettle with a whole half pound of pork in their center, to cook all night long on the back of the stove and till dinner-time next day.
And when Lucy suddenly appears from outdoors with the first of the trilliums in her hands and the evening's stars in her eyes, Lucy's mother gets Peter and Lucy cup custard, and the two of them eat the custards together at the table. Peter's is saffroned with nutmeg all over its golden crust, and he drinks in his regained love with nutmeg in his mind. And doesn' t Mrs. Brown up and force two more of her best baked desserts on Peter! And doesn' t Peter, in spite of the fact that he is welling up with lobster stew and love, eat both cups to the last sliver of yellow!
Suddenly, with the dandelions all turning to white-haired ghosts, with the shad beginning to smack the night waters off the farm, and with all the small birds jumping out of their nests at once and learning to fly or being eaten by the cat, school lets out with a confused tangle of barefooted boys whooping for freedom.