June comes in with millions of white daisies, and no one can tell where the land leaves off and the sea begins, because the surf of daisies stands at the high-water's edge and washes up all the hayfields to the woods.
The garden is coming up. The beans are crooking their backs up through the loam, potatoes are lifting lumps of earth up on their blunt leaves, and the peas are up high enough for Peter to hoe. Peter goes barefoot up the rows. He feels the cool earth over his toes as much as over the pea roots. It isn't too hot for comfort yet. or too thick along the rows for time off. So Peter has a chance to dig out a woodchuck, his bear for next week's circus. He gets so stained with earth that he has to sit for half an hour at a row's end and souse his feet in the tiptop high water of the whole year.
The water is so warm that Peter goes in pants and all. He chases horseshoe crabs, riding on each other's backs, and wonders if it is for love. He takes them apart and sticks them by the rail down in the mud so he can find them when he wants them next week for his chariot races in the circus. The horseshoes are irate. One of them doubles up for rage in the water, tail standing straight up, too deep for Peter to see, and the boy finds him with his foot when he wades out deep and gets nearly impaled on his upright spike. Peter's clothes cling to him like his skin. The wild-pea vines stand right in the tide's water, and their purple lacy flowers are swum over by minnows. Using his straw hat as his dip net, Peter scoops up mummiechubs and sticklebacks by the dozen, meaning to have his mother fry them for him, but he forgets all about them till two mornings later when their smell wakes him up in the morning.
Mother spends her days in her flower beds. She nails up twine by the back stoop for her morning-glory vines to run on, and unrolls chicken wire for her sweet peas to climb on. But her chief pride is her dory. It is an old one that has been mustered out of the family service. Now it carries a load of petunias instead of quahaugs, and it sails the front yard instead of the Atlantic's waves. Mother's cinnamon roses arc blossoming all over the yard and off into the birch woods.
The mosquitoes come in vast swarms, bringing the shad with them as they always do. The shad school by continents into the bays. Every night now all hands arc out on the water till the small hours of the morning. They string the bays with deep nets with large meshes. They sit quiet in the dories, Father and Uncle Timothy pulling on their sweet corncobs and blowing the smoke out to keep the swarms of mosquitoes away. Peter slaps mosquitoes on his wrists and ankles and listens to the mysterious gurglings and whisperings of the sea at night. The tails of shad slap the surface in a thousand places.
The men put their lanterns over the side and see that the water is alive with big-bellied silver angels. They shine their lanterns out from the boat and see that all their net corks have gone under. Then Uncle Timothy and Father stand up in the dory and begin to take in the net. It comes in like wisps of moonbeams dropping beads of fire. Every so often there is a wide fiery fish with sad eyes, choking in the meshes of the net. The fish loom thicker and thicker as the net comes from deeper and deeper down. At last Peter cannot see the meshes for the great strangling angels shaking rainbows of spray and bright scales as they rankle together in the last vast pockets of the net. The light plays on Uncle Timothy as he towers above the lantern and pours the shad between his legs into the dory.
The dory is down to the water's edge with silver hordes of the fish, and the men row home gently, almost foundering and taking in buckets of brine over the gunwales. Under the shadowy June stars Father and Uncle Timothy clean the shad, slicing them deep along their bluish back fins and lifting out their backbones clean as a whistle. They gut them with one slice of their knives down the whole length. The guts and heads and tails they shovel into tubs. Tomorrow these will go on the garden, to be hoed into the hills of corn as they used to be hoed in by the Indians on these same acres a thousand years ago. For these are the makings of the milk in the kernels of corn ears. Peter is reeling with sleep, and the mosquitoes are like distant bands playing.
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