Uncle John isn't here, of course. He is getting his beauty sleep up in the attic chamber in Uncle Timothy's soft bed. Uncle John will be ready for the shad next day when they come hissing out of Mother's hot oven on a beech wood plank. Uncle Timothy cusses softly to himself when he thinks of his bed and Uncle John.
Next day, the smokehouse is filled with tiers of the folioed fish, and Peter wears himself down to withing lugging in green popple wood and keeping up the fire that is mostly green smoke under the gutted silver seraphs. He smokes them till they are the shade of his garden-stained toes and stacks them in the woodshed loft for next winter. The whole farm glitters with shad scales from the harbor to the woodshed.
Peter's mother boi's two dozen of the largest of last night's fish with half a cup of vinegar till their skins curl off. Then she spreads them out on her charred beech plank, dusts them over with salt and cinnamon and cloves, laces long strips of salt pork back and forth over their plump sides. She slides the plank into a hot oven, and with a slow green oak lire she cooks them for an hour till their oil runs down into the charred beechwood and the aroma of last year's shad, deep in the wood, rises and joins this year's fragrance and the charcoal's aroma eats its way into the fat flesh of the fish. She brings them to the table still on the plank, seething and sending out wreaths of flavor, with three mountains of her browned biscuits ranging them round.
Uncle Cephus, whose old and practiced nose can scent a fresh shad planked with pork half the width of the Atlantic, happens to drop in from the “Mary Louise” to negotiate the loan of a cupful of molasses and to feel of Peter's muscles to see if they aren't getting too landlocked and stiffened. He is prevailed upon to stay for dinner. He sits down Opposite Uncle Timothy, and their wide mustaches, the white and the brown, work in unison over disappearing hunks of baked shad. Uncle John, wrapped aloft in clouds of fragrance, starts up out of his beauty sleep and comes down, his bald head shining, and he falls like a fish hawk on his favorite food. He catches up with Uncle Cephus and Uncle Timothy in short order. He has no handicap of a mustache to get tangled in the shad bones.
For, in spite of mother's bath of vinegar, a few hundreds of bones still remain in the fish. But these coast men make nothing of fish bones. Uncle Cephus and Uncle Timothy know where every last shad bone is, and Uncle John soon learns from them. They save them all up in their cheeks, the way chipmunks save up acorns in the fall of the year, they group them together in bunches, and then, every so often, they blow them out of their mouths and pile them up in neat windrows on both sides of their plates. Planked shad is the dish of June month, and it oils up the backs of the eaters for the work of hoeing the leaping corn and the running peas. That is, all the backs but Uncle John's. His is too lean a failure to get any good from the oil.
Father and Uncle Timothy, Andrew and James and John, properly oiled up by shad, go off to fish the lobster traps. But Peter, the studious and patient one of the family, has to stay ashore and snuff ashes over the three long nets that were glorified by choking angels last night. The nets are in a dreadful mess of Gordian knots, snarled full of kelp, rockweed, and eelgrass. It is up to Peter to clear them and spread them over half the farm, to dry and toughen and sweeten in the sun.
It takes a whole day of righteous, hard, backbreaking work. Whatever cuss words Peter has picked up from the shore-king of cussing and the sea-king of it, Uncle Timothy and Uncle Cephus, come in handy now. It is like trying to get meshes of thin moon-beams free of thickets of dead spruce. Peter fights snarls, his hair tangled in with the rockweed and eelgrass. He goes head down for hours. He does bis best to read his month's book. Lorna Doone, through the latticework of the nets, toeing the book ahead of him as he works, but he gets so snarled up he has to leave the “Girt” John Ridd all tangled in with the ditches and hedges of the Battle of Sedgemoor.
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