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.
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.
But when the sun touches the buttercups on the western hills. Peter is done. The farm is all lace, nets float on its daisies from the seashore to the spruces, and butterflies are coming up through its taut meshes, clear of all knots and all seaweed. And this head-down day is not all lost. For Peter has discovered a place in a meadow which is white with wild strawberry blossoms. He puts the place down in his memory.
And that night Uncle John, rejuvenated by shad steaks, comes into full flower and full cry. He comes our to Peter, after his afternoon's siesta on the parlor couch, and sits by the boy on the south-sloping hill. The old haunted house of Quahaug Bay lies at bis feet and Peter's, no bigger than a birch chip at the rim of the twilit ocean. It is all very still and clear. The long northern afterglow washes over the seacoast. Voices of distant children at play and men at work on their lobster traps on wharves come up to Peter and his uncle as his uncle tells him ghost story after ghost story about the specters in that very haunted house down there at their toes. Uncle John knew those ghosts personally as a boy on this coast.
There was every kind of “hant” there in the small house. How they could all crowd into so small a place bears Peter, bur crowd in they did. There was the pretty lady who played on Sunday evenings on the organ that wasn't there. Uncle John had sat in the parlor there and heard her.
But the best of all is the story of the fisherman who used to sit on the from doorstep there with his long-bearded head right on his own knee, and his bead kept singing “Rock of Ages,” It seems that that was the hymn the old fellow had been singing the night he came home unexpectedly early from the prayer meeting and found bis wife carrying on with her fancy-man right in the parlor on the horsehair sofa, in spite of its prickles and slipperiness. The old husband took down bis shotgun, put it under his beard, and blew his head off into kingdom come. They never found hide or hair of it anywhere, though they looked hard. It was a terrible thing. It was, says Uncle John, a great shame and blot on that house. The old fellow had the best bass voice in the country. They missed it awful at the prayer meetings. But Providence made it up to the poor old man in the here after, and gave him a brand new head to hold on his knee and sing “Rock of Ages” on the front doorstep every Sunday evening when it was fair. Uncle John heard him sing, saw him, too.