Out in the cornpatch the corn is an inch higher for the shower that has ruined a hay day, and the boys will have to sweat hard to keep up with it with their hoeing. The horses leave the rack for the mowing machine, for there is no rest for a horse in July.
After the world has dried nut a bit, Mother and Ann and Molly and Jane, deep in the shade of their sunbonnets, creep deep in the uncut grass, ahead of Father and his rearing team laying the next meadow low. The she-folks come home with pails of small wild strawberries, and they sit on the cool doorstep and spend the rest of the day hulling the berries and staining their fingers deep red. Mother has her largest milk pan full of the little red hearts of summer by the time the stars come out. She crushes the strawberries with her applewood pestle, colored with bygone summers, stirs into them their weight in sugar, and folds into the doubled weight of berries and sweetness an equal weight of the sour cream thick as yellow velvet. And down in the dark, cool cellarway the vast pink mess goes.
Tomorrow comes the Fourth and Mother's strawberry cream. slightly fermented and risen with bubbles in it like raised bread. The year's first mess of peas is picked and run into the house by the boys before the pods know they have been broken from their vines. The girls shell them and pour them in the kettle along with generous slabs of butter. The little boys of the farm have canoes galore as they brace the pea pods apart with different lengths of broken matches as Uncle Cephus taught them to do. and they make an ocean with Mother's washtub and splash themselves sopping wet while the peas cook in the kettle.
The dinner horn blows to the farm's four corners, menfolks and boys come from every direction, from the cornpatch. from shaking out the hay, from raking, from mowing. They line the kitchen table. They down hot bowls of the green peas and cool bowls of the strawberry-cream, wiping their mouths or mustaches off with slabs of fresh golden johnnycake. Uncle Timothy starts the sequence over again, hot bowl, cool bowl. Uncle Cephus is mine modest, he takes a second bowl of the strawberry-cream only. The family eat till they feel like groaning for happiness. Peter, who has raked three fields of hay with the horse rake, on top of celebrating the Fourth with cap pistols and torpedoes, falls asleep with his face in his third helping of strawberry-cream. This is the feast of the month. It is another name for beatitude
The he-folks have gone back to the hay at last. They have left Peter asleep at the table with his face in happiness. Peter stirs. He wakes. He sits up suddenly and remembers something. For all his belly is rounded with peas and cream and wild strawberries, he snatches a lard pail and goes like a streak of yellow lightning in his Hying curls to that swale where he saw the blossoms of strawberries under the shad net. His mother and sisters have missed it. The mowing machine has not leveled it yet. They are there! On all fours be goes and picks whole trees of hanging red hearts, he picks with both hands. His pail fills fast.
And when his pail runs over. Peter legs it to the farmhouse to the northward. He collides with Mrs. Brown just as she comes out to hoe her tame strawberries, and he thrusts the pail of wild ones in her broad lap. She calls into the house. Out comes Lucy, all smiles and dimples. She sits down by her mother and hulls till every dainty fingertip is as red as love. Peter sits beside her and drinks in the fragrance of the hulled berries and—when she isn't looking his way—Lucy. Peter even stoops to hull a bunch of berries now and then. His eyes are running over with goodness. And it isn't just the peas and strawberries he has in him. It isn't all Lucy. And it isn't all good goodness. He thinks of the black-haired Ben. hopelessly annihilated now. The stretch of his life ahead is all strawberries and fair-haired sons of his bobbing down the future.
Lucy's mother makes a strawberry shortcake out of Peter's present, and this boy who is already half pure strawberry-cream eats his way through three two-decker helpings of the shortcake. He plays parcheesi with Lucy till her bedtime, and lets her win every game, though it takes a lot of skill to do it. Peter goes home through the deep July dusk, with Roman candles going up here and there from some farm celebrating the Fourth late, Peter goes through fields alive with lightning bugs, feeling like Achilles dragging Hector, whose real name is Hen Boody, nine times around the walls of Troy.
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