And now the year of the seagoing farm lifts to its crest with mushrooming July thunderheads leaning over it. It comes in haying-time. The tinker mackerel are running by nations in the sea. continents of herring are trailing against the farm so hard that its ribs are cracking, vows Uncle Cephus. But for all that, for once all farming of the sea has to wait, and all hands—and arms and legs and hearts—are in the hay. Everything comes at once in this corner of the world, and July proves it. But the hay cannot wait, and the thunder grumbles, and nun strain and sweat. Windrows run up over all the hills of sleep, strong men are still pitching hay in their dreams, and Peter, fast asleep in his bed, still treads the hayrack.
Even the deepest of sea-uncles is mustered in With a pitchfork. Cephus is here with the rest, lifting hay to the high rack. His white hair is all tangled in with the white hair of the rising thunderclouds in the west. Uncle Timothy is stripped to his waist, sweating like a Trojan, swearing like a Hessian trooper, and his big mustache leans bushily away from the wind. Father is in his shirt sleeves and cool as a cucumber. Peter is working like a man on the load, stowing away, trying to keep up with three men carrying whole worlds of hay on their upright forks and all lost from sight but their legs. He catches the worlds and rolls them to the middle of the rack.
Thunder outside. Thunder in. The big barn shakes with eight-footed thunder as the straining horses come pounding up the runway and across the planks of the Hour. and behind them comes the rack, with Peter prone on the top to keep from being brushed off by the lintel of the high door. The load fits exactly between the mows and makes one sweet world of hay. Father takes his place on the middle of the rack. He doesn't roll up his sleeves even now. But he shoves home his fork and comes up with his load and swings it to the mow. where Uncle Timothy is a wet red Indian to the belt. Calm as the incoming waves of the sea, the vast forkfuls rise, and the rack that Father is standing on goes down, and the mow rises. Fourteen forkfuls is what a load means to Father, and he knows where each forkful is. He can feel each with the tines of his pitchfork.
All the boys tread and stow away under the shouts of the slave driver Uncle Timothy. He keeps the hay rolling at them. They have to look alive not to be lost till the middle of next January under the rising tide of daisies and clover. The boys' overalls are dark blue with the heat in their bodies. They are as often upside down as up. They take what fun they can with tumbling and somersaulting on the hay, but they are likely to get a rap on their overalls from Uncle Timothy if they fool too much and don't tend to the business of packing down the forkfuls of grass. And their world is hot and dusty and dark and full of the prickles of thistles, and more work than play.
And the cool artist among the rankling lobsters out at sea is the same artist here, he uses his pitchfork as he uses an oar or a cod line. And the loud goes down to the bottom of the hayrack, and Father picks up his reins and drives out of the west door of the barn as cool as he came.
Only Uncle Cephus gets any rest. While the rack is unloading, the old captain sits in the shade of the high barn door and sees the snowy peaks of Java instead of the mountains of lightning standing up along the west. And he is at peace with the world.
And the thunderhead touches the sun, the sun goes out. and lightning rips the world apart. It rains all at once like falling pitchforks. All the rest of the hay, so beautifully made and windrowed and bunched, must be shaken out tomorrow to dry all over in the sun. Then it must be raked and windrowed and bunched once more. But that is the luck of hayingtime, And the boys of the farm forget the backaches of tomorrow and run and cool their hot dusty feet in the sudden rivers that are running over white clover blooms where no rivers should flow. Their breeches are still in summer, but their feet are in hailstones and water that feels like January. And the rain gone eastward turns fire now, and a world-wide rainbow spans the dark sea.
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.
And this salt-water Achilles burns the lamp rill all hours that night, nor being able to sleep, over his book of the Trojan war. And he plays not only Achilles' part, but Agamemnon's, Ajax's, and Menelaus'. He strews lien Boody all over the map.
For the next ten days, though, Achilles has to go back to the bayfields. He rakes scatterings and uncovers two nests of field mice and carries the blind things home in his pockets and feets them milk with his mother's medicine dropper until they catch cold and die.
Between windrows Peter sets his eel pots. They are big wicker bottles with pinched-in bottoms and stoppers of wood, woven by an old Indian of the coast who is a friend of the family. Peter crushes up horseshoe crabs for bail, stoppers them up, and sets them on their sides in the bay's channel. The cels creep in through the hole in the tunneled bottom and gorge themselves on the spawn of the crabs, just as they did for a thousand years for the Indians, and Peter conies along in his skiff, pulls out the traps, and unstopples them, and the yellow-bellied beauties pour out around his feet. Uncle Timothy gets out his jackknife and smacks his lips. It is fried eels for supper.
Peter turns a hundred grindstones for Uncle Timothy, till his mind goes round and round. He dogs his uncle trimming up with his scythe, till at last his hour of glory comes. Uncle Timothy sits down by the wall to smoke and lets Peter use his scythe. The boy runs it into the ground, nicks it on the stone wall, nearly takes off his own legs, but he gets the trick of it at last. Just then Uncle Timothy fetches a roar and leaves the scene. He has discovered he is sitting on a hornet's nest. Over the hill he goes. Peter drops his scythe and runs to see where. And Uncle Timothy disappears into the broad Atlantic to get rid of the yellow jackets.
In the midst of lightning and new rollings of thunder, the last load of hay rumbles barnwards to fill the barn to the hand-hewn rafters. And on top of the rack Peter's father has put the spray of wild roses which always comes in on the last load, for good luck against lightning and good luck to all the fourfooted creatures that will feed on the hay all winter long.
From hay to corn. Peter gets so hot hoeing the corn, he sheds his overalls at each row's end and buries his burning in high water.
There are so many kinds of work to run back and forth to in these brief summer days, which the seagoing farm of the north depends on for its food, that Peter forgets all about love. Not once docs he have time to mount the hill back of the kitchen and look north-wards or stand there at night among the songs of thrushes and sigh his soul away in that direction under the low summer dipper. Peter falls asleep at night with his clothes on, and his father has to peel his overalls off him like the azure skin off an eel. He carries him like lead to his bed. The father laughs to see his handsome sons sound asleep there. The windrowed brothers lie like four brief Adams before the Fall with not a stitch of clothes on their copper bodies, and their Indianed toes turn this way and that in their sleep, trying to locate a breeze in the hot room. This is the best crop of this seaward farm, and the father closes the door on his naked wealth with a smile.
While Peter is resting, Uncle Timothy makes him dig him a peck of young quahaugs, and he shells them out and eats them, tossing every fifth one to Peter.
July's book is the Arabian Nigbts. It is Father's huge unexpurgated edition, and Peter reads it up in the pasture, keeping one eye on the bull that pushes down the bean patch fence if no boy is around to watch him, and one eye on the jinn in the book.
And smack into the midst of the harvest days in the busiest peak of the year comes Aunt Esther, the city flower, for her month of rusticating in the green peace of a seaside farm.
This aunt has no uncle in tow. She had a husband once, but she lost him in a railroad wreck. It was just as well she lost him, vows sweating Uncle Timothy, for he would have been hard on her complexion. Aunt lather's complexion is her chiefest treasure. She uses up all the sour milk in the cellar each night on her face, and goes to her bed looking like a ghost. She wears a veil when she picks a mess of green beans and a hat when she cuts beet greens. She wakes Uncle Timothy up going out for morning dew to wash her cheeks in. She wears gloves when she snaps beans or picks over the peas.
And Aunt Esther's skin, says Uncle Timothy, looks like his cowhide boots after he has worn them out in the rain. All that lost motion! But this aunt goes right on taking care of her beauty. She has read that bee stings rejuvenate the facial muscles, so she goes out to the beehives for a treatment. But she comes in after the first tiniest application and screams for the witch hazel. She is a burden at dinnertime, for she has to have the shades down to keep out the cruel light of July, for her complexion's sake, and Uncle Timothy can't tell where his mouth is to put one of the year's first potatoes Into it. Uncle Timothy can't tell the green beans from the turnip greens, and he trembles all over with frustration.
And out in the rough winds of July gales sweeping suddenly in from the Atlantic, the wild roses have the kind of skin that Aunt Esther would sell her soul for. Like soft velvet. And the moral of that is, swears Uncle Timothy, a good skin comes where it is needed and when it wants to, and it is no use for anybody making a fool of herself over it at all.