The Milky Way rolls over the little seagoing farmhouse, and its far fires bring on another month, with everybody running from one kind of work to another. Mother is up to her heart in canning corn and beans, tomatoes and peas. The cellar shelves are filling up with enough vegetables, shining through glass, for two years ahead. That is Mother's margin of safety, two years. For who knows but two years of steady snow will come and whiten twenty-four months on this cold coast? It happened once, in 1817.
The girls are buried and lost in the long forests of the garden rows, they stumble over green snares of cucumber and pumpkin vines. The garden is a jungle. Baby William, taking his first wide steps, hampered by the kind of pants he still wears, gets lost in the forests of pole beans, and they have to locate him by his cries and the bean poles he is holding to. The tassels of the corn brush on the clouds, and the silk in the ears matches the little girls' hair. They have to call Peter from his clamming, to earn his tall hunting boots, on the clam flats, to come and pick the highest beans and break off the tallest ears on the cornstalks. Barefooted and lithe from his clamming, Peter goes up the birch poles like a squirrel, and rains hatfuls of beans down on the girls' heads and pails.
Peter is working SO hard he doesn't recall love at all. As the days roll over him with mounds of clams and quahaugs, corn cars and cucumbers for the pickles Mother is making by the washtub, the boy, worn down by heavy summer, forgets there ever was such a girl as Lucy in the world.
In the fever of things, when pickles are at white heat, and Mother's blackberry jams are running over in her oven, doesn't the berry Aunt arrive—Aunt Elizabeth. She arrives with crates and baskets and barrels in her wake. She comes prepared with mitts made out of stocking legs to protect her wrists, straw sleeves to be pulled on over her cloth ones, high boots for the bushes, arnica for bee stings, ointments for poison ivy. Uncle Henry armed to the teeth with smudges against mosquitoes and black flies, a whole arsenal of firearms to keep off the skunks and snakes and woodchucks, and a great gleam in her eye. No one has expected Aunt Elizabeth this early. Usually she comes with the first frost.
Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Henry take the family by surprise, and the morning flapjacks give out. Mother has to mix up more. Peter has to bring up two new combs of the family honey. Uncle Henry is hearty and eats like a horse. Bur all the boys are glad to see him and his firearms. And he brings unlimited ammunition. The boys have him in action before he is half through his dozen flapjacks. The bay and the woods whine with bullets. and the woodchucks and rabbits take to their deepest holes. The farm is, an explosion at this time of the year.
Mother hangs all the children with baskets and pails graded to each picker's size. For mother will be darned if she will let these locusts—which is what Uncle Timothy calls Elizabeth and Henry—strip the farm of its berries and take them all to the city. Mother even equips Uncle Timothy against his will, for he hoped to have a quiet forenoon curled up around a peck of sweet quahaugs and a lobster or two boiling in a pail over spruce boughs down on the shore. Mother hangs a milk pail on Timothy's arm, puts a large cipper in his hand, and pushes him out of the house in the wake of Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Henry and the children. He must pull his weight in the boat.
Peter has a water pail hung around his neck and another on his head with its bail under his chin—and a light in his eye. Me knows where all the different berries grow thickest, but he isn't telling Aunt Elizabeth. He takes the lead and decoys her into a blackberry patch up above her sun helmet. He makes a feint or two, to put her off the scent, one to port, one to starboard, then he drops on all fours and skitters like a woodchuck to a place far away among dead logs where the blackberries hang down in the gloom big as his thumbs, so ripe that he can shake them off into his pail. He eats every fifth handful as he picks with both hands, to get tired of their taste so he won't have to sample them and hold himself back in his picking any more. His lip; grow dark. His belly is full, he needs to eat no more. Now he really sails in, and the berries rain into his pails. His pails brim up and run over. He goes bent double down a culvert he knows and emerges into a field without a rent in his breeches, for all the spikes of thorns he has been in, not a cowlick in his hair, not a wrinkle in his conscience. He streaks home, empties his pails upon his astounded mother, and doubles back into the hills for more.
The raspberries. Aunt Elizabeth's favorites, are mostly gone by, but the blackberries and the huckleberries are in full cry. Aunt Elizabeth emerges disheveled and lacerated from the blackberry patch. She is cut to the bones of her corsets, and so she goes for easier game. She discovers Uncle Henry under a pine tree deep in a nap, hangs him with pails, and leads him to the blueberries. The late blueberries hang heavy, without an underdone one between the ripe. Slender Aunt Elizabeth, on her armored knees, sweeps the berries into her pail. But portly Uncle Henry finds his big pants get in his way. He tries going on all fours and stains the knees of his pants scandalously. He tears his shirt on a hawthorn bush, barks his shins on a ledge. Eating blueberries surreptitiously, he keeps his eyes on his wife, who doesn't allow him to guzzle when picking.
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