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.
Aunt Elizabeth surprises a snake, and Uncle Henry has to conic and drive it away, and so Amu Elizabeth discovers from bis purpled mouth his defection from duty, and she gives him a tongue-lashing for his sins. The portly picker's pail still rattles. He can Stand no mute. When his wife is bent over, head down on her third pail of blue-berries, Uncle Henry waddles to the stone wall and dives over. He falls farther than he expected to and brings up in a juniper patch, barbed with hundreds of little daggers. and in many other kinds of thorns. He finds his pants fishhooked with beggar lice and bristled with burdocks. He finds walking is an agony and sitting a torture. The next half hour Uncle Henry spends picking thorns out of his person.
Aunt Elizabeth hallos to her husband. Uncle Henry hears her just over the wall. But he sits tight, free of thorns now. and smiles. A mother partridge and her pretty brood come upon him and wink at him with round, friendly eyes. Uncle Henry winks back at them. They keep his secret and melt away into the spruces. But a saucy red squirrel discovers him. begins to scold and criticize his appearance, and threatens to give him away with his chattering. And so Uncle Henry walks quickly away with tobacco and sleep and peace in his mind. He will tell his wife he got lost in the woods. He starts for the clearing, and he does get good and lost in the woods.
Peter is on his third pail in his own private huckleberry patch when he hears what he takes for a bear. It is Uncle Henry, though. Lost and confounded, he has taken a good nap and now wakes and wonders which way is home. Having stumbled by accident into Peter's berries, he starts to fill himself with the highly spiced huckle-berries. Peter hails him. And Peter saves him a lot of grief by giving him a whole quart of his berries, and makes a friend for life.
Uncle Henry unslings his twenty-two and disgorges boxes of cartridges. Peter leaves his uncle with his berries and turns into Daniel Bonne. He fills the woods with whistling lead and falling squirrels, red and gray. The sound he makes attracts Andrew and James and John, who have been hard at berries till now, to him. They join their brother and demand their share of the ammunition. 'Peter gives it to them. But he has pretty well scared all he chipmunks and woodchucks into the next county. So the rest of the boys have to pick on the crows. Andrew wings one down, but all the others leave the state screaming blue murder. After that they have to use up the rest of the cartridges in the five boxes cutting off oak leaves and the fungi on birch trees. Uncle Henry gets in another nap on a bank of moss. The boys have to prod him with he twenty-two's muzzle to wake him up and get him moving again.
The hunters come upon Uncle Timothy curled up round a bottle of their fathers bourbon under a hack-matack tree. Their uncle is drowning his sorrow over the lost quahaugs. He has about a quart of blackberries and blueberries, assorted, all mixed in with twigs, leaves, and inlelible bunchberries. And he is piucushtnned with thistle cads, beggar lice, and rose apples. He hires the smaller toys to pick them out of him at a nickel apiece. Uncle Henry, dry from so much sleep, helps Uncle Timothy finish the last of the bourbon. The two uncles then burst into song. The day is a good day after all.
The dish of the month is Mother's blueberry pudding, a stout concoction of a quart of flour, two teaspoons of cream of tartar and one of baking soda, sifted, and two teaspoons of lard worked with the hands into the (lour, the whole mass made into a heavy liquid with milk, a pint of the blueberries, dampened and rolled in dry Hour first to keep them from sinking in the pudding, added to the mixture with a teaspoonful of salt. Having greased her biggest lard pail, Mother pours the makings of her pudding into it, sets the pail in a big kettle filled with boiling water, and cooks it for two hours. When the pudding is turned out on the platter, Father cuts it horizontally with a looping codline, and Mother hands out the slices, wetting each down with thick vanilla cream sauce.
At the roundup of the day's take of berries, it is found that Aunt Elizabeth, with no scout to guide her but her fine nose for berries, has come home with twelve quarts of blueberries, six of blackberries, and two of huckleberries. The uncles are a total loss, but very songful and happy. Each of the girls has gathered about ten quarts of berries, Andrew, James, and John together muster seven. But Peter, for all the nine squirrel pelts on his belt, pours out thirty quarts of perfect blackberries, blueberries, and huckle-berries. He wins applause for upholding the family's honor on the berry fields and saving a lot of sweetness for their own winter. But Aunt Elizabeth sets her lips in a thin line and declares that she will tie that boy to her apron strings tomorrow, and then she will know where to go for berries.
But next day ten yoke of oxen could not drag Peter berrying, let alone the apron strings of an aunt. For word has spread up and down the coast like wildfire that the tuna have arrived. Peter is for the new reach boat, with the pulpit erected on its prow against this day. The menfolks get up at crack of day and load in stout hawsvrs of fishlines with hooks the size of Peter's hand, long coils of rope with kegs at the ends of them and poles stuck up in them carrying the family colors on gay gonfalons, and pies and cakes entire and stacks of sandwiches Mother has got up ahead of the morning star to put up.
The fishermen buy dingy hake from sleepy Sam Scoville in the haze of early morning. They pick up Uncle Cephus at the “Mary Louise,” where the old captain has heard the news in his bones and knows the horse mackerel, as he always calls the tuna, have arrived without hearing a word from any soul along the coast. Cephus has been waiting on his deck since the second cockcrow for the family to come by. He lowers himself into the boat as lightly as a boy of ten. And now the family can go hopefully, for in Cephus they have the best tuna man on the whole coast.
The men and boys cut up the small dinghies and make the hash they call “chum,” as the lobster boat rides the smooth and oily swells of August. It is going to be a lovely calm day. It is so still they can hear the wash of the swells two miles behind them on the coast ledges. They bear out south-by-east till the land behind them is only a low azure cloud on the horizon. A hundred boats are joining them from three directions. Everybody knows the news. Men are standing tall in the pulpits at the boats' bows with long harpoons in their hands. The waives have the “look.” The family boat slows to a crawl.
Suddenly a bronze lobsterman to star-board lets go his iron in a long arc, paying out his line to it as it whizzes after the iron. A white commotion in the sea, and the harpoon dips under. A strike! Uncle Cephus, quiet in his best trousers, tries his harpoon's point on his palm, and a gleam comes into his eye. Father nods his head, and the boys throw over the “chum.” The white snowflakes of cut-up fish twinkle and zigzag down into the dark water. Peter on the port side puts over his line with a hake on the hook hung by the backbone. Father on the starboard does the same. Uncle Timothy at the stern. Everyone is very quiet. A fisherman two boats away is all at once commotion. Suddenly, by some unseen power, he starts off fast over the sen.
Peter gets the first bite. A little trem-or down deep below, then his arms are nearly wrenched from the sockets, he starts paying out his line hand Over fish. But it brings up slack, and his face falls. A gone goose! But father suddenly stiffens at his hack and yanks a yank, and then his line sings away wicked through his hands so fast it smokes. Father lets it run till the spool is almost bare. Now he starts slowing the line down, gingerly and gradually. He begins drawing it back, coil by coil. Out it sings suddenly again, and out he lets it go. But back again he gentles it. All the way this time. Under the boat's side a bluish torpedo looms, with staring eyes and fins like blue sickles. Uncle Cephus grows taut. His iron arm slowly rises. His blue eyes grow bluer. Peter's eyes are half out of his head.
“Turn him to port a bit, William, so I can go in back of his gills,”
Father gently swings the torpedo a dight sidewise. Big Uncle Cephus turns into a bolt of blue lightning, His arm goes down too quick to follow. The whole Atlantic churns around the boat and turns crimson. Away go line, harpoon, and all. Father pays out the two hundred feet of rope like quicksilver, keeping it from taking a turn around any boy's leg or arm and dragging him to limbo. He ups the keg, and over that goes, its tall staff staggering as the keg goes to sea, clucks, and disappears.
“He'll go six hundred, bet my soul,” is all Father says.
“Joy go with him!” says Cephus. He'll go six hundred and fifty, bet you mine. And he won't stray too far. I put it right under Little Rodney's backbone, and it will stay put till he gets barnacles on his belly.”
The family gonfalon conies up at last far out on the horizon. 'The menfolks pay no attention to it at all. They are busy with another torpedo. Peter hooks this one, but be hands his line over to Father when it begins to get hot. Father maneuvers the fish to the boat's side, and Uncle Cephus puts the family trademark into him deep with his second harpoon. This fellow is not so big as the other. He is a little fellow, hardly five hundred pounds! He doesn't take all the line over when he makes his run. They get him to the sidle again. Uncle Cephus gives him another iron, and the water reddens all about the boat.
“You hurt him bad,” says Father.
“Shouldn't wonder,” says Cephus, and his mustache quivers.
They rig the rackle-and-fall and swing it out Over the waves. The vast blue-green head breaks the surface, running with bronze lights. Uncle Cephus leans over and threads a wire cable in the fish's gaping mouth and out through his gills behind. The silver and bronze and blue giant waggles his headside to side, tired. He doesn't like this business at all, and he says so with his head. They make the cable fast to the tackle block. Father pulls, and Uncle Cephus puts his great weight into it. The fish gives a last flop. All hands help at the fall. The wire cuts his gills like a knife, and the lust red life pours into the sea. The torpedo mounts skyward with triangles of pure, solid but chin, gold along his back. The fish swings in. He is bigger than Uncle Cephus, but Uncle Cephus takes him in his arms and eases him into the boat. “Four-eighty,” says Uncle Cephus. He knows. He has that kind of an eye. And he has this sea baby in his arms.
The day burns on. Hundreds of vast fish are landed in the boats. The family have two tuna aboard as the sun slides into the waves. They go after their biggest fish. They locate (heir two gonfalons one after the other. The tuna hitched to them are tired now, and they bring them aboard. The last, which was the first harpooned, is so large Father has to borrow a friend's tackle-and-fall, and the friend, to get the fish into the boat.
The family go home through the long August afterglow on an ocean like the Field of the Cloth of Gold in Dickens' History of England, which is Peter's book of the month. They are down to the water's edge. Four monsters, head over one rail, tail over the other, weight them down. There is hardly room for the boys. But the four boys fit into the contours of the men, and they go happily into the dark, Peter falls asleep, standing up between Father and Uncle Cephus. But he wakes and sees (he great fish going aloft in the sputter of arc lights at the wharf, where they sell them at four cents a pound. ＄146 it is for an August day that will be like a bright dream all his life to Peter.
That night Peter eats a mahogany slab of that first fish of theirs. Bur Uncle Timothy doesn't eat any, either of the light or the dark steaks.
“Me?” says Uncle Timothy; “I'm not having any. Too rich for my blood. Thanks just the same. I'll stick to my bread-and-milk, I wouldn't dare. Oily?—say if I ate a hunk of that baby, I'd blow myself into kingdom come when I went to blow out my lamp tonight, I ain't hankering to die young.”