The seagoing farm's harvest goes on into the month when the frost flowers dust all the pasture over just before the real frost comes.
Only the harvest quickens up, and it comes now, not only from the sea and land, but from a new direction, the air. The law lifts from the seventy-seven varieties of ducks. Hardy dinners—and it takes a hardy man like stout Uncle Timothy to stand up under the fishiness of such—whistle up the bay on coots. They honk half a mile up in ring-necked geese coming back fat from Labrador and wild rice. They dusk the twilight in dusky black duck. Peter even shoots a whistler in the well-pond among the outraged frogs that thought love and war were over.
The air drops stews and potpies all over the water and land as Father stands up and gives them both barrels. Uncle Timothy lets go with his eight-gauge, Peter gives them the works with his sixteen-gauge, Andrew picks them off with his twenty-two, and James snatches it from him and pinks them, and out on the water the ocean blossoms with yellow thunder, and Uncle Cephus brings down a fourteen-pound goose. The old captain in the family signals to Peter with his red-and-white flag to come out and join him at his famous goose stew with cod-lead dumplings made out of almost dry dough, exploding into miracles in the hot pottage.
And when Father isn't looking, Peter, full of cod-lead dumplings and vast valor, borrows his twelve-gauge Lefever and knocks over a black duck, and knocks himself over, tail over teakettle as Uncle Timothy puts it, on the first barrel and never gets the chance to shoot the second.
Smack in the middle of chevrons of wild birds going over, school starts up once more. Peter goes off the bay and up the wood-road, squeaking proudly in the unaccustomed shoes he has earned our of huckleberries, and blisters his heels badly in the cause of culture. And his face at night matches his heels. For when Peter goes to get Lucy Brown's books to carry them home for her, he finds they are under the arm of black Ben Boody, and Lucy's arm is through Ben's arm, and her dancing eyes see nobody in the world but the black boy who looks for all the world, to Peter's way of thinking, like a codfish, and not a very good-looking codfish even.
Peter legs it slowly a mile and a half behind his brothers and sisters. James twits him on his lost love, and he heaves a stone at James. This settles it. He swears off all womankind for good. He brings down a poor hungry song sparrow with his sling, and his black mood and blacker deed hush the pinewoods with horror around him.
That night Peter has to dig three rows of early potatoes and get them into the cellar. He steals away from supper and reads the book to match his bitterness, The Ms Found in a Bottle, by the light of a guttering candle with a sad fall wind crying lonesomely around the eaves of his room. Andrew asks him to dowse the light so he can sleep, but Peter refuses to. Andrew has to bury his head under the quilts. Late in the night, in a crucial part of the story, Peter drops a drop of hot candle fat on Andrew's car. Andrew comes awake with a roar and slaps him and slaps out his taper.
Peter remembers the story of Cupid and Psyche and how Psyche dropped the blazing oil on the young God of Love, and how the God of Love sighed deeply and flew out of the room forever. Only Peter must admit Andrew doesn't look very much like Cupid, and doesn't fly away. He flies at Peter and wakes James up. Then the two of them lie on Peter, keep him down on the bed, and keep him from lighting his candle again. Everything Peter touches turns into bitterness.
Next morning, who should blow in on the family but the cheerful aunt, Hattie. She, like several of Peter's aunts, lacks the balance wheel of an uncle. Peter isn't surprised in the case of Aunt Hattie. No man could last more than a few months through such optimism. Aunt Harriet's spouse was lost at sea in the Great Blow of 1898. Peter has the feeling that it wasn't a great blow at all. Hattie's man probably spent all his nights out on deck or even our on the bowsprit of his schooner waiting for something in the way of a blow to come along, big or little.
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