October comes to the northern seagoing farm like a bonfire. The white fires of the deep frosts burn the earth and leave it scar and brown in the sun. But the fires of the turning leaves make red and golden flames of all the forests. And these colored fires burn all day long and shine far at sea. It is like walking through the Book of Revelation to go after the cows at evening time, and Peter holds his breath between tall, cool Haines, liven the cows come solemnly home, for they know they will soon go to the pasture no more. They sense the end of sweet grass, and they fall sad and walk slow. The bright cries of the silent, painted warriors of death warn them, as they used to warn the painted Indians of centuries ago, that death is in the air. The burning woods have all fallen as quiet as the grave. For the last nations of the birds have gathered in flocks and gone south, and the coast has no more song.
This is the final harvest month. Everyone makes haste to gather and house the last that the gardens and orchards yield. The sea takes a back seat to the land now. And sailors dig potatoes, not clams. Uncle Timothy leaves wakes Or warm potatoes behind him, not wakes of cool spray, and he uses his clam hoe for the apples in the earth. Peter and the other boys have hard work keeping their uncle in sight, he goes so fast and so fierce. They lug the potatoes in baskets they used for clams on the other side of summer. Vast squashes that no one knew were there till the frost limped their leaves now come out bright suddenly across the greenless hills and light up the afternoons. Pumpkins appear, now that their tents of pride have fallen around them. The whole farm is a new and larger one than Peter guessed, now that all the leaves are dying and the odor of death is over the year.
Peter is prisoned for hours in the dusky bin down-cellar, and potatoes come down to him like waves of a brown sea. He rolls them into the far corners of the bin, and his mouth tastes of good fall earth. Pumpkins come down at him like suns from the sky, and the light on their rinds lights up the cobwebs festooned between the rafters of the cellar ceiling. Spiders, enormous with their harvests of indolent fall flies, hang heavy, head down, from the beams.
The dish of the month is the granddaddy of all the raccoons, fattened on the fat of the garden and now paying back his debt surrounded with potatoes he did not eat. He is as fat as a crock of butter from the corn cars he has stolen from the family. Now the family grease their gullets against the cold mornings with their own goods secondhand. Peter catches the coon in his trap, at the upper end of the corn patch. He skins him and stretches his pelt on a wide board. Peter has a second barred tail to go on his Daniel Boone cap made from the brother of this very coon.
Mother dresses the raccoon, and he lies in the bake pan, legs up, a deep brown, with the largest potatoes of fall like nuggets of gold around him and onions between the potatoes. Mother has parboiled him with soda, to take some of the wild flavor out of his meat, and she has roasted him two hours in a hot oven. She drains off a pint of his fat, and with his dark juices makes a thick gravy and squeezes a lemon into it.
Uncle Timothy is very partial to roast raccoon, and his is the greasiest chin at the end of brown October's brownest and fattest feast. The boys and girls pipe up with old song:
Raccoon and possum jelly,
Et so much I bust my belly!
Uncle Cephus goes light on this strong meat of the earth. He can stand even a coot's wildness because that is a wildness of the sea, but this land raciness is a different matter. But Cephus stows away many potatoes that have absorbed the gentler aroma of the raccoon.
The sea is like crushed sapphires in the clear sunlight, but it begins to grow uneasy on its far horizon on the cold mornings, and islands lift from it and grow only by a stem in the mirages of the end of a coast year.
From the potatoes and the popcorn, the family rush to the turnips they have pampered with the family mussel mud. The boys pull them, and Uncle Timothy trims their tops off with his cleaver. Father washes each in a tub and trims it into a purple-and-cream jewel. He puts his trademark on each stem by cutting it four ways with his jackknife. For this is the money crop of the year from the landward half of the farm, and the family takes great pride in the turnips' good looks. People as far down the coast as Portsmouth and as far up as Eastport will taste the flavor of mussels of the sea in the family's rutabagas come to market without crack or flaw. Twenty to thirty tons of these go from the sea farm each year. These are the family heirlooms.
The flawed and the runes among the turnips Peter boils in the pasture, in a wash boiler that has been mustered out of the kitchen, over his very own fire. It is a pleasant thing on a nippy fall morning to have a fire at one's face in the blue out-of-doors, and the color of its burning fits in with the color of the burning maples and birches. The geese leave looking for tender grass in the pasture and come hissing and cackling around Peter and his lire. For they know turnips when they smell them cooking. Peter mashes the vegetables up for them and spreads a golden banquet Out for them on the dead grass. The geese gobble up the red-hot turnip mash, jerking their thick necks back and forth and opening their bills wide to cool off between bites. There are a hundred of these gray beauties fattening up for the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons. and the family turnips put delectable pounds on their waddling legs.
Then it is apples. The farm turns golden and red with them, in the cellar, the storeroom, the barn floor, in the tool shed, and the attic. The girls of the house chop in the wooden trays till their arms ache, and Mother makes mincemeat by the barrels and lays it down in stone crocks belowstairs. The house reeks of apples and cinnamon and hot sugar. Pies overflow the oven with candied juice. Uncle Timothy gets outside a whole crinkly universe of an apple pie at one sitting. Mother's greatest specialty in pies is her pork-apple. She bakes that in a skillet. The pared apples are five inches deep in it, and they are mixed with dices of far salt pork. The fruit and meat arc laced with ribbons of molasses, brown sugar is added, and the top is put on it with breathing holes shaped like the lines of wild geese winging south, and the pie is baked an hour in its deep dish.
Peter lives in the high branches in the orchard, and his broadside tingles from the apples his brethren cannot resist winging him with when his mind is not on them but on the biggest apples at the top of the tree. He waits to get his revenge, and when his brothers are picking up stray fruit below him, he seizes two loaded boughs and shakes them like a hurricane with all his body. A red avalanche buries James and Andrew and John. Innocent Uncle Timothy gets smacked on his bald head, but his head is hard, and he makes no more of big apples than of so many raindrops.
But the loveliest apple picking of all could happen no place in the world except on a seagoing farm. It takes place far from the house and all tame things. It is in the ancient orchard on the seaward point of the farm, and the orchard is walled in by pinewoods. No road goes to that orchard, it is too wild and remote and lost. So Father and the boys go to gather these apples by dory, and that turns work into an unheard-of joy. They row to the picking under a lapis lazuli sky when the day is young. There they pick the small tart fruit, descended from the Indians' apples, festooning gnarled old trees. Some of the trees are prone, but they still bear. Some are only hollow cylinders of trees marked with the cuneiforms of a century of wood-peckers and sapsuckers and yellowhammers. The apples bite back when they are bitten. They are sour as time. But Father likes to have some of these hard, wild apples to mix with his tame, to point up his mincemeat and his cider. So he turns the boys loose in the snags of the old trees' boughs. And they fill many old sacks with the fall fruit of this ancient orchard by the sea.
When the day is old and the pines have made a blue twilight of the orchard, the men and the boys sling their sacks of Indian apples on their backs and go bent double towards the water. They wade the dead grass and stagger blind through the pinewoods, as partridges go up like a bolt of thunder. Uncle Timothy carries two bags above his broad hips, and he is too great a temptation for Peter. The boy slips his sack off his back and gets a hard apple. He puts all he has into it and burns his uncle with a bull's-eye. Uncle Timothy bellows a bull's roar, but he goes grimly on, unable to straighten up and turn on his tormentor. But he knows without looking whose arm threw that apple. And Peter's own back will burn at the shore from the venom in Uncle Timothy's hard hand. He will get his. going home a crying at the sea. The day is long, and a burnt man remembers.
The frost in the wild deep grass and pine needles rises like powdered amber around the apple gleaners. It tingles in their nostrils. They come to a still ocean like a sapphire pulsing fire in the low sun, Peter gets his burn back. But it warms what was too cold anyway, and he does not mind it. He and the others arc too sunk in the spell of apples to think of ordinary things. They stow their sacks aboard the boat beneath a sunset like a wide window opened in the wall of paradise.
Uncle Timothy and Father take the oars. The boys lie along the sacks of nubbly apples, and the smell of apples is in them and through them and goes cut over the sea. These apples come home by water, through an afterglow that is clear amber.
That golden evening is a weather breeder. Next morning a wild October rainstorm lashes the house, the coast, the world. Peter lies on his belly in the attic and reads the book of October, Twice-Told Tales. And gods shake the roof of his father's house and the walls of it, and Peter shakes with the house and feels good all over. The fragrance of hot mincemeat comes up the stairs to him. Slices of drying apples droop on strings from the rafters over his bead. The whole house smells of apples and resounds with the music of a mighty rain. And Peter is happy as a rainbound boy can be.
Three days of rain. Then the weather clears under a northerly gale. The young trees bend almost double, and the wind that means the end of things roars like the sea. All the leaves of the earth ate going from the trees. The farm is going bare. The air shines red and golden with the bright leaves' going. Peter leans against the gale on his way to school, and the north wind makes balloons of his breeches' leg. He is sad for the sight of the flying leaves and the ending of summer. The green half of the year is gone like a fish under the sea. The world has grown wider for the loss of its leaves. The boy can see houses he never noticed were there before on far hills which the wind has stripped. And Peter thinks of lost Lucy, and Lucy fits in with the sad bright time.
And on the wave of his sadness, Peter falls in love with another girl. Emily is as dark as Lucy was fair. Maybe it would be well to have some change of color in his family's hair, Peter thinks. Emily has nine ringlets down to her waist, and Peter's mind gets tangled in those. Peter carries her books for her and helps her find footing across the drenched earth. Emily clings to Peter from the force of the wind and her curls lash his checks, and Peter burns all over. And he burns the more because his way takes him past Lucy's windows, and without looking Peter feels and knows she is there watching him and his new love.
Across the wild light of this new excitement the shadow of the returned Aunt Emma falls. She is back for the autumnal equinox. Back with jars of cold cures and bottles of herb drinks that taste like torchlight processions and brass bands.
And Peter's walking in the gale and serving as shield to Emily have laid him low with the cold of the year. Aunt Emma pounces upon him in his fever. She adds heat to heat. Peter lies on his bed, radiating heat waves like a hot teakettle. Bitter brews go into him. In his fever-dreams Emily screams with her curls across the whole sky. She looks like a maenad. And Peter is uncomfortable with maenads, they are so unsettling and uncertain to get along with.
Peter wakes in the middle of the night, alone, for his brothers have doubled up with Father and Uncle Timothy. Me looks out through the high window panes, and three shooting stars go down the whole length of the sky. Downstairs he hears the hollow voice of Aunt Emma late at work cooking up new remedies to try out on him and lecturing his father on his being too easy on his children. Aunt Emma sounds very far away now, And Peter is very sure he is going to die, now he has seen three stars fall. He decides to give his jackknife, which Uncle Cephus gave him on his tenth birthday and which he has slept on every night since then, including this, to James, after all. But not his ship in the bottle. That goes to Father. Peter falls to sleep with tears in his eyes over pity for himself. The last thing he does is hope that his brothers will be kind to his dog Spot.
Peter wakes, all well and hollow as a reed, on a brilliant October morning. He goes downstairs three steps at a time and embraces Spot. He cats two bowls of the corn that mother has been hulling while he was abed, with five tablespoons of the farm's marsh-rose-mary honey. Aunt Emma keeps at him and makes him keep his elbows off the table and his hands on it only to their wrists, but even that doesn't keep him from doing great execution on corn and honey.
Peter goes pulling lobster traps with his father and gets the last dregs of his cold blown out of him, by a stiff wind that has winter in it. Father lets him pull two traps all by himself, and Peter brings up five counters in all. And on their way in, Father hails the “Mary Louise” and asks Uncle Cephus if he wouldn't like a guest overnight. Uncle Cephus smiles his pleasure—it is too windy for any words—drops a line to the boy, and Peter goes up hand over hand as his uncle has taught him to travel and joins him for a night aboard. That night is starred by stories almost till dawn. And the shadow of Aunt Emma is washed from the boy's mind. At midnight Uncle Cephus fries flap-jacks the size of his frying pan, tosses them into the air, and catches them without once smearing the edges of the pan, and Peter cats several.
Next day Peter sleeps till noon and is wakened at last by the wild pitching of the schooner. He looks through the cabin port, and the sea is a cauldron of whitecaps. Uncle Cephus is sleeping like a baby. Peter lies on his pitching bunk and knows it is too windy for his father to come out for him today. And so there will be another day and another long night of Uncle Cephus and pirates and flapjacks, and maybe Aunt Emma will be gone before Peter can get back to the farmhouse.
It turns out a windy red-letter day. Uncle Cephus knocks over a wild duck going past the schooner at fifty miles an hour, retrieves him from the waves, and roasts him with cracker stuffing for Peter's dinner. He plays checkers with Peter, and offers the boy a corn-cob pipe. Peter takes it without batting an eyelash and smokes it like a man. His Uncle Cephus knew he would. The captain has missed some of his tobacco when Peter has been around before.
So here is a great peace for Peter at the end of the busiest month of a busy year. Peter takes a holiday, learning enough to fill a book about the lore of ships.
And, as a cap to it all, when Peter does get back to the farm, Aunt Emma is gone!