Yet Uncle Timothy comes to life once more as the glow of coming Thanksgiving begins to light up his month of darkness. He springs to life with the broad-bladed butcher knife that only a hefty man like himself can flourish. Uncle Timothy pulls on his white duster like a priest of a pagan religion. Out he goes, breathing smoke for his breath in the frosty chill of a white morning. And from the pigpen wild and pagan sounds shatter the still cold. Pigs' squeals roll up the hill to the spruces and chill the squirrels and crows to the marrow. Down in the marsh the rabbits sit up on their haunches among the frozentussocks, and their meek eyes barken to this sound of death in the early morning.
Now comes that unforgettable breakfast of hogs' haslet when Peter and his brothers and sisters stuff themselves full of crescents of liver, fried deep in onions, and cross sections of tender heart. Porkspareribs are coming smoking on heaped platters. And there are huge meals of pigs' feet and the dumplings that are raised flour bursting into big blossoms in the midst of gelatinous broth. There are suppers of cold hogshead cheeses. And there are festoons of pork sausages such as only Aunt Lydia has the deep secret of making.
For Aunt Lydia is the aunt of the month. She is the cook and the braided drug-maker among all the aunts. She comes with the hard frosts and the first snow Hurries, and her coining is like a carnival, like Thanksgiving itself. She is round and rubicund and rosy, circular of body, and rounded with laughter. She lends a band to Mother in taking cure of this year's fresh pork. All the odds and ends of pigs are her portion. She gathers them all up and sets all the girls of the family, and the smaller boys, to chopping. She brings sweet smelling herbs from her own garden, finicky things this solid family have no time or are too heavy of hand to raise. Her days are chopping trays making wooden music, and the winds of sage and onion and garlic blow through the house. Her little sausages are packed with every odoriferous thing and they hang in the kitchen and shed and run on out into the toolshed, even, and festoon the plows.
Thanksgiving brings most of the aunts to the farmhouse. All save Emma. Her moral sense could not stand such hilarity and such letdown in family discipline as Thanksgiving Day brings. Hut minis pour in from east, west, and north. There are none hailing from the south, for that is purely ocean, and aunts cannot flourish there. They all concentration this small farm of the shrunken year, and the farm has to expand again to take them all in. They take the place of the lost spring, summer, and fall.
It happens this year that this is a very jovial Thanksgiving, for it happens that the pork is very splendid this fall. Word gets around. You can't stop it spreading. So the family this year has to sleep in eight-hour shifts. Uncle Timothy grumbles, of course, at having to double up with a newcomer. But he doesn't really mind too much having to share his bed, only he wishes it could be with an uncle who docs not snore a deeper bass than his, as Wilbert does. Or else wishes it could be with a man who shaves oftener than once a week.
The meals before and after the meal of the year are more or less continuous. night and day. The aunts help and pull their weight at the cooking and serving and washing up afterwards. The venison goes down, the mincemeat goes down, and the smokehouse shrinks noticeably. But all this is as it should be. For love lights up the lean and dark days of the year. Friendships and affections are laid on thick now in one cast feast such as the old Indians on this very shore used to have just before going on the warpath and into the white silence of the winter.
The day of days sees the oldest family gobbler shine in mahogany splendor in the table's center. But the family's geese add their crisp fatness to the feast of friendship too. There are ten kinds of vegetables which nobody bothers to eat till days later when the turkeys and geese are wishbones and seven kinds of local pie.
Peter flounders, as do Andrew, James, and John, and Baby William has to be carried off on all-fours. But children are expected to flounder at this season. Uncle Timothy goes practically into a coma.
Only one of this large reunited family eats sparingly. That is Uncle Cephus. He comes in late from his schooner to the feast. He eats cautiously and quietly. And when the stuffed feasters check on things, by lamplight, after the three-hour stretch of utter relaxation from so much eating, they find that Uncle Cephus has stolen away home to his gaunt old vessel and his memories of an earlier day when a Thanksgiving dinner such as this would have seen members of the family come in from the sea that is so empty now, come in from the south. For tall sea captains and their brides from the world's underside and from the far Pacific would have come home here. In these shrunken days now, the deep-sea visitors are among the missing. The old-timers, the round-the-world men and women, must send their regrets. For they are asleep under the deep cold seas on the world's opposite side, off Java and off Cape Horn. It is too late for them to come. Or they are sound asleep in the high, headland graveyards along this coast, done with Thanksgiving turkey and sleeping double in beds, done with friendships and families, done with all feasting and with the earth itself. Only one of all of them is left, and he, Cephus, steals away to his shrunken schooner on an empty, empty sea.
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