Wide winds shake the bare world now, and there is a great sound of doors going to. The ocean is growing too dark and cold for seagoing farming.
The small farm that was so wide in summer is shrinking in and in on itself every day, and every hour. Tin's last little green gully is lost to the gray of ruin, this last running vine to white frost. The fields are stripped and empty. The crows are leaving the woods and have not much more to say for this year. Work goes indoors mostly, and many windows shine in the house after four o'clock. All the high windows in the barn light up like windows in a cathedral. Summer is gone indoors into (his vast house. The cows chew their cud in this house's fragrance. The fisherman-farmer's lantern takes the place of the son. The cows take a tall man doling out grain as some kind of a god left over from summer, and they stand quiet and give down their milk through his cupping and stroking hands.
The boats have all come home to the cove, save for the reach-boat that still goes out daily to the forests of lobster buoys. The boats huddle together out of the wind under the lee of the fishhouse and boathouse. There is a light in the fishhouse nightly, where things are being stowed away for the winter.
The light on Uncle Cephus' schooner is as lonely and distant as a star on the darkening sea. For even Uncle Cephus has shrunken, and neither he nor his tall schooner stems to fill as much space in the world, A big uncle grows small in a boy's mind. Peter sees his uncle so seldom he almost forgets he is there, and his uncle's light of an evening is more like one of the smaller stars than any sign of life.
And Peter shrinks up, too. For one bitter day on his way home from school he climbs a tree to get his lady of the long curls a hornet's nest the fall winds have exposed there, to go over her mantel, and he snags his breeches on a dead limb there and lays himself open to the cold world. Long-Curls thinks it is funny, and titters. Peter doesn't think it is funny at all, and he has hard work walking more than side to her the rest of the way home, crablike, to conceal his rearward wound. Emily thinks this is still funnier, and titters all the more. She cannot get over her titters,and so she drops Peter's Geography she has been carrying for him ever since he climbed the tree of disaster, right in the middle of a puddle, open at South America, Peter's favorite place, and doesn't seem sorry one bit.
Peter feels the book swell, and be knows be will have to get his mother to iron out the pages with her flatiron. Hut he also knows his mother will never be able to make. The book look the same again. It will look like Uncle Timothy in his winter fat. The book swells and swells, and Peter suddenly falls out of love completely, and walks off and leaves the tittering girl.
The boy walks home all by his lonesome next afternoon. And ii doesn't help him any to notice that Lucy is walking home by herself, too, Inn keeping a good ways behind him. For Lucy has shrunk also. And the bare world is too wide for Peter or Lucy or anybody to make any impression on it at all. And on top of everything else, it rains. Peter gets home with sloshing feet.
So Peter buries himself in a book of bitterness and reads Gulliver's Travels to all hours of the night in the cold kitchen after everyone has gone to bed. He stops reading now and then and listens to the rats that have taken over life now in the house and run in the walls on errands he cannot understand. And the low wind that has come up out of nowhere sounds like the whinnings of the silly Houyhnhums and the squealings of the sillier Yahoos. It is a bitter, bitter night.
But the bitterness lifts and blows all away next week when his father lets Peter go with him after his winter deer. Peter walks to bis father's port, bis sixteen gauge at the ready. He walks even lighter than his father does, without rustling so much as a birch leaf or snapping the smallest spruce twig in woods that are all fallen birch leaves and all dry spruce twigs. He holds his breath in so that he feels as if he were going to burst. His gun is loaded with buckshot, and his mind is loaded with excitement.
Peter and his father walk into the wind. It is growing dusky all over the world. though it is only around three o'clock. For the day, like everything else on the sea-going farm, has shrunken too. The two hunters come along a lost stone wall to a lost clearing where a house once stood. The cellar of the house is only a pit fringed with junipers now, and the two skirt the junipers quietly. Beyond the heap of bricks chat were once a huge chimney and fireplace, they can see the top boughs of old apple trees with a few withered yellow apples still clinging to the leafless boughs.
Peter's father all at once grows tense at his ears, at his back. Peter grows tense at his. His father lifts each foot slowly and gingerly as he goes up the knoll. Peter lifts each of his feet the same way. They hardly move at ail at last. Father's deer rifle is at the ready. Peter's gun is, too. The ancient apple trees rise gradually Out of the earth, and their gnarled trunks begin to appear. Peter's eyes burn. Peter's heart stands still.
Peter's father all at once grows tense at his ears, at his back. Peter grows tense at his. His father lifts each foot slowly and gingerly as he goes up the knoll. Peter lifts each of his feet the same way. They hardly move at ail at last. Father's deer rifle is at the ready. Peter's gun is, too. The ancient apple trees rise gradually Out of the earth, and their gnarled trunks begin to appear. Peter's eyes burn. Peter's heart stands still.
His father springs forward. Peter springs with him. His father's rifle leaps to his shoulder. What was a patch of sere brown grass below an old apple tree comes alive with branching horns, and goes off bouncing, a broad white scut showing, in long leaps for life and the safe spruce woods below. And beside his a narrower scut bounces. A long line of fire from Father's muzzle. A line of fire from Peter's. Smoke fills Peter's eyes. Maybe the two flying patches of white made the woods. Maybe they didn't. The two menfolks run down the hill.
There in the waning light, just short of the tumbling wall and safety and the dim woods, lies the grass-patch with horns, nose to earth, crumpled and quiet. And just over the wall is the other, a young buck, down on his belly his head still up. His eyes are wide Open with fear and hurt. And Father has to finish the young deer off.
Just for a split second Peter feels more like crying than anything else. Hut the shout he has in his throat comes out, as the buck's eyes go our and his head sinks. Peter throws himself, all trembling with shame and joy mixed crazily together, upon the body of his first deer, and grasps his prize to his thumping heart.
It is the peak of one of the mountains of life, and the breath comes slow and hard in Peter's chest.
Among brothers and sisters with wide eyes that night in the kitchen Peter tells how he brought down his first deer, how easy it was, and how he never had a bit of “buck fever” but got the leaping deer just back of his foreleg. Uncle Timothy pats Peter on the back and tells him he will soon be as good a shot as his father and keep them all in venison every season.
Next noon it is Peter's venison the family eat for dinner, a well-browned haunch of dark meat baked in the oven in a thick blanket of bacon from the farm's pigs. Peter has the first piece of all, buttressed about with potatoes he dug himself last month, browned almost as deep as the deer meat. The boy hunter sits on the top of the world. And. at the moment, love seems like a little thing beside the glory that is making Peter grow a whole inch while he eats.
The menfolks go often to the woods now to fill in the gaps of their tame meat with wild. For this seagoing farm happens to lean hard on the woods everywhere, and it is fed not only from the ocean and the vegetable garden but from the spruce and maple thickets as well. Uncle Timothy must get his deer, and he does, after three days walking and great agony in his bunions, Uncle Cephus gets his, without much walking at all, for being a seaman, he studies the wind, sits down, and lets his buck come right up to him. The line in the shed lengthens, and the lost creatures of the woods hang by their heels in the frost.
Mother is chopping her last and best mincemeat, from the stringier and tougher meat of the deer and from the wild apples that came home to the farm by boat over the sea. She stews the deer meat and drains it. Then the girls chop it into the halved apples. The whole house smells of orchard and woods. Raisins and orange peel go into the chopping trays and are worked into the brown mash. The great rocks are filling up with savoriness in the cold cellarway.
Uncle Timothy's orbit has shrunken, and it hugs the fire in the kitchen stove now. The others go to the woods and the bay. to bring down new game, but Uncle Timothy, now he has his deer, takes his annual ease, looks at the cold outdoors, and puts another stick of oakwood on the lire. The Stealthy winter creeping through the dark spruces is deep in Uncle Timothy's bones now, and he grows as sluggish as a bear meditating on his long winter sleep. He grows bearish in his manners, too, and he is a hard man to get a word out of from morning till night.
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.