And the year fills out its circle, and December comes with storms and sunshine to this coast. It brings the dark day of the pulling out of the boats. The gathered uncles of Thanksgiving can scent that day coming, and they vanish before it dawns. For uncles are notoriously backward, at least in holidaytime, at breaking the holiday spirit with sweat and the straining of long-disused muscles. They melt away.
Now the dark day comes when the ocean door swings to and these seagoing farmers take to the house for the cold months of the year.
Under a leaden sky spitting snow like steel filings the sad ritual begins, the ritual of the great retreat. For this northern ocean will turn any night now to thick ice along its edges, and the boats that are left out are boats that are doomed. The grinding ice floes will crack their ribs, as it cracks the ribs of wharves that are not towed ashore and hauled out. Only a stout old craft like the “Mary Louise,” anchored in bold water beyond the tide rifts of the shore, can hope to survive the savageries of shore ice. The pilings of piers will grow twice their size in stockings of ice, and many of them will go out with the going of the ice in the spring.
So the seagoing farmers bring down the horses from the snug barn, this gray day, for the work to be done. Cradles have been built, rollers and runways constructed. All is ready. The tide is at the flood and nearing the full.
The largest craft comes first. The pride of the family, the cabined and hooded Hampton dory, leaves the ocean first. The men run her upon the floated cradle, and then, aided with tackle-and-fall, urged on by much shouting, the horses lean into the harness, the tugs tauten and twang, and slowly the beauty of the family comes up the runway on her cradle to her own big white house. It is a long, winter residence, roofed over tight and boarded up at the sides. Once she is in, her engine is drained and oiled and covered over with canvas. The men close up the ends of her house, and the boat of lobsters is snug for the winter.
Next, the smaller boats come ashore. The dories two such stout men as Father and Uncle Timothy can manage between them. For the hibernating Uncle Timothy is here, alone of all the uncles. It is his last day's work before he succumbs to the long winter drowsiness. They heave the dories up the bank, turn them over bottoms up. The men go into the woods that are never far away from water on this coast and lop off the thick lower branches of the spruce trees. The boys drag them over the frozen ground and weave them into a roof over the boats' bottoms. They cover the dories over from the snow and the sun. The sun is more the boats' enemy than the snow. Like apple trees, the wise thing for a dory to do in a northern winter is to keep cold.
Peter slides away from his brothers and rests awhile under one of the dories in a mysterious upside-down universe, with the seat he used to warm with his own warm seat as he rowed now making a roofing to his head. All is dryness where wetness used to be. Peter can see the light seeping in under the curving gunwales and hear the swish of the spruce boughs covering him and the dory over. His brothers miss him and shout to him to come and help with the brush. He does not answer. He holds his breath and smiles and watches the last light die out under the edges of this boat turned into a tent. He sits there in the growing gloom and thinks the long thoughts he has not had the chance to think of since last winter, he has been so busy running from one thing to another and one chore to the next all the year long. They are sweet thoughts, and they go well with the pungent smell of the spruce boughs that make this little new world of his. The last light fades from under the dory, and he is at utter peace with himself.
The boy enjoys the complete darkness all he wants to. At last he gets on all fours, lowers himself to his belly and wriggles out under the boat's gunwales, through the prickly spruce boughs that tickle his face. He reappears all at once among the workers while they are still shouting for him. He gets a smart smack on his backside from Uncle Timothy, but heat there is not unwelcome on a chill day like this one. Peter goes back to his brush. Each boy, Peter, Andrew, James, and John, comes along like a little forest all by himself, no boy showing save for two blundering feet under the spruce boughs, or now and then a roof of hair and a pair of eyes peering through the twigs. The boys are plastered with pitch, and find it hard to open the fingers on their hands. Their clothes are a total ruin. And the dark stains on their skins will last out the month of December and maybe linger over into the New Year, scrub them as they—or their mother—may.
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