Uncle Timothy cuts the boys all a hunk of spruce gum. It is brown and pitchy looking as it comes from the tree, but it turns purple with the boys' chewing. It gives them energy to go on, as Uncle Timothy swore it would. Their jaws work in common with their laboring legs. The boys feel like the old Indians who used to chew this same gum in this very cove here, as they worked themselves up to go off to wars and scalping parties. So the short-legged workers taste like spruce, as well as smell and look and feel like it.
The smallest skiff, the one-boy kind, which Uncle Timothy brings out of the water on his wide, tough head, is on the bank at last. Every boat's keel and bottom are covered against the weather with tarpaulin, boards, or brush. The sea door is closed. All hands sit down for a moment and look out on the vacant ocean. They cannot help feeling like prisoners who have built up their own walls around themselves. But this is winter, and they must make a three-month farewell to the sea. And there is always Uncle Cephus' schooner out there, holding open the road to life. They look at their pitchy hands. Uncle Timothy spits on his. The door is closed.
But more sea tools must be put away. Every lobster trap, every clam basket and hoe, every anchor, every foot of lobster warp, each oar, every dipnet, every fresh line must be housed home. There are hundreds of implements these sea farmers must rub free of rust, grease paint, polish, or put away for the winter. The shore of this sea farm turns into pyramids of heaped-up lobster traps. Festoons of lobster buoys are taken in and hung around the fishhouse walls. Every inch of rope is coiled and stowed away. Every net is folded or hung on its proper spool or beam. The mosaic of tools and nets and lines that makes every coast fishhouse nests—within nests—of wonders is slowly built up. The windows of the fishhouse are dimmed out as the piles of gear taken in out of the weather grow and shut out the light. There is hardly room enough for one man in the center of this cocoon of rope and oars and anchors. The light of the year goes out. Silence comes into this place which smells of tar and rope and peace. Only the thieving and curious winter mouse will move in this silence that has descended on the sea-half of this salt-water farm.
The men and boys go out of the house of silence hushed, on tiptoe. Even Uncle Timothy knows a poem when he closes the door on one.
Let the snow come now. All is safe.
And come the snow does, in long white armies from the north, in wild whirling squadrons from the northeast, and from the sea. The brown earth goes under. The sea shows black between the headlands and along the coves for the whiteness of the drifts at the water's edge. The spruces and firs with spills clinched tightly against the cold turn a green that is almost black. The silver drains out of the white pines, and they loom sad and dark also. The only life left in the white world is the swarm of chickadees come south to this Riviera from the Arctic Circle. They keep the pines alive as they sweep through them like warm snowflakes and, as often upside down as upright, peck out the winged seeds from the opened pine cones. Their baritone cries make the still afternoon vibrate, and their jetty eyes burn with a happy fire.
The sea farmers are home for good. Uncle Timothy takes his winter seat on the smooth beechwood in the wood box, hugs the stovepipe with his hairy hands to make sure that the stove drafts are drawing right, keeps a steady flow of beech going into the stove, hour after hour, rouses Peter or Andrew up to run and fetch new wood every so often as his bulk descends into the depleted wood box, and whittles away at seasoned and dry white pinewood with his jackknife, for morning's kindling and for whittling's white sake, until the kitchen floor is snowed over with his slivers of pine. But even his jackknife is slowing down. He nods for an hour at a time, with his knife poised. Uncle Timothy is on the edge of his annual hibernation.
For some days the outdoor members of the family rest up from the boats inside. Father and his crew wait for the first snows, which never last, to blow themselves out.
In the house Mother and the daughters are boiling over with preparations for Christmas. The sewing machine hums, mixing bowls clatter, and puddings go down-cellar to age against the holidays.
And Peter on the last day of school recites “Horatius at the Bridge,” out of his book for December, The Lays of Ancient Rome, brings down the house and, amid the plaudits of massed parents and School Committee, lights such fires in the blue eyes of Lucy Brown as will probably not go out until she is a married woman with her first baby and falls in love all over again with a husband who is also a boy of old Rome. Love comes for keeps this time, and past a tittering girl shaking long curls that are probably not natural but done on her mother's fingers, and past a dark boy with a long face, Peter pulls Lucy, with the prize ribbon for speaking fluttering on his chest, all the way home on his sled.
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