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.
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.
On top of this cataclysm, doesn't Uncle Timothy, right on the precipice of hibernation, rouse himself up, rise from his warm beechwood seat, put on the only good pair of pants left him by the braiding Aunt Lydia, shake off forty years of indifference to the heart, go over the hills and two-foot drifts two farms away, propose to the Widow Toothaker, marry her after three nights' wakefulness, and leave his brother's house for good, and start in on married life at his age, in the fifties, on a ten acre farm mostly ledges and juniper! But the farm happens to have an even better harbor than Brother William's and a wide front door to the inexhaustible larder of the ocean. And Timothy is, for all his bulk, a smart man with a clam hoe and a lobster trap.
The day before Christmas, a holiday he has never missed since he wore is first brief trousers, this coast man, whom no one could pry away from the sea with a cant dog, takes off with his new bride for a honeymoon at unsalty and wintry Niagara Falls! Which all goes to prove that you can't tell from the looks of a tomcat, as Father declares, how far he can jump.
Christmas comes in with its mince pics and roasted goose, and with a lot of salt mackerel and pungent red herring as side dishes.
The dish of the month is the Christmas Day gander fattened on the family turnips that got their sharp flavor and stout texture from the mussel mud of the sea. But the dish of this month is also the last tenderloin from Peter's first deer roasted on the ancient spit over the open fire on the sitting room hearth. It is also mince pies which have the taste of the sea their apples were ferried home on grained into their flavor and the taste of the deer the family brought down. The dish of the month is likewise the family's fattest hams smoked over popple wood by Peter. It is the family lobsters Mother put up in jars last September, when lobsters were their tenderest and juiciest, steaming now in a stew that recalls summer. It is the blackberries that Peter kept the berry aunt from bagging compressed now into thick jam. The dish of the month is legion, and most of it has the flavor and sparkle and salt life of the sea in it. So, though the sea turns into a solid continent of white two miles out from the shore on the night before Christmas, when the thermometer falls suddenly twenty-two below zero, and though the “Mary Louise” joins the mainland at her moorings, the sea is still here at the family table.
The aunt of this month is legion, too. For most of the monthly aunts return, with proper and even improper uncles in tow, and the good Lord only knows how many he and she cousins of all calibers, to put their imprints on the boys and girls of the farm's family and shake the family up into bubbles of excitement. The uncles and aunts and cousins come to help celebrate Christmas Day and the two or three weeks after it. So the hole left by Uncle Timothy's departure is not noticed. And Uncle Timothy sends home from the Falls a colored post card of his honeymoon.
The best Christmas fir tree on a farm where there are probably ten thousand Christmas fir trees goes up to the ceiling in the farm's parlor and has to bend its topmost plume horizontal to fit the festivities. The aunt transfigured by Chicago and culture plays all the familiar carols on the farm's melodeon, for all it is a wheezy antique, with Peter pumping hard at the bellows because the pedals won't work. Peter, Ann, Andrew, Molly, James, Jane, John, and even Baby William, who has only half a dozen words to his name, sing their heads off. Lucy comes over for the afternoon to play blindman's buff and pin the tail on the donkey with her future husband and his brothers and sisters who are the uncles and aunts of her children to come. And joy runs over.
The beechnut brittle, made out of Peter's few beechnuts he was able to snatch from the squirrels, boils over on the kitchen stove while Mother is trying to keep the blindman's-buff players from wrecking her best chairs. The smell of it rolls into the front room, and the whole house smells like Araby the Blest
In the midst of it all, Peter misses something. It is Uncle Cephus. He asks about him. The family suddenly falls silent. Father looks grave. He says maybe the old fellow is under the weather and so cannot come. He goes to the window that looks towards the sea where the twilight has already fallen, shades his hand from the light and looks out. Father turns to the room with a strange face.
There is no light there where one has been for so many years. No light on the schooner frozen into the bay.
Father goes and gets his axe and pole. He goes out alone into the dark. Peter wants to go, but Father says no. The family watch his lantern move along the night. He is gone only a short time. He comes back with news that puts the light of this Christmas out completely. Dark news to end up a year. Uncle Cephus is dead in his bunk.
So the world and the years turn on their way of change and sadness still. The last deep-water link this seagoing farm had, the last link it had with people and ideas on the other side of the world, is broken and gone. The lost farmer-sailor who was at home in Tio and Batavia, Bremen and Liverpool and Venice, who had friends of good will all around the curve of the globe, had joined the older farmers who were also merchant princes and ambassadors of the young Republic of the West.
Yet in spite of the breaking of such old links, this seagoing farm will go on. Peter will have sons by Lucy who will inherit these hard, steep acres leaning away from the winds. His sons will learn to eke out agriculture by fishing. They will learn how to have a good time while doing a dozen different kinds of work at once, to have good health and great zest and joy in life, and to be themselves at all hours of the day and night, fair weather or storm. For while the Maine coast lasts, hearty all-round people, who are boatbuilders and sailors as well as farmers, will not perish from the earth.