A MILD WINTER ON THE CAPE.
"It's be'n a mild winter on the Cape;" the Wallencampers congratulated
one another, blinking, with a delicious sense of warmth and comfort, in
the rays of a strong March sun.
The Wallencampers were not, perhaps, generally incited by that love of
stern, unceasing, and vigorous exertion which is, geographically
considered, one of the chief characteristics of our hardy northern races.
True poets and idealists, they were lazy, and they had but few clothes,
both excellent reasons for inclining kindly to the warm weather.
And yet, notwithstanding this, they had grown used to a wild ruggedness
of nature and condition, a terrible, sublime uncertainty about life and
things in general when the wind blew, missing which, in this earthly
state, they would have pined most sadly. And I do not believe that they
would have exchanged their rugged, storm-swept, wind-beleaguered little
section of Cape Cod for a realm in sunny Italy itself; no, not even if
the waves of that bright clime had rippled over sands of literal gold,
and their winter had been nine months in the year instead of the
customary six and a half.
"A mild winter on the Cape." Grandpa Keeler often repeated the words; and
sitting by the fire at night, his eyes grew big and wild, and his tones
took on a terrible impressiveness as he told of _rough_ winters on the
Cape, when the snow lay drifted high across the fences in the lane, and
"every time she came in yender"--pointing in the direction of the
Bay--"she licked offa slice or two o' bank, and the old Ark whirled and
shuk--O Lordy, teacher!--as ef she'd slipped her moorin's and gone off on
a high sea, and ef you'd a heered the wind a screechin' inter them
winders, you'd a thought the"----
"Bijonah Keeler!" Grandma Keeler spoke. She said no more. It was enough.
"You'd a thought something had got loose, sure," concluded Grandpa, with
a keen glance aside to me that revealed, as with tenfold significance,
the obstructed force of his narrative.
In the daytime, Grandpa was now much out of doors. He had most frequent
and loving recourse to an interesting looking pile of rubbish at the
south end of the barn. There he sat, and napped and nodded, and employed
the brief interims of wakefulness in whittling bean poles, preparatory
for another year's supply of that dreaded and inexorable crop. Earth's
disturbing voices, Grandma Keeler herself, seldom reached him there.
Early, too, I saw him in the garden, leaning pensively on his hoe--a
becalmed and striking figure in a ragged snuff-colored coat, and a hat
marked by numerous small orifices, through which, here and there, strands
from his silvery fringe of hair strayed and waved in the breezes.
It was Grandma and Grandpa Keeler's custom at the first approach of
spring to detach themselves from Madeline's household, and to form a
separate and complete establishment of their own in the sunny kitchen,
away out at the end of the Ark. I was still, nominally, Madeline's
boarder, and sat at the table with her and the little Keelers; but the
impulses of my heart were ever guiding my feet to that other dear resort,
where doors and hearts seemed always open to receive me, and an
inexpressible warmth and light and comfort pervaded the atmosphere.
It was early in March, when, returning from school one day at the
noontide intermission, I found Grandma standing without the Ark,
singularly occupied. The sun was shining on her uncovered head, and the
tranquil glow on her face was clearly the exponent of no fictitious
happiness. In her apron she had a quantity of empty egg-shells, so
carefully drained of their contents as to present an almost perfect
external appearance, and these she was arranging on the twigs of a large
bush that grew just outside the window.
I was glad, afterwards, that I intruded then no skeptical questions as to
her purpose, for, as I stood and looked at her, her action gradually lost
for me the tinge of eccentricity, with which it had at first seemed
imbued. I realized that there was something grander than reason, more
exalted than philosophy.
"I suppose you've heerd about egg-plants, teacher;" said she, at length,
turning to me, while the sun in her face broke up into scintillant beams
that penetrated my being, and quickened my very soul. "This 'ere old
bush ain't bore nothin' for years, and it looked so bare and sorrerful,
somehow, standin' out here all alone, and everything else a kinder wakin'
up in the spring, I thought I'd try to sorter liven it up a little;" and
she resumed her placid occupation.
"Blessed Grandma," I could only murmur, as I turned to enter the Ark;
"inspired, delightful soul!"
It was in March that the Wallencamp sun-bonnets came forth, all in a
single day, a curious and startling pageant. The Modoc, who had gone
bareheaded through the winter, assumed hers as a turban of impressive
altitude, while the diminutive Carietta and the infant Sophronia appeared
but as vagrant telescopes on insufficient pegs.
In March the "pipers" lifted up their homesick notes at nightfall, in the
meadows. On the last day of that month, I found arbutus in bloom under
the leaves in the cedar woods.
Scarcely had the first faint signs of herbage appeared on the earth ere
the Wallencamp cows and horses were given over exclusively to the
guardianship of nature, and to wander whithersoever they would, for the
Wallencamp fences had ceased to present themselves as obstacles in the
way. Indeed, some portions of them had been utterly obliterated, and this
was easily traced to a habit prevalent among the Wallencampers of
resorting to them for fuel when, on some winter night, other resources
were found to be low.
Other portions of them were decayed, or blown over in the wind, so that
there was just enough left to sit on for private soliloquy, or social
debate, and to give a picturesque charm to the landscape; yet, it was a
fact which I found worthy of notice, that, in going from one place to
another, no true Wallencamper ever walked over a broken-down part of the
fence, or went through a gap in the fence; he always selected an upright
part of the fence to climb over, even going a little out of the way, if
necessary, to effect this purpose.
The Wallencampers were staunch on the matter of individual rights; they
turned each his own horse and cow into his own door-yard. Animated,
doubtless, by something of the same principle, those attenuated animals,
having made an impartial _détour_ of the premises, congregated, as of one
accord, along the highway, especially in that part of the lane between
the Ark and the school-house.
I made my way through these new perils from day to day, in safety, until
the deepening green of the hills and fields called the herd away to wider
pastures.
Dr. Aberdeen, however, remained behind. Dr. Aberdeen, as he was termed by
the Wallencampers, was a horse of peculiar and distinguished parts. Among
his other eccentric gifts, he had a harmless habit of chasing beings of a
superior race. In what manner this propensity had first manifested
itself, I do not know, but it had been eagerly seized upon as ground for
further development by the juvenile element of Wallencamp, and especially
by the Modoc, under whose lively tuition the animal had reached an almost
strategic ability in the art.
Dr. Aberdeen was truly of the mildest disposition imaginable. He had
never been known to kick. He had never even been known to open his mouth
and snap at a fly, but the expression of his countenance, if it might be
so called, when he was on the chase, was vicious and determined in the
extreme, and by no means betrayed the purely facetious nature of his
intentions. During school hours he seldom wandered from the immediate
vicinity of the school-house, where he appeared to be waiting for the
children to come out to play. Often have I looked up to see him gazing in
at the windows with a gleam of evil expectancy in his melancholy dun
brown eye.
With the joyful advent of the spring came, also, Tommy's tame owl and
"Happy Moses." Tommy's owl emerged from his winter-quarters, and took up
his daily post of observation on the fence on the shady side of the
school-house. He was blind in one eye, which eye was always open, the
other was always closed. Yet with that one glassy, unblinking orb,
Tommy's owl seemed to me, as I lifted my eyes to the window, to be
reviewing the past with an indifference as calm and all-embracing as that
with which he sent his inexorable gaze into the future; and to take in me
and the passing events of the school-room as a mere speck in his
kaleidoscopic vision of the ages.
What was the winter's thraldom from which Happy Moses had escaped, I
never learned. He was a broad-shouldered fellow, six feet in height, with
a beard like flax, and a sunny, ingenuous countenance. What term should
have been applied to his eccentricities in politer circles I cannot say,
but in Wallencamp, he was artlessly designated as "the fool." Whether it
was on this account, that with a certain rashness of perception peculiar
to the Wallencampers, they always prefixed the adjective "happy" to his
name, or merely on account of the transparent sunniness of his
disposition, I cannot say, either.
Happy Moses played with the children. He regarded me, as one of the class
of those who presume to teach, with mingled scorn and aversion. When I
went to the door to blow the children in from their play, he invariably
turned his back upon me, cocked his hat on one side of his head, and
walked away with an air that was palpably reckless, defiant, and jaunty.
When he reappeared, it was usually with his knitting-work, to which he
devoted himself in a desultory way, reclining on the school-house steps.
But sometimes he sat on the fence with the owl, and then it was
noticeable that while the gaze of the one was transient and silly, the
gaze of the other seemed to grow the more unutterably searching and
profound. So, at last, the new term was fairly established with these
three--Dr. Aberdeen, Happy Moses, and the owl.
Hulled corn and beans had now become but as a dream of the past in
Wallencamp, and for a brief season before the accession of lobsters, life
was mainly supported on winter-green-berries, or box-berries, as they
were called. These grew in large quantities at "Black Ground," a section
of the woods which had been burned over. Daily I met happy groups of
Wallencampers, with baskets and pails in their hands, going "boxberry
plummin.'"
We had boxberry bread, boxberry stews and pies, and one day, I caught a
glimpse of Grandma, in her part of the Ark, frying boxberry
griddle-cakes.
Grandpa, when I met him, at this time, wore an air of deep dejection; yet
he bore his woes in silence, doubtless avoiding any concession that
should suggest the need of another clarification of his system. Once,
when nobody was looking, he cautiously withdrew a handful of scraped
birch bark from his pocket and gave it to me, remarking that he thought
it was "a little more bracin' than them tarnal woodsy plums."
Next in the order of events, as the Modoc stood in her place in the
reading-class and slowly enunciated each separate syllable of the lesson
in a tone as remarkable for a loud distinctness as it was for a total
lack of meaning and modulation, from that side of her dress which had
been sagging most heavily, something fell with a crash to the floor. It
was a boiled lobster of anomalous proportions. The pocket had given way
at last under its overpowering burden, and now appeared ignominiously
upborne on the claws of its former prisoner. The Modoc seized the
crustacean with glittering defiance in her eyes, and at recess, I saw
that turbaned Amazon devouring it, with a group of wistful and admiring
faces gathered round. The boys were out in the bay "setting pots" and
"trolling for bait." Soon, not a child at Wallencamp was lobsterless. I
discovered two under the infant Sophronia's desk one morning, and
afterwards kept a sharp eye in that direction. Sophronia's conduct
throughout the session was in an unusual degree exemplary. I detected no
guilty blush on her countenance, I heard not the crackling of a claw,
but when she went out, I observed that she took no lobsters with her.
Investigating the place where she had been sitting, I found a wild
confusion of claws and shells, as carefully denuded of meat as though
they had been turned inside out for that purpose.
What was my surprise and mortification to find a like collection at
nearly every seat in the school-room, and all the while my flock had
seemed unusually silent and attentive; such proficiency had those
children acquired in the art of dissecting lobsters.
I saw how many they devoured day by day, and how much water they drank,
and I fancied that they themselves grew to partake more and more of the
form and character of marine animals. I believed that they could have
existed equally well crawling at the bottom of the deep or swimming on
its surface.
We had lobsters, too, at the Ark. For the first day or two of this
dispensation, Grandpa's face perceptibly brightened. At the end of two
weeks it was longer than ever before.
He came over from his potato patch, I remember, and leaned on the fence,
as I was going by to school.
"It's be'n a mild winter on the Cape, teacher," he observed, studying the
heavens with an air of utter abstraction. Then his glance fell as it were
inadvertently in the direction of the house, and he immediately continued
with a peculiar spark of animation kindling in his eye; "I've et so many
o' them 'tarnal critters, teacher, that I swon if I don't feel like a
'tarnal, long-fingered, sprawlin' shell-fish myself! But it's comin' nigh
time for ale-whops. They're very good, teacher, ale-whops are--very good,
though they're bony as the--they're 'tarnal bony, teacher. They're what
we call herrin's in the winter."
Grandpa then laughed a little and showed his teeth.
"I was goin' to tell ye, Bachelder Lot, here," he went on; "he was a'
askin' Captain Sartell what kind o' fish them was that it's recorded in
the Scripters to 'a' fed the multitude, and then took up so many baskets
full o' leavin's; and the Captain told him that as to exactly what manner
of fish them was, he hadn't sufficient acquaintance with the book of
Jonah to say, but, as near as he could calk'late, he reckoned they was
ale-whops.
"And the Bachelder told him that it seemed to him he was right, and had
solved a mystery, for it stood to reason that there wa'n't no other fish
_but_ an ale-whop, that they could feed five thousand folks out of seven
little ones and then take up twelve bushel baskets full of bones!
"And the Captain was pleased, and kind o' half owned up that he hadn't
felt no ways sure as to his surmise to begin with, but he said when the
question was put to him, he didn't think no man ought to hesitate to come
down strong on a doctrinal p'int.
"Wall, as I was a sayin', teacher," concluded Grandpa, his teeth still
skinned and gleaming, "it's be'n a mild winter on the Cape."