I leaned against the wooden fence and looked at the two new knockabouts in the lagoon, exactly alike except that the Bobkat was brown, with a silver waterline, and the Moujik II was white with a gold waterline. The bowsprits were very short. Mr. McGill, who manufactured oil stoves, owned them both, and one or the other of them came in second in every race at the Yacht Club. Mr. McGill had that new house near Powder Point Hall, with the imitation windmill which had an electric pump inside. That was where the dance had been. Mother had brought back a Japanese lantern and Uncle David had brought home a clown’s mask with red holes for the eyes. He put it on at breakfast. What was that thing he had said to Mother, when we were going round Clark’s Island in the motorboat, something about drowning. To drown with thee. They were both holding the wheel, one on one side, and one on the other. Laughing, as I jumped down from the cabin roof into the cockpit. To drown with thee. It was that Quaker-talk that the old man had talked in Salem, putting his hand on my head. And Mother and Father had been talking it when I went to the top of the stairs that night after the card party in Cambridge. To drown with thee. What had they meant by that.
I played ducks and drakes, skipping one stone twelve times over the water towards the Bobkat, and then went through the bayberry jungle and the grove of wild cherry trees to the edge of the golf course. Should I try to kiss Gwendolyn or not. Did she expect me to. Was Sanford just trying to get me into trouble when he told me to. When she saw me diving off the end of the dory she laughed, turning her face back toward Dorothy Peters as if she were saying something about me. I swam out a long way into the channel, hoping they would row out toward me, but they didn’t. They went along the shore, very slowly, not looking at me again. And disappeared round the end of the Point, still laughing.
There were no golf balls in the bayberry jungle, though I kicked the grass in the places where I had found them before, so I went along the west side of the golf course until I got to the bungalows, and then crossed to the road and walked along the sandy bicycle path. The telephone poles were humming in the southwest wind, a little boy was trying to fly a kite on the lawn of the mystery house, behind the trumpet vine arbor, but he couldn’t run fast enough to get it off the ground. A pretty girl was leaning out of a tiny window in a dormer at the top of the house, watching him. I blushed when she looked at me, and walked on quickly, and was opposite the Soule House, where Molly was sitting in the swing, when Father — I was thinking about the box kite, meaning to ask Uncle Tom if we could hitch it to the cart and give Porper a ride over the tennis court—
He came out from the behind the lilac bushes and skimmed his panama hat at my head, twirling, so that it almost settled on my head, but fell on the path. He took the back of my neck in his hand and shook me, not saying anything. He was smoking a cigarette. Then he threw the cigarette away and sat down on the lawn where the four-leaf clovers were. His brown cigarette finger was tapping on his knee. He frowned and asked me how Porper and Susan were. I said they were very well, and asked him if he had come to the clambake. He wanted to know if Susan had learned to swim. I told him no. Had I played any baseball. Yes. Wild flowers. Yes. Done my Latin with Mr. Dearing. Yes. Was I a member of the Company this year. Yes.
He got up again, and we walked along the little road that led down to the cove and the dyke, past the henyard, where last year the trap used to be set at night for skunks. We had heard shots in the early morning and gone out to see the dead skunk. The road led through sweetgrass, the kind the Indians made into baskets. Every year they came, selling baskets from door to door, old women and old men. We walked as far as the top of the little bluff, overlooking the cove, and stood by a crab apple tree, talking, and Father asked me how far out into the water I could throw an apple. I threw one, and he smiled, watching it splash at the edge of a mud flat, and then said, Watch me. He took a short stick out of the grass and stuck an apple on the end of it and then whipped it with a whistling sound over his head: the apple went clear across the cove and thudded into the soft mud at the foot of the eelgrass. I tried it several times and sent one apple half way across, into the middle of the channel.
— That was a good one.
— Where did you learn to do that, Father?
— Your grandfather taught me at Jackson Falls.
— That was where the wildcats were.
— And the moosewood.
He took out his packet of Sweet Caporals and lit another cigarette. We started walking back slowly towards the Soules’.
— Did you come down for the clambake, Father? Are we going to have it this week?
— No. I don’t know.
He took off his spectacles and polished them with a blue silk handkerchief. He was frowning again.
— I don’t know how long I’m staying: I’m staying at the Soules’. I don’t want you to say anything about having seen me — understand? I may go back tonight, or I may stay for a week. But I don’t want you to say anything about it. I suppose you go for the mail every morning, don’t you.
— Yes, usually.
— Come here tomorrow morning to see if I’m still here. And now run along back.
He stood watching me, and I ran the whole length of the narrow bicycle path to show him that I could do it this year without slackening once. When I got to the end, by the crossroads, I turned round, but he had gone. I was out of breath, but it wasn’t because of the running. Did he mean that I couldn’t even tell Susan? Probably not, because, of course, the twit would get excited and say something without meaning to. What was it all about. Why was he staying at the Soules’ instead of coming to Uncle Tom’s. Why was he keeping it a secret. Did he want it to be a surprise, and did Mother know about it or not. Gwendolyn and Dorothy Peters coo-eed from the door of the Silliman barn, but I didn’t stop. Let them coo-eee. I took the short cut past the Wardman house and the little brown pond, dropped a twig close to a frog so that he dived into the warm soupy water, and then ran up the slope past the windmill and round to the front porch. Mother was cutting Porper’s hair, and laughing, and I didn’t dare to look at her when I gave her the letters. Uncle David was mending the tennis net with a reel of white cord.
— Why not use a bowl. Clap it on the young feller’s head and then cut round it.
— particularly also the food, the wonderful and perpetual sense of delicious and abundant food, the great jugs of rich cocoa, the great deep dish of blue-misted blueberries, the piles of muffins with their warm fragrance under the fresh napkins, the hot sweet corn wrapped in damp linen, the mountain of steamed clams. Porper beating with his spoon and saying second help, third help, fourth help, fifth help. The floating island pudding with the little white islands of stiff-beaten white of egg, which vanished on the tongue like sea fog, and the brown column of griddle cakes, Molly laughing as she brought in a new batch. This is the grub that makes the butterfly. Every time we had griddle cakes Uncle David said that. And the procession of covered carts that brought the food every morning, standing at the kitchen door by the corner of the tennis court — Mr. Crowell’s shiny white one with all kinds of meat in it, hanging on hooks, and the red board at the back where he cut it up, which he always scraped with a knife when he had finished; and the little blue fishcart, and the great truck of vegetables and fruit. Aunt Norah always standing with her hands on her wide hips and chaffing with Mr. Crowell or Mr. Peterson. You ought to grow vegetable marrows, they’re as easy to grow as squash, and have a much more delicate flavor. Why is it, Mr. Chase, that when we come to live by the sea we never can get fish. Or have to pay through the nose to get it. And those little mackerel — why they’re not big enough for the cat, let alone Porper here. Shall we buy Porper a whale?