Twice-Told Tales (38 page)

How like a dream it was when I bent over a pool of water one pleasant
morning and saw that the ocean had dashed its spray over me and made
me a fisherman! There was the tarpaulin, the baize shirt, the oilcloth
trousers and seven-league boots, and there my own features, but so
reddened with sunburn and sea-breezes that methought I had another
face, and on other shoulders too. The seagulls and the loons and I had
now all one trade: we skimmed the crested waves and sought our prey
beneath them, the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds. Always when
the east grew purple I launched my dory, my little flat-bottomed
skiff, and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge, the Middle Ledge, or
perhaps beyond Egg Rock; often, too, did I anchor off Dread Ledge—a
spot of peril to ships unpiloted—and sometimes spread an adventurous
sail and tracked across the bay to South Shore, casting my lines in
sight of Scituate. Ere nightfall I hauled my skiff high and dry on the
beach, laden with red rock-cod or the white-bellied ones of deep
water, haddock bearing the black marks of St. Peter's fingers near the
gills, the long-bearded hake whose liver holds oil enough for a
midnight lamp, and now and then a mighty halibut with a back broad as
my boat. In the autumn I toled and caught those lovely fish the
mackerel. When the wind was high, when the whale-boats anchored off
the Point nodded their slender masts at each other and the dories
pitched and tossed in the surf, when Nahant Beach was thundering three
miles off and the spray broke a hundred feet in the air round the
distant base of Egg Rock, when the brimful and boisterous sea
threatened to tumble over the street of our village,—then I made a
holiday on shore.

Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett's store, attentive to
the yarns of Uncle Parker—uncle to the whole village by right of
seniority, but of Southern blood, with no kindred in New England. His
figure is before me now enthroned upon a mackerel-barrel—a lean old
man of great height, but bent with years and twisted into an uncouth
shape by seven broken limbs; furrowed, also, and weatherworn, as if
every gale for the better part of a century had caught him somewhere
on the sea. He looked like a harbinger of tempest—a shipmate of the
Flying Dutchman. After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war and
merchantmen, fishing-schooners and chebacco-boats, the old salt had
become master of a hand-cart, which he daily trundled about the
vicinity, and sometimes blew his fish-horn through the streets of
Salem. One of Uncle Parker's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder,
and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he
spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and
battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be
seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail
through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he
expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and
goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the
Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at the
Isle of Sables, where he had gladdened himself amid polar snows with
the rum and sugar saved from the wreck of a West India schooner. And
wrathfully did he shake his fist as he related how a party of Cape Cod
men had robbed him and his companions of their lawful spoils and
sailed away with every keg of old Jamaica, leaving him not a drop to
drown his sorrow. Villains they were, and of that wicked brotherhood
who are said to tie lanterns to horses' tails to mislead the mariner
along the dangerous shores of the Cape.

Even now I seem to see the group of fishermen with that old salt in
the midst. One fellow sits on the counter, a second bestrides an
oil-barrel, a third lolls at his length on a parcel of new cod-lines,
and another has planted the tarry seat of his trousers on a heap of
salt which will shortly be sprinkled over a lot of fish. They are a
likely set of men. Some have voyaged to the East Indies or the
Pacific, and most of them have sailed in Marblehead schooners to
Newfoundland; a few have been no farther than the Middle Banks, and
one or two have always fished along the shore; but, as Uncle Parker
used to say, they have all been christened in salt water and know more
than men ever learn in the bushes. A curious figure, by way of
contrast, is a fish-dealer from far up-country listening with eyes
wide open to narratives that might startle Sinbad the Sailor.—Be it
well with you, my brethren! Ye are all gone—some to your graves
ashore and others to the depths of ocean—but my faith is strong that
ye are happy; for whenever I behold your forms, whether in dream or
vision, each departed friend is puffing his long nine, and a mug of
the right blackstrap goes round from lip to lip.

But where was the mermaid in those delightful times? At a certain
window near the centre of the village appeared a pretty display of
gingerbread men and horses, picture-books and ballads, small
fish-hooks, pins, needles, sugarplums and brass thimbles—articles on
which the young fishermen used to expend their money from pure
gallantry. What a picture was Susan behind the counter! A slender
maiden, though the child of rugged parents, she had the slimmest of
all waists, brown hair curling on her neck, and a complexion rather
pale except when the sea-breeze flushed it. A few freckles became
beauty-spots beneath her eyelids.—How was it, Susan, that you talked
and acted so carelessly, yet always for the best, doing whatever was
right in your own eyes, and never once doing wrong in mine, nor
shocked a taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And whence
had you that happiest gift of brightening every topic with an unsought
gayety, quiet but irresistible, so that even gloomy spirits felt your
sunshine and did not shrink from it? Nature wrought the charm. She
made you a frank, simple, kind-hearted, sensible and mirthful girl.
Obeying Nature, you did free things without indelicacy, displayed a
maiden's thoughts to every eye, and proved yourself as innocent as
naked Eve.—It was beautiful to observe how her simple and happy
nature mingled itself with mine. She kindled a domestic fire within my
heart and took up her dwelling there, even in that chill and lonesome
cavern hung round with glittering icicles of fancy. She gave me warmth
of feeling, while the influence of my mind made her contemplative. I
taught her to love the moonlight hour, when the expanse of the
encircled bay was smooth as a great mirror and slept in a transparent
shadow, while beyond Nahant the wind rippled the dim ocean into a
dreamy brightness which grew faint afar off without becoming gloomier.
I held her hand and pointed to the long surf-wave as it rolled calmly
on the beach in an unbroken line of silver; we were silent together
till its deep and peaceful murmur had swept by us. When the Sabbath
sun shone down into the recesses of the cliffs, I led the mermaid
thither and told her that those huge gray, shattered rocks, and her
native sea that raged for ever like a storm against them, and her own
slender beauty in so stern a scene, were all combined into a strain of
poetry. But on the Sabbath-eve, when her mother had gone early to bed
and her gentle sister had smiled and left us, as we sat alone by the
quiet hearth with household things around, it was her turn to make me
feel that here was a deeper poetry, and that this was the dearest hour
of all. Thus went on our wooing, till I had shot wild-fowl enough to
feather our bridal-bed, and the daughter of the sea was mine.

I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a gateway in the form
of a Gothic arch by setting up a whale's jaw-bones. We bought a heifer
with her first calf, and had a little garden on the hillside to supply
us with potatoes and green sauce for our fish. Our parlor, small and
neat, was ornamented with our two profiles in one gilt frame, and with
shells and pretty pebbles on the mantelpiece, selected from the sea's
treasury of such things on Nahant Beach. On the desk, beneath the
looking-glass, lay the Bible, which I had begun to read aloud at the
book of Genesis, and the singing-book that Susan used for her evening
psalm. Except the almanac, we had no other literature. All that I
heard of books was when an Indian history or tale of shipwreck was
sold by a pedler or wandering subscription-man to some one in the
village, and read through its owner's nose to a slumbrous auditory.

Like my brother-fishermen, I grew into the belief that all human
erudition was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles and
solemn phiz as he passed to his little schoolhouse amid a waste of
sand might have gained him a diploma from any college in New England.
In truth, I dreaded him.—When our children were old enough to claim
his care, you remember, Susan, how I frowned, though you were pleased
at this learned man's encomiums on their proficiency. I feared to
trust them even with the alphabet: it was the key to a fatal treasure.
But I loved to lead them by their little hands along the beach and
point to nature in the vast and the minute—the sky, the sea, the
green earth, the pebbles and the shells. Then did I discourse of the
mighty works and coextensive goodness of the Deity with the simple
wisdom of a man whose mind had profited by lonely days upon the deep
and his heart by the strong and pure affections of his evening home.
Sometimes my voice lost itself in a tremulous depth, for I felt his
eye upon me as I spoke. Once, while my wife and all of us were gazing
at ourselves in the mirror left by the tide in a hollow of the sand, I
pointed to the pictured heaven below and bade her observe how religion
was strewn everywhere in our path, since even a casual pool of water
recalled the idea of that home whither we were travelling to rest for
ever with our children. Suddenly your image, Susan, and all the little
faces made up of yours and mine, seemed to fade away and vanish around
me, leaving a pale visage like my own of former days within the frame
of a large looking-glass. Strange illusion!

My life glided on, the past appearing to mingle with the present and
absorb the future, till the whole lies before me at a glance. My
manhood has long been waning with a stanch decay; my earlier
contemporaries, after lives of unbroken health, are all at rest
without having known the weariness of later age; and now with a
wrinkled forehead and thin white hair as badges of my dignity I have
become the patriarch—the uncle—of the village. I love that name: it
widens the circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful to my
household in the kindred of affection.

Like Uncle Parker, whose rheumatic bones were dashed against Egg Rock
full forty years ago, I am a spinner of long yarns. Seated on the
gunnel of a dory or on the sunny side of a boat-house, where the
warmth is grateful to my limbs, or by my own hearth when a friend or
two are there, I overflow with talk, and yet am never tedious. With a
broken voice I give utterance to much wisdom. Such, Heaven be praised!
is the vigor of my faculties that many a forgotten usage, and
traditions ancient in my youth, and early adventures of myself or
others hitherto effaced by things more recent, acquire new
distinctness in my memory. I remember the happy days when the haddock
were more numerous on all the fishing-grounds than sculpins in the
surf—when the deep-water cod swam close in-shore, and the dogfish,
with his poisonous horn, had not learnt to take the hook. I can number
every equinoctial storm in which the sea has overwhelmed the street,
flooded the cellars of the village and hissed upon our kitchen hearth.
I give the history of the great whale that was landed on Whale Beach,
and whose jaws, being now my gateway, will last for ages after my
coffin shall have passed beneath them. Thence it is an easy digression
to the halibut—scarcely smaller than the whale—which ran out six
codlines and hauled my dory to the mouth of Boston harbor before I
could touch him with the gaff.

If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation, I tell how a
friend of mine was taken out of his boat by an enormous shark, and the
sad, true tale of a young man on the eve of marriage who had been nine
days missing, when his drowned body floated into the very pathway on
Marble-head Neck that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride,
as if the dripping corpse would have come where the mourner was. With
such awful fidelity did that lover return to fulfil his vows! Another
favorite story is of a crazy maiden who conversed with angels and had
the gift of prophecy, and whom all the village loved and pitied,
though she went from door to door accusing us of sin, exhorting to
repentance and foretelling our destruction by flood or earthquake. If
the young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I
speak of pilots who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its
taste, and could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston and
Mount Desert guided only by the rote of the shore—the peculiar sound
of the surf on each island, beach and line of rocks along the coast.
Thus do I talk, and all my auditors grow wise while they deem it
pastime.

I recollect no happier portion of my life than this my calm old age.
It is like the sunny and sheltered slope of a valley where late in the
autumn the grass is greener than in August, and intermixed with golden
dandelions that had not been seen till now since the first warmth of
the year. But with me the verdure and the flowers are not frost-bitten
in the midst of winter. A playfulness has revisited my mind—a
sympathy with the young and gay, an unpainful interest in the business
of others, a light and wandering curiosity—arising, perhaps, from the
sense that my toil on earth is ended and the brief hour till bedtime
may be spent in play. Still, I have fancied that there is a depth of
feeling and reflection under this superficial levity peculiar to one
who has lived long and is soon to die.

Show me anything that would make an infant smile, and you shall behold
a gleam of mirth over the hoary ruin of my visage. I can spend a
pleasant hour in the sun watching the sports of the village children
on the edge of the surf. Now they chase the retreating wave far down
over the wet sand; now it steals softly up to kiss their naked feet;
now it comes onward with threatening front, and roars after the
laughing crew as they scamper beyond its reach. Why should not an old
man be merry too, when the great sea is at play with those little
children? I delight, also, to follow in the wake of a pleasure-party
of young men and girls strolling along the beach after an early supper
at the Point. Here, with handkerchiefs at nose, they bend over a heap
of eel-grass entangled in which is a dead skate so oddly accoutred
with two legs and a long tail that they mistake him for a drowned
animal. A few steps farther the ladies scream, and the gentlemen make
ready to protect them against a young shark of the dogfish kind
rolling with a lifelike motion in the tide that has thrown him up.
Next they are smit with wonder at the black shells of a wagon-load of
live lobsters packed in rock-weed for the country-market. And when
they reach the fleet of dories just hauled ashore after the day's
fishing, how do I laugh in my sleeve, and sometimes roar outright, at
the simplicity of these young folks and the sly humor of the
fishermen! In winter, when our village is thrown into a bustle by the
arrival of perhaps a score of country dealers bargaining for frozen
fish to be transported hundreds of miles and eaten fresh in Vermont or
Canada, I am a pleased but idle spectator in the throng. For I launch
my boat no more.