Wind and Wings

by LLEWELLYN HOWLAND

1

IN the summertime, if the weather was fair, breakfast at “ The Cottage” was served on the “South Terrace.” Five strokes on an old bronze ship’s bell (six-thirty, God’s time) was the signal that brought the Skipper and his crew together around an old pine table.

A wind-twisted buttonwood tree shaded the mossy brick pavement, while a pergola over which clambered a wisteria still further protected the table against the butter-melting sunshine.

From his seat here the Skipper looked out to the southwest over Clark’s Cove and the Bay beyond and forecast the weather from the sky, wind, and water — and from the evolutions of the terns and gulls made a shrewd guess as to what schooling fish, if any, were about. No misinforming daily paper was required. Sight, sound, and smell supplied all news that was essential.

One clear, hot morning as we gathered round the table, the Skipper appeared with a basket of peaches which he had picked in the walled peach alley before the sun could dry the cool night’s dew from their soft cheeks, but in whose hearts lay the ardent glow and sweetness of a long procession of sunny days. To peel these thin-skinned beauties, we had only to pinch up and break a little fold of the downy envelope, when the whole of it could be stripped off, leaving the pinkish-yellow flesh ready to dissolve, a mouthful of juicy delight, the stone coming away freely without any clinging fibers.

Deborah, nominally the cook but actually the beneficent tyrant of the household, who maintained she could tell from the looks of the sunrise what food would “set tasty” with her “folks,” had provided for us that morning a dish of bacon — half fat, half lean, sliced thick (five eighths of an inch at least), and cooked very slowly in deep bacon fat that had been strained through cheesecloth after trying. This came onto the table enfolded in a napkin, from which it emerged a pale yellow, as free from greasiness and as brittle as a heart of tender celery— but retaining the full-bodied flavor of Pig.

At sunup that morning, in my bedroom, its window overlooking the low kitchen L, I had been awakened by Deborah s voice chanting over and over: —

accompanied by the sticky slap, slap, slap of bare palms and the flat side of a butter paddle on a batch of dough. For a full half hour, as I was dressing, “the incomparable Deb" continued these exercises, so I was not in the least surprised or saddened when, flanking the dish of bacon on the tray she set before the Skipper. I saw a Fayal basket heaped with flaky crescents of cinnamon brown, straight from the range oven, favorably known as “Debby’s beaten biscuits.”

To balance the biscuits was a glass jar of strained lemon-colored honey of last season’s “Pepper Bush Run.” For we “kep” bees at “The Cottage” and the Skipper took great pains to cherish a long, thick hedge of Clethra at the shaded and damp east bound of one of the meadows. From these graceful spikes of tiny white blooms in August our bees extracted the very essence of all that is most sweet in the New Bedford countryside.

For drink these summer mornings we had tea — Souchong - the color of a lazy, peaty brook, served in small Chinese bowls. When the bowls were filled from a teapot of matching pattern, the scalding liquor heated them uncomfortably; so there was a pause that gave time for the thin smoky steam to whet anticipation to a keen edge and bring the tea finally to that temperature from which all fiery harshness hud disappeared, leaving only, as the first sip met the palate, a flavor of the Far East and an elusive suggestion of Stockholm tar.

In such surroundings, and spreading butter and honey on a succession of beaten biscuits, my mind strayed out and beyond the sparkling ripples on the surface of the distant Bay. Faraway lands had begun to raise their misty mountaintops on my horizon when the Skipper’s excited voice recalled me from my daydreams.

“There they are! They’ve struck on at last!” And he pointed to the Cove, where a dark shadow was careering over the surface with an armada of terns hovering and diving above it.

The sustained drive and speed of this shadow, the concentration of terns and the agitated wheeling of a rapidly increasing flock of herring gulls that kept pace with it, all combined to convey a clear message to the Skipper. As he read it, the Bay had been invaded by the ever hoped-for schools of bluefish which unpredictably would choose these waters for an attack on the pods of helpless herring fry that always at this season flowed out from certain fresh-water streams.

Here was luck for me: something I had waited for all summer. For I had the Skipper’s promise that if and when the bluefish struck on, I, as a neophyte, should be inducted into that most exclusive of fraternities, “The Bluefish Trollers” Dr. Pease (a neighbor on the Point) and the Skipper. Gone were dreams; the glint on the water was not a pathway to future voyaging and adventure but the arena of the present, where at this very moment was waiting a host of swift and wily adversaries.

2

JUMPING from my chair, I was rushing off to fetch nay basket, packed long since with carefully chosen gear, when Eli, Dr. Pease’s farm boy, his shirt clinging to his sharp shoulder blades and beads of perspiration glistening on his nose, ran panting onto the terrace to announce: —

“Dr. Pease sent me to tell you you’ll have to wait for him till he can find out what ails Mis’ Bibb — she was took awful bad after breakfast. He give me a dime to tell you you wasn’t on no account to go fishin’ without him!

A lurid statement of symptoms followed. Attempted murder by poison was the least I could gather, and yet, at the end, the Skipper only sighed, put a coin in the boy’s half-extended hand, and said: —

“Well! Thank you, Eli, for the message and here’s another dime to run home again and fell the Doctor I’ll wait for him — but not one minute past ten — at the boathouse.”

Off went Eli and with him my bounding spirits — for, “too bad" as was the thought that poison had wormed its way into a home on our Point, it was “just awful" to think that our foray on the bluefish must be postponed for two hours and more. The sun’s glory and the splendor of the blue sky seemed dulled, and the hours of daylight stretched ahead drab and dreary, as I slumped into my chair again. The thought of the smack boat Dragon, all found and ready, waiting interminably at her moorings, almost brought tears to my eyes. Hang it all! Why couldn’t Mrs. Bibb choose some other morning to be sick?

“If you’d rather help Deborah make gingerbread than go fishing,” said the Skipper suddenly, “get right into the milk room and look hard at a pan of cream — don’t waste such a sour face round here! Or — you can look cheerful and help me pick another basket of peaches. They might perk up Mrs. Bibb after the Doctor’s doses.”

I soon found there was no room in the peach alley for such a pest as gloom, and the prospect of being allowed to deliver the basket — an errand of mercy - produced an actual glow of pleasure.

By half past nine the Skipper and I were at the boathouse, with our luncheon in a waterproof bag, the eelskin baits in glass jars of brine, “chocked off with hay in a stout splint basket, the hooks and lines looked to, and the water jug rinsed and filled. Again I was beset with impatience and gloom. Suppose the fish “took off” or Mrs. Bibb died, or a thousand other things went wrong! Even the Skipper’s usual calm appeared ruffled by small gusts of temper.

By a quarter to ten the tension was almost unbearable — when suddenly it was released by the sight of an old friend, “Julius Caesar,” shuffling through the sandy road towards us, his glossy chestnut hide darkened by sweat, while behind him surged and bobbed a wide-track buggy, its varnished leather hood glistening in the hot sunshine. Abreast of the boathouse the old horse was turned off the road, where he came to a jerky stop in the shade on the north side of the building.

Without a word the Skipper and I laid hold of that rig and had the horse out of the shafts, unharnessed, and the headstall buckled and long hitch rope fast, before Dr. Pease, with empurpled face, could heave his two hundred pounds out of his carriage. Still in silence the three of us, as if our lives depended on it, fell to rubbing down Caesar’s coat with wisps of hay from a burlap sack that was lashed to the rear “ex,” and it was not until Caesar had given himself a shivering shake of contentment, and a feed of hay had been spread at his forefeet, that the Doctor, mopping his own face and heavy black side whiskers with his bandana, broke into speech: “Jehosophat!” said he. “That was a close shave!”

This remark, although I wondered whether it referred to Mrs. Bibb, or the time, or to some event on the road, was entirely disregarded by the Skipper as with irritable energy he hustled us aboard the Dragon, to have her presently under sail heading for the open water of the Bay. Out there the fresh southwest wind, which had overcome the land breeze of early morning, gave the Dragon her to range of mobility, while the clear atmosphere allowed the Skipper to keep in constant sight of his scouts, the squadrons of terns, on whose evolutions he so largely based his maneuvers in his battles with the fish. Besides the terns there were flocks of gulls to be watched and also a fleet of twenty or more boats to be kept, so far as possible at a distance.

“No living creature — not even a fish — likes to be disturbed at mealtimes" was a saying the Skipper kept in mind when he designed his fishing boat, the Dragon. She was eighteen feet over all with a beam of six and a half feet, low-sided, and undecked except for narrow waterways and washboards. A crew of three was her limit without overcrowding. If properly sailed she made little disturbance forward or aft, and her low sides made for case in getting fish inboard quickly and quietly.

The fish lines, or drails, as we called them, were cotton, three-strand nine-thread, with a hard twist, and about the size of a light cod line. A single steel hook scraped bright, the point and barb filed sharp to cope with the well-armed and armored mouth of the bluefish, was attached to the drail with a three-ply twisted copper wire leader on which was threaded a long bead of lead, also scraped bright. An eelskin inside out was stretched over this combination and so lashed that the bright hook, as it was towed, could wiggle freely somewhat after the manner of a sand eel’s tail, while the shining bead suggested his head.

3

OUR stations and duties aboard the boat that day were: Dr. Pease as ballast in the waist, to windward, tending a two-hundred-foot drail; I on the lee side in charge of a longer line; the Skipper aft with no line, but both hands busy with the tiller and sheet of the loose-footed, tanned spritsail — his faculties on the stretch to put the Doctor and me over the belated stragglers of the driving schools, which take a bait more eagerly than the leaders of the van.

To “head off ” a school of bluefish was unprofessional. To be caught in a jamb of boats was to be branded a “bungler”; but to outguess competitors by observation of the terns’ actions was to the Skipper an art that seemed to give him more than half his pleasure in this sort of fishing. Nevertheless it was serious business and the Dragon was a silent ship, except for the Skipper’s frequent warnings of “Hsrd-a-lee!” or “Jibe-oh!” — and the flip and flatter of a landed fish and the splashing as it was tossed into the fish well abaft the centerboard trunk.

So occupied, time slipped quickly by, until suddenly the day seemed to pause— the blue of the sky to windward paled to gray, the fish “took off,” and the wind lost some of its vigor.

“Time to reel up! ” said the Skipper as he noted this lull and realized that the fish well was nearly full, while his own “innards” felt empty.

As the lines came inboard to be faked neatly on their square hardwood reels, the Dragon was put sharp on the wind and presently came to anchor in the lee of “White Rock,” with the sail frapped round the mast and stopped with several turns of the sheet.

While the “grub” and the wadded basket with its pot of hot tea were being dug out of the stern locker, the eelskins were peeled off the hooks and sealed in the jars of brine and the hooks given a wipe with a tallowed rag.

Lying there in the cool shadow of the big pink granite rock, the Dragon was rolled gently by the little swell that swashed against the rock’s sheer base, while her crew “relished” their sandwiches of toasted rye bread, cold roast, beef, and raw tomatoes.

Sleep undoubtedly would have followed, had not a pod of herring fry, looking more like a chunk of pressed Smyrna dates than a school of fish, floated slowly upward alongside.

Instantly the Dragon became a ringside seat at an exhibition that far outdid any man-made spectacle. For suddenly from the depths shot scores of bluefish — a steel-blue flotilla of nature’s submarines, murderous action personified — that tore into that huddle of innocence, ripping and slashing as it passed and leaving a wake of wreckage behind, while, timed to a split second, the air above was alive with heavy-winged herring gulls that swooped down to come to rest on the water, head to wind, and fall to work gobbling up the maimed survivors of the attack, now drifting helplessly on the surface.

Above the gulls was a ceiling of terns, more numerous and incredibly swift, attacking the pod that still floated aimlessly a few inches underwater. Shimmering, when touched by the sunbeams, like glazed porcelain and filling the air with their creaking cries, the terns wheeled, hovered, dipped, and rose till, their objective marked, they dove like bullets to disappear below the surface and reappear as quickly, each with a fishlet in its orange-red, black-tipped beak.

The concentration of such numbers of these aerial acrobats gave the feeling of being in the midst of a furiously agitated storm cloud that was tossed about in uttermost confusion and from which fell a silvery rain that purfled the sea with countless dimples, but of which not one drop landed on the Dragon or collided one with another. Of all his acts, the most skillful is that by which the tern, emerging from his dive, withdraws himself from the rain of his fellows. Mathematically, it would seem impossible for a body of his size and shape to come to tht surface, spread his wings, project himself into the air with head to wind, and instantly select a course clear of his companions, who are showering down seemingly into the same spot he but that instant has quitted.

Then, as mysteriously as it had appeared, the pod of fry sank, the air above the Dragon was wiped clear of terns, and the only evidence of such murderous combat was a gull or two, lifting and falling on the gentle swell, mopping up what was left of the carnage.

But if, as the Skipper pointed out, the sky was searched, a steady drift of terns could be seen on a northeasterly course at a height of perhaps forty to sixty feet, while another ragged procession was flying out to windward, or southwest, so close to water level as to appear at times to pass through, rather than over, a wave. Those aloft were flying light; those below were carrying every one a silvery fry.

After watching these hard-working birds for a while the Doctor said: “If it’s agreeable to you, Skipper, I’d jest as soon cruise about for a spell watehin’ the birds and tryin’ to drive some sense into this blame’ boy’s head.”

The “blame’” boy showed that he was “agreeable” to the Doctor’s proposal by twitching the grapnel off the bottom smartly, while the Skipper unfurled the sail, shoved the sprit into its becket on the mast, and began to jog the Dragon slowly to windward.

From the spate of information that now poured forth I gathered that the birds on the southwest course were grownups who’d been to market and were hurrying home with their supplies to feed their ever hungry fledglings, which nestled on a barren islet, six miles to windward, known as “Gull Island” — the then, and present, summer resort of tern society; further, that they were flying as close to the surface as they could to take advantage of the “drag” the water creates on the lower hem of the wind that passes over it. Obvious too was the fact that this drag which brakes the wind extends upwards only a few inches on a windy day, while on a calm one, particularly when a strong tidal current is running counter to the direction of the wind, this influence stretches many feet aloft and is often powerful enough to appear to kill what little breeze is astir.

And now, as sometimes happens of a summer afternoon on Buzzards Bay, the southwest wind faltered and gradually dropped to a calm. Within a half hour the warmth died out of the air, followed by a cool breath from the east, tainted with a hint of clammy mud flats. Close on the heels, of this herald came a light northeast breeze, bringing with it a rose-pearl fog that slowly enveloped the Dragon until she was sailing alone and silent inside a contracted sphere of mist and gray-green water.

During this shift of weather I had not been allowed to sit idle with heedless eyes; for again the Doctor gave all his attention to “driving sense in,” and before the fog shut down too thickly I had seen the procession of birds, beating their way close along the wave tops to the island, suddenly rise to take the upper track, while those coming to market dropped to the lower one — a complete reversal of conditions earlier in the day. Watching the homegoers sailing high with hardly moving pinions, it was beyond doubt that they had found the exact height at which the new, favorable wind gave them the maximum of speed with the least effort and that the travelers below had gauged to an inch the level where the drag cut to its limit the countercurrent of air.

With visibility contracted to a few yards by the fog, I became fearful that my interesting friends, the terns, would lose their way, leaving the “chickens” on the island to starve. In a whisper I confilded this fear to the Doctor — but he only shook his head and pointed astern, where, looking like gray ghosts with black caps, tern after tern shot out of the smoking wall to leeward and disappeared to windward in the blink of an eye. So seen, ahead or astern, every bird cut the boat’s course at the same angle; there was no sign of confusion in his flight; every move was purposeful; he was confidently on his desired course.

By ‘early evening the Skipper had piloted the Dragon safely through the fog to her moorings and landed his crew in the boathouse.

Here he and the Doctor, after rolling up their shirt sleeves and tying on their oilskin aprons, were about to operate on the row of ten plump bluefish, the pick of the Dragon’s well, that lay before them on the skinning bench, and the Doctor had actually made his first incision when the Skipper, suddenly paling at the tearing sound of the stroke, dropped his knife and cried: —

“Good Lord, Lem! What about Mrs. Bibb? I never thought about the poor woman all day. What ailed her, and did she die?”

“Poison — not dead,” replied the Doctor.

A long pause followed while the Skipper’s curiosity built itself up until he exploded with: —

“Oh, come on, now! Tell us what you did for her.”

“Nothin’ very much,” said the Doctor mildly. “Jest watched her fer a while, and when I seen she wars a-sinkin’ and a-sinkin’, says I to myself, ‘That woman’s got suthin’ inside her what had oughter come out’ — so I pumped her out.”

The Doctor’s subdued tone, and the astoundingly graphic picture he drew, so excited my imagination that I stood staring at him, pale and shivering. Divining my distress and need of more enlightenment, he continued: “’T wa’n’t nothin’ but white powder — arsenic, I suspicion. Arsenic’s kinder easy to get mixed into the sugar bowl most anywheres. Don’t need to worry none about it — bound to happen in the best of families oncet in a while.”

And with that, he turned to the work in hand, leaving me then and forever after somewhat suspicious of sugar bowls in general, but - positively distrustful of those in the “best families.”