Miss Perry would praise the recitation and the choice of the passage, and shake each boy’s hand.
When the boys got older, this ritual became a joke between them and Miss Perry. One year Miss Perry forgot, or chose to forget, to ask them to recite, and the boys, then thirteen and eleven, brought it up. Now that Charlie was seventeen and Tom fifteen, it seemed to Dick that this rite was kind of silly, especially in front of Elsie Buttrick.
But Elsie kept herself well to the rear during the presentation and recitation. Charlie and Tom both laughed at “If you don’t tear the pages or scribble on them,” which Miss Perry said in a way that made fun of herself, and then both boys recited with good grace and an easy detachment.
Elsie stepped forward with her present for the boys, but stepped back when she saw that there was a final stage — opening the glass doors of the bookcase and admiring the collection as a progression of the boys’ reading. Dick enjoyed this part — each book standing for a year in the boys’ lives, marking transitions. May and sometimes Dick had read the books aloud to the boys until they were nine. And then the second, more subtle transition to full-fledged adult books. This year Charlie got Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator.
It was a peculiar little library. All the books were by New Englanders, except some of the very early children’s books such as A Child’s Garden of Verses (Charlie’s) and a complete set of Beatrix Potter (Tom’s). Among the ten-to-fourteen-year-old books there were Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy, Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, several books by Louisa May Alcott, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a book by one of the boat-building Herreshofs about boys learning to sail.
And then, more recently, Thoreau, Melville, more Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Francis Parkman’s History of the French in North America (all nine titles for Charlie’s fifteenth birthday), and Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, Conquest of Peru, and Ferdinand and Isabella (for Tom’s fourteenth birthday). Joshua Slocum, although he hailed from the Maritime Provinces, had been included as a Rhode Islander, since he acquired the boat in which he sailed alone around the world here in Rhode Island, just on the other side of Narragansett Bay.
Miss Perry had said — not annually, only once or twice — that the collection was a history of New England thought and attitudes, but, given the enterprise of New England thought and of her whaling, fishing, and merchant fleets, that that history touched a great part of the world.
Miss Perry now repeated this to Elsie, as a way of bringing Elsie in. Elsie gave Tom and Charlie each a rigging knife, and Miss Perry said they should pay Elsie a penny, because a present of something sharp was unlucky and might cut the friendship.
The boys got the fishing poles out. Elsie asked Miss Perry when she should come back for her. Charlie said, “Aw, come on, Miss Buttrick. Be a sport.”
Dick said, “Pretty tame stuff, after swordfishing. At least there’s no sharks in the salt pond.”
Dick found the flounder hole after some drifting around, getting their hooks cleaned by little scup. They started pulling in flounder, about a half-pound apiece. A couple of smaller dap.
They were alone in a deep cove. They could hear the rustle of the spartina. Tom had set the anchor and sat straddling the bow, dangling his bare feet over the water. Charlie was in the stern, Miss Perry in a folding chair in front of him, Dick and Elsie on the rowing thwart.
Miss Perry got a heavy strike. As she reeled in she chanted, “ ‘A minnow, a minnow! I have him by the nose!’ ” The boys had heard this line too. Elsie looked at Charlie. Charlie said, “It’s from one of the books.”
Dick leaned over past Elsie, caught Miss Perry’s line, and swung the fish in. It was a sea robin, its pectoral fins spread like wings. Dick held the sea robin up to Miss Perry’s ear so she could hear it croak. “My gracious,” Miss Perry said. “It’s prehistoric.”
Tom looked back and said, “ ‘But what a horrible surprise! Instead of a smooth fat minnow Mr. Jeremy Fisher landed little Jack Sharp the stickleback, covered with spines!’ ” Miss Perry crowed with delight.
They had a pail full of fish. The fishing slowed. Dick said, “Time to go in?”
They all said no, and settled peacefully.
Miss Perry said, “We look like a daddy longlegs.” She pointed at the poles jutting up and out all around, the lines running out and down into the still water.
“Missing a leg,” Charlie said.
“Or three,” Elsie said.
Miss Perry said, “No matter. We still give the impression of a daddy longlegs.” She smiled at Dick, her face buttery with sunlight that filtered through the brim of her straw hat.
The skiff swayed a little as Elsie slid herself backward off the thwart and lay down. She nestled her head on a life jacket; her calves flattened out on the seat. She stuck the butt of her rod in her armpit, the first length of it across her thigh. Her hat was down to her nose. Her visible mouth yawned. She said, “This is nice. What’s nice about flounder fishing is it’s so dumb.”
Charlie looked sharply at Elsie, a little bit hurt. Dick laughed. Charlie looked at Dick. Dick shrugged and tilted his head. Miss Perry put her pole on top of Elsie’s and pushed down hard once. Elsie struggled to sit up, lost her hat, reeled in frantically until her bait showed. “Now, that’s dumb,” Elsie said to Dick. The boys laughed. Miss Perry confessed.
Everything was still again. Far off and aloft the wind was moving clouds across the sea, but around them the pond was so unruffled Dick could see green on the water near the bank, the sky on the middle of the cove. Dick was struck by love for Charlie. The skiff seemed to float in the center of his heart without a sound, holding Charlie.
This perfect stillness held for a minute. Dick’s reflex of checking things rippled across it without spoiling it. Dick jigged his rod tip a couple of times. He narrowed his eyes against the bright water. He didn’t want another fish; he ducked his head and said, “You want to run us home, Charlie? Get the anchor up, Tom. Make sure you wash the mud off.”
Charlie cranked the engine and the skiff rose up, cut a long arc across the water. Dick swung round to face front, made room for Tom between him and Elsie’s shins. He put his arm around Tom’s shoulders. “When we get to the creek, you scull us up.”
As they swung past Sawtooth Island, Dick saw that there was a ring of new-planted willow trees. They’d got the roofs on the first cottages on the point too. Dick thought of his boat, still not decked.
Tom broke out the sculling oar. Miss Perry came forward to take Tom’s place. Charlie folded her chair and raised the motor in the well. “Now, watch this,” Dick said to Elsie. “Not many people know the trick of it.”
Tom worked the oar in neat pushes and pulls, and they nosed smoothly up the creek between the banks, a foot of perforated black mud at half-tide, topped by a mat of roots and stems and a shimmer of spartina.
Miss Perry chanted, “ ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!’ ” and Tom and Charlie chimed in.
As dumb as flounder fishing, Dick thought, but it seemed okay for Charlie and Tom to go along and get silly with Miss Perry. Somewhere they’d got goodhearted. It wasn’t anything he’d taught them. Nor had Miss Perry, though he was grateful to Miss Perry for the way she seemed to draw it up out of them. For all her old-fashioned stiffness, she had the trick of that, as handy as Tom twitching his oar to and fro, moving the skiff up the creek smooth as silk.