ONE
Jubilance was tempered with sadness, sadness was brightened by hopefulness at the celebration that night in Elias Johnson’s house. The captain prepared his special drink, a “switchel,” to toast the Task Force that could now be disbanded. The generously filled mugs contained a mixture of rum, molasses and ginger-flavored water. It was a potion that sailors usually foreswore as being for landlubbers and sissies—but not when made with the extra dollops of rum Johnson poured in with a generous hand.
The captain toasted the group, ladies first: Elizabeth and Bonnie. Then Peter Hubbard and Amos Tarbell, Ben Dorset, Russell Homer, and Stephen Scott for supplying the special equipment they had needed. “Well, we got the scurvy lot!” were his words. “And the more credit to all of us for it!”
They drank heartily, and took more. By common consent, they put off the mourning they still had to do for what they and Yarkie had lost. Now was the hour to refill the cup of their triumph and supremacy. The old man did not hesitate to brim up Elizabeth’s cup when she held it out again and again. Or Bonnie’s, or Hubbard’s, or the others’.
They exchanged yarns that had the men slapping their thighs and calling out, “Whacking good!” In one story, Amos Tarbell used the word “mooncussin’” and had to explain it to Hubbard and Bonnie Taylor. Nowadays, it referred to nighttime scavenging on the beaches, people picking over the tide’s flotsam and jetsam; but its origin was out of a time when people swung lanterns on dark nights to mislead ships. The wrecks could then be plundered. The trick couldn’t work when the moon was out, so those nights the folks “cussed the light”—and now walking the beach with a lantern had become “mooncussin’.”
Laughing now, Bonnie Taylor told how Elizabeth had fooled her into picking up a scallop, without warning her she’d get squirted. She knew about squirting clams, but not scallops.
Elizabeth’s turn brought a poem for Peter Hubbard’s edification. It was one that had so tickled Elizabeth’s fancy she had memorized it from a book called “Cape Cod Pilot,” a Federal Writers Project back in 1937. It was attributed to an Eva Tappan of Yarmouth, and went:
“We drove the Indians out of the land
But a dire revenge the Red Men planned;
For they fastened a name to every nook
And every schoolboy with a spelling book
Will live to toil till his hair turns gray
Before he can spell them the proper way.”
Ben Dorset contributed the way old-timers confounded newcomers who tried to start lobstering. The natives would smile while the interlopers baited their traps with cut-up flounders, all correct. Then the old fellows would steal the lobster catch out of the traps and send them to the bottom with their concrete sinkers after removing the float. The newcomers never could find their traps again. “And,” he chuckled, “the way you could tell when they became old-timers was when they started to do the same to the next batch of tenderfoot that came along to lobster their waters!”
Russell Homer nodded knowledgeably. “You have to get up mighty early after your lobster. When the breeze whips up the whitecaps, you can hardly see your floats at all.” He grinned winningly. “I was always out when it was still ten-eleven blankets cold!”
Hubbard and Bonnie both looked at him with bemused smiles. “Ten-eleven blankets cold”—what a graphic way to describe the temperature. It would be a refreshing note on the television weather reports!
When the switchel was finished, it was time for the Task Force to break up. Separate groups formed with the goodnights. Elias Johnson and Stephen Scott considered how to bring the evacuees back to Yarkie, and which mainland officials to contact about the island’s deaths. Amos Tarbell and Ben Dorset discussed assigning the two fire trucks to a continuing patrol on High Ridge in case pockets of fire might still flare up. Peter Hubbard talked to Russell Homer about sailing him with his specimens to Chatham the next morning for a flight back to Cambridge; except for his report, his project on Yarkie was now completed.