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being ready with her gear and two men, by the date of May the first. And I knew then that
David Copperfield
and
The Tempest
and all of those friends I had dearly come to love must really go forever. So I bade them all good-bye.
    The night after my first full day at home and after my mother had gone upstairs he called me into his room, where Isat upon the chair beside his bed. “You will go back tomorrow,” he said simply.
    I refused then, saying I had made my decision and was satisfied.
    “That is no way to make a decision,” he said, “and if you are satisfied I am not. It is best that you go back.” I was almost angry then and told him as all children do that I wished he would leave me alone and stop telling me what to do.
    He looked at me a long time then, lying there on the same bed on which he had fathered me those sixteen years before, fathered me his only son, out of who knew what emotions when he was already fifty-six and his hair had turned to snow. Then he swung his legs over the edge of the squeaking bed and sat facing me and looked into my own dark eyes with his of crystal blue and placed his hand upon my knee. “I am not telling you to do anything,” he said softly, “only asking you.”
    The next morning I returned to school. As I left, my mother followed me to the porch and said, “I never thought a son of mine would choose useless books over the parents that gave him life.”
    In the weeks that followed he got up rather miraculously, and the gear was ready and the
Jenny Lynn
was freshly painted by the last two weeks of April when the ice began to break up and the lonely screaming gulls returned to haunt the silver herring as they flashed within the sea.
    On the first day of May the boats raced out as they had always done, laden down almost to the gunwales with their heavy cargoes of traps. They were almost like living things as theywe baited the tubs of trawl in the afternoon and set them at sunset and revisited them in the darkness of the early morning. The men would come tramping by our house at four A.M. and we would join them and walk with them to the wharf and be on our way before the sun rose out of the ocean where it seemed to spend the night. If I was not up they would toss pebbles to my window and I would be very embarrassed and tumble downstairs to where my father lay fully clothed atop his bed, reading his book and listening to his radio and smoking his cigarette. When I appeared he would swing off his bed and put on his boots and be instantly ready and then we would take the lunches my mother had prepared the night before and walk off toward the sea. He would make no attempt to wake me himself.
    It was in many ways a good summer. There were few storms and we were out almost every day and we lost a minimum of gear and seemed to land a maximum of fish and I tanned dark and brown after the manner of my uncles.
    My father did not tan – he never tanned – because of his reddish complexion, and the salt water irritated his skin as it had for sixty years. He burned and reburned over and over again and his lips still cracked so that they bled when he smiled, and his arms, especially the left, still broke out into the oozing salt-water boils as they had ever since as a child I had first watched him soaking and bathing them in a variety of ineffectual solutions. The chafe-preventing bracelets of brass linked chain that all the men wore about their wrists in early spring were his the full season and he shaved but painfully and only once a week.
    And I saw then, that summer, many things that I had seen all my life as if for the first time and I thought that perhaps myplunged through the waters of the spring and manoeuvred between the still floating icebergs of crystal-white and emerald green on their way to the traditional grounds that they sought out every May. And those of us who sat that day in the high school on the hill, discussing the water imagery of Tennyson, watched them as they passed