“That’s good, but a nightshirt’s better. I’ve been dreamin’ o’ nightshirts ever since we bent our mainsail. Ye can wiggle your toes then. Ma’ll hev a new one fer me, all washed soft. It’s home, Harve. It’s home! Ye can sense it in the air. We’re runnin’ into the aidge of a hot wave naow, an’ I can smell the bayberries. Wonder if we’ll get in fer supper. Port a trifle.”
The hesitating sails flapped and lurched in the close air as the deep smoothed out, blue and oily, round them. When they whistled for a wind only the rain came in spiky rods, bubbling and drumming, and behind the rain the thunder and the lightning of mid-August.
They lay on the deck with bare feet and arms, telling one another what they would order at their first meal ashore; for now the land was in plain sight.
A Gloucester swordfish-boat drifted alongside, a man in the little pulpit on the bowsprit flourished his harpoon, his bare head plastered down with the wet.
“And all’s well!” he sang cheerily, as though he were watch on a big liner. “Wouverman’s waiting fer you, Disko. What’s the news o’ the Fleet?”
Disko shouted it and passed on, while the wild summer storm pounded overhead and the lightning flickered along the capes from four different quarters at once.
It gave the low circle of hills round Gloucester Harbor, Ten Pound Island, the fish-sheds, with the broken line of house-roofs, and each spar and buoy on the water, in blinding photographs that came and went a dozen times to the minute as the We’re Here crawled in on half-flood, and the whistling-buoy moaned and mourned behind her.
Then the storm died out in long, separated, vicious dags of blue-white flame, followed by a single roar like the roar of a mortar-battery, and the shaken air tingled under the stars as it got back to silence.