In the Key of Clam
DESPITE the Worcester Festival and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, we had always felt that the love of music was not indigenous to New England; and we enjoyed the satisfaction of having our opinion confirmed when we moved into a back-water of New England where the inhabitants, by virtue of isolation and inbreeding, remain as nearly as possible the modern copies of their Pilgrim forefathers. The copy is a good man, but he has no music.
Certain sounds he has. A young neighbor of ours, for instance, is the proud possessor of a nondescript wind instrument on which he has learned to work, emitting on Sunday afternoons weird, unrelated bellows, like an adolescent bull whose voice is changing; but this is not music, nor is the stertorous thumping from cottage melodeons that we sometimes hear, reminding us of the soughing of dropsical bass-drums.
If, we asked ourselves, music hath charms to sooth the savage breast, what soothes the breasts of our neighbors? What keeps them from treasons, stratagems, and spoils?
The thing that keeps our primitive New Englander sweet throughout the year is the annual church clam-bake. Hard of exterior, he is very soft inside; he is only waiting for a chance to come out of his shell. It is not for nothing that his folk-song, or racial symphonic poem, is written in the key of clam.
Our annual church clam-bake is called the Knotty Shingle Bake; and the name shows the vitality of New England traditions. We are obliged to explain to the passing stranger that the neat, white, clapboarded Congregational Church that crowns the hill back of our village, whose spire is a famous landmark, or water-mark, for ships at sea, originally, beyond the memory of any man now living, was a mean structure, shingled with extremely knotty shingles, presented by a parsimonious parishioner. Even the knot-holes of the original structure have long since passed away. Nothing remains save the old nickname, to mystify strangers, and to gratify the love that the natives have for permanence, which is largely composed of hatred of any sort of change.
The clam-bake itself has the sanction of immemorial tradition. Originating with the Indians as a pagan rite, it became a Christian ceremonial with the early New Englanders. I can imagine that, a hundred years ago, church bakes began with a blessing and ended with an exhortation; but at the present time the church bake has a great deal more bake than church about it. Even in our back-water, creeds have crumbled. Unlike city communities, we have had no opportunity to translate mysticism into applied ethics; and our churches have become largely social centres.
The Knotty Shingle Bake takes place the third Wednesday in August, when the summer heat is tempered most gratefully by the breath of the sea that draws in over our fresh-water ponds, our tidal river, our undulating, scrubby barrens, forbidding but picturesque, and through our woods which, relapsed since the first cutting into a second wildness almost primeval, are traversed by innumerable half-obliterated, romantic wood-paths leading to overgrown clearings — breathing-places for the sun — where partridges whirr up from the blueberry bushes, and an occasional deer stands startled before bounding off into a thicker covert. All the stores of the village are closed, the yellow store and the other one, on this great feast-day of the year; and the colors are run to the top of the tall liberty pole that was set up during the Civil War, and is a lasting memorial to the patriotism of the men who stayed at home.
The church and parsonage are over a mile from the village, so that the loneliness of the spot has caused many a minister’s wife to keep her husband from accepting the charge he coveted; but I confess I cannot understand such feminine exactions. The average attendance at the bake is fifteen hundred, — enough visitors, it would seem, to satisfy the most insatiable demand for society.
Of course, our village cannot supply this vast attendance. From scattering farms and distant hamlets, the people come, and from lonely roads through swamp and woodland, hermits in effect, as stubborn and knotted in character as decrepit apple trees, but humanized by the bake, harmonized by the clam tuning-fork. Even sojourners in the neighboring summer resort come with their furbelows and futilities, striving vainly to conceal their sense of superiority, whom we, in the old Puritan ideal of democracy, force ourselves to regard as equals.
The long tables are spread in the oak grove beside the church; the last preparations are completed, the men of the congregation characteristically giving money or produce, the women characteristically giving their time and work. A chowder has been made; an ice cream has been manufactured, a sort of dietetic reinforced concrete, to serve as coup de grâce for the banqueters; and the altar, once pagan, then Christianized, and now humanized, is ready for the sacrifice.
The last embers are swept from the bed of white-hot granite boulders; rockweed, olive-colored, rubbery, bulbous, the delight of children at the sea shore, is spread on the stones, where it snaps and hisses a fragrant incense; and on top of this is placed the most deliciously heterogeneous collection of viands ever imagined by pagan, Christian, or common man: fish in slices, green corn in its husk, dressing in deep pans, cylindrical sausages wrapped in paper, sweet potatoes in their native armor, and, dominating all, flavoring all, almost bursting their burlap bags, are the clams, —thin-shelled, tender, translucent, pervasive, invasive, omnipresent, omnipotent!
In effete cities, these radiant beings are qualified by the adjective ‘soft’; but to us New Englanders, living on the land near the water in which they grow, any limiting adjective robs them of dignity, if, indeed, it does not take something from their actual, innate quality. To us, the four simple letters C-L-A-M mean as much as S-P-Q-R meant to the ancient Romans.
The high priest of the sacrifice, a paid functionary like most priests, bears as symbol of his office a trident, altered for terrestrial uses since leaving Neptune’s hands. With this implement he covers the steaming agglomeration with rock-weed and canvas, and thereupon leaves it to its bivalvular apotheosis.
The crowd disperses through the grove, where the earthy sweetness of the trodden weed mingles with the ocean sweetness of the rock-weed, exhaling from the bake, and bustles into place at the long tables. There is a sudden cry of chowder, an impetuous rush of waitresses, the splash of dippers, the clink of spoons in plates.
Gurgle, gurgle, clatter! Sip, clink, clank! With marvelous unison and magnificent powder, perfectly responsive to the twin conductors, Health and Hunger, the great folk-song or symphonicpoem begins in double fortissimo, sounding at the outset its heavy motif in the major key of clam.
However much of an idealist your New Englander is, he always bases his idealism on reality, like a true pragmatist. These New Englanders have come here primarily to eat, and they concentrate their minds on eating, on the good old Anglo-Saxon principle of making work of play. No Gallic dalliance, no Gallic wit. The pleasures of the table have now become their business; according to the new doctrine of efficiency, each strives to form a perfect union of precision and speed; and at the close of the festival, when watermelon, eaten from the hand, comes to perform the function of fingerbowls, the man who has the highest pile of clam-shells beside his plate is accounted the greatest hero, as if the seat of virtue were the stomach.
Never, perhaps, since the days of mediæval baronial banquetings, has there been such huge feeding as at these clam-bakes among the temperate Puritans of New England. Only Yankee ingenuity could have discovered how to pluck pleasure without pain. The clam is the only stimulant known without a reaction.
The symphony does not end with a full burst from the orchestra like most symphonies. Repletion is suggested by an irregular rallentando, a dauntless diminuendo. After the watermelon melody, the dominant key of clam is again sounded by the mightiest virtuosi of voracity in the orchestra; and the symphony closes with an exquisite tinkle of the last clam-shell on the highest pile.
The gastronomic grove is now dedicated to the social graces, or to as much social grace as the unregenerate New Englander, with his instinctive distrust of anything approaching the aesthetic, will permit himself. The men assume a gruff exterior, their pleasantries taking the form of a rude raillery that belies their kindly hearts; or else they are humorously silent, gaining the guerdon of men who shrewdly look wise and say nothing. As always in social gatherings, above all other sounds are heard the voices of women, rising and falling in unconscious rhythm, shrill, insistent, maddening as tomtoms. The voices of the children have a sweeter shrillness, vying with the birds; and the scene gains its ultimate, human touch from the dogs, their enthusiastic souls well-nigh bursting their little bodies, bright exemplars of pure joy to their less canine brothers.
Youth will have its fling, even in New England. Several games of baseball have been improvised, the young men ruthlessly bedewing gaudy suspenders and lavender neckties with the sweat of sport. Old men, whaling captains turned farmers, leaning on their sticks, watch this sport with the pretty, childlike pleasure old men take in watching; or greet one another after many days, or many years, like ships speaking in mid-ocean, never, perhaps, to meet again. These men have sailed the seven seas; they know China, India, Cape Horn, Kamchatka. In a true sense, they are men of the world; and as they talk with you of crops or clams, their blue eyes seem fixed on far horizons. Soon they shall be called to sail the longest and the most adventurous of their voyages; but they are incurious of death, with the merciful anæsthesia of approaching dissolution.
Beneath all the festivity, there is an undertone of sadness, neither pessimistic nor expressed. These people have wrested a meagre living from the soil or from the sea; and they bring their worries with them. They cannot cry, ‘One day to madness and joy!’ with an Eleusinian abandon. Serious, clumsy, often crabbed, hard to start, but harder to stop when started, this is the race whose magnificent momentum has conquered continents and muddled through to make a Shakespeare.
It is only a step from a festival to a funeral; the cemetery adjoins the clam-bake grove. Trees, God’s green monuments, have been rigorously excluded from God’s acre. The place is thronged with an overflow of persons from the bake, who admire the ugly stones, gaze pensively at the graves of arrivals since the previous August, or wander idly about in the half-holiday spirit that cemeteries seem to evoke. Never is the village of the dead so full of living people as on this day.
But the young have scant interest in mortuary memorials. They pass on into the woods beyond, which in June are gloriously aglow with mountain laurel. Insensibly, — who knows how? — by instinct or the will, the couples disperse and disappear. They need no laurel. Unconsciously, they are seeking the blue blossom that blooms everywhere miraculously, to wither or bear sober fruit. Without knowing it, they are treading something far different from silent, deserted wood-paths. They are entering a region they can pass through, but never wholly banish from the memory, a region where the minutes are as hours, the hours as minutes, where they discover anew the truth, older than Copernicus, that the universe centres in two loving hearts. A moment since, and it was only the Knotty Shingle Clam-bake, and a holiday; now, it is a holy day, indeed; and all the future shall be dated from this hour.
The impatient automobiles have taken the sojourners at the summer resort back to their city life at the sea shore. In the aromatic August dusk, passionate buggies rush by with their freight of love. Democrat wagons amble past, loaded with parents and children, as easy-riding and as unexciting as the domestic affections. The colors float majestically earthward on the liberty pole. Both the stores are opened; and the loafers congregate to talk things over. They infest every place of comfort ; they stretch and puff their pipes. They are not given much to generalization; but they agree that the bake was a great success; and they feel a pleasant fatigue after their enjoyment, and bask in a virtuous sense of having played a noble part. Meanwhile, the women of the congregation are busy on the hill, washing the clam-bake dishes, — a labor too hard for men.
The Knotty Shingle Clam-bake is a thing of the past for another twelvemonth; but its influence will be felt throughout the year, permeating the whole countryside like a gentle fructifying inundation. To swamp road and wood-path and sandy barren, has come a year’s supply of styles and scandals. A thousand new anecdotes have been caught in the tenacious New England memory. Imaginary card catalogues have been written up to date with recent deaths and births that are imminent. The first steps have been taken toward many marriages and some divorces. The whole region has been made sweet by the salty tang of clam.