The Ebbing Tide (11 page)

“I think so.” She poured coffee for herself and took the pot back to the stove. When she came back, frowning a little with a dozen unformed but urgent questions, he said in his unhurried voice, “You've always been a strong person, and you intend to keep on being strong. Whatever you've set out to do, you've done. You've prepared for your husband's leaving, so you could take it in your stride. And when he comes back—” He looked down at his pipe again. “And when he comes back—” he repeated, and she felt a hurrying of her heartbeat, a quickening awareness along her skin of some unsaid meaning behind his words; as if the simple phrase had some connotation for him that she would never know. The pause lengthened; into it came the asthmatic ticking of the clock, and Owen's breathing.

“And when he comes back,” Garland said at last, “you'll be as steady and strong as you've always been. That must be a wonderful thing for him to know. It should give him peace of mind in spite of everything. So many hundreds of women have cracked up and gone under since the war began. They're soft as putty. They just can't take it.”

“How do you know about me?” she protested. “How do
I
know? He's only just gone.”

“Do you know what I thought when I came here, and in the first few days?” Their eyes held gravely.

“I thought you were the most at-peace woman I'd ever met. As complete and self-contained as a tree. Or as the Island itself.”

I should be embarrassed
, she thought,
but I'm not. It's the way he speaks
. . . . Aloud she said, “It's not true. Oh, I don't mean I intend to crack up. But I'm not really at peace . . . things bother me sometimes.” It was incredible that she should be admitting this. She was being astonished at every turn of the talk.

“Storms shake the trees, don't they? But when their roots are deep, they're safe. And the Island goes fathoms deep down into the sea, it's based on rock rising out of the very core of the earth. Surf can't hurt it.” He looked very tired now, his voice was slow. “The mine bothered you, didn't it? But you're all right now.”

“I had a terrible dream about Nils and that mine,” she admitted. “It was . . . awful. But as soon as it fades, I'l be all right. You see, I really worry about Nils, or why would I dream like that?”

“Of course you worry about him. You love him. He's part of you. But you love him so much that you don't intend to crumble in a disgusting welter of self-pity while he's gone. . . . You're helping him in every way you can.” He stood up, and knocked his pipe gently on the edge of the ash tray. “You'll dream, but you know how to handle that. It's when you don't know how to handle dreams that you go to pieces.” His face shouldn't have been gray when the lamplight was so yellow. . . . “I know about dreams. Nightmares. When you begin to have them in the daytime, you give out. If you're lucky, it won't be
both
your mind and your body that goes. I don't know which is worse.”

“You were discharged,” she said quietly. “You gave out—”

“They convinced me that it wasn't an insult to my manhood to give out,” he said with a wry twist to his mouth. “Three years in the thick of things, operating through battles. . . . I suppose it was when I began to get tired—they didn't seem to be able to spare any time for leaves, and I could have done with thirty days—that things crowded in on me. But it wasn't till after I got—well, a letter—that I began to have a hard time distinguishing where reality left off and the nightmare began.”

He stopped abruptly and stood as if he were listening. After a moment he said, “You know, I've been back in the States since January but I still can't get used to this quiet. . . . Will you forgive me for talking about myself? I didn't intend to—”

“Forgive me for probing,” Joanna said.

He put out his hand and smiled. She had been avoiding his smile since he came; but now she would not avoid it, nor his hand. She put hers out, and felt the warm, dry grip of his fingers.

“You had an explanation coming. And I didn't mind telling you. That surprises me, since you're the first person to whom I've spoken about it since I left the hospital. . . . Will all that coffee keep you awake?”

“I don't think so. But I ought to listen for Owen—”

“I'm not a heavy sleeper. I'll leave my door open and I'll hear him if he moves.”

“You shouldn't be bothered with this,” Joanna protested, but he shook his head.

“We're friends, aren't we? No protests then.” He stood out of her way. “Sleep well, and good night.”

When she reached her room she knew she was aching with tiredness, but her mind was alert and racing. She lay down, feeling her muscles quivering against the sheets; after a few minutes she heard Garland come upstairs and go to his room. In the cool dark, she remembered their conversation and was grateful for it, but stirred in spite of herself. It had helped to tell him that she'd dreamed, but her chief and most vivid sensation was not of relief, but of compassion. The letter he had mentioned so briefly was from a woman, she was sure of it; a woman who had in some way gone under, who hadn't been able to wait for him with strength and serenity.

Nils
, she said soundlessly in the dark;
Nils, I wouldn't do it. . . . I'd die before I'd let you down. You're sure of me and you can always be sure
. It was at once a pledge and a prayer.

T
HEY DIDN
'
T MENTION THAT NIGHT AGAIN
, but the next few days passed with a feeling of ease, almost of relaxation. Owen mentioned it when he was alone with Joanna, having breakfast at dawn before he went out to haul.

“My Lord, you've sure stopped waggin' around here like a broody hen. I thought you didn't like the guy!”

“We've been through a battle together,” Joanna said flippantly. “Dragging you in before the dew fell on you. The dew
and
Thea. It makes us comrades.”

“Jeest, that was rotten gin.” Owen contemplated his evening in retrospect. “I don't remember anything after Leonie shoved me out the door. Just remember she was some mad.”

“What for?”

Owen glanced at her with a fiendish twinkle in his black eyes. “Seems to me I sullied her honor by puttin' my arm around her.”

“It's a wonder Sigurd didn't knock your head in,” Joanna remarked dispassionately.

“He was pegged out in the corner. Leonie and I were holdin' the fort and I wanted to hold Leonie. But she stayed pure. I don't remember anything else till the next mornin', and my stomach burnin' like I'd drunk iodine.”

“Spare me the details. I was around, remember?”

“You and Dennis! Jesus, I was some sick. I haven't got over it yet.” He was pulling on his rubber boots and when he straightened up he was breathing hard, his high cheekbones were stained with dark color. “Don't know what that poison does to anybody's wind, but a man's a fool to drink it.”

“I know,” Joanna said. Usually she could think of some withering remark to supplement Owen's after-a-bout observations; but since she and Dennis had talked, she didn't want to be sarcastic. She saw Owen as a sick man, and it was easy enough, when he looked as he did now.

He went out without whistling; she wondered with an unpleasant start of alarm if that took too much of his breath. Jamie wasn't awake yet, neither was Garland, and she took an empty water pail and walked down to the well. It was a clear, warm morning, more like August than the middle of April. The sun had not yet risen from the sea in the east, and the pale, windless light was without sound or brilliance. She could not even hear the rote on the back shore, and knew that all around the Island the water lay as still as it lay in the harbor, like faintly rippled, silver-gray silk.

A song sparrow trilled out suddenly from the alder swamp, and then she became aware of all the sleepy chipping and chirping, as chickadees and sparrows and nuthatches—and all the other small birds that brought April to the Island—began their day.

But they added to the stillness, rather than took away from it, and she heard a clatter and rattle from the beach as Owen pushed his punt down; the thud of rubber boots on the firm ground as Matthew Fennell came along the path on his way to the shore, Sigurd's front door closing ith a small explosive sound in the hush. The Island was awake and stirring, and she had stood dreaming long enough at the well.

She drew her pail of water and set it on the curb in time to say hello to Matthew; when she walked back toward her house she met Francis Seavey coming out of his, oilclothes over his arm, swinging his dinner box. He gave her his bashful nervous grin, and ducked his head.

“ ‘Mornin', Jo!” He hurried on down to the shore, as if Thea were coming after him with her grandfather's horse whip.

Joanna, smiling, went into her own house.
I'll write about this morning
, she thought.
I'll put it all in a letter to Nils, how quiet it was before the gulls were up, how still and yet how busy
. . . .

Dennis Garland was to leave the next day. He intended to wander around through the New England spring, he said, and then come back in the summer to see what the Island was like then. Joanna was nsure whether she would miss him or not, but she
was
sure that she as glad he had come. She had written about him to Nils, telling him at last that the Place was sold. She wasn't afraid that Nils wouldn't ccept the news well. He always accepted everything with equanimity, because he said that everything had its reason. And if she said that Garland was a decent, quiet man, that would be enough for Nils.

The morning of that day she woke up to see the spruces swaying gainst the great fluffs of wind-clouds that blew boisterously across the un. She'd slept late, she thought with astonishment; she'd been sleeping long and soundly ever since the night when she'd sat with Dennis Garland over coffee. It was as if in some way she'd lost a weight from her soul.

Jamie was standing up in his crib, looking at her over the side, his mouth tucked in disapprovingly.
“Mama,”
he said sternly.

“Oh I know it!” She laughed as she lifted him out. “Scold me. . . . By the sound of the wind I don't guess our Mr. Garland is leaving us today after all.”

Owen and Garland were eating breakfast when she came down. “Fool, crazy westerly,” Owen muttered blackly. “Wanted a breakwater for years. Anybody'd think we didn't even belong to the States out here.”

“Maybe it's the administration,” Garland suggested. “Maine's too hard-rock Republican to expect anything from the Democrats—or want anything. To hear my brother hold forth, anyway—”

“Lord, it's always the wrong administration.” Owen dropped sugar into his coffee with a fine disregard for rationing. “They've been promisin' a breakwater now since before I was born—”

“Can you remember that far back?” Joanna said, and received a look. She laughed, and went about fixing Jamie's breakfast.

“First the Republicans promise it, and then the Democrats. I guess maybe I'll start bein' a Socialist.”

“That won't get you anywhere.” Garland's lean face was serious but his eyes, unclouded gray this morning, held a twinkle. “You don't think they'll do anything for you millionaire lobster fishermen, do you? My boy, you Islanders are plutocrats these days. Or didn't you know it?”

“Sure, I know.” Owen pushed back his chair and walked into the kitchen, to stare down at the harbor. “But one crazy westerly can turn us into paupers. Where can you get new trap stuff now? Nails and riggin'? What do you do if your boat goes ashore and smashes up?”

Garland joined him at the window. “Your harbor's wide open, isn't it?”

“Yeah. Look at those old seas comin' in past Grant's Point. Look at those boats jumpin' around.”

Joanna, listening, didn't have to look t o know what the harbor was like this morning. She knew too well how the combers drove into the little harbor, breaking in a surge of swirling white foam against blue-green sea. She knew how the surf was piling up on Eastern Harbor Point, in literal explosions of water that sent spray as high as the tree-tops in smoky plumes. Alternately the day dazzled and darkened under the blowing clouds. Sometimes the harbor and the Island lay under moving shadows that turned the water to dark emerald and peacock shades, and blackened the woods, and deepened the yellow fields to bronze; then the roof of clouds would part, and through the widening rift one glimpsed the high, shining, blue arch of the world. The gulls circled in soaring arcs, borne on the wind and exultant in their surrender to it. When Joanna was young she had wanted to be a gull, and she still felt an excited beating in her throat when she watched the wide, sweeping patterning of their wings.

The men went down to the shore; it was not a day to stay indoors. Though the house was set back from the harbor, and sheltered by the windbreak, the wind made itself felt in quick shudderings of the window panes. The tawny grass in the field rippled like a yellow sea, and the smoke from Sigurd's and Thea's chimneys blew away in shreds. And Jamie was excited by the wind, like all young animals. He drummed his heels and his fists until Joanna took him out of his highchair, and then he raced around the house shouting at nothing, his eyes shining.

Washing the dishes, she looked down at the harbor, and between the fish houses she caught glimpses of the boats, plunging and bucking at their moorings, their bows to the wind. The moorings were laid as stoutly as could be made possible, heavy ground lines and heavy anchors, thick hawsers for the pennants. But even at that it was enough to make a tight uneasiness in Joanna's chest; the boats pulled so hard and seemed so helpless in the merciless march of combers from the sea.

There was enough to do in the house, but she was drawn back to the windows over and over again. She went upstairs to do the bedrooms, after she'd put Jamie out in the sunny lee of the house to play, and found herself at the window in Dennis' room. Brigport was ringed with surf, and the mile-wide stretch between the islands was feather-white. She half-shivered with excitement, loving the wind and yet fearing it with some deep primordial instinct.