The Ebbing Tide (22 page)

She turned her face away and put her hands up to cover it. “I'm so ashamed,” she whispered.

“Nora, honey,” Matthew said hoarsely, but Joanna put her hand on his arm and wouldn't let him go. Nora would talk to Dennis as she would talk to no one else.

Dennis said quietly, “But after a while you wanted the baby, didn't you? What changed your mind?”

“It was the day Jamie was lost. I kept thinking how it would be for Joanna and Nils if anything happened to the baby, and then I thought about Nils, and about Matthew . . . how much Jamie meant to Nils, and how much
our
baby would mean to Matthew.” She took her hands away from her face and looked up at Dennis with a desperate honesty. “Then all of a sudden, I knew that if I—had anything done—it would be killing Matthew's baby. And then I knew I couldn't do it, even if Gram
was
still around.”

Dennis nodded. “What happened today, Nora?”

“I was feeling so darned
good
—” her smile was shaky, but real—“because I was beginning to be happy about the baby, and I hadn't been sick for a couple of days, so I had to be smart and run up the stairs. But when I started to run down, I—I caught my heel, or something.”

She was ready to cry again. “And I've made an awful mess for everybody, and I've lost my baby, just when I wanted him.”

“Don't forget that dozen or more you're going to have.” He held her wrist in his fingers for a moment, and looked at his watch. “Well, can you sleep now?”

“Yes.” It was the slightest whisper of sound. Joanna began to pull down the shades, Dennis moved the chair away from the bed.

“Doc,” Matthew whispered harshly. “Can I speak to her for just a minute?”

“Five minutes if you want to. We'll go out.”

“I don't care if you hear. I guess I been pretty dumb.” He looked at both Dennis and Joanna in sheepish apology. “I never knew just how it was with Nora—about Gram, I mean. The poor kid, I—”

“You're all right, Matthew. Don't start worrying now, when everything's going to clear up.” Dennis nodded toward the bed. “You'd better talk to her before she falls asleep.”

“Sure.” He cleared his throat and went cautiously across the darkened room. Just outside the door Joanna stopped.

“I'm going to listen,” she said shamelessly. “I've been worried about Nora for a long time.”

“We'll both listen.” They waited by the unlatched door, standing close together in a silence made eloquent by the shared battle of the last half-hour.

“Nora, honey,” Matthew murmured. “Look, darlin', when you have that baby, Gram can go away. She's got that cousin over in Liberty. Or she can go away
now
, if you want.”

Nora's voice was faint, tenuous as a dream. “Not now, Matthew. She'd just die if she thought you didn't need her any more. Maybe after we have the baby she'll want to go, she'll know that we're all right.”

Joanna turned her head and smiled at Dennis. “Nora's grown up overnight.”

“She's a game kid. You won't have to worry about her any more.” They moved away from the door, toward the kitchen where the coffee was bubbling with a self-important, cheerful sound. “Is there anybody on the Island that you
don't
worry about?”

“My brothers call it minding everybody else's business,” she explained candidly. “But I guess I take after my father. He fussed about all the Islanders as if they were kin to him.”

“Well, all you Islanders are kin to each other,” he said seriously. “Because of the Island.”

She met his eyes without glancing away; her lids were heavy with fatigue, she looked at him through her thick Bennett lashes. “Then you and I are kin, because you're an Islander now—aren't you?”

There was a sort of inner gleam that came sometimes instead of a smile. “How about some coffee? We'll drink a toast to each other and the occasion.”

So swiftly she couldn't have drawn away, he put his arm through hers.

T
HERE WAS NO SIGN OF
O
WEN
or of the dog in the house; the doors stood open to May. Joanna ran upstairs and found that Jamie wasn't in his crib, and his scuffed play shoes and overalls were gone too. Owen had taken him up and dressed him then, she thought with the little warm amusement she always felt whenever Owen attended to his small nephew. Probably Jamie was down in the fish house brandishing a hammer, and he'd have a new swear word in his vocabulary; but she was too tired to worry right now. She felt as if she'd like to sleep for hours. When her mind wound backward over the trail it had taken since she'd begun to work in the garden just after dinner, the cabbage plants seemed a hundred miles away.

When she went downstairs again, Owen was coming up by the well. Jamie roved ahead of him. Dick sniffed expectantly at the wellcurb and Owen shouted at him to come away.

He was grinning when he came in, and she remembered, as if it were a fragment of a dream, the black rage that had been consuming him when she had gone out.

“I've been down callin' up,” he said. “Mother's fine. She says Mateel's upset and Charles is all hawsed up, but things are calmin' down.” He dropped into a chair, fishing for his cigarettes. Joanna looked at him blankly. It came to her with a shock that she'd forgotten about Young Charles. Guiltily she glanced at herself in the mirror over the sink. Her cheeks were flushed with tiredness, the same tiredness that made her eyes look veiled, half-mysterious, but fortunately she didn't appear as blank as she'd felt for a moment.

Owen was lighting a cigarette and Jamie waited, his rosy mouth pursed, his intent blue eyes holding twin reflections of the tiny flame. Owen lowered the match and Jamie blew it out, then trotted off through the sun parlor and out the back door.

“Well?” said Joanna. “How bad is it? How long has Young Charles been up to this business?”

“He never did anything but snitch the shells, to celebrate D-Day with. The other kids been raisin' hell around there for a year, but Young Charles never got in on it till just now.” Owen took a long breath of smoke and expelled it slowly. “The Judge talked to him, and took a shine to him, I guess. Anyway, he's given him a chance. Put him in Charles' custody.”

“Maybe Charles'll have sense enough to take him on the
Four Brothers
this summer. Philip would be willing, I know.”

“Philip could get along with the devil himself, but those other two are too damn' much alike. Nope!” Owen shook his head. “They gowel hell out of each other, those two. Charles has got other plans for the kid.”

“What are they?” Joanna stacked dishes in the dish pan.

“Perk up,” said Owen, grinning. “He's bringin' him out to you. The White Man's Burden. You're supposed to have the iron hand in the velvet glove, or somethin'.”

Joanna looked at him in dismay, dropping a handful of silver on the plates. “What are we going to do with a sixteen-year-old boy?”

“Oh, Charles is bringin' out a peapod for him, and he wants me to stake him to some traps. We keep him busy, and set a shinin' example.”

Joanna gave him a glance of twinkling malice. “You're a fine one for that, I must say.” She leaned against the sink, mentally rearranging beds. “When is he coming?”

“In a week or so. As soon as school's out, so he can bring Ellen at the same time. . . . You particularly happy about this? You feel able to wrastle with Young Charles, do ye?”

Joanna straightened her shoulders and returned his grin with composure. “Of course I do. It's a job, but I can do it. It's not going to be very handy for either us or the boy, but if his father wants him out here, out of the way —” She shrugged, and took the teakettle off the stove.

“What happened up at Fennells', anyway?” Owen said idly, after a moment.

“Oh, Nora fell downstairs and knocked herself out. Scared Matthew silly. But she's all right now.”

The
Four Brothers
came as soon as Ellen's school was out. It was a crisp day, with a little north-west wind riffling the water and turning it as bright in the sun-glare as crumpled tinfoil. There was a cold edge to the air, but a fragrance, too, and over by Schoolhouse Cove the wild roses were opening, and the blue flag was appearing in the marsh, in stiff ranks of pale green, blade-like leaves and purple-blue flowers.

Joanna's emotions were a compound of dread and delight. Dread because Young Charles was coming, and yet she couldn't refuse to have him. But what were they going to do with him? There were no other boys his age, there were no amusements, and he was a high­spirited handful. . . . Delight because Ellen was coming, Ellen who would have grown a lot since last Christmas and whose blue-gray eyes were as undisturbed, as candid, and as quick to sparkle as her grandmother's eyes. Joanna was glad the Island looked at its best. The fields were full of flowers, daisies and buttercups growing intermingled so that they were shifting gold and silver when the wind blew.

She went down to the well, Jamie tagging along behind her, and just as she brought up the dripping pail from the cold, mossy darkness, the
Four Brothers
came in sight off the southern end of Brigport.

She rested the pail on the wellcurb and watched. Her two older brothers, Charles and Philip, had bought the seiner, and later the two younger brothers, Mark and Stephen, had joined the crew, and it was then they had named her the
Four Brothers
. Everybody along the coast knew her and the Bennett boys. If Owen had joined them, she would have been called
Five Brothers
, but Owen had been out discovering life on his own when the other four became a team. Now Mark and Stevie were in the Pacific, and two other men, not family, had taken their places; but the
Four Brothers
was a family boat, to Joanna, and there was the familiar tightening in her chest as she watched the boat come toward the harbor, cutting glassy, curving wings and leaving a wake that glittered.

Jamie was watching too. He pointed a plump, rigid forefinger. “A boat!” he cried.

She set the pail down and took Jamie's hand. “Come on,” she said, suddenly as excited as he was. “We'll go meet them!”

Charles, over forty now, had gray at his temples and a glisten like frost over his black hair. But like his father before him, he had kept his strong, agile spareness. His face had settled into a lean and determined cast. As the boat slid alongside the old wharf, he looked up at Joanna and grinned, and for a moment he showed the vivid Bennett charm that had combined with his natural talent and ambition to get him most of the things he'd wanted out of life. But when he was not smiling, he seemed grim, with a cut to his mouth and a narrowness to his eyes that his father never had. This business about Young Charles would have gone hard with him, Joanna thought.

Philip came between Charles and Owen in age. He was one of the quiet Bennetts. When they came up on the wharf, it was to Philip that Joanna went first, realizing as she put her arms around him how
nice
he was. He smiled at her from blue-gray eyes like his mother's and Ellen's, and hugged her.

“You're almost handsome, Phil,” said Joanna. “Why doesn't some woman grab you up?”

“Because every time a female looks at him he hides behind a damn' spruce tree,” said Charles. “Hey, can't you kids get your gear out of there?”

Ellen emerged from the fo'castle and waved at Joanna. “Hi, Mother. I was combing my hair, so I'd look neat when you saw me!” She climbed nimbly up on the washboards and then on to the wharf, and hugged Joanna with all her wiry young strength. Ellen was twelve, and tall like both her parents, but her movements had the half­awkward, half-graceful, lankiness of her father. Her hair had darkened to a pale soft brown, and lay on her shoulders, smooth and shining and straight. Her profile, as she turned away from Joanna to gaze happily around her, was delicate and strong at once, a hint of maturity in the firm cut of her mouth; yet her forehead had the wide innocence of childhood.

“Looks as if the bait house'd blow down in a good gale,” remarked Charles.

“I think it looks beautiful just the way it is,” said Ellen passionately. “I think everything looks beautiful.”

“Even the smell, huh?” That was Young Charles, who had thrown his bags out into the cockpit and now appeared behind them.

“You'll get used to the smell of bait after you've been baitin' up all summer, son,” said Charles dryly. “Throw that gear up here, and speak to your aunt.”

“Hello, Charles.” Joanna spoke casually to the boy, smiling, and he grinned back. He was a handsome boy, not as tall as his father and Philip, but strongly, compactly built, light on his feet, with thick bronze curls and a foreign, velvety texture to his glance, an almost liquid quality. But when he laughed, he was pure Bennett. It was easy to see why he was a worry to his parents, but it was also easy to forget the shame he had caused and to like him very much. He had possessed the same endearing make-up since babyhood.

Jamie stood by, looking at his uncles with somber blue eyes, and his lower lip was definitely anti-social. He stood with his hands behind his back, watching Young Charles toss the bags up to Philip, and his stomach was out as defiantly as his lip.

“Come on, Jamie!” Ellen went down on her knees to hug him and he accepted her homage imperturbably. With the children going on before, and Philip and Young Charles coming behind with the bags, Joanna and Charles walked up through the village to the house. It was dinner time, and no one was in sight. Sigurd didn't come out to hail Charles, Thea didn't call from her back door.

“Lord, it's empty around here,” said Charles. “But it's still home.”

“Why don't you move out here again?” Joanna asked him lightly.

“I might, at that.” His face was somber. “What we've just been through — with that kid —” He shook his head. “I've got other boys growing up. And girls too. Young Donna's wearing lipstick now whenever she gets a chance and she's only fourteen. I'll be damned if I like what they learn on the mainland.”