The Ebbing Tide (8 page)

“Well, anyway,” Thea went on cheerfully, “what's he like? Is he nice? Gee, he looks like a professor or somethin'. He isn't a
preacher
, is he?” she added with alarm.

“I don't know what he is,” said Joanna. “He's very quiet, that's all I know.” She went down on her knees before the stove to slide the beanpot into the oven.

Thea hovered around for a few minutes more, and then went out. Most likely she would now go down to Sigurd's to check notes with Leonie, Sigurd's housekeeper. In a few days now they would know; the fact was inescapable. But until then, Joanna reasoned, let them stew.

It was so warm and sunny at noontime that she let Jamie's nap go by and took him out for a walk after dinner. Dick, who had escorted Dennis Garland across the Island in the morning, met them by the fish houses and decided to go with them. What was Garland doing over there? Joanna wondered, and looked into Dick's kind, shining eyes as if she could see mirrored there what he had seen this morning. He would have followed the stranger's feet around through the house and the barn, he would have sat down beside Garland on one of the great, flat, shelving rocks that looked out to sea; perhaps he'd even shared a sandwich with him, and Garland had talked to him, as lonely people will address their thoughts to dogs and very small children.

Lonely!
Why had she thought of that word? Perhaps because the man walked in an aura of solitude. Nils had always been like that, but it was a self-sufficient aloneness. Not a loneliness. And this man looked as if he had always been alone.

She walked slowly along the path toward the Old Wharf and the long beach, with a half-intention of going up the road past the marsh toward the Bennett homestead. That, at least, remained irrevocably Bennett; the sloping meadow before it, the long point between Schoolhouse and Goose coves; Goose Cove, and then the woods. And Sou-west Point belonged to the Bennetts too. When you thought of all the land in the Island's three hundred and sixty-five acres, you knew Uncle Nate's Place wasn't so big after all.

The sun lay warmly on her head, and there was a mild, dream-like atmosphere around her. The wind had gone down. The harbor moved against the shores in pale blue peace, the gulls stood in a white row on the boatshop roof. Dick, his coat gleaming with bronze lights, followed Jamie toward the beach. When Jamie grew up, he would walk like Nils, she thought, and the idea brought Nils before her almost as vividly as if he'd been hauling his skiff up over the beach rocks. She hadn't heard from him since he'd left, but he had warned her about that. Ellen had written that he'd come to Pruitt's Harbor to see her and the rest of the family. Beyond that, she knew nothing of his movements. But she wasn't disturbed by the blankness. When she could see him as clearly as this, in the soft bright clarity of the silent noon, she could not worry. It would be only when she could no longer summon him up, or recollect exactly the tones of his voice, that she would be afraid.

“Joanna!”
The hail rang out in the stillness, shattering her mood of peace. It was Sigurd, standing on the wharf above the lobster car. His blond head gleamed, so did his grin. “Come over and see what I found today!”

Jamie, his hands full of stones, was almost down to the water's edge. He gave her a pleading look, and she nodded. “You can throw them, Jamie.” She walked out on the wharf, and Sigurd, looking immensely proud of himself, pointed out at the harbor.

“See? Found it driftin' out by the Hogshead, and I towed it in.”

“What?” She couldn't tell where his big scarred forefinger was pointing, and he jabbed it in annoyance.

“There! On Stevie's moorin'!”

She stared, frowning and perplexed, at the big black cylinder, bobbing gently in the tide. Light reflected brightly from its wet rounding surface. Sigurd went on eagerly, his big voice reverberating against her eardrums.

“I tied it up out there, and then I called up the Coast Guard. They're sendin' a boat out to see if it's any good—”

“Well, what
is
it?” she demanded.

“A mine,” said Sigurd. “Can you figger that?” His voice cracked in ludicrous amazement. “There it was, floatin' around . . . must of got loose from somewhere. “
Almagstige Gud
,' I said to myself, “Sig, you're a lucky kid. Lucky you didn't run into it.”' He laughed uproariously, and Joanna smiled, but her impression was that of pure horror.

“Do you think . . . it's a good one?” she asked quietly, resisting an impulse to run down to the beach and pick up Jamie.

Sigurd shrugged violently. “How do I know? That's why I called the Coast Guard.”

“You'd better watch out none of the others run into it coming in to the car.”

“Sure. Be just like Franny to smash to hell into it. Be the biggest noise he ever made, huh?” He threw back his head and laughed again.

“Well, I'll get on with my walk. You did fine, Sigurd. I'll expect to see you towing in the
Deutschland
some day.” She left him standing in the self-satisfied contemplation of his find, and went down to the beach.

“Come on, Jamie,” she said with a sharpness she didn't mean for him. “You can throw more stones later.” Jamie threw all his stones at once, with a fine tragic air, and climbed the sloping beach laboriously. He would walk with her, but his disapproval was plain.

They went up toward the homestead, and the sky was as blue, the colors in the marsh as lovely, but the dreamlike feeling was gone, and she felt her nerves tightening. She fought against the increasing tension; she took deep breaths of the soft air, she concentrated on watching Jamie stamp ahead of her, and on Dick ranging through the marsh whose bronze grasses reflected the glints in his coat and in his eyes. She watched the flight of crows from the trees behind the schoolhouse, jet black against the little white belfry, which in turn shone against the sky. But again and again she saw the big black tube, made fast to the mooring, rising and falling gently on the calm water. There was something deadly in the very contrast; like a battle in a field of ripe wheat ready for the harvest, under autumn sunshine. The mine, anchored in the sheltered little harbor, had suddenly brought the complete ugliness of the war to Bennett's Island.

She'd planned to sit on the sunny granite doorstep of the homestead for a little while, but as soon as she had reached the weathered and silvery gateposts, she knew she must go back to the harbor. Perhaps it would not look so bad this time. She would not know until she had looked again.

T
HE
C
OAST
G
UARD BOAT
came out from Limerock in the late afternoon, and by that time everyone who could make it was on the shore. Even Nora Fennell came down, bright-eyed with excitement. “Gram's taking a nap . . . Gosh, seems as if something's happening around here, doesn't it?”

She stood beside Joanna on the wharf and watched the dinghy from the Coast Guard boat circle around the mooring. “Why don't they go close to it?” Her excitement began to fade. “Golly, you don't think it's dangerous after all, do you?”

“I don't know,” said Joanna. She had only come down because Jamie had seen the boat from the kitchen window and had gone into a delirium of ecstasy about it. The men stood in a little knot at one side, watching it without speaking. Even Sigurd's first exhilaration over his find had died out. Thea stood between him and Franny, hanging onto their arms. Her voice was more high-pitched than usual, perhaps because no one was answering her questions.

Leonie came along the wharf and joined Joanna and Nora. “Housekeeper” was a courtesy title only, and in the old days Leonie wouldn't have presumed to speak so freely to two decently married women, nor would they have greeted her so calmly. But it was somehow impossible to regard Leonie as a light woman. She was slight and trim and mousey, she walked on sensible shoes and looked at her world through horn-rimmed glasses that were always shining.

“That one,” she said acidly, looking at Thea's back. “She turns my stomach . . . So does Sigurd, today.”

“Why?” Nora asked obligingly.

“Towin' that thing in . . . I suppose if he found Tenpound adrift he'd come bringin' it home. Some people can't leave anything lay. We're like to be blasted out of our beds to Kingdom Come.”

Nobody answered. The truth of her statement was too evident, and Joanna tightened her grip on Jamie's fist when it wriggled protestingly. “No, you can't go to Owen,” she told him.

“Well, I'm not intendin' to stand here and watch my doom comin' at me,” said Leonie, and started out for home, putting her feet down with no nonsense on the planks.

“I keep forgetting she's living in sin,” said Nora in mild astonishment. “Thea acts more like a scarlet woman than Leonie. They say Leonie plays poker with the men, and she can drink too.” She giggled softly. “I wonder what she's like when she's drunk.”

“She teams Sigurd around like mad,” said Joanna. “I'm not keen on watching my doom approach, either. Come on, Jamie.”

“I guess I'll wait for Matthew. Gram's good for another hour, and I'm going to have some fun while I can . . . if you can call it fun.” She gave Joanna a wry grin, and went toward the men.

Joanna left the wharf. The sun was going down and she felt chilled; yet it was still warm. The chill was not from the weather, she knew, but it had something to do with the thing tied up at Stevie's mooring, around which the Coast Guard dinghy moved so gingerly.

Jamie slowed, Dick bounded away from her, over toward the marsh. She saw Dennis Garland standing there by the old anchor sunk into the ground where the beach joined the marsh. His clothes blended with his background, and she would have missed him if Jamie and the dog hadn't seen him. He stood there, motionless, his hat brim slanted so that his face was shadowed. He was, somehow, an anonymous figure. He could have been anyone. But because she knew who he was, and why he was on the Island, she thought of him as she walked home; of him, and the mine, together.

In the evening the men talked about the mine. The captain and crew of the Coast Guard boat had been afraid to touch it. When they left they cautioned the fishermen about touching it again, and added that they would send for a mine expert from Boston to come down and look at it. Meanwhile, it remained in the harbor, a quiet, black, ominous thing.

During the evening Joanna added a little more to her scant hoard of knowledge about Dennis Garland. He had been in the Navy. Owen told him about Stevie and Mark, and he was interested. He had been in the Pacific himself, he said, and then turned the subject abruptly, asking a question about the Island. The change was so sudden that Joanna looked up at him, but his face told her nothing. He lay back in Nils' chair, watching the smoke from his pipe drift toward the ceiling, and his sharply rugged profile was remote and seemingly at peace.

Owen lounged in his own chair, his moccasined feet outthrust, a drink at his elbow. Dick lay between the two men, showing a fine impartiality. Joanna, sitting at the table, trying to write letters, glanced at them often. It was a pleasant, companionable scene. So had Nils and Owen sat during many an evening, sometimes with a cribbage board between them, and so had she glanced first at the fair head and then at the black one, and marveled at the easiness that was in Owen when he was with someone who could gentle him. Now he had that same easiness, and it gave her a pang, as if somehow he were being disloyal to Nils.

She gave up trying to write her letters and went out into the kitchen and turned up the lamp. She put more water in the tea-kettle, and laid out the things for getting breakfast. The woodbox was full of seasoned birch and spruce, and fine stuff for kindling. Owen had been outdoing himself at keeping the woodbox full, she thought dryly. She washed her face and brushed her teeth, took her lamp from the shelf and went up to bed.

It was one of those nights when she felt an onrush of loneliness for Nils. The bed looked big and cold, the towering headboard was too imposing for a woman sleeping alone. She turned back the covers so that they would look more hospitable, and began to undress. After the itching nervousness she'd felt downstairs, her skin received the cool air gratefully. She stood naked for a moment, rejoicing in her freedom from clothes as simply as an animal enjoys freedom from its harness. She could see her reflection, all dim shadows and brief golden highlights, in the mirror; she was supple, as narrow-flanked and high-breasted, as if she had never had two children and nursed them both. One thing she had always enjoyed was her superb physical and mental health.

Jamie turned over, murmuring, in his crib, and she reached for her pajamas. In bed she sat cross-legged, brushing her hair and reading. The men were talking so softly downstairs that she couldn't hear even a murmur. How much longer would Dennis Garland stay? she wondered. But he had bought Uncle Nate's Place. There was no hopeful doubt about it, and tomorrow she would have to write to Nils concerning it, and the boys. Tomorrow . . . She blew out the light and slid down between the chilly sheets.

That night she dreamed. It was the first time she had ever dreamed like that since she had been grown-up, waking up to the sound of her own incoherent moans, reaching out into an emptiness that suffocated, feeling clammy and chilled with sweat. She lay in the darkness for a long time, huddled into a tight ball, rehearsing over and over the horror of the dream. She had been watching the mine rising and falling gently on a sea as friendly and blue as Jamie's eyes. She could only see one bit of the mine, since most of it was under water; but what she saw had not been terrifying. It flashed in the sunlight as it moved. Then, though she didn't see the boat, she knew it was there, she heard it coming nearer and nearer, and knew Nils was on it; she'd felt a great surge of happiness.

I hadn't expected to see him as soon as this
, she thought.
They must have come back for something. This is a little unexpected gift
.