High Tide at Noon (2 page)

Joanna turned away from the well and went down the road. She went past the fish houses built on the shore, with their spindle-shanked wharves high above the rocks. Here was the long bait house where the men had kept their hogsheads of herring, across the road from the old wharf where the boats were hauled up for repairs. If she looked hard at the ruins, she thought, she would see herself squatting there in overalls and tattered sneakers, black pigtails down her back, peering with intent and pretended understanding down into the cockpit of her father's boat and listening to the intricate and sometimes profane diagnosis of the engine's ailments. But somehow it always happened that he looked up, his squarish brown face absorbed, and saw her there.

“Run home now, and help your mother,” he said patiently, day after day. “The shore's no place for a girl.” She would go, her heart seething because the boys could stay, even the ones who were younger than she. Men had all the privileges in the small but complete universe that was the Island.

Beyond the beach, where a great anchor had been sunk in the pebbles and sharp-edged grass since long before she could remember, the road turned off. One might go around the curve of the beach, on a plank wall over the stones, and reach the handful of houses built there above the water's reach; they had the high bulk of eastern Harbor Point beyond them to cut off the wind, and the fields behind them. Or one followed the proper road through the tawny, sweet­smelling marsh that was so starred with the heart-shaking blue of wild flag.

Joanna turned into the road, lingered by the old boats on their sides at the edge of the marsh. The battered and disreputable sloop was there, the one she used to play in; one mast had fallen at a crazy angle, but the other one still tilted gallantly at the sky. And here was another boat, not so old. . . . Unbelievingly her finger traced the faded name, and something wept soundlessly within her for this boat, hauled up into the marsh, the once trim and glistening whiteness of her, because her skipper thought he'd be coming back. . . . The boat was named
Donna
.

She hung back, looking at the harbor and the little dilapidated camps near the anchor, and the way by which she had come through the sunlit emptiness of the village. She looked everywhere but before her as she followed the road into the marsh. But finally, in spite of herself, her eyes were tugged upward and she saw the house.

It was built on a high place between two coves, at the top of a sloping meadow; the road went to the foot of the meadow and turned off to border Schoolhouse Cove, which was the shape of placidly shining loveliness in the noon sunshine, and wander off through the daisy­spattered fields to end where a cluster of white buildings gleamed against the Eastern End woods.

But Joanna had no concern with those houses and the woods. She left the road and went on soft sand among the sprawling, gray­green beach peas and stiff primrose, and walked through gate posts bleached to silver. Grass muffled her feet now. As she went up the slope, Schoolhouse Cove lay below her left hand, and at her right lay the whole meadow, a veritable pool of sunlight lying against the massive darkness of spruce woods. And before her there was the house against the sky.

Joanna stopped, and the scent of the Island was all around her, red clover and white, sun-warmed juniper, bayberry leaves, and the sea. Her hands were tight in her pockets and her heart was swelling until it was too big, until it was stopping her breath, and making her throat ache. She was no more an unreal creature walking in a dream. She was flesh and blood, and she stood in an emptiness worse than she had ever dreamed. At this moment she knew the full stature of her loneliness. She wanted to storm at the silent trees, the unmoving rocks, the great, placid, unthinking ocean; she wanted to fling herself into the grass, and dig her nails into the warm moist earth, and stifle her mouth against it.

In an instant that was like eternity, the storm passed. Reality was upon her. . . . They're all gone, she said to herself. You know where they are, why they're not here. You know which are dead, and why the others will never come back. You knew before you came. But you came, didn't you?
You're home
.

But this wasn't home, a deserted island taken captive by the grass, an empty house against a hard blue sky. Somehow she forced her feet onward through the tangled grass, dreading to come to the house and its irrevocable solitude, yet driven. She looked around her with strained and desperate eyes, as if seeking a sign. There was no sign.

She reached the front doorstep. The grass was high around the stone, and the rose bush sprawled its long suckers across the door. She thought, you could pick roses from the sitting room window, little spicy white ones . . . and she saw her mother standing on the stone slab, pruning back the branches, her face serene and absorbed and all the great wide sun-washed world of sea and sky around her.

Her breath quivered in her throat. She was sharply grateful for the raucous shriek of crows flying toward the woods. With a swift thrust she put the key in the lock, and the door swung open, almost as if it had been waiting for her touch. The smell of a closed and empty house came to her nostrils. Closed and empty for a long time. . . . She went in, and shut the door behind her.

The silence of an empty house, from which all voices and the sound of feet have gone away, is different from the sunlit silence of out-of-doors. At least there you can feel the wind on your face and see the grass stir. But the door was shut behind the woman, Joanna, and this inside quiet was a heavy and tangible thing. It sent a tautness through her body; she found herself straining her ears for a sound somewhere—no matter how faint—and she walked on tiptoe, as if she must preserve the stillness, as if some doom would fall on her if she marred this perfect hush.

But it was strange to be quiet where there had been so much noise. Almost she could hear feet running on the stairs that rose before her into the gloom. Her breath caught sharply. Oh, God, she thought, and folded her arms tightly across her breast to stifle the pain that burned like a physical thing. She moved like one entranced toward the kitchen.

Sunlight lay in pale rectangles on a floor coated thinly with dust. The silence held; there was not even a fly to drone through the warmth. She walked across the room, forgetting to tiptoe, and her light step seemed brazenly loud. With brown hands that wanted to tremble, she took a key from a nail and wound the old-fashioned clock on the shelf. She would make a sound, she thought, and take away this terrible emptiness.

Suddenly, with a mad whirring of wheels, the clock began to strike. She stood staring at it, her hand to her mouth, crying silently to it to stop. But it went on and on, and memory sprang into being in her brain, vivid and cruel.

There was another time when the clock had gone mad like that. Without volition her feet carried her toward the sink: her hands moved out to touch the cold edge and her eyes lifted to the old mirror hanging there. She saw her face in the greenish depths, hollowed and pale, her hair very black above that pallor, her eyes very wide. She dropped her lids and behind her she felt the sunlit emptiness of the kitchen, and she heard the clock whirring and striking over and over.

The crazy thing, she thought on the verge of panic. It's loud enough to wake the dead. Her hands tightened on the sink until they were white.
Wake the dead
. . .

And all the ghosts who walked in the house came alive.

T
HE YOUNG GIRL
J
OANNA
stood looking at her face in the mirror, and the dishwater was warm around her thin, bony wrists. She tilted her head with its heavy black mane and said seriously to herself: Am I pretty?

Her eyes glinted at their reflection from a sooty curl of lash, and her brows were wide black brush strokes on a brown forehead, clear and spacious and marked sharply with the widow's peak that belonged to the Bennetts. Am I pretty? she thought, and smiled so that a dimple came into one cheek, to match the cleft in her chin. Well, not bad, she decided impersonally, and dismissed the question.

“I could swear those pots of mine to the south'ard have been bothered,” her brother Charles was saying, and she stopped dreaming over the dishpan. In the mirror she saw them standing around the stove, tobacco smoke wreathing their heads; Stephen Bennett, her father, filling his pipe with leisurely fingers as Charles talked to him. It was to his father that Charles always spoke first; he was the oldest son, and some day he would be standing in his father's place with his own boys around him. This seemed to draw them together, so that Joanna always thought of them in later years as she saw them now in the mirror over the sink: side by side at the end of the stove. Philip and Owen, who were younger, stood a little apart from them.

Charles Bennett never forgot he was the oldest, nor did he ever let anyone else forget it. He looked like Stephen, having the gypsy darkness that marked most of the Bennetts, the black eyes, the big nose, the stubborn strength of chin, and the big, long-legged frame. But he had a quick arrogance that was not his father's, or perhaps Stephen had lost it with the years.

“Yes, by God, they've been hauling that string to the south'ard,” Charles said crisply. “It's happened once too often. I know who's set his pots right around me—some of 'em damn near on top of me.”

“I was on the wharf,” said Philip, “when George Bird came in this morning. He'd been out before anybody else was stirring. Pretty near three hundred pounds. That's good fishing when the bugs are tapering off.”

Philip was twenty and tall, and broad of shoulder, but there was a mildness in his speech and looks, taken from his mother. His eyes were quiet and gray-blue in his tanned face. His hair was not the Bennett black, his smile not so flashing, nor his scowl so dark. His thin-lipped mouth held a gentle humor.

“Yes, my boys, Georgie did himself proud this morning.”

“By God, we ought to haul with a gun on the washboards!” Charles cried out.

“Don't talk like a fool, man,” his father said. “What good would that do? Even if you could prove they'd hauled you, shooting wouldn't help.”

“It would show 'em we know what's going on and we don't intend to take it sitting down.” He leaned forward, and the arrogant jut of nose and chin came into a shaft of sunlight. “There's plenty others on here that feel like carrying a gun. But they're all like you, Father—they stand around and say it wouldn't help. They won't take a gun with 'em and find out. Put a bullet hole in the Birds' waterline a couple times when they're helping themselves to somebody's pots, and they'd take the hint. Most of us are too damned easygoing around here!”

“Meaning me?” Stephen's rare smile flickered, and Charles had the grace to redden.

“It's time we ran those bastards off the Island!” Owen leaped explosively into the conversation. Keeping silent was always an unbearable strain for him. At seventeen he was cock o' the walk—or of the beach—but sometimes he couldn't make his father and older brothers believe it. They turned toward him now, Stephen and Charles with lifted black eyebrows, Philip smiling a little.

“We could get rid of them easy. What if none of the Birds ever got a lobster day after day? What if they didn't even find their traps, next time one of 'em went to haul? Man, would
that
gowel 'em”

“Golly, our rooster's learning how to crow pretty good,” said Philip, and Owen flung up his stubborn chin. A lock of black hair danced on his forehead.

“You'd sit still and let them bug your pots right off the beach and be too lazy to do anything,” he accused. “We've had those sons o' bitches bleeding the Island for too long! Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if lobstering was poor and they didn't have enough to eat. But Simon had him a new boat this year, six months after he came home from that freighter without a nickel in his pocket. And young Ash has money to burn—
plenty
. But he's not enough of a fisherman to make all that out of his little string.”

The scrawny young Ash had been Joanna's bitterest enemy when they went to grade school on the Island. She spun around in a whirl of dishwater and excitement. “Well, why don't we do something right away?” she demanded. “Why don't we do what Grandpa Bennett used to do—order 'em out, the whole damn—
darned
shootin' match?”

“Because Grandpa owned everything then, darlin' mine,” said Philip. “But Father and Uncle Nate weren't like Grandpa. When they got the Island, they sold hunks of it to the men who looked like good workers.”

“And George Bird was one. So when his crew starts raising hell, there isn't one damn thing we can do about it—legally.” Charles crushed out his cigarette with a vehement gesture. “Can't even keep 'em off the shore. George's got a shore privilege.”

Stephen took his pipe out of his mouth and his quiet dark gaze took them all in, from the oldest son to the thin and glowing girl. “Well, have you all said what you've a mind to?”

They looked at him in quick, uncertain silence, and then his slow smile was reflected in Charles' eyes. “Sure, I guess we've all said over five cents' worth. We're listening, Father.”

“Thanks,' said Stephen dryly. “As far as the Birds go, Owen's got the soundest idea.” Owen glowed and his father added, “
Sound
—if I held with robbing another man's pots and cutting them off. I don't. So I'll have no more talk of it, Owen.”

He turned to Charles. “Somebody's been bothering you, and I don't like it any more than you do. You say you can swear it's the Birds. Can you?”

Charles said with uneasy anger, “It wouldn't be anybody else.”

“Why not?” Philip put in. “There's more than one on the Island who'd like to gowel the Bennetts, Cap'n Charles.”

Stephen nodded. “It's been known to happen, a man thieving from somebody else, and all the blame being laid to another with a bad name. You can't go off half-cocked after the Birds without proof, Charles.”