High Tide at Noon (3 page)

“Proof!”
Charles' nostrils were rimmed with white. “What more proof do I need, by the Jesus, when I find my pots with the doors open and bait bags stolen, and George Bird bringing in three hundred pounds?”

“His traps are all to the west'ard,” murmured Stephen. “If anybody saw him to the south'ard, you'd hear about it.”

“But young Ash is set right on top of me, the little rat!” Charles rapped back at him. His Bennett temper was out in the open now. “And there's more than one's told me about seeing George come up alongside of Ash, outside the harbor! I'm telling you, Father, I'm damn sick of this stinking mess. A bullet in the waterline is the only kind of talk they understand!”

“I'll have no more of this talk about guns!” For an instant black eyes locked and fought with black eyes. It was Charles who gave way first, and Stephen went on in a milder voice, “It's proof I want.
Proof
I know it's hard to get, but you'll get it in time, if you try hard enough. You can't come up behind them on the water, but you can follow them along the shore. It'll take a while, but in the end it's worth it. Take a gun out, and the first thing you know you've got a shooting feud like what's been going on at Brigport for the last year! That's your stinking mess, Charles! The state ought to get out there and clean it up, they'll never stop it themselves.” He put his hand on his son's shoulder. “That's the Brigport way of doing things, but not the Bennett's Island way. And there'll be no Bennetts mixed up in it.”

His fingers tightened on the obstinate shoulder as he watched Charles' locked face. “Seems to me we're a little too good for that, Cap'n Charles. Oh, I know they call us too damn high-minded over at Brigport, and around the shore; too big for our boots. But that's what keeps us able to live with ourselves. And you'd find yourself poor company if you'd been trimming up another man's gear, or if a bullet went wrong and hit a man instead of his boat.”

He looked around at the rest of them. “Bring me proof, and I'll be with you all the way. Until then—well, this goes for all of you. The Bennetts have always upheld the law, instead of taking it into their own hands.”

Charles turned suddenly and walked away from him. “Honestly, Father!” Joanna burst out. “You're too
decent
for this place!”

Charles was putting on his rubber boots. He looked up at her with the swift and charming Bennett smile. “That's right, Jo, talk right up to him. The rest of us can talk from hell to breakfast, and he'll still tell us to remember the Golden Rule.”

“Charles,” said Donna Bennett from the doorway. They all looked toward her as she stood there with two of the bedroom lamps in her hands. She was slender and tall, her light brown hair smooth and silky under the neat braids she had worn from young girlhood. There might be fine lines in her face, worn with the bearing and raising of Bennetts, and there was certainly white in the braids. But her eyes could be as wide and gently amazed and contemplative as they'd been when young Stephen Bennett was courting her, the new schoolteacher, and trying to sweep her off her feet when she wouldn't be swept until she'd made up her mind.

“Charles,” she said now, and Charles, meeting those eyes, shut his mouth. Owen turned his scowl toward the window, and Joanna felt her mother's cool blue-gray gaze on her own hot cheeks.

It was then, in that instant of silence, that the clock went crazy. For a moment they all stared, stricken with a common amazement. It struck twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, before Charles threw a boot at Philip and roared, “Stop the damn thing!”

“I can't,” said Philip innocently. “It's a Bennett clock. It won't shut up till it's out of wind.”

Laughter burst across the room that had been ominous with storm a moment before. And now it was a good place to be. Joanna, watching them with their big, whole-hearted mirth, father and sons alike, felt love and pride run through her like a warming fire. She met her mother's smiling eyes and a little current of understanding passed between woman and girl.
Men
, it said in loving amusement.
Our men
.

Stephen clapped Charles on the shoulder on his way out to the workshop in the barn. Philip took his cap from its hook. “Going down to the shore, Cap'n?”

“Yep!” said Charles cheerfully. “Say, Sigurd ran ashore on Tuckanuck this morning and bent his wheel—you seen it?” Halfway to the door he slid his arm around his mother's waist and began to waltz, incredibly light-footed in his rubber boots.

“‘Let me call you sweetheart,'” he sang tunefully, “‘I'm in love with you . . . '”

“Charles, the lamps!” Donna cried, but she was laughing at the same time.

Owen came across the room and leaned against the dresser by the water pails, watching Joanna wipe the dishes.

“Jo, want to do something for me today?” The Bennett smile was a little different in Owen. It held at once a sweetness and a reckless charm that was known to work wonders. Not with Joanna however, who gave him a suspicious sidewise glance.

“What is it?”

“Don't look so ugly. You know you like to paint. It's my double-ender. Honest, Jo, you're the only one could do it like I want it.”

“Well—”

“You're a damn good fella, Jo!” He went out whistling. The kitchen was abruptly silent except for the rattle of dishes and Donna's soft humming as she fuled the lamps and polished the chimneys; but the air still seemed to vibrate with the echoes of strong, deep-chested voices.

Joanna swept the hardwood floor, already scrubbed to whiteness, and gave the bright rag rugs a cursory shake on the back doorstep. She took the orts—table scraps the dog Winnie didn't want—down behind the house and threw them to the gulls in Goose Cove. Now she was her own man till supper time.

The fresh sweetness of early June—the Island's particular June—lay all around her and she felt like a gull who has been caged, and then let free to sail once more on great gray wings across the fathomless blue lakes of the sky. It had been a cage, that school on the mainland twenty-five miles away; her mind winced, and locked itself against the thought of two more years to go. But now she had all summer before her, and the sun was warm on her head as she walked down the road in her good-feeling dungarees and one of Philip's shirts. And there was an especially satisfying smell to be breathed from the marsh, a scent made up of new grass and warm black earth.

She heard the steady thrumming of an engine and hurried her long legs so she could be at the beach by the time the boat came round the point. She recognized the sound—she knew each engine as one knows the voices of friends—and this was one of her favorites. It was Karl Sorensen's
Priscilla
, with his son Nils at the wheel.

It was a sight to make Joanna's heart turn over and send a chill of gooseflesh along her arms, the sweet way the boat skimmed past the harbor ledges with the water curling back in a sun-shot glitter of white and crystal from the high bow. She came swiftly across the smooth blue water, straight as an arrow, like a creature with life and impulse of her own. Then the fish houses hid her from Joanna, who wished for perhaps the nine-thousandth time that she were a boy with some hope of having a boat of her own.

With the
Priscilla's
engine shut off, it was very quiet. A gull mewed lazily overhead, and the beach lay deserted in the sunshine. Joanna sat on Owen's overturned peapod. Presently he would appear with the paint; in the meantime she was content to look through narrow dreamy eyes at the blue shimmer of the harbor beneath the point's tawny height, and think the long, long thoughts of fifteen.

A shout split her reverie to bits, and she lifted her head to see the
Priscilla
at her mooring, and Nils standing on the bow. His fair head glinted against the sky.

“Jo, come and get me!” he yelled between cupped hands.

She slid off the double-ender and her thin brown hands were quick, untying the painter of the nearest skiff. This was what she liked, the feel of a boat under her feet and the oars in her hands, the tug of water against the blades and the effortless rhythm of a perfect stroke, with the tiny whirlpools it left behind. . . . The punt nuzzled gently against the power boat's wet white side.

Nils came aboard with an easy lightness that barely rocked the skiff. “Thanks, Jo. I don't know where my punt is. Sig's idea of a joke, I guess. He's probably lugged it upstairs in the fish house.”

“You been to haul?”

“Me, go to haul with the old man's boat?” His slow smile came alive all at once, a good sunny smile without craft. It took away a certain Nordic austerity from his young tanned face. “What do you think Grampa Gunnar would say to that? ‘Ya, you make the boy soft—let him row!' Nope, I was over to Brigport.”

“Why didn't you tell me you were going?” she demanded.

“I clean forgot. You can go next time.”

She rowed hard, eyes stern under black brows. “Can I steer?”

“When we get outside the point.”

She nodded, feeling a deep satisfaction. With Nils, a promise was a promise. She glanced over her shoulder at the beach and saw Owen coming down to the water. It swirled and chuckled around his boots as he pulled the bow up on the pebbles.

“Cleopatra on her barge,” he drawled. “Pretty good, the way you squareheads get the women to tend on ye.” He nodded at the peapod. “Paint's all ready, Jo. And go easy, for God's sake. Don't slap it on too thick. Cripes, I'll be glad when I can haul from a power boat like a human being.”

“Stop throwing away your money on sweaters and flannels and white shoes,” said Joanna, “and you can buy Tim Gray's old boat. He'll sell her—bare boat—for a hundred fifty.”

“How come you know so much about it?” he asked suspiciously.

“Oh, I listen around!”

Nils' Swedish tidiness wouldn't let him drop ashes even on the beach. He deposited them neatly in the cuff of his boot and said without haste, “She's looking right out for you, son, and it's no joke about the
Old Girl
. Look, with the money you make you could buy her in a month, pick up an engine somewhere—”

“I don't want any goddam decked-over dory! I'll have me a thirty­four footer, with lines like a yacht. And she'll be built to go.” His dark eyes scanned the harbor, already seeing the boat of his heart, trim and elegant, at her mooring.

“You'll never get her, the way you throw your money around,” said Joanna unfeelingly.

“Get to work, brat.”

Joanna put her hands in her dungaree pockets and looked across the pea pod at him. Two years younger, she was almost as tall, and her black head tilted at just the same arrogant angle.

“How much do I get?”

For a fraction of a moment, Owen looked amazed. But only for a fraction. “You mean you want
money?”
he inquired in gentle distaste. “You never said anything about it when I asked you.”

“But I was thinking about it,” she said, utterly unmoved by his expression of hurt reproach. “Two bits an hour. That's my price.”

Black eyes challenged black eyes, and deep inside of her something was laughing a little, but it was scared too. Never in her life had she asked any of her brothers for pay for the chores they gave her to do. But she was fifteen now, and it was different. “Twenty-five cents an hour,” she said briskly.

“Fifteen,” said Owen. His smile was sweet.

“Twenty-five. Or do it yourself.”

Owen shrugged: “Oh, I guess I can afford to give a kid a little spending money. Come on, Swede.”

“I'll have the first two hours now,” said Joanna calmly but irrevocably.

Two pairs of Bennett eyes narrowed, two Bennett jaws tightened. And then, before Nils' humorous blue glint, Owen reached into his pocket and tossed her the money. He walked off without another word.

“He”ll get it back before sundown,” said Nils, starting after him. “He'd talk you out of your eyeteeth if he could.”

“Not me,” said Joanna briefly, and picked up the brush.

T
HE SUN WAS WARM
on her head and through the back of her blouse, and the gulls drifted and cried in the high radiant reaches of the sky. Sometimes a man came across the beach and the stones rolled under his rubber boots. An engine roared occasionally in the harbor; a child called out, over on the rocks where Marcus Yetton's youngsters played among the tidewater pools, looking for crabs. The whole busy, quiet, self-sfficient life of the Island flowed around Joanna as richly and placidly as the paint flowed from her brush.

She knew without thinking it in words that the Island was a good place. There were work and money and food; there was not a poor man on the Island, unless you counted Marcus Yetton. But Stephen Bennett said Marcus was his own worst enemy, spending his money on foolishness and hobbling along with cheap gear and flimsy potwarp. But at that the Yettons had plenty to eat. So did Johnny Fernandez and Nathan Parr, who lived in the shabby camps between beach and marsh. She looked up at them now, as they sat in the sun smoking their old pipes and baiting trawls, and she knew that these two, who had come as transients years ago, had stayed on Bennett's Island because it was a good place to be. The Bennetts had made it so.

And all the world wanted lobster to eat, it seemed. Prices were high, and the hauls were big. Only this morning a smack had come out from Friendship, wanting a thousand pounds in a hurry; they had cleaned out Pete Grant's car and bought each man's haul as he came to the wharf, at five cents more than they'd been paid a week ago.

She looked up as a power boat came in close to the beach, and scowled, recognizing George Bird. He had taken up some of his traps, with Closed Season beginning in another ten days, and now he was dropping them overboard in shallow water. When the tide went down, he and his boys would carry them up the beach to be stacked.