High Tide at Noon (4 page)

But in this sunny peace, she could be philosophical even about the Birds. There always had to be a worm in the apple. That seemed to her to be a very apt thought, and she would tell it to Charles at supper time.

I'll never live anywhere else but here, she thought. None of us will. This is Bennett's Island, and we're the Bennetts. We'll live here forever. . . . When she looked up she saw the road across the marsh, the sloping meadow with its daisies like a new snowfall, and the house high and white against the luminous sky of June. The marsh, the rocks, the meadow, the beach where she worked, the massy woods looming blackly beyond Goose Cove—the Island belonged, almost every foot of it, to the Bennetts, her father and her uncle Nate, herself and her brothers and her cousins. And so it would always be.

“Ahoy the peapod!” Nils hailed her from his brother Sigurd's boat, tied up at the old wharf while her propeller was being fixed. Joanna looked up, squinting against the sun. “You've done your trick. Come aboard and set a while.”

Her aching shoulders and knees, and the glistening yellow expanse of fresh paint, told her the two hours were up. Nils was her chum, he'd see that she didn't work overtime. She climbed the old wharf from the wet rocks where the tide was going down, and went aboard.

The boys sprawled on the lockers, smoking and talking, Nils and Owen, and Uncle Nate's second son, Hugo Bennett. He was a slight merry boy with a tumbled curly head and the brilliant Bennett eyes. There was a mischievous sweetness in his look, and though he was older than Owen and Nils, he looked younger. Now he was smiling dreamily at his cigarette.

“Yes sir,” he said blissfully. “Pretty damn good, I call it. She's built from the ground up, that one—Hi, Jo.”

“Maybe she used to be.” Owen was skeptical. “But she's a mite wore off at the corners by now.”

“You don't know anything about it,” said Hugo earnestly. “The trouble with you guys is you don't have any technique.”

“What the hell good is that?” demanded Owen.

Hugo threw him a look of intense pity for his ignorance, and began to enlighten him. Joanna felt a twinge of boredom. Women again. That was all they talked about. She sat cross-legged on a locker beside Nils, who seemed to be balanced on the back of his neck, and smoked one of his cigarettes while she considered his quiet common sense. She was beginning to think most of the Island girls were pretty dumb to run around in the bushes with a pack of gormless idiots who spent most of their spare time bragging. Nils was different. He could have ten women on the string without anyone knowing it.

He caught her look, and winked. “Hey, Hugo,” she interrupted her cousin, who was now rather flushed of cheek and bright of eye. “Who is it this time?”

Since Joanna was one of the gang, he told her cheerfully, and she grinned at him, the dimple deep in her brown cheek. “You want to know what Charles said about
her?”

“Jo, are you aboard?” She heard her father's voice so suddenly that she caught her breath and choked violently on a mouthful of smoke. Owen pounded her back. Nils deftly popped a stick of gum into her mouth. An instant later she came out of the cuddy and climbed on to the wharf where her father stood.

He looked down at her sternly. “Joanna, run along home. The shore's no place for a girl.”

“I was just going, Father.”

“And spit out that gum.”

“Yes, Father.”

For a moment his hand rested on her shoulder, and the smile in his eyes came warmly to life across his face. “Too bad you couldn't have been a boy, I guess. But your mother and I like our girl.”

She ducked her cheek to touch his fingers. In this moment of rare closeness she dared to say it. “Father, why can't a girl have a boat of her own? Even just a punt?”

“I never thought much about it, Joanna. A boat's a funny plaything for a girl to want. And don't you ever think about new dresses?” He glanced at Philip's faded blue shirt. “Or are you going to wear your brothers' clothes all your life?”

She straightened, flung up her chin. “I'll wear ' em all summer as long as I have to dress up all winter, by God!”

“Watch your tongue, my girl,” he warned her, but his mouth twitched. He had always been proud of her spirit.

Sigurd Sorensen, a big, yellow-maned Viking, came across the wharf with Charles.

“Steve, you been down there an' looked at my wheel? Looks shacked to me. Hi, Jo.”

“That's Steve's sixth boy,” said Charles. “Hello, mutt.”

She nodded gravely at them and walked away. If she had to go home and do the dull and senseless tasks allotted to girls in this life, and leave behind her the good solid talk of men, about boats and wheels and engines and the summer fishing, at least she could take the long way home.

In the flood of afternoon sunshine the village lay asleep, the harbor a wide blue mirror at its feet. The season was always late on the Island, so now in June tall old lilacs, purple and white, bloomed fragrantly against silvery shingles or white clapboards. And everywhere the grass was green, crossed and recrossed by narrow paths fringed with chicory and wild caraway's fragile blossom; where the grass grew tall, it was starred with daisies.

Joanna crossed the field by the well, and turned by Gunnar's spruces into the lane that led past the long low clubhouse under the trees, where the suppers and dances were held; then it led her into the big sunshiny space, drifted with daisies and the occasional fire of Indian paintbrush, where the empty Whitcomb place dreamed against a wooded hillside, and swallows swooped toward her with their shrill little cries. The path turned away from the house to trail mysteriously through another bit of woods into the Bennett meadow.

But Grandpa Bennett's apple orchard grew in these woods, and it was here that Joanna stopped at last. For the orchard was in bloom. Here, with the great spruces towering in dark and immobile silence around them, the sunlight streamed across boughs heavy with pink and white blossom; the little trees stood knee-deep in the tall grass. A cuckoo glided without a sound into the shadows.

Joanna stood taut as an arched bow. She might have been completely alone on the Island, in the world. . . . It was with her eyes still rapt, as one who has heard Voices, that she turned her head and saw someone standing at the far end of the orchard, by the cemetery gate. Her return to the thoughts of this earth was rapid. It was Simon Bird.

In five minutes she could be safe in the meadow, in sight of home, she thought, remembering an instant of panic and struggle in the blackness of the schoolhouse entry during the Island's Christmas party. She'd never spoken to Simon Bird since. But she had watched him, sometimes.

She watched him now, standing motionless against a tree trunk while he came toward her through the long alley of sun-splashed bloom. He had a thin tanned face and flat cheeks slanting to a lean chin. His red hair was like copper with the sun on it, and he was slight and narrow-hipped in his snug dungarees.

“Hello, Joanna,” he said softly. “Pretty up here, ain't it? Almost as pretty as you are.”

“I'm not pretty,” she said, her throat roughening. “Don't talk so foolish.”

“Sure you are. Oh, not like one of them candy-box covers down in Pete Grant's store. You got something else. Fire.” His chuckle was a sound of secret amusement. “I ought to know that!”

“What about those girls down in Cuba, that you told Charles about?”

“Oh, that trash.” He shrugged. “They're second hand. everybody's handled them. Me, I like to be first. How old are you, Jo?”

“Going on sixteen.” They hadn't said it was Simon who hauled their traps, they'd talked mostly about his father and Ash. The other girls were always giggling about Simon, and she thought they were dumb, but it was true what they said about him—he
was
good-looking. And they all had an eye on him, too. But as far as she knew, he hadn't looked back.

“See here,” he said. “Look what you did that night. You're sorry, ain't ye?” His eyes, his slow smile, wheedled her. He came close and she saw the faint little white line in his tanned cheek. She remembered, her heart hammering all over again, the thick darkness and her terror and her fingernails breaking his skin, his muttered,
“Christ!”

“Well, you wouldn't let me go,” she muttered.

“I only wanted to kiss you. Would you fight like that now, Jo?” His voice dropped. “After all . . . what's a kiss between friends?”

She wished he wouldn't stand so near. It did some odd thing to her breathing. Her eyelids felt heavy, as if her thick lashes weighed them down. This was the time to run away, and she knew it. If she wanted to run away . . .

“Would you fight now, Jo?” he murmured. Her feet wouldn't move, and the tree bark was rough against her cold palms, and deep inside her head a voice mocked her. You don't dare say
no
, it said. You're a coward, wanting to run away. What are you scared of?

I'm not scared of anything, Joanna answered it, and the sense of adventure was warm and sweet in her blood. She was not a child now, and it was time to find out things for herself. And deep down, in some wild, forbidden comer of her brain, she had never really forgotten how Simon's mouth had felt on hers in the brief moment when he'd succeeded.

I want to
know
, she thought defiantly. Was it wrong to want to know? So she tilted her chin at fate and said in a perfectly level voice, “I wouldn't fight . . . again.”

“I didn't think you would.” Simon stepped back. He lit a cigarette and things became real again. The world broke in. Already the orchard was in shadow. The breeze was freshening, and the robins were singing as they always did when it was almost evening.

Simon looked at her through cigarette smoke. “Take a walk with me, Jo . . . tonight. Only your folks won't let you out. The old man's not lettin' any of this Island trash get near his daughter.”

“I can get out when I want to!” she said, her cheeks scarlet.

For a long moment they looked at each other. Then Simon said, “Round 'bout ha-past-eight, I'll be up at the Whitcomb place.”

She thrust her hands into her pockets and walked by him without another glance. “Don't disappoint me, Jo,” he murmured. He didn't touch her, yet his voice halted her as his hand might have. She turned to look at him, and all at once that sense of adventure was back again, clamoring in her blood, sending a liquid brightness into her eyes, and softening the curve of her young mouth.

Then, with the unpredictable whimsy of a young colt, she began to run, straight down the path to the open meadow beyond.

O
WEN WAS GOING TO PLAY POOL
at the clubhouse after supper, and Joanna went along with him. Hugo was already there when they arrived, knocking balls about the table. The main building was kept locked, to keep the children away from the glossy hardwood dance floor—capital for sliding—but all club members had their keys. Most of the young crowd joined when they were the required sixteen years, and had saved up the fee for a life membership—ten dollars.

Hugo's eyes held a darkling twinkle. “Hello, mates. Look what I got!” With a conjuror's flourish he brought a flat bottle out of his boot.

“Where'd you get it?” said Owen skeptically. “They say you can go blind, drinking that cheap stuff.”

“Hell, nothin' cheap about this!” Hugo was affronted. “Forest Merrill's old man got it off a boat yesterday, outside the Rock. It's pure Scotch whiskey.”

“I'll tell you about that after I try it.”

“You know a lot about it,” said Joanna. “You never even tasted pure Scotch whiskey.”

“Shut up. You playing?”

“Nope.” Her tone was carefully airy. “I'm going over to Gunnar's and see Kristi for a while.”

As she reached the door Hugo called after her. “Hey, Jo!” Leaning over the table he grinned like a very good-natured devil. “What
did
Charles say? You know—”

“I'm not letting her tell you and she ought to know better,” said Owen with sudden brotherly propriety. “Go on, beat it, Jo.”

“Aw, you just want to tell him yourself!” Joanna made a face at him and went out. The cool dark wind blew against her hot face as she went up the lane toward the Whitcomb place. It loomed large and pale against the vast blackness of the woods. How very silent the Island was tonight, she thought; it semed to be listening, holding its breath. . . .

A tiny red glow near the steps was Simon's cigarette. She saw it move, and heard his soft voice.

“Hello, there.” He put his arm around her. “What are you shaking for? Cold? Come on.” His arm urged her up the steps, he opened a door, and she recoiled from the chill blackness of the house.

“Is it all right?” she whispered huskily.

“Sure it's all right. My dad keeps the key. Nobody'll ever know, sweetheart.” He was so near, yet unseen, that his breath was warm against her cheek.

They went through the cold silence of the house into the front room. It was like moving in a dream. Everything was strange and unknown; not the least strange was the nearness of Simon. She could smell the stuff he put on his face after he shaved, the clean dampness of his hair; she could imagine how it looked, its red darkened by the wet comb as it sprang into waves. She could smell his sweater, too, soft and woolly. At last he stopped her and put his arms around her, and she was glad, because he was real and she was so queerly afraid. Not of the dark; she'd never been afraid of the dark. . . .

Simon kissed her. His mouth was gentle and oddly hot against her wind-cooled skin. She stood rigidly still, trying not to tremble, and kept her lips pressed tightly shut.

“Relax, darlin',” he whispered. “I've got a lot to teach you and you're going to like it. . . . Relax, honey.”

He kissed her again and again, and gradually she began to feel a sweet drowsiness creep over her. She felt heavy in her eyelids, in her head, in every finger, each muscle; she only want ed to stand there in the tight circle of his arms, leaning against him. Almost without her knowing it, her mouth went soft and willing under his.