High Tide at Noon (45 page)

“That old man?” Alec looked skeptical. “Why? Look, she's been raising hell right under his nose and he doesn't do a goddam thing about it.”

“Maybe so,” Joanna murmured. She'd never told him about the Port George story Hugo had told her on that May afternoon so long ago. She'd never told him about Owen and Leah, either. She was half-minded to tell him now, but she had never told yet, so she shut her lips on the words.

Owen's
White Lady
was still on her mooring.

“I thought Owen was going,” she said.

“Sure he is. The schoolmarm's waiting. Only he's got a quart from somewhere this morning and I guess he and Hugo are killing it. With Mark's kindly assistance.”

“
Mark!
I don't like that. Mark's Owen all over again, only he hasn't got me to keep him out of Father's way when he's drunk. If they go over there and start acting up, it'll be a mess.”

“I'll go stir 'em up. They'll miss the supper if they don't shake a leg.”

Joanna tilted her head impatiently. “It's a fine thing when I have to ask my husband to keep tabs on my brothers. No, leave them alone, Alec. Let them miss the supper. And if Father catches Mark drunk—well, maybe that's what Mark needs.”

“Tough little nut.” Alec's hands gave her shoulders a loving shake. “You used to have such a time about it when they raised hell, and now you don't give a damn. But I don't want to see them get into a chew, for your mother's sake anyway. So you go along and get supper on the table, and I'll round 'em up and get 'em under way. I bet Stevie's worn down to a nub trying to drag that gorm of a Mark home to clean up.”

He leaned forward and kissed her swiftly, and there was no one to see them but a gull on a spiling, watching them with a beady and wicked eye. They went up through the dark shed, arm in arm, and parted by the store.

“Be along pretty soon!” he called over his shoulder and swung along the path that led by the fish houses to the beach. She waited a moment to watch him, wondering how she had ever thought he was weak. Well, he
had
been weak once, but that was a long time ago. Now his very walk showed the difference. He was like a slender steel blade, as straight and as strong, walking as if at last he was sure of himself and his place in the world.

A ground sparrow rose up fluttering from the Queen Anne's lace as he passed it. He watched its flight as he walked, his narrow alert head turned to burnished bronze in the slanting light. Some impulse made him stop and turn around, by the Birds' fish house; he saw her standing there at the corner of the store, and waved. It was like a salute.

As she turned toward home, she was aware of her passionate eagerness to tell him about the baby; it seemed as if she could hardly wait for him to come. The walk they were planning, the first one they had taken for a long time, became vastly and thrillingly important. The Island would be all theirs tonight.

She hoped it wouldn't take long to get the boys started. They didn't deserve to have someone caring about whether they missed the supper or not. She was sorry Stevie had waited to go with Mark. As for Mark, he needed a good thrashing, even if he was twenty.

The long yellow light slanted into her kitchen and filled it with a warm and tranquil glow. When she looked out, the harbor and the village lay under that light too, the houses buried among their climbing roses and lilacs, the spruces that looked black, the mass of the Eastern End woods over there, Gunnar's cow grazing in the field beside the lane, her hide red in the warm light. There was hardly a sound in this hushed and peaceful hour; the cow's bell sounded clear and sweet when she moved her head, but it only sharpened the stillness. Even the eternal duet of gulls and sea was silent.

She sang to herself while she waited. One little tune stayed in her mind, she couldn't get rid of it. She'd ask Alec to teach her all the words, so she wouldn't have to go around singing over and over again:

She'd get Alec to teach her how to play the fiddle, too. It would be something to do when she couldn't get out and ram around the Island like a tomboy. She'd always wondered why women wanted to get heavy and out of shape with carrying a child, and then to have the agonizing business to go through at the end of the time. But now she knew.

“Darling, will you hurry up?” she pleaded soundlessly, and then chuckled aloud from sheer happiness. He was coming through the gate. She felt like running down to meet him, as she'd done when they were first married, and she was halfway down the steps, and the perfume of her pet white lilac bush was strong in her nostrils, when she saw it wasn't Alec coming up the path. It was Stevie.

She sat down on the steps and thought, What is it now? On this night of nights, was Alec going to fool around half the evening?

She grinned impishly at Stevie as he came toward her, tall, and still carrying his teen-age gawkiness in his long arms and legs. He had on his best blue suit and white shirt, but it looked funny. Decidedly funny. Queer. Stevie looked queer too, hesitating there in the middle of the path, running a hand through his damp black hair, almost as if he were afraid of her.

“Well, young Lochinvar,” she said, “would you mind telling me if you know why my lord and master hasn't come home to his supper yet?”

Stevie didn't answer her. He came to the steps, his eyes set very deeply between brow and cheekbones that were bloodless under the tan. And then she knew what was wrong with his suit. It was wet. Drippingly wet.

“Have you been overboard?” she demanded, and even as she said it there was a constriction in the pit of her stomach, a sudden, sickening tightness. Stevie opened his mouth and shut it again. His eyes clung to hers with a desperate, wordless pleading, and she said, carefully, “Where's Alec?”

She knew when he answered that he hadn't meant to say it the way he did, that the words came straight and without mercy from his shock and horror.

“He's dead.”

“Oh,
no!
” she cried, her voice shaking, the words mingling with the echo of Stevie's voice in her ear, He's
dead
. . . it kept echoing; her head was ringing with it.
He's dead, he's dead
. But of course he wasn't dead, and this wasn't true. She was dozing, there on the steps.

Stevie's voice went on, uncertain, ready to break. “He was going to row us out to the
White Lady
in his peapod—Owen and Hugo and Mark and me. We were almost out there, we were fooling, and you know how tittleish that peapod is—well, she capsized. I guess Alec—” His voice rose ludicrously, “He cracked his head on the side, and he—and he—” She saw as from a great distance that he was fighting to keep from crying. “He went right down, Jo! Mark and I, we got him up, as soon as we could—”

“Where were Owen and Hugo?” She cut across his rising panic.

“Hugo started to drown and Owen was trying to hold on to him—and Christ, Jo, there wasn't a soul—not a living soul around the harbor! They were all gone!”

He sat down on the steps, his head in his hands. Joanna put her hand on his shoulder, hardly knowing what she did. A coldness had followed the tightness in her stomach. A coldness that crept through her until she seemed to feel nothing. Her head wasn't ringing now. It was very clear. Alec was dead. A half-hour ago he had turned and waved to her, and now he was dead.

“I'm going to the beach, Stevie,” she said. “Are you coming too?”

“Back there?” His eyes widened. Then he stood up. “Yes, I'm coming. Pete Grant's called the Coast Guard, they'll bring out a pulmotor and stuff. And Mark's doing that artificial respiration we learned in school.”

“Then you're not sure!” Her heart pounded violently. “There's a chance—”

His strong young hands tightened on her arms. He had control of himself now, he would control her. “Don't hope, Joanna,” he said gently. “Don't look for a chance.”

They walked down through the lane without speaking. Everything was the same: the harbor still shimmered out there, the gulls still drifted in the same unclouded sky. But now she saw a hundred things she had never noticed before; they intruded themselves on her mind. A mole on Stevie's brown cheek; the dark down on his upper lip. A patch of ripe strawberries in the grass beside the lane glowed up at her, incredibly red. And she heard a cuckoo from the woods behind the clubhouse. You didn't hear them very often.

As they reached Gunnar's spruces, she said suddenly, “Stevie?”

He looked at her, his young face stern and pale, his dark eyes soft with his helpless sympathy. They looked strangely alike at the moment, except that her eyes were dry and blazing; but the pallor and the sternness were the same.

“Stevie, were they drunk? Owen and Hugo and Mark, I mean?”

Instantly she saw him withdraw from her. It was as if a shutter dropped over his open look. “They had a little, but they weren't drunk,” he said, and nothing more. She knew he would never say anything else. It was Bennett lying for Bennett, even to her, another Bennett. Besides, what good would the truth do?

They had taken Alec into Jud Gray's boat shop. At the end over the water, where a window on the west side let in the red light of sunset, they all stood—all but Alec and Mark. Alec lay face down on an old sprayhood spread on the floor in the midst of curled yellow shavings, and Mark was astride his back. His eyes were like black coals and his face was ghastly in the ruddy light. He looked at Joanna as if he didn't see her and went on counting in a toneless voice, swinging forward, pressing down, swinging back. She saw them all, before she moved where she could see Alec's face, turned from her.

Someone was very sick in a dim corner. Hugo. Between spasms he moaned. Johnny Fernandez was holding him up, crooning to him in a low, unending murmur. Owen leaned against Jud's bench, staring at Mark, smoking in long, famished drags on a cigarette. His suit was wet, too, the coat tossed into a corner, his black hair drying into a wiry crest. Nathan Parr stood beside him, watching Mark, with his thin, sunken old face set, his eyes queerly bright. He saw Joanna and spoke to Owen, who came toward her, skirting Alec's feet, and put his hands on her shoulders. How terrible he looks, she thought in some remote corner of her brain. Like Death.

And Death was here in this shop, with the half-finished hull of a boat towering above them and a red light flooding in on them. With Alec lying there, so flat and thin, his head turned away from her and the back of his neck so young.

“You shouldn't be here, Jo,” Owen said to her. “Stevie, take her away.”

She moved Stevie's hand gently from her arm and lifted her head a little higher. “Why shouldn't I be here?” she asked him clearly. “With Alec?”

He shrugged and turned away from her. She walked around Alec's feet—they'd taken away his rubber boots, and his socks were gone, and the sight of his narrow bare soles brought back a sharp, lightning image of the day on Pirate's Island. But only for an instant. She knelt on the sprayhood and looked down at his face.

Why, he's asleep! she thought with something like shock. How many times had she waked up to see him like this, lying on his stomach with his head on his hand, his face absorbed and remote from her, his mouth crooked in the faintest ghost of a smile, his hair tumbling across his forehead. Only then his skin had been bronze against the white pillow, and now it was white against the dingy gray canvas.

It was that, and the pallor of his lips, merry and mild even now, that told her he was gone. She looked at Mark. “You're tired, you'd better stop,” she said.

He shook his head. “Not till I drop,” he said between stiff lips.

“Mark, it's no good. Don't do it any more.”

“I—won't—stop.”

It was then that the doors at the far end opened, and they heard Pete Grant's voice, subdued now, but still resonant. “Down here, boys. Down at the end. I hope to God you can do somethin'.”

The Coast Guard had come. The group in the fading light from the window looked toward the men who came past the raised hull; white caps showed in the gloom, and an officer stepped out of the shadow of the boat and looked down at Alec. Joanna, on her knees, looked back at him. Then she leaned forward and kissed Alec's mouth.

“That's one to sleep on, darling,” she said to him without sound, and then Stevie whispered behind her, “Come on, Jo . . .
Please
.”

She went away from Alec then.

I
N THE LONG SITTING ROOM
in the Bennett house, the windows were open; three to look out on a blue sea and cream-and-amber ledges, on gulls drifting in a light-drenched sky. Three to look down on the meadow, ripe with summer, and to let in the scent of ripe field strawberries and Donna's white rose bush. At the foot of the meadow the Islanders had come through the gate in little groups of two or three, the men in their good dark suits, the women in their good dark dresses.