High Tide at Noon (52 page)

It was only when Dave was in a hurry that he'd leave stuff around like that, especially aboard Nils' boat. The cuddy was wann and snug, a man could live in it if he had to. Nils kept it scrubbed up, its white paint fresh, and everything stowed in its place. His papers were framed under glass to keep them clean.

He laid an unrolled chart across his knees and studied it by flashlight, following his penciled course to Cash's, the course he had marked in with Owen and Alec leaning over his shoulders.

The water slapped and chuckled under the smoothly flaring sides, and sometimes the boat pulled a little at her mooring, like an impatient colt, but not very often. A muffled sound startled him into instant, questioning alertness. He switched off his light, and listened. Somebody was out rowing around, shipping oars close to the bow of his boat.

There was another noise, a jarring bump. A skiff under the bow would bump like that against the stem iron . . . if somebody was fooling around with the mooring.

Nils picked up his flashlight, moved lightly as a cat toward the slide, and pushed it back. In almost the same instant he was out through the hatchway, and had flashed the light across the low cabin roof at the bow beyond.

It caught and glittered on the broad, long blade of a bait knife; and Simon Bird looked back at him. If it hadn't been for the gleam of his red hair, this sharp and startled white face with the light reflected like fire in its eyes might have belonged to a desperate, half-crazed stranger who was trying to cut Nils' boat loose from her mooring.

Nils said quietly, “We'll talk about this when we get ashore, Simon.” Simon dropped from sight, and Nils heard the bait knife clatter in the bottom of the punt, and the rattle of oarlocks. He leaned over the side and kept his light on the punt as it skimmed shorewards. When it had disappeared beyond Stephen Bennett's boat, and he was satisfied that Simon was going to the beach, Nils ran forward to ex­ amine the mooring hawser. It was hardly damaged, the knife had only begun to go through the sturdy seizing of potwarp and burlap. But there was enough to prove someone had been at it.

Nils knelt on the bow, holding the light on the hawser, ignoring the wind that whipped across the harbor and would have taken his boat out past the point in no time at all, if he hadn't been there.

Nils was mad. He hastened across the cockpit, flashing his light upon the winch head and discovered his punt had gone adrift. The turn of the rope around the winch head hadn't been enough, the way the tide was pulling, and by now the skiff was probably far outside the harbor, dancing on her merry way.

He started up the engine and ran straight for Pete Grant's wharf. When he had walked up through the shed, his footsteps echoing in the empty darkness, he turned into the path that led around the shore to the beach. He didn't run, but he walked like a man with business to attend to. He stopped sometimes to listen, but there wasn't a sound. Not even the faintest suggestion of a beach rock turning under a boot.

He walked back again, and stopped between his father's fish house and the Binnacle. Simon was not there. And there was no way to find him in this bitter-cold dark.

Nils walked up toward his grandfather's spruce windbreak. When he stopped to look across the field toward the Birds', he saw a moving light through the kitchen windows. It was only for an instant, but it was enough. Someone was walking around the Birds' kitchen with a flashlight. Nils went past the well, with his long even stride, crossed the lane, and turned into the Birds' path. There was no faintest gleam of light showing now, and the house seemed to sleep in the starlight. But there
had
been a light there.

The back door was unlocked, and Nils walked in. The darkness was warm, there was a coal fire in the stove, and he sniffed coffee in the air, as if somebody—Simon—had just had a quick drink. Nils scratched a match and lit the lamp over the sink; then he lifted a heavy fist and knocked hard on the cupboard doors.

“Ahoy the house!” he shouted. “Get down here, George! And be quick about it!”

“For Christ's sake!”

He turned quickly and saw Ash standing in the doorway of a room off the kitchen, staring at him with red-rimmed eyes. Ash, scrawny in his undershirt and pants, his suspenders hanging, his hair on end, was even less attractive than usual. “What the hell do you want, rammin' around in this house like you owned it?” he demanded.

“I want Simon. Where is he?”

“Simon?” Ash blinked, and looked at the line of jackets and coats and caps behind the door. “Ain't he home yet? No, by Jesus, he ain't, and his heavy jacket's gone, too.” He scowled at Nils, and then looked bewildered. “It was here when I went to bed—he must've been in since. What do you want him for, anyway?”

“If you're lying, I'll wring your stringy neck, Ash,” said Nils coldly, and turned around to confront a belligerent and even more unbeautiful George, with his long winter underwear wrinkled around his legs and his eyes bleary with sleep above his black-stubbled cheeks and chin. He stared at Nils. Then he said anxiously, “What is it? What do you want?”

“Simon.” Nils looked him up and down. “Ash here says he's out somewhere.”

“Why, I—” George looked at the jackets too. “He must be. What do you want him for? It's 'most two o'clock.”

“I'll wait for him,” said Nils. “He won't stay out for long. Too damn cold, even if he did hop in for a swig out of the coffee pot and his thick jacket.”

“I never heard him!” said Ash defensively.

George came all the way downstairs and huddled over the stove like a disconsolate rooster shut out in the rain. “What's he done, that's what I want to know. Ain't I got a right to know?” he said plaintively.

Nils leaned against the dresser, his arms folded, and looked at George with cold blue eyes. “My business is with Simon and nobody else.”

“Oh, Jesus.” George shook his head, and almost wrung his hands. “I give up. I can't do nothin' with that boy, Nils. Nothin'. He's like a wild hawk. Always has been. He's breakin' his mother's heart, that one.”

“I don't think you and the other one there ever did much to keep him from breaking it,” Nils remarked. He took out his cigarettes. “I'll give him one hour to get in here. You've heard of smoking people out, haven't ye? Well, we'll freeze him in.”

“What is it, George?
George!”
Mrs. Bird was a frightened voice at the head of the stairs.

“You better go back to bed, Flora,” said George heavily. But his wife came down, a confused, withered little woman in a full flannel nightdress like the kind Nils' grandmother wore. Simon had got his red hair from her, but certainly not his brass. She looked at Nils as if he were the devil in person.

“What's the matter?” she whispered faintly.

“I just want to talk to Simon, Mrs. Bird,” said Nils and his voice was gentle. His grandmother had told him what a nice girl Flora Arey had been, too nice to throw herself away on George Bird. “You better go back to bed, like George says. It's nothing for you to get fussed up about.”

But she sat down weakly in a rocking chair and started twisting a handkerchief in her fingers. Ash yawned loudly and went back to bed. George still hovered over the stove, and Nils watched them all with his unclouded, sea-blue gaze, his arms folded across his chest, and the lamplight yellow on his hair.

The clock on the table ticked very loudly in the stillness of the room. George's breathing was wheezy; his wife didn't make a sound, but she looked at Nils with scared eyes, and kept on twisting the handkerchief. The hour crept by, and his rage burned deeper and deeper.

Suddenly, in the quiet, they heard an engine in the harbor. They all three stared at each other. Then Nils turned and went out. Simon must have hung around in the cold and the dark, up in the woods behind the house or even as close as the shop, waiting for Nils to go. Then he got tired of waiting. Nils walked down to Pete Grant's wharf to be sure his own boat was all right.

She was safe and fast; he inspected the lines carefully with his flashlight, and then stood on the car a long time, listening to the fading sound of Simon's engine through the wash and roar of surf on the harbor ledges.

When he couldn't hear the engine any more, he went back up the wharf and walked around the shore. If he had been mad before, he was twice as mad now. His anger was a quiet and self-contained thing; it could contain itself for a long time, until Simon Bird came back into his reach again.

In the east there was a faint lightening in the sky; it was after four. No sense to go to bed now. Nils went into the fish house, lit a lantern, built a fire in the stove, and began stripping the broken laths from a trap battered by the last storm. He worked steadily, his face stem and absorbed, until the lantern light grew pale and sickly against the first ruddy fires of sunrise. Then he went up to Stephen's house.

T
HIS DAY THAT
N
ILS HAD WATCHED
grow from the darkness was full of sunshine and wind; wind that whipped the sea into a glittering blue-green wilderness of mountains and deep shining valleys.

It was too rough to haul. So almost every man on Bennett's was in the store, waiting for the mailboat, when Simon Bird called up from Brigport. No one but Nils and the Bennetts knew about the events of the night before. But the fact that Simon's boat was gone from its mooring, and that George was cleaning up his fish house in a very agitated manner, and jumped whenever he was spoken to—this was enough to drop an interested silence over the conversations around the stove and candy counter when Pete turned away from the telephone and barked, “Ash, it's that brother of yourn!”

Ash, somewhat pale and uneasy, took the receiver and said nervously, “Hello . . .” The rest of his conversation was flat and monosyllabic. The listeners learned absolutely nothing. Ash hung up, rang off, and walked out of the store, as if he would like to hurry but didn't quite dare.

Nils and Owen walked out behind him. They caught up with him in the path, one on each side of him. Owen rested a heavy hand on his shoulder and said companionably, “Hello, young Ash!” Nils said, “Hi, bub. Where's Simon?”

Ash's voice came out in a squeak. “He won't be back—he'll never be back in this godawful hole! He's sold his boat to Tom Robey, and Tom's runnin' him ashore in her right away—prob'ly they're gone already!” He glared at the two taller men like a bantam rooster. “And I'm gettin' to hell off as soon as I can get my gear together.”

“That's fine,” said Owen jovially. Nils said nothing at all. They let him go, and watched him scoot along the path toward his father's shop.

“Well, you got gypped out of breaking Simon's neck, Nils,” Owen said. “We should've gone over there first thing this morning and tended to the red-headed bastard.”

Nils shrugged. “So he's never coming back. Well, he wants to remember that.” He looked over at Brigport, its fields tawny in the brilliant sunshine, its shores white with surf. “If he ever comes back, I'll be waiting for him.”

George and Mrs. George and young Ash moved away on the next boat day. Everybody was very polite to them, and bought up their traps at fairly good prices, considering the fact that the Bird strings seemed to have been built up mostly from other men's property.

A week after they had gone, Nate Bennett wrote to his brother Stephen to tell him he'd seen George in town, and had made him an offer for the house and shore privilege, and George had been almost too ready to sell.

“Never want to go back to that place,” he'd muttered. “They'd just as lief cut your throat as not.”

No one seemed to know anything about Simon or his where-abouts. But it wasn't long before Joanna had her last contact with him—a strangely roundabout contact. There was a letter from a Boston lawyer. Simon wanted payment on the house, right away.

He was paid, even though it was a bad winter. The Bennetts dug deep into their pockets, and Stephen finished up a bank account that had been already sadly depleted by loans to Marcus and Forest, and several others, and his own heavy expenses for keeping his gear. in repair.

“You shouldn't be paying this,” Joanna told her father bluntly. “Let him have the house.”

“It's worth the money to know the Birds won't have a foothold on the Island—they won't have anything to come back to,” he said.

The day the receipt came, he took it out of his pocket at the dinner table and held it up. “Do you know what this means?” he asked the family, his dark face somber. “This means that the Birds have left the Island for good. How does that sound, after all the chewing I've listened to in this kitchen?”

Stevie grinned broadly. “Sounds pretty swell to me!”

“We never got a chance to mess 'em up,” gloomed Owen. “I'd like to have given Simon a good send-off, but he slipped right out from under our hands. If we'd gone after 'em way back in the beginning, they'd have been gone a long time ago.”

“So you're going to growl because you didn't get a chance to paste somebody,” said Philip. “Instead of being glad they're gone, and for once you can rest easy, without having to go out and sit on your traps like a hen on eggs.”

“Oh, I'm glad enough. We made George squirm a little, too. And maybe I'll meet Simon ashore sometime.”

The talk went on, over and around Joanna, and she thought, they're gone, but it doesn't seem real. Gone as easily as that. The slip of paper by Stephen's plate was sign and symbol of something she had thought about ever since she was fifteen years old. She tried to fit it into her brain. The Island without the Birds; the Island without Simon. She would never have to meet him again. She tried to imagine it, remembering those wordless passings in the lane, the time by the rain barrel outside the store—oh, the countless times when her sick rage had come over her just at sight of him. And she would never have to hear his voice again, perhaps she would even forget the echoes of his soft, insolent words on that very last time, when he told her the house wasn't hers.