High Tide at Noon (53 page)

Now, eating dinner in the kitchen, bright with noon sunshine and warm with the wood fire crackling in the stove, her parents and brothers talking around her in pleasant voices, she could almost make Simon Bird seem a dream. And did Alec know, wherever he was?

Sunshine struck red lights from black crests of hair, slanted across rich, healthy brown skin, glinted in restless black eyes or in clear blue­gray. She thought, I should be happy now—as happy as I ever could be. I've got what I wanted. Why don't I feel as if everything was all right for us now?

She didn't know the answer to anything. The Birds were gone, and they wouldn't rob Nils, or Marcus, or Nathan, or anybody else, ever again. Men could leave their fishhouse doors unlocked. But how long would there be men on Bennett's Island to leave doors unlocked, and set traps in the calm knowledge they wouldn't be touched?

The kitchen was flooded with sunshine, but it was a strange sunshine; there was no brightness in it.

As if she had been patiently and considerately waiting for the Birds to remove themselves and for the Island to settle down into its mid-winter hush, Joanna's baby was born the day after the receipt came. Joanna was sleeping in the ell chamber now, and she awoke that morning with the certainty that this was the day. She felt very tranquil. She lay in bed and looked out at the snow falling quietly in the windless dawn, dropping its light veil over the face of the meadow, rimming the dove-colored serenity of Goose Cove with white, falling faster and faster between Joanna's windows and the black wall of spruces across the meadow. It seemed to her there was no sound anywhere. No single gull, no surf, no wind.

Ellen Douglass was born when the snowy day was slipping into a snowy dusk. She came with no long and annoying delays, and with a minimum of trouble for all concerned. Afterwards Joanna's chief sensation was surprise. It hadn't hurt half as much as she'd expected, after listening all her life to Aunt Mary's vivid accounts of her own experiences, and knowing without being told how her mother had suffered when the last two boys were born.

Before she fell asleep she spoke of it drowsily to her mother. Eric Sorensen's wife and Stella Grant, who'd been a nurse once, were out of the room, and Donna stood by the bed holding the baby in her arms.

“Of course she didn't give you any trouble.” Donna looked down at the little red face in the blankets and a pair of intensely blue eyes stared unwinkingly back at her. “She'll never give you any trouble. She's a good girl, she is,” Donna said, and carried her newest granddaughter out of her room.

Joanna smiled as she slipped gratefuly into sleep. Her lips shaped the words she was too tired to say out loud. “A little blonde girl named for your mother, Alec. How you'd love her!”

No baby that had been born on the Island in the past five years aroused such interest, unless it was Susie Yetton's last one. Everybody had gone to visit Susie, and compared notes afterward on whether or not the baby looked like Johnny. At three it was the image of Marcus, so at last they'd given up speculating. But Joanna's baby—Alec's baby—was something different. There was not a woman on the Island who didn't bring a gift. They told Joanna she looked wonderful, and then they looked at Ellen, placidly asleep in her basket, and wiped their eyes.

Joanna was touched by their feeling for her; she felt that she loved them all, even the bedraggled Susie, who, with her oldest girl Annie, had crocheted a little afghan. Grandma Sorensen, very feeble now after her shock, had made some little shoes and sent them up by Kristi. In spite of the winter weather, Mateel came up often through the woods from the Eastern End.

As far as the family was concerned, Ellen was its jewel. They weren't chary, like most men, of holding a tiny baby; before she was out of bed Joanna was used to the sight of her brothers carrying her daughter, looking bigger and blacker than ever because the baby was so little and fair. Stephen called her a humming star and said none of his own children had ever been so good. They came in from hauling, scrubbed up, peeked to see if she was awake, and had her up in their arms in her nest of blankets while Donna's back was turned.

It was hard for Joanna to stay quietly in bed for two weeks; she awoke each morning full of a vitality that flushed her skin with color and glowed in her voice. Now she was slender and supple again. Now, if she wanted to, she could run and bend and twist. And Ellen was such a sweet baby for her and Alec to have made between them, with her unsurprised blue gaze and her fluff of fair hair, and the deep dimple in her chin. Would the day never come when she could get up?

It came. Out in the kitchen, feeling beautifully flat in her taken­in dress, her shining dark hair caught back with a red ribbon, Joanna lifted her baby from the basket and carried her to the seaward windows. “Here comes Grandpa,” she said, “back from hauling. I'll bet he's thinking what a funny little mite you are.” She smiled at the idea of calling her father “Grandpa,” but in a year or so that's what Ellen would be calling him. Little Charles said it already.

Then, without warning, the old sense of loss and desolation flooded over her in a great bitter wave. Little Charles could look out and say with wild joy, “Daddy's coming, Daddy's coming!” But Ellen would never say it; Joanna would never hold the small body up against her shoulder and point, and say, “See Daddy out there? He's coming home to see his girl.”

Her eyes watched the eternal tossing of the water outside, the everlasting circling of the gulls, but they were seeing something else; Ellen, sunshine tangled in her yellow hair, running down to the gate, and Alec swinging up the lane. Light and shadow fell across his white shirt, his cap was pushed back on his head, he was whistling. And then he dropped to his heels by the gate, at just the right level for a small girl to fling her arms around his neck and hug with all the warm, worshiping intensity her little body could hold.

Alec hugged her too, and came up the path with her perched on his shoulder, one small tanned hand gripped tightly in his hair.

Joanna turned away from the window and went to sit down in a rocking chair near the stove, the baby still in her arms. She leaned her head back and shut her eyes.

“What's the matter, Jo?” said Kristi anxiously, turning from the dresser.

Joanna smiled at her. “Just tired, that's all. I'll rest.”

Kristi didn't stay long after Joanna was up. She went home again, to keep house for her grandmother and work on her things for her chest. Peter had given it to her for Christmas; he had made it lovingly with his own hands, and it was truly a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Perhaps this proof that Peter could work with tools as well as any old-country boy softened Gunnar; at least he'd stopped his sarcastic objections to the marriage.

On a windless day in early February, when the men had all gone out to haul, Donna walked down to the harbor to spend the afternoon with Eric's wife, and Joanna stayed home with the baby. Alone here in the kitchen, with Ellen asleep in her basket, she ironed minute dresses and gertrudes, and was surprised at her own quiet content. There had been a tortured period when she'd never expected to feel like this again . . . if indeed she'd ever felt like this. Peace after pain—the heart's pain and the body's pain both—had a different texture. It must be always tinged with sadness, but it is overlaid with a deep thankfulness that the edge of grief had been blunted a little, at last.

She caught herself humming as she worked. Looking down toward the harbor, she saw the village around the shore, its windows silver in the sun; the harbor was silver too—liquid, living silver, never quiet, but forever flashing.

Someone was coming through the gate. She narrowed her eyes against the glare, wondering which of the men was back from hauling so early. It was not until he was almost up to the house that she saw it was Nils.

He came in quietly, as he always did. “Hi, Jo.”

“Hello, Nils. How's everything?”

He laid his cap down on the dresser and walked across to Ellen's basket. “I suppose you mean lobsters when you say how's everything. Well, they're less and less.” He leaned over the basket and said in interested surprise, “Hey, she's awake! Hi, Ellen. Is she old enough to smile yet? She just did.”

“Gas,” said Joanna briskly.

“I don't believe it. I'll bet she knows me.” He put down his forefinger, gently prying open an infinitesimal pink fist, and the minute fingers closed around his big one, and clung.

“Look at that,” said Nils in a hushed voice. As Joanna leaned over the basket with him, he looked at her with eyes that suddenly deepened in color; his face was intensely serious. She thought of the way his face had matured and hardened, the bones showing cleanly and strongly through the flesh, the mouth composed and still, and strong in its very stillness. But that expression on his face—it struck an echo deep in memory. She couldn't quite catch it.

Nils said abruptly, “Joanna, what are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you staying here, or planning on a job?”

“And leave the Island?” She stared at him. She hadn't thought of a job, and now it was a new problem with which she had come face to face. How could she expect her father to feed and clothe her and Ellen, to pay for Ellen's schooling as he'd paid for hers? He wanted to, but it wasn't his responsibility, this child lying there with Nils' forefinger in her fist, looking up at them with her calm blue eyes. Yet—leave the Island? She hadn't counted on that.

“I don't know,” she said slowly. “Nils, I don't know. My mother needs me here right now, but the boys will be marrying and having their own homes, and there'll be less and less for me to do.”

“That's what I wanted to talk to you about.” Gently he freed his finger from the baby's clasp, and straightened up. “Jo, I'm no good at talking, but maybe I can get this over to you. What I want to know is—when things get straightened around—if you'd think about marrying me.” His eyes held hers as he talked. “I know this is no time to talk to you about it, but I've got to tell you now, because of the way things are.”

She said slowly, “Nils, why do you want to marry me? Are you still in love with me?”

It was queer, asking him that. On the Island people didn't talk much about love. But he was answering her, directly. “I'm still in love with you. And if you ever married me, I'd want you to make it the kind of a marriage you wanted it to be. I mean—” For the first time he hesitated, a slight flush ran up under his skin. “I know there'd never be anybody else for you like Alec. That you'd think of, that way. You wouldn't ever have to worry.” The flush deepened, and his cool straightforward voice was suddenly husky.

“But Jo, if you'd let me look out for you and Ellen—well, that's all I want. There wouldn't be any strings. And Ellen would have everything you wanted her to have.”

Joanna looked into his eyes and they looked steadily back at her. She knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he meant what he said; that he'd be willing to take her in a sterile marriage that wasn't marriage at all, and be grateful to give her child and Alec's everything she wanted her to have. Those were his words, and they were true. She felt humble, suddenly.

“Listen, Nils, you deserve a whole lot more than what you'd be willing to expect from me! You ought to have somebody who—well, for her there'd never be another man like you, no matter what happened. You said it was that way for Alec, and it ought to be that way for you, too.”

Nils' mouth twisted in a little grin. “What if I'm one of those one-woman guys? 'Twould be kind of a nuisance, being married to a woman who was crazy about me, and I didn't care much about her.”

“Nils, do you honestly think you could stand it any better, being married to a woman you're in love with, and who isn't crazy about you the way she should be?” Joanna shook her head. “Nils, I can't ever marry you. It's the way you said—there'll never be another Alec for me, and if I couldn't bring a man anything more than just being friends, I wouldn't want to marry him.”

“Maybe in two or three years you'll feel different—”

“No. You think it's hard for me just to
talk
about it now. But it won't be any different then, Nils. She's Alec's child and mine, and I'm a little too proud to ask another man to feed and clothe her when I can't give him the love he should have.”

Nils listened, politely and impassively; it seemed to her that she must make him understand. “Nils, don't you
see?
You're not a one­woman man—no man is, unless he makes himself that way. You haven't been around with girls enough. You've kept faithful to me, but I didn't want your faithfulness! I was in love with somebody else. You've got to open your eyes and look around, and find a girl who deserves a man like you. And you'll love her, and she'll love you, and you'll have children of your own.” She stopped her eager flood of words abruptly, and added in a quieter voice, “I'm glad to think you'd want to be good to Ellen. So many men don't care much for a step-child.”

Nils picked up his cap from the dresser. “I guess I'd better go. I just wanted to tell you what I was thinking, Jo. I thought in a couple of years we'd both be pretty lonesome sometimes—this Island can be damn lonesome—and where we'd always got along so well—” He stopped suddenly and his face broke into the old lines of youth and laughter, as if he were trying somehow to cheer her up. “You going to cry, Jo? What is there to cry about?”

“I'm not going to cry. I was just thinking about you and Ellen.”

He stopped at the door, his hand on the knob, and looked back at her. “I love that little mite,” he said in a level voice, “because she looks the way I always thought ours would look—yours and mine. so long, Jo.”