High Tide at Noon (56 page)

“It's not as if I wanted to go,” he said simply. “But I've got to. If it was myself alone, like Phil or Owen, I wouldn't be scared to stick it out.”

It seemed odd to Joanna to hear Charles admit he was scared, but she knew it wasn't for himself, it was for the slight girl whose eyes never left his face, it was for the small boy and girl asleep down at the Eastern End. She almost felt the way Charles relaxed when Stephen nodded and said, “I know. You have to do what you think is best. How much more do you need for the boat?”

“I've got somebody to buy the
Gypsy
, and they'll give me a good price for her—bare boat. Her engine's got enough power for the other boat, if I get her.” He looked across at Philip. “Phil, how about you? You've got something in the old sock, and I've got to clinch the sale in a week. Come in with me on it, and she'll be half yours.”

Philip's blue-gray look met his dark one quietly. “I wasn't thinking about leaving, Cap'n Charles. And I
was
thinking about a new engine for my own boat.”

“Look, inside of two months you'll have back everything you put into the seiner, with interest. And I'll buy your share off you and you can come back and buy all the new engines you want.”

Charles was on the edge of desperation, though he tried to keep his voice light. Being a family man had changed him from the reckless boy he had been, the one who'd walked with a touch of swagger. The old arrogance was there, but it had been tempered. Charles knew now what it was to think about food and clothing for others beside Charles.

Philip smoked in silence. Owen said roughly, “If I had anything I'd let you take it. But I still think it's a lot of foolishness. The Island's got plenty of life yet. ”

“You mean Karl's hired girl's got plenty of life yet. If it wasn't for her, you'd be out of here in a minute. How about it, Phil? If you don't come in with me on it, I'm licked.”

Charles and Philip, the two eldest. In all Joanna's memories, neither of them had ever let the other down. She knew now, without a doubt, that Philip must give in, even if he hated and dreaded it. Stevie had gone away with Mark, because Mark counted on it. So would Philip go in with Charles.

Before summer was over, Charles had moved his family away. Philip went with them. Donna cried a little when he said good-bye, in the kitchen, but he kept his arm around her shoulders, smiled down into her eyes, and said he'd be back before the winter was out.

Owen stubbornly refused to go with them and be one of the crew. In the end it was Hugo who went. Nathan and Mary Bennett came out for a few weeks, to clean up the house and sell the cows to a Brigport man; the first of September they locked up the white house and the barn, where the golden cow on the weathervane was bright against the autumn blue, and went back to the mainland.

Others left, too. Old Anna Sorensen was ailing, but she refused to be sent ashore to live with Eric, whose wife she'd never liked. In the end, Karl decided to move his parents to Port George, a place that was small enough so that they wouldn't miss the Island too much; yet there was a better chance there. He told Stephen about it.

“They think we're rich out here,” he said. “When I told 'em I came from Bennett's, they said, ‘What in the devil do you want to come here for? Out there you can make money!” Karl's mouth twisted ironically. “I said ‘Sure, when there's lobsters to catch. But there ain't any, and our boats have to be bigger and our traps heavier, out on Bennett's.' Well, they says, ‘You can fish all winter because it ain't ice-locked out there.' ‘Sure,' I told 'em, 'but supposing the wind blows all the time? Can't haul in a living gale of wind, even when your pots are full. What's the use of sitting around on your backside all winter, waiting for the wind to stop blowing?' ”

Karl was not usually so eloquent. He ran his hand wearily through his thick fair hair, so like Nils'. “Oh, hell, Stephen, I don't
want
to go. I've left the Island before—just for a few days—and been homesick every time I looked out on a good day and saw it out here. But I'm like all the others. I can't see any other way.”

“Sure, I know,” said Stephen, and for a moment his hand stayed on the stalwart shoulder of the man who had been his chum since their childhood together on the Island.

One afternoon before the Sorensens left, Joanna went down into the lower part of the meadow, near Gunnar's alder swamp, to pick blackberries. She took Ellen with her, and put her on a blanket where the grass grew short and thick. Ellen was a tall baby at eight months, with a cap of silky yellow hair and eyes like Donna's and Philip's; grave luminous eyes that looked at you long and consideringly, and then, disarmingly, crinkled into broad laughter. Sometimes Joanna wished her baby's eyes were like Alec's, but already there was a sweetness in Ellen's smile that spoke of him.

Now she played on the blanket, her legs tanned a soft biscuity gold where her blue creepers ended, and made cheerful noises to herself and Winnie. Joanna picked blackberries shiny as lacquer, feeling the September sun soaking warmly through the back of her dress, turning sometimes to look at the baby and the old tawny-coated dog lying at the edge of the blanket.

She was startled when Gunnar came out from the alder swamp, but only for an instant. “Come back here and be quiet, Winnie,” she ordered the dog. Then with the old, cool politeness, “Hello, Mr. Sorensen.”

“Hello, Yo.” He blinked at her in the brilliant sunshine, and came slowly toward her and the baby. “Ha, young lady, how are you?” he said to Ellen in his deceptively mild old voice. Ellen gurgled. He stood there silently for a few moments, watching Joanna pick berries, and she wondered if he were going to tell her those were his bushes.

“Yo,” he said unexpectedly. “What you t'ink of dem all going, huh? You going too?”

“
No!
” she answered sharply. “No, I'm not going.”

“Your fadder won't go, will he?” Gunnar shook his head, still hardly touched with gray. “I used to t'ink Stephen, he vass the softest. But he's more like the old man than the udder one—Nate. Stephen gets his teeth in and holds on.” He came closer to Joanna and looked searchingly into her face. “You still miss your man, Yo?”

She felt herself stiffen, her face went blank. “Yes, I do.” And what business is it of yours? she thought. She was almost liking him when he spoke of her father, but now the old antagonism came back.

Gunnar sighed and shook his head. “It is too bad to miss someone. I miss dat boy Nils. Sometimes I wanted to beat him, but I miss him yust the same.”

“Where is he now?”

“Karl, he got a card from Rio de Yaniero last week.” Gunnar sniffed. “A beautiful place. I'm glad the boy can see it. But the women—” His grin split his cheeks, and for a fraction of a moment Joanna realized what a dashing young seaman he must have been. “They are very dark. Bad business, too. But Nils has sense.”

“You never used to think so, Mr. Sorensen.”

“Ya, I thought he vass stupid . . . dumb. But now I know different. He vanted to marry you, didn't he?”

She was too startled to be angry at his inquisitiveness. Besides, there was a sadness in his voice, and she felt something like pity for him, because he was so old, and it was too late to make up for the way he had lived. “Yes, he wanted to marry me,” she answered him. “I was proud that he thought so much of me. Nils is a fine man, Mr. Sorensen.”

“If he had married you, I would have been glad.” Gunnar's narrowed old eyes were very blue, watching her. “You are a good woman, Yo. You are a good vife to your husband, and now you are a good vidow. Nils is right about you all the time, and I am wrong.”

He lifted his hands and dropped them again, sniffed and sighed. Ellen had crept off her blanket, and Joanna caught her up to put her down in the middle again. Gunnar watched them for a moment, then turned back to the cool, sun-spattered dusk of the alder swamp.

On an impulse Joanna ran along the path behind him. As the old man turned toward her in surprise she said with the warm, winning sincerity of the Bennetts, “You're going away from here pretty soon, Mr. Sorensen. Shake hands before you go.”

He looked down unbelievingly at the girl's brown hand, its fingertips stained purple with berry juice, then up into the dark eyes smiling at him through the thick Bennett lashes. “Shake?” said Joanna.

Without a word he took her hand into his rough-skinned one, and gripped it hard. Then he turned around and walked toward the alder swamp.

The day when the Sorensens were going to leave—Gunnar and Anna, Karl and David and Sigurd—Gunnar didn't wake up. He was dead when the girl went up to call him. It was his last and most irrevocable protest against leaving Bennett's Island.

As always, he had had his way. When the others left, Gunnar alone stayed behind. As autumn deepened into winter, and Joanna wandered alone through the Western End woods and the shaggy orchard, and the cemetery, she always looked from Alec's grave toward the small, neat stone that said
Father
on it, and was glad she had run after Gunnar in the meadow that day, and put out her hand.

T
HIS WINTER GAVE NO INDICATION
of being worse than last year; it didn't sweep down on the Island with a howling gale or a premature cold snap. But in November lobsters dropped down to twelve cents again. To a community which had once considered fifty cents a fair price, and which never, in its worst imaginings, had known lobsters to go below thirty cents, the last few years had been bad enough. They'd touched twelve cents then, but here it was again, and winter coming on—it was almost too much to endure.

On the premise that if they must starve to death they preferred to do it in some sort of comfort, Johnny Fernandez and Nathan Parr sold their gear to Stephen Bennett and Jake Trudeau, and went ashore.

To Joanna, walking alone in the late November afternoons, the place was like a ghost town. In the harbor Marcus Yetton's shabby boat, Stephen's
Donna
, Owen's
White Lady
, and Ned Foster's boat rode their moorings. Very soon now the Trudeaus wonld bring their boats up from the Eastern End and moor them in the harbor for the winter. Then there'd be seven boats to look lonely where there had once been twenty or more.
The Basket
was on the bank.

Sometimes she saw someone moving around the beach or the fish houses, but more often the thin swirl of smoke from a chimney was the only sign of life. On boat days there was activity, but Link Hall was complaining about the small amount of mail and freight he carried for Bennett's. The Island knew that Link would be perfectly happy if he could get out of running to Bennett's this winter, and only come as far as Brigport.

The loneliness of the village, with its boarded-up houses, was oppressive to them all. And sometimes the Bennett house seemed intolerably silent without the boys. True, Owen was still there, but he wasn't home much; he went across to Brigport late in the afternoon about four days a week, and if the weather breezed up, he didn't bother to come home till the next day. No, it was Philip Joanna missed, with his easy quiet presence, and the Little Boys.

There was no hope of Mark and Stevie coming home now. They'd given up their lobster business to go as crew on Charles' boat, along with Hugo and Philip.

“At least,” Donna said often, her eyes pensive, “they're all together, even if they're not here.”

Charles and Philip were doing well. Charles, in particular, wrote glowing letters home. He wanted his parents and Joanna and the baby to come to the mainland, for the winter anyway; he knew the rotten price of lobsters, why did they try to stick it out? He could get them a nice little place near him. He'd never known he'd like a town so much, being an Islander born and bred, but this place was different. There was a sardine cannery right there, ready to buy his herring; and Joanna could work there for good pay, if she wanted to.

So on, and so forth. Stephen smiled, and said it was fine they were doing well. He was proud of them. But his place was here on the Island.

Joanna, hearing him say it, was fiercely glad. Though sometimes the emptiness of the village frightened her, more often she knew a sort of exultation as she walked through it. We'll show them what we're made of, she thought. Just a handful of us, but we can stick it out, and when the others come limping back, they'll see for themselves. They think the Island's let them down. But they're the ones who've let the Island down.

There was still school on Bennett's Island, though Marcus Yetton's middle five were the only pupils. Miss Adams hadn't come back this year, and the new teacher was a middle-aged lady who boarded with the Grants, and spent most of the school session trying to break the young Yettons of swearing and—Julian in particular—of smoking.

Joanna, walking home from the store once in a January dusk, thought about the school. Her father must try to get some families with children to move out to the Island by spring, else by next fall there wouldn't be enough children to keep up the school. And once they lost the school, it would be hard to get it started again. She pictured Ellen, starting the first grade; brief yellow pigtails, a starched blue gingham dress . . .

Out on the harbor ledges the surf gleamed through the darkening day, and the wind sharpened. Lights burned in Marcus Yetton's house—the only lights on that side of the harbor now. She had a warm feeling toward Marcus; there was more to him than she'd thought, when he would stick like this. Maybe it was just weakness, because he'd leaned on her father so long he was afraid to strike out for himself. But all Stephen could let him have now was a rent-free place for his bait butt and his small gear, at the far end of the boat shop. So it could be loyalty that made Marcus stay; loyalty to Stephen or to the Island, it was the same.