High Tide at Noon (59 page)

“Not Owen tonight, honey,” Stephen said. He got up and went to the door, calling out, “Hold your horses there, don't knock the house in!” He went through the entry, Winnie crowding past him and Ellen at his heels, and Joanna and Donna began to clear the table.

“Speak of the devil,” Stephen said good-naturedly. “Hello, Julian. Out of breath, aren't you, son? Come in.”

Joanna, standing by the table with the coffee pot in her hand, saw a gasping and greenish-pale Julian stumble into the kitchen. Stephen, following him, said in a leisurely voice, “Come up to see me about those traps, did you?”

Then he saw what Joanna and her mother saw—the pure terror that stared at him from the boy's eyes. He caught Julian by both thin shoulders.

“What is it, boy? What's happened down at the house? Somebody hurt? Speak up!”

Julian spoke up. One word—the one word that had been the unspoken fear of the Island since the first man had come to live on it.

“Fire!”

He dropped into a chair and began to cry. Stephen pulled his jacket from the hook. “Is it your house?”

“It's the boat shop,” the boy choked. “The traps—it's all afire!” The last word was a desperate wail, and Stephen was gone on the run the instant it was spoken. Joanna and Donna looked at each other across the room. Donna had gone white as her apron, and Joanna knew by her own sudden coldness that the blood had left her face too. She set down the coffee pot with a clatter.

“Mother, all those traps, and they're dry as tinder!” She reached for her trench coat. “I'm going down there. I can do
something!”

“There aren't enough people left on the Island to stop a fire.” Donna moved to the window facing the harbor. “Look.”

Joanna saw the flames then, burst against the night, beyond the dark mass of trees at the foot of the meadow. It seemed as if the whole sky was aflame; she had never seen anything that filled her with such sheer, devastating panic. But she said quite steadily, “They'll see it from Brigport and come over. And I think the wind's right to blow it toward the harbor.”

She went out, and started for the harbor on the run. She was right about the wind—it would blow the fire away from the land. But the traps—two hundred and fifty, with buoys and warps, as well as Marcus' handful. Sickened, her mind turned from the thought and fastened on the wild hope that the fire wasn't as bad as it looked. Maybe it wasn't so much out of hand that three men couldn't control it.

But when she was halfway through the marsh and had a full view of the old wharf, she knew it was foolish to hope. She had heard of a raging inferno, and now she knew what it was. The whole beach, the marsh, the houses across the harbor, were illumined by the glare, and she could feel the heat and hear the deadly hiss and crackle.
The traps
, she thought, and found herself crying furious, bitter tears.

There wasn't much for the men to do but let the fire burn itself out. A boatload came over from Brigport, ready to help in the fight, but they could only stand around with the others and wait, or work around the edges with brooms and buckets, dragging out a trap when they could. The tide was high, washing up the beach, and they threw the traps overboard. But they could salvage only a few, and some of those were mere black skeletons. The shed crashed in at last, with a roar, a burst of flame and smoke, a shower of sparks against the night sky.

Joanna went to stand beside her father, who might have been a figure of stone as he stood watching the end. In the red flickering light his face had never looked so strong or so austere. There was something in it that kept her from speaking to him. Besides, the heaviness of her own despair weighed her tongue. She had stopped crying, and watched the dying fire with eyes as stony as Stephen's.

At last someone said, “I guess it's about done, boys,” and there was darkness and a chill and the sound of the sea again, where there had been streaming flames and heat and the roar and crackle of fire. Joanna heard men talking all about her—mostly the Brigport men. A woman was sobbing hysterically. That was Susie Yetton, with the youngest child in her arms and two others hanging to her skirts and wailing after her. Marcus was with her.

Stephen walked away from Joanna, and she heard him after a minute, talking in his own pleasant, level tones. “Well, Marcus, we've been in the same boat all along, and we're still in it.”

“My God, what are we going to do now?” Marcus' voice trembled and broke. “Stephen, what'll I
do?
Every last one of my pots gone, an' no money, an' there's Susie an' the kids—”

“Every last one of my pots is gone, too, Marcus. And no money. I know what it means as well as you do. But—” He paused, and Joanna knew, as if she were seeing it, that his hand had gone out in the familiar reassuring gesture she had seen so many times, the hand on Marcus' shoulder, gripping hard as if he would pour his own courage and strength through his fingertips into the younger man. “Don't worry, Marcus,” he said quietly, and then came back to Joanna.

“Joanna, you run along home and make up a big pot of coffee. We need it.”

“Yes, Father,” she said, and turned toward home. She couldn't run, going back. She couldn't cry. She felt dreadfully weary, as if it were an intolerable effort merely to walk. She wished she could go back to Stephen and put her arms around him; for she was of his blood and bones, and though he had spoken to Marcus as he did, she knew that this night had brought his courage and strength to an end. He had kept his faith through everything. But this was something a man couldn't fight against. This was something to break a man's heart.

When she came into the kitchen Donna sat by the stove rocking Ellen; Julian still sat huddled by the table, he looked up at her with a swollen, tear-grimed face.

“They couldn't save the traps,” she said quietly, and the boy broke into fresh sobs. Joanna looked down at his racked shoulders and knew with a curious lack of emotion that Julian had been smoking in the shed. But it was no use to say anything about it. It wouldn't bring back the traps. Maybe Marcus would thrash the boy, but that wouldn't bring them back, either. And Julian was suffering now, he would suffer for a long time. Probably he'd never want to smoke again, she thought with wry humor.

Without a word between them, the two women began to make coffee and set out cups. After a moment the boy Julian slipped quietly through the back door, into the windy dark. In a little while the men came.

S
TEPHEN
B
ENNETT WAS THE LAST TO LEAVE
the Island. The Trudeaus and Ned Foster rented camps at Brigport; the Yettons went to the mainland, to Port George. Stephen knew a man there who owned a small cannery and a fleet of sardine boats. He hired Marcus—in return, Joanna thought, for something Stephen had probably done for him in the past. But it was not very often Stephen looked for return. When his traps were gone, and there was nothing—nothing but the Island—he tightened his jaw, lifted his indomitable black head, and said, “We don't need help. We'll get through this somehow.”

But they had to leave the Island. If he were a young man, and unmarried, he said, he could fight it out and build up again from the very beginning. But no matter what good soldiers his women­folk were, he couldn't make them face it—they had gone through enough with him already. They would go where the boys were, there'd be some sort of work he could get.

That was all he said, and then they had to begin the new—and heartbreaking—business of closing up the house.

It seemed as if the Island had never been so beautiful. Every scent on the wind, every daybreak and nightfall, every changing tint in the sky and wheeling flight of gulls, even the hoarse chatter of the crows and a song sparrow calling at dawn—everything that Joanna had known all her life, that was as familiar to her as breathing, stabbed her a hundred times a day. She lay awake at night looking at the familiar pattern of stars beyond her window, listening to the surf whose sound was as close to her as her mother's voice, and she knew all over again the heavy and hopeless grief that stayed with her for so long after Alec died.

To pass a window was to see loveliness that burned and ached; but the young woman Joanna wasn't so lost in her own unhappiness that she didn't know what went on behind her mother's serene blue­gray eyes and her father's steady dark ones. All three of them smiled more than usual in those days. They kept their voices light, and talked with determination about the pleasures and advantages of the new life ahead of them.

“We'll all be together again,” Donna said over and over, and then her voice would falter—almost imperceptibly—and she would have an errand in the other part of the house. And Joanna knew that her mother knew the truth; they would never really be together again.

Before Ned and the Trudeaus left, they helped Stephen haul the
Donna
up on the beach, into the marsh. With the
White Lady
beside her, she was safely and snugly cradled against the force of winter storms and flood tides. Joanna stood by, watching with that bleak tightness around her heart that had been there ever since the traps burned. It was midafternoon in October and the sun was bright and warm, the sea was peacock-colored between the islands, the gay little clouds of autumn scudded merrily across the sky.

The
Donna
had been newly painted for the fall season; her white paint dazzled, there against the green and rust and fawn of the marsh. When she was settled and fast, and the other men went down to the beach to bring up a dory, Stephen stood looking at his boat. Then he laid his hand on the glistening flare of the bow.

“You won't be on the bank for long, old lady. We'll be back.”

Joanna walked home quickly then, her eyes burning.

The Island lay long and dark under the threatening sky that last day. Long and dark and alone . . . and betrayed, Joanna thought, standing in the stern of the mailboat and looking back for as long as she could. Her mother had taken Ellen down into the cabin. Stephen was in the pilot house with Link Hall; they wouldn't look back. But Joanna must look. The wind was edged with winter, the sea whipped up into a gunmetal chop, and the gulls rode high above the mailboat, crying and crying.

Yes, Joanna must look, and as the dark sea widened between the
Aurora B
.'s creaming wake and the creaming surf on the Island's shores, the forsaken Island, where nothing lived now but the little wild things, she knew she must feel like a homeless soul forevermore.

O
UTSIDE THE EMPTY HOUSE
a breeze stirred the untended rose bush and a long trailing branch tapped faintly on the window pane. The woman looked toward the sound. Beyond the slender bough, beyond the sea of ripening grass sloping down to the weather-silvered gate, the marsh stretched lush and green to the harbor and the camps on the beach. They were little and huddled and old.

Her footsteps echoed in the listening silence of the bare room. For a fantastic moment, as she reached the window, it seemed to her there had always been this silence, that it lay over the whole world—at least this world that lay beyond the glass.

The houses on the other side of the harbor, their paint scaling away in the unshadowed sunlight of noon—they too held this hushed and echoing stillness. If even a gull had lighted on a roof as the woman watched, it would have been life; but at the instant there was not a gull in sight, and from the locked quiet of the room where she stood, the whole scene had the timeless unreality of a toy village inside a round glass paperweight. And somehow she had been caught there, inside the glass.

The men who had come ashore down there, the children who had run back and forth between those houses, paddling in the tide­water pools, their voices mingling with the sound of engines and the dogs' barking and the cries of gulls, the women who had stood in those doorways and looked out to see if their men were on the mooring yet, the people who had laughed and quarreled and laughed again in this room behind her—they had never known or even dreamed that the grass would grow so high, or that some day they would all be gone and this silence would have come down over the Island. They would have laughed, if any one could have told them about it.

Yet it had been coming for a long time before they knew. The woman leaned her forehead against the glass and wondered if there had been one of them who knew the signs for what they were. No matter now. It was long past.

She wished with a weary passion that she hadn't come. How long would it be before the dragger came back? It didn't seem as if she could endure this much longer. She opened the front door, and at once the breath of the Island blew against her face, intolerably fragrant with the mingling of bay leaf, and clover, ripe grass, the first strawberries that always reddened so early just below the house. It was a breath that had blown eternally through her childhood and her growing up; now it brought a new force of memories to clamor at her brain. She had an impulse to clap her hands over her ears, as if she could shut them out.

But at least there was other sound out here, it wasn't like the house. She sat down on the stone doorstep, the white rose bush trailing above her. On the other side of the house was the sea, but some unknown instinct kept her from going toward it. It was as if some worse loneliness would appall her at the sight of that vast, twinkling blueness.

She didn't know how long she sat there. At last she stood up and stretched her cramped arms. She stepped out of the cool shadow into the sunshine, and it was kind to her lifted face. She felt tired, as if she had come a very long way, and nothing mattered now but rest.

It would be a long time before the dragger came back. She supposed she must eat; she'd take her lunch down into Goose Cove and eat it, and perhaps she could see the boat far out on the horizon.