High Tide at Noon (8 page)

“Charles told me.”

He nodded. “Well, it's foul enough, but it was bound to come, Jo, the way we've let you run free. It's a sign. Sign you're growing up. People seeing you as a girl, not just Steve Bennett's kid.”

“But I don't want to grow up!” The passionate words burst from her before she realized. “I wish something could happen to me so I'd stay a kid forever, if growing up means all this chew, and staying at home, and never having fun any more, just so they won't talk about the Bennetts!”

The compassion of his look brought the sting of tears to her eyelids. She was terribly ashamed. He stood up, and his big brown hand rumpled her hair affectionately.

“Joanna, I don't like telling you to stay home. It's like putting a gull in a cage. But it was bound to come sometime. You couldn't go on like that forever.”

“I know it.” Her lips felt stiff.
In a cage
. Four walls. Already she felt them closing in on her, stealing her very breath. And against them rose the too-vivid picture of the beach in the pale morning sunlight, young gulls fighting over a dead fish, a dory pushing off, the shining light on the sea, the sparkling drops falling from the blades of an oar.

Stephen was saying reasonably, “I don't expect you to sit in the house all day. I'm just asking you to quiet down. Remember, you're growing up, and you're the only girl we have. Your mother worries enough about the boys—”

“But you can keep your girl home,” said Joanna, and by some miracle she smiled up at him.

“You're a good girl, Jo,” he said, “You're the finest kind.” He went by the lilac bushes and into the barn, where the shop was, and Joanna sat motionless on the doorstep. But there was nothing in her face that was unhappy or self-pitying. There were only narrow, dry eyes watching the splendid freedom of a gull's flight, and a curiously level mouth; there was a steely acceptance that was not resignation in Joanna's heart.

I'll stay home, she thought. The boys can ram around and drink, and raise hell, but talk doesn't matter if you're a boy. I'll stay home, and there'll be no cause for worry, or for any talk about Joanna Bennett for them to bring home.

But some day the Island will belong to me again.

Someday I'll be free.

J
OANNA' S ROOM WAS A SMALL ROOM
under the eaves, with a window looking over Schoolhouse Cove and the point, and impertinent little boats with red sails on the wall paper. It was a bare room, with its narrow white-painted bed, the chest with the faded red flowers, and the mirror over it.

Bare it was, but not if you garlanded it with the heartsinging hope or the heavy burden of despair that alternately lived in it along with Joanna, who came home from school across the bay so many times to unpack her suitcase on the narrow bed. . . . Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. There were plenty of homecomings in three years, until that final June; plenty of times to kneel by the window, her arms on the sill, and breathe rapturously the scent that was the Island's own, or watch the snow slant blindingly across the winter-barren point and hide the gray sea, but never its voice.

But when she stopped in her unpacking, a dress in her hands, to watch a boat cut swiftly through the plunging water outside the cove like a gay and living thing, the rapture of return would be gone; the unspeakable delight of coming home to the Island, of which she had dreamed since the last departure, would disappear with the knowledge that the time was past when she could wriggle hastily into her dungarees and be off to the shore and the boats even before dinner.

With slow fingers she could put on a gingham dress and a starched apron, and go down to set the table, and tell Donna all the important things that were for her ears alone; then the men came in, and if they hadn't seen her at the wharf, she was kissed and hugged, and they were all happy together. But all the time, under the laughter and the eager talk, she remembered how it was when there was something urgent and satisfying to do that first afternoon; buoys to paint, or a sail in somebody's boat to try out a new engine, or a long lazy afternoon in the sun, with the boys painting or whittling, and talking about their latest hell-raising.

Then graduation came, and in her seventeenth summer on the Island, she discovered a new truth; that when boys begin to ask you to go to dances, and walk you home the long way—with a stop under a tree somewhere to tell you how sweet you are and pant passionately down your neck—when all this happens, you have lost forever the fine free comradeship of the shore. Stephen was right when he said it couldn't have gone on forever. She tried them all, but in the end it was Nils who took her to dances in the clubhouse and church in the schoolhouse. Nils alone was the same chum he had always been. The story had died, as as far as Joanna knew, no one even remembered it now. If they talked about her, it was to call her stuck-up and say she thought herself too good for the Island boys. But Joanna tilted her chin at the talk, and made sure they'd never have anything less harmless to say about her.

Donna's health was increasingly bad. Time was beginning to take its toll of the frail but indomitable woman who had brought six lusty Bennetts into the world. While Joanna was at school, Nils' younger sister Kristi worked at the big house as hired girl, with Nate's wife and daughter coming to help with the heavy housecleaning.

By fall of that seventeenth year, Joanna herself had decided her future. It was to be here, on the Island, with the family. No need for cousin Rachel or Aunt Mary to come up and help out any more, she told her parents arrogantly. Kristi could go home and help her grandmother. She, Joanna, already had the reins of the household in slim but very strong hands. All the stern promises she had made to herself that fifteenth summer, all the glowing dreams of a career carved out magnificently by Joanna Bennett, free adult in her own right—all faded away before the realization that she wanted to be with her mother, that she could fill the place of a daughter now as never before.

On her nineteenth birthday she stood in her little room, watching the purple winds of dusk come down across the cove, and thought back to the rebellious summer. She had come a long way since then, and there was still time enough before her in which to attain her heart's desire. Every one had a heart's desire, she knew. She couldn't have put hers into words. But the breath and being of the Island pervaded it. I'll know it when I see it, she thought, and meanwhile she could be patient. She was on the Island; the family was all together, except for the younger boys away at high school. And she was nineteen today.

She looked down at her sheer, fine stockings, the new suede shoes, and at the little silver watch on her slim brown wrist, and smiled. Nineteen was a magic word; as yet she didn't know why, but at intervals during the busy March day, she had thought, I'm nineteen! And it had sent a tingling warmth all through her.

Downstairs the back door was flung open, and voices arose in the kitchen, deep and strong and merry, full of vitality and the hungry delight of coming into a bright warm kitchen and the smell of supper, and Donna's smile. The men were back from hauling. It was time to run downstairs and get back to work, birthday or not.

They were all talking at once in the kitchen, their dark faces stung with red, rimed with frozen spray and flying vapor, their heavy clothes giving off the cold breath of out-of-doors. They had been gone since morning, because it had been the first good hauling day in two weeks. Now, home in the warm lamplit kitchen with money in their pockets and supper on the way, they were boisterous as they kicked off rubber boots and washed up. Winnie made ecstatic sorties at their heels, getting in a lick or a nip where she could.

Stephen put on his moccasins and went over to the dresser, where Donna was busy. Joanna heard his quiet voice, around his pipe. “Donna, where'd this bunch of wild hawks come from?”

The spatula lowered over the birthday cake she was frosting. “I married a wild hawk.”

Philip had come out of the turmoil around the sink. “But you tamed him, lady,” he said. “Tamed him proper, too.”

“I wonder who'll tame them.” Her blue-gray eyes rested serenely on Charles and Owen. “I don't wonder about you, Philip. You were born with manners, and a way of thinking first. But those two . . . ”

The first son and the third were wrestling now, hard and supple bodies driving one against the other, steel wrist against wrist, broad shoulder against shoulder. “Charles has something to keep him in line,” Donna said thoughtfully. “He's got to remember who he'll be some day. But Owen—”

“He's the wildest of the lot,” Joanna put in. “Don't shake your head at me, Mother. You know it as well as we all do.”

Stephen dropped his hand on his tall girl's shoulder. “Hello, birth­day child. Sure, we know about Owen. Wild, maybe, but all Bennett straight through. And Life'll clip his wings.”

“If a woman doesn't do it first.” Philip lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “Ever think what a flock of strange women well bring into the family?”

“Often,” said his father.

“I don't worry,” Donna said. “But I think you boys will have to go off the Island for your wives—there's not much choice here right now.”

“Why, Mother, what's wrong with a nice little Dutch heifer like Thea Sorensen?”

“God help us!” said Donna piously, and they all laughed. Philip's eyes and Donna's were the same clear bright gray-blue, crinkling at the corners and full of tiny sparkles when they laughed. Whoever got Philip would be luckiest of all the Bennett wives, Joanna thought. But all Bennett wives would be fortunate women.

Moving quickly between kitchen and pantry, she thought it would be strange indeed if Life didn't dip her brothers' wings. Hers had been clipped almost before she knew how to spread them. But if it had to be women who did it—and she knew the boys were too full of life and blood to live without women—she hoped with all her heart they would choose women of good stock, intelligent, serene, and clear­eyed, like their mother; women who were fit to carry the Bennett name, and bring strong healthy Bennett children into the world.

There'd been too many compulsory marriages on the Island and on Brigport for her not to realize the risks. There was Marcus Yetton, who'd been studying radio by correspondence, and had been considered a boy of great promise till Susie came into the picture. Susie, daughter of a transient fisherman who'd rented a camp for the summer to go trawling for hake. She'd been slovenly and dullwitted, with a faint gleam of prettiness that died as soon as the baby was on the way. Now all Marcus' promise was forgotten; it was a baby a year (in a vain effort to keep Susie at home, the Island said), a boat forever on the beach for repairs, and Susie an uncouth little slut who was a byword on the Island. And Marcus dragged down, down, till he was as low as she.

Jeff Bennett, Joanna's cousin, had a wife somewhere, living with her people. He sent five dollars a week for the child. And Thordis Sorensen, Nils' cousin and Thea's sister, got into trouble with Forest Merrill. They fought terribly, the whole Island knew it; Forest was always swearing she'd tricked him, that somebody else had been there first. . . .

It was something that could happen so easily, a wretched marriage like this, to anyone who was as fullblooded and vigorous as the Bennett boys. But they're
Bennetts
, she thought now, as their laughter and tomfoolery rang in her ears. They weren't just like anybody else, they weren't even like Jeff and Hugo. They had a pride in their name. It was that which would keep them straight.

Her mother gave her a light spank. “Look at all these starving men, and you lallygagging around with your mouth open like little Annie Yetton!”

“Where's the food?” Owen struck the dresser with a huge brown fist, and the lamps jumped.

“There goes that rooster again!” said Philip. They streamed toward the table, toward the fresh-baked hot yeast rolls and yellow butter churned in Nate Bennett's kitchen, the baked stuffed lobster that was Joanna's choice for her birthday supper, the potatoes in their crisp, shiny brown jackets, the pickles that held the spicy sweetness of last summer, the kale that might have been freshly picked instead of taken from a jar in the cellarway, the strong, good coffee, and the yellow Jersey cream in the squat pitcher.

They all talked at once, and to Joanna it was as if they were all warm and safe against the March wind and dusk outside—and against everything else. Nothing could touch them; her love for them all reached out and encompassed them. Though Mark and Stevie were at school on the mainland, they were all one together, so would always be.

It was while Joanna was cutting the cake that Stephen leaned back in his chair, looking rather pleased with life, and said, “Well, the folks for the Binnacle will be here tonight. Ned Foster called up when I was in the store this afternoon—the mailboat's moving them out.”

“I'm glad somebody's going to live in that little house at last,” Donna said, smiling faintly. “It's such a nice little house, right on the harbor. I hated to leave it when we came up here to live after Grandpa Bennett died”

“Well, the Fosters are just the people for it. He'll be a credit to the Island—he's quiet and he works hard.”

“Swell ice cream, Jo,” said Owen indulgently. “Tough on you to have to make it yourself on your birthday. If I'd been home, I'd have froze it for you.” His eyes glinted behind his thick lashes as he glanced at his father. “What's Ned Foster's wife like?”

“She's probably fifty and sprung in the knees, Cap'n Owen,” said Joanna. “Don't look so interested.”

“I've never met her,” Stephen said. “But they're plain, sober people. I wish we had more of them, instead of the stuff that's come ashore here like so much driftwood. The Eastern End Crowd—the Trudeaus—”