Storm Tide (19 page)

It was as if his plea took all his strength. Joanna freed herself, and he made no move to hold her. He stood watching her, no strut left to him now, his eyes on her face.

“You'd better go home, Randy,” she said. “And don't ever come back.” Her voice was very quiet. “You stay on your own island. You don't belong on mine.”

She walked quickly through the gate without looking back. She became aware, by the time she reached the schoolhouse, that her legs were shaky, her wrists and arm hurt, and that she felt like sitting down. But there would be no sitting down until she reached her own kitchen—a sanctuary where she could wash her face and comb her hair, and drink some strong coffee before Nils or Stevie came home.

Still she didn't look back. It wasn't until she had reached the doorstep that she paused, and looked down toward the harbor. She saw Randy then, following the path through the marsh. He walked as he had always walked, with a quick wiry arrogance.

She went into the house, feeling the homely, familiar peace of it drop like a mantle on her shoulders.

I've had a horrible day
, she thought.
But its all over now
.

C
RYSTAL DAY SLIPPED INTO AMETHYST TWILIGHT
, and the men came home tired and cold and hungry, preoccupied by thoughts of warmth and a hearty supper; corned hake, boiled potatoes, pork scraps, mashed squash and piccalilli. And there was apple pie, still warm; Joanna had made it from the last of the Gravensteins that had grown on the twisted little tree close to the cemetery gate. They were Nils' favorite apples for pie, and this pie Joanna had made as his grandmother always made apple pie; in her biggest biscuit pan, with a thick snowfall of sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg over the tart apple slices, and the whole dotted with tiny bits of pork before the top crust was laid deftly upon it.

It was really a beautiful pie. “A real John Rogers pie!” Stevie said when it came out of the oven, sending its fragrant steam into the room. But it was at Nils that Joanna looked, and when she saw him smile, she felt a sudden loosening of muscles that had been oddly tense ever since he came into the house.

When they asked about Randy, Joanna merely said that he had taken his own time about getting up, but had gone home eventually. Already the incident under the spruces beyond the gate had become as remote as a dream. She could exclude it from her daily scheme of thought, for Randy was a person of no importance. Far more important was what Nils had said at breakfast time, and it had upset her more than she would have believed it could do. For in her heart she knew it was no slight thing. Without Nils and his unquestioning support, there was so much she couldn't do; and one fact of which she had been certain, when she married him, was that she would work and dream and plan for the Island to the utmost, and what she couldn't do with her own two hands, Nils could do. But if he was to be unexpectedly stubborn and strange, Nils, whose very dependability had been one of the certainties in her life—it was incredible. And it mustn't happen.

That had been a small thing this morning. But there would be bigger things. And Stevie had sided with him. Stevie, of all people. But he was only behaving as her other brothers had acted, she reflected with a fatalistic bitterness that didn't show on her calm, firm-lipped face. Not one of them could really know what the Island meant to her; it was as if the mystic heritage of
oneness
with the Island had been passed down to only one of the Bennetts, and that was herself.

She didn't suppose, as she darned Ellen's socks while the men listened to the weather reports, that a few shingles on Uncle Nate's roof meant all the difference between the rich growth or stagnation of the Island. But she was certain of one thing; that Nils had never said
no
to her before. And she wanted, more than anything in the world, to be certain that he would not say it again.

She went to bed before Nils and Stevie did. From the unheated room beyond the sitting room, she heard faintly the sounds from the kitchen; the rattle of water pails and the shutting of the back door as someone went down to the well. The wood dropping in the woodbox—that was Stevie—and the muted blows of the axe as he split kindling in the shed. Then there was the return of Nils with the water pails—in the starbright silence of the night she had heard the cover of the well drop back into place—and the men's goodnights, and Stevie whistling as he ran upstairs, three steps at a time.

When Nils came into the bedroom, Joanna was sitting up in the big pineapple-topped four-poster that had been Grandma Bennett's; the room was lit by lamplight and in spite of its coldness it looked warm, with the pastel-flowered paper, the old hooked rugs on the wide, painted floor boards, and Grandma Bennett's Rose-of-Sharon quilt on the bed. Joanna, in her flannel nightdress, was brushing her hair.

Nils got into bed and lay beside her, watching her, his arms folded behind his head. She gave him a quick smile and went on brushing her hair, her head bent over. His quietness seemed strange to her sometimes; Alec could never have lain so still, merely watching her. In another moment he would have pulled her down against his chest, laughing into her eyes, pulling at her nightdress till he could kiss her bare shoulders. But not Nils. Though she couldn't see his face she felt his blue eyes, and their look was as tangible as a touch.

“Your hair shines like a crow's wing,” he said quietly. He took the brush from her hand and laid it on the stand beside the lamp. He turned down the lamp and blew it out. Then, with neither hesitation nor urgency, he pulled Joanna down beside him and put his arms around her. The stars came into the room; she saw Orion, frost­brilliant, against the upper panes.

For a long time they lay close and warm. The cold in the room was scented faintly with the lavender she liked to keep among the clean sheets. But near to her she smelled Nils' cleanliness, and the new flannel of her nightdress. Nils' breathing was deep and contented. Now was the time for her to speak.

She murmured his name into the darkness. “I'm sorry about this morning,” she said, her voice warm with her sincere penitence. “I shouldn't have jumped on you like that. So early in the morning, too.” She chuckled ruefully. “After you'd gone out I realized . . . but it was too late to call you back.” She lifted her face so that she felt the warmth of his cheek near her mouth when she spoke. “I hated to have you go out like that and be mad all day because of my foolishness. Stevie looked at me as if I was a moron, and I guess I acted like one.”

“I wasn't mad,” Nils said. “You didn't have to worry.”

“If you weren't mad, you gave a good imitation of it. Your eyes looked like blue ice.” She chuckled again. “Anyway, I'll know better than to nag any more. You're right, Nils—Uncle Nate's roof isn't your affair.”

She felt she had made a generous apology, and the matter had been taken care of. She felt wonderfully light and free. She was happy and even more generous. In the darkness she kissed his cheek and murmured, “Do you mind about taking the lobsters in, and going to the market? Because we could get Mark and Stevie to go ””

“I'll go,” Nils said. “I've told you that already. But from here on you'd better let us men decide who'll make the trips, Joanna. Caleb and Jud, Mark and Stevie and myself.” She stiffened instinctively, and he tightened his arm around her. His voice was easy and friendly. “I wasn't mad this morning, Joanna, but I thought I'd better make things clear. . . . I'd already figured out what to do about the saddleboard on the Whitcomb house, and the gardens. I've always got my work done, and kept all the loose-ends tied up, but I've never figured that I had to talk about it. Seemed as if doing it was enough. . . .”

She was rigid now. In the cold darkness she was not cold, and her skin burned. “I've already apologized,” she warned him. “I guess I've got it through my head what you wanted me to know, Nils.”

“I don't know if you have or not, Jo,” he said. “No, don't move away from me. It's cold on the other side of the bed. . . . I think we ought to get this settled between us. We haven't been married very long, and we've got a long life ahead of us, and I want to tell you this. I'm not speaking ill of the dead, because I liked Alec, though God knows there were times when I wanted to cut his throat for what he was doing to you—”

She said in a desperate, smothered voice, “ Nils, you'd better stop—” It was the first time he had mentioned Alec's name since they'd been married.

“I'll not stop,” said Nils, and he wouldn't let her move away from him. “I know what kind of a woman you had to be, Jo—what kind of a wife. You were his backbone, and you'd have made a man of him if he hadn't drowned when he did. But it was a damned hard fight, wasn't it, Jo? Every step of the way you had to watch him and pick up the pieces each time, and a lot of the time you had to tell him what to do—didn't you, Joanna?”

“Why do you have to
talk
about it! What difference does it make to you what Alec did? Oh, Nils, I never thought you were so smug and self-righteous, and—”

She felt his hand come firmly over her mouth. “Be quiet, Jo. God in heaven, I'm not being smug. But maybe you think I wasn't supposed to notice the hollows under your eyes and the times you were sick with worrying because he was gone every night. . . . And here's what you don't know, and what I'm getting at. I made up my mind then that if I ever had you, you'd know what it was to take life easy and not be anxious and shamed every day of your life. Not driven. I wanted you to know what peace was, and I wanted to work for you, Jo. I guess that's what I wanted most. To wait on you and give you things, and give you a chance to laugh a lot, and keep your chin up the way you always did when you were a kid.”

She said quietly, “Well?”

“I guess I've been taking the long way around, Jo. But what I meant to say was—you can take it easy now. You don't have to drive anybody—me or yourself. We've got a lot of time, and nothing's going to wash away the Island before we get it the way we want it to be. And I'll do my job without being told how, and you—you be easy, Joanna. And happy. That's all I want.”

The silence came into the room, with the stars. Orion had moved. . . . Nils' arms tightened even more, and she lay against him rigidly, feeling the deep steady thud of his heart, and her own heart's swiftness. She sorted out his words in her mind, and what did they amount to? That he loved her, she had already known; that he had despised Alec's way of life, she had already known; and now she knew, beyond a doubt, what he expected of her beyond her body.

But it's my Island!
her soul cried out in outraged protest.
I wasn't trying to drive him
.
I was only suggesting
—Words flooded to her lips in an angry torrent, but she held them back.

“We've always been honest with each other,” he reminded her.

“Yes,” she said in a tight, aching voice.

“That's why I told you those things.” He searched for her mouth and found it, and kissed it. “If I wasn't so crazy about you, I wouldn't give a damn. But I've wanted you too long to let things go wrong now.”

He kissed her throat gently, yet she sensed the passion behind the simple gesture. But tonight she could neither meet it nor pretend to meet it, and turned away from him with a gasping sound, as if she were suffocating. She actually felt stifled. He let her go. Quietly he said, “You thought I was smug about Alec. Well, I never was. Because no matter what he did, he could make you forget it when he touched you. I knew it, by the way you looked at him.” His low voice stopped for a moment. “Know something, Joanna? You've never looked at me like that. Not once.”

She turned back to him. She found herself crying and put out her hand to touch him. But it touched only sheets, still warm from his body; and Nils was shutting the bedroom door quietly behind him.

She waited for a time that seemed like an hour, though it couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes. The silence of the night deepened, and in it she could hear her heart beating. There was no other sound in the house. She wiped away her tears; they had come as an outlet for her almost unbearable nervous tension, and now she felt tired in every bone, as if with no effort at all she could sink into sleep.

But not with Nils gone. As she felt for her slippers in the dark, and pulled on her robe, she was faced with bewilderment. It was a new sensation for her. She didn't know what to do. She must tell Nils to come back to bed. He'd had a long day, and he needed his rest. After that—well, after that she would see. She put the thought resolutely from her and went out to the kitchen.

He was not there. The room was still warm from the dying fire, and the clock ticked placidly on the shelf. Amazing that this was the same kitchen into which she had come, also in darkness, at five o'lock this morning, to start breakfast; then the chief problem of her existence had been Randy Fowler. . . .

She halted in the middle of the room and listened. The light from the dock swept through the kitchen and caught her for a brief instant, tall in her robe, her eyes big and dark. The barn was connected with the house by the shed; and it was from the barn that the sounds came. Faint, yet distinct, the clean-cut rhythms of a hammer.

She went through the shed, past the orderly woodpile on one side and the oilskins hanging on the other—when she brushed against them their coldness sent chills over her; past the washtubs, the brooms and mops, and the other miscellany that had its place in the shed, and opened the door into the barn. Years ago, her father had fitted the barn up for a work shop, saying he was no farmer. And it was here that she found Nils.

He was patching pots. A lantern on the workbench gave him a yellow light by which to work, and he had kindled a sputtering driftwood fire in the old-fashioned stove.