Storm Tide (22 page)

But when she asked Helmi, later, over the coffee cups, the girl shrugged. “I don't notice it much,” she said. Something about her kept Joanna from telling her what Vinnie and Marion had said. Helmi wouldn't be interested in them, or even in Joanna. It wasn't conceit, Joanna thought; it was just that nobody else existed for her except Mark. So she wouldn't notice the wind shrieking around the house at night because she would have Mark to herself then.

The boys came in for a mug-up, and again Joanna saw the clear, brooding, green gaze rest on them. The other look, which Joanna had caught once, didn't come back. Watching Helmi's way with the boys, a silent way of serving them, of nodding at their compliments on her turnovers, of shrugging at their jokes, she thought with a tinge of sadness,
We all have something. She has her jealousy. Nils and I
. . .

It must have been the wind that made her feel like this. She wouldn't stay very long. In her own kitchen she would feel better. And if the wind would stop blowing she wouldn't have these morbid thoughts.

Walking briskly homeward she thought about herself and Nils.
There isn't really anything wrong with us
, she reflected.
We're honest with each other, anyway
.

The next day was boat-day but nobody went over to Brigport. The mouth of the harbor was rough enough; but even if anyone had wanted to get through it, the way back from Brigport would be too dangerous. Nils went down to the shore to work with Caleb and Jud on the old wharf. They were re-planking it, and had cut stout straight spruces for the new spilings. Mark came up, and he and Stevie went down to help out. So Joanna was alone in the kitchen. She paused frequently to look down across the wintry marsh at the harbor and the surf on the rugged point beyond Caldwells'.

It was in one of those pauses, when she was getting dinner on the table, that she saw the boat come into the harbor. She saw it plunge down almost out of sight between the swells, rise up again, wallowing crazily in the tide-rip. Panic tightened her throat. It was a Brigport boat coming. That could mean a telephone call—a telegram—an emergency. She wondered if the men down at the shore saw it. She wanted to put on her things and hurry down there. Watching the boat come into the comparative peace of the harbor, heading straight for the old wharf, she felt as if she couldn't bear to stand here dumbly and wait. She dressed and went out into the bitter wind that tried to blow her down the slope to the marsh.

The boat was almost up to the wharf, and the men had stopped to look. Caleb was lighting his pipe, and the puffs of smoke were blue in the bright air. He glanced up from under his shaggy brows at Joanna.

“Kind of in a pucker, ain't ye?”

She grinned at him, a little anxiously. “It's an occasion, isn't it?”

“The rest of 'em think so.” He nodded his head toward the end of the wharf, where Nils, Mark and Stevie stood, with Jud craning his short neck to see past them as the boat slid within hailing distance.

“It's Jonas Pierce,” Joanna said. “I wonder what he wants.” Her heart was hammering. She told herself it was from her quick walk down from the house.

“Looks like he's got a passenger,” Caleb said. They walked down to the others, just as Pierce cut off his engine and the boat reached the wharf. He grinned up at them, his angular Yankee face burned red with cold across cheekbones and nose.

“Mite cold, ain't it?” he called up. “Got company for ye. He come out in the mailboat. Tried to keep him with me till better weather, but he wan't interested.” He clambered up on the bow and threw a line to Nils, who made it fast around a spiling. There was someone coming out of the cuddy, a tall man in a leather jacket and brown tweed trousers. He had to bend his head and broad shoulders to get through the small opening. It was Owen Bennett. For six years they'd half-believed him dead; and they'd believed beyond halfway that they'd never see him back on the Island again, big and handsome, with a sort of wild, glowing strength that flashed out from him like too­dazzling sunshine from the sea. He had never written, or looked back in all those years. Now he had come home.

Joanna's first thought was,
I never saw him look like that before
, and her heart felt a great shock. The dark Bennett eyes that swept over the silent group in that instant were the same, but not the gaunt face, with the big bones showing so clearly, and the sallow-tinged pallor instead of the warm, healthy brown.

It was Mark who recovered first from his astonishment. “Jesus Christ!” he exploded, and jumped down into the cockpit. “You old—where the hell have you been?” He was pummeling Owen in the ribs, and Owen was laughing; it brought him back then, the old Owen. No, it was a ghost of Owen. No wonder her throat kept drying.

“My brother,” she said swiftly to Caleb. She ran forward over the new planking, conscious suddenly of movement all around her. Stevie was handing up Owen's bag to Nils, Jud was shaking his head and repeating, “I never would of knew him!” The water surged in long swells against the spilings and washed over the rocks beneath the planks, the surf roared and flashed on the harbor points, the gulls swooped down to the sea and rose straight upward again on the wind.

Owen climbed up on the wharf. He shook hands all around, and his voice was the same. “How goes it, Nils?” “Hi, kid,” to Stevie. “That you, Jud? I'll be damned!” Yes, his voice was the same. . . .
Almost
the same.
But it's too quiet
, Joanna thought in bewilderment. Everything about him was too quiet. Where was the magnificent noise of him?

His eyes met hers then, and his whole expression sharpened, as if he saw her questioning. It was only for a moment, and then as she smiled at him, she could have sworn she saw his eyes go blank. It was as if she had spoken her question aloud and he was pretending he hadn't heard it. Instead he put his arms around her and kissed her cheek. She hugged him back, and felt his thinness.

“Anything to eat up at the house?” he demanded.

“Pea soup and johnnycake,” she said promptly.

“Then what are we waiting for?” He picked up his bag. Nils and Mark and Stevie began to pick up the tools they'd been using on the wharf.

Jud said, “Makes me think—I'm kind of lank. Wait till I tell the old lady who come! . . . Come on up to the house, Jonas, and have a mug-up!”

“Wait a minute, Owen,” Joanna said. “Here's a new Bennett's Islander. Caleb Caldwell.”

Owen, his eyes appraising, put out his hand to meet Caleb's. “How do you like it?”

“I like it fine,” said Caleb, and if Owen's glance was appraising, Caleb's took in every line and plane and indentation of Owen's face in the brief moment when his eyes looked out from their shaggy­browed hollows.

Then Owen smiled, and in that smile and the way it warmed his voice, he was completely Owen. “That's good. It needs men like you.” He walked on, toward the road, and Joanna followed him. Behind her came Nils, and the boys.

It seemed to Joanna that she had no time at all that day to be alone with her thoughts; if she could just be alone a half-hour she could figure things out, and adapt herself to Owen's being home again. To this new Owen, rather; for she could not reconcile him with the Owen who had alternately tormented and cajoled her, who had taken her tongue-lashings and sworn good-naturedly at her temper, who had filled the house with storm or a very boisterous sort of sunshine. There was racket enough in the homestead that afternoon, but it was Stevie and Mark who made it, it was Owen who sat still, talking sometimes with Nils, or not talking at all, but merely smoking, and listening.

She would watch him covertly; his proftle was the same, decisively cut, with quick, strong strokes as if the sculptor had known exactly where he was going. It was like all Bennett profiles, bold of nose and chin, with eyes deep-set.

But this quietness. . . . That was what baffled her.

Late in the afternoon, when the foot of the meadow was hidden in a faintly purple cloak of shadow, Mark went home. He bade them all a blithe farewell. “Five of us, now,” he said exultantly. “Five Bennetts. Jesus, we're doin' all right!”

“Who makes five?” Joanna asked quickly, laughing at his excitement. “You can't even count straight.”

“I forgot. Nils isn't a Bennett.” Mark grinned at Nils. “But he's the same as one.”

Joanna didn't know why she felt uncomfortable. She glanced quickly at Nils, and said, “Maybe that's a doubtful compliment. He'd probably rather be a Sorensen.”

Mark laughed and shrugged. “Well, anyway . . . Take a walk down one of these days, Owen. Everybody come down. My God, it isn't the end of the world down there!”

“Pretty damn' near it,” Owen observed. He lit another cigarette. “Remember me to your wife.”

Stevie picked up the water pails and went out with Mark. Owen stood up and stretched his long, lean body. Too lean for Owen, Joanna thought, remembering how he had always made even the biggest room seem small. He said, “Hey, Jo, where am I supposed to turn in?”

“In your own room, of course,” she said. “It's all straightened up for you.”

“I'm going up then. Take a soshe before supper.” “Take a soshe!” That was what he'd always said for “take a nap.” Joanna said suddenly, “Are you glad to be home, Owen?”

“Happy as a clam at high water.” He grinned down at her, and then went past her. They heard him going up the stairs. Not running, the way he'd done six years ago. She and Nils stood in the kitchen, listening to the sound of his feet, and their own silence lay immutably between them. Then Nils said, “He forgot his bag.” He picked it up, and then Joanna was alone. Distantly she heard their voices, and then the shutting of a door. She turned back to her supper preparations.

While she worked, she tried to remember what Owen had said since his arrival at noon. Not one word of what he'd done in those six years, since the morning he'd said the Island was too small for him, and had walked out of this kitchen. He had kissed Ellen good-bye, she remembered, lifting her out of the high chair and touching his big nose to her diminutive one. He'd been splendidly confident, ready for anything, he'd had money in his pocket and the superb health of a young lion.

And that was all they had known of him. She'd had her own griefs and preoccupations; trying to darn smoothly over the cruel tear in her life's fabric that had been Alec's death; seeking a way to a clear independent future for Ellen and herself; watching the Island life go to pieces. Then, when only her father was left, stubbornly hanging to his boat and his traps, sure the tide was on the turn, there had been the fire that took the traps, and so they had left the Island. But they had not thought it would be for long. They had never dreamed that Stephen, her father, would never see it again, and that it would be five years before she set foot on its red rocks again.

It had been hard, trying to find a new rhythm for life on the mainland. Sometimes it had been torment for her, who had been so passionate and stubborn in her oneness with the Island.

So she had not thought about Owen too much, except to believe he would fall on his feet, whatever happened to him. . . . But now, in her thirties, with Ellen growing fast, she looked back to that time and wondered at the iron courage of Donna and Stephen. What agony of spirit must have been theirs! What torment her mother must have endured, thinking of Owen, for whom she had always feared! She remembered her father's steel-lipped face when Charles, the oldest son, had brought home the girl he'd “got into trouble.” So how had he felt about Owen?. . . Some day she could speak about it with her mother, but she would never find out what Stephen had really thought. . . .

Dusk was filtering softly into the corners of the kitchen, and behind the saw-toothed black wall of woods the sky was darkening bronze. Nils hadn't come down from upstairs yet. She felt a pang of jealousy because they were talking; yes, they'd always been chums, but so had she and Owen been comrades of a sort, and sometimes, in rare moments that she had never forgotten, they had come close to each other.

But the pang didn't last for long. She knew she should light a lamp, and dispel the dreamy sadness that surrounded her, but at the same time she wanted to hold on to it. She wondered if her father knew that tonight two of his sons and his daughter were to be sleeping in this house—the boys in their old rooms, and the girl, as mistress of the house, in the room where he and his wife had slept. And that Owen had come home. . . .

She wasn't surprised to feel tears slipping down her cheeks. She stood alone, looking down at the dusk-rimmed harbor, the shadows thickening behind her, and let her sadness possess her. She felt weak and tired, and it was a relief to let go, if only for a moment. She didn't know Nils had come down until he spoke quietly from the darkness behind her.

“You want a light, Joanna?”

“No!” she said swiftly, and then, with a quietness to match his: “I didn't know you were here—you startled me. No, don't light the lamp, Nils. Not yet.”

She didn't want him to see the tears. They were a sign of weakness. She stared out toward a harbor that was no longer to be seen. Nils came and stood beside her. He didn't touch her, but she felt his nearness.

“Tired tonight?” he asked her gently.

“Not tired.” And then, because of the bewilderment that had pursued her all day, and her sense of weakness, she surrendered to an impulse and said, “I'm worried, Nils.”

“About Owen?”

“Yes.” She turned to him quickly, straining to see him in the dimness. “What's the matter with him, Nils? He's not himself.”

“He's tired, Jo, that's all.” She felt Nils' hand brush her cheek, and his finger discovered a tear. He put his arm around her shoulders and she was oddly grateful for it.

“Tired?” she repeated.