Storm Tide (23 page)

“Worn out. He told me a little about it. He's done about everything a man could do and still live, I guess. And it's nearly killed him.” Nils spoke calmly and uncritically. “He collapsed after a while. Came home as soon as he could crawl, he said.” He paused for a moment. “He didn't say much. Probably will talk more, later. But there was one thing he said—that he never thought he needed the Island, till he found out he
did
need it. So he came home."”

“So he came home,” Joanna said slowly. She stood in the circle of Nils' arm without moving. “Thanks for telling me, Nils. About what ails him, I mean.”

“Don't let it get you down, Joanna.” His arm tightened around her shoulders.

“I'm not letting it get me down,” she said, and suddenly the moment of weakness was past. She straightened her shoulders imperatively against his arm. “Nils, we'll have to get him back into shape. Plenty of eggs and milk and fresh air, and sleep—he'll be himself in no time.” Her eagerness gathered momentum. “Let's see, what can he do around here? He'll need a boat, and he'll probably want the
White Lady
back again. I'll talk to him about it tomorrow. We might as well start working on that right away.” Excitedly, her natural energy flowing back into her, she walked away from Nils' arm and reached for a lamp.

“I'd better be getting supper on. I wonder where Stevie is. . . . Nils, where do you think we could get hold of some money to get Owen a boat?” The lamplight flared up and reflected twin radiances in her eyes. “You could let him have a few traps for the spring crawl—”

“Maybe he doesn't want to go lobstering,” said Nils.

“Oh, fiddlesticks! Of course he'll go lobstering! That's the best thing for him if he needs fresh air and exercise!” She felt so happy it seemed impossible that she'd been sad and tearful only a few moments ago.

Nils contemplated her steadily across the kitchen. “You can convince him, if anybody can, Jo,” he said. “Need the woodbox filled? I'll tend to it.” He went out to the shed. Joanna began to peel potatoes, singing under her breath. By spring Owen would have a boat and traps, and there'd be a crowd of Bennetts fishing out of Bennett's Island. Her knife paused, her mouth smiled. Mark was right—you could, after all, consider Nils almost a Bennett, and that strengthened the Island even more.

L
IFE IN THE HOUSE SEEMED
suddenly to be revolving around Owen. It was a way he had. And Joanna was concentrating on him, with a fierce determination to build him up again. He had come back to the Island when he needed it, and the outcome was simple. He would be willing to work for it now, as he had never worked for it before.

He slept late, and went to bed early. The first few days he hardly stirred away from the house; he would sit in the kitchen with Joanna, pipe in his mouth, watching the snow drift down silently across the gunmetal flatness of Goose Cove, or watching her work, his dark head tilted forward, his elbows on his knees. They talked, but not of himself. Joanna wouldn't ask him any questions about where he had been and what he had seen. She was too proud to seek his confidence. To her the years of his absence were a void in his life, as if he had simply dropped out of existence for that time and then had come back into it.

She knew he had lived hard. Owen had always gone to extremes. This was one of them . . . this new uncanny quietude of his, watching the snow fall or, later, watching the blue shadows of the woods lengthen across the white meadow. The other extremes were too many women, too much liquor, too much of the hell-raising he'd always liked to tell about. Only now he didn't tell about it. At thirty-two, there was a frosting of white at his temples, and deep sardonic lines in his face, an odd twist to his mouth sometimes. His eyes looked tired.

It was pneumonia that had slowed him down. That was all he told Joanna. She wondered if he had changed so much that he shrank from telling her the rest; he'd always been frank enough about his affairs when they were kids together, and she'd been one of the gang.

She talked to him as if she could never get caught up on the six years. Of their father and his dying, of Donna, their mother, of Charles, thirty-six, and his newest children, of Philip—thirty-four now and still an old bach, of their Uncle Nate's family and the last she'd heard of their cousins Jeff and Hugo.

She talked to him also of Brigport; more than she'd ever talked to Nils about it. In the old days Owen was always the first to call them “those Brigport bastards.” Now he didn't call them anything, but she knew he could understand her far better than Nils, because they were of the same stock. They were Bennetts, and this was Bennett's Island. As good as Nils was, he couldn't feel a
something
that wasn't there. He loved the Island, she knew that; but not with the deep-rooted love the Bennetts bore for it. Else he could never be so calm. . . .

Sometimes Owen walked down to the well and got water for her, and went down to the shore when Nils was due in from hauling. He hadn't yet gone down to the Eastern End to meet Helmi, and he seemed indifferent to the fact that he had a new sister-in-law.

“I might have known Mark would pick a Finn,” he said.

“What kind would you pick?” Joanna asked casually. She was mixing batter for pancakes, and as she watched the thick creaminess swirling around the spoon in the yellow bowl she was wondering how many women's lives he had disrupted in that six years, how many women sobbed at night into their pillows and alternately damned and prayed for him.

“I'm not pickin' any,” he said with a grin. “A man's an oary-eyed fool if he thinks he can't get along without women.” Nils came into the room then, and Owen, sudden deviltry lighting his tired eyes, said, “Look at Nils, there. Been waitin' for you since Adam was a kitten, and now what's he got? Bet he wonders what all the shouting was about!”

He laughed, and Nils laughed too. They went out together. Joanna didn't look up from the pancake batter. Her anger at Owen made the spoon beat till the batter flew over the rim of the yellow bowl. Then she left it abruptly, feeling out of breath. No, Owen wasn't twitting her—he didn't know—he
couldn't
know anything to go on. It had just been his idea of fun. Nils had carried it off—why couldn't
she?

She crossed the kitchen and looked down at the beach in Goose Cove, and saw them walking along the beach. It was a mild, sunny day, in spite of the snow lying heavy and white along the boughs of the spruces, and there were seabirds swimming and feeding in the Cove. Owen and Nils stopped to watch them. She wondered what they were talking about, her husband and her brother.

In a week Owen showed more color in his face, a new browning of his skin, a quickening in his step. Joanna had written to her mother, knowing how Donna would look when she read the letter and knew he was safe at last. Whatever had happened to him away from the Island, he was secure now that he had come back to it. . . . Joanna told him as the first week came to an end, that she had written. He was standing by the sink, shaving, his eyes intent on the mirror.

“I'd like to see Mother,” he said.

“She's only in Pruitt's Harbor, Owen! Two hours away.” She came and stood beside him, “She'd be so darned happy to see you,” she said eagerly.

“Not the way I look now,” he said, and his smile had the sardonic twist that didn't seem like Owen. “I'll wait till I get some of the devil's fmgerprints off my face, first.”

It was at the end of that week, too, that Ellen came home for the weekend. The storm had kept her and Joey at Brigport the weekend before. Nils hadn't told her about Owen. When she came into the entry in the bright blue snowsuit Donna had sent her for Christmas, her pink-cheeked, narrow-boned face framed in a hood pointed like a brownie's, she stopped short in the doorway to look at the tall stranger standing by the stove.

Joanna waited, Nils, coming into the entry behind Ellen, waited. Owen didn't move while Ellen's eyes moved over his face, comparing his thick black eyebrows and widow's peak, strong nose and cleft chin with her mother's and Stevie's. She looked at them all consideringly, and then back at Owen.

“You must be Owen,” she said finally.

“Hello, young Donna,” he said, as soberly as she had spoken. She smiled at him then, knowing what he meant.

After dinner Owen said suddenly, “Let's go for a walk, Ellen.”

“I'm going to wipe the dishes for Mother,” she said.

“You ask Mother if she always wiped the dishes when she was supposed to,” Owen suggested, and winked at her. Her wide, humorous mouth, so much like Alec's, quirked. Joanna said hastily, “You can go this time, Ellen. It's better to go for a walk now, while it's warn.”

Ellen looked gravely delighted, and began to get into her snowsuit. Stevie had gone down to the shore, and Nils was attending to the wood fire in the sitting room. Over Ellen's absorbed fair head, parted into neat and shining pigtails, Joanna's eyes met Owen's. He grinned at her, and she felt a sudden upsurging of happiness, because then he looked exactly as he used to look. He was on the way back. It might take a long time, but she would get him there, and when he was strong and hard again, with the
White Lady
solid under his feet, he would have his two hundred traps, and Brigport would see then just how dead Bennett's Island was.

When he and Ellen had gone out, she went into the sitting room where Nils was. From the window they could see the tall figure and the diminutive bright blue one making for the flat rocks that reached along the shore from Goose Cove to Chip Cove.

"Do you realize it's the first real walk he's taken?” she murmured.

Nils said, “Does he think he's going to shoot any seabirds with that rifle? He doesn't know Fair Ellen.”

“Oh, she made him promise he wouldn't kill anything with it,” Joanna laughed. Then, soberly, she turned to Nils.

“Do you mind them being here, Nils? First Stevie, and then Owen?”

“Why should I mind? It's their home.”

She felt herself flushing, though there was no slur in his tone. “Your home, Nils,” she corrected him.

“Look, Jo, they were raised here. The house belongs to your mother and you and the boys.”

She knew she should leave it at that, but for the life of her she couldn't. “But we're running the household—you and I. You're my husband, so that makes you the man of the house.”

“Does it? Thanks,” said Nils, and, surprisingly, grinned at her. “Well, I'm going back to work. Anything you want done first?”

“No,” she said absently. But as he walked out of the room and through the kitchen she had an impulse to run after him and shake him hard and—no, what good would it do? Somewhere along the line Nils had developed this new and annoying habit of making her say things he could pick up; and if he didn't pick them up in words, he had a look. . . .

But there was something to say, after all. She went out into the kitchen where he was pulling on his boots. “Nils, I wanted to tell you while Owen's not around. . . . If he wants to borrow from you, you mustn't let him have too much.”

He glanced at her remotely, as if deep in thought. “Why?”

“Well, the other boys can let him have some pots too, and we can find him some sort of boat till he can earn enough to get the
Whitt Lady
back. Unless you want to let him go with you for a while.”

“He's your brother, isn't he? And you want him back on his feet as soon as you can get him there.”

“Yes, but why should everything be handed to him without any effort on his part?” she argued. “He walked out on the
White Lady
, why should you make it easy for him to get her back? Let him work for her.”

“Is that the only reason?” Nils asked her quietly. “Or is it because you don't think I know how to handle my money?”

She stared at him, and then turned quickly and went out of the kitchen. He followed her into the sitting room and came up behind her where she stood at the window, her forehead against the cold glass. She felt his hands grip her shoulders lightly.

“Listen, Jo,” he said softly, “why don't you relax? When are you going to stop worrying about me? I'll do my part, and I'll do my job, and I'll do it right, too. You don't have to plague yourself with thinking there'll be nothing in the money box when we need it. . . . You had to plan for the both of you, once, but not any longer. . . .”

“Do you always have to go back to that?” she demanded, shrugging her shoulders out from under his hands. “It's not like you, Nils.”

“I have to go back to it, Joanna. I know what makes you fuss, sometimes. And you don't have to fuss now. I'm not—”

“No, you're not Alec,” she said. “Why don't you say it, Nils?” She swung her head around and saw how brilliantly, coldly blue his eyes were.

“I wasn't going to say that, Jo. But you've said it yourself, and you know the truth of it, and that ought to be enough for you.” He left her abruptly. She was alone in the house again. It seemed to her that she was forever listening to the sharp sound of a door closing, and then knowing she was alone.

By the first of March Owen's Saturday walks with Ellen became a regular feature of her weekends at home. . . . It was a March that came in like a lamb, and it promised an early spring. March was full of promises. The young Fennells would be out by the end of the month, and there was the Whitcomb place to be cleaned and aired for them. And then there was the loveliest promise of all—that of the Island spring.

After the storms of February, it was a heaven-sent boon to the Islanders to have March come in with skies of blown blue and white to be seen through the bare, amethyst-tinged branches of a birch tree, to feel that certain softness in the wind, to see the summery, glistening blue of the sea on a fine morning. It might not last, the Islanders said, but by golly they'd make the most of it. . . . Mark and Stevie took the lobsters ashore that lovely weekend; Caleb and Jud brought the children home from school Friday afternoon, and on Saturday Nils went out early, to get in a good day's work while the weather held. He intended to start shifting his gear, a few pots at a time, so that when the spring crawl began in April, he would be ready.