Storm Tide (26 page)

“Going out?” he asked quietly.

“Yes” she said. “Don't come with me, please.” She spoke as quietly as he.

He let her go, and she went through the kitchen, took her jacket and scarf from the hook and went out. The wind caught at her with rough, wilful hands and cut her to the bone. Without lowering her head she walked into it, out on the long high point behind the house. The smell of the sea was all around her, cold and salty, and the light from the Rock swung its beam across her and away, and then back again. Spiny rosebushes caught at her slacks and once she bumped her shin on a sharp edge of rock. It brought involuntary tears to her eyes but still she kept walking, driven by a fire of furious energy. She knew she couldn't go back to the house and face Nils until she walked off this intensity of anger, which amounted to passion.

We were to work together for the Island
, she thought,
and this is what it is. This it what it will be
. . . . She hoped she wouldn't hate Jud. That would be foolish. For Jud hadn't taken anything away from her. It was Nils who had done it. Her husband.

She found a place at the very end of the point, a shelf of rock where she used to read when she was a girl; with sheltering walls of rock behind her, and the sea gurgling and splashing below her, tossing up a salty bead of spray to her sometimes, she sat with her knees drawn up and her chin resting on them. Between the flashes of the Rock light it was very dark, and the darkness was full of sound; she found herself listening. The night-voice of the sea, the wind blowing across the point and rustling in the dry dead leaves and grass; the gulls on the ledges — did they never sleep?

The Island was talking to her. It was all around her. She listened, and forgot her anger and her bitterness in the moment when the Island spoke to her. She found the old certainty again, the sure knowledge that she was the Island's child; and as if the hard rock behind her and under her were sheltering arms, she leaned back, relaxed, and was comforted.

The Island was with her. In spite of Brigport, in spite of Nils and all the others, she would find a way to work for it. Let Jud have the car, even though it was her right. There would be something else for her.

W
HILE HE WAS ASHORE WITH
M
ARK
, Stevie had seen a boat he wanted. And he had discovered something else too—the whereabouts of the
White Lady
. His news was the final spark to set aflame Owen's desire to have his boat back. If he had forsaken her for all these years, he had only to hear that she was fishing out of Pleasant Point, with a canopy top disfiguring her long, lovely lines, and he would not rest until she was back in her own harbor again.

She was his, for all he'd left her for his father to sell. He had designed her himself, sworn and struggled while he built her, fought those who'd tried to hinder him, who'd dared to lay a malicious hand on her hull, and launched her on a shining blue day in June. She was his as much as a child is flesh and blood of its parents.

He said none of these things in words, but Joanna knew they were there. She knew by the way he walked the floor after Stevie had told him, by the way he stood at the window, his dark face brooding, and, finally, by the way he went out of the house into the raw March afternoon and prowled alone in the woods until evening. She was not surprised when he came downstairs the next morning, while Nils was eating his breakfast by lamplight, and announced that he was going to start building pots that day, if Nils would lend him laths and the nails.

So he had begun to work for the
White Lady
. He spent eight hours a day building pots. Between times he ate a good deal, slept heavily, walked sometimes to the Eastern End to see Mark, but never for long. Now that he had begun to work he was like a dynamo. He was himself again in his impatient drive and energy; in two things only was he not himself. He was getting along without liquor. And he rarely mentioned women. It made Joanna wonder even more intensely about the six years of his life that were lost to his family.

There was something else she wondered, as she watched her menfolk come and go. She knew that when Owen had his pots built, he would have to use another man's boat to work from, and it would still be a long time before he could make a clear profit of a thousand dollars to buy the
White Lady
. And so she wondered if, after her warning, Nils would lend him the money. He probably would, she thought as she mended and washed and cooked for the men; she had been foolish to think anything she said could influence Nils, if his mind was made up. It was odd, how little she had known him after all. . . .

She showed no resentment when it became common knowledge that Jud was going to buy lobsters. She even congratulated him, and the eyes that met Nils' were darkly clear and guileless. It didn't really matter. If she could not have the car, she would have something else. She would know it when she came to it, and even Nils couldn't interfere with destiny.

Stevie brought his boat home less than a week after he had spotted her. He had the money, made in the winter's fishing, and the
Elaine
was ready for use. She was being sold by the widow of a fisherman who had just died, and he had kept his engine in smooth-running condition. Stevie sailed her home proudly; she was a broad-beamed, sturdy, 28-footer, with power in her engine.

“She's not much for looks,” he admitted, when almost everybody assembled on the old wharf to view the
Elaine
. “But she can go. Of course, she's a mite wet. She throws a hell of a lot of water, but I figure that'll keep the women from pestering me to go sailing.”

“What women do you mean?” Joanna teased him. She winked at Helmi, who stood beside her, her fair head uncovered in the crisp breeze. “Helmi and me? Can't we pester?”

“Present company always excluded,” Stevie said gravely. “You want to go now? I ll take you out around the harbor ledge buoy and back.”

“Come on, Helmi,” Joanna said eagerly. “It's nice and choppy out, too. There'll be spray flying.”

“Too bad you got just the family females to tote around, Stevie boy,” Jud said. “But they're good-lookers, anyhow.”

Stevie grinned, and jumped down from the wharf to the beach where his punt was tied. “You girls coming or not?” He stood looking up at them, his dark eyes narrowed against the sun, his teeth white in his brown face. Joanna slipped her arm through Helmi's.

“Come on—” She felt the younger girl's arm tighten.

“No,” Helmi said. “You go, Joanna. But I don't feel like it.” She seemed uneasy. “I think it's too rough—”

“I didn't know you were afraid o f a little water,” Stevie called to her. “But it will be kind of wet, at that. You nervous, Joanna?”

“Not me!” Some sixth sense told her not to urge Helmi to come. The girl had her reasons. The choppiness was not really one of them, she was sure. Perhaps it was Mark. He took odd spells of temper—perhaps Helmi thought he wouldn't like it if he came in from hauling and found she'd been running around in another boat, even Stevie's.

Joanna released Helmi's arm and said, “Then go up to the house where it's warm, Helmi. And would you start some coffee for us? Nils ought to be in pretty soon, and we'll all have a mug-up.”

“I will start the coffee,” Helmi said, her sea-green eyes wide and serious on Joanna's face. “But then I think I'd better walk home, and be there when Mark comes in.”

Owen, who had been talking boats with Jud at the end of the wharf, came up beside them, and shoved his dark yachting cap back on his head. He grinned down at his sister and sister-in-law, his eyes full of black diamond glints behind thick lashes. There was a ruddy color in his skin. “Stop lallygaggin', Jo. Steve's waiting. I'll walk Helmi up to the house and make her drink a cup of coffee before she starts for home.”

“That's right, Owen, you look out for her,” Joanna said, and jumped down to the wet, pebbly beach. Jud's wheezy laughter followed her.

“That's mighty like tellin' a rabbit to look out for a head o' lettuce, ain't it?”

She half-turned back toward the round and ribald little man, but Owen and Helmi were already leaving the wharf, and Stevie was saying, “Grab hold there and help me shove this punt down, Jo.”

When they were rowing out to the mooring, the water slapping smartly under the punt's bow, Joanna said, “Jud goes too far with his humor, sometimes.”

“Oh, nobody minds what Jud says,” answered Stevie. He looked over his shoulder toward the
Elaine
. “See the little sweetheart. Maybe she looks kind of stubby alongside the
Donna
, but she looks good to me.”

“Me too”, said Joanna, and prepared to ask all the questions that were routine when you went aboard a new boat; they were, she thought, equivalent to what you inquired about a new baby. Smiling at this thought, she clambered over the
Elaine
's washboards and forgot about Jud.

March brought the Fennells. It was a March that was beginning to look like April, and the day they came showed buds on the alders, new green grass in the sunny sheltered places around the houses, and a sweet chattering of sparrows and kinglets and nuthatches in the spruces. From the Bennett house one heard the noisy spring crying of the gulls out on the ledges, and in the sunlit blue of Goose Cove the seals were playing. There was a faint nip in the wind, and a splashing of white around the rocks, but in the road through the marsh the mud puddles reflected the skies of spring.

A good day for them to come, Joanna thought. She had a fire going down at the Whitcomb house so it would be warm, and on her own stove their dinner was cooking. It was a Saturday and Ellen was home; but the men were out to haul, after a week of rain and wind. Owen had gone out with Nils, and was setting his first load of pots.

Ellen was so excited about the newcomers that she kept running up from her playhouse on the point to stand on a high rock near the house and peer down across the harbor, toward the western end of Brigport. Joanna, laughing at her daughter's eagerness, was almost as excited. Another family for the Island; it was enough to excite anybody. Nils was pleased too, and he intended to be in early enough to help move the Fennells' furniture.

Another family for the Island
. One less empty house. In another year how many empty houses would there be? None, she prayed. If God was good. And He
was
good. He would send others. And plenty of lobsters, so the men wouldn't be discouraged; and not too many storms. She laughed aloud at her specifications. If everybody prayed as she did, God would have a hard time filling the orders. Then she was at the window again, looking down at the harbor. Joey Caldwell was rowing his father's dory—he had five traps of his own, and because the harbor mouth was quiet today, he could go and haul them. Marion Gray was going past the old camps where the hand-to-mouth fishermen used to live, when Joanna was a girl. Maybe in another year even the camps would be occupied. But not with old pod fishermen, but with men who knew how to work, and to get the most from it. The camps could be fixed up; she'd talk to Nils about it.

She'd liked the weatherbeaten old men who'd lived there during her girlhood; everybody had. And if they'd been living in the camps now, she wouldn't want to put them out. But they were gone, and what was the sense of bringing back others like them?

While she was at the window she saw the
Janet
F. hauling out beyond the western end of Brigport. She wondered if Randy and Winslow were together. If Randy was alone, and looking over at Bennett's, what did he think? Probably not of her, unless to wonder how he'd come to act so foolishly about a woman almost ten years older than he. Randy's sort was easily consoled. Was his father as easily consoled? Or did he still plot and dream behind his smooth, expressionless face?

With spring so richly promising in the air and the lobsters coming so well, and the Brigport traps not set so close as they had been, Joanna found it hard to worry.

There was only one thing to consider, and it made a vertical line between her black eyebrows as she turned away from the window and the lusty, flashing day outside. Randolph Fowler hadn't given up in the long, silent fight to put Timothy Merrill out of the business the Merrills had run on Brigport since long before the Civil War. And maybe Timothy had thought himself safe too—safe, and a little smarter than the “foreigners.”

There's danger in being safe
, Stephen Bennett used to say to his arrogant and cock-sure children. And Joanna, repeating his words now, almost as some mystic incantation to rise with the steam from the boiling lobsters, knew beyond a doubt the truth of them.

She dipped the smoking hot, red-orange lobsters from the kettle into the white-enameled pan and put fresh ones into the bubbling sea water, their noses down so they would die quickly. Ellen burst into the kitchen.

“They're coming, Mother! Two boats, past Brigport.” She saw Joanna pick up another live lobster, holding it behind the waving claws, and her vivid face clouded. “Does it hurt them, Mother?” she asked in a small voice. She had asked it many times before, and always Joanna answered her carefully.

“Only for a minute, Ellen. And we're supposed to eat them. God wouldn't have told men how to build boats and make traps if he hadn't meant for them to catch lobsters.”

Ellen said doubtfully, “Yes. . . . But how could anybody get a little tiny calf, and love it, and feed it, and know all the time they were going to kill it to eat?” Her blue-gray eyes misted. Joanna said, “I don't know, dear,” and mentally crossed a calf off next summer's purchases. She did hope Ellen would let them have a pig, however.

“Did you say they were coming?” she asked. And Ellen's sparkle came back.

“Let's go down and meet them, Mother! Come on!”

The tide was coming and the two boats tied up alongside the old wharf; when the tide was high, it would be easy to unload the furniture. Matthew Fennell's boat was a neat, high-bowed craft with a roomy cuddy, and a jigger mast on the stern. The other, larger, boat carried even more furniture, piled on the deck around the cuddy, on the washboards and stern, and in the cockpit, leaving the owner just enough room to stand at the wheel and move around the engine box. He was a strapping, ruddy man with a loud voice and an infectious laugh.