Storm Tide (29 page)

She stopped, making a helpless gesture with her hands. “Nils, whatever made you ask that?”

His eyes swept across the moonlit stretch of sea and then came back to her. “That's what I thought you'd say, Joanna. Well —” The old gate creaked faintly as he swung it open. “It's a good thing to know just where I fit.” He motioned her through the gate.

“Nils —” she began, hardly knowing what she wanted to say.

“Never mind, Joanna. I think I understand.”

She walked wordlessly beside him through the Island's fields, with the sea on either side. It was a world hushed with sleep and white with moonlight. They passed Schoolhouse Cove and came to the corner where they turned between the old gateposts and started up the rise to the house. There was no sound except the soft rush of waves on the beach and their feet on the gravel of the road.

Joanna knew she was walking in beauty — the beauty of the night and the Island. But at the same time she walked in loneliness, a strange and sudden loneliness. She looked at Nils as he walked beside her; sometimes his elbow brushed her arm. But she had the odd sensation that if she reached out to take hold of him, he would not be there.

S
EPTEMBER AND
O
CTOBER SEEMED TO BE
the first months of a new year on the Island. That was the time of the fall spurt. In the summer the lobsters were always scarce; they crawled under the rocks to shed and breed, and though the men kept some of their traps out, it was what Nils called “playing at lobstering.” Some of the men went handlining and made money in cod and an occasional big halibut. There was a good market for them in Vinalhaven, and it wasn't too far to run at the end of a day's good fishing. All of the men helped in the gardens after supper at night. Every family had a garden, even the newcomers, the Fennells, and the canning kept the women busy through the summer.

The canning started in July, with the first wild strawberries that seemed to grow wherever there was grass to shelter them. Sou'west Point was the richest ground, although it was a long walk, through the woods and over the rocks, to reach them; the Bennett meadow was full, so were Uncle Nate's fields, and the field at the Eastern End. Young Nora Fennell was ecstatic about the berries she found around her new home. For the month of July everybody feasted on wild strawberries, picked in drooping red clusters whose sweetness melted on the tongue and tasted of cold, clean fog, and summer rain, of concentrated sunshine flavored with bay and red clover and spruce, and born of the lambent blue sky of the Island summer.

They ate strawberries picked along the overgrown path through the orchard, they ate them crushed and sugared, and whole with cream; they ate them between tender crusts, and poured in their own bright juice over split and buttered hot biscuit. And the women cooked them down into jam that, eaten in winter, would hold the essence of summer in its wine-red richness.

The vegetables matured in the gardens, and those not eaten fresh were canned; beets, beet greens, swiss chard, beans—string and shelled—some tomatoes, though they were hard to raise on the Island. The potato blossoms danced in the light winds, in time with the buttercups and daisies and red clover that carpeted the fields, splashed with the blazing orange of devil's paint brush. The turnips and squash were meant to last through the winter and spring, to be eaten as fancy dictated with soups, roasts, corned fish and pork craps.

The canning was the major thing in the summer, and it seemed an endless round. Between picking berries—raspberries and blackberries followed the strawberries—and working in the garden, and canning, Joanna was never idle; and she was always ready for sleep at night. Nils filled every spare moment too. He built over the boat-shop, with some help from the others; but sometimes he was up before daylight and down at the harbor, working alone before anyone was up. When he went to bed at night he was ready to sleep, like Joanna, and the next day always came so quickly. . . .

The men had stopped selling their lobsters to one of the big concerns. Charles Bennett had written about a friend of his who was starting up a business and would pay even more for carred lobsters than the big companies. It was true. Richards was eager for all the lobsters he could get, and he paid five cents extra, to the others' three cents. Like the big companies he ran a lobster smack. It was small, and he was his own captain, but he came promptly every two weeks and collected the lobsters from Jud's car, so that now no one had to go ashore with the crates. Moreover, Richards, a laconic but obliging sort, took in the grocery orders and delivered the supplies on the next trip. Jud said it was like the old days, when he was a young sprout.

Joanna had written to Portland about the return of a postoffice to Bennett's Island. If she could get it, then the mailboat would have to run down to Bennett's and deliver mail and freight. The next step was a store. Oh, things were moving along.

The spring and summer had been richly peaceful for the Island. Brigport had kept its distance. Except for the mail and occasional freight, there was no need for the Bennett's people to go to the larger island. And if Tom Robey thought they would come to him again for bait, he was disappointed; whenever Owen went ashore in the
White Lady
—for she was back again—or Nils in the
Donna
, they brought out several barrels of bream. In September the
Marianne
had come out several times and seined herring. And Richards could always be depended upon to bring bait out on the smack.

It was a time when you could imagine almost any dream and hope coming true; and Joanna had enough dreams and hopes—and plans—to last her a lifetime.

On a late October morning—so incredibly warm and peaceful as to be an echo of midsummer—she stood on the stone front doorstep, picking an armful of the small white and lavender-rose chrysanthemums that grew under the front windows. Her mother had planted them there, years before. . . . Joanna looked out across the Island, warm as summer, yet tinted with autumn over the marsh and the fields, and the yellow-leaved birches and alders, the fire-red bushes at the edge of the woods, and the tiny scarlet vines creeping among the tall, tawny field grasses. The smell of the chrysanthemums was cool and spicy, blended with the sunny, aromatic odor of the earth beyond the shade of the house; bird-voices were loud in the windless, dreamy day. It seemed as if they always chattered and fluted and whistled with an extra throat-bursting energy in the fall, to make up for the silent winter to come.

She saw some black ducks fly up from Schoolhouse Cove, their flight criss-crossing the long, effortless arcs of the gulls. It was an instant of loveliness, or rather of the pure essence of beauty. It quickened her heart. Sometimes she had moments of indefinable anxiety, even of depression; sometimes she felt edgy and short-tempered, and that bothered her, because she had never been nervous. But these moments didn't last. And on days like this one, she felt energy fairly teeming through her.

She should soon hear about the postoffice, she thought. Perhaps today, since it was a boatday. . . . She stood on the shady doorstep and listened to the silence of the house behind her. Ellen had gone back to school, to the third grade, and Mrs. Robey. Stevie was taking Nils to Brigport, and would bring back the mail when he returned. The
Donna
's engine was not working right, and Nils was going ashore to see what he could find for a new one.

She realized suddenly that she was looking forward to the next few days. It would be a change to sleep alone, to read as late as she wanted to, and then fall asleep with no sense of restraint. She told herself often that Nils asked nothing of her now because he was so tired; but sometimes when he came to bed she wondered if he had really fallen asleep so quickly, and she would be nearly engulfed by a wave of mingled compassion and guilt.
If he feels cheated
, she would think,
why doesn't he hate me?
She felt at those times that it would be easier if he looked at her with contempt; and then she would tell her-self that they had agreed to make their marriage a partnership for work, and he had nothing for which to reproach her. If she couldn't look at him as she had looked at Alec—was it her fault?

And when it came to reproaches, she had her own resentments, if she cared to let them flourish. The reproofs he had given her; the way he had assumed control of the Island business and the way her brothers let him do it; the lobster car, where Jud now reigned. . . . If Nils ever felt cheated, didn't she feel cheated—though she never showed it—when she saw the business Jud was doing? Not only with the Bennett's men, but there was also a handful of men from Brig-port who for reasons of their own didn't like Ralph Fowler. It was turning out just as she had planned—except that she wasn't running the car. Oh, she could have the postoffice—Nils approved of that. Once or twice she'd known a childish, furious impulse to throw up the idea, but such impulses never lasted. After all, the postoffice was for the good of the Island. More people would come to it when the mail ran regularly.

She thought of all those things as she stood on the doorstep, twirling a chrysanthemum in her fingers, its petals still dotted with dew. She looked past the schoolhouse at Tenpound between the Islands, and heard the
Aurora B
.'s high whistle as she entered Brig-port harbor. In a little while now Nils would be gone, and for a few days she would relax.

“Why can't things be the way I want them?” she asked the ragged flower. She could not hide from herself the fact that sometimes she knew an almost intolerable tension, and a frightening sensation that life could not go on like this.

In the warm October silence, the drone of Caleb's hauling gear, down in Goose Cove, reminded her that when Stevie came back with the mail he'd want to go out to haul. No time for dreaming or anything else now. She went into the house, cool and empty this morning, and put the chrysanthemums into an old pitcher. She set it on the table, where she could sniff the cool, frosty scent whenever she went by.

Dry, seasoned spruce made a quick hot fire, and she had the water on for coffee while she cut up the cold potatoes and corned hake for the fish hash. Stevie would want a good dinner, and fish hash was the thing, with a whiff of onion in it, and the pork scraps left over with the fish and potatoes from the night before. She had apple pie for him too. And after he had gone out, she would be at no one's beck and call until it was time to get supper, and he and Owen came home.

The old, winged, sensation of freedom came back to her. She began to whistle as she fixed Stevie's dinner. When next she looked out the window, the sturdy little
Elaine
was coming into harbor.

While Stevie washed, she looked over the mail. There was a letter from her mother, and that was all for Joanna. But Nils had two besides the
Fishing Gazette
and the
Atlantic Fisherman
. She read the return addresses in the comers of the envelopes. Eric Sorensen, Nils' uncle in Camden; and P. S. Grant, in Limerock.

“Why, that's Pete Grant!' she said aloud, and Stevie lifted his face from the towel.

“Huh?”

“What's he writing to Nils about?” she demanded, frowning. She turned the letter over and looked at it on both sides.

“Maybe he wants to sell Nils something,” Stevie said helpfully. “Maybe he's heard you're trying to get the postoffice, and he figures you could use the store and wharf.”

He sat down at his place, and Joanna laid the letter aside slowly, her brows still drawn. She put the dinner on the table for Stevie and herself, and then read their mother's letter aloud. It was Donna at her best, the even tempo of the words, the little touches of dry humor. Charles was doing well with his seining this fall. And he was doing well in other ways too; Mateel was expecting another baby. . . .

All the time she and Stevie were smiling over the letter, Joanna thought of Pete Grant's letter to Nils, and wondered. If it was private business, what on earth was it? And if it were Island business, why didn't Pete write to her about it? She wondered about the letter all through the meal, and Stevie, catching her glance as it shifted swiftly from the envelope, teased her.

“How are you going to hang on till Nils comes home and opens that? Now if it was from a woman you'd have something to really get all hawsed up about.” He pushed back his chair. “Good dinner, Jo. Want me to bring in some lobsters tonight?”

“If you do we'll have some baked and stuffed for supper,” she said. She got up and tucked Nils' magazines and letters behind the clock.

“Strong-minded, huh?” said Stevie. He grinned at her and went out. She was alone, her long lovely afternoon was about to begin. But its shining surface was dimmed.
Pete Grant's letter
. It must be Island business, she thought again. And if it should be, she was justified in opening it.

Just the sight of Pete's ungainly, hardly legible, handwriting evoked him before her as he'd looked striding down the wharf to the lobster car, a bluff, mustachioed giant of a man, who had been one of the first young men to work for Grandpa Bennett on the Island; he'd been a hired fisherman then, like Nils' grandfather, Gunnar, and Jud's father and the rest.

But Pete's enterprising Scots blood had put him into something else. One of the other young men who lived in the camps had wanted to buy some of his Saturday-night baked beans—Pete was the best cook of all the bachelor fishermen—and he saw the possibilities of a good business.

It
was
a good business, too; baked beans and brown bread once a week, then a sideline of doughnuts and pies. In no time he was prospering, and not merely as one of Grandpa Bennett's fishermen, who were obliged to sell their fish to the Captain at a minimum price and buy their supplies from him at a maximum one. By the time Pete had married and started a family he had a store all his own, and there was nothing Captain Bennett could do about it, since in a moment which he had always regretted afterwards he'd sold Pete a piece of land.