Storm Tide (3 page)

“Remember how you used to take me hauling?” Joanna asked Nils now.“Out of the kindness of your heart, because I was crazy for a peapod of my own?”

“You never thought I'd still be fishing from a peapod, fifteen years later, did you?” Nils balanced the wet trap on the gunwale, reached into it for its lobsters. “You never thought life would turn out like this.”

Chin in her hands, she watched him measure, tossing two into the stern of the peapod and a little one overboard. “I wonder if I'd have done differently, if I'd known.”

“I guess not,” Nils said. “I figure you have to live through a certain kind of life to come out where you're supposed to. No short cuts.” He smiled at her somber face. “Look at me—six times around the world and getting to be first mate on that old tub of a freighter—and I never thought that when I was thirty-two I'd be back here a pod fisherman, same as when I was seventeen.”

“You never thought Bennett's was going to reach right out and take hold of you so you'd
have
to come back.” The peapod rocked only slightly as Nils slid a fresh bait bag onto the baitline, buttoned the trap door, and let the trap slip overboard, its warp trailing after it, to sink down into the oblivion of deep green water. Nils began to row toward the next yellow and black buoy that scarcely moved on the sea. As they approached the high rock cliffs of Sou-West Point, a few gulls rose upward, lazily, and then settled down again.

The luminous blue peace of the day brooded over the man and woman in the rowboat. It laid its hush on Joanna's mind and heart. She watched Nils rowing, standing up to push forward on the oars; his eyes, calm and remote with his own thoughts, looked past her toward the distant horizon, and the rhythm of his stroke was irrevocably steady, as if nothing could ever break it. Like Nils himself. Nothing in all the years had broken Nils' stroke.

He rowed fast, so the red and black buoy seemed to swim past Joanna and bob in the wake of the peapod. She straightened up at once alert.

“Whose buoy is that?”

“Toby Merrill,” he said idly.

“But he's set inside yours!” She scanned the water. “There's another one—there's a lot of them. Nils, what's the idea? Brigport fishermen aren't supposed to be fishing around here.”

“Plenty of lobsters to catch around here,” said Nils. “Guess they figured the grounds were going to waste with everybody gone from here. You can't blame them.” He nodded at an orange buoy. “There's one of Ted Robey's. And there's one of the Fowlers'. Winslow's or Randy's.”

They had rounded Sou-West Point now, and as they came between the point itself and the black reef beyond, she saw that the whole west side was dotted with buoys of every conceivable color combination.

All the tranquillity she had felt fled abruptly. Her cheeks grew hot. “Nils,
all
of Brigport's over here!”

“Sure. And there's Winslow Fowler's boat up there outside Grant's point—he's working down this way.”

She was amazed at his good temper. “Nils, you're peppered with them. Why didn't you say something when you sold your lobsters over there?”

“Why should I, Jo? I couldn't catch all the lobsters over here. It's been a damn' good season—more'n enough for everybody.”

Joanna watched the dark green boat with its white-painted hunting cabin move along toward them at a leisurely pace. The drone of its hauling gear was unnaturally loud in the still air. Everywhere she looked, even as far out as Bantam Ledge-barely breaking this morning-she could see boats at work. But Winslow Fowler's boat was the nearest to Bennett's. She became aware of the instant hostility which the sight caused in her, and tried to shunt it off. Nils was right. Had she expected no one to come near the Island during the five long years of its solitude? But she had been conditioned years ago for this instant defense of her own.

She met Nils' glance, and flushed like a girl. “I'm not really steamed up. But never in my life have I seen a Brigport boat hauling so dose to Bennett's. Why, the line was settled way back when Grandpa Bennett was a young blade!” She laughed. “I guess seeing Winslow Fowler's boat like that makes it sharper than ever—what's happened to the Island.”

“Guess Brigport fishing around the Island didn't make any dent in the lobsters,” Nils said.

“But they'll move out, won't they? Now that the Island isn't empty any more?”

“You mean with one fisherman?”

Her mouth twitched at Nils' dry tone, but she realized suddenly that she was as serious as she had ever been in her life. That conditioning, she thought wryly . . . “In six months,” she began, “by the time the spring crawl begins—there'll be more than one fisherman here. And it's up to us to get them out now.”

“Winter's coming on,” said Nils. He braced his feet to haul another trap; the warp fell in wet coils over the toes of his rubber boots. “They'll shift their traps out to deep water anyway. Come spring they won't bother to put 'em back here.”

“Maybe. But you can't tell.”

“Calamity Jane,” said Nils. They smiled at each other, and Joanna knew it was borrowing trouble to start imagining things on this gem of a morning, when for the first time in many years she saw her way clearly and confidently before her. She turned her head and looked up at the steep west side, the rocks tawny and massive in the morning shadow of the woods. Her island. Who could harm it now?

The
Janet F
., throttle open, roared head-on at the peapod, veered to one side apparently in the nick of time, and circled it, setting it to rolling wildly. “Still the same sweet children that I used to feel like strangling,” Joanna said acidly, thinking of the traps resting on the forbidden bottom. Why, it had always been forbidden to Brigport. Let Nils try setting a trap in
their
waters . . . The
Janet F
. circled the peapod once more, leaving a curved silver wake on the pastel water. Then, engine cut to a whisper, she slid close to Nils and Joanna.

Nils' oars held the small boat steady. Joanna said, “They always were brats. Remember when their father used to bring them down to the Island when they were little?”

The green side of the
Janet F
. loomed above them, and the young man at the wheel grinned down at them. “Hi, Nils. How goes the battle? Hi, Joanna. Heard you was comin' back.”

“Hello, Randy.” Joanna was cool and aloof, but Randy didn't seem to notice. After five years, in which he had grown from his early teens to young manhood, his grin was the same. He stood erect and tense by the wheel, giving the impression of limitless nervous energy, harnessed with difficulty in his slight body.

He wore a black peaked cap tipped back on a close-clipped brown head, and in his thin brown face his eyes had a continual sparkle and motion, like the sea with the sun shining on it, and the wind forever skimming it and making it restless; like the sea except for their color. They were a light sunlit brown.

He leaned toward Joanna now, unaware of her remoteness. “Swell to see you, Jo! By God, it's been a hell of a while since you grabbed me by the collar that time.” His thin cheeks were slashed with dimples. “Remember? That time I set off them giant salutes at the 4th of July dance.”

First the traps, and then rocking the peapod. Show-off. He needed to be cuffed, Joanna thought, and she looked at him distantly. He and Nils laughed at the memory of the giant salutes, and Nils was stripping off his wet canvas gloves to take a cigarette from Randy's package.

She looked past Randy at Winslow. He lounged against the cuddy, smoking, and taking no part in the conversation. He was older than Randy, and heavier in build; his jaw was fleshier, his eyes sullen and shadowed. He looked at Randy and Nils as if their banter disgusted him.

As if
, Joanna thought with a sudden rush of anger,
Nils and I had no right here. As if we were the ones who'd gone over the line
.

At least Randy was civil. And if it annoyed Winslow to have Randy stop to talk with them, then Winslow should be annoyed. “Hello, Winslow,” she said deliberately. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it.

“Hi.” He kicked Randy's boot. “Look, you intend to sit here and gas all day?”

“Don't mind him, he was out girlin' last night, and she warn't just what you'd call accommodatin',” said Randy. He twinkled at Joanna. “I told him there's some girls don't go for that strong-arm stuff. But he's got to learn the hard way, that boy.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake!” Winslow growled. He ground out his cigarette viciously.

“I suppose,” Joanna suggested lightly to Randy, “that you know all the answers.” She hoped perversely that it would infuriate Winslow if she prolonged the conversation.

Randy was still twinkling. “Well, almost all of 'em . . . I'm glad there's go in' to be people on Bennett's again. Some place to go.”

“Yes, come over,” Joanna invited. “Nils would probably like to talk to another man once in a while, instead of just me.”

“Is he crazy?” said Randy.

“Get that engine goin', can't ye?” Winslow exploded. “Anybody'd think you was out on a yachtin' trip, and we got over a hundred pots to haul this momin'.”

Joanna smiled at Randy, and Nils pulled on his gloves again and took up the oars.

“Nice to have seen you,” she said.

Winslow moved bait boxes around noisily, his broad back turned. Randy's fingers touched his visor; his grin flashed out, touching Nils, sliding over to her, and staying.

It was noon when Nils rowed up through the long Gut into Brigport Harbor. There was no slackening of his stroke as he rowed among the moorings in the long narrow harbor, though he had been rowing steadily all morning.

There was warmth and peace in the bay this September noon. The rounding white sides of the boats were mirrored in the still waters below them, the gulls dreamed on the sunlit saffron and red ledges, somewhere on shore there was the sound of whistling. The immense and untroubled autumn sky arched over it all, the sea, the islands dreaming in the sun, the boats that seemed also to dream at their moorings, like the islands and the gulls.

In a little while, Joanna thought—by September next year—the boats would lie in the harbor of Bennett's Island, and there would be women in the houses that looked down across it, lavender smoke rising straight in the crystal motionless air, and men going home to dinner, and a young boy whistling as he hauled a dory up on the beach.

When they came into the big part of the harbor, where the stone wharves were, the fish houses built over the rocks, the store, and Cap'n Merrill's boat shop, there was an amazing bustle of activity around Ralph Fowler's lobster car, moored dose to the sheltering wall of the breakwater. Ralph was uncle to Randy and Winslow.

“Who does that big boat belong to?” Joanna asked Nils. “The Elsie R. They're getting bait from her, aren't they?”

“They sure are. That's Tom Robey's new boat. Named for his mother. . . . Tom must have got some herring last night. Remember Tom?”

“I remember when the clubhouse kitchen got shacked,” said Joanna with dignity. “It was a great disgrace. That Bennett girl resisted Tom Robey's advances, and everybody got into the fight. If she'd had more tact . . . But then, those Bennetts always did look down their long noses at people. . . . Tom's come up in the world, hasn't he?”

“The Robey boys are doing all right for themselves. If a war doesn't come along and break up the seining crew, Tom'll be a rich guy before long.”

“I hope they can keep that mess over in Europe,” said Joanna. “But when I think of those Nazis, and the things they're doing . . . the way they're bombing London—”

“Well, don't think about 'em right now,” said Nils. “Time enough to get mad when we get into it. Look, I'll drop you off at the wharf, and go sell my lobsters and get some bait. I can't lug much, but I can hire somebody to bring it down for me.”

“Nils, we ought to get the
Donna
into the water again, so you won't have to be dependent on anybody.”

Nils held the peapod close to the foot of the ladder for her to step up. “We can't do everything in a day, Jo. And we've got plenty of time.”

“That's what you always say.” She smiled down at him from the ladder, and walked up the wharf with her quick light stride. It seemed queer to be getting the mail at Brigport, but it wouldn't be long before there'd be a store and postoffice at Bennett's again. Her eyes were luminous, seeing the Island as she wanted it to be, as she had dreamed of it for years. And now she and Nils stood on the very threshold of reality, and the dreams were no longer dreams. Almost, she could touch them.

She walked up the slope from the wharf to the store. Seeing the sign
R. Fowler
over the door, she remembered how her father used to say he couldn't get accustomed to seeing that name over the door instead of
T. Merrill
. He'd always said that the old-timers of Brigport still called Fowler a foreigner after he and his clan had been there ten years. She smiled; she wondered if now, after thirty years, the Fowlers were still foreigners.

The store was dim and cool after the radiance of the day, spacious and well-stocked as it always had been, with miraculous and fascinating things that Pete Grant had refused to buy for the store at Bennett's. He'd called them pure foolishness . . . Randolph Fowler came out of the postoffice to meet her.

“It's Joanna, isn't it?” he said in the deep pleasant voice she remembered, with its faint trace of mainland accent. She put out her hand and he shook it warmly. “I guess Nils is to be congratulated, from what I hear.”

“That's right,” she said. “I'm Mrs. Sorensen now.” He looked almost the same after five years; thin-faced and short, like Randy, only broader, he still wore an immaculate white shirt, quiet-figured tie, a starched gray cotton-twill coat. There was some gray in his neatly groomed dark hair, but his mustache was the same. She remembered how that mustache used to awe her when she was small, and had been brought to church services on Brigport. Randolph Fowler was always called upon to sing “Shall We Gather at the River,” or “The Old Rugged Cross,” and while all the grown-ups listened with reverent pleasure to his baritone, Joanna had watched in fascination the way his mustache moved up and down.