Storm Tide (5 page)

“Why, I'll have to talk to my wife a little, I guess. Then there's the boy's school in'—he goes into the seventh grade this year.”

“There's a good school at Brigport,' Joanna said eagerly. “It's small, but it's good. I want to send my little girl there. Joey could go, couldn't he, Nils?” She pulled chairs out from the table. “Everything's getting cold. Let's sit down.”

This was beyond her wildest dreams, to have people coming so soon. Why, the Island would be peopled again, long before the year was up! Over the scraping of chairs and dink of china, she said to Caldwell, “The Binnacle's big, but it's right in the face and eyes of everything. Your wife might not like that. Have you any other children?” She smiled at Joey, who blushed and smiled back.

“Just the boy.” Caleb accepted the bowl of pork scraps from Nils, and looked across the table at him as he spoke. “You understand, I've only lobstered in a small way. Never any deep-sea lobsterin', same as Jud tells me about. Haven't any gear, but I had an offer of thirty pots the other day. That's kind of small potatoes for startin' in out here, isn't it?”

“Around here you can do fine with just thirty pots!” said Joanna enthusiastically. “This time of year, in the fall spurt, you can make enough to build any number of new ones. That is,” she added in a more practical tone, “if you get them overboard soon enough.”

Caldwell must come; her mind was made up to it. She knew with an instinct deeper than mere thought that the Island could do with a man like Caldwell. Nils would want to investigate him. But she
knew
.

Nils said, “There's a lot of things a man ought to understand before he moves out here. It's home for Jud, so maybe he doesn't think of 'em as drawbacks.” He smiled at Jud, then moved the salt and pepper shakers contemplatively. “The winters, with the mail-boat only running down as far as Brigport, might be kind of tough for somebody who's never lived through a Bennett's Island winter.”

“Anybody would think you were trying to discourage him, Nils!” Joanna exclaimed, laughing. “What is there to be afraid of? You heard Jud say he was an island man at heart, didn't you?” She smiled at Caldwell and, without her conscious knowledge of it, all the vivid heart-warming Bennett charm was in that smile.

“There's always plenty of bait, and you can go hauling all winter long, because it never freezes up. Now I'll tell you the drawbacks, Mr. Caldwell. Sometimes the wind blows for a week or two at a time, and you can't go out to haul. But when a good day comes you get more than enough to make up for the windy ones. If you want to get off on the mailboat, you have to go to Brigport in a small boat, and get your groceries over there, too. But as soon as we get some people out here, we'll have a store, and our postoffice back, and then Link will
have
to deliver the mail down here, even if he doesn't like putting the
Aurora B
. into this harbor in winter time.”

Caldwell glanced at Nils. “What's the matter with the harbor?”

“The harbor's all right,” said Nils. “For lobster boats—”

“It's just that it's small, and the
Aurora's
sixty-five feet long,” Joanna said quickly. “It's hard to swing her around when the wind's a certain way.” She smiled to see the faint shadow leave Caldwell's face.

“Then there's the school. While it's still good weather the children can be set ashore on the sand beach over there—it's just a mile from the harbor—and picked up in the afternoon. Later on, they'll have to be boarded during the week. I have to find a place for Ellen, and I can find a nice place for Joey.” A new thought struck her. “Nils,” she said excitedly, “Cap'n Merrill and his wife—I'll bet they'd like to have a boy staying with them, especially if I vouched for him.”

The boy colored and glowed under her luminous gaze.

“You're convincin' me, but remember, there's my wife to be convinced, too,” said Caldwell dryly. “And your man there—it's a big risk, lettin' strangers into a place like this.”

“Oh, Nils is convinced,” said Joanna gayly. “Nils, you show him the houses after dinner. The Yetton place is my favorite, with the harbor right at its feet, and a nice fish house, and a little spruce grove behind it to cut off those north-east winds. Of course it's shabby, but if you think your wife will like it, I imagine we could do something about paint and paper, don't you, Nils?... Does your wife like the radio, and reading?”

Caldwell nodded. His eyes seemed amused under the heavy brows. “She does a lot of knittin' and patchwork, too.”

“She'll get along fine,” said Joanna decisively, and arose to take the gingerbread from the oven.

“My God,” said Jud, “she's quite a salesman, ain't she?”

Joanna's cheeks were blazing, not with the steam from the gingerbread, but with triumph. She had done it; she had made sure Caleb Caldwell would come. He had all but said so. And with him and Jud, there would be three families on the island. If she could only find others to talk to as she had talked to Caldwell, others who would come . . .

When at last the gingerbread was gone, and the coffee drunk, Jud was eager to get down to the harbor again.

“You start along,” Nils told them. “I'll fill up the woodbox and water pails first.”

Joanna stood at the window that looked harborward, and watched them going down the slope, past the chunks of granite rock that overlooked Schoolhouse Cove, toward the alder swamp at the foot of the meadow. The marsh that stretched to the harbor beach was streaked russet and burnt gold, and lavender asters foamed along the road. Beyond the marsh's edge and the old boats on their sides in the tall grass, and the camps huddled on the shore, the harbor shone, blue and brimming and empty.

Nils was coming back from the well. Winged sunlight flashed and danced on the brimming pails, so that they seemed to hold living light instead of water.

She ran to hold the door open for him, and followed him across the kitchen to the dresser. “Nils, didn't you like that man? And Jud coming back, too—if we'd ever
dreamed
, when we left Brigport this noon, that they'd be here!”

Nils took out his pipe and filled it with deliberate fingers. Smiling faintly, he looked past her at the brilliant sea outside the south-east windows, at a gull flashing by close to the pane, and she was reminded with sudden poignance of her father, standing like this in the midst of a swirling maelstrom of young Bennetts.

She put her hand on his arm and looked into his face. “Nils, you hardly said a word the whole time.”

He looked down at her, still that faint quirk to his mouth. “You did all right.”

“You think I persuaded him?” she demanded radiantly. “Now if only his wife is willing—”

“I'd better get down to the shore and unlock the houses,” Nils said.

When he had gone she began to clear up the dishes. To the comfortable humming of the teakettle, the voices of the gulls coming through the screen door, and the nearer sweet chatter of the sparrows, she reviewed the whole morning from the rising at dawn. The meeting with the Fowler boys—her mind quickened to a fresh realization; with more fishermen on the Island the Brigport men
must
move their pots. And soon.

She thought of Nils then, of the way he had stood looking out to sea, like her father; the way he had smiled at her elation. What was it he had said when she reminded him of his silence at dinner?
You did all right
.

Inexplicably her stomach seemed sickeningly empty. She felt as if she had been slapped. Slapped by the realization that she had done all the talking, even when Caldwell seemed to glance toward Nils. It had been Nils they had questioned first, but she had taken over.

She remembered now the openly amused glint in jud's eye, and felt a rush of fury. Jud and his kind thought a woman didn't have a right to be heard. But she, Joanna, certainly had a right to be heard when it was Bennett business under discussion. She was the Bennett, not Nils.

Only . . . the way Nils had said that . . . Almost as if he thought she'd talked too much, that she might have given him a chance. Her hands slowed on the dishes she was washing, and she felt hot and irritable. She looked up then and saw her reflection in the mirror over the sink; she saw the level dark eyes, the black brows knitted above them; the flush under her brown skin, the strong, straight Bennett nose, the firm cleft Bennett chin.

It was when she met those mirrored eyes that she felt her discomfort vanish and lightness flood through her. What foolishness she had been thinking! It was as if the sight of herself had reminded her of the eternal truth. She was first and foremost what she had always been: Joanna Bennett, who belonged to the Island.

The Island must be peopled again. If Caldwell came, if other men followed, why this silly concern about anything else? As long as they came.

You did all right
, Nils had said. Perhaps she ought to tell him when he came in that she hadn't meant to do all the talking. But even as she thought of it the impossibility was so strong she knew she would never mention it at all.

T
HE ALDER LEAVES HAD TURNED YELLOW
, and the line storm had blown most of them away by the first of October. The spruces remained unchanging, looking black in the dawn and at sunset; but the alders were almost bare, and the birches stood slim and white at the foot of the meadow. But still, when Joanna walked down to the harbor on her way to the Yetton house, the birds played among the branches and fed on the seeds; the fearless chickadees and their cousins, the nuthatches, the juncoes, and the warblers who stopped to rest and feed on their trip south.

Myrtle, Magnolia, Chestnut-sided, Bay-breasted—the warblers darted and chirped among the branches and were not abashed by Joanna. Ever since she was small and going to school, she had stopped here to watch the birds in the spring and fall. One day soon they would be gone, except for the juncoes and chickadees. It was hard to believe, when the sun lay so warm along her bare arms, and the sea stretched far over the horizon in its gentle and infinite blue.

From the time Caleb Caldwell's letter had come, saying he was moving out when Jud did, early in October, she had worked daily in the Yetton house, washing windows and woodwork, sweeping, dusting down cobwebs. She tried to do a room a day. When the days were cold and windy, with rain battering at the panes, Nils came down and worked with her. Days he went to haul, he gave her a few hours in the afternoon.

New paper came from Montgomery Ward, the ceilings were whitewashed, the woodwork and floors repainted. It hardly seemed the same house where Marcus Yetton had grown old and harassed before his time, but still able to produce a baby a year until Susie's worn-out and under-nourished body refused to deliver living children. . . . Hardly the same house where young Julian had grown to the age of twelve, and where he should have been having his supper one September night instead of smoking stolen cigarettes in Stephen Bennett's boat shop.

Scrubbing, painting, papering with the energy of a dozen women, Joanna felt as if she were eradicating for all time any trace of the Yettons. She was surprised at the bitterness that tinged her memories of them. After five years there should have been no bitterness, she thought. But why not? For years her father had kept them, literally fed them from his own pocket, because Marcus was so shiftless a fisherman; and then, when everybody else, even the Bennett boys, had left the Island, and Stephen was hanging on by sheer will power—to have Julian's dropped cigarette send the boatshop and two hundred and fifty traps, with warps and buoys, up in flames!

When Nils was there working with her, Joanna said nothing of what she felt. It was better to keep it silent, and hope it would be washed away, as the dust and cobwebs were being washed away by her brooms and cloths, by the Caldwells.

She wanted to paint the outside of the house too.

“I don't know,” Nils said. “I've got to haul every good day and do what I can about fixing up the old wharf, and the
Donna
. I don't see how I can do it, Joanna.”

“I can do it myself. I've always wanted to paint a house, and it's only one story high, anyway.” She laughed. “Every time I look at that faded-out weather-beaten green, I think of Marcus. Just like his complexion.”

Nils got white paint for her at Brigport, and told her to go to it. After that, when he was out in the peapod, she painted through the long warm mornings, glorying in the smell of the paint, the blue sky overhead, the solitude all around her; yet not dreading the fact that the solitude was soon to be broken.

When she had finished, the low-roofed house looked tidy and pleasant, snuggled into the shelter of Eastern Harbor Point. It didn't look as if it had been flung there by a giant hand, and remained huddled fearfully against the spruce-dotted rise. She made Nils walk out on Pete Grant's wharf, and they looked across the harbor at the house.

“Now, how will that look to Mrs. Caldwell when she comes into the harbor on the mailboat?” she demanded.

“Good,” said Nils. “But what about the fish house? It looks pretty drab, now.” They looked across the expanse of harbor at the weathered building built out over the rocks. It was low tide, and the little wharf looked high and spindle-shanked.

“The fish house is solid, and so is the wharf,” Joanna said firmly. “You know it, and so does Caleb. And Mrs. Caldwell will be interested in the house, not the shop. Besides,” she added eagerly, “you can cover it with that pretty green tarpaper that Charles put on his shop over at Pruitt's Harbor.”

“You want me to do it right now?” inquired Nils. “Or can I have my dinner first?”

She laughed, and then her dark eyes went intensely serious. “Nils, do I sound like Aunt Mary teaming Uncle Nate around?”