Storm Tide (51 page)

She glanced up at him anxiously. “He didn't get under your skin, did he? You know how Owen likes to plague.”

“Finish your breakfast, Jo. Nothing can get under my skin now. . . . How about some fresh coffee?” He reached for her cup, but she put her hand on his wrist.

“Nils, there's something I want to tell you before I eat another mouthful, or before you step out of this room again.”

She spoke quietly enough, and his answering tone matched hers.

“What is it?”

“There's a story going the rounds on Brigport, Nils. It's about you.” It was in the room with them now, the ugliness and the threat that she'd tried to keep away from her and Nils in the hours just passed. It was as if suddenly the blizzard had broken through the glass, and even the glowing stove had no power against its bone­piercing cold. Yet her voice didn't falter, nor did her eyes shift away from his.

“They say that you killed Winslow and threw his body overboard—that day you brought the boat in.”

“Who says it?”

“I don't know. Ellen and Joey brought it home from school. Joey got into a fight over it, and Ellen—” her child's small, strained face came before her as she spoke the name. “Ellen says she won't go back there. They tormented her, Nils.”

She saw the shifting and tightening of muscles and bone in his face, the almost imperceptible hardening of mouth and eyes. Still he said nothing. Smoke streamed up in a thin ribbon from the cigarette between his two fingers. Joanna's own fingers were cold.

“If you don't want to bother with it, we don't have to, Nils,” she said. “We don't even have to go back to the Island, if you don't want to go.”

“We'll go back,” Nils said. He reached again for her coffee cup and she didn't stop him. “We'll go back as soon as the weather clears. This needs a little tending to, I think.”

He went out of the room with her cup and she stared at the door closing behind him, and listened to the sound of his feet going down the stairs. She thought of what he'd said, “This needs a little tending to, I think.” Yes, he'd tend to the malicious story the way he took care of everything. . . . As she waited for his return she felt a new stab of shame. The assurance in his bearing was heart-warming to her now; it could have been thus through the past months, if she had not been so blind, so foolishly selfish.

She'd lived through a great many hours recently which were to be remembered always, some of them for penance.
This
hour she would keep close to her until she died. . . .

T
HE BLIZZARD HAD STOPPED BY MIDNIGHT
, and at sun-up the next day the snowplow came in from the main road, and turned around in Eric's meadow accompanied by a deafening grinding of gears and Peter's delirious barking. He had seen the snowplows every winter for eight years, but he still wasn't convinced that they wouldn't continue straight up the hill and plow up his favorite doorstep, to say nothing of the people he owned.

Nils and Owen went down to the meadow with their rubber boots pulled up to their hips, and their shadows blue on the snow, and found out from the operator that the Limerock bus would be running as usual. Then the snowplow went back to the highway along the road it had just cleared. Peter chased it, almost sure that he had it in a proper state of terrified retreat, but determined to make certain. Then he came swaggering back to the house, to receive a piece of Joanna's doughnut for his valor.

She and Nils and Owen left that morning, walking along the hard packed snow through the spruce woods to the highway. The trees were powdered with the glittering dust; the same sparkling stuff flew up from their feet, and blew like spangled smoke from the tops of drifts. The world had an aching brilliance; the sky's aquamarine hurt the eye, and the tree shadows thrown across the snow were sharp blue on dazzling white, each one perfect in itself.

“Regular Christmas weather,” Owen said. His breath came out like smoke from a chimney.

“I made a list this morning,” Joanna said. “Somehow I hadn't got around to Christmas. . . . It crept up on me, I guess. I'll have to do everything at once, before we go back.”

“You'll have the whole day for it then. This wind won't die down till tonight sometime.” Owen fell back to light a cigarette and Joanna and Nils walked on; it was too cold to loiter.

“How about a doll for Ellen?” Nils asked her in a low voice. “She'll have a good Christmas—she won't miss Stevie like the rest of us, and she doesn't know about the Philippines.”

“Of course she'll have a doll.” She reached out her mittened hand to his. “What'll you and Owen do while I go shopping?”

‘I don't know what Owen'll do, but I've got a few ideas about it.” He looked at her steadily, and then, flushing very slightly, he said, “You mind if I go along with you? I can help carry the stuff.”

Their hands dropped apart as they heard Owen's feet behind them; but all the way to the bus stop, and even after they'd clambered aboard, her fingers remembered the firm pressure of his.

Owen waved them a nonchalant farewell when they got off the 6bus, and strolled off in the windy sunshine, looking very handsome; he towered over most of the people he passed, and the women turned to look at him. Nils and Joanna didn't see him again that day.

They stayed at a Limerock rooming house that night. They pondered the idea of going down to Pruitt's Harbor, but decided against it. The bus—the one which lacked a door—went on a spasmodic schedule, and if the next day should be clear and calm, Owen would be ready to go as soon as it was light enough to see. Besides, Joanna found to her shame that she was tired by mid-afternoon. She was worried, too, that her stamina played her false. It was Nils who reassured her.

“You've had a lot on your mind,” he told her. “You can't expect to start dancing jigs the first thing. You get rested up, and lose those circles under your eyes, and then we'll come over and make a real visit with your mother, and Charles, and the rest of 'em. Now you'd better go to bed.”

She obeyed him, loving his matter-of-fact way of calming her, and the way he changed to tenderness when he tucked her in, and kissed her. She felt neither foolish nor ashamed; she was happy, and no longer lonely. If only Nils felt the same. . . . He went out to buy her a magazine and some candy, and she lay in the drab, impersonal room looking peacefully at his suitcase beside hers, and praying, somewhere in the innermost chambers of her soul, that she could make him happy always.

When he came back he gave her the bundles to open while he hung up his outdoor clothes. Magazines, candy, grapes, a bottle of vitamin capsules. She held them up to him, smiling, as he came into range of the lamp.

“Do I really need 'em, Nils? I never had to take medicine in my life!”

He didn't answer at once, he was looking beyond her into the shadows of the room, his face set; it was the way he'd looked when she had told him about the Brigport story, about Joey and Ellen.

“What is it, Nils?” she asked him swiftly. She put out her hand to take his, and made him sit down beside her.

“Rich Bradford and his wife are staying here tonight,” he said. “I met Rich in the hall downstairs.”

She waited, her eyes feeling hot, her heart beating hard.

“Rich walked by me without speaking. Turned his head away.”

“Oh, Nils, he couldn't have known you. He always liked you!”

He said angrily, “Didn't know me—with this hair? I had my cap off, and he met me right by the light. He knew me, Joanna.” Then he moved his hand in hers, and tightened it around her fingers. “I thought it could wait until after Christmas,” he said simply. “But now I know it can't wait.”

At noon the next day the
Whitt Lady
sailed into her home harbor. The wind had dropped, and the sun shone across the blue bay and the whitened islands that rimmed it,. the gulls circled against the sky, and their voices were needle-sharp in the silence after the engine was cut off.

It had been a quiet trip out, except for the very start, when Owen had pounded on Nils' and Joanna's door at the first edge of dawn and announced through the panels that he was going home now, by God. He was in a bad mood, and stayed in it, until the
Lady
was halfway home. Then, with the Mussel Ridges far behind and Vinalhaven growing smaller, and the first glimpse of Bennett's Island coming out beyond the end of Brigport, Owen began to brighten. Perhaps the flat pint bottle in the empty bait tub under the washboards had something to do with it.

The harbor was empty of powerboats when they came into it, except for the
Donna
. The skiffs bounced gently at the moorings, orange and buff and white and green; Jud's robin's-egg-blue masterpiece was tied up alongside the lobster car. All the men had gone to haul, and the fact that no smoke rose from the boatshop's chimney meant that Jud had gone home for his dinner. No one would be in before mid-afternoon.

To Joanna it seemed right and fitting that there should be no one on hand to take a line or call greetings to Nils as the
Whitt Lady
came alongside the wharf. It meant that she and Nils could walk up to the house alone—Owen would take the boat out to the mooring. She could reach for his hand if she wanted to, and know he wouldn't hold back from her. And they could walk alone into the house, and it would be as it should have been on that long-ago September evening.

Of course, Owen would be coming in afterward, but if the whole world trooped into their kitchen, what difference could it make to them, when they could glance across the room at each other and in an instant reaffirm the truth?

When they actually started up the frozen road, with its snow­filled ruts, they had too many bundles to hold hands. But they could look at each other, there was no limit to that. The Island never held the snow; the high places of the Bennett meadow were bare, but down by the gateposts there were drifts and Nils tramped a way through them for Joanna. She caught up with him, exhilarated by the bright, winy cold, laughing for nothing but excited happiness. For this little while, when they might have been the only two persons on their Island, there were no spectres, no shadows; only themselves in a world of pure white and blue, with snow-dust glittering on their eyelashes and the sun dancing in their eyes.

From the crest of the meadow the Bennett house looked down on them benignly, waiting for them to take possession again.

Nils had the fire built by the time Owen came with the rest of the load, and while Owen pulled off his gloves to warm his hands, Nils took the water pails and went down to the well. Joanna, still in her outdoor clothes, was unpacking the groceries. By the time the kitchen was warm, dinner would be almost ready. It was wonderful to feel so hungry; it was wonderful to be home again, seeing the thin rectangles of sunlight slanting across the creamy boards, catching the glint of sea and curl of white on the tawny ledges when she passed the seaward windows. . . . And from the harbor windows she saw Nils, breaking the ice in the well with the well-pale. . . . She paused, watching him, and forgot that Owen was in the room until he spoke.

“God Almighty, Jo, how in hell did you get around him?” he asked with a lazy curiosity. “Got him in line again, didn't ye? I didn't think you could do it.”

“Well, that gives you something to wonder about,” she countered easily. Only a week ago, any reference to Nils and herself would have thrown her into a fury. She marveled at the difference; she had turned to her brother, smiling. She knew that nothing he could ever say, in good temper or bad, could really touch the private, secret world she and Nils had now found for themselves.

With dinner over, and Owen gone upstairs for a nap—Joanna guessed that he'd not been to bed at all the night before—she and Nils decided to walk down to the Eastern End to get Ellen. But when they came out of the house, Nils hesitated, and looked down the meadow toward the smoky-lavender cloud the bare alder swamp made. His grandfather's house lay beyond the alders.

“Come down to the old house with me first,” he suggested. “I promised Gramma I'd look it over, and now is as good a time as any.”

“A little longer won't make any difference to Ellen,” Joanna said. “She'll be so darned relieved and happy to see you, because of Christmas and this other thing. . . . Does your grandmother get homesick for the house, Nils?”

“No, but sometimes she thinks about the flowers she had and feels bad for them. They used to be a comfort to her, I guess.”

They cut down across the meadow, tramping a path through the pocket of snow at its foot, and came into the alder swamp. It was sheltered here, and held the sun, and there was a constant drip of melting snow and the loudly busy chatter of chickadees. They flashed across the path before Joanna and Nils, holding undisputed possession of the alder swamp until the juncoes and sparrows came back, and then the ubiquitous warblers.

They came out onto the Sorensen place and skirted the big barn and the woodhouse. Nils had the key to the back door of the sunparlor; and so they entered the house where Nils had grown up. Joanna hadn't been in it since she was a young girl. That meant she had never been in it when it was empty. Always Grandma Sorensen had been working around in the long sunparlor, where the family had eaten in warm weather, where she and Kristi had washed and ironed; or she had been making bread in the kitchen, tending the chowder that simmered in the black iron pot, singing hymns in her sweet, tremulous old voice. And Joanna had never been there when the fact of Gunnar Sorensen's imminent entrance hadn't hung over the house like a pall.

Joanna looked back over the years as she followed Nils through the empty house, listening to their echoing footsteps, wondering what he thought as he stopped to look at a picture on the wall, or his grandmother's small collection of ornaments on the what-not. These sunny windows in the dining room had always been full of plants; this was Anna's chair, this was Gunnar's. He used to sit here of an evening and rock, and read the Bible aloud by lamplight while his grandsons Sigurd and Nils and their sister Kristi knit trapheads out in the sunparlor. There were windows on that side of the dining room too, so he could see all three blond heads, and know that they were listening respectfully. Or at least not slacking their work. Little David, the youngest—their mother had died when he was born—would be in bed by that time. He was subject to nightmares and would cry out, but Gunnar wouldn't allow his wife Anna or Kristi to go to him. The nightmares had a reason, he said; when David became a good boy, the devil would stop tormenting him. It was Nils who had figured out the arrangement—“to save space,” he told his grandfather—whereby David slept with him.