Storm Tide (52 page)

Nils was going upstairs now. Joanna followed him silently.

This was no time to speak to him. She contented herself with her own thoughts, trying not to dwell on the memory of the time Gunnar had come in late from a seining trip and found that Nils hadn't white-washed the henhouse as he'd been told. It didn't matter that his small, trembling wife told him Nils hadn't had time to do the henhouse, because he'd split up some extra firewood for her cooking; he had come upstairs in his heavy rubber boots, spangled with herring scales—they'd sparkled on his beard too, Nils had told Joanna once—and dragged the sleeping boy out of bed, kicking him awake, and set him to white-washing the henhouse then, at one in the morning.

Here was the bed in which Gunnar and Anna had slept, in which Gunnar had died; he had simply stayed asleep one morning.
He always hated me
, Joanna thought, looking at the bare mattress and pillows in the big bed.
There should be something fighting against me in this room, trying to drive me out
. Then she remembered that he hadn't hated her always. Once, just once, a little while before he died, he had spoken to her humbly.

“If Nils had married you, I would have been glad. . . . You are a good woman. Nils is right about you all the time, and I am wrong.—

And here we are
, thought Joanna now. The pale sunlight lay across the bedroom floors and Nils was walking through the other rooms. She heard his deliberate feet, and went quickly to find him.

He had stopped in a small room under the eaves, with a slanting ceiling like her own room at home. “This was mine,” he said. It was the first thing he had said since they came into the house.

She looked at the narrow bed under the small window. It was at the front of the house, and in the old days Anna's seven-sisters rose bush had climbed up to this window. . . . She realized that Nils was watching her quietly.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I was seeing you,” she said. “Lying in bed with your arm under your head, the way you do, on a summer night, with the breeze blowing up from the harbor and coming in through the roses. . . .” She wanted to touch him, break through the shell of loneliness that had seemed to enclose him when he entered the house. “I know you weren't reading, because Gunnar wouldn't let you read in bed. So you were thinking.”

“No limit to that, anyway,” he said dryly. “Know what I'm thinking now?”

“Tell me.” She moved closer to him, and put her hand in his with a now-familiar gesture.

“Well, I used to swear that if I ever got out of this house, I'd never come back into it. And after I did get out of it, I had the funny feeling that if I only stepped inside the door, all those old things would rush at me and drive me out again. But it's funny.” He shook his head. “Instead, I've been thinking about the way we've all turned out. Grampa could bully us, and plague us, and hang us up by the thumbs, and insult us about our mother until we wanted to kill him. But in the end he couldn't really hurt us. . . . And he
did
teach us how to work.”

He sat down on the bed and pulled Joanna down beside him. “Sigurd's skipper on his own sardine boat, down East. He's married, and has a hell of a good time out of life. Kristi's married, and happy with a family of kids to spoil. And she married the man she wanted, too. Grampa couldn't stop that.”

“He tried hard enough,” murmured Joanna.

“Then my father put David through high school after Grampa died, and Dave put himself through the University of Maine, so he's the family pride and joy.”

“What about Nils?” Joanna asked him softly.

“Nils?” He turned his head and looked down at her. “Oh, he did himself proud, too.” He put his arm around her and pulled her close to him with a suddenness that made her gasp and laugh.

“He married a wild woman that needed taming,” she said. He cut off the last word with his mouth on hers, and she felt a quicksilver sweetness run through her body. The back of his neck was strong under her palm; while their mouths held in an intensity of hunger too long denied.

When he lifted his head, it was as if she came back by a long and enchanted way to the bare room under the eaves. She burrowed her head against his shoulder and let her fingers explore the back of his head, under his ears, to the hard corner of his jaw and thence to his chin.

“End of the line,” she said with regret, and sat up. “Back to work, Nils.”

“What do you mean, work?” asked Nils. She found she couldn't move away from the arms that held her against his chest. She knew by the way he smiled at her what he was thinking.

“Nils, not here!”

“Why not? Nobody knows we're here—”

“Because—oh, Nils—” Laughter bubbled out suddenly. “The ghost of your grandfather.”

Nils' arms were tightening. “Nothing for him to hang around here for. Everybody works too hard. He'll be down East prodding Sig . . . . ” The laughter went out of his face. “You're so beautiful, Joanna,” he said simply. “Don't fight me.”

When they came downstairs the sun had moved away from the dining room window. Nils led the way down the narrow, twisting stair; at the foot he waited for Joanna, and kissed her. “You know,” she said slowly, “sometimes when I was all excited about something and you took your pipe out of your mouth and told me why my idea wouldn't work, you made me think of my father—and I felt like a little girl again, getting stepped on. I think that was why I tossed my head so much, Nils.”

“Do you feel like a little girl now?”

“This,” said Joanna, “is no way for a little girl to feel. . . . What did I do to bother you, Nils, besides teaming you around like your grandfather, and always trying to run things?”

“That's about it,” said Nils candidly. “Except—well, you were so damned independent. You had some good ideas for the Island, and I was proud of you. But . . . You want the straight truth, Joanna?”

She lifted her chin and smiled at him. “Yes, darling.”

“I felt as though I didn't have anything of my own, Joanna. Not even my wife. I was living with Joanna Bennett and her brothers in the Bennett homestead. That was what it amounted to. The night Mark counted me in as a Bennett, well—that hit me, Jo.” His mouth quirked. “Sounds foolish, but that's the way it was.”

“What about now, Nils?” she asked him carefully. She could feel the tightening along her spine and in her jaw. “How is it now?”

“It's different,” he answered, and went to kiss her, but she turned her head away. His fingers caught her chin like a vise, and then in one deep breath drawn and released, she fought the impulse that had threatened her for a moment, and won.

“It may be different, but it's still not right,” she said. “Nils, would you like us to live down here?”

His answer was simple and unadorned. “Yes.” He didn't insult her intelligence by adding explanations and she was grateful. He knew what a step it would be for her, how much store she had set by the homestead; what it had meant for her to be in her mother's place in the Bennett house.

Her eyes didn't shift away from his for a second. “All right, Nils,” she said. “It's up to you to choose where we'd live, anyway.” She knew by the set of his mouth and the way the lines came in his forehead that he thought he had asked too much of her. He should not think that; he should know his right and claim it.

“And besides,” she added demurely, “it wouldn't do for a lot of little blond Sorensens to be running around the Bennett house. They ought to grow up in a Sorensen house.”

That did it. The hard lines broke into tenderness, as she went into his arms and heard his voice whispering against her hair.

T
HEY WENT OUTDOORS AND AROUND
to the front of the house. “The seven-sisters bush is still alive,” Joanna said. “And I'll plant hollyhocks all around the house, Nils.”

“Delphinium, too,” said Nils.

She smiled at him. “Of course, delphinium.”

They walked past Eric Sorensen's house, and the Arey house, and took the road that led to the beach. They could see the smoke puffing up from the chimney of the boatshop, and they could hear the whining throb of an engine in reverse; someone was backing away from the car. The smoke, and the engine's sound, took away the Island's emptiness. Joanna and Nils were no longer the only two persons on it.

When they came by the end of the boatshop, they had a full view of the wharf. The tide was going, and the car was out of sight, but Jud was toiling over the top of the ladder, and Caleb's boat was moving slowly toward her mooring, Joey poised tautly upon the bow with the gaff in his hand, ready to hook the buoy. His slender figure was outlined distinctly against the warm red rocks that made a sheer rise from the water to the top of Eastern Harbor Point. At its base, the thick rockweed uncovered by the tide had a dark wet gloss in the sun.

“Bright kid, Joey,” Nils remarked. Joanna said excitedly, “Isn't that Ellen coming up the ladder behind Jud?”

It was Ellen indeed. Jud reached down a hand to her and they could hear his wheezy chuckle as she refused help and landed nimbly on the wharf. Helmi followed. She turned to reach down for the package which Mark held up to her, and then he came over the top of the ladder. Joanna had a glimpse of his stormy face under the plaid cap before Ellen caught sight of her and cried out.

“Mother!” She ran over the wharf, her brownie hood slipping back from her radiant face. “You're here! We've been for the mail and you ought to see all the Christmas packages—”

Everything stopped at once, her clear high young voice, her eager rush. She had seen Nils. Then joy came, incandescent, and the headlong rush.

“Nils!
Oh, Nils!” His arms opened to catch the flying little figure and her arms went tight around his neck. She talked in little snatches, punctuated by a child's breathless, throat-catching laughter. “I never thought—and you've been gone so
long
. . . . It seems like forever, Nils!”

They shimmered before Joanna's eyes, a shifting blur of bright blue, and the soft brown of Nils' jacket, his wheat-colored hair as his cap fell off in the violence of Ellen's hug. Her throat tightened at the recognition of the love these two bore for each other. . . .
It makes us a real family
, she thought inadequately, and winked back the wetness as she turned to greet Helmi.

Helmi seemed thinner and fine-drawn, but she was smiling. “why did you come back so soon, Joanna? I'll miss Ellen.”

“Helmi, she wasn't too much of a bother to you, was she?”

“I liked having her. It gave me something to do.”

Mark bore down on Nils. Yes, he
was
stormy. “Jesus Christ, about time you got home!” he said violently. Jud, behind him, wheezed.

“Purty way of greetin' your brother-in-law, I must say! Whyn't you just shoot the poor son of a bitch and be done with it?”

“It may come to shootin' before we're done,” Mark said, looking ominous. “Way they're chewin' over on Brigport.”

Nils clapped Mark's shoulder. “Come on up to the house, Mark.” He reached around Mark to shake hands with Jud, whose eyes were more watery than usual and who kept sniffing as if he had a cold.

“Buildin' boats, were ye? Whyn't you tell that uncle of yours that boat belongs in these waters, none of this fishin' in the bay with her! . . . It's good to see you back, son.”

Matthew Fennell's boat swerved boldly around the harbor point, with a home-coming air about her, and came with an arrow straightness toward the car. Jud hurried back across the wharf, muttering. “Last man in, as usual. Works hard, that boy. Don't wonder he stays out all day, with that old woman waitin' at home for him. . . . Even if his wife is a nice girl. . . .”

Caleb was just beaching his punt, and Nils called down to him and Joey. Caleb's answer came, deep and unhurried. The boy's smile was dazzling, as Ellen's had been. That moment told Joanna more clearly than anything else what Joey had fought for, at school; Nils was his hero, almost his god.

It was surely not possible that she'd ever been jealous of Nils, and not proud. . . . They walked up to the house, the two men behind her and Helmi, and Ellen everywhere at once. Mark was talking vehemently in a restrained voice; it was always an effort for him to suppress either pleasure or rage, so he seemed to be talking between clenched teeth.

“What happened at Brigport?” Joanna asked Helmi.

“Captain Merrill told him something.” Helmi gave her a sidewise look.

“Go ahead, Helmi. I heard about this before I went ashore.”

Helmi didn't look surprised. “I was wondering about that, today. But I didn't tell Mark what I thought. . . . Captain Merrill called us into his boatshop when we landed on his wharf this afternoon. He said it had come to him—he wouldn't tell us who said it.”

“Naturally,” said Joanna. “But he wanted us over here to know what was going on. Cap'n Merrill's always been a good friend to us.”

“He seems good,” answered Helmi. She and Joanna had reached the path through the drifts by the old gateposts. They looked back at the men, Mark so black-browed and emphatic, Nils fair and reflective. Ellen skipped between them.

“Ellen hasn't been very gay, I knew she had something on her mind,” said Helmi. “Look at her now.”

“Nils is home, and he can fix everything. Ellen's sure of it.”

The translucent green of Helmi's eyes darkened to a cold, grayed color, like a suddenly clouded sea. “It's—
abominable
for them to say such things about Nils! Joanna, how can you be so calm? You look perfectly peaceful.”

“I wasn't peaceful when I left here, Helmi,” Joanna said. “But I'm like Ellen—I'm not scared when Nils is here.” She knelt suddenly and scooped up a double handful of snow. “Isn't this wonderful for snowballs?” she demanded, and was glad to see the faint smile that lighted Helmi's face.