Storm Tide (6 page)

“You sound like Joanna. The way you always sounded.” His hand gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. “Full of ideas for yourself and everybody else. Let's go home and eat.”

“But I did a good job on the house, inside and out, didn't I?” Young joanna had learned to row, to fish for cod, to waltz, as Nils had taught her, not her brothers. It had always been for Nils' approval that she looked.

“You did fine on the house. Now let's see how well you did on the fish hash.”

They walked back, lightly and carefully, over the wharf to firm land. It had been a long time since anything had been done to Pete Grant's wharf. Pete, who had kept the store and bought lobsters at Bennett's Island since long before Joanna was born, lived on the mainland now. But he still owned the western harbor point, and the wharf and buildings.

Joanna stopped by the store, and looked through the dust-filmed windows. “You think Pete will let us have the postoffice in here?” she asked. “We ought to be able to have one, if we start working on it right away.”

“Not today, Lady,” said Nils firmly, and took her by the elbow.

It was a sunny day, with a fresh little north-west breeze ruffling the water into a frothy edge of white around the rocks, when the
Aurora B
. was due to steam down between the islands and land Mrs. Jud Gray and Mrs. Caleb Caldwell on the wharf with their assorted household goods. The men and Joey would come in Caleb's boat.

When the day had been set for the migration, Joanna had made arrangements for Ellen to be brought up from Pruitt's Harbor and put on the mailboat. Now, as Joanna walked down to the wharf, she knew three kinds of pleasant anticipation. She was to. see Marion Gray again, after all these years; she was to meet Mrs. Caldwell, who, like it or not, would be bound together with Joanna and Marion in the enforced camaraderie of the only women on the Island; and she would see Ellen. It had been a month she and Nils were married, a month since she'd brushed out Ellen's Alice-in-Wonderland mane and braided it, and saw the saucy starched bow of her gingham pinafore bounce around the corner on the way to the second grade.

Now Ellen was to sleep in the little room that had been Joanna's, she was to begin her Island childhood, to wake to the same sounds and scents and colors Joanna had known. It was, to Joanna, a thing too wonderful for ordinary contemplation. And there would be something else for Ellen to see with her solemn gray-blue eyes. She would grow with the Island, see it reach its full stature, become what her great-grandfather had intended it to be. The young Joanna had been born into a time of richness and plenty for the Island; and she had seen it die. Now it was beginning to live again. And Ellen would see it, she would be a part of it.

Nils had gone out to haul, intending to be home before the boat came, but he wasn't in yet, and Joanna waited alone on the wharf. The freshening wind whipped at her wine-red corduroy skirt and jacket, tugged at her crisp black hair. She loved the wind. Anyone who had grown up in a houseful of Bennett boys was afraid of nothing that was strong and vigorous and noisy.

She thought of her brothers now; of Charles, comfortably settled at Pruitt's Harbor with his Mateel and his five youngsters and his mother; of Philip, the next oldest, still unmarried, still quiet-spoken, partner with Charles on
The Four Brothers
. Mark and Stevie, younger than Joanna, had gone with Charles in the beginning, that was how the big seiner had got her name. Now they were partners by themselves, line-trawling like Jud and Caleb.

And there was Owen... Her mind slipped quickly past the thought of him. She was afraid to think of Owen too much. He was the next older than herself He had outgrown the Island—or thought he had—and had left it without a backward glance. He had left his boat too, the
White Lady
, the boat he'd designed and built himself, and loved more than any woman. No one in the family had heard a word about or from him for six years now. For all they knew, he might be dead, and she didn't want to dwell on that. Or there were things harder to think about than death. Owen had always been so violent; he liked his liquor, he made conquests of women who should have been forbidden to him. He had been the strange, wild one in the Bennett clan. And he had been a law unto himself.

The boys had not wanted to come back. All except Owen, they had seen her married to Nils, had kissed her and hugged her, and told her they were glad to see her and Nils together at last, and watched them set off for the Island. But not one had wanted to come back. To come home.

Thinking of it, Joanna's shoulders straightened, her mouth hardened.
Let them stay over there
, she thought.
We'll do all right
.

A boat's whistle sounded outside Eastern Harbor Point, and then she saw the Aurora B. plunging through the tide rip with a bone in her teeth. She forgot all resentment.
Those poor women
, she thought.
They'll be frozen almost to death
.

Marion Gray, moving briskly around Joanna's kitchen helping to set the table, was the same as ever, plump and sturdy like her husband, rosy from the wind, no speck of gray in her neat brown hair. Mrs. Caldwell—Vinnie, Marion called her—was a trim, birdlike little woman. It was from her Joey took his big golden eyes, freckles, and short nose. She was young, not thirty-five yet, Joanna guessed, but there was a timeless quality about her, as if joanna had always known her, tiny and dependable, and full of energy and ambition that seemed too big for such a slight creature. She had been woe-fully seasick, but she was undaunted. She sat by the window, sipping hot coffee, and looked down at her house.

“There's room between it and the trees in back for a vegetable garden, isn't there?” she asked. “And space for a nice little lawn in front, between the house and the shore. I brought some dahlia bulbs. They'll look handsome, dahlias will, against that white paint next fall.”

“I hope you won't be lonely on that side of the harbor,” Joanna said, delighted with her.

“Lonely? When all my life I've wanted space to throw out my arms without hittin' somebody on the nose?” She laughed. “And when my work's done, you'll see me climbin' up on that point to watch for Caleb to come in from haulin'.”

Marion went over to look out at the harbor. “Those menfolks ought to be showin' up soon, hadn't they? They left before the mail-boat did.”

“Sakes, I don't worry about Caleb.” Vinnie Caldwell rocked comfortably, then stopped. “I better not do that, or I'll be topsy-turvy again, and this coffee's too good to lose.... Marion, you know that old engine of his just chugs along. Nothin' flashy about her, but she gets where she's goin'—sooner or later.”

“Looks like it's later, in this case,” said Marion tartly. “Jud bought a case of beer yesterday. They get thirsty on the way, there won't be anything to move on.”

“Caleb never drinks in front of the boy, not even beer.” Mrs. Caldwell leaned back in her chair and sighed. It was a sigh of pure contentment. There had never been a sweeter sound to Joanna's ears.
I was right from the start
, she thought,
about the Caldwells
. . . .

Ellen was coming down the stairs, hopping from one step to the next and humming under her breath. That was how Joanna used to come downstairs, wrapped in her private imaginings. She remembered ruefully that half the time
her
deepest contemplation had to do with the best way to get even with Owen. . . . Hearing her daughter now, Joanna half-wished she could see into Ellen's head and know what she was thinking, what stayed in her mind of the view she had just now seen, from the window of the little room with the faded red sailboats on the walls.

But on the whole, she was glad she couldn't see. For it was what Ellen thought and considered and dreamed that made of her seven-year-old self a real, inviolable, personality.

She had been very mysterious when she came into the house. Her slender face solemn, her blue-gray eyes wide, she had refused to let Joanna stay with her while she changed her clothes.

“That Mrs. Caldwell was awful seasick. You better go tend to her.” she had admonished Joanna. “You wait till I come downstairs. You'll be surprised.”

And now she was coming into the kitchen. She was slim and tall in a pair of her cousin Charles' outgrown and faded overalls. Except for her fair coloring, it might have been Joanna herself standing in the doorway, watching the grown-ups unsmilingly. Joanna didn't speak. She hadn't expected the overalls. Ellen looked back at her, waiting, and then Marion Gray said heartily,

“Well! Who's this boy? A little girl came over with us, but I don't know where this boy came from!”

Suddenly the somberness was gone, Ellen's smile flashed into being, her eyes crinkled up into sparkles, a deep dimple pricked her cheek, her front-teeth-missing grin was delicious.

“Mother, are you surprised? Aunt Mateel let me have them. She said you
always
used to wear overalls when you were little!”

“And so I did,” said Joanna. She wanted to put down the soup ladle and hug Ellen as she hugged her at night, at bedtime; she wanted to take her daughter's hand and lead her outdoors into the great sun-drenched world of sea and sky and tawny field, to sit with her on the red-brown rocks that sloped from the soil of the Island into the sea and then went down and down and were still the Island. . . . She wanted to show her the grassy places between the coves and the woods where the Indians' supper fires had pricked the lilac dusk with flame; and the treeless, rolling ground at the Western End where the wild strawberries carpeted the slopes in July, and the ripe raspberries trembled on the bushes in August, and where the gulls nested on the sheer naked cliffs at the very tip of the Island, and where the surf rolled even on calm days over long black reefs that the men must know as they knew the lines in the palms of their hands,

All these things flashed through her mind as she stood there, ladling hot lobster chowder. The women talked to Ellen, and she answered them, neither shyly nor boldly. But Joanna, smiling a little, her brown hands steady and certain, thought of the million things she would show her daughter.

Marion Gray said to her in a hushed tone, “If you don't mind my sayin it, Joanna . . . She may have your mother's colorin', and your build, but when she smiles she's her father all over again.”

Joanna nodded. “Everyone notices that resemblance to Alec.”

Relieved that she spoke so casually, Marion added, “I always said there never was a sweeter smile than Alec's. . . . But there, I have to say there's no better man than Nils. How's Ellen like him?”

Marion's frank curiosity didn't anger Joanna. “Ellen loves him,” she said. “She calls him Nils, because she's always been interested in her own father. But she thinks Nils is wonderful.”

“That's lovely,” said Marion, her eyes moist.

“I'm going to have a playhouse,” said Ellen to Mrs. Caldwell, “out on the rocks. My mother had a playhouse. I want mine the same place hers was.”

“I'll show you where, this afternoon,” Joanna said.

No one happened to see Caldwell's boat come into the harbor, with Nils' peapod in tow—they had picked him up between the islands. They came unexpectedly into the kitchen, with Joey trailing hungrily behind them.

There was another man with them. Jud introduced him as Matthew Fennell; he lobstered out of the little fishing port where the Grays and Caldwells had lived. He was in his early thirties, like Nils. He had not much to say, and a slow, pleasant smile. Burnt brown like the others, he was shaved and neat, his reddish-brown hair recently clipped. Joanna liked his ruddy face and clear, friendly gray eyes. You could tell a lot about a man by his friends, her father used to say, and if this was a friend of Caleb Caldwell's it was a good sign.

Mrs. Caldwell, helping Joanna with the second table while Marion washed up the first lot of dishes, spoke about him while she and Joanna were at the stove.

“He's a real nice young fellow, Matthew is. A nice wife, too—about ten years younger than him, but a good girl. They have their hands full looking out for Gram—that's his grandmother, who brought him up. Old battle-ax,” said Mrs. Caldwell without viciousness. “Matthew'd give his eye-teeth to be on his own—he's been lobsterin' on shares for Clyde Sparrow. You know him, he owns Sparrow Island, to the west'ard of here. What Caleb says, lobsterin's a good life for a man who knows he owns his own gear.”

Joanna nodded. “It's nice he could come along and help. That'll be two men to each house. It's no fun, wheeling stuff up that slope to Jud's, or around the shore to your house.”

Mrs. Caldwell took two plates of chowder to the table, and Joanna wondered if Matthew Fennell were goweled by the fact that the other three men eating with him were their own masters. She knew it would gowel her! But Matthew Fennell looked easy-going enough.

They ate heartily, for they planned to have everything moved and the stoves set up by late afternoon, when the warmth of the day would be gone. Joanna intended to help each of the women set things to rights.

But before she did anything else, she was going to do what she had promised; find for Ellen the place among the rocks where her own playhouse had been. Already she had collected, in her walks along the beach, bits of blunt-edged colored glass and china for dishes. And a battered teakettle from out in the shop, and a rusty pan or two. Oh, she would set Ellen up in great style, and leave her there with her dolls, with Goose Cove shimmering on one side of the point and Schoolhouse Cove on the other side, a great rise of rock for her housewall, a small square one for her stove, and a floor of wonderful flatness, with hardly any slant to it at all.

By sunset it was all done, and smoke lifted from the chimneys as triumphantly as any banners. Joanna came out of the Caldwell house, leaving a weary but profoundly happy Vinnie starting supper in the kitchen, and collected Ellen, who with Joey was exploring the tidewater pools among the rocks by the fish house.