Storm Tide (8 page)

The boat lunged wildly, and rolled as she hit the backwash of the surf on the big yellow rocks that guarded the Gut. It was only for a moment; then all at once she was in smooth water, and Ellen and Joanna came out of the cabin into the drenched cockpit to watch their progress among the moorings. It wasn't too choppy for some to go out to haul. The
Janet F
. was out, Joanna noticed.

Now it was warm and windless, and the men took off their oil-skins. “'Magine it blows some out there in winter,” Caldwell said mildly.

“Some,” Nils agreed gravely. Joanna touched his arm.

“There's Tom Robey over there, and he must have some bait.” She motioned toward the big boat anchored near the breakwater. Smaller boats and dories were clustered around, and in the sudden hush as Caleb shut off the engine, they could hear the men's voices.

“It's Tom all right, and he's loaded down with herring, by the looks of him. Saw him seining down around Pirate Island last night.” Nils turned to Caldwell. “There's our bait, and I guess it's just in time. We sure need it. . . . We'll drop this crew off, and go over.”

“This is what I call mighty convenient,” said Caldwell. “Over home, bait come down in a truck, and didn't come, half the time. Feller used to get drunk.”

“How many bushels can you lug in this boat?” Nils asked. “We can get some fresh bait and some to corn.”

“Let's fill 'er up and see,” Caldwell suggested, “Jud and me are figgerin' to go haul this afternoon, if it dies away. Some fresh bait would go good. And I almost like herrin' better'n bream.”

Nils set the suitcases ashore and helped Ellen get started on the ladder. Joanna was already at the top to meet her. Joey followed.

“You behave now, young feller,” said Caleb. “Be a credit to the family. After all, we're furriners around here, and we don't want 'em to think we're Hottentots, or some such.”

Joey grinned. Ellen said, “A Hottentot is
black
.”

“Well, so's Joey, 'bout the time his mother gets after his neck and ears,” said Caleb without smiling, Ellen's eyes danced with her suppressed mirth, while Joey turned pink under the freckles.

“So long till Friday, Ellen,” Nils said. “Jo, we'll pick you up on the wharf here in about an hour.”

She left Joey first, at the Merrills'. Mrs. Merrill opened the door to them with a welcome that was heartening to a boy starting a new school in strange country. The Captain was down at the shore, she said, working on the new boat; he'd most likely want Joey to come down and help him after school. That was, if Joey wanted to.

Joey's amber eyes were very big. “
Gosh
,” he breathed reverently. “Sure I want to. Boats—I mean—I—” His words strangled in his throat. He turned very red, and Mrs. Merrill and Joanna, knowing what he meant, mercifully forgot he was there.

They talked for a few minutes, and then it was time to take Ellen to Mrs. Robey. It was still early enough so the children could present themselves at morning recess and not lose the whole session.

“Joey,” Joanna said to him, “Ellen will be just around the bend in the road, in the little white house nestled against the hill. Be sure to fasten the gate behind you, or somebody's cows will be into Whit's dahlias. Would you mind calling for Ellen and walking to school with her just this first day?”

“Gosh no,” said Joey earnestly, if vaguely. He was still in a dream of boat-building.

“He'll be along, soon as he's fortified with a glass of milk and a couple of doughnuts,” said Mrs. Merrill. “My, Joanna, with that build and that fair hair, he puts me in mind of my Bob, when he was that age.”

This is going to work out all right
, Joanna thought as she left him. It was a responsibility, finding a boarding place for another woman's child. But she should have known it would work out all right. Boats were Joey's passion. So were they Cap'n Merrill's. And Mrs. Merrill loved boys. Good or bad, it made no difference to her; besides, they were usually all good after a concentrated dose of her grandmothering.

It's a pretty house,” said Ellen, walking backward. “Is mine as nice as that?”

“Oh yes, you'll like it.”

“I hope so.” Ellen sounded dubious. “Can I come down and call on Mrs Merrill?” She could hardly take her eyes from the spotless white house with its ell kitchen, and red vines climbing over the sprawling porch, the heavily fruited apple trees around it and the wall of spruces around it. The fieldstone well curb had a special fascination for her.

Joanna hoped prayerfully that the Robeys' white picket fence, with dahlias, would make up for the well curb. And it did. Other things helped. For instance, the way the rambling, low-posted house fitted against the hillside, and the ice-pond on the other side of the twisty road through the spruces. . . . Oh, this was almost better than apple trees, Ellen's eyes said.

Mrs. Robey was not a plump white-haired grandmother like Mrs. Merrill, but a slender, quiet-voiced one, who showed Ellen a little low-ceilinged room with a flowery quilt on the bed. There was a rocker just Ellen's size with an old-fashioned doll sitting in it; she looked at Ellen with bright blue eyes painted in her china face. She wore full rose-sprigged skirts, and it was clear from Ellen's first enchanted glimpse of her that they were going to be friends.

“Her name is Phoebe,” said Mrs. Robey.

“Phoebe,” repeated Ellen in a soft, careful voice. She kissed Joanna good-bye very serenely.

“I thought I was going to miss you,” she said, her arms around her mother's neck. “But now I don't think so.”

“I don't think so either,” Joanna agreed. “And after all, if you walk up to the top of the hill, you can look down across Brigport to Bennett's and see the house over there.”

“Good-bye,” Ellen said. “I want to count Phoebe's petticoats before Joey comes. One of them has ruffles on it.”

“I'm dismissed,” Joanna said to Mrs. Whit. She felt proud of Ellen's poise. All in all she felt satisfied with the morning. She knew in her bones that all would go well with Joey and Ellen as far as their boarding-places were concerned. For school, that was another matter. But it would be the same in any new school, and Joey would look out for Ellen until she had made her own friends.

She met no one on the road back to the harbor. The birds darted and twittered in the spruces, and in the places where the sun had not yet struck, there was still the glitter of dew. The coolness was giving way to the delicious warmth of an October day.

Soon she saw the blue harbor shining through the trees, and the roofs of the fish houses below her, black against the sun glare on the water, and she heard the impotent clatter of the gulls who sat on the breakwater and watched the transfer of herring which they couldn't touch.

She didn't mind the prospect of having to ride home with a boatload of fish. From her earliest childhood she had understood the importance of bait. Why, the smell of the baitsheds had been sweet to her, and to get her hands into rich corned herring, and help Charles or Philip bait up, had been heaven. Seeing the hogsheads full was like opening your cupboard doors and seeing the laden shelves, or going down into the cellar where the jars of canned stuff—your own canning—were stored. It gave you a safe warm feeling; a knowledge that there was something put by against the long winter days ahead.

Caldwell's boat wasn't back at the wharf yet, and she went into the store. Randolph Fowler was behind the counter. A big hulk of a man whose clothes glittered with herring scales was lounging against the apple barrel, drinking a bottle of pop. After the brilliance outside he was a black bulk which she didn't recognize as she shut the screen door quietly behind her.

Fowler was talking. “You did just right,” he said. “You want to do that every time, Tom. They'll soon catch on.”

The big man's laughter rumbled in his chest, and he put the pop bottle down with a flourish. It was Tom Robey. “They better,” he said. “And the sooner they catch on, the healthier for the bastards.”

Joanna had to smile. In the old days Tom had always been calling somebody a bastard, too. ‘Hello, Tom,” she said, and put out her hand to him. “How are you?”

Fowler nodded at her and began to arrange canned fruit on the shelves Tom looked down at her hand, his heavy brows drawn; he seemed confused. “My hands is filthy, Jo,” he said.

She wondered if he was embarrassed by the memory of the time when he'd tried to kiss her against her will, at a dance in the clubhouse; it had been years ago, when they were in their teens. Her brother Owen had knocked Tom down, and the ensuing row between the boys of Brigport and Bennett's had made island history. “Tom, you don't think I hold
that
against you, do you?” She smiled at him. “We were all kids together. Let bygones be bygones.”

After all, he was letting the men have bait—it didn't hurt to put him at his ease. But he still looked as if he wanted to get away in a hurry. “Well, thanks, Jo,” he mumbled, and strode past her, pulling his cap down over his eyes.

Fowler came back to the counter. “Something I can do for you?”

Joanna laughed. “What ails Tom, anyway? . . . Let's see, I've got three lists here. I'm a regular shopping service this morning.” Pleasantly, she met Fowler's eyes. But his usual genial manner was absent; he was looking past her at nothing, with an air of remote patience.

I feel so happy
, she thought,
and everybody else has something on his mind
. She began to read the first list aloud. Silently Fowler moved to collect the groceries.

She borrowed the wheelbarrow outside the store to take the box of provisions down to the wharf, and met Nils coming up. Without a word he took the box under his arm.

“It's not very heavy,” she said. “He didn't have half the things I wanted. Or else he'd mislaid them. Either he's running on a shoe string or it's time for him to reorder. How's the herring, Nils? Big enough for us to have some fried for dinner?”

“See for yourself,” said Nils. It was then that she noticed the immobility of his face was tighter, harder than usual. It started a little pulse of warning in her brain. The brilliant day was suddenly shadowed, though the sun burned as bright. There was no warmth in it.

They came to the end of the wharf and looked down at the boat. Caleb sat on a firkin, smoking his pipe. In the bait and lobster boxes near his feet, there was herring. Possibly two bushels. There was no brimming cockpit-load of blue and silver fish.

“Is that all you could get?” she asked. “Is that all there was left?”

“There was plenty left,” said Caleb, looking up from under his shaggy brows. Joanna turned to Nils.

“But it wasn't Tom who turned you down, was it? It couldn't have been. Tom was up in the store just now. . . . There he goes along the beach. He'd let you have all you wanted. He gives the orders, doesn't he?”

“He gives the orders, yes,” said Nils. “And he gave them, before he went ashore. I don't know why, or how, or anything about it. . . . Let's get started back.”

His lips came together hard on the last word, and he said nothing more. But that he was furious Joanna knew from the faint whitening around his mouth.

T
HAT NIGHT THEY TORCHED HERRING
in Goose Cove, where the fish were schooling. By dusk you could hear the tiny, fast, whispering sound they made in the water; you could smell them, Joanna insisted.

With three men there could only be one team, and they took the biggest dory; Caleb and Jud rowing and Nils dipping. Joanna collected the rags for the torches while Nils made the torch basket and fastened it to the side of the dory. Then, as darkness shut down, they began to work. Marion Gray and Vinnie Caldwell came up to watch with Joanna from behind the house. Out of the wind there, they could see the whole cove. The torch made a mockery of the darkness, it threw its great ruddy flickering light far and wide.

Joanna loved to watch torching. The men's yellow oilclothes glistened like some burnished stuff in the firelight, and the oars gleamed strangely; the light shot its radiance down through the water so that the dory flew forward over a sea of translucent jade green. The movements of the men who rowed and the man who stood in the bow and swung the big net down, and brought it up full of living, squirming silver, held for her the charm of accomplished dancers, or the effortless flight of gulls.

But tonight the scene was robbed of some of its poetry by the knowledge that they shouldn't be out there working like this for a handful of bait. They had no big boats to fill with their catch, so even if the sea were alive with herring, at best they could only get enough for the next few days; none to salt down for the winter. Tom Robey should have supplied them, and he didn't. This sudden inexplicable refusal was like a stone wall forever hemming her in, whichever way she turned.
Why, why, why
, her mind kept saying, even while she laughed and talked with the women.

The herring were thick in the cove that night, and they worked until their shoulders ached from rowing and dipping. Then they came ashore, hauled the full dory up and covered it with a tarpaulin to keep the early-rising gulls away. Nils' peapod was full too. They had plenty for a few days.

Joanna had coffee ready, but Caleb and Jud said they preferred to wash the soot off their faces in their own kitchens, and then have their mug-up. Joanna was not sorry to be alone with Nils. He had been out working all day, and she hadn't had a chance to talk to him about Tom Robey.

She said nothing while he washed the smut from his face and ears, but poured his coffee for him, and set out man-sized sandwiches. As he came to the table she thought he masked his weariness and anger well. It was another way in which he reminded her of her father.

She poured out coffee for herself and sat down opposite him. “What do you think of it?” she asked him at last. “Of Tom, I mean.”