Storm Tide (9 page)

“I don't know.” Nils watched his coffee as he stirred it. “If he'd been on a drunk, I'd think he was ugly from a hangover, and took it out on us. But he's been seining right along.”

“Did anyone over there say anything to you about it? Ralph Fowler, or anybody?”

“They'd already cleared away. Ralph had gone home from the car to dinner, and Tom was just going over the side to go ashore when our turn came. He kept on going, and I tried to argue Milt into giving us some. But he was under Tom's orders.” Nils stopped stirring. His blue eyes looked reflectively into space, as if he were seeing the scene again. “Finally I told him to take his bait and go to hell with it.”

“Nils, you didn't.” Her eyes danced. “You don't talk like that!”

His mouth twitched. “I did this morning. Well, here we are. Caldwell's been here a week, and this hits us in the face. If he thinks it'll be like this all the time, hell be going back to the feller that comes in a truck, drunk or not.”

Joanna said fiercely, “To think I was nice to that ape in the store this morning!”

“Especially when he's seining out by Goose Cove Ledge, right now,” said Nils dryly. Joanna jumped up and ran to the window that looked seaward. There, beyond the black loom of the point, were the swaying lights of the
Elsie R
.

“Right in our own backyard!” she exclaimed. “That's adding insult to injury! Why doesn't Brigport just move onto the Island and be done with it?”

Nils drank his coffee calmly. “Now, don't connect the traps up with this bait business. They'll move their pots out, now that they see we're getting populated again. But the seining's always been different. I could go torching in Brigport harbor, if I had a mind to.”

“Yes, and if you could spare a few bushels of herring and somebody wanted to buy them, you'd sell 'em, wouldn't you? That's always been the way.”

“Tom,” said Nils, with the flicker of a smile, “is different.”

“
Different!
” She came back to the table. “Nils, what can we do when anybody gets in our way like this? You three can't torch enough herring to put in your winter's supply—”

“I think,” said Nils slowly, “that I'm going ashore on the mail-boat tomorrow. I'll go down to Pruitt's Harbor and see what your brother Charles is doing. Might be he'd come out and catch us some—then we can have plenty of bait, fresh and to salt down for the winter, right here. No sense thinking about Tom any more.”

Her eyes lit up at once. “Nils, that's wonderful. I know Charles will come!”

“Charles might have too much on his hands, or be out somewhere,” Nils warned her. “So don't look for him. But I'll get somebody.” He got up and carried his dishes to the sink. “I'm about ready for bed, I guess.”

“Go ahead,” said Joanna, “I'll be right along.” He took a lamp from the shelf, lighted it, and went through the sitting room to the big room that had been Stephen's and Donna's. He walked silently in his moccasins. Joanna, alone in the kitchen, did the last tasks of the day; filled the teakettle, adjusted the dampers on the stove, washed the cups and saucers they had just used. She would have left them till morning but Nils, who got up first and made the coffee, hated to see dishes left over.

A strange man she was married to, she thought. A mild man, in appearance and speech. He had been mild, almost gentle, when he had said, “I'll get somebody.” But she knew what lay behind those quiet words. Somebody would come twenty-five miles from the mainland to do what he had planned; he would not come home until he had made sure of it.

Bennett's Island would have its bait.

The morning was gray and still. A pearly light lay over the Island and in it nothing seemed to move. Caleb took Nils over to Brigport to board the mailboat, and when the sound of the engine had died away outside Eastern Harbor Point, Joanna walked home in a stillness so perfect she hated to break it with the slight sound of her feet. The water was motionless, the pale lovely gray of silk. The fading asters gleamed along the road, the birches at the edge of the alder swamp were very white; but their bare branches were a cloudy network of soft amethyst. The woods of both the Eastern End and the Western End looked black and impenetrable, somehow forbidding.

By the time she reached the house the dampness was striking through her shoes. But she paused on the doorstep to look across the pale mirror of Schoolhouse Cove toward her Uncle Nate's big house and barn. Perhaps one of her cousins, Jeff or Hugo, would come back some time and live there. But she doubted it. The Island had always been too small for them.

It gave her a lonely feeling, to think how long it had been since smoke drift from those chimneys, and she went inside quickly, to her own companionable wood fire. A delicious sense of holiday came to her. She was all alone. She could do as she pleased all day, unless Vinnie or Marion came up to keep her company. Perhaps by afternoon she would welcome them. But now . . .

She went into the sitting room and took a book from the shelves. It was an old favorite; to read it as she drank a leisurely cup of coffee was like having an old friend drop in. Sometimes she wished she had an old friend, with whom she had shared her childhood on the Island. There had been Kristi Sorensen, Nils' sister, but she was married to one of Jud's boys and living in Massachusetts. They had five children and a car, and Kristi was fat now, and liked to go to the movies.

No, her book would have to do for company this morning. She drank her mid-morning coffee, had some coffee cake, and then moved to the rocking chair by the stove and went on reading. Her dinner would be warmed-up fish chowder. No work to that. Nils was on his way to the mainland to do something about the bait, Ellen was all right . . . Joanna read on, unconsciously relaxing after the tension of the last few days.

She was abruptly alert when she heard someone try the back door. She got up to open it. But it was not Vinnie or Marion. It was Randy Fowler.

“Hi,” he said, and grinned at her. “Can I have a drink of water?”

Automatically she motioned him in. “Where did you come from?”

“From your wharf in the cove,” he said easily. “Win stayed home this morning—toothache—and I was haulin' alone, so there was nobody to growl at me if I got thirsty and wanted to come ashore for a drink.”

“There's the water pails,” said Joanna.

“You wouldn't offer a guy coffee, would ye?”

“I wouldn't,” said Joanna, “unless he was in distress, and you're not. What's the idea, Randy?”

His sparkling glance traveled around the kitchen while he thought up his answer. But she sensed what the idea was. Of course he knew Nils was out; perhaps he'd been late starting to haul, and had seen Nils board the mailboat. It was something one of her own brothers might try. Smart-alec stuff.

“Well, I was haulin' a few off the point here, and just dropped in. Anything wrong with that?” He put his booted foot on the stove hearth and took out a cigarette. Over the match flame his eyes stayed on her, watching for her reaction.

“Nothing's wrong,” she said casually. “Nothing at all. . . . Your traps must be pretty handy to shore, for you to drop in here without going out of your way.”

“You ain't splittin' hairs, are ye?” He grinned audaciously into her eyes. “Not with all the lobsters there is to catch, and prices gettin' higher by the minute. Come this war the Democrats are headin' us for, prices'll shoot sky-high for any kind of sea food, and we'll all be in the gravy.”

“In the trenches, in your case,” she suggested.

“Sure, they'll haul me in by the neck,” he agreed. “So why begrudge me a few lobsters? There's plenty to go 'round.”

“Are you just as willing to share Brigport waters with us, Randy?”

Randy looked hurt. “Hell, Jo, I never came to get into no arguments! Chew, chew, chew—that's all I hear to home. You the chew-in' kind, too?”

“I'm a woman of few words,” Joanna said. “It won't do you any good to try to get me into a conversation. So you might as well run along.”

“You mean that, Jo?” He was not smiling now. He had, oddly, the surprised look of a child who has stubbed his toe and fallen hard.

“I mean it,” she said.

“Jo, you mad at me for comin' in like this?” he demanded.

“No, not mad. A little annoyed, maybe.”

Randy's face had been flushed and excited when he came in. It was rather pale now. He looked at once miserably embarrassed and meek. But only for an instant. He took off a stove cover, dropped his cigarette into it, and with that gesture recovered his flippant poise.

“O.K., I'll go. As the old feller said, ‘I been kicked out of better places.'” At the door he turned back and looked at her, the familiar twinkle in his bright brown eyes. “All right if I drop in when the old man's home?”

He shut the door before she could answer, and she was left alone to remember his impudence, and the peculiar unhappiness that had flashed over him for an instant.

I believe he's smitten
, she thought suddenly, and laughed aloud. But it might not be so laughable after all. Boys like Randy didn't often take the first hint; they were persistent, if nothing else. They considered themselves invincible, and the more remote a woman was, the more determined they became. She didn't look forward to snubbing Randy, but if this morning's snub didn't work—she shrugged, and went into the sitting room to watch the
Janet F
. pull away from the wharf, her engine shattering the gray quiet of noon.

He'd turned the subject neatly when she had tried to speak about the pots, with his talk of high prices in sea food. He knew very well what she meant, and he hadn't intended to give her a satisfactory answer, admit his pots and the others from Brigport shouldn't be set so close to Bennett's. Maybe he'd take it better from Nils. It seemed to her that the Brigport men should be starting to shift their traps by now, if they intended to abide by the unwritten law. . . .

That nagged at her, like a hidden thorn in her finger. That, and the bait business. In her mind she reviewed that bright morning, and the indefinable smell of the store as she came into it, and Tom lounging against the counter, drinking pop . . .
I wish I'd turned up my nose at him
, she thought now.

She remembered Fowler's smooth baritone voice. “You want to do that every time, Tom. They'll soon catch on.” And then Tom's answer. The fragment of conversation came back to her with a vividness that was disturbing.

They could have been talking about the bait, she thought now, her mind dashing at each possibility like a terrier after a rat. Suppose Tom had given his orders to Milt, and had come ashore, and told Fowler about it. . . . Suppose Fowler, with his stuve, strong personality, had given the orders to Tom in the first place—

But why?
Her fingers drummed on the window pane.
The Janet F
. was out of sight around the point by now. Why should they want to discourage the men from Bennett's like that? Both Fowlers—Ralph with his lobster-buying, Randolph with his store—profited by the trade from Bennett's. She couldn't understand it; she couldn't find any sensible angle from which to survey the problem.

She walked into the kitchen, and all her peace was gone for the day. Perhaps it was just her imagination; perhaps Fowler's remark and Tom's answer had no concern with bait, was about feeding cows, or settling arguments among the seining crew.

But there was one thing she did know; something was wrong. Some hostile force was working against the Island. Against her. She drove one clenched fist into the other palm and walked the length of the house and back again. She wanted Nils to come home. It seemed a year since he had left, and it was scarcely three hours.

But if he came home, if he should walk through the door this instant, what could she say to him? All the things that had been swirling through her head since Randy's visit? She saw with a too-sharp clarity the way his blue eyes would begin to crinkle at the comers, she almost heard his unhurried voice telling her not to be impatient and suspicious, she couldn't have everything come to perfection in the first month.

She wouldn't tell him, then. She would wait until she had something to tell him; something he must recognize as fact, and not her imaginings. So she must watch, and listen, and weigh everything carefully—

But if they're trying to go against me—if anybody is
, she thought,
I'll know. And I'll stop them
.

N
ILS CAME HOME LATE
the next afternoon. Charles didn't bring him, but Joanna recognized the boat that dropped anchor outside Goose Cove as a Pruitt's Harbor craft. She was the
Marianne
, belonging to two cousins who had been in friendly competition with Charles for a long time.

They set Nils ashore, and he came up to the house, quietly satisfied with his accomplishment. He held Joanna as if he had been gone a month.

“Charles was going down to Portland with a load of mackerel,” he said, still keeping her in his arms when she would have got coffee for him. “He talked the Kimballs into coming out. Promised 'em all kinds of herring. Well, they'll get their fish, and we'll get our bait.”

“Are there any in Goose Cove now?”

“I don't know. We may have to chase around some, but we'll do all right.” He kissed her deeply and let her go. “How about some supper? We want to get started.”

But they didn't have to go away from Goose Cove for their night's work. Caleb Caldwell brought his boat around from the harbor, with his and Jud's dories in tow, to be filled with herring. The women sat in the kitchen with Joanna, busy with patchwork and mending. Occasionally they went out beyond the dooryard to watch the seining operations; the boat was brightly lighted.