The Ebbing Tide (14 page)

He knew how Nils looked from the photograph on the radio, and sometimes she tried to tell him about the real Nils; the inner serenity and fortitude of the man, and the goodness. But she had rarely talked about Nils to anyone like this, and she was grateful when he said simply, “Owen's told me about him.”

“He's always been more patient with Owen than I've been. He tried to tell me almost what you've told me, but I thought it was a case of men sticking together.”

He smiled, and walked across the room to look at the photograph. “He wouldn't have had that taken, if I hadn't told him it was for Jamie,” she said. “He's so darned self-effacing—”

“Not self-effacing. Self-assured.”

Thus they could talk almost freely about Nils. And he asked question after question about the Island. She told him all she knew about it, from the time her grandfather had bought it from the State of Maine. He was delighted with everything she could tell him, and she found herself remembering old anecdotes she thought she'd forgotten, and bringing down albums of old photographs from the attic. She wanted him to see the harbor when it was full of graceful sloops, and schooners that brought out the mail and groceries, much as the lobster smack brought the groceries now.

“Then Pete Grant opened a store and spoiled us for forty years,” she told him. The mention of Pete Grant began a whole new period of recollection; how Pete lived as a young man in one of the camps and baked beans every Saturday night for himself and his bachelor chums, and eventually was selling them to everybody on the Island who didn't have a woman to bake beans for him. The life of the Island about the time of Pete Grant's advent and for the next twenty-five years or more had been a golden time. In Joanna's mind, filled with the stories she had heard, that period stood for snug winters given over to quilting and social evenings, knitting bees when a man's trap-heads for a whole season's need would be done in a single evening; indeed, the winters seemed to be long, unhurried seasons of content and abundance. Her grandfather had been in his prime, and his sons Stephen and Nathan were young men, ambitious and industrious, but willing to limit their ardent young energies to the boundaries of the Island. It had been like a little principality, lying far at sea, its existence known to so few that even in Limerock there were people who said wistfully, “Seems to me I've heard of Bennett's Island . . . where is it, anyway?”

Joanna showed Dennis pictures of Uncle Nate's Place as it had been once. He was intensely interested, and his interest led her on to talk more. It was only at the end of these evenings that she realized she knew nothing more about him than he had told her that one night. He spoke as if he had no family and no past, and she wondered increasingly if he had been married, if it had been his wife who had let him down, what the woman looked like, what their life had been together. It was a matter for endless conjecture. She lay in bed, falling asleep, and thinking. There was one thing that she did know. Whoever and whatever the woman had been, Joanna despised her.

She's as much of a fool
, she thought coldly,
as I'd be if I let myself lose Nils
.

A
PRIL WAS PROGRESSING
toward May now, and the annual miracle was taking place when color seeped slowly and unmistakably into the fields and trees. The dead bronze of the marsh had an emerald sheen where the new grass sprang from the damp black earth, the buds took form on the sleek lilac branches and on the knotty boughs of the apple trees in the orchard. The old maple tree in the cemetery, sheltered by the big spruces that walled in the little plot, showed red buds against the wind-broken sky, and Joanna, looking up through them, her hand on the smooth strong trunk, knew she was not dreading the spring as she had expected. It had seemed as if she could not enjoy it with any fullness of heart when Nils was gone, and the little canker of worry lay always deep in her mind; but when she saw the red buds against the delicate blue and white, she knew there were some things that would always fire her spirit. Red buds, and the first roseate flush along the apple boughs, the first bluebirds to light on the raspberry canes in the field—she always forgot how blue they were; the early morning crying of the gulls circling and calling over the harbor after their winter silence; the new traps outside the fish houses, and the repainted buoys hung in the sun like beads to be strung by a giant, red and yellow, blue and white, black and orange.

Owen was walking down to the shore every day now. He'd be going out to haul soon, and there would be no further reason for Dennis to stay. The thought held some slight sadness for her. She had grown used to him. . . . Owen seemed to be on sure footing now, he had been living without liquor for two weeks and there was a fresh, clear-eyed vigor about him that was convincing. It was Dennis who had done it, in those long hours when he and Owen had talked. He'd helped Owen over the edge, and for this Owen—and the rest of the family too—would be eternally grateful to him.

She came home one afternoon from a long walk up through the Bennett meadow to the orchard and cemetery, and thence down through the Fennell's field; walking slowly in the soft late light, with Jamie and the dog forging ahead, she was in a gentle, half-melancholy mood. Dennis had bought Uncle Nate's place, but somehow it seemed to form no ties. She had the feeling that once he had left he would disappear into the emptiness from which he had come. Nils would never know him, and they would all have lost a friend.

She went down the narrow lane that passed the clubhouse, a long low building nestled flatly under the spruces, and then came to the closed-up Gray house, set back from the lane among its trees. The sun had gone down behind the high part of the Island, and the lane where she walked lay in cool shadow. But as she turned into the path that led close by the windbreak, the long shadows of the spruces stretched across the tangle of tawny grass, and the gables of her own house were gilded with ruddy sunshine, the windows ablaze.

“Hello!” Jamie crowed out, and she saw Dennis coming from the house to meet them, smoking his pipe and wearing his old tweed jacket. It was odd how much a familiar part of the scene he had become in a few weeks.

He admired with gratifying interest Jamie's handful of somewhat crumpled alder tassels, and waited until Joanna reached him.

“I've made a decision,” he said. She stopped in the path.

“What?”

He laughed. “Don't look so horrified. Not until after I've told you, anyway. . . . I'm going to stay on the Island.”

“I'm anything but horrified!” said Joanna. Her dark eyes began to shine. “I was just thinking how we'd miss you—”

“Don't think I'm going to impose on you further, though. You have enough to do. I've been talking to Sigurd, and I'm going there.”

“You haven't imposed.” They walked along together toward the house, and she thought,
Better Leonie than Thea
. She didn't protest because he was leaving the house; they both knew the impossibility of his becoming a permanent boarder. Aloud she said, humorously, “Sigurd's place is considered the local sink of iniquity, because he and Leonie are living in sin. But you'll get good food and a clean room.”

“I like that couple. I shan't mind the iniquitous part of it. Do you know why I decided to stay?”

“Why?” They loitered along the path. Between the trunks of the windbreak the late sun streamed with a summery warmth, and the harbor burned brightly blue in the ruddy light. It was too pleasant to hurry.

Dennis took his pipe out of his mouth and cradled it in his hand, staring at it. “For years I've been preaching against escape; and now that I've decided to run away from the unpleasant aspects of life, I've discovered that escape is a very restful and delightful thing.”

“What are you escaping from?” she asked him candidly.

“I've already told you. The unpleasant aspects of life—”

“It's not always pleasant here. It can be hellish.”

He stopped again, and gestured with his pipe. “Look. To put it simply, I like it here. I feel happy and at ease. By all the rules of convention, I should go back to a place and a manner of living that has become very repugnant to me. By all my personal philosophy I should go back. But I'm not going.”

They had reached the end of the windbreak and he stood looking down at the harbor, his eyes narrowed against the brilliance of the setting sun. The harsh radiance illumined his face, and she saw how much younger it seemed than when he had come; as if he had cast off all the anxieties and silent fears and weaknesses that had come with him, and had forgotten himself entirely here on the Island. He had eaten plain food and slept long hours in the silence he'd found unbelievable; he'd become involved in the life of the place. And now he was going to stay.

She wanted him to stay. It was not for her to say anything now. But she had a moment's misgivings when she glanced at his hands, the surgeon's hands. She remembered her blunt question.
But you're still a surgeon, aren't you? I mean—a man doesn't simply stop being—

He'd spoken of escape then, she remembered, and she'd felt that she'd unwittingly touched a raw wound.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked suddenly, and she realized he had been watching her.

“Supper,” she answered promptly.

“If I knew you better I'd call you a liar,” he said, smiling, as he walked with her to the house.

He moved down to Sigurd's the day that Owen went out to haul for the first time. The house echoed with its stillness when they had both gone. Joanna turned on the radio and was beating up a gingerbread to the accompaniment of a cowboy singer when Thea came in.

“I see you lost your boarder!” she shouted above the music.

Joanna nodded and went on beating. Thea flattened her bony hips against the dresser, licked her fingers and rearranged a curl.

“How'd he happen to go, I wonder?”

The cowboy yodeled piercingly. Thea glanced around the corner at the radio with an ostentatious shrug of her shoulders, which Joanna chose to ignore.

“I said,” Thea repeated loudly, “How'd he happen to move?”

“Oh!” Joanna gave her a bright look. “He wanted to.”

Thea's eyes narrowed. But her thin, reddened mouth still smiled. “S'pose he couldn't very well hang around with Nils bein' away and all. . . . You seen Nora Fennell lately?”

“What?” said Joanna. From the next room a voice made a plaintive query.
Why do you treat me as if I were only a friend . . . ?

Thea's smile was an effort now. “I said . . . Nora hasn't been down to the harbor for a long time. Maybe she's in the family way.” She giggled. “That'd be somethin' wouldn't it? I've been thinkin' Matthew must be a lot like Franny—couldn't make—”

If you don't love me I wish you would leave me alone
, wailed the bereft cowboy.

“I wonder if there's anything else on,” said Joanna, and went in to the radio. When she came back to the kitchen, Thea was gone. Joanna smiled.

S
OMETIMES IT SEEMED TO
J
OANNA
as if there were four Joannas, each a distinct personality, whose pattern of thought was as different from the other Joannas as the east wind from the west. There had been the girl who'd existed from birth until the time she married Alec Douglass; no, until the time she'd
met
him, for surely she had begun, without knowing it, a new design in life on the day he had come up the ladder of Pete Grant's wharf and taken off his hat to her with as much courteous charm as if it had been a top hat, and himself in white tie and tails. He'd been gaunt and hollow-cheeked, and his clothes were worn thin; the wind had blown through them that raw March day. His boat was the same—his name for it was
The Basket
. It showed up pitifully among the sleek prosperous boats in the harbor, and Alec Douglass himself had looked too thin, too white, too impermanent among the five Bennett boys and Nils—who in those days had been like another brother to Joanna. Yes, Alec Douglass had blown from nowhere, with his battered old hat under one arm and his fiddle under the other, and he had seemed as evanescent as the dreamlike hush before a storm. But he had stayed, and married the Bennett girl. Nils Sorensen wanted to marry her, but it was Alec who got her.

The life Joanna lived then bore no relationship to her wild-bird teens, or to the life she had lived since. She had been happy as she had not believed it was possible to be happy. That was at the first of it. In three years she knew an all-consuming ecstasy, then a slow but damning awakening to reality; aching pride, and a humiliation during which her chin never lowered. Alec was a gambler. He carried cards in his pocket as he carried her in his mind, and one fever equaled the other. It was a tribute to Alec's heart-breaking charm that Joanna never grew bitter, and it was a tribute to that proud chin of hers, and the level black eyes, that Alec chose betwen her and his other love, and she won out. The June evening when Alec was drowned in the harbor, he was the man she had believed he would be.

The interval between his death and the birth of Ellen was barely an existence. She kept herself carefully numb; she never wept for Alec. Not even when she was alone did she loosen the iron barriers she'd set on grief.
Once I give in, I'll go mad
, she had thought. There was the baby to think of. She owed the child some sort of life, even if she herself never felt anything again but this cold blankness.

But when she looked at the hour-old baby, she knew she was ready to go on. . . . The next period was a strange one. Something happened to the Island. One by one her brothers left; even Nils went away, after the day when he had faced her across Ellen's basket, with Ellen's minute fingers gripping one of his, and she'd told him she would never marry him or anyone. The other fishermen went, and then her father had to go. He couldn't hang on alone. The Bennett homestead was empty for the first time since the earlier Bennetts had built their log cabin on the slope above Goose Cove. . . . Except for the tangible evidence of Ellen, who had her father's long slim body and his quicksilver smile, the three years with Alec had been a dream; only it was as if she had fallen asleep at home, with the sea murmuring in her ears, and had awakened in Pruitt's Harbor. She had worked in the sardine factory to take care of herself and Ellen, she had friends, she participated in the life of the town. Not for her to live in a shell of solitude, knowing only her family. But there had been no roots. Her roots belonged somewhere else.