The Ebbing Tide (32 page)

“Damn all women,” Owen said savagely. “If I hadn't been chas­in' after one, I'd seen what was happenin' to the moorin'.”

“Well, you never let anything go before like that, and
I'd
hate to be condemned for
my
first mistake.” Her knitting needles made a tiny, cheerful clicking, making a sweater for the Red Cross.

“By Christ, it's my last mistake then,” he growled. “And if I want to look at a woman I'll go to Limerock — instead of this gormin' around takin' walks, and all the rest of the foolishness.”

Joanna smiled, and went on knitting. As deeply absorbed in Laurie as he was, his threat was a hollow one. And henceforth he'd be better company around the house, and that was what Joanna wanted; it would be easier to get used to the loss of the
Donna
if Owen were not stamping in and out in a black fury of self-accusation.

She had written to Nils at once about the boat, and the answer came back by air-mail. They would repair the
Donna
somehow, he told her, no matter how badly she'd been smashed. He gave directions for the care of the engine.

Thanksgiving was coming, and then Christmas. The Island winter set in all at once, after the long and dreaming fall. Snow drifted down across the harbor, and outlined each dark spruce branch with white; the fields were as dead, as snow-bound in the lee, as if they had never known summer. In the early mornings after a snowfall, the white was penciled delicately with the tracks of chickadees and juncoes and crows. The brook froze, and the ducks moved into the barn, the alder swamp was a tangle of bare branches through which the sunlight fell freely on places that it could never reach when the leaves were green.

There were flashing, sunny days when the sea smoked with vapor; it was calm enough to go to haul, but the vapor at once burned and froze the flesh. There were mild days, when the clouds were soft and delicately tinted over Brigport, and the paths grew muddy. Then there were blizzards when the steady pounding of surf was drowned out by the high thin wail of the wind. The snow blew, and cut like fragments of ice, and left the Island bare in some places, deeply drifted in others. There were days to go haul in, and there were many more days that weren't fit, except to row out to the mooring and pound the ice off the bows and decks. In the fall the men shifted their traps to deep water, far from the Island. The lobsters went there in the winter time, to live in the protective mud. So when the gales came, the traps were fairly safe. They might drag, but there was less chance of their being splintered into matchwood against the rocks. During a blow the Islanders settled in snugly, with a minimum of worry. There were long hours of radio, hours warmed by aromatic fires of spruce wood that had been cut in warmer weather and had had time in which to season. There were card games, and the sewing afternoons, and the children coming and going from school; reading, knitting, quilt-piecing.

And this was the time when the Islanders ate summer from the jars that stood on the celler shelves; vegetables, strawberry jam that tasted of sunshine, raspberries and blackberries, the mackerel and herring that had been caught on still, mild, nights full of stars. Life on the mainland offered steam heat, movies, stores; but they'd all had their fill of mainland living, and for the most part they were content on the Island.

For the first time in many years there was a Christmas party in the clubhouse, with recitations and songs, and a little play by the children. Laurie Gibson had been keeping them busy all fall with the preparations. After the children's part was over, there was the Christmas tree, with a present for everybody; ice cream the Fennells made, cakes contributed by everyone who had any spare sugar. Then the dance came. It was just Bennett's Island people this time, and it was a happy evening, even though a steady undercurrent of sadness beat through the music for Nils and Mark and Stevie.

Joanna was glad when New Year's was past, it meant that it was the turn of the year, and anything could happen now. Germany could be beaten, Japan could surrender, and Nils would come home.

She hadn't gone far from the house during November and December, and Dennis Garland hadn't called. They'd danced together at the Christmas party and had been pleasant and polite to each other.
It's really easy to be like this
, Joanna thought, but sometimes she found herself wondering what she would do if she should glance out the harbor window and see Dennis coming. The very fancy caused a sickening constriction in her breathing, and so she did not think of it often. She thought instead about how it would be if she should see Nils coming up the path.

Nora came down one raw, slate-gray afternoon. In her dark-blue ski suit, with her visored red cap and woolly mittens, and her cheeks as red as the cap, she wore a sparkle about her, a gayety, that took Joanna back to the time when Nora had first come to the Island.

“You look happy,” Joanna said appreciatively.

“I am! Guess why I'm out? Gram shooed me out. Said I wasn't to poke around the house all day with an old lady!”

“Well, take off your things then, and be comfortable . . . . What's come over Gram, anyway?”

“Oh, she's been that way ever since I fell down stairs that time. Now that she knows I'm perfectly willing and able to give Matthew an heir, she's been fine.” She gave Joanna a sheepish glance. “Of course, I've been meeting her half-way.”

“Good for you,” said Joanna dryly. “Well, how about some coffee? I was just going to make some.”

“Grand!” Nora dropped down on the floor beside Jamie . “Hi, old-timer! Let me see your new boats.” Joanna left them and went into the kitchen to start the coffee. It was good to see Nora looking so well; perhaps it had been all for the best that she'd lost the baby, since the change in her — and in Gram — had dated from that time.

The world wasn't so badly off, after all. It gave her an optimistic lift, and she went back to the other room in anticipation of an after noon of lively conversation. She found Nora still kneeling beside Jamie, while he demonstrated his new boats. But Nora's eyes were shadowed and remote.

“That's fine, Jamie,” she said absently, and got to her feet. “Joanna, what I really wanted to tell you about —” There was trouble in her voice, and in the set of her mouth. “Well, I don't suppose you can do anything, or anybody can, but it's been on my mind. It has to do with Laurie.”

“Laurie?” Joanna took out the inescapable knitting and Nora curled up opposite her in the other big rocker. “I thought she was more fun than a basket of pups. Don't tell me she's hard to live with.”

“No, she isn't hard to live with. She's swell, really.” Nora gazed out through the geraniums at the wintery field. “But she isn't so gay these days. I don't know whether she's run-down, or if it's something on her mind. Matthew noticed it too, especially after she came back to the Island after Christmas.”

“Maybe she doesn't like winter on the Island after all,” Joanna. suggested.

“I don't know,” Nora said somberly. “Sometimes in the morning her eyes look bad, as if she might have been crying.”

“The children don't complain. But she might have had words with Owen — he doesn't go up there much lately.” She tried to think back to the last time Owen had gone to see Laurie, and discovered with a faint shock that she couldn't remember. Had he really taken the
Donna
's loss so seriously, then? She doubted it.

“Whatever it is,” Nora was saying, “she covers it pretty well. It only comes out when she's off guard. You catch her staring into space.”

“Poor Laurie,” Joanna said absently. “Maybe she's worried about things at home.”

The conversation turned to other things, and she did not think of Laurie again - consciously - until just before supper, after Nora had gone. She was alone except for Jamie and the dog. Ellen had gone to the homestead from school, to play with her cousins. Joanna lit the lamps, and started supper, and while she was cutting out biscuits, the idea came to her. It hit her with all the unpleasant impact of a door slamming on her fingers, and it sent a vibration of astonished dismay along her backbone that swung up her chin and left her staring at the cupboard doors with narrowed eyes and tightening mouth.

I may be wrong
, she thought.
But I could be right. God knows I don't want to be right
, but — Out in the sun parlor the door banged. Dick bounded through the kitchen on his way to meet Owen, and she knew that sometime within the next fifteen minutes, she was going to break a cardinal rule and ask Owen a personal question — about Laurie.

He had nothing to say when he came in, but then he never did when he'd been working on gear all afternoon and came in hungry. She gave him a cup of coffee to hold him until supper time, finished cutting her biscuits, and put them in the oven. Then she went into the dining room and sat down opposite him at the table.

He was sprawled low in his chair, his head tilted back, his black eyes heavy-lidded and sleepy as he watched the smoke from his cigarette rise toward the ceiling. She tried to study his bold profile impersonally, as if he weren't her brother, as if she hadn't always possessed a fierce sense of pride where her brothers and their behavior was concerned.

He was a handsome devil, and he was old enough, and practised enough, to know just how to sweep a girl like Laurie off her feet. But how did you go about asking your brother how far he'd gone with a girl? There was a time, when they were in their rowdy, blatantly honest teens, when she could have asked him and been answered. Now, she didn't know.

She would have been willing to swear, before today, that Owen couldn't talk his way around Laurie. But today all that was changed. She knew what the Island could do to a girl who was not Island-bred and more or less immune. Laurie was warm-blooded, as sensitive as Joanna to fragrances and atmospheres; from the first she'd been highly infatuated with the Island. And as the year deepened from the rich bloom of early September into fall, she'd spent hour after hour with Owen on the warm slopes of the West Side. Joanna knew those dreamy days, when a lilac mist hung over the horizon, and the water rippled in little quicksilver curls around the rocks, and a silence like that of an enchanted land hung over the woods where no one ever went but children — or lovers.

She wished she knew if Owen, by some incredible freak of affairs, really loved the girl. But a man like Owen didn't have to be in love, he needed only to be tempted by the fact that the fruit was ripe.

“Owen,” she said at last. He gave her a lazy glance through his lashes.

“Yeah.”

“Nora says that Laurie isn't very happy. She's got something on her mind.” This was blunter than she'd intended to be, but at least he was listening.

Owen dropped ashes in the cuff of his rubber boot and said deliberately, “What do you mean — unhappy?”

“Well —” Joanna shrugged. “Preoccupied. Moody. You know.”

“No, I don't know.” Owen was sitting up now. His black eyes were hard and direct and hostile. “What are you gettin' at?”

“Maybe she's in love. Girls get sick with it, I've heard. It strikes in, or something.”

“If you're fishin' for information, I can't help ye any. Jeest, I haven't talked with the girl since way back last November sometime.” He crushed out his cigarette in his saucer, and stood up, stretching till his fingers touched the ceiling. “You think she's got caught on a stump, or somethin'? Lost your good opinion of her, ain't ye?”

“I didn't say anything of the sort,” Joanna protested, and Owen laughed.

“What in hell are you hennin' around for, then?” He pulled on his mackinaw and picked up his cap. “Well, I'll get a few more buoys strapped before supper, I guess.”

He went out whistling, and she sat still, looking at his coffee cup. She had found out exactly nothing, and all she had was a soiled and uncomfortable feeling. She hadn't lost her good opinion of Laurie; but she knew what it was to be a girl like Laurie, and she knew her brothers. She had known Island boys all her life and had seen the effect of their particular brand of romantic hawk-wildness on the women who had come in contact with them. Islanders were
different
; and mainland girls were fascinated and drawn by that very difference. If anything had happened to Laurie, she needed a friend.

S
OMETIMES SHE SAW
L
AURIE
walking up the lane on her way home from school in the late afternoon. The firm, spring vitality wasn't there now. Ellen observed that Miss Gibson seemed tired these days, she wasn't so much fun as she'd been.

Then Young Charles and his sister Donna told Joanna that Bobby Merrill wasn't coming over from Brigport any more. The teacher didn't have any boyfriends now, they said. Everything added to Joanna's apprehension, and when she saw the girl at a distance — Laurie never dropped in, these days — she felt a helpless compassion for her.

But she lacked courage to ask Owen any more questions, after that one attempt. And so she had to make up the story herself, and she didn't like it. It spoiled everything that was in the least degree enjoyable about the life she was living now, when she must always remember that Laurie Gibson was miserable, that she was a long way from home and in alien surroundings. She found herself watching the spruces as Laurie must see them, tossing and swaying against winter-blown skies. She saw the rushing clouds, listened to the wind and the sea's rote, watched the surf forever piling in deadly white chaos on Eastern Harbor Point, and their familiar response in her was deadened, because of Laurie.

Owen never spoke of Laurie. Then he came in at the edge of dark one night, with fine crystals of snow powdering his black brows and hair, and said with savage abruptness, “Matthew Fennell's been holding forth all afternoon down in the shop.”