The Ebbing Tide (39 page)

“Wait till he's home awhile,” she told Young Charles. “Then we'll have a big supper and dance, the way we used to have back in the old days. Maybe Owen'll be here by then, too. But if you have something just for Nils, he'll be embarrassed.”

“By garry, I wouldn't be!” the boy said fervently. “I'd expect the brass band and flowers and speeches and the whole works! . . . Hey, you know what, Aunt Jo? I'll lay you any money the Huns and Japs are goin' to kick in right off. Why, they've got the papers all ready to sign, most likely. Else why is Nils comin' home now?”

“I don't know,” said Joanna truthfully. “I don't know whether he's discharged or if it's a furlough. But I don't think he's won the war single-handed, even if he is pretty good!”

Young Charles responded to her smile, but shook his head. “My father says he'll be damned if he knows why they'd let a good man off, unless they don't need him any more.”

“I'm not worrying,” said Joanna. It was true, in more ways than one.

Thea had barely noticed Joanna ever since the discussion about Young Charles, back in the summer. And as far as Joanna was concerned Thea was nothing more than a shadow. For the past six months she had come and gone, shaken her rugs from the back doorstep, hung out her clothes, gone to the well, and yet, for Joanna, she might not have existed. The ugliness of that evening had long since faded, with all her other private ghosts. It was with a start of surprise that she saw Thea coming across the yard one morning, picking her way around the damp places while her freshly made curls bobbed like premature dandelions in the wind.

She met Thea at the door. “Good morning, Thea.”

“Hi, Joanna.” Thea smiled widely, not at all abashed. “I just wanted to tell you — it's swell about Nils comin' home.”

Joanna was faintly touched. “Well, thanks, Thea. I guess everybody feels pretty happy about it.”

Thea turned away, and then looked back. “I been wonderin'. . . Did he say why he's comin'? There was a feller over in Port George—he come home suddenly like that. His face was sure one nasty mess. His wife like to died when she saw him.” She stepped blithely off the doorstep. “Well, I got a molasses cake in the oven. Franny likes molasses cake. I know he ain't much, but at least he's all in one piece.”

She went back across the damp dead grass, the brassy curls quivering. Joanna watched her from the doorway. The wind that blew against her face seemed tinged with April and not with February, and the chickadees were happily busy in the bare alders; but she hardly felt the wind or heard the birds. The hobgoblins were surrounding her again, the early dreams of a bloody and shattered Nils. She shut her eyes against them, and they gripped her throat. Then she heard Thea's door slam, and at that loud and insolent sound, anger swept over her, as revivifying as a pail of cold water. She opened her eyes and her sane serenity came back to her. “Thea's a bitch,” she said distinctly to Dick, and went back to her work.

Every boat-day was, in its own way, an ordeal. She didn't look for Nils, but for some word from him, and no word came. After that one brief note, there was nothing but silence, and the hope that beat in her like a hundred pulses; and the moments when expectation poured over her in an almost sickening wave. On boat-day mornings she awoke before daylight to these waves, and by the time the
Aurora
whistled at Brigport, Joanna would be inwardly trembling from weariness.

The week of good weather broke. It was winter again, with a knife in the wind that was all the more sharp after the warm spell. There was a day of spitting snow, of sullen, heavy clouds, and a penetrating cold that crept into the house and overruled the fires. Joanna awoke to the certainty that Nils wasn't coming, after all. Something had happened. There'd be a letter presently, explaining everything, and written in brief cool words to hide his bitter disappointment.

She didn't tell Ellen anything of what she thought, but Ellen was in a silent, downcast mood of her own by the time she left for school. Jamie was fractious, whining at nothing, throwing his toys, bullying Dick until Joanna had to spank him. He wouldn't take his nap, but she made him stay in his crib; it was a relief when he fell asleep in the late afternoon, worn out by the many frustrations that had upset him all day.

Joanna made coffee and drank it slowly, luxuriating in the sudden silence. Ellen had gone to Charles' house straight from school. No one had called all day; the cold spell was keeping them in as surely as the warm week had brought them all out like the chickadees. She sipped her coffee, with Dick's head warm and heavy on her foot, and wished that Owen would be coming up from the shore at any moment now.

She took her empty cup to the kitchen and put it in the sink. Through habit she glanced down toward the harbor. The village looked shuttered and locked, as sleepy and withdrawn into itself as Dick. There was no smoke from Nils' and Owen's fish house, and only a thin, tired thread of it, white against the pewter-gray sky, from Sigurd's shop. A few gulls huddled on the ridgepole of the Binnacle, but they seemed to have no relation at all to the shrill, joyous creatures that had looped and soared over the harbor for the past week.

There was a boat heading toward the mainland, past the southern end of Brigport. It was gray like the sea around it, but she saw the white wake foaming back toward the Island, the huge wings of water curving out from either side of her bow. A Coast Guard boat going in from the Rock, probably. There were men aboard the boat, and those men and herself might be the only human beings alive in the world of black spruces and cold white foam and gunmetal sea.

Except for the gulls, there was no other sign of life anywhere, and then a man came around the corner of the Binnacle. He walked slowly, and used a cane. His head was bent against the raw sweep of the wind, which cut across the Island from the east. She stood watching him in absent-minded interest, wondering if he were someone from Brigport. But it was only for a moment that she didn't know. He lifted his head to look up at the house behind the windbreak, and she saw the cap; he straightened his shoulders, and she saw the cut of his belted dark coat.
It was Nils
.

How she held herself so still for the next five minutes, she never knew; but something held her there, some stubborn refusal to meet him where Thea, or anyone else, might see. What was in her now was not for anyone but Nils. She stood like stone, her breath coming shallowly as though her lungs were cased too tightly. It was Nils, yet he moved so slowly that it seemed not to be Nils at all—not Nils, who had always walked with such a quick, light step. This man limped, and as the cane pressed against the damp ground, it pressed against Joanna's heart. The cane was familiar to him, it was a part of him, and Joanna felt a coldness settle around her, the chill pang of jealousy. All of the time that Nils had spent away from her, all of the life he had lived away from her, was like something stolen from her, and she had been cheated even of sharing his pain.

The thought of that pain, which he had hidden from her in his letters, only hardened the rigidity which she already knew. Then as he came abreast of the well, she saw his face clearly for the first time, she saw the searching look of him as he stared toward the house. He was so thin that there were hollows between his cheekbones and his chin, and his eyes were deepset and shadowy. He hesitated; then he moved forward again, as if he had to prepare himself for the effort, and she sensed his tiredness, and the awkwardness of his body, as if they were her own. She could wait no longer.

He came up past the end of the windbreak and between the bare white lilacs toward where she stood on the step. His eyes were hollowed, but so blue that they hurt her. She had forgotten how blue they were.

“Nils—” Her voice turned back on itself and almost didn't come. “Nils.”

The cane clattered on the doorstep as he reached her and took her into his arms. At first his lips were cold, but soon they were warm against her temples, her cheeks, her mouth. They held each other desperately, like two people drowning; as if they couldn't hold each other close enough, ever. She forgot about the cane, now that she could feel him through his uniform, the hardness of his bones and the lean spare flesh over them; it was really Nils, that was really his warm breath mingled with hers, his flesh under her lips, his mouth searching blindly for hers.

T
HERE WAS SHRAPNEL
in Nils' leg. They had gotten out most of it, he said, but not all. That was why he hadn't been discharged yet. Not that he'd ever be of any use to them again, he added dryly. His ship had gotten a direct hit during the invasion of some tiny but important island, and most of his crew had been killed. He told it quietly, without drama, after they had gone into the house. It had been some time ago; he had been writing from sick bay for several months now.

Joanna listened to him as calmly as he was speaking, while they sat over their coffee cups in the little interval of solitude granted them before Ellen came home and Jamie woke up. But inwardly she was anything but calm. All this had happened to him and she had known nothing of it; while she had been engrossed in her own whims and fancies, Nils had been a few inches from death.

He had been lying in sick bay, expecting to be told every time a doctor approached him, that he must lose his leg. And yet he had written her the sane, reassuring letters that had been her one link with the life they had known together.

He should not know how shameful a failure she had almost been. He needed her now, if he had never needed her before. How he needed her, she wasn't sure. But she would be ready when the sign came. In the meantime she must wait without words, and she knew already that it would be heartbreakingly hard not to tell him that she understood what his lameness meant to him, and why an impersonal blankness settled mask-like over his face when he glanced down at his leg. But she could not speak of it until he did; and when that would be, she didn't know. But if there was waiting to be done, she could do it.

Dick heard the back door and grumbled, but refused to move away from Nils; then Ellen came through the sun parlor, singing under her breath. Joanna and Nils looked at each other, their eyes smiling as their hands touched, and didn't speak. Into the silence Ellen came, all oblivious, her blue-gray eyes bemused with her daydreams. She stopped in the kitchen to take off her parka, turned from hanging it up, and saw Nils.

She looked at first as if she were seeing visions; as if her imagination had placed him there, as if the Aladdin lamp were casting spells. “Hello, Ellen,” he said, and his voice dispelled her doubt. She ran to him in silent rapture, her eyes so wide, so shining, that Joanna's own eyes blurred.

By the time Ellen was in the chair with Nils, her arm around his neck, Jamie awoke with a roar, and so they were all together again.

Though nobody had seen Nils walking up from the wharf where the Coast Guard boat had left him, by evening everyone knew he was home. Laurie, down in the store to call up about Owen, heard the news from Philip, who'd met Nils on the street. By the time supper was over, they were beginning to come in, everyone on the Island who could possibly come.

No one offered to stay long, even Franny—he came without Thea—whose meager face was all but exalted when he saw Nils; Sigurd hugged Nils ferociously, heard the cane fall to the floor, and stood off with his big face contorting oddly. He stayed only a few minutes longer. When he had gone Nils said with his faint smile, “Poor Sig . . . he takes it hard.”

The Fennells came and went, and Laurie, in her new status as Mrs. Owen Bennett; Leonie ran in when she'd finished her dishes. Charles and Mateel, with Young Charles and Donna, came in for a little while. Most of them ignored the cane after the first glance. Joanna found herself looking for Dennis, and yet, by all processes of reason, it was foolish to expect him. He would not come, because he didn't know Nils, and he would consider it an intrusion for a stranger to come into the house.

When the others had all gone, Thea came. Ellen opened the door for her, following her into the dining room with an expression of mild bewilderment. She glanced at Joanna with an almost imperceptible shrug.

“Hello, Thea,” Joanna said pleasantly. Nils, who had begun to read, put down his book and stood up.

“Well, Thea, how are you?”

“Just fine, Nils!” Thea, with her best dress showing a vivid, snug, electric blue under her open coat, long earrings swinging and flashing from under her curls, kissed him soundly while Joanna and Ellen looked on with amazement. Then she stood back to look at him. “My, if you don't look distinguished! I'm proud to claim you for my cousin, Nils. Not that I haven't been proud all along—I've tole
everybody
every chance I got!”

“Thanks,” Nils murmured. He sat down again, stretching out his stiff leg, and Thea stared down at it. Her eyes had the glassy, bulging look they sometimes had when she was highly excited. “What happened to you?” she demanded avidly.

“Accident,” said Nils. “How's your father and mother these days?”

“They're fine.” She sat down. Joanna resumed her knitting. She didn't dare look at Nils' gravely polite face, she would want to giggle. Well, she'd save the giggle until after Thea had gone, and she and Nils could laugh together.

She glanced up once, during the course of Thea's spirited conversation, and Thea looked across at her with a full and insolent stare. Joanna's mouth trembled, wanting to smile. She rummaged busily through her knitting bag for her instruction book and studied it fervently.

“How do you think your wife looks?” asked Thea. “She's stood the war real good, hasn't she?”

“Joanna always looks the same,” said Nils.

“I expect you worried some about her, but anybody could've told you there was no need to worry about that one.”