High Tide at Noon (46 page)

Joanna Bennett Douglass, wearing a new black dress, sat in the little ell chamber among her parents and brothers, and her sister-in-law Mateel, who was crying softly into her handkerchief. Joanna heard the minister's voice going on and on. The minister hadn't known Alec at all, so how could he talk about him like that? And besides, she had a strange certainty that this was not Alec at all. She had kissed Alec good-bye there in the boat shop, and pushed his hair back from his forehead, and the Coast Guard had taken him away. But this man they had brought back, who lay there with his eyes shut, not caring about the minister and the women who sobbed—Joanna had looked at him remotely. She couldn't make this out to be her Alec, who'd waved to her from the road.

While the minister was talking, a song sparrow flew into the rose bush and trilled out his song. If that were really Alec, Joanna thought, he'd wake up when the sparrow began to sing. There'd been one they used to hear at dawn.

It was when they reached the cemetery that feeling came back to her. It was as if she had been chilled to numbness, and then with an aching rush the blood came back. One moment she was standing passively between her father and Charles, grateful for the soft little wind that blew a scent of sun-warmed spruce to her nostrils. In the next moment, she knew. Alec was gone, he was dead, in a few minutes now the earth would cover him.

She stood without moving a muscle, her face like stone, but inside she was crying out that she couldn't bear it, she must run, run—

It was the apple tree that did it. The petals drifted down on the wind, like snowflakes on the turned brown earth. She looked across the ugly hole at her feet and the tree stood white and radiant and lovely in her sight. Each blossom, each petal, was edged with light; and as they floated down and touched the earth, she felt each one on her heart.

“Do you think they can feel the flowers coming down?” Alec had asked once. “I'd like an apple tree over my grave.” His voice was in her head now, with its undertones of laughter. But she couldn't hold on to it, and she would never hear it again. There had been two people sitting on the stile once, looking at the apple tree, and now, standing by the grave, she remembered his lips against her throat. And she would never know them again.
Never, never, never
. The word clashed through her head till she thought she must cry out, and run away from it.

But she stood erectly between her father and her oldest brother, and there was not a quiver of her lips to betray her, nor the faintest moisture in her eyes. Her head was as high as it had been when she had walked toward Alec Douglass to become his wife. No one should pity her. She hated pity.

The family wanted her to come back to the big house and sleep again in her own small room. She would be the daughter of the house again; caught up in the whirlpool of activity, of argument and laughter, she wouldn't brood, they thought.

But she wouldn't come, and Philip took her side. He said she'd be better off to go back to her own house if she wanted to. Didn't they realize she was as much Bennett as the rest of them? he asked. If you were a Bennett, you'd sooner undress in public than show the way you felt. You wanted to be decently alone with your troubles, until you knew how to live with them. So Joanna spent the summer alone in her own house, and if the family worried about her, they knew better than to let her know about it.

If they'd known about the baby, they would have worried more. But she wasn't ready to tell them yet; she wished she need never tell anyone. If Alec couldn't know, why should anyone else? Knowing she must go through the long wearisome pregnancy alone, and face the ultimate agony without Alec, knowing he would never see his child, she wished more than once that she could die too. But there was no chance of it with a strong, healthy girl like herself. So she ate for the child's sake, and made herself sleep, and gave way only a few times to the wild, passionate storms of grief that tried to sweep her away. Though she had no joy of the baby now, she couldn't forget her responsibility toward it.

The summer was too long, too intolerably beautiful. She thought it would never end. She longed for the winter when she could shut herself in, and the harbor would be hidden by snow and flying vapor, and she wouldn't have to see the boats coming home to their moorings.

She woke in the early dawn to lie there and think about Alec, going over and over their time together, every quarrel, every embrace, every joke . . . and the day on Pirate Island. She would lie there quietly as the day crept into the room, with tears welling and falling as if they would never stop. But they were silent tears.

She would wipe them away at last, and get up to begin her day. Nobody else knew about those tears. The Islanders shook their heads at her still-lipped poise. “You'd think all that trouble, losin' her husband and everything, would pull that chin of hers down a mite, wouldn't you?” they said.

The boys came by daily to see how she was, bringing some special dish down from the house, filling her water pails, splitting kindling. She was quieter than she had ever been, but she could still joke with them, and they were relieved. She was always carefully natural in her manner, wherever she was, so that no one would show pity for her.

So she tended her garden and canned her vegetables and berries, and the fall came at last, sweeping down on the Island in the worst equinoctial gale the coast had seen for years. The crashing wind on the hill behind the house, the foam flying in the little cove, gave Joanna a strange comfort. She drew the curtains early that day and lighted a lamp, and sat down to sew. She had the radio in the kitchen, but she didn't touch it very often. The inner silence of the house didn't bother her. Rather, she cherished it. Sometimes, even after almost three months, she thought she heard Alec's whistle outside, and then she would remember that it couldn't be Alec; but she had a feeling that something of him stayed in this house, that some essence of him was in the air, in the very walls. So she wasn't afraid of solitude, nor of silence.

Besides, she had the baby. Now it was a living presence. She would have to tell the family about it soon, but not yet. There was an odd security in sitting here by the lamp, with the curtains drawn against the late, stormy afternoon outside, hemming diapers that nobody knew about. She smiled faintly, remembering Stella Grant's frank curiosity about the money order she sent to Montgomery Ward. She'd talk enough about Jo Douglass sending off for stuff when she'd just been left without a cent to bless herself with—well, almost without a cent, just the boat and the house. The way that Alec rammed around playin' poker, he couldn't have left her much else.

Oh, Joanna knew, without bitterness, only with a tiredness, just how they talked. But Stella and the rest would talk more if they knew what came in her packages. They'd know soon enough because she couldn't hide it forever, but she didn't care. When she was a young girl, she'd carried a chip on her shoulder; their talk made her furious, fighting mad. But now it was no more to her than wind blowing. The gale crashed and moaned in the trees on the hill, but it was only a noise that couldn't hurt anyone. It certainly couldn't hurt her, shut into the magic circle of lamplight in the house that still held Alec for her.

Mark had been down to see how the woodpile was, and fill her water buckets. Charles had come up to the mailboat this morning, and dropped in on her with an armful of the last glads from Mateel's garden. Philip had come in to smoke and talk for a while in his pleasant, quiet voice about the Island, the lobstering this fall, the recent departures—Jud Gray had kept his word and moved his whole family to the mainland when the prices hadn't come up as expected in the fall spurt. His going left quite a hole: Jud had lived on the Island for years, raised all his family there. And he'd had tears in his eyes when he left, Philip said.

“If he felt so bad, why is he so hell-bent on moving off?” Joanna asked, and Philip shrugged.

“Scared, I guess. Lobsters never dropped down like this in the fall spurt. They been down a long time, Jo. And he's got those girls to put through high school.”

“I thought the Grays had more loyalty,” she said bitterly. “He couldn't stick it through with the Island, could he? Had to run!”

“Well, if lobsters come up again the laugh'll be on him,” said Philip mildly, and changed the subject. “Still not ready to move up with us?” he asked her, his blue-gray eyes steadily on hers, and she shook her head.

Now, alone at last, she thought of it and shook her head again. No, she wasn't ready yet. She supposed she'd have to go, sooner or later. She couldn't keep up the house on nothing. Her father and the boys had bought Alec's pots from her, but the money wouldn't last forever. “But I won't go till I'm ready,” she said to the diaper she was hemming. Almost at the same instant, through the unending roar of the wind and the crash of rain against the windows, she heard someone knocking at the door.

Involuntarily she put her sewing out of sight before she went to answer, wondering who would knock—none of the family would. Maybe it was Kristi, on her way home from the big house. Her lips framed a smile, and she opened the door.

It was Simon Bird who stood in the entry in his dripping oilskins. She stared at him in surprise and he said in the soft, familiar voice, “I didn't aim to scare you, Jo.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothin'. Just a little friendly call, Jo. I knew you was alone, and with this livin' gale o' wind, I thought you might kind of appreciate a caller.” His slate-colored eyes smiled at her as he took off his sou'wester and hung it on a nail in the entry. “Well, can I come in, Jo? You ain't goin' to keep me standin' here while we talk, are ye?”

Speechless at his sheer effrontery she stepped back, and he came forward to lean against the dresser. His dark red hair gleamed like mahogany under the light; the bones in his narrow face were sharper than they used to be, his mouth thinner. His oilskins were new and shining, brilliantly yellow. She remembered Alec had never been able to afford the new oilskins he'd wanted.

“It's kind of you, Simon, but you're wasting your time. The storm doesn't bother me. So thanks just the same.” She waited in chill courtesy for him to go, but he didn't move. He smiled as he opened the neck of his oil jacket.

“You wouldn't turn me out into the rain again, would ye? When I walked up here on purpose? Besides, it's time you saw folks again. A young woman like you hadn't ought to bury herself.”

“There's no call for you to come up here, Simon.”

“I don't see why, seein' you ain't a married woman any more.” He lounged against the dresser, lighting a cigarette. “ 'Bout time you started havin' company. Funny Nils ain't been up—I been watchin'.” He gave her a sidewise glance, his mouth quirking, and she felt a tremor of rage run through her body.

“Will you please get out?”

“I ain't in any pucker to move,” he said pleasantly. “Don't look so stuck-up, Jo. I don't smell like a bait butt. You know damn well you're lonesome up here. You got used to havin' a man around, you know what it's like, and you'll be lookin' around for another one pretty soon. No harm in me keepin' you company of an evenin', is it?”

The soft, persuasive voice wound itself round and round her brain until she would have done anything to stop it. She could hardly believe it was true, that he had the incredible nerve to come like this. She stood watching him, her hands at her sides, her eyes dark and unreadable and steady on his narrow bright ones.

“Are you going to get out of here?”

“When I'm ready.” He smiled at her amiably as her chin tilted. “Look, Jo, you got no call to be uppity to me, or anybody. When you goin' to find out that it don't count much to be a Bennett nowadays? Or a Douglass?” His smile deepened as he watched her. “You oughtn't to go around the Island with your nose in the air like that. Folks don't like it. They ain't nobody but what don't know what Alec put you through last winter, and then left you without a cent.”

“Simon, I'm warning you.
Get out of my house
.”

“I'm gettin' out,” drawled Simon, “when I'm damned good and ready.”

“I'm not strong enough to throw you out. But if you don't go, you'll be sorry for the rest of your life.” Her voice was very quiet. “My brothers don't like you, Simon. And there's five of them all bigger than you.”

Simon laughed. “Aimin' to scare me, Jo? Look, darlin' mine. You can't tell me to get out of your house . . . because it ain't
quite
yours.” He fumbled in his pocket and took out a billfold, opened it with maddening care. Joanna watched his calloused fingers with eyes strained wide by unbelief. His words still rang in her head, they hung in the hushed room . . .
because it ain't quite yours
.

The words on the slip of paper he handed her danced before her eyes, then steadied. PAY ON DEMAND . . . Simon Bird . . . five hundred sixty-five dollars . . . and Alec's familiar gay scrawl at the bottom, striking at her as sharply as if she'd heard his voice.

“Poker,” said Simon with laughter behind his words. Laughter at her, Joanna Bennett Douglass. “I kept lendin' your fine husband money fast as he lost it. He was always waitin' for his luck to turn. It never did.”

He took the paper from her fingers and put it back in the billfold. “Got to keep this safe. You oughtn't to take this too hard, Jo. Tain't as if you didn't know what he was up to, what kind of gamblin' fool he was.” He blew a long cloud of smoke into the room, smiled at her through it. “Everybody else knew it too, seein' the way he let his pots go to hell, and you rammin' around in shoes with the soles goin' through. Course you never knew he'd get in so deep he'd put up the house as security.”