Storm Tide (14 page)

The instant passed. Stevie was taking his lamp from the shelf and lighting it. He said “Goodnight,” and left them. Nils filled his needles methodically, so they'd be ready for the next time, he hung the finished trapheads in the entry. Joanna did her last small tasks in the kitchen, and they were ready for bed.

He took the lamp from the table and walked ahead of her to their room, holding the lamp high to light her way. They walked through the quiet house; quiet inside, a sleeping quiet, and quiet outside tonight. There was hardly a murmur of wind, and the sea's rote was a faint, far-off sound.

“Fog tomorrow,” Nils said, as they reached their room, and he set the lamp on the dresser. He walked to the window and stood looking out. Joanna joined him there and they watched, without speaking. The fog was creeping in from the east already, but overhead the stars still burned, and Orion climbed the sky. Joanna put her ann through Nils'.

“Nils, is it really a good idea?” she asked him.

“Sure it is,” he said. “What's the matter? Don't you believe me?” He slipped his arm free of hers and put it around her, tightening it.

“I only wanted to be sure,” she said, and the feeling of Nils' strangeness was quite gone, and it was the way it had always been with Nils, ever since she could first remember.

W
HENEVER
J
OANNA AWOKE DURING THE NIGHT
, she saw the ghostly pallor of the fog against the windows, and heard the muffled sound of the fog horn at the Rock blowing at its brief intervals. She would come awake slowly, first conscious of the comfortable warmth and perfect relaxation of her strong, healthy body under the covers, and the fresh-smelling cold in the room, and of Nils beside her in his sound sleep. Then she would remember how they had talked in the kitchen, and what she was to do in the morning. She would look then at the fog outside the windows, creeping quietly across the sea to fill all the darkness with its pale, wreathing breath, and she would listen to the foghorn and think,
Tomorrow nobody will go out, and I can see them all
.

Then she would fall asleep again, lying separately in the bed, independent of Nils. At the first of the night, when she lay in his arms with her head against his shoulder, she lay awake until she knew he was asleep, and then slipped gently free from him. He was usually tired enough, after a long day on the water, to sleep so deeply that he never moved when she left his arms, no matter how tightly they had held her.

Sometimes in spite of herself she thought of her brief marriage with Alec Douglass, and how closely they had slept together, like healthy young animals. It seemed almost impossible that she had ever been so free and unselfconscious with anyone.

But tonight she didn't think about it. She thought of tomorrow . . .

In the morning her inner excitement woke her before Nils, and that was exceptional. Usually he was up and moving around quietly in the kitchen, building the fire, making the coffee. She lay there and watched him sleeping, her eyes tracing the familiar moulding of his forehead, cheekbones and nose; the controlled yet generous lines of his mouth; the whole strong impassivity of his sleeping face. The early light caught the glint of his blond beard, very faint on his tanned jaw.

If I loved him
—her thought began, and then she corrected herself, for she did love him;
If I were in love with him, it would be all the way, with nothing left out
, she thought. And that was what he deserved. She felt her regret stirring again, and then, suddenly, Nils was awake; his sea-blue eyes looked calmly into hers, and he smiled.

“Hello, Nils,” she said softly.

“Hello,” he answered. He pulled her gently to him and kissed her cheek, still flushed and moist with sleep, her throat, and finally her mouth. She smiled at him drowsily as he looked down into her face. Then he lowered himself from his elbow and rolled out from under the covers.

The day was about to begin. Already Nils had turned his mind from her to the day's work. . . . She followed him out to the kitchen in a few minutes and found the fire already burning briskly.

They didn't have much to say during breakfast. Joanna was used to Nils' spells of silence, and they suited her, because then she could think her own thoughts, and this morning she had a great deal to think about. She would start with Jud, she thought. Probably Caleb would follow Jud's lead. But there wasn't any reason to think they wouldn't all agree; after all, her plan was to their advantage.

She looked across the table at Nils and said directly, “Do you know why anybody mightn't think it was a good idea, earring the lobsters and taking them in?”

“Well, no. Except that folks think more about dictators than they used to. Might be they'd think they were being bossed.” He saw the quick lift of her chin and added, “People get funny ideas. So don't be surprised if somebody feels like fighting this Brigport mess out in their own way.”

“I don't see why they should,” Joanna said stiffly. “Everyone of us here on Bennett's has been slapped in the face.” She watched him pour out a second cup of coffee and thought of something else. “Nils, you don't mean that you've got a better idea than mine, do you? Because I wish you'd tell it to me, if you have.” Her grin across the table at him was comic, nose-wrinkling. “Or maybe, way down underneath, you don't think there's anything to worry about—that it's all my imagination.”

He shook his head at her. “Nope. It's real enough. Somebody's acting up. And I
haven't
got a better plan.”

They heard Stevie coming downstairs. Nils pushed back his chair and took out his pipe, Joanna got up to put more bacon in the iron spider.

When at last the men had gone, Nils to the shore, Stevie to the Eastern End, she put on her boots and raincoat and went down across the sodden, yellow-brown meadow to the woods. She walked in a small, circular clearing in the fog that moved with her; it made the way through the meadow seem over-long, and she could almost imagine that this sloping, uneven ground with its dead wind-matted grasses and spiny skeletons of raspberry and rose bushes, its occasional granite outcroppings, went on forever, with no high wall of green-black spruces to end it.

The fog eddied thickly around her, brushing her face and deepening her color, clinging to her thick black hair in little beads of moisture. Her raincoat was beaded too, and her boots were wet and shiny. She liked the fog, as she had always loved every face of the Island. A little fog didn't hurt. It was when there was a long fog mull that she, like the others, hated it; yet it was not quite hate on Joanna's part, for she walked in the fog every day, as long as it lasted, and took a guilty pleasure in it when she knew the men were cursing it.

When she came to the woods she didn't follow the path through the narrow part between the meadow and the Whitcomb place. Some day, she thought, she would stop avoiding it, but not today, when the old white house would look so cold and deserted against the dark hillside. She turned into the little grove of birch and spruce and alder swamp that belonged to the Sorensen property. When she came out of that dripping, silent place, where even the chickadees were voiceless this morning, there was Gunnar Sorensen's barn with its hip roof, and the many-gabled house that had once been half-hidden in Anna Sorensen's flowers.

This was the house where Nils had grown up. Gunnar and Anna were his grandparents, his mother had died when he was small. She skirted the buildings, following the overgrown path, and reached the windbreak of spruces which Gunnar had planted when he was a young man. The water dripped from the thick boughs. It was a wet, gray, dripping world, and through it the harbor gulls made their ceaseless thin crying.

But it was not a depressing world. Not for Joanna, at least. Her eyes caught with delight at a handful of rose haws still left on their naked bush, glowing like tiny circles of orange flame against the wet grass. The contrast deepened the grass color to a rich tawniness; and the gray of the granite chunks was a cool, clear, uncomplicated thing.

More spruces made a thick shelter over the path up to Jud Gray's house. Joanna's feet quickened. She went around to the back door.

Jud was home, and that was what she had counted on. In the small, cosy kitchen, lamplit against the shade of the trees outside, Marion was making pies and Jud was knitting trapheads. The radio was playing. Joanna came in to the accompaniment of organ music and a soothing male voice pleading that the listener should tune in tomorrow and hear how Susan conquered her predicament.

Marion's rosy face was absorbed; she nodded with an absent­minded smile at Joanna. Jud pushed back his chair.

“Come in, come in, Jo!” he roared above the radio. “Get off them wet things and set down by the stove. God A'mighty, Marion, turn off that guts-'n'-gurry. I can't stomach no more of it!”

Marion snapped the switch. “Don't act like you was such a brute, Jud Gray,” she said placidly. “You know you been just as much worried 'bout Susan as I've been.”

“Susan,” said Jud, “is a goddam fool. Anybody that says I'm interested in her doin's, or any other o' them idiots, I'm goin' to have up for libel. Set, Joanna. What's Nils doin'?”

“Something or other down at the shore.” Joanna grinned at them both. “You didn't have to stop listening to your program just for me, Jud.”

“You ain't got past the age when you need a trimmin', Jo,” he warned her.

“And I haven't got past the age when I've got some ideas,” she retorted. “I'm not going to beat around the bush. I've got something on my mind this morning.”

“Is it what Jud come up and told you last night?” Marion asked. “Those Fowlers! I never did like them, even when they first come to Brigport.” Her mouth tightened. “And that Randolph singin' solos in church, and cheatin' everybody out of their eyeteeth—”

“Now, old lady, you remember your blood pressure,” Jud said. “And give the girl a chance. Might be she's collectin' a fund, or somethin'.”

“To feed the starving Fowlers,” said Joanna. “Well, that's what it's about, anyway. Jud, would you like it if you didn't have to sell your lobsters to Ralph?”

Jud's round face was alight. “You mean
Nils
is goin' to buy?”

“No, not now. Maybe later. But this is the idea. Everybody can car their lobsters, either in separate cars, or in a big one like that old one of Pete Grant's down on the beach—keeping count of what they put in, of course—and then it'll be turn about, taking the lobsters ashore and selling them direct to the company.”

Marion arranged apples in the pieplate, sprinkled them liberally with sugar and nutmeg, laid on the upper crust with care and delicacy. But she was listening. Her eyes fairly snapped.

“Now that's the first sensible remark I've heard in this kitchen for a long time,” she said. “It's a lot more practical than a string of curses that's goin' to make it mighty hard for Jud to look his Maker straight in the eye.”

Jud puffed violently on his pipe. “You be quiet, woman. Jo, what about oil ‘n' gas?”

“Nils says we can have it come out as freight on the mailboat.”

“Well . . .” Jud squinted judicially. “That's all right. It's even better'n all right. It's fine. The only thing is . . .” He took out his pipe and scowled at it. “I haven't got a boat. Only way I can take my turn is to borry Caleb's boat.”

“You can work that out with the men—
if
they all agree.” She grinned at Jud. “Well, I didn't have to argue with you, did I?”

“No, and you won't have to argue with Caleb, I'm thinkin'. He's an independent feller, Caleb is. He ain't takin' no—”

“
Jud
,” said Marion, looking over her glasses.

“Hell, I wasn't goin' to say anythin', and if I was, I think Jo's heard that word before.” He twinkled at Joanna like an elderly cherub. “As I was sayin', Caleb don't want much more truck with the Fowlers. Gettin' the mail over there is about all we can stomach.”

“And we won't have to be doing that for long, I hope.” Joanna stood up and reached for her raincoat. “When we get a few more families here, I'm going to write about the postoffice.”

“You don't need to hurry about goin',” said Marion. “Sit down again.”

“I'll be in again one of these days. Only today I've got a couple more calls to make.” She stood by the door, laughing and at ease; a tall and vibrant presence in the small room. The elderly people looked at her with a shiny mist in their eyes.

“She's her father's girl, Jud,” Marion said. “ 'Member how he used to come in here?”

Jud cleared his throat and was busy with his pipe. “Yep. . . . Well, Joanny, you won't have any trouble with Caleb, and you was always able to twist your brothers 'round your little finger.”

“Oh, everything's going to turn out all right,” said Joanna. She was still smiling and assured. And as she went down the white clamshell path under the dripping dark spruces, she too was remembering her father. When they said she was her father's girl, she was always secretly warmed, and proud. . . . If Stephen had been so minded, there would have been almost nothing that he couldn't have done with his smile and his voice.

But there was another way in which she was not like Stephen, nor like Donna either. Jud and Marion didn't know it, yet. Perhaps nobody would ever realize it. All they would realize was that ther were no Marcus Yettons on Bennett's Island any more.

She walked past the other empty houses at the harbor and past the remains of the boatshop, and the old wharf where a few gulls sat on the wet rocks, fluting absently into the fog. The tide was down and the pebbled beach gleamed gray and black and steel-blue; the rockweed strewn by the sea was tinged with bronze. The fog had lifted a little, so the space around her had widened somewhat. As she went along the boardwalk over the beach stones, she could see, and enjoy afresh, the white paint on the Caldwell house and the starched, flowered curtains in the sitting room windows.