Storm Tide (2 page)

That was Nils. Did he ever forget
anything?
Joanna doubted it. She touched a match to the fine kindling, adjusted the dampers, and took the clean new water pails from the dresser.

Down in the field the well curb had been rebuilt, and the well-pole was firm smooth yellow wood in her hands. The water came up from darkness, icy clear. There was never such water in main-land wells, she thought. There was never such air, so clean-washed, so fragrant with the tall ripe grass and the spruces, the sea, and the cool wind that had sprung up at sunset. Nor such blessed and perfect silence.

There was no one on the Island but themselves. They would be as solitary as Grandpa and Grandma Bennett had been, when they first came. When she awoke in the morning, when she cooked Nils' breakfast before he went out to haul, she would know how Grandma Bennett had felt when she was young Sara Bennett, coming without fear or question to this strange, wild, distant island her husband—her very new husband—had bought from the State of Maine. No one else had ever lived there but Indians. Sara and Grandpa—it seemed disrespectful to call him Charles—had lived in a log cabin the first year. From the well curb Joanna couldn't see over the slope, down into the sheltered place where the woods met Goose Cove beach, but it had been there that Grandpa had built the cabin. During the long winter he had cut down the trees that would later build the homestead where he had raised his sons; the house that stood now on the breast of the slope, its windows fired with the afterglow.

Joanna walked up the path, half in a dream, and met Nils at the door. He took the pails from her. “What are you thinking, Joanna?” he asked her.

“About Grandpa Bennett. And us.” They went into the kitchen and Nils set the pails on the dresser without slopping. He went to the stove and began to fix the fire, his face absorbed, his blond head silvery in the lamplight.

“Nils, we stand almost where they stood,” Joanna said.

“I know,” Nils answered. He put the covers back on the stove, fixed the dampers, and looked at her quietly, the tall young woman he had loved with such silent intensity for so long. He saw her lifted black head and her rapt, brilliant dark eyes, her cheekbones burned red with wind under the smooth brown, her mouth curved and tender with whatever dream possessed her now, and her shoulders, squared and unafraid under the white blouse; shoulders that asked for no hands to touch and strengthen them. He knew that look of hers, and he waited quietly until she should see him again.

“We'll do what they did,” Joanna said. “Only we'll build so strong that nothing can hurt it again.” Her voice deepened. “Father died of a broken heart—pneumonia couldn't have killed him if he hadn't been ready to die—because he couldn't live away from the Island. But he had to leave it. I don't intend to let it break
my
heart, Nils.”

She lifted her strong hands in a curiously vivid gesture, as if she held the world between them. “It's whether I can keep it in my hand, Nils. Or whether its hand will be over me.” Then all at once her expression, her whole body, changed, and she was
seeing
Nils again. She crossed the room swiftly, and put her hands on his shoulders.

“What do you think, Nils?” she demanded. “What do you think when you look like that? We can do it, can't we? We can make the Island what it was meant to be. We can do anything, can't we?”

She wasn't asking for reassurance. It was a chant of triumph. Nils nodded. “But we've got to creep before we can walk,” he said.

She stared back at him, her dark eyes narrowing and searching his blue ones, almost as if she hated his caution, and then they heard Charles' gay whistle outside.

“Oh, Nils,” she said suddenly, shaking her head. She kissed him lightly on the mouth.

Charles came in, scaled his cap toward the row of hooks on the entry wall. “What the hell, haven't you cooked that beefsteak
yet
?” he demanded. “I know this is a honeymoon, but it's not mine. And I'm due back at the Harbor tonight. I want some grub!”

Then there was laughter, and unbounded cheerful confusion in the Bennett kitchen, until in the lavender afterglow Charles started back across the glassy, opalescent sea toward Pruitt's Harbor.

Joanna and Nils walked back to the house from the wharf, and stood on the rise to watch
The Four Brothers
cut a long, curling wake at the feet of the black-silhouetted ledges; but before she rounded the point of Chip Cove, Charles turned to wave his cap, and they knew they must not watch him out of sight, for that meant bad luck for the boat.

When they came into the kitchen, where the fire snapped in the stove, and the lamplight's warm radiance pushed the dusk back, they knew that they were alone on the Island. Except for the birds who slept in the thick dark forest, they were alone. By the kitchen table with its bright plaid cover they stood looking at each other. Joanna smiled at Nils and rubbed her bare forearms.

“It was cold out there,” she said. “Wonderful Bennett's-Island-September cold.”

“Wonderful Joanna,” said Nils quietly and unexpectedly, and took her in his arms. She felt in his kiss the long-restrained passion of the man, as deep and powerful and boundless as the sea. She felt it in his tightening arms, and the strong quick thudding of his heart against her breast. As she put her arms around his neck, she knew a swift wonder and pain at all the years he had waited for this. How patient he had been, how strong. Eleven years ago, when she was nineteen, she'd married Alec Douglass; and Nils had seen her look at that whimsical and beloved stranger with her heart in her eyes, he had seen her stand by Alec's grave with her whole body frozen in incredulous despair; he had heard her tell him, across Alec's child's crib, that beyond Alec there was nothing else.

But he had been patient. And now she stood in his arms, they were like lovers standing there, and their arms were tight around each other, and his mouth was on hers. It was the first sip to satisfy the terrible thirst and hunger of those years in between; and because of this drought and famine that he had known, he would be thirsty and hungry for her all the rest of his life.

She knew it with a terrible clarity, and she wondered, even as her mouth burned under his, how she could have been so blind about Nils until this instant. Perhaps it was because he had always been so quiet and unhurried and understanding. That day they had agreed to get married, and work together for the Island—was that all she'd thought about? The Island? Oh, she had been ready for marriage. But not for this drive of passionate urgency that made Nils a stranger to her, that called no response except dismay from her body.
I love him
, she thought. But
I'm not in love with him
.

Her face burned with shame at her stupidity. Unconsciously her arms tightened, as if to protect him, and he lifted his head. His eyes blazed into hers, and she thought of blue fire. In a swift involuntary gesture she pulled his fair head down against her shoulder, before he could see her face, and she felt his famished lips against her throat.

I mustn't let him know
, she thought.
But it was the Island I thought of, first, last, and always. I thought we could work together and we can. We'll do everything we planned. But he shan't ever know about this
.

This
was the dismay and weariness and pity that spread, achingly, through every muscle and sinew of her body. From a dry throat, her voice came, and she pressed close to him as if she too were famished.

“Nils,” she whispered against his cheek. “We're home. And together, Nils.”

T
HEY WERE UP AT DAYLIGHT
in the morning, moving around in a calm breathless hush that meant wind to come. The curious opales-cent luster of the sea, and the clear unclouded breadth of sky, the way no faintest breeze stirred the tall grass, and the unnatural loudness of the crows' voices—it all added up to one thing. A weather-breeder. Let it come, Joanna thought with exultation. She was safe at home, and Nils had plenty of pots stacked on the beach in case he should lose any. The woodpile in the shed was dry, and there was food enough for a siege.

She almost welcomed the thought of it. To feel the force of the gale striking at the house, to see the white water flying high above the rocks wherever she looked, to hear the steady thunder all day and all night, and know it was echoing in her blood as it had always done—she knew she would love it fiercely, not as she loved this silent, unreal morning when she wanted to make no sound to crack the hush.

Nils was quiet too. He brought in fresh water and more wood while she fixed their breakfast, and filled his dinner box. He stood by the stove, immaculate even in faded dungarees and blue shirt, and watched her.

“That's a lot of grub,” he observed mildly.

“It's enough for two. I'm going with you, Nils.”

“Good,” said Nils, and she knew he meant it. When he had gone down to Goose Cove to put his bait aboard the peapod, she changed her dress for slacks, stacked the few dishes in the sink, and went through the house to fling all the windows wide. While she was gone the mellow September sunshine could fill the house, and be held there when the rain came. It seemed to her that she couldn't get enough of the Island's fragrant breath.

From every window of the Bennett house there was something to see; things that had been of the very substance of her being since earliest babyhood. From the north windows she looked down across the meadow and the marsh to the harbor. Its sunlit emptiness didn't make her lonely as it had done, when she watched the boats grow few; already in her mind she saw the other boats that would lie at their moorings, the strong clean boats of the fishermen who, like Nils, would be good fishermen because they felt a deep satisfaction in their work and their way of living.

Beyond the harbor and its two high points of red-brown rock, Brigport stretched its long lean length upon the sea; in the early morning sunlight, pasture and dark spruce forest and white houses, with great barns, looked across the sound at Bennetfs. Most of the men on the larger island were fanners as well as fishermen. . . . Twenty miles beyond Brigport the Camden hills billowed out of Penobscot Bay, they were gentle curves of amethyst and plum-color. Below Brig-port, to the west, there was Metinic. To the north-east, the cliffs of Vinalhaven, and then the blue, cloudlike mountain of Isle au Haut, like some foreign land, with Mount Cadillac peering past it.

From the east windows Joanna looked across the unruffled azure of Schoolhouse Cove to her Uncle Nate's fields—where the cranberries would be ripening in the mossy spots—and the locked white buildings and bam against the Eastern End woods. Schoolhouse Cove bounded Nate's land on one side, and Long Cove on the opposite side. Beyond Long Cove there was the minute island called Tenpound. In this air which made the land loom, Joanna could see the sheep grazing. So Whit Robey of Brigport still kept his sheep there, she thought, and that little instant bridged the seven years more completely than anything else had done.

She looked back to Schoolhouse Cove and beyond, at the long harsh points of land jutting out into the sea, with the gulls perched on them in white rows. The sun was rising steadily higher, and the water was so bright she couldn't look at it for long, but she gazed long enough to pick out Pirate Island, five miles to the east . . . a barren length of yellow ledge, where no one lived. Yet she knew of a tiny secret meadow, where in May the strawberry blossoms spangled the grass with white stars, and song sparrows caroled from the hummocks of tall grass where they had their nests.

The memory of that hidden meadow brought her from her knees. She could think of it quietly now, not with intolerable longing. The Joanna who had found it there, with Alec to drop beside her in the warm blossoming grass, had lived in another life.

Joanna walked through the rooms and stopped at a window that looked south. The polished glass in the tower at Matinicus Rock caught the sunlight like fire. It looked steadfastly out over the sea toward Spain, as it flashed its light over it at night. When she was little she had thought the light shone all the way to Spain and swung its beam through some little Spanish girl's home as it did through the homestead.

On the ledges between Bennetes and the Rock, there was no play of surf this morning. Close to the Island, on Goose Cove Ledge and Green Ledge, the gulls were at peace with the world. Her gaze dropped to the shimmer of Goose Cove, so still the woods were mirrored darkly in it. Three gulls paddled lazily on the surface, nothing whiter than their breasts above their shimmering white reflections. Two seals dived and tumbled in the water close to the shore, unabashed by Nils. They popped their sleek dripping heads out and looked at him, and then went back to their game, catching a glisten of sunlight on their wet hides. Over in the shadow of the point, among the rockweed-covered boulders, black ducks were feeding. They too were unafraid. It was strange how quickly an island went back to the wild things when it was left alone, she thought.

And then there was Nils. He stood patiently by the double-ender, pipe in mouth and long-visored cap pushed back on his head, looking out across the cove. He was waiting for her; she shook her dreams off, as the seals shook water from their heads, and ran downstairs and out-of-doors.

They went along the south side of the Island, hauling traps set close to the tumbled rocks in the rich kelp growths where the lobsters liked to spend the warmer months. In a little while now it wouldn't be so easy; he would have to start shifting his traps outward, away from the Island. And he couldn't fish from a double-ender then. But the
Donna
, in her cradle in the marsh, was Nils' boat now, to re-fit and paint up as he pleased, and put overboard again. She had once belonged to Joanna's father, Stephen Bennett; his widow, Donna Bennett, had given the lovely and gallant boat to her new son-in-law as a wedding present.