Storm Tide (25 page)

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Nils went to bed before she did, and was asleep when she went in, and so when she awoke in the morning her plan was still inside her head, warming her like a secret sun. It was Sunday, and a good day to work outside; when the repairs were done and the work caught up, Nils could rest on Sunday as he had been brought up to do by his grandfather, and as Stephen Bennett had always done. But until then, each Sunday must count, either as a good day to haul, or a good day to work ashore. Owen went down to the harbor to help him, and the day slipped by quickly. By bedtime she had not yet told Nils her plan. But she could wait. It was only the first of March yet, and besides, there was always the one, absolutely right, moment for telling those things. . . .

The Fennells were due sometime this month. Already Matthew Fennell had written to say so. On Monday, with Ellen back to school, Joanna began to clean the Whitcomb place. It was a cold day, but a sunny one, and Joanna had never feared the cold anyway. By the time the sun was high she was crossing the meadow in her slacks and jacket, a kerchief holding her dark hair in place, broom and dry mop over one shoulder, dusters in her pockets, dustpan and brush under one arm. This morning she'd limit to a thorough sweeping and dusting. Later the washing of floors and paintwork and windows....

Nils was out to haul again, and Owen was home, reading beside the stove and keeping the fire going under the mammoth kettle of soup. She was alone, and oddly happy. She was not afraid of memories coming to her while she worked in the house where she had lived with Alec. She would think instead of the young couple who were coming here, Matthew Fennell, and his wife Nora. She liked the name Nora, and tried to visualize the girl who carried it. She was “game,” Matthew had said, and somehow that made her a likeable, honest, tomboyish girl who wasn't afraid of an adventure.
I think I'll like Nora
, she thought as she unlocked the door of her house, and stepped into its chill, resounding, emptiness.

With all that she had to think about, the memories were like leaves blown in the wind; they drifted by, but she didn't try to catch them. Here was where Alec had sat and played his fiddle while she got supper on the table . . . here by the dresser he had caught and hugged her. It made her smile. He'd been so loving and so lovable. Ellen was like him in a way — she had his slimness and his height, his wide humorous mouth. But in her reserve she was oddly like Nils. No wonder he loved her as if she were his own. There seemed to be a spiritual kinship between them. But Alec would have loved Ellen too. . . .

Here in the sitting room was the writing desk. Where the money box had been kept; the money box that so rarely had money in it, because when Alec knew there was money in the house he must use it somehow. It might be on a foolish, extravagant gift for her, it might be a gift to someone down on his luck, it might be for gambling. It was the gambling that had put an end to the ecstasy of that first year. You always came back to the gambling when you thought of Alec. It was as if his story had been written from the start, his pattern laid out for him to follow; and when he swerved from it — she remembered when he had burned the pack of cards he'd always carried — he had broken some mystic law and had been wiped out, as must be all who deviate from their pattern.

She went over to the windows and opened them quickly, letting in a rush of pure cold air flavored by the sea. Where did these queer thoughts come from, she asked herself, and, leaning out, saw Helmi coming along the path to the steps.

She ran to open the door for her. “Hello! Isn't this nice!”

“Hello.” There was a faint color in the girl's face. “I thought I'd walk up to see you, and then you weren't home. Your brother told me you were here.”

“Well, I'm glad you came,” Joanna said. “Come in and warm yourself. I've built a little fire to take the chill off.” She led the way into the kitchen, astonished and yet pleased that Helmi had sought her out. “Are you nervous about Mark being gone over the weekend?”

“No, I am never nervous about being alone. And what is there on the Island to be nervous about?” She pulled off her flowered kerchief and her silver-blonde hair fell free.

“Nothing,” Joanna admitted. “And the boys ought to be back this morning.”

“I know. I thought I would come to see you, and be here when they came. Now I'll help you. What do you want me to do?”

“Well —” Joanna laughed. “Gosh, I don't know. I've swept and dusted nearly the whole house. Next thing is washing the floors. But it's a little cold today —”

“Where is the water? The cold is nothing.”

“You're a girl after my own heart,” said Joanna, “but the soap and the buckets and the mop are up at the house. Come and have dinner with Owen and me, and we'll wash the floors this afternoon.”

As far as Joanna was concerned, Owen's rest-cure was complete. At least his reaction to Helmi was normal, though he showed a little more fitnesse than he had used in the days gone by. Watching him, and watching Helmi's polite indifference, she was amused, and at the same time certain that he would be wanting to get to work soon. The day down in Marshall Cove with the gun had been the turning point. Whatever had been hanging over him when he came home, it was gone now; or at least he had thrust it into its proper place.

If Helmi seemed unmoved by his charm, Owen wasn't annoyed. Instead he announced that he would help them wash floors. It was rather an amazing offer, coming from Owen. When he went into the sitting room to get the noon war news, Joanna followed him.

“If you think you can break her down, you're mistaken, my boy,” she told him, her eyes laughing. “She's unbreakable. There's one girl who's practically immune to us Bennetts. I'll bet you didn't think there was such a critter.”

“Hell, she wasn't immune to Mark, was she?” Owen grinned at her, the big, youthful, vivid grin he'd always had.

“She's crazy about Mark.” Her laughter faded. As he reached out to turn off the radio, she put her hand on his arm. “Owen, I know you're feeling full of beans and you want some fun. But —”

“Oh, my God!” he said violently. “What do you think I am! Not altogether foolish, I hope!”

“Well, you
have
been, sometimes — haven't you?”

He didn't get mad. Instead he rumpled her hair roughly. “Still the same Jo. Trying to make silk purses out of sows' ears. Golly, when you married a feller as well-behaved as Nils you sort of wasted your talents, didn't you?”

“Nils,” said Joanna with dignity, “is restful after a lifetime of my brothers.”

Owen really worked that afternoon. He carried water and kept the fire going to heat it; he whistled and mopped, while Helmi and Joanna washed woodwork and windows. In an hour the house was perfumed with soap and water and fresh air. Owen pursued the girls indefatigably from room to room, sloshing suds with abandon, singing ribald songs under his breath. When they got too ribald, Joanna and Helmi moved to another room.

The day moved on. From the upstairs windows Joanna showed Helmi the view over the roofs of the village; they saw the smoke from Jud Gray's chimney come up from among the green-black spruces, to be caught and torn to shreds by the gusty March wind. They saw Gunnar Sorensen's barn and house, and beyond the windbreak of spruces Eric Sorensen's red roof showed. They could look past the other empty houses and see the new, bright, tarpaper roof on the long fish house, and the ruins of the boatshop that Nils wanted to rebuild. Across the harbor Vinnie Caldwell was taking in her wash, white sheets snapping against the rise of Eastern Harbor Point and a brilliant dark blue comer of Long Cove; white sheets no whiter than the surf on the ledges and the whitecaps in the tide rip at the harbor mouth.

The day was washed in sunshine and wind, and the Camden mountains bloomed purple and blueberry colored on the horizon. And a boat was working her steady way down past the western end of Brigport, heading for Bennett's Island.

“There they are,” Helmi said. She was smiling; her face looked young and softened. Her lips were parted as she watched the tiny boat. When Grant's point hid it, some of the light went out of her eyes. She began to polish a window pane.

“If you start now you'll get to the shore in time to meet them,” Joanna said, taking the cloth out of Helmi's hand. “Go on.”

Helmi didn't argue. “Thank you,” she said, and went out of the room. Joanna heard her shoes on the stairs, light and fast. She went on polishing the glass, knowing a strangeness about the sound; for it might have been her own feet running on the stairs, running to meet Alec.

Owen's voice from the doorway startled her. “What the hell's she running for? She sounds scared.”

“Not to me!” Joanna laughed. “She sounds like a girl in love with her husband. The boys are coming.”

Owen lit a cigarette and leaned against the door casing, his eyes thoughtful through the faint blue smoke. “Wouldn't you know,” he said as he had said once before, “that Mark would marry a Finn?”

Eventually the excitement was over, the grocery orders parceled out, the money for the lobsters stowed safely away in the billfolds. Mark and Helmi refused an invitation to stay for supper and walked back to the Eastern End; during the winter Mark kept his boat up in the harbor. After supper Owen and Stevie went down to Caleb's, and Nils and Joanna were alone.

It seemed a heaven-sent interval to Joanna. The silence of the house lay about her and Nils. He read and smoked, and at first she read too, but her thoughts and her secret delight wouldn't let her relax enough to follow the story. Now was the time to talk to Nils about buying lobsters. It was almost as if Fate had meant it to be so. She laid her book aside and leaned forward till she could see Nils clearly, where he sat at the other side of the sitting room table. The Aladdin lamp between them poured its yellow radiance over them both, lighting her face and his.

She watched him for a long moment without speaking. Then, as if he felt her gaze, he looked up. As always, the blueness of his eyes gave her a shock; she never quite remembered how blue they were, and how intent.

“Hello,” he said, and smiled.

“Nils, I want to tell you something,” she said, her hands clasped in her lap. “I had an idea. I think it's one of the best I ever had.”

Nils laid aside his paper and began to refill his pipe. Joanna said frankly, “I know you don't like some of my ideas, but I can't see a thing wrong with this one. I've thought of it from all angles.”

“Well, why don't you tell me what it is?” he said reasonably.

Her eyes glowing, she began to tell him what she had in her mind. When she had finished she waited, erect with her eagerness and pride, and watched his face. His eyes had not moved from hers. Now he took his pipe from his mouth and looked down at it.

“You've got it all figured out, haven't you?” he said. “Is that why you didn't want me to lend the money to Owen?”

“No,” she said truthfully. “I didn't have the idea till afterwards. But now I think the money would do more general good if it was used to start me off than if you lent it to Owen. Nils, I could put it all back in a month, with the lobsters coming in good, and the price so high —” She leaned eagerly toward him. “And Nils, I'd love doing it. It would be something
real
for the Island.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “We need a buyer here. No reason why we shouldn't have one. I've been thinking of that. I knew it was no job for me.”

“Well, then —”

He looked at her radiant face. “I'm sorry, Jo, that you've got your heart set on it. But it's no job for a woman, tending a lobster car.”

Her hands tightened on each other. “What do you mean, no job for a woman?” she asked him quietly. “It's my own Island, my own people. Who else would do it, then?”

“I've been thinking of Jud,” Nils said. “His back's bothering him so he's finding it too much of a chore to get out to haul all the time — but Jud would do all right on the car.”

Joanna sat very still. Only the whitening of her knuckles showed the feeling that was beginning to possess her.
Jud on the car
, she thought, and wondered, when she replied, how she could speak so quietly.

“Nils, I want to do it. I never wanted so much to do anything in my life. Have you —” Her lips were dry. “Have you said anything to Jud yet?”

Nils shook his head. “No, I was going to talk to you about it, first.”

“Thanks,” she said, and her bitterness seeped out a little in the word. She couldn't sit quiet now. She got up and walked around the room, and came at last to the window overlooking the darkness of Goose Cove. Beyond the point the Rock light came and went. “Nils, don't you think I'm smart enough to tend car?”

“It's not that, Jo, and you know it.” She heard him get up and walk toward her, out of the circle of lamplight. “If there wasn't any man to do the job, it might be different. But you don't need to do it. You've got enough to keep you busy.”

She swung around and faced him. “You sound like those Germans — church, children, and kitchen, or whatever it is! Nils, I never thought you'd be like this. I'm a
Bennett
. Isn't it right that a Bennett should run the lobster business here? It's our island, isn't it?”

“Everybody's working for the Island, Joanna,” Nils said imperturbably. “Jud as much as any of us. And it's his island too. He owns a chunk of it.”

She was baffled and furious. It seemed to her that she almost hated Nils. She wanted to buy lobsters; she needed his help. And he was refusing her. Until now, it had been little things, and she could make her own compromises and adjustments. But there was no compromise or adjustment here. It was an intolerable situation. She walked by him toward the door and he reached out and took her wrist, his fingers gentle but unbreakable in their hold.