Storm Tide (41 page)

Owen brought his magazine to the table. Stevie was lost in his own thoughts. So they ate dinner in silence. But when she served the pie and coffee, Owen laid aside his magazine in anticipation.

“Blueberry, huh? Hey, you're not so bad after all, sis! Been lookin, a mite ugly lately, but I'll forgive you, since you went and made me a blueberry pie.”

“Thanks,” she said laconically. She sat down at her own place, empty of pie, and began to stir her coffee. She had forced herself to eat dinner when every morsel scraped her throat. But she couldn't force down pie.

Owen picked up his fork and glanced at her quizzically. “None for you, kid? Don't you like pie?”

“Leave her alone, she's watching her figure,” said Stevie. “You know how girls are.”

Owen shrugged. “Never knew Jo to go off her feed for anything.” He took his first mouthful of pie, and dropped his fork, to stare at Joanna with his brown face wry and puckered.

“What the hell's the matter with you, Jo? You slippin'?” He pushed his plate away from him and took a mouthful of coffee. “I've heard about these women that can't remember how to do things right when the old man's away, but I never thought you'd be one of 'em, Jo.”

There was a glint in his black eyes and a twitch to his mouth that said he was teasing. But she was in no mood to take it. He pushed back his chair, its legs scraping the floor, and the rasping sound was more than Joanna could stand.

“What's the matter with the pie?” she demanded ominously.

Stevie answered her, his voice mild. “I guess you forgot to sweeten the blueberries, Jo.” He lifted the top crust and sprinkled sugar over the filling.

“Nossir, I never thought Jo'd be one to make a mistake like that,” said Owen. “Jesus, were
they
sour!”

So he was going to keep it up, was he? She felt the familiar burning in her cheeks, as if the room were too hot. “Maybe I
did
forget something, for once! And maybe it
is
bad enough to swear about! But at least I make an effort to do something extra around here, and that's more than you do!”

“Oh, for God's sake, Jo—you mad? What are you jumpin' down my throat for?” He looked at her in disgust. “What's wrong with me now?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all, except to sit around in my way.”
I won't shout at him
, Joanna promised herself.
I won't shout or swear
. . . . “For a solid week you've done nothing, with all the stuff outside waiting to be done. But
you
can't do it—” sarcasm crept heavily into her voice and gave it a cutting edge. There was nothing worse to infuriate Owen, and she knew it. “
You
can't do it—Owen Bennett, of Bennett's Island—unless Nils is here to team you around! You and Stevie and Mark are the Bennetts, but Nils has to show you what to do, because you can't see it with your own eyes!”

“Do what, for instance?” Owen challenged her.

“You could fix up those camps before they fall to pieces! We've got nails and shingles and hammers—why don't you get to work?”

Owen scraped a match viciously across the stove. “The goddam things can rot into the ground before I'd touch ‘em,” he said. He looked at her from narrowed black eyes. “Listen, Jo, you tryin' to get rid of me? Because you're makin' a damn good job of it . . . same way you got rid of Nils! You don't want brothers, or a husband either—all you want is a hired man to keep the woodbox full.”

She was standing up now, holding on to the back of her chair. She spoke slowly and carefully from a tightening throat. “You want to be careful, Owen. You talk too much.”

“So do you,” said Owen. “You always did. That's what's the matter with you.” He walked out of the room. She stood rigidly still, looking down at the table; at the cooling coffee, the dark blueberry juice running out on the white pieplates. She heard Owen go through the sitting room and upstairs to his own room. Then, one at a time, her fingers unclamped, her knuckles stopped showing whitely through the brown flesh.

“Jo, listen,” Stevie said. She had forgotten him entirely, and there he was, watching her with concerned eyes. “Jo, you don't want to let Owen get under your skin like that. And I'm sorry about the camps. Fact is, I never even see 'em half the time—”

She didn't answer; she was studying his face carefully. He got up and came around the table to her, and she turned to him. “Never mind the camps, Stevie,” she said. “I guess they don't matter much . . . if they
do
fall down.”

Stevie took hold of her elbow. “Jo, you look tired. Why don't you go lie down, and I'll clear up here?”

Suddenly her head cleared, and she could push Owen's crude statements away and see out past them, and realize with a rush of shame that Stevie was worried about her. About
her
. What had he seen on her face—what had she showed that wasn't meant to be seen? Panic wanted to assail her, but she held it off.

“Oh, gosh, Stevie!” She laughed up at him. “I did let him bother me, didn't I? But I think I bothered him a little too. Anyway, he's gone to his room to sulk, but I'll be damned if I'll go and sulk!” She began to clear the table, with a brisk clatter of dishes. “You go back in the other room and get your Sunday programs.”

“I'll wipe the dishes for you,” he offered, but she took him by the shoulders and turned him toward the sitting room door.

“I like the galley to myself, Cap'n. Go on.”

Stevie went. She was safely alone again, she could let the aching smile slip from her face.
I can't live in the same house with Owen any longer
, she thought.
Maybe he'll go away now
. . . . Immediately she was horrified by the knowledge that she wanted one of her brothers to get out—to go anywhere, even to leave the Island, as long as he left her alone.

Stevie had the radio on again. He kept it turned down low, and lay on the couch near it, his hands behind his head, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. She hated the sound of the radio today, but she hadn't the heart to make Stevie turn it off. When she had finished the dishes, she went into her own room; with two doors shut between her and the sitting room, she could hear nothing.

She took off her shoes and lay down on the bed, pulling the Rose­of-Sharon quilt over her. She could look across at the woods; and as she lay there, trying to make each tense muscle relax, she remembered another time when she had lain in the pineapple-topped bed and looked over at the woods. Only instead of this harsh, cold, December light, there had been a soft snowfall at daybreak, and she had watched the gently dropping veil that made no sound, knowing that her baby would be born that day.

In January Ellen would be nine. She wanted a birthday party. . . . Joanna closed her eyes and wished she could drop off to sleep, and not wake up until dusk. . . . Because this had been Nils' bed too, he came into her mind again and again. She tried to imagine him in Uncle Eric's house, talking patiently with his uncle's wife, answering Eric's questions about the Island. He wouldn't find it hard. He wouldn't be tormented, as she was tormented; for he had simply made up his mind, and that was the way things were to be. He had put her and the Island behind him.

Once he had put the Island aside, after he had been such an integral part of it for so long, it wouldn't matter to him that the Island needed him. And that it
did
need him, Joanna was forced to recognize. The fact stared her in the face at every turn. Once she had worried about Nils' moderate ways, thinking he was of the same stamp as her father, from whom the Islanders had accepted all that he could give them, and had offered nothing in return. Money, advice, his unfailing friendship—they'd taken it as freely and unconsciously as they took water from the well, or wild strawberries from the field. And how very few among them had thought to
offer
, without prompting, their labor for an hour or so?

But she had proof that it was different with Nils. As she lay alone on the bed, watching the sunlight shift along the wall of the woods, she began to feel a reluctant admiration for him. It was clouded with her own hurt, for she was always being hurt these days; sometimes it seemed as if the Island itself were turning its face from her, who loved it so passionately. And Nils, who didn't love it half so deeply, could do for it what she ached to do, and couldn't.

She didn't know when she fell asleep. But at last the ceaseless, shifting cloud patterns above the spruces had their way, and they were the last things she remembered before there was nothingness.

It was Stevie who woke her up. She struggled back to awareness in the shadowy room to see him standing in the doorway, saying her name in a hushed tone.

“Jo . . . you awake?”

She sat up, her heart beating hard. “What's the matter?”

“I've been waitin' for you to wake up,” he said. His voice sounded curiously tense, for Stevie. “Finally I thought I'd come and get you.”

She slid out of bed, leaving the warmth under the quilt. “But what
is
it, Stevie? What's wrong?”

“‘Those damn' Japs are bombin' Hawaii,” Stevie said. “Pearl Harbor.” His words caught oddly in his throat. “Sinkin' our ships. They started this momin'. . . .”

She followed him out into the sitting room. The radio was going; Owen sat beside it, his elbows on his knees, his profile somber and iron-hard in a shaft of late sunshine.

“But there's a peace conference in Washington,” she protested. “They couldn't bomb us, when they're talking peace!”

“Peace conference, hell,” growled Owen, and turned back to the radio and the voice. that came from it, bringing treachery and bloody, choking death into the sitting room to blot out the empty fields and the unmoving spruces. The bulletin was agonizingly brief; its very curtness was worse than long details which would at least have given one something to go on. The report ended, and swing music blared into the room, frantically, as if the players were infected with this terrible shock that Joanna felt now; that burned in Owen's eyes as he snapped off the radio, and flattened Stevie's voice when he spoke.

“I'm goin' to enlist. Go in Tuesday on the mailboat. The Navy'll take me.” He went over to the window and looked out toward the sea. Owen stayed where he was, his head bent forward, his eyes on the floor. Joanna looked swiftly from him to Stevie's back; she could sense the way Stevie's muscles had pulled themselves tightly together under his plaid shirt and corduroys. She went to stand near him, and saw a slight twitching in one flat brown cheek.

The sea stretched away from the flatly shelving tawny rocks out toward the lighthouse on the horizon, its bright surface dimmed by clouds blowing past the sun. As Joanna watched, the dulling shadows moved swiftly across the face of the water; ·and then a fresh gust of wind followed, sending a diamond shimmer over the sea.

And somewhere, in waters that sparkled as brilliantly, though under a warm sun instead of a wintry one, American boys like Stevie had fought and died, and were fighting and dying still. And some had had no chance to fight. . . . She looked at her brother now, knowing what had set his jaw like stone and what must be passing through his mind as he looked out across the sea he'd always called his “own special piece of ocean.” And now, suddenly, he didn't belong only to the Island, nor the Island to him; the whole United States was his, and he owned vaster stretches of sea than he'd ever dreamed of crossing.

So he would go. . . . She remembered the destroyer in Limerock Harbor, and Stevie's lifted, intent face as they went by it.

“Maybe they'll send me down there right away,” Stevie said, in this new drawn-out-taut voice. In the room behind him and Joanna, Owen got up from his chair.

“I'll be goin' to Portland with you, Steve,” he said.

T
HEY DIDN'T WAIT FOR
T
UESDAY
and the
Aurora B
., after all. They left the very next morning, in the
White Lady
, heading for Pruitt's Harbor, where they would spend the night with their brothers Charles and Philip, and their mother. The next day they would go to Portland. They expected to be back before the end of the week, to get their traps up and put their boats on the beach.

There was not much to do, as far as Joanna was concerned. She was alone in the house day and night now. It was the first time she had ever been alone, except for a few months after Alec died, and then she was not really alone, for she had been always conscious of the baby, as yet unborn.

Now she had so much to think about, so many new prospects to try to understand and assimilate, that she was scarcely conscious of her solitude. Marion and Vinnie came up, and Nora Fennell. It seemed as if they must get together and talk out the horror and amazement and dread that they felt.

Like everyone else, she kept the radio going until she thought she could bear no more, and then, after a time of silence, she would go back to it. She listened to the declaration of war—on the same day the boys left to enlist. She heard the warnings for the air-raid scare on the next day, and knew a thrill of pure animal terror when she heard an airplane engine, coming near; but it was one of the big Coast Guard flying boats that would be doing patrol duty now, every day. Standing out on the windswept point behind the house, her hair blowing back from her lifted face and the incisive edge of the December air cutting through her coat, she watched the plane go over. It flashed silver against the sunwashed blue. She made her­self imagine, deliberately, what she would feel to see an enemy symbol on its wings.

She wasn't frightened or panicky. After the first stunning disbelief had passed, and she realized, like everybody else, that one nation
could
betray another nation's faith in its good intentions, she was angry; and with such a sheer hate as she felt, there was no room for fear. She only hoped that her mother wasn't too nervous, and that Ellen, going to school, wasn't too frightened by the wild tales that children liked to tell each other. Over the weekend she could talk to her, and try to give her some idea of what this war was all about.