Storm Tide (42 page)

The thought passed through her mind that Nils would have been able to explain to Ellen. He would be talking things over with Uncle Eric now, or he'd be down at his father's, trying to make it clear to his grandmother, who had cried so when the Germans invaded Norway, because she'd grown up in Sweden dose to Norway's border and loved it almost as much as she loved her own country. She would be crying again now, the heartbroken tears of an old, confused woman, and it would be Nils who comforted her, speaking to her in Swedish, the language of her heart.

But perhaps he wouldn't be able to comfort her, Joanna thought. For Nils had always been Anna's delight, and if she asked him if he would go, and he answered
yes
–

On this thought Joanna got up from her chair and began to walk through the empty rooms. It seemed to her that her feet echoed almost as they had done when the house had been empty for so many years, and had smelled of loneliness.

Nils might be enlisting now, like the boys. They might run into each other on the way to Portland. He wouldn't think to write to her about his plans, either. She was out of his life. . . . He had left her. . . . She folded her arms tightly across her breast and watched the cold shadows lengthen and darken across the faintly whitened meadow. It was a stormy sunset tonight, dull red, blocked out by a foreboding bank of dark purple cloud. She could imagine that purple cloud sweeping on, covering the Island in its cold mist, and those who lived on the Island caught in it as if it were a whirlpool; spinning in chaos.

She knew then she must get away from the house and away from the radio. Nightmares were bad enough; nightmares in daylight were too much.

She dressed warmly and went down to the Eastern End while the wintery red light still poured over the Island. Everything looked unnatural, the water, the beach stones, the dead grass in the fields, the spruces. The Island seemed unprotected, spread out under too much sky; and Joanna felt small and impotent, walking along the road in a world where nothing else moved. Not even a gull.

When she entered the woods, the gloom seemed almost friendly, at least it shut out the sunset light. The sound of the sea on the rocks below the path was a familiar voice. At least that would stay the same, no matter what happened to everything else.

The light had faded to a dim afterglow by the time she came out on the slope above Mark's place, the sea had darkened. Already the lamps were lit in the house, but as she walked down the path toward the buildings she heard the ringing impact of an axe. Mark was splitting wood out by the barn. In the clear colorless light that precedes dusk, he saw her and called to her.

“Hi, Jo. How goes it?”

“All right.” She stood watching him, her hands deep in her coat pockets. He leaned his axe against the barn door and took out his cigarettes.

“Heard anything?” he asked. She knew he meant the boys, and shook her head. “No. Too soon. Besides, they'll be back before long.”

In the flare from the match Mark's face showed, withdrawn and somber. He looked old tonight, she thought.

“I ought to go,” he said. “I've been thinkin' that ever since Sunday. But I don't know what to do about Helmi.”

“What does Helmi say?” Joanna asked.

Mark shrugged. “You know Helmi. She never says anything, and I can't tell what she thinks.” He began to gather up the wood he'd just split; Joanna helped him, and they went toward the house, their arms full. “Owen and Stevie don't have to plan for a wife,” he said. “Christ, I don't know what to do, Jo! I don't feel like sittin' snug out here while some other poor bastard does my fightin' for me. . . . But Helmi won't go back to her family, and she hasn't got anybody else but me.”

“She's got the Bennetts,” Joanna murmured.

“Yeah—but——” They had almost reached the door. Mark stopped and looked at her over his armful of wood. “I might's well tell you, Jo. I'm worried about her for another reason too. No, it's not a baby, though I wish to Jesus it was.“ His voice sounded bewildered. “I don't know
what
it is . . . that would make a woman cry in her sleep.”

Until now, Joanna hadn't been cold. But now she was chilled to the bone, the wind had a freezing breath. She shifted her load of wood and tried to see Mark's face in the deepening shadows.

“How long has she been doing that?”

“Just since Sunday. Seems like the war's preyin' on her mind or something.” He was groping for words and staring at the lamplit kitchen windows; following his gaze, Joanna saw Helmi through the thin, crisp curtains. She was sitting by the table, reading; and the bright sheen of her hair was like a second lamp in the room. Without shifting his eyes from her Mark went on. “The first time I woke her up. I thought it was a nightmare. . . . In the morning I asked her about it and she said it wasn't so . . . said she never cried, any time. She was so—upset, I never said anything more about it.”

Poor Mark!
Joanna thought helplessly. She heard herself asking, “Does she cry every night?”

“Every night. I don't wake her up now.” His voice dropped low, still groping, and Joanna knew only his desperation had driven him to tell her about this. “Now I—put my arm around her and snuggle her up to me . . . and she puts her arms . . . ” Joanna could hardly hear him now—“around my neck and holds on hard, and keeps on crying, as if her heart would break. And all the time she's still asleep. That's what makes it so—so damn' hard.”

He turned away from the window. “Jo, how am I going to walk out on her, even if it's my duty?”

“I don't know, Mark.” She would have to tell him something, even though her own mind and spirit were so tired this new business made them ache and grow numb. “A lot of women are upset right now. Probably Mother is. Vinnie's scared to death; she'd like to grab Joey under one arm and Caleb under the other and go inland as far as Kansas, she's so terrified of submarines. That's what she feels, but what she thinks is—she's got to keep her chin up for Joey and Caleb, and make out that she believes Caleb when he says the Germans can't bomb us and no submarines'll come in as far as Matinicus Rock.”

The arm-load of wood was getting unbelievably heavy. “Vinnie has nightmares, probably. From trying hard not to show anything. Marion's worried about her boys having to go, but she tries not to show it. So I imagine she doesn't sleep too well, either.” She added, smiling faintly, “I woke up crying myself, last night, Mark. God only knows how much I've cried that I don't know about.”

“Nils ought to come home,” he said gruffly. “Eric's got a son-in-law who could help him . . . . You oughtn't be alone up there, Jo.”

“Nils will come home when he can make it.” She didn't see the sense of telling him she'd slept badly before December seventh; al­ready he seemed to feel better to think Helmi wasn't the only one who cried nights. . . . Already he'd forgotten Nils.

“Then you think Helmi'll get over those spells?” he asked.

“As soon as she gets things straightened around in her mind, yes,” said Joanna practically. “Let's go in, Mark. This armful of wood is getting to weigh a ton.”

When they came in, Helmi got up and walked slowly toward them. “Hello, Joanna,” she said in her low voice. “You were nice to come all the way down here.”

There was nothing about this tall, unhurried girl to suggest crying in the night; nothing about her lucid green gaze to speak of nightmares, except, possibly, the new, faint, hollowing around her eyes.

There were a few more days before the boys came back from Port· land. They were dreary days, spitting snow; night began early. But surprisingly they did not drag. Now it was Helmi and Mark Joanna thought about in the intervals when she was not thinking about the latest accounts of the Pearl Harbor bombing, and the news from the Philippines, and the islands that lay beyond. Everything was mixed up together in an odd chaotic fashion. . . . She thought of Nils too, remembering him every time she went out to the woodshed to bring in the wood he had cut at odd moments during the summer and fall, and brought out of the woods on a sled after the first good snowfall. He was before her as he had looked when she'd gone up to the cutting on the hill above Marshall Cove, taking coffee to him; the sun pouring down on his blond head and stripped, sweat-glistening, shoulders, the glint of sunlight on the swinging axe, the muscles, made powerful by years of hauling pots, moving smoothly under his skin. She could remember so many little details, the mist of perspiration on the fine blond hairs on his upper lip and on his eyebrows, and the surprising cool blue of his eyes; the way he sat on a stump drinking coffee, and laughing when a hornet scared her away from a raspberry thicket.

He was Nils then
, she thought, meaning that he was the Nils he had always been, her friend who was better than a brother.

Then something would recall Mark and Helmi to her again. There was a strange foreign thing nagging at her when she thought of Helmi, and for a long time she couldn't isolate it from her other feelings. Then, one gunmetal morning toward the end of the week, she knew it for what it was.

Envy
. She, Joanna Bennett, who had never wanted to be anyone else but Joanna Bennett, or have anything that another person had, envied Helmi. For she remembered too well how it had been to love a man with all her soul and body. If this war had come when she and Alec had been a year married, she would have cried in her sleep too, and clung to him as Helmi dung to Mark. . . . She would not have guessed, when Mark first brought Helmi home, what passion there was in the girl, what a capacity for loving. But now she knew, and now she envied.

Whatever agony Helmi was enduring, it was a token of life. And anything, even agony, would be better than this state where you felt neither dead nor alive. You didn't even want to cry, when here was all the solitude in the world to cry in, and no one to hear you. No one.

An hour later the boys came. She didn't know it, until she saw the
White Lady's
jigger mast swaying against the leaden sky; the boat was hidden by the boatshop, all but the masthead flying its tiny bright red flag. They would be coming up to the mooring, and they had made the harbor just in time. An evil wind from the northeast was raising its voice around the house, and the snow was flying faster and thicker. Already Brigport was blotted out; in another hour the Island would be indistinct, and the sea wiped out, except for the thunder of it.

She came out of her apathy and put more wood on the fire, set the teakettle over the blaze, and began to get a meal ready. Until this moment their enlistment hadn't seemed actual. But in another week, perhaps, they would be gone.
All over the country
, she thought,
women are realizing the same thing
.

They were a long time getting to the house. When she saw them coming through the gate the percolator was bubbling, the scent of bacon was racy in her nostrils, and the eggs were frying, slowly and delicately as her mother had taught her, in the big iron spider. She turned away from the window and set the table. Her hands were cold, and the plates clattered more than usual.

Finally she heard them at the back doorstep, and then they were coming in, making a good deal of noise in the entry. She heard Owen swearing, and Stevie shushing him; then Stevie himself came into the kitchen, with his cap on the back of his head, his dark eyes shining with his smile; he had a new white scarf tucked into his leather jacket, and against it his skin was as brown as a gypsy's, but a warm, ruddy brown.

He took her by the shoulders and kissed her, the smell of the cold still around him, snowflakes melting on his jacket; while he still held her, he whispered quickly against her ear.

“Take it easy, Jo. Owen's in a bad way. They took me and turned him down.”

Owen was kicking off his boots in the entry; it sounded as if he were throwing them against the door. She said swiftly, “Why? Why didn't they take him?”.

“Heart goes too fast, or something. . . . Tell you later. He's drunk as a coot, and ugly.” He released her shoulders as Owen came into the room.

From the entry door he contemplated her and Stevie, his head lowered so that he looked up from under his brows. He steadied himself with a hand against the door casing. The fingers were gripping hard; the knuckles were white.

“Dinner ready?” he growled.

“As soon as you get washed up it'll be ready,” Joanna promised him cheerfully. Inwardly she felt sick. Only once or twice had she ever seen Owen as drunk as he was at this moment. And this was not a joyous spree. That was what made it worse.

She hurried to get the eggs and bacon on the table, and poured the coffee. Stevie washed, and urged Owen toward the sink.

“Hurry up, Cap'n. You want to eat cold eggs?”

“To hell with the eggs!” Owen muttered. He went to the sink and stood looking down at the wash basin, rubbing his hand over his square, unshaven chin, swaying slightly. Joanna couldn't bear to look at him; there was a gaunt desolation about him that made her set her teeth hard and become very busy around the table.

Stevie had refilled the basin for him, and Owen stared down at the surface of the water, his black eyes fixed. “Ought to drown myself,” he said indistinctly. “No damn' good. A Bennett, too. . . . Not good enough for the Navy. Owen Bennett, fisherman. . . . Stay where you are, you goddam bastard. Right on your own hunk of Island. Because you're not good enough to fight for it.” He gripped the edge of the sink. “Why don't you jump overboard, Owen Bennett?”

Joanna reached out and touched Stevie's shoulder, without realizing she did it. She felt as though she could not stand another moment of this. Stevie winked at her, and pushed back his chair.

“Well, you can't drown yourself in that basin, by God!” he said easily. “You'd better wash yourself in it, and have your dinner. It's bacon and eggs. Finest kind.”