Storm Tide (49 page)

It was hard to believe that somewhere also in this well of silence Nils existed. But he was there in the barn; there was no reason for his aunt to lie. In a few moments now they would be talking as they had always talked, calmly, without lifted voices, and she would explain to him why he must come home. He would understand. He knew how to be reasonable. She would tell him about Stevie's going away, she would admit freely that she needed him there on the Island, that no one wanted to work without him; and she would tell him about this filthy, impossible story the children had brought home. Even now it was growing larger, and more people were listening—and believing; the longer Nils stayed away, the more easily they'd be convinced they knew the truth.

She opened the door into the barn, reassuring herself that Nils would go back with her. She would insist upon it.

She saw the boat first. There was no escaping it. It towered above her and seemed to fill the barn; it looked much bigger than it really was. The fine, tenuous lines of winter sunshine from the windows softened the raw yellow timbers and planks to warm gold, coppery­toned in the shadows; she was a golden boat, rising out of the warm, quiet gloom around her.

For a moment Joanna gazed at the boat. Then, shutting the door noiselessly behind her, she looked around for Nils. . . . A workbench had been built against the wall, reaching from the shed door to the end of the barn and the big doors through which the boat would move on her journey down the slope to the sea. Nils stood at the farther end, fitting a small shiny blade into a block plane. So quietly had Joanna come that he didn't yet realize she was there. She had intended to speak to him evenly and decisively, but now that the moment had come, she only stood there, watching him.

His hands held the plane over the bench, his pipe was in his mouth, he looked as he had always looked; absorbed, intent, and very clean.

She couldn't just stand here, indefinitely. She must speak to him. . . . But curiously, it was difficult to say his name and walk toward him, as if she'd seen him only yesterday. She felt all at once as if he had been gone for a lifetime.

It was then that he turned away from the bench, and saw her.

He was incredibly still.
As if I was dead
, she thought.
As if he thought he'd never see me again
. The pulses were loud in her ears, and she found she was still holding the doorknob with a fierce grip.

“
Joanna!
” said Nils softly. “Is it you, Joanna?”

The astonishment didn't leave his face; it was almost a dazed astonishment, and it was reflected in his voice. He didn't move, except to take the pipe from his mouth. Joanna had a frightening sensation that if she spoke to him from where she stood, he wouldn't be able to hear her. She must walk toward him. But she felt a reluctance to let go of the doorknob. If she did, the barn floor would rise and fall under her feet as the
White Lady
had done. . . .

She took a step toward him, and he said nothing at all; he only stood watching her, his pipe in his hand, and she could see him better now; her eyes were used to the dimness. The dazed look, as if he'd been startled from a dream, was gone.

“I'd just been thinking about you,” he said. “But how—why did you come over here, Joanna? What's happened?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but she felt again that sensation of her strength oozing from every pore, and with it the trembling she couldn't stop—she'd always been able to control it, but now it was growing wilder and wilder. Her eyes felt too big again; but they saw only Nils standing at the far end of the workbench, waiting for her, his hair a blurry bright spot in the thickening shadows; only Nils, strong and clean and calm. . . .

She put out her hand and felt the cool, firm, scarred wood of the bench as she walked. It helped her, too; it helped the watery feeling in her legs. Nils didn't take his eyes from her face, and she sensed, rather than saw, his disquiet and unbelief.
I can't look as queer as that
, she thought in some vague corner of her mind.
That mirror on the bus
. . .

At last she reached him. Her journey was over; she could tell him to come home, and then she could go somewhere and sleep, and get over being so tired. . . . Nils' hands came out to touch her shoulders, they gripped her with their strength, their warmth went through her coat to her skin and into her blood.

“Joanna, what in God's name has happened to you?” he asked harshly. “Are you sick? Is that why you're here?”

She was past answering. The touch of his hands had done that. She could not have spoken then to save her life. She looked at him for one long, drowning moment and then the last of her strength was gone. She felt her arms go around his neck, and the quick, tumultuous springing of her tears. There was no holding them back, and she was beyond thinking of her pride.

“Joanna, what
is
it?” she heard Nils say, and then, blessedly, his arms came around her and held her so tightly and strongly that they hurt her and her breath came hard; but she would not have relinquished one snatch of the pain. When she trembled, his arms tightened even more. He had never known her to tremble or to cry, but she couldn't stop either.

After a while he didn't try to speak to her, and the only sound in the barn was that of her sobbing. Joanna Bennett, sobbing like this! It was an incredible thing and she knew it; but the knowledge didn't quiet her. It was journey's end in more ways than one. For she was safe now; she was secure. She forgot shame and resentment and frustration in realizing that one certainty.

She didn't know how long it was that she cried out her weakness and defeat in Nils' arms. But finally she felt herself growing quiet. Her head lay passive against his shoulder, her face against his neck. The fresh scent of his skin and the smell of his clean shirt had been in her nostrils as she cried. . . . The stillness descended around her again, like a shadowy cloak. She realized that it was growing cold in the barn. The cold was aromatic with the new wood of the boat.

She felt Nils' face move against her hair. “Tell me now, Joanna,” he said gently. His voice sounded oddly shaken. Not like Nils' voice at all, except in its gentleness. He tried to hold her away from him, to look at her, but she felt an intolerable pain at the thought of letting go of him. It was a new and foreign sensation, but she didn't question it.

“Don't make me let go of you, Nils,” she said in a choked voice.

Again that blessed tightening of his arms, so that she felt weightless and almost light, almost like a child carried in the strong, unfaltering arms of an adult. “All right, Jo. Only for God's sake tell me what's wrong.”

Her helpless confusion eddied around her. “Oh, Nils, I can't. . . . When I try to straighten it out, I—” She began to cry again and it frightened her. “Everything's wrong . . . the Island's going away from me, and nobody will do anything, and Winslow—” She lifted her head then, to stare through her running tears at his face.

“Nils, aren't you ever coming home again?”

“I didn't say I wouldn't be home.”

“Because if you don't want to go back to the Island,” she said with infinite care,“I'm never going back either. I don't care where you go. Only don't ever leave me behind again, Nils!”

“You don't mean that, Joanna,” he said, so near she could feel his breath on her cheek. “You wouldn't give up the Island for anybody.”

“I do mean it,” she answered with a curious serenity, and knew that she was telling the truth. “Nils, wherever you are, that's my Island. I never knew it until now.”

He said swiftly, “You're beside yourself, Joanna. You're sick with crying so hard, you've let yourself go to pieces, and I never thought you'd do that. . . . Come in the house now and let Aunt Karin put you to bed. You need rest.”

He moved, but her hands held him. “Nils, don't send me away from you!” Her voice shook with panic. “Oh, my dearest, don't send me away!”

For a long moment he didn't answer her; she felt the rigid poise of him and a new and frightening thought set her head to swimming in blackness. He didn't want her. It was true then, that he'd put her behind him; he'd held her in his arms, and let her soak his shirt with her tears, out of kindness and pity, nothing else. . . . She couldn't square her shoulders and lift her chin. She was defeated.

“Joanna, listen. You said—” His words came slowly, as if he framed them with difficulty. “You said
dearest
. Are you going to tell me you mean that, too?”

“I mean it, Nils.” From what depths her words came, she didn't know. But she knew that she was not lying when she said, “You
are
dear to me, Nils. You're my dearest.”

“Oh, Joanna,” he said on a long, tormented breath.
“Joanna. . . .”
He pulled her close to him again, this time it was not as if she were a heart-broken child. In the dimness she turned toward him, unseeing, yet sure. As sure as the blind, instinctive seeking of her mouth for his.

S
OMEBODY OPENED THE SHED DOOR
and stood gazing into the shadows of the barn. By the tilt of his head and the set of his shoulders, silhouetted against the clearer light of the shed, it was Owen. He stood without moving, looking up at the boat; it was no longer a golden boat, for the sun had dropped below the level of the hayloft windows. It was a ghost boat, a shadowy glimmer rising above him.

Joanna and Nils, standing close together at the far end of the workbench, didn't move; but in an instant he saw them and hailed them.

“You fellers got your business all talked over? Nils, she read the Riot Act to you yet?” He laughed. “I thought I'd take a look at the boat—”

“You can see it better in the morning,” said Nils pleasantly.

“My God, man, sounds like you're kicking me out. Oh, hell, don't ever say I can't take a hint!” Still laughing, he shut the door noisily and they could hear him whistling as he went back to the kitchen. They didn't move until the faint sweet thread of sound had died away completely.

Nils kissed Joanna again, gently now, on her temple and on her cheek. She stood peacefully within the barrier of his arms; it seemed as if all her life and all her world had condensed to the radius of this small circle. Yet it was not small. It was as big and as boundless as space. And wherever she moved, she would never leave that circle again. She knew it for an irrevocable fact; and she knew the strangeness of it. The remembrance of nights when she had felt trapped and dismayed by Nils' nearness seemed a chaotic dream. This was like the awakening to a sun-washed morning, and the glimmer of endless, benevolent ocean and of unbroken sky arching from horizon to horizon; it was like the first opening of eyes still clouded by the dream, yet glimpsing through the mist the familiar and safe and beloved. And because of the horror of the dream, even the familiar would take on a new lustre. It was as if a whole new world had been given to her.

Nils sighed. “Aunt Karin'll be bringing the coffee out here next,” he said. “I suppose we'd better go in. . . . Hungry, Joanna?”

“I don't know. . . . I guess so. Nils, I was almost seasick coming over today. And I was scared.” She remembered as she spoke that no one was to know; but suddenly it was imperative that Nils know. She even took pleasure in telling him, and in feeling his hand stroke her hair, hearing him murmur, “Poor kid.”

“I thought we'd never make it. I thought we might drown,” Joanna said. “And for the first time in my life, I hated the sea.”

“It was because you were tired,” Nils said quietly. “It probably wouldn't happen like that again.” They walked slowly toward the shed door. She was tired, but it was a good sort of tiredness, as if she could fall asleep without effort and without dreams; and Nils' arm was like iron around her waist.

Now she was content to sit in the comfortable rocker by the stove, drinking strong coffee and saying nothing. Karin rattled dishes in the pantry, singing to herself in Swedish while she mixed up a special cake for a company dessert. Eric Sorensen had returned from his errand in the town. He was a square-built, solid man with reflective pale blue eyes and a calm good humor; though it was said he had a touch of his father's temper. But he had none of Gunnar's cruelty, or Nils would never have stayed with him for so long.

Watching Nils as he talked with Owen and his uncle, Joanna's mind moved in dreamy circles, not touching for long at one spot. But it hesitated on Gunnar's name. Nils had really hated his grandfather, she knew. He'd had a barren childhood and youth in Gunnar Sorensen's house; no woman had ever held him when he was small, or spoke to him with little love-names as he grew up, for his grandmother had been too much afraid of her husband. . . .

Joanna's mind stopped its wandering. She gazed at Nils over the rim of the coffee cup. The lamp had just been lit, and as he leaned across the table to point out to Owen something on the boat-plans, his face was clear to her. It had an extraordinary clarity; and it seemed to print itself with the same brilliance on her brain. There was
something
—something she'd just been thinking . . . if she could go back and pick up the thread, she would find out something about Nils that he had never told her. If only she could recapture it—that instant of almost-perception.

It was gone. But perhaps it would come back. She looked at Nils' face again, and in that moment he glanced across at her. Not a line of his face changed, but there was a quick, subtle lighting of his eyes. As surely as if he had touched her, a warmth ran through her that didn't come from the coffee. Then, for the first time that afternoon, she remembered that on Brigport they were accusing Nils of murder. She fought to keep this new and comforting safety, and shut away the other thought; it had no place in the circle. At the same time she knew she must
not
shut it away, Nils had a right to know and to prepare himself.