The Ebbing Tide (15 page)

So she had come back to the Island, and the fourth life began. It was with Nils, and it was so complete that she looked back on the other periods as fragments, as parts of a whole; the entirety was
now
. In her childhood Nils and the Island had always been there. The Island had at once surrounded her and pervaded her; Nils had been so close that sometimes she felt more tied to him than to her brothers. Now it was the same, only in a deeper sense. She no longer accepted Nils blindly, she knew his value, and the senseless thing that life was without him.

The knowledge of the entirety was with her now, even with Nils overseas. So if Dennis Garland told her she was serene, she had reason to be.
As long as I don't dream again
, she thought. The dream about Nils and the mine had so shaken her she still remembered it at odd moments during the day.

It came to her one day while she was waiting for Owen to come in from hauling. It was well past noon, but he was shifting traps today, from deep water to more shallow places around the Island, where the lobsters crawled as the year warmed. Jamie was asleep, and the silence grew more and more oppressive, and in it the memory of the dream blossomed viciously. The house seemed to suffocate her all at once. When sweat sprang into the palms of her hands, she put down the book she had been trying to read, and went out.

The lilac buds looked ready to break, and the seven-sisters bush over the front door was showing signs of life. A robin who'd been wandering over the wet lawn—it had been raining gently all morning—flew away when she came out, and lighted in the field beyond the lawn. She examined the swelling buds carefully, and inspected the tulip bed on the western side of the house. There were small green blades piercing the damp dark earth. She must remember to tell Nils that, she thought, scrupulously ignoring the dream; but it lay treacherously beneath her forced calm, like the ledge called Tumbledown Dick at high water.

It was a gray, gentle day, the air was cool and moist to breathe, and there was hardly a sound. She couldn't bring herself to go back into the house again. Jamie was good for another hour's sleep, so she walked down to the harbor. It lay at high tide, silvery except where the trees made reflections of translucent green, and even they were overlaid with a silver stipple. The timothy was hung with cobwebs; they were truly gossamer, she thought. She walked around to the old wharf. Sigurd would be tending the car, and she'd have a few words with him, and then come home again.

There was no one in sight when she walked out on the wharf, but she could hear Sigurd's voice, reverberating through the silver hush.

“Nothin' to it, by God! Only thing is, I like to grab a nap when I finish my dinner, and I can't, long as I have to tend the goddam car!”

He was down on the car, with the doors open; he and Dennis Garland stood looking down at the lobsters moving like shadows through the water. Sigurd leaned on the scales and gestured largely. “The most work's gettin' the critters bailed into crates when the smack's comin'. That'd be a hell of a chore for you—“he squinted at Dennis' hands—“till you got hardened up some. But Christ, everybody'd turn to and help. We'd get 'em crated up faster'n you could spit through a knothole. . . . Hi, Jo.”

“Hi.” Hands in her pockets, she grinned down at the two men. “What are you doing, trying to foist off your job on somebody else?”

“I'm trying to talk him into it,” said Dennis.

“It sounds as if he's convinced.”

“Well, I am,” said Sigurd bluntly. “Damned if I ever wanted to tend car in the beginnin'. But Richards, he was set on havin' somebody take over after Jud Gray went ashore to live. If I wasn't doin' it, I could set out more pots—”

“And take a nap after dinner,” Joanna added.

Sigurd laughed mightily. “Well, if Dennis here wants somethin' to do, he don't have to start twistin' my arm to get it. He can have it!”

“Congratulations,” Joanna said to Dennis. “I hear you're the new lobster buyer.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds pretty important. And I don't mind admitting that I
feel
pretty important.” His grin was unaffectedly happy; she marveled at the simplicity of a man who had lived as Dennis had lived, who knew as much as Dennis knew, and who would come here to this small and unknown spot and be happy because he'd been accepted.

She couldn't stay to talk much longer, but she felt rather pleased with life as she walked home. She had forgotten the dream, and she was composing a letter to Nils, which she would write as soon as things had quieted down after supper.
My darling, the tulips are coming up. . . . Jamie said “Keep still your noise” to Dick today, his first real sentence, and of course it was for his pal and nobody else. . . . Owen is shifting pots, he looks five years younger. He has played poker twice down at Sigurd's and didn't drink either time. . . . Dennis Garland is going to tend the car for Sigurd. He loves it here
.

S
UDDENLY
D
ENNIS WAS NO LONGER
a man from the mainland, a “foreigner.” The Islanders treated him almost as a native. If they pondered and discussed among themselves—and they did—Dennis knew nothing of it, for they accepted his presence on the car with equanimity. They might have wondered with burning curiosity why he was here, where he had lived, why he wasn't practising; but if he'd chosen to stay on Bennett's Island, that was his affair. Men had come to Bennett's Island for a variety of strange reasons in the past, and had gone without the Island's knowing any more about them than it did about Dennis Garland. And they liked Dennis. He was neither a talker nor a show-off, he didn't act as if he knew more than anybody else, and when he came down on the car in overalls and shirt-sleeves, with his old felt hat pushed back on his head and his pencil tucked over his ear, he was pleasant to meet.

After he had been on the job for a week, he came up one evening to have supper with Joanna and Owen. The smack had come that day, and although the men had helped to bail and crate five thousand pounds of lobsters, he had done a good share of it himself, and he showed his blistered palms with a certain humorous pride.

“Hey, good enough!” said Owen. “Marks of honest toil, huh? You're doin' all right, son. You were doin' all right with that bail net this afternoon, too.”

“I thought it was going to throw me, at first. But there's one thing I'm really proud of.” He looked at his fingers and wiggled them. “No lobster's pinched me
yet
.”

“They will, chummy,” Owen assured him. “They will.” He tilted back his chair on its rear legs, scratched a match with his thumbnail, and lit his cigarette.

Dennis glanced across the table at Joanna. She was looking at his hands, her face locked in thought. “What's the matter?” he rallied her mildly. “
Should
I have been bitten by a lobster, for purposes of initiation?”

She smiled. “I was wondering if you men were ready for your dessert. Indian pudding.”

The front legs of Owen's chair came down with a crash. “Bang,” said Jamie with enthusiasm, and tried to rock his high chair.

“Why didn't you tell me there was dessert?” demanded Owen. “Lord, I wouldn't have been such a hog with the baked lobster!”

“I haven't had Indian pudding since I was a youngster,” said Dennis reminiscently.

Out in the kitchen Joanna spooned the golden brown aromatic pudding out of a baking dish, and thought of Dennis Garland's hands. She understood his pride, and she was proud for him, as if he had been one of her brothers. But at the same time she had remembered the skill that belonged to those hands, the training they had received, the work they had done. Somehow the waste seemed terribly wrong; and yet he was happy, he looked calm and well-satisfied with his day's work. Involuntarily she shook her head, and carried in the dessert and the coffee.

Owen intended to play poker with Sigurd that evening. A couple of men were coming over from Brigport to join the game, and it was going to be a good one, Owen said. With the spring crawl everybody had been making money hand over fist, and the Brigport men were known as lucky fishermen.

“We'll see if Bennett's can't take their money away from them,” said Owen complacently. Joanna looked at Dennis and shrugged. She hated gambling, but she never worried about it where Owen was concerned, especially when he wasn't drinking now.

“Dennis, why don't you ever sit in?” Owen asked suddenly. “Ever play poker?”

“Sure, but I can't hope to keep up with you fishermen. Poker's too expensive for me.”

“You ought to have enough in your pockets. Tonight, anyway, when the smack's just been and gone.”

Dennis lifted an eyebrow. “What's that to me?” he asked pleasantly. “I'm not in the business—I just look out for things for Sigurd.”

Owen folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. “You mean to tell me that son of a gun took the—” His voice rose mightily. “Listen, you're supposed to get three cents a pound—the man on the car gets it.
For himself
. You ain't workin' for Sig now, you're buyin' lobsters for Richards. Sig's out of it.” He pushed back his chair and stood up, towering over the table. Jamie looked up at him with fascinated blue eyes, Dennis with mildly startled amusement.

“The dirty crook! I'm goin' down there now and tell him what he is.” Knocking his chair out of the way, Owen went for his jacket.

“Listen, Owen,
I
don't want the three cents,” Dennis protested. “It's enough for me just to have something to do—”

“Oh, my God!” Owen said savagely. “It's yours. Why should Sig have it? Of all the two-bit racketeering square-heads—what are
you
laughing at?” He glared at Joanna. “You think it's funny? Your own brother-in-law pullin' a fast one like that?”

“No, it's not that.” But she couldn't help laughing. “It's just—well, because it's Sigurd, I guess. He was always crazy. . . . Like bringing the mine in, when he didn't know whether it would explode or not. He was so
proud
.” She plucked Jamie out of his high chair, and he put his hands on her cheeks, looking for the dimple. “And now he probably thinks he's been very clever, he's probably been patting himself on the back and telling Leonie what a remarkable fellow he is.”

Dennis was smiling too. “But if you told him he was dishonest, he wouldn't understand why you were so wrought-up about it. And he wouldn't be at all resentful about being caught.”

“You two,” muttered Owen. But his first fire of righteous wrath was dying out. He knew Sigurd of old. He took out his cigarettes, “But I'll tell the low-life beggar. The three cents is yours. And that Leonie!” He gave them a sidewise look, his black eyes glinting in the lamplight. “She ain't your type, Dennis, most likely, but she's got an awful snug waist for a man to get his arm around. And if she thinks Sig is so remarkable, she ought to be put wise.”

“I didn't think she was
your
type, Owen,” said Joanna.

“Well, she ain't
rightly
my type,” he conceded in the deliberate drawl that meant he was in fine fettle. “But beggars can't be choosers, and there ain't much choice around here.”

“Considering that she's Sigurd's housekeeper, she behaves like a pillar of virtue,” said Dennis. “Don't tell me you ever got close enough to learn how snug her waist was!”

“The last time I was down there,” said Owen, “I not only had my arm around her waist, I—” He broke off to grin at them.” ‘Course, she'd been havin' a little toddy—and Sig was snorin' on the couch. But she's a good woman, you can believe that. She'd only let me go just so far. The first time I tried it, she booted me out. The second time—oh, what's the sense of givin' away the secret of my technique?”

He reached over to rumple Jamie's silky yellow hair with a big brown hand, pinched Joanna's cheek ungently, and went out.

“Exit the hero, whistling,” murmured Dennis.

“He's pretty impossible when he gets on the subject of women,” said Joanna. “but I can stand anything as long as he's not drinking. Well, I have to get this boy to bed.” She ran her hand lightly over Jamie's head, smoothing down the devastation Owen had left. “It's funny, but for a long time it felt like a baby's head. Now it's a boy's head, and he's only a baby when he's sleepy.” She glanced almost shyly at Dennis, who sat back in his chair, smoking his pipe. “I love watching him grow, and yet sometimes—”

“You think he's growing too fast.”

“Yes. I want him to love the Island, and to live here if
he
wants to. But it's not an easy place for children to grow up in.”

“I shouldn't worry about him,” Dennis said peacefully. “He has his father's eyes and his mother's chin.”

She began to unlace Jamie's shoes. “Thank you for having so much faith in the eyes and chin. I wish you could meet Ellen. She's twelve, and tall for her age, slim and almost blonde. She goes into silences so much like Nils' silences that she could be his own daughter. She'll be here when school's out.” Suddenly she knew she didn't dread the summer as she had thought. Even without Nils it would be bearable, as this spring had been bearable.

He stayed until she had Jamie in bed and the dishes washed. When he left, she walked with him to the end of the windbreak. The April night was still and cold; the Island lay in unreal clarity under the moon. The rooftops looked as if they were covered with snow, the trees stood in painted silence against the steel blue sky. Over Brigport a row of tiny white clouds lay motionless. Occasionally there was a flash of moving silver as the water curled lazily over the harbor ledges; but the movement was the exception rather than the rule.