The Ebbing Tide (18 page)

He stopped, and leaned over to fuss with his boots. Joanna knew what he had almost said.
Lonesome without the dog
.

“Who's lonesome?” demanded Gram from the sitting-room doorway. Tiny and erect, without even a cane to help her, she marched into the kitchen in her starched black and white print. She looked at all three of them in turn from her sunken but still fiery gray eyes. “Nora, stand up straight. Matthew, them your ashes on the floor? Must be. Man hadn't ought to smoke a pipe if he don't know how to manage it. . . . Hello, Joanna.”

“Hello, Mrs. Fennell.” Joanna smiled at the small tyrant, feeling like a hypocrite.

“I want to know who's lonesome,” announced Gram. She sat down in a straight chair, her back as stiff as the chairback. Nora's hand slowed on the egg beater. Matthew, sweeping his ashes onto the dustpan, didn't look up, and Joanna hurried into the imperceptible pause. It didn't do to mention the dog.

“I get lonesome, Mrs. Fennell,” she said. “With Nils gone.”

“But you've got the boy.” Gram's beaked nose quivered at the tip and her mouth set hard. “You got the boy and the girl too. You know a woman's duty on this earth. Take Nora, now.” Joanna looked remorsefully at Nora, whose head was bent lower than ever, one wing of hair sliding past her cheek and hiding her face. “Say Matthew got drowned today—what'd Nora have left? What's Matthew got, so's he can be satisfied he's leavin' kin behind? Nothin' but the back of her hand!”

“Gram,” said Matthew with his customary patience.

“Ask her why she don't have a baby, a big healthy girl like her! Moanin' around about a
dog
. . . . It ain't natural.”

Joanna stood up. “I guess it's time for me to be starting dinner.”

“I'll walk down to the gate with you.” Nora turned quickly from her work and went to the door, waiting there with defiance in her pose.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Fennell,” Joanna said.

“Good-bye,” Gram said acidly, and looked with open appraisal at Joanna's figure in the fitted percale print and cardigan sweater. With the door shut safely behind them, Joanna turned to Nora, laughter welling up in her dark eyes.

“Nora, does she think I'm going to have another one?”

“She's got a complex,” said Nora. She looked around at the field and at the newly leaved birches against the rim of the woods with her eyes narrowed and her forehead creased as if her head ached. “Where's Jamie?”

“He probably was bored, and started for home.” Joanna nodded down toward her own house; often she and Jamie had come up diagonally across the open ground instead of coming up by the lane. “He'll be soaked to the knees, it's so wet in there. But it won't hurt him.”

The field had a shimmer of green among the clumps of dead, brownish-yellow grasses, the strawberry plants showed along the path, tiny white petals against green leaves. There was sunshine, and a fresh soft breeze blowing from the west, where the mainland was a violet line between blue sea and sky. Impossible not to walk lightly; but not impossible for Nora, who walked with her head bent, and her lower lip bitten in.

“Nora, how long since you've been to the mainland?” Joanna said suddenly. “I think it would do you good. You need movies, and something new to wear, and some meals you haven't cooked yourself—”

“I need more than that,” Nora muttered. “I need—” She stopped short. Her eyes, when she faced Joanna, were wide now, and filled with a sort of liquid desperation, like a trapped animal's. “Joanna, why do you think Matthew didn't get out early this morning?”

“I don't know,” said Joanna. Her heart was beating fast, with the urgency of the other girl's terror.

“Because I was sick, and I didn't want Gram to know. I was miserably sick, Joanna! Matthew was running up and down stairs, waiting on me, and I made him promise he'd tell her I had a sore throat or a bad headache, or something—”

“Sick?” said Joanna slowly. Nora nodded. She looked sick enough now.

“I'm going to have a baby, I think. And I don't know what I'm going to do.” She put her hand out and gripped the top of the gate, her knuckles were marble-white through the taut flesh.

“Why—you'll have it, I should think,” Joanna said. “Nora, it isn't so terrible. You've probably heard lots of stories, and been scared silly by them—but most of them weren't true.”

“It's not the pain I'm scared of,” Nora spoke with difficulty. “I could stand any amount of pain. It's—” Her cheeks flooded with angry color, the desperation in her eyes turned to fire. “I
won't
have it! I promised myself I'd never have a baby when Gram was alive, and I won't! It wouldn't be my baby; it'd be hers, because she's thrown nothing else at me since the day I married Matthew!”

Joanna watched her and listened in compassionate silence. A few years ago she would have tried to talk Nora down, she would have argued with fierce ardor, trying by sheer overwhelming will-power to
make
her think straight. But she was humbler now, and more pitying; and she knew that all the determination in the world couldn't change Nora. The years of the old lady's domination had set up such an unreasoning obsession in the girl that nothing could break it down, except Nora herself.

“Nora, think of Matthew and not of Gram,” she said finally, because she must say something.

“I'm going to think of
me!
” said Nora fiercely. “Gram's always come first. It was always what
Gram
wanted. Well, this is one thing that Gram wants that she isn't going to
get!
”

There was nothing to say, even while she was fighting back her dismay. “Be careful.” That was all.

“Oh, yes, I'll be careful!” Nora was smiling now and it wasn't a nice smile. “But I guess I'll be taking that trip to the mainland, the way you said. Maybe I'll go, in a day or two.”

“Come and see me before you go,” said Joanna, in one last effort.

Nora's smile was crafty. It chilled Joanna. “Maybe I won't have time. So long, Jo!” Almost blithely, she started back to the house. Joanna shut the gate quietly behind her. For a moment, as she walked along the lane, she was almost blinded and deafened by her dismay. If ever there was disaster in the air, it hung around Nora Fennell in an unmistakable aura. At the thought of the girl's probable aim when she went ashore, Joanna winced. No reputable doctor would do as she asked; but from Nils Joanna knew there were plenty—not doctors—who were making a profitable business out of the war, since Limerock was swarming with hundreds of new people, servicemen and the women who followed, inevitably, in their wake. And when Nora discovered how wrong she was, and how completely a fool, it would probably be too late.

If only Nils were coming home to dinner, in from a day's hauling. There was nothing he could do, but she needed his sanity and his composed outlook. Thinking of Nils took her mind off Nora, and the day came back to her again, the essence of the Island spring that was composed of sun-warm spruce, ripening bay, the damp spongy soil and growing grass under her feet, the ineffable, tenuous sweetness of the wild pear tree by the clubhouse, and the west wind. She breathed deeply of its cleanliness, and everywhere she looked there was more cleanliness, the stark, geometric beauty of firs piercing the sky, sunlight on her own steeply gabled roof, the vibrant whiteness of a gull sweeping close over her head, and the neat black hood of a chickadee in an alder.

Without complacency, but with a heart-shaking intensity, she realized her own good fortune, and she walked home with thanksgiving in her mind; thanksgiving blended with a yearning compassion for Nora.

W
HEN SHE CAME INTO THE YARD
she was so sure that Dick would come bounding across to meet her that the certainty almost evoked him before her, wide mouth, smiling eyes, ears lifting as he ran. So the emptiness was the more complete for his absence, and Jamie's.

“Jamie,” she said. She didn't raise her voice, yet it seemed to echo in the sunlit silence. At the same instant the mother-animal­instinct told her that the yard was empty. When she said his name again, there was an undercurrent of fear in it, and she set her lips tightly together. He could not be far away, and Dick was with him. She went toward the barn, saying to herself,
Don't hurry, he'll be at the brook with the ducks. Don't hurry
. But her feet wouldn't obey the cool logical message from her brain, they were responding to the quick terror that had sprung up in her from that feeling of emptiness. It was as if Jamie had never been. One moment he was sitting on the bottom step up at Fennell's, in the next moment he was gone.

He wasn't at the brook behind the barn, and neither was the dog. She wanted to whistle for Dick, but her mouth was too dry. She stared at the alder swamp, where the thicket of smooth gray­barked branches was taking on a warm violet sheen, and the green-gold tassels were beginning to form. There was no sound. Even the birds seemed to have gone. A little breeze sprang up from nowhere and ruffled the blossoms of the wild pear that leaned over the brook, rippling their reflection into nothingness. The ducks weren't there.

Suddenly a crow called out from the dark belt of spruces beyond the alders, and other crows took up the warning until the air was suddenly shattered by their voices. There was no more stillness. She felt a jolt of excitement in her chest. Crows always shrieked like that when an alien element came into their territory; it meant Jamie and Dick could be wandering out toward the Bennett meadow.

She crossed the brook and ran along the path among the alders. There was nothing to fear if he had gone along here.
If
he had gone along here. . . . She reached the spruces, and there was no sign of dog or child in the clear, cold brown shadow. The crows had quieted again, the silence settled down around Joanna like a heavy and tangible thing. She reached the Bennett meadow. It stretched before her, a sea of golden grass that rippled faintly and noiselessly in a little wind from the sea. It was an immensity of sunlit space; it would be like walking around the world for Jamie's not-quite-two-year-old legs. The dark wall of woods ringed it until it came out at Goose Cove. Again there was the jolt in her chest, sickening this time. But he couldn't have reached the shore in such a little while. Unless—her mind circled frantically. Unless he'd gone up into the woods behind the Fennell house, those dark, ancient, deep woods that walled the meadow.

But he hadn't wanted to leave the yard this morning; and he was so stubborn that she couldn't rid herself of the idea that he'd started home under his own power. She ran back along the path through the alder swamp and came to the barnyard again. From the yard he might have gone to the shore—she'd taken him sometimes to meet Owen when he came in from hauling. She tried to think casually;
He'll be playing around in somebody's skiff, that's what he loves
.

Thea came out as she went by the house. “Where you goin' in such a pucker?” she demanded.

Joanna didn't look at her. “Jamie's gone,” she said, and kept on. She heard Thea's heels clattering down the steps.

It was a year before she reached the harbor beach, below the old wharf. She knew she should have been prepared for its emptiness, the high tide brimming blue-green with only a narrow border of white and lavender and gray beach rocks between the water's edge and the path, a few skiffs jostling against a dory like puppies against an old dog. Nothing else. She stood staring, not knowing which way to turn next.

But the wharf was behind her.
Please not the wharf
, she said steadily inside herself. That was one thing Nils had mentioned often, because when he was Jamie's age he was always running away to the wharf. Once he'd fallen overboard, but there was a boat at the car, and he'd been fished out and sent home with a sound slap across his bottom. But there were no boats at the wharf this morning, there was no sign of life anywhere. The Island might have been deserted; it lay still, unstirring, in the full flood of May sunshine.

“Mrs. Sorensen,” said Dennis Garland's voice. “What is it?”

She turned then, and saw him standing on the wharf just above her, and remembered him with a great surge of relief. If he had been around the wharf all morning, he would have seen Jamie.

“I've lost Jamie,” she said to him quite simply, looking up. “Have you seen him?”

He was tall against the sky. “No, I haven't, but I'll look for him.”

“I don't think he's gone too far.” She managed a creditable smile, but she knew his trained gray eyes could see beyond the smile and sense her growing panic. She framed her words carefully.

“We were up at the Fennells'. He and Dick stayed outside—they always do. When I came out they were gone, and I thought he'd got mad and started home. He didn't want to go up there with me in the first place. But when I got home he wasn't there.” Her mouth wanted to tremble. She tightened her jaw. “I think he might have gone up behind the Fennells', there's an old path up through the woods—”

“We'll find him,” Dennis said. He jumped down onto the beach. “Do you want me to start up there, behind the Fennells'?”

Thea and Leonie came hurrying toward them. Joanna said, “Maybe they'd look up there, if you'd go through the Fennells' field into Barque Cove. I've taken him that way along the West Side.”

His eyes said,
Don't give in
. “Good. I'll go now. Matthew hasn't gone out yet—I'll put him to work too.”

“I'll go back through the swamp,” she said. “I only ran through there before. But this morning he was going toward the swamp when I called him.” Why hadn't she remembered that before? She could feel her face grow cold as it whitened. “There are holes—deep ones—”

“Don't forget, Dick's with him,” Dennis reminded her. “Well, let's start.” His quiet composure braced her, and she felt strength come back into her legs. They turned toward Thea and Leonie. Thea was puffing, Leonie stern with anxiety.