The Ebbing Tide (2 page)

When she went out Jamie was coming across the barnyard, lifting his small rubber boots with deliberation.

“On the double!” said his father, and Jamie hurried, his somber face suddenly transfigured with deliberation.

“See the boat?” he demanded.

“Not today, Tyke,” Nils said cheerfully. “We're going to build some pots.”

That was almost as good as seeing the Coast Guard boat. These departures were never hard on Jamie; almost his first words had been “Bye, Papa!” and he accepted everything as a matter of course, and had a fanatic adoration for the Coast Guard boat and its crew. But building pots was fun, and he could have a hammer to pound with. He reached up for his father's hand.

They went around the corner of the house that Nils' grandfather had built, neat, white, steep-gabled, and passed by more lilac bushes. These were white lilacs out here at the front door. Then they came out past the end of the spruce windbreak Nils' grandfather had planted after the house was finished, and the northwest wind blowing up from the harbor tried to take their breaths away.

The field was a tawny brown now, but in a few weeks the path would be showing green, and the grass would be growing tall around the well. The harbor was a bright, eye-hurting blue overlaid with shifting silver this afternoon, the boats rolled at their moorings, and a little edge of surf chuckled and tossed at the base of the red rocks that walled the harbor's curve.

Beyond the long island of Brigport, a mile to the north, the sky gleamed like a thin, polished shell of pale turquoise with a mysterious light behind it. It was one of the days when the Maine coast shone like a jewel.

The wind was a knife, but it was the wind that had brought this day. Joanna refused to lower her head to it as they walked down to Nils' fish house.

It was warm in the fish house, with the sun streaming in from the long low windows over the bench, and a fire of driftwood and lath ends dozing along in the oil-drum stove. The sound of the water muttering under the little wharf and surging up over the pebbled beach so nearby added to the snugness. The war seemed to exist only in another world, when Joanna could watch Nils working at the bench. He had spent most of his ten days building pots to add to her brother Owen's string. Owen fished his own gear, to which Nils' pots had been added, and the income from those traps belonged to Joanna.

It was always a pleasure to watch Nils work, even if he didn't talk. He moved with such smooth, unwasted energy, always at the same competent pace.

“I'm glad Owen hasn't got in from hauling yet,” she murmured peacefully. “He'd be in here slatting around . . . and this is so nice. Nils, when it's like this I almost feel as if the war might be over tomorrow . . . it seems as if it can't go on much longer.”

“I'm afraid it's going on for a lot longer than most people think.” He was building bottoms this afternoon; he took three blows with his hammer to drive a nail in the end of a lath. Jamie, over in the corner, was having a deliriously wonderful time with a pile of red and white buoys and an old warp. “We'll invade the continent any time, and I don't think we'll breeze right in big as Billy-be­damned. . . . Then there's Japan to lick.”

“You don't have to be so realistic when I'm having a nice little daydream, do you?” She went over to the bench and stood beside him.

His mouth twitched a little, but he didn't look at her. He set another nail in place, and lifted the hammer. Then he laid it down on the bench, and looked at Joanna.

“What is it?” she asked calmly enough, but her heart had begun a slow, hard pumping. It was the impact of his eyes, as tangible as if he'd put his hand on her shoulder and gripped it hard.

“Joanna, I've been putting this off too long,” he said simply." But the ten days are up, day after tomorrow, and it's only fair to you to tell you now.”

“Nils, I wish you'd tell me quickly.” Her voice was low as his. Jamie pawed happily among the buoys.

“When I go back this time, it's for keeps, Joanna. I go overseas.”

She wondered in that first stunned moment why she hadn't guessed. It seemed as if she should have; how could she ever have been so confident and so happy? Now when she looked back, everything pointed to the truth. But she hadn't known, and so it had to hit her now, with this dreadful, shocking
suddenness
.

For an instant the fish house was unbearably hot, and the sound of the water and the wind outside grew into a roar that deafened her ears. Through that instant her eyes didn't shift away from Nils', and then everything moved by degrees back to normal again. Everything but herself, but that didn't matter as long as she didn't show it in her face. She took in a breath, carefully and experimentally, and let it out again.

“Well,” she said. “I wasn't expecting that, I guess. But I don't know why not.”

“I didn't expect it,” he said soberly. “But then there's no reason why they should keep me here, if they've got more use for me in the Pacific.”

“How long will it be, Nils?”

“I don't know. Nobody knows.” He picked up the hammer again.

Her hand reached out and covered his, and then the world that was the Island—and would continue to be the Island, no matter what countries fell—broke loudly in upon them. A boat was roaring into the harbor, wide open; that would be Owen in the
White Lady
, back from hauling at last. Jamie dropped a buoy on his foot and burst into a howl of rage and pain.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
was just like any morning when Nils was home. He got up quietly before sunrise to build the fire and make the coffee. Jamie still slept soundly in his crib in the corner of the room that had belonged to Nils' grandparents, but the dog, a benign blend of collie and shepherd, crawled out from under the bed when Nils got up, and went downstairs with him. Joanna lay in bed listening to the faint sounds below. Nils had thought she was asleep, and she hadn't moved when he kissed her cheek. Now that he was out of the room she could lie there in the grayness just before sunrise and stare at the ceiling as she had stared up through the dark for so much of the night.

She listened with an almost aching intensity, yet without consciously thinking that it would be a long time before she heard those early morning sounds again; the back door opening to let Dick out, and shutting again; the faint rattle of a stove lid; the distant, tinny clatter of the dipper against a pail as he took out water to wash in. Then the sky was paling over the black frieze of spruces outside her windows, and then the pallor was flushed with rose-gold. She slid out from under the quilts, her feet feeling for her slippers, her hand reaching for her dark-red flannel robe. Though it was cold in the room she stopped before the massive, old-fashioned dresser and brushed her dark hair quickly.

When she opened the door at the foot of the stairs she smelled coffee. She could look through the dining room into the kitchen, and see Nils making toast. He turned his head and smiled at her.

“Hi. Come and get it while it's hot.”

“It smells like heaven,” she said. She went past him to the sink and thought how much simpler and easier it would be if she could stop and put her arms around his neck and say, “Nils, hold me tight, because I'm scared.”

But he'd look at her in amazement if she did. She'd never hugged him before breakfast, she couldn't start now. . . . She splashed icy water on her face and buried it in a towel. Then, together, she and Nils set the table in the dining room. In the Bennett homestead, where she'd grown up, the kitchen was the core of the house, and all meals were eaten there. But in this Sorensen house, the kitchen was barely big enough to work in. Nils' grandmother had been a little woman, no big-boned, long-legged creature like Joanna.

The first cup of coffee had become a ritual in their married life. He might have his bacon and eggs, or beans, or fish hash, with her brother when Owen came down—or
in
, if he'd been on one of his all-night poker games over at Brigport. And then she'd be busy with the children, and the day would be on its way. But this first cup of coffee, drunk in silent comradeship while the rest of the house slept, symbolized their life together.

Owen was stirring around upstairs. Their little interlude of quiet was at an end, and there was no telling when they would be alone again today. Tonight, yes; but she didn't want to wait for the dark. She wanted their eyes to meet with no veil between them, she wanted to reach out to him from her own need and have him reach out to her for a similar urgency. Not the hungers of their bodies would drive them, but their common dread of what lay before them, their fear of the unknown. . . .

He caught her gaze across the table. “What are you thinking?” he said, smiling faintly.

Thinking that I want you to need me
, she answered, but it was a silent answer. Aloud, she said, “Owen's coming. He was out till two this morning, so I expect he'll be ugly. I wish he wouldn't drink so much.”

“Owen will always drink, and more so now that there's a war on that he can't get into,” said Nils. “Don't think that he's gotten over it—that his kid brothers were taken and he wasn't. Go easy on him, Jo.”

“I'm always easy on him,” she said bitterly. “Maybe if he thought I wouldn't cook for him, or wash his white shirts so he can impress his lady friends, he'd pull himself out of it. Some day he'll catch pneumonia and die
like that
.” She snapped her fingers.

Nils shook his head. “He won't die, Jo. People like Owen don't die.” He began to fill his pipe, his blue eyes tranquil and remote. Something caught at her breath and turned it to a quick stab of pain. No, Owen wouldn't die. People like Owen didn't die because they were safe here at home, safe to rot alone. But men like Nils went out to the Pacific and died in the surf off tiny islands that suddenly became tremendous and bloody names. . . . She had been through all this with her two younger brothers, looking for their letters, trying not to think what it might mean when no letter came, listening to news dispatches, studying maps, and then re-reading the letters in an attempt to discover something tangible from their careful vagueness.

Now Nils would be added to the others. . . . Her desire to touch him, to cling to his squarish, strong hands, as they filled his pipe, grew so strong in her that she got up hastily from the table.

“I'll dress,” she said, “and then get breakfast.”

She dressed in the cold bedroom, with Jamie still sleeping in his crib. She looked out of the windows while she put on her clothes. After the crisp, boisterous wind of yesterday the day was calm, almost silkenly so. Over the harbor the sky was a pale, luminous blue, and the harbor lay below it, a placid shimmer of reflections. Already Sigurd Sorensen and Matthew Fennell had gone to haul. The
White Lady
remained at her mooring, and the
Donna
, Nils' boat. The
White Lady
would go out day after day, in kinship with the sea and the wind and the gulls, but the
Donna
would stay behind, on her mooring, until Nils came home again.

The
Donna
had been left once before, but her skipper had put her on the bank. He'd promised to come back, but he had died before he could fulfill the promise.

“You'll never go on the bank, I promise you that,” Joanna said soundlessly to the lovely, high-bowed boat that had been her father's and was now her husband's.

There was a man rowing across the harbor now in a peapod, the oars stirring the still water into ripples of pale gold. The same pale gold gilded the oar-blades and the sides of the peapod, and invested the man himself with a touch of mysticism. He was edged with light. . . . Sometimes on mornings like this one, when each spruce across the harbor stood out separately and brightly green in the clear pale light, and the gulls floated high over the ledges to drop their crabs and sea-urchins, the emptiness of the harbor had an almost dreamlike quality for her, as if it couldn't be true that there were only four fishermen here now. Sometimes it seemed as if the others had gone to haul, and they'd all be back in the afternoon . . . but the absence of skiffs and peapods at the moorings gave the lie to that.

But when the war is over
, she promised herself,
they'll be back
.

Owen was going down the front stairs, and Jamie was stirring with little animal noises in his crib. She went back to him and picked him up. He was a warm, sleep-heavy bundle in blue flannel, who gave her a shiny, drowsy smile and hooked one arm firmly around her neck.

By noon, when Joanna brought Jamie in for his dinner, the twittering and chirping in the alder swamp had reached almost hysterical heights of gratitude for the flooding, windless sunshine. The day had a soft, evanescent beauty, the boats coming into the harbor moved without effort between glistening crystal wings and left liquid silver in their wakes; there was more crystal and silver—or was it pure, living light?—captured where the water swirled casually among the rocks.

From the kitchen window Joanna saw the
White Lady
come in. Owen was home early today. Usually the others were in by noon or soon after, but Owen, whose string was set farther from the Island than any other man's, didn't come in till mid-afternoon. Sigurd Sorensen, Nils' brother, came in first, because he bought the other men's hauls for a company in Limerock, and so he had to be on the car when the other men came in. Francis Seavey was in early because he hated lobstering, and had never done it in his life until his wife had made up her mind to it; Matthew Fennell was never late because he went to haul in the morning as soon as it was light enough to see a potbuoy. But Owen, who considered himself the only proper fisherman of the lot, was in with the rest today. Probably his headache was too much for him, she thought skeptically. She hadn't found out yet whether the festivity of the night before was a poker-and­drinking party, or simply a drinking party.