The Ebbing Tide (20 page)

“It ain't that much of a strawberry festival over there,” he said. “It's pure hell, most likely. We'll hear about it after awhile.” He moved uneasily about the house, as if it were too small for him, and she wondered if he would go looking for a drink; if anything could tempt him to backslide, this would be it. This helpless immobility, this waiting here, tormented by the belief he was letting his brothers down, that his manhood was at fault, that in this monumental struggle he was nothing.

But he hadn't got drunk after all, though there was enough reason for it. The news from the Normandy beaches grew progressively worse in the next few days. And the fog came. A warm fog which seeped insidiously into the house and turned all the woodwork whitely damp, and kept the clothes clammy. It was too mild to keep fires going, too damp without them. The wind stayed stubbornly to the eastward, and all day and all night it bore the moody bawl of the foghorn from Matinicus Rock.

Too much fog could ruin the wild strawberries, and this year more than in the past few years it looked as if there would be an exceptionally good crop. There was no chance to go to haul, the fog hung so smotheringly thick it was hardly possible to see the bow of a boat from her wheel. The price of lobsters was climbing all the time, the traps were probably full—and the prospect was certainly a tantalizing one.

Tempers were short. Viciously short. Because of the shortage of trap stuff, some of the men didn't have any extra laths laid by, so they couldn't put in their spare time building new gear. There was nothing to do but stick by the radio, listening, cursing, and finally falling into morose silences. There was a noticeable lack of complaint about the shortage of cigarettes, the O.P.A., and Roosevelt during that week when the whole world, and Bennett's Island were thinking about the coast of France.

Joanna was grateful for her garden and for the letters from Nils. They were so calm, so matter-of-fact, that they took away some of the horror that she knew could grow upon her like an obscene fungus if she read all the stories about the Pacific and brooded upon them. She worked in the garden, fog or not, and at last she was rewarded. The wind shifted to the west, the last fog blew over like a silvery veil across the sun, and she knelt in clear warm light, seeing the diamond sparkle on the grass all around her, and over against the house the lilac plumes nodded among their leaves. Rich, oriental, purple fragrance against New England's white clapboards.

Jamie would sleep for two hours and she had a sense of freedom as she thinned the delicate, pale-green cabbage plants. Owen would be in soon, but his dinner was ready on the back of the stove. She wondered what Dennis thought about D-Day. She'd hardly seen him to speak to, alone; whenever he'd come to the house in the past week Owen had been there and they'd sat and talked. When he'd first come to Bennett's, he hadn't wanted to talk about the war.

She was so closely aligned with the Island that she felt a personal sense of achievement whenever she looked at Dennis and saw the tangible evidence of change. Without smugness she knew she had a right to be proud. He had singled her out, he had told her more of himself than anyone else knew, there was a companionship between them that she considered rare and satisfying, and that she knew he valued. He had told her so. She was not naive enough to give their friendship the complete credit for his new health and serenity, but she knew that it had helped greatly. There were some things the Island couldn't do alone.

Footsteps fell on the grass. She looked up quickly, half-expecting it to be Dennis, and in the next second expecting Owen; but it was Thea. Joanna sighed, and leaned over the cabbages with renewed and quite fervent interest.

“Hello, hello!” Thea's angular shadow fell across her, Thea's voice bounced merrily against her eardrums. “Workin' hard improvin' your figure, I see!”

“Working hard improving the food situation,” Joanna said dryly, and sat back on her heels. “How are you?”

“Finest kind!” She jigged up and down, hands on her hips, her brief skirt waving around her knees, which were unpleasantly thin and unpleasantly bare. Joanna remembered Owen's comments on them, and her mouth quirked.

“I must say you look gay enough,” she murmured. “Make-up and everything. What's going on?”

“Oh, nothing! You know I always dress so's I'd be presentable anywhere.” She slid a supercilious glance at Joanna's open-necked blouse and smudged slacks. “Not that there's anywhere to go on Bennett's, but it's sort of good for the morale,
I
think.”

“Oh, yes,” said Joanna sagely.

“Well, I only run over to say hello. I have to be gettin' Franny's dinner on.” She giggled. “It's short lobsters—only I hadn't ought to say so in front of you—the Bennett's bein' so fussy about keepin' to the law.”

A small tinge of premonition shot through Joanna's mind. She felt herself growing wary.
Thea is a scheming bitch
, she thought calmly,
and she's like her Grampa Gunnar. She's on the prod today
.

“Don't worry, I won't tell,” she said pleasantly. “Besides, it wouldn't be the first time, would it? Anybody knows what lobster shells smell like, burning.”

Thea's eyes narrowed, their shiny blue darkened. “If everybody burned stuff, they'd never get caught, would they? That's what I said to my cousin this mornin' when we were talkin' on the phone—I went down to the store and called her up to see if she's heard anything from her boy in England.” She nodded confidentially at Joanna. “You know Signe, that lives in Pruitt's Harbor. She knows Charles, and all of them.”

Joanna's shoulders were tight and square under her blouse. But her fingers heaped earth about a tiny plant, patted it into a bulwark of strength for the fragile stem. “How is everybody in Pruitt's Harbor?”

“Seems like they're in an awful stew right now,” Thea went on. She was trying to be airy, but an inner excitement made her words jerky. “
Your
family, that is. I imagine your mother's just about sick over it, but of course Young Charles ain't really one of her boys, just a grandson—” Joanna sat back on her heels and looked up steadily at Thea's face, waiting. Thea's eyes were glistening. She seemed a little uncertain under the dark contemplative gaze. She moistened her lips.

“I thought you ought to know, and me bein' one of the family, by marriage—of course I wouldn't start claimin' I
wasn't
connected, the way some people might do, seein' as there's never been anything like this in the Sorensen family—”

Joanna stood up, with no impression of hurry. She was taller than Thea, she was erect and lean in slacks and shirt. Now she put her hands carefully into her pockets, before she could get at Thea's shoulders with them, and said mildly, “Whatever are you getting at, Thea? Can't you seem to say it, right out?”

That did it. A furious and ugly blush spread like wildfire over Thea's neck and face. Her voice lashed out shrilly, like a curling whip, or a snake's tongue. “If you want to know, Young Charles and some of his pals broke into the hardware store D-Day night and stole a whole lot of shotgun shells, and God knows what else, and the sheriff found the boxes right in Charles' wood-house!” She went on and on, a vicious noise in the quiet day. “They've been stealin' stuff right along, breakin' and enterin', and the sheriff's been layin' to catch ‘em. Well, now he's caught the little bastards, and he's likely to get ‘em all sent to Thomaston for a good long while!”

Joanna stood quietly, simply staring at Thea. The echoes of Thea's voice seemed to jangle hideously in her ears.

“Go on home, Thea,” she said at last. “You've been around to everyone with the story, and now you've told me, so your job is done. Go home.”

Thea's bravado was gone. She flounced around, switching her shoulders and her thin hips under the tight rayon skirt, but the flourish was weak. “Well, anyway,” she said loudly and vindictively, “your mother won't be goin' around lookin' like she thought she was so much of a lady, with her grandson in Thomaston State Prison!”

The last word was a gasp. Joanna, looking beyond her, saw Owen standing at the corner of the house, a silent but ominous figure against the white lilacs.

“Get home, Thea.” His voice was quiet, for Owen. His feet were set wide apart in rubber boots, his hands were in his pockets. His thick black eyebrows made a bar across his face. “Get home, before I wring your goddam neck.”

Thea took a step forward. “Scram,” said Owen. “Shove off. And don't ever set foot on this side of the windbreak again.”

“Nils is my own cousin—” she protested feebly, but when Owen took his hands out of his pockets she moved swiftly sidewise, and all but ran across the lawn and out of sight beyond the windbreak. They heard the back door slam. Joanna shrugged, and went toward the house. Owen came in behind her. He went directly to the sink and splashed water into the basin, clattering the dipper as if he wanted to hurl it through the window.

Joanna set the food on the table for his dinner. When she came back into the kitchen he was standing in the middle of the floor, his face black with thought. They looked silently at each other, and he exploded at last.

“Somebody's a damned liar!”

“We'll know the truth of it pretty soon,” Joanna said, over and above her own inner sickness. “Of course, everybody's got it to talk about now. Sit down and eat.”

He sat down mechanically. “Still . . . the kid was always wild. Hates school, just like I did.”

“I won't believe it's s o bad,” Joanna said stubbornly. But she felt tainted and shaking inside, as if Thea's malice had sprayed filth over her. The house threatened to suffocate her; she couldn't stand Owen's storming.

On an impulse she said, “Watch out for things, will you? I'll be back in a little while. Jamie's asleep.”

Owen nodded, blackly, and she escaped into clean space. She began to walk with no aim, her feet carried her swiftly through the leafy alder swamp and out toward the Bennett meadow, but she was hardly conscious of her direction.

She felt the same scalding, impotent wrath she'd always felt whenever a Bennett fell publicly from grace; a harmless misadventure of hers, at fifteen; Owen's behavior; Charles' marriage to Mateel, when he'd “got her into trouble”. . . Whatever one of them had done exposed not only that one, but all the others, to gloating eyes like Thea's, or to the indignant pity of those who defended them. And now Young Charles had been arrested for burglary, and no one had ever been arrested in the Bennett family. As Thea had said, jibing, the Bennetts had always kept to the law.

If they'd all stayed on the Island where they'd belonged, this wouldn't have happened. It was almost a relief to feel angry because Charles had moved his family away to make more money. She was angry with Mateel, too, for having so many children that she didn't have time to spend on Young Charles; angry because her older brothers hadn't taken Young Charles on the seiner, the
Four Brothers
, last year when he'd wanted to go with them.

But not even anger could drive away the reality. Suppose he
had
been breaking and entering for a long time; suppose they
did
send him to Thomaston prison for several years. Did they really put sixteen­year-old boys in the State Prison?

There was no way to escape this, and she walked across the Bennett meadow, up toward the woods, and the cemetery, without any knowledge of the usual comfort the Island could give her. The war was here, suddenly, in this sea of sunlit grass, under this blue Maine sky, where the gulls had always scissored the air with their wings. The war was responsible for what Young Charles had done; it had caused death, destruction, disease, madness, every crime under the sun; and it had taken Nils away from her. She wanted Nils so terribly that when she reached the edge of the woods, and stood in its shadow, she gave herself up for a moment to the intensity of her longing.

And then, with tears making a shimmer of light in her eyes, she walked up through the blooming orchard to the cemetery.

A
FAINT, DAMP COOLNESS
that smelled of grass and wild roses touched her moist forehead. The birds were singing. By the time she had entered the shadow of the big spruces that fringed the woods, the clear sun-washed air around the treetops was cut into a lace-like pattern of sounds. Joanna's senses quickened, in spite of her preoccupation, her ears and nostrils were as sensitive as an animal's so that she heard and smelled these things without thinking consciously of them.

In the orchard there was the heavy drone of the bees around the apple blossoms, and sunlight topping the little trees with silver; her head brushed the lower branches and petals began falling, floating into the deep cool grass around the gnarled trunks. When she looked up she saw the sky, shining with a burnished intensity after the week of fog, blue between the masses of pink and white. A white-throat sparrow sang out suddenly; the first this year, and the three steady, sweet, fluting notes half-stabbed Joanna.

The cemetery lay at the end of the orchard, so that the farthest apple trees leaned over the fence and scattered their petals on the grassy graves. The flowers set out on Decoration Day were still bright. She had bordered Alec's grave with the pansies Ellen had sent out—bought with Ellen's own money for the father who had never seen her. Their brilliant, velvety little heads trembled in the faint breeze. But the apple blossoms were over them all, a canopy of fragrance.

She walked around the corner of the little cemetery and up onto a little rise, where an old fence roamed out of the woods and joined the cemetery wall. There was a stile over the fence and she sat down on it. Here was silence, sunshine, sweetness, and one tall birch, that she had known for a good many years. She always thought of it as being golden with autumn against the spruces, but today it looked springlike in its young green.