The Ebbing Tide (21 page)

She closed her eyes and sat without moving. There was no sound but the rustling of leaves, the far-away crying of gulls out on Goose Cove Ledge, the sibilant rush of a cuckoo's wings. She closed her eyes and waited for peace to come to her.

She felt, rather than knew, that someone else was there. When she opened her eyes she saw without surprise that Dennis Garland was standing at the edge of the woods where they marched up from Goose Cove. She thought,
He always comes
, and then felt her first astonishment. He did always come, didn't he?

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I've disturbed you.”

“No, you haven't.” She smiled faintly at him. “I've just been listening to the birds. This is a wonderful place for them.”

“So I've discovered.” He came toward her, running a hand through his fairish hair. The slanting light struck through the branches, highlighting his strong-bridged nose and gaunt cheekbones. He looked austere, but she was used to that now, knowing how he changed when he smiled.

He smiled now, as he sat on the other side of the stile and took out his pipe. “Every day I discover something more enchanting about the Island. I don't know if you like that word, but I do. The Island
does
enchant.”

“I know. Look what it's done to me all these years!”

“You looked enchanted when I came along. The sun on your face, and your eyes closed, your head lifted as if you were invoking some secret god.”

She loved the way he talked. It took her out of herself, it was balm on the sore Young Charles had made. Already the tension was easing in her chest. She found herself watching his face, the shifting sparkles of light in his eyes, the way his thinly cut mouth said words in that easy voice, and she was suddenly embarrassed because she was staring. She looked down at his hands as he filled the pipe. His hands were always clean, for all that he worked on the car, and the nails were cut short, they weren't bruised or broken. A surgeon would have to keep his hands immaculately clean. His hands were his whole work, his whole life.

He went on talking, describing a bird he'd seen, while she watched his hands. There were tiny, short gold hairs on the backs of them, and he wore a wristwatch. She'd always wanted to give Nils a watch, but he could tell time by the sun; and now that he was in the service, he'd bought himself a watch. The thoughts slipped idly through her head, without pain, and it came to her suddenly that she was not miserable any more. It was as if watching those square­tipped, strong fingers, the long, capable thumb, had steadied her as much as those strong fingers had steadied her when they gripped her arm the day Jamie was lost; and later on that day, when they had held her against his shoulder for silent comfort.

With an effort she pulled her gaze, and her mind, away from his hands. She looked out across the cemetery, and her eyes seemed heavy-lidded, as if relaxation had come too soon.

“That must have been a Maryland yellow-throat you saw,” she said. “A little black mask—yes, that's a yellow-throat.”

“He was a brazen little chap,” said Dennis. “He looked me over as thoroughly as I took stock of him.” He looked off across the cemetery. “You know, I have never known a cemetery that was so full of friendly peace as this one is. I don't wonder you come here often.”

“I've always loved it,” she answered. “Ever since I was a kid. It was a favorite hideaway.”

The smoke from his pipe rose upward in a thin turquoise column. “Sigurd tells me there are some unmarked graves here—shipwrecked sailors—”

“Over there, at the far side, where the apple blossoms have fallen on the grass.” She pointed, and turned to him, eager to tell him the story that had always seemed so romantic and sad. “The ship went ashore off Brig Ledge—it was a brig, so that's why it's Brig Ledge now—and my grandfather, and Nils' grandfather, and some of the other old-timers, saw it, but they couldn't do anything, they couldn't even launch a dory. It was horrible. Later these five bodies were washed ashore, and three of them were very young, hardly more than boys.”

He was listening, but a remoteness seemed to have passed over his face; she remembered then that he had seen hundreds of boys' bodies lying in the surf. The tragedy of these five wouldn't impress him. Her voice flattened.

“Well, anyway, they buried them. And that apple tree always has the best apples. When we were kids we thought it was some sort of gift from those boys to us.”

“It was a nice thought,” he said gently.

“Yes. We called them the Sailors' Apples.”

At once the words echoed in her head. She heard her own voice, shadowed with some unknown emotion, saying those words into the sunlit silence,
We call them the Sailors' Apples
. The words were repeated over and over again, with the persistence of lights flashing and dancing on the sea. A tremor ran through her and her skin felt chilled, and then warm.

With an effort she threw off the spell the words had cast and looked up. Dennis was watching her. The remoteness had gone, in its place was an absorption, as if he were studying every plane and contour of her face and throat. Red showed richly under the brown of her cheeks, and she must have made some movement, for suddenly awareness flashed into his eyes, as if his thoughts had come all at once into focus.

She stood up quickly. “I ran away from home. Jamie'll be waking up and roaring.” She spoke with an ease that hid the unreasonable quickening of her heartbeat. Now everything was going back to normal. That funny, frightening moment there on the stile was over, and Dennis was unfolding his long legs and standing up.

“I'm afraid I ran away too. Leonie'll be keeping dinner hot for me.”

They walked down through the alley of blossom that was the orchard, stopped to see where a cuckoo had gone, and turned down the damp cool path that led into the Bennett meadow. Conversation was desultory but pleasant. It was no different from all the other times they had met, and yet, in a distant, secret part of Joanna's mind she was remembering Dennis' face when she had looked up.
He was looking at my face the way I was looking at his hands
, she thought. And she had watched his hands because they fascinated her. The inevitable conclusion set her heart to beating again with a thick jolt, half­sickening.

His hands fascinate me because he's a surgeon, because they can do wonderful things
, she reasoned with herself.
But it's impossible for him to be
—her mind rebelled at using the word
fascinated
again, but it rebelled even more at saying that he might be in love with her. It was ridiculous.

They went through the alder swamp, Joanna walking ahead. He had sought her out in every way, he had made no secret of preferring her company, yet he was always the same, courteous, half-remote, never intruding.
It's because he knows what I am
, she thought,
what sort of woman I am . . . what sort of wife
. . . .

She looked almost with astonishment at her own back door, smelled the familiar strong sweetness of the lilacs, and remembered slowly Young Charles. She felt as if she had been in another country.

“D
OC
! D
ENNIS
!” The voice assailed them violently, ripping harshly through the mantle of silence in which they had walked. They both turned and saw Matthew Fennell running down from his house, plunging awkwardly in his rubber boots over the uneven ground. He ran like a man driven by demons.

“It must be Gram,” Joanna said her lips drying. “It's sure to be Gram.”

Dennis nodded his head curtly toward the running, stumbling man, “Come on,” he said, and started up to meet Matthew. From the back door Owen hailed her.

“What goes on?”

“Something's wrong up to Fennells',” she called back. “I'm going to see!”

“O.K.!” He stood on the doorstep for a moment longer, his hands on his hips, scowling in the brillance of the sunshine, and then she was running after Dennis, lightly, over the ground she had known all her life.

Still Dennis reached Matthew before she did. Matthew's tan had turned muddy, his forehead dripped sweat, and he breathed in long sobbing gasps. The sight of his urgency was shocking to Joanna. Dennis gripped him by both shoulders.

“Take it easy, man. Speak slowly. Now, what's happened?”

“Nora,” Matthew said hoarsely. “She's bleedin' to death, I think. Hurry, will ye?” He twisted away from Dennis, who still held one arm as they walked along.

“What happened?”

“She fell downstairs, and she—she—” He mopped sweat out of his eyes with a blind and hopeless gesture. “She was goin' to have a baby.”

Dennis glanced over his shoulder at Joanna. “You any good at this? I'll need help.”

“I can obey orders, if that's what you want,” she said crisply.

“
Good
.” He broke into an easy run, still keeping his grip on Matthew's arm, and Joanna ran with them. But something twisted inside of her. Nora hadn't gone to the mainland, after all. She'd taken things into her own hands. To Joanna, the big white house seemed hung with tragedy, as if death had already come into it. It had looked like that, the night Alec was drowned.

“How long since it happened,?” Dennis asked Matthew.

“It was around dinner time she did it, but she said it was all right, it hadn't hurt her or nothin'. And I believed her.” His face contorted. “Mebbe if I'd come for you then—”

“You can't be blamed!”

“I was sort of worried, but she kept on smilin'. . . . It wasn't till she collapsed that I see how bad it was. I come out on the porch and I saw you. Like it was meant to be.”

“Probably it was meant to be,” said Dennis. “Now get hold of yourself, man. You can't help Nora by collapsing yourself. She's young and she's healthy, she's got plenty of chances.”

They had reached the steps. Dennis had to help Matthew, the man seemed to be nerveless with terror. Gram awaited in the kitchen, looking smaller than ever, her eye-caverns immense.

“She's in there,” she said sternly, her forefinger stabbing at the doorway into the living room. “In my bed. A fine mess she's made, for all her foolishness.”

Joanna had a moment of pity to spare for the old lady, who had known in one brief instant both the realization of her hope for Matthew, and the cruel destruction of those hopes.

After that there was no time for pity. There was Nora, her eyes circled in blackness, her face so white it seemed already transparent, her chestnut hair dark and stringy with sweat around her forehead. She didn't speak, and her lips were pressed tightly together; lips so pale that it seemed as if they had been drained of blood. If Matthew was terrified, and Gram was gazing bleakly at ruin, Nora was something else. Whatever she had done to bring this on, she was paying for it now; her face was rigid, as if she were willing herself to show nothing.

Dennis did what he could with the materials at hand. For Joanna, it seemed as if the next few minutes were incredibly long; when she looked at the clock, and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed, she was amazed. The brilliant day outside, the ethereal light across the apple blossoms, the cuckoo's wings—they had all been relegated suddenly to the distant past. The present was made up of silent hurry and a man's voiceless fear; and it was the color of blood.

Gram stayed strictly out of the way. Perhaps, at last, her old legs were tottery. Matthew wandered around the rooms, his face twisting when he looked at Nora, and then lined with anxious hope when he looked at Dennis. Dennis gave him a quick smile sometimes, but he worked silently. Joanna found herself watching his hands again; they drew her as inexorably as a fine pianist's hands draw the listener who is lifted beyond himself by the music.

At last it was over, they could take a long breath, and some of the fear died out of Matthew's face. But Nora, lying in a clean bed whose sheets seemed no whiter than her skin, looked the same. She started at the ceiling, her eyes unmoving, her lips a taut line. Joanna and Dennis, who had gone out into the kitchen to wash up, and to set some coffee going, came back into the room and saw Matthew standing beside the bed. He glanced at them miserably.

“You sure she's all right? She won't speak to me.”

“Of course she's all right.” Dennis touched Matthew's shoulder briefly. “She doesn't feel any too good, that's all.”

He moved a chair beside the bed, and sat down. He had been deft and impersonal as he worked over Nora, his face drawn and almost mask-like in its absorption. Now he was smiling faintly, his eyes tired and very kind. He put his hand on Nora's forehead.

“Are you feeling better now, Nora?” he asked her gently, and she began to cry. Abundantly and without effort the tears welled out and ran from the outer corners of her eyes to the pillow. Her mouth was shaking and she stared up at Dennis with mute pleading. Matthew made a small agonized sound and started forward, but Joanna stopped him. Her lips shaped the word,
No
. In a moment now Nora would talk, and Matthew wasn't going to like what he heard. But it was his household, and it was time he set it in order.

“I want to know,” whispered Nora, “if I can still have a baby.”

“No reason why you can't have a dozen, if it's all right with Matthew. But you'd better stay away from the stairs.”

Matthew gave Joanna a watery smile, and she smiled back, but inwardly she was not sure what to think. Perhaps Nora was going to cover up as best she could; Joanna couldn't blame her for that. “I thought—” Nora swallowed hard. “I thought it was a judgment on me for not wanting the baby. I didn't, at first.”

“A great many girls feel that way at first. That wasn't any crime, Nora.”

“But you don't
know
why I didn't want it!” Her voice rose in faint, frantic protest. “I thought it would be Gram's baby, not mine! And I was going to do something, and not have it.”