The Ebbing Tide (29 page)

“Come and sit down,” said Joanna. “Have you met Miss Gibson face to face yet?”

“No, I've been admirin' from afar.” His black eyes were bold and bright on the girl's face, his white grin shameless.
Now, Owen
, Joanna cautioned him silently.
She's much too young for you. It'll be like killing a sitting duck
.

But Laurie wasn't flushing, or looking away uncertainly, as he meant her to do. Her eyes didn't move from his.

“How do you do?” she said pleasantly. “I know already which boat is yours. The White Lady. It's beautiful.”

“She's beautiful,” Owen corrected her.

“Oh, I'll learn. I know more about logging and raising potatoes than about boats.” She smiled at him and went on eating pie.

“Go and wash if you want a mug-up,” Joanna said to Owen. Her mouth twitched, and Owen lifted one eyebrow at her in a Mephistophelian threat before he went out into the kitchen.

The teacher stayed a while longer, playing with Jamie, talking with candid enjoyment to both Joanna and Owen. If she was conscious that Owen watched her, that his eyes held a gleaming devil, she was not at all disconcerted by it, and Joanna felt like chuckling. This would make rich material to write to Nils.

When the girl left, Owen went over to the windows, walking catlike in his stocking feet, and watched her cut across the field toward the lane that led to the Fennells'. She walked briskly and well, her head up.

“Well, Cap'n Owen?” Joanna said softly. “She didn't react, did she? Too bad Charles didn't let you pick out the teacher.”

“You're feelin' pretty perky, huh? Pretty chipper?” He glared down at her good-naturedly. “But don't start crowin' too soon, darlin' mine. I've met that kind before.”

“She's probably engaged to some nice boy in the service,” said Joanna. “She has his picture on the dresser, and she writes to him every night—”

“But she's down here on Bennett's Island, don't forget. And she's not sixty-five, she's about twenty-five.” Owen was still staring across the field, though she had gone out of sight by now. His voice dropped, he looked as if he were contemplating something utterly delectable. “She looks like a nice ripe berry. All ready to pick. Damn' enticin', if you ask me.”

After supper Ellen went out to the barnyard to give the orts to the ducks, and came in with her eyes glowing. “Bobby Merrill from Brigport's just gone up to Fennells. I know he's calling on Miss Gibson! I saw him going up the lane, and he's all slicked up with a white shirt on!”

Owen tilted back in his chair and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “Now that's what I call an enterprising boy,” said Joanna, without looking at Owen. “It's choppy out, too. And he came all the way over here to go courting. I think they'd make a nice pair.”

“Me, too,” said Ellen with heartfelt conviction. “Maybe if she had a boyfriend down here, she won't get homesick.”

“That's what your uncle thinks,” said Joanna. She got up from the table. “Why don't you two settle down and have a nice chat about Miss Gibson's welfare while I put Jamie to bed?”

She went upstairs, Jamie toiling ahead of her.
I feel so good
, she thought.
Maybe I haven't been laughing enough. I can write Nils a good letter tonight!
She bent swiftly, thankfully, and kissed the back of Jamie's neck.

Time slipped away; Jamie's birthday came and went, with a cake for which his grandmother sent the sugar from Pruitt's Harbor. Joanna had a party for him to which everybody came, and Jamie distinguished himself by hitting Charles' youngest on the head with his new dump-truck. There were gifts from everybody on the Island and his Sorensen and Bennett relatives on the mainland.

The weather held out. A hurricane was reported, and everyone got ready for it, but Maine escaped with nothing more than a gale which wasn't as bad as most of the gales which were simply reported as “strong winds.”

October had a dreaminess which no other month could have. The horizons were hidden in a melting lilac haze, the distant islands were painted against a tender sky, the gulls dreamed in the somnolent hush of noon. It was an exceptionally beautiful fall; the last fall that Joanna remembered like this was in the year when she married Alec. She found herself thinking sometimes of that fall. She would be walking along the curve of Schoolhouse Cove, while Jamie threw stones into the water and she would see a thicket of wild roses tumbling over the old sea wall, their hips a brilliant, burning red; and instantly she would be surrounded with an atmosphere that she had not sensed for years. That first fall with Alec had been touched with indefinable magic. Never, before or since, had there been an Island autumn like that one; and now, fourteen, fifteen years later, the magic could wrap itself around her again, as gently and tenuously as fog, and it filled her with vague alarms. She would hurry Jamie up over the beach and along the road through the marsh, leaving that unnatural nostalgia behind. She would start a letter to Nils as soon as she reached the house, setting his picture before her to strengthen her heart's image of him. Then the other feeling would be gone as if it had never existed, as if even Ellen were no bond with that distant past; as if Ellen were Nils' child as well as Jamie was.

It would go then for a while, until some morning in the first instant of waking, she would hear the sweet, stubborn “yank-yank” of the nuthatches in the spruces, and the “dee-dee-dee” of the chickadees in the alders, and she would remember helplessly how she'd listened to the little birds when she awoke before Alec, and his head lay heavily against her.

But in the crib across the room slept Jamie, with his flaxen bang and his eyes as blue as larkspur, and he was the fruit of a love that had come late, but richly; and Nils' heavy clothes still hung in the closet, so she could see them when she opened the door, she would even lay her cheek against the warm stuff of a wool plaid shirt and pretend that he'd be in from hauling in a little while.

She was not always unhappy except for these moments. The Island was too lovely, and there were good moments in every day. Thea didn't disturb her now, except when Dennis came up to the house for something, or when she met him in the road and was obliged to stop and talk, out of courtesy. Then she'd remember Thea, uneasily, and at the same time feel like cursing her, because Thea had cast a blight over her acquaintance with Dennis. She had to put her mind forcibly on whatever they discussed, she had to make her eyes meet his gray ones openly, and she had to will back the color that wanted to creep up into her cheeks. Her inner confusion on these occasions infuriated her and she blamed it all on Thea.... Almost all.

Sometimes, in spite of the fine case she'd built up against Thea, she would know doubt that spread through her self-righteous anger as insidiously as smoke. Perhaps the confusion had its roots within herself; perhaps the frankness had gone from their relationship at the time when they sat on the stile at the cemetery and she had surprised that look on his face. Perhaps—but she shifted quickly away from the blackberry blossoms above Barque Cove in the moonlight. She'd simply been tired, and lonesome for Nils that night.

No, it was Thea who was responsible for the lack of ease she felt when she talked with Dennis now; and she, Joanna, was an idiot if she heeded the blatherings of an idiot.

In late October, Nils wrote in one of his letters: “I know it's cold there. It doesn't change here. I'd like to see a no'theaster blowing down between the islands, and have to wear mittens, and come down into a cold kitchen in the morning and build up the fire.”

It was the nearest thing to homesickness he had ever expressed and Joanna, knowing him as she did, understood what other things he meant. He meant herself, and Jamie; he meant the house, the big spruces stirring blackly against the star-powdered sky, the frosty dawns when each twig and blade of grass shone silver in the first sunlight, the pure, sweet, icy water that came up from the mossy darkness of the well. Yes, she knew what Nils meant in that sparse paragraph. He was homesick. Even in peacetime, when he had sailed on a freighter before he married Joanna, his Scandinavian blood had rejected the warmth and lushness of those tropical islands.

But mostly this letter meant that he was homesick for Joanna.
I'm homesick for you too, Nils
, she said to him silently.

O
WEN'S COURTSHIP OF THE TEACHER PROGRESSED
at an incredibly slow pace. Joanna had long since stopped worrying about Laurie's susceptibility, and had come to admire the girl for her poise and common sense. There were two Brigport boys calling on her, when the weather permitted, and Owen had to take his turn. It was rather amazing that he kept on courting, since he was used to being the only one; he was fond of saying that where he set his pots, nobody else dared to follow. Now the Brigport boys were on his grounds, but he was taking it with remarkable equanimity.

He took Laurie for long walks on Saturdays and Sundays. Joanna saw them sometimes when she was picking cranberries. They were usually on the far side of Old Man's Cove, on a sunny slope, Laurie taking excellent potshots at buoys with Owen's. 22 while he sprawled on the grass beside her. He was apparently at a standstill, since Miss Gibson seemed to be more in love with his rifle than with him. But still he followed her, and whenever he came home with the black Bennett look on him, and stalked up to bed without speaking, Joanna had an amusing postscript for her letter to Nils.

Owen didn't go down to Sigurd's much these days. Francis Seavey went down several nights a week to play cribbage with Sig. Owen snorted at this.

“I guess Leonies satisfied with Franny, if she's still worryin' about her honor. He wouldn't know how to muckle on to her if she showed him how.”

“I suppose you don't go down there any more because Leonie's likely to hit you with something,” Joanna suggested.

“Oh, my God!” Owen looked at her in rank disgust. “I'm sick of that set-up, that's all. Guess I'll have me a housekeeper of my own. Build me a little camp on the back shore, and find me a woman who'll keep her mouth shut all day and be ready for bed when I am, and—”

“Spare me the details,” said Joanna. “And what are you moaning about a housekeeper for, when you're courting the school-ma'am?”

“Laurie's a good girl,” Owen stated emphatically, and put down his cup with unnecessary firmness. “Give me some more coffee. Laurie's a good girl, and it looks like she'll go back to her mother just as good as the day she came down here. Lord, Bennett's is slipping.”

“
This
Bennett is, anyway.” Joanna patted his head as she passed him. “Looks like you've met your match, chummy!”

She dodged his big brown hand and went out into the kitchen, laughing.

In the fall there was always torching, when the ocean was full of herring that fired the water as the stars fired the sky. One night when it was particularly mild, Joanna went up to the Fennells' to get Laurie. The men were going to torch in the harbor, and it was too good an opportunity to miss watching them.

Nora waved them out wistfully when they asked her to come. “Nope! I've got a little cold, and Dennis told me that if I kept healthy, and remembered to take my vitamins, rd be okay—you know.” She grinned at Joanna. “So long, Laurie.”

“She's a happy thing,” said Laurie when they were walking down the dark lane toward the harbor.

“Yes, she is . . . There's a hole here, be careful.” Joanna flashed the light on a dip in the path.

“Gram is always telling me I should get married,” Laurie chuckled. “She looks over all the boys as if she were
my
Gram instead of Matthew's. She inclines toward Owen, I guess. Says the others aren't dry behind the ears.”

“Which one do you incline toward?” Joanna asked casually.

“I don't think I incline toward any of ‘em, really,” said Laurie frankly. “I haven't thought much about getting married. I haven't been a teacher long enough yet.”

“And you're doing all right at that . . . Well, here we are.” They had come to Nils' fish house. Joanna led the way around to the front of it; from the little wharf, with the water gurgling and swashing underneath, they could watch in comfort. The night was strangely mild, and free from wind, and before them the harbor was brilliant with the ruddy flare of the torches. There were two dories at work; Francis and Sigurd rowed one, with Owen in the bow with the dipnet, and Matthew and Young Charles rowed the other, with Charles in the bow.

A torch made of oily rags, and. flaming in a wire basket, was projected from one gunnel on each dory. The men at the oars rowed fast and hard, as the man in the bow directed them. It was hard to tell which job was the more exacting. There was more to handling the dipnet than the lowering and lifting of it, heavy with the dripping, squirming, silver fish. The man who stood in the bow in his oilskins must spot the herring and give the word to the oarsmen; then, as the herring swarmed upwards to where the torch burned above the glassy, emerald green surface, the net would swoop down, sweep in the fish, and lift again, to tilt its cargo into the dory. After a while the men would be knee-deep in herring, the tiny scales would glitter in the light from the torch, and the faces of the men would be smeared with soot.

Joanna had loved the torching ever since she was a child, and once it had been her most passionate wish to be able to row hard enough to help out. She told Laurie about the old days when there would be five or six dories in and out of the harbor, instead of only two.

“They never depended on the lobster smack to bring their bait then,” she said. “They got out and worked for it, like this.”

“They must get awfully tired,” said Laurie, watching Owen's dory gliding past the wharf. Owen stood up in the bow, the torchlight shining on his yellow oilskins.