The Ebbing Tide (3 page)

She was opening a jar of greens at the dresser when Nils came in, moving quietly. He came up behind her without speaking, and put his arms around her, resting his lean cheek against her hair. She put down the jar and turned quickly in his embrace, as if she had been waiting for this moment all morning; she put her hands on his shoulders.

“Nils, I—”
I'm going to miss you
, she'd almost said. And it was such a silly thing to say. The way she would miss him, and he would miss her, was too great a part of them to be reduced into mere words. But as if he knew her thought, he tightened his arms, and drew her close and kissed her. His lips were cool against hers.

“Jamie asleep?” he asked.

“Yes, he was so tired he didn't fool around today.”

“Owen's coming.” Nils nodded at the window, and she knew Owen was on his way to the house. “Let's leave him to hold the fort while we put the
Donna
on her mooring.”

“What have you been doing with her?” she asked curiously.

“Oh, I ran her around the harbor a couple of times, and then took her in to the wharf while I tidied her up.” He released her and stood away. “Well, are you coming?”

She dumped the greens hurriedly into a saucepan and set them on the stove. “You bet I am!” she laughed, but she was thinking,
Tidying up the Donna!
As if she needed it! She was already spotless, but tomorrow he was leaving her.

Owen came in, kicking the door shut with a vicious swing of his rubber boot. The kitchen was smaller than ever when he came into it and stood scowling at them, his thumbs hooked into his belt, his black yachting cap on the back of his head. He was in one of his silent rages, when his black brows made a thick bar across his face and his full, squared lower lip was prominent. He was as dark as an Indian, and his repressed fury made him darker.

No need to ask him what the matter was; a hangover always affected him this way. “I'm going down with Nils to put the boat on her mooring,” Joanna told him. “You can help yourself to dinner if you don't want to wait for us . . . Jamie's asleep.”

Owen grunted and brushed by Nils to the sink. Nils, undisturbed, stepped out of his way. He was far more patient with Owen than Joanna could ever be. Men had a strange, tight kinship, she knew, that a woman couldn't understand. Nils and Owen were poles apart, but still they understood each other.

She went out and Nils came after her. It was high noon, the air was at its height of warmth; the sunshine poured without stint or shadow over the Island and a sea as blue as in midsummer.

“You had a wonderful idea,” Joanna said. “I couldn't sit down and eat with Owen right now. He's in one of his I-hate-everybody moods.”

“He probably enjoys having us out from under his feet for a little while, too,” said Nils.

The rest of the Island—three houses were occupied besides the old Sorensen house—was busy with dinner, so no one came out to break the warm harmony of their mood as they walked down to the shore. The
Donna
was tied up at the end of the Sorensen wharf. She hardly moved, the water was so calm. The tide was high, and they stepped onto the buff-painted deck and then down into the cockpit; Nils cast off the single line that held her gently against the spilings and started the engine.

Responsive as it had always been, after years of painstaking, loving care, the engine began its soft refrain, and the big boat moved away from the wharf; the water churned up by her wheel went chuckling and swashing around the green-massed spilings and over the rocks shaggy with seaweed in the dark shade under the wharf. The boat headed so quietly out into the harbor that a gull standing on the almost-submerged peak of a ledge didn't fly upwards in fright, but remained like an ivory carving, breast to breast with its reflection.

Joanna stood beside Nils at the wheel. It would only take them a few moments to go to the mooring at the outer edge of the harbor; but she could drink in those moments as if they were some rare essence, and remember all the silent, sun-flooded noons of her life, especially when she and Nils had had the harbor to themselves. But that was in the first month of their marriage, when the Island had begun to take on new life again. The
Donna
moved across the harbor, cleaving gently the soft brimming blue, that glimmered into quicksilver in the boat's wake, and then broke in little glistening lines against the saffron and rose-red rocks. Above the rocks the spruces stood in sharp exquisite detail against a sky that ringed the horizon with light and became the soul of all blues at the zenith. A day like this came rarely to the Island, and it was a heart-shaking thing.

There had been a time when she and Nils had been actually alone on the Island; she had gone to haul with him in his peapod on mornings like this, and when they had come back the house was waiting for them alone. It had stood open in the sunshine, with the woods hovering close, and nothing to disturb the light or the still depths of shadows but the birds. Now there was noontime smoke from other chimneys—and until the war had come, and begun to rage through the Atlantic, there had been someone in almost every house. Their solitude had not lasted very long, but they hadn't cared too much, because it was for the Island's good to have people again. . . . Then most of the young men had gone into the service, the old-timers had left because married sons and daughters had found work in war plants, and the grandchildren needed someone to watch over them. They didn't mind leaving so much; there was no mail boat now, and often the telephone was out of order or shut off because of secret communications from the Rock. . . . One woman frankly admitted she was glad to be leaving the Island because the depth charges were too close and there were too many stories of submarines, and they didn't like the sight of fighting planes and bombers flying high in the thin mist of clouds.

Now Nils was going, and as she stood beside him watching the
Donna
's steady bow against the horizon, she had the feeling she had had so many times as a child, that the world consisted of a flat expanse of sea, with Bennett's Island and Brigport in the midst of it, a line of blue unreal mountains along the northern horizon with nothing beyond them, and an immense half-sphere of sky inverted over it all. When Nils left, he would drop into nothing beyond the edge, as her younger brothers had dropped. Their letters always seemed to arrive out of blank space, and so would Nils' letters. . . . She turned her face quickly from the horizon beyond Brigport, and waited for Nils to slow down the big marine engine and go forward to gaff the mooring buoy. But he met her eyes with a faint sparkle in his, and turned the
Donna
out past Eastern Harbor Point.

“Come and steer,” he said. Words that had always sent her to the heights of ecstasy, from the time he used to say them to her when she was a gangling, eager twelve-year-old.

She took the wheel and Nils sat down on the washboard, watching the Island as it slid by. There was no need to talk; there was only motion, the steady vibration of the engine, the shining sea flowing past, the little sea pigeons flying up with a flash of their small red feet. She knew now why they were doing this, and if she had known any questions in the early morning, they were being answered now. Nils was saying goodbye to the Island. Perhaps he would never tell her in words what he felt about the Island, but he was taking her with him to share this final moment.

Long Cove was gliding by, a long stretch of beach whose rounded rocks gleamed white in the sun, white as a gull's breast against the blue line of sea. Above Long Cove flat fields stretched across the Island to Schoolhouse Cove, on the seaward side. In the marshy places she and Nils had picked cranberries, and where the fields bordered on the beach there were blackberries in August whose purple-black sweetness was richened by spray. There was high, densely wooded ground after Long Cove, and the empty buildings that shone palely against the dark high wall of trees, overlooking the fields and the two coves, were Bennett property. In the big barn that dwarfed the other buildings Joanna and Nils, her brothers and his cousins, had played hide­and-go-seek. . . . She glanced sidewise at Nils and saw that he was not too remote from her, so she spoke.

“Remember swinging out of the hayloft on a rope?”

“If I ever knew of Jamie doing that, I'd want to wring his neck,” said Nils. “And I thought your uncle was an old fussbudget for objecting.” He shook his head and laughed.

“Nils, d'you think we could ever get hold of that place—if Aunt Mary was willing to sell?” she asked eagerly.

“Maybe she'll be ready to talk business when I get back,” he said.
When I get back
. . . . It was like a little cold wind skimming across the water and turning the surface to a darker, colder blue.

After the woods ended, the Eastern End began, a narrow neck of land whose shoreline on both sides, lee and windward, was guarded by a brutal jumble of rocks. But the tide covered them today, and the empty buildings looked serene and not too lonely in the sunshine. The Eastern End land looked barren, if one didn't know what strawberries grew in the deep grass in July, what birds nested in the low bushes, and how incredibly lush the field could look when there were people living at the Eastern End, and stock to keep the land shaven and green from one shore to the other.

The fish house built up against the steep bank above the cove wore sunshine on its weathered shingles, and wavy ripples of light from the water that lapped around its spilings. A line of gulls sat on the ridgepole and were not alarmed by the
Donna
's calm purring progress; but on the high rocky ledge that rose outside the cove like a seabound castle the gulls started up in a cloud of harsh cries and beating wings when the boat went by. The young gulls circled with the old ones, gray-brown wings only slightly less graceful, but already as strong.

“Remember the day we went ashore there?” said Nils. “Rowed down from the harbor in a skiff—”

“Nobody would have known if Owen hadn't been down to the Eastern End playing with the Trudeau kids, and went home and
told
,” said Joanna.

They were silent again. She turned the wheel and the
Donna
began to round the Head, which rose up from the fields as a rocky hillside and ended in a bold, massive face of tawny-red rock below which the
Donna
looked tiny but indomitable. There was always a surge here, even in this fine weather. Glittering sheets of water swelled in long slopes, and the boat rode gently with them. Nils was looking up at the Head against the sky. The softness that had been around his mouth and eyes when he remembered the forbidden trip in the skiff was gone. Joanna felt a gradual tightening in her chest; it was reflected in the way her strong brown fingers tightened on the spokes of the wheel.

Remembering was no good, because the present was upon them, and there was no escape. Tomorrow he would be going. It would be bad enough for her, but at least she could remain with the Island. Nils would be leaving everything, and the Island was as much in his blood and bones as in hers. Their grandfathers had come here together.

In all the years she had known Nils, since her earliest memories began, she had had to make up for herself what he was thinking. Now, because she knew him as well as anyone could ever know Nils, she was almost certain of his thoughts. She longed to cry out to him that she knew what he was thinking; but Nils never wanted to burden anyone, even herself who was waiting, with the things that lay heaviest upon him.

If she knew Nils, and she
did
know him, she knew that nothing could ever take him by surprise. Not even death. He had taken death into account from the moment he had received his orders. All these ten days at home, when he had let her think it was an ordinary furlough, he had been taking death into account, and because of that, everything he had done and said had been for the last time. When he was talking with Owen, there must have been the quiet certainty that he might never again set or haul a trap, or take his own boat out of the harbor.

When he was rocking Jamie at night. . . . Her throat began to ache; she kept her eyes straight ahead over the cabin roof, though they were filled with a burning mist of blue, and glittering light, and wavering rocks. She wanted to hold Nils against her breast as he had held Jamie. It seemed at once a hideous monstrous thing that she could not comfort Nils as simply as she could shelter Jamie and stop his crying. She held herself rigid there by the wheel, without looking at his face. He mustn't know what she knew. He would want her to think he was like her brothers, who went out into the blue hell of the Pacific with their self-assurance around them like armor. Other men were killed, other men came back maimed. But not they. Wait and see! That was the Bennett of them.

But Nils came of a different strain. The knowledge of death, and sin, and punishment, and hell, had been his since he was little older than Jamie. Night after night his grandfather Gunnar had read the Bible to his wife and his grandchildren—the Old Testament with its grandeur and terror; and he had added his own warnings of the doom that awaited all human flesh. It was true that Nils had taken it stolidly, and Sigurd had all but laughed in the old man's face, and it was their sister who cried and had nightmares; but it was now, when Nils was a man of thirty-seven, that Joanna recognized what part of Gunnar's teaching had borne fruit.

In the room where Nils had slept as a boy there was a framed verse on the wall at the foot of his bed; it had been there always, he had told her, and he knew it by heart. Morning and night for almost all his life he had read it. It must have become deeply, irrevocably ingrained in his being.