The Ebbing Tide (33 page)

“What about?” Joanna asked idly. Ellen was with her cousins again, the house was quiet.

“Laurie Gibson,” said Owen. He shook his mackinaw with a fine disregard for the clean kitchen floor, and hung it up; then he sat down to pull off his boots. Joanna waited for him to go on, her impatience making knots in her stomach. But Owen wasn't to be hurried. He put his boots behind the stove and padded around in his stocking feet, whistling softly.

“Your moccasins are on the woodbox,” she said at last. “What about Laurie?”

“Oh, her.” Owen gave her a bright, mocking glance. “Nosey, ain't ye? What's your pucker?”

Joanna turned away from him in annoyance, and his voice followed her, softly and slyly. “Even if I didn't tell you, darlin' mine, you'd find out in a couple of months. So'd the whole Island. It's practically a sure thing.”

“Owen . . . no.”

“Yes. She hasn't said anything, but Matthew's sure of it, and he's all hawsed up. Says some beggar left her in the lurch.”

She said hesitantly, “Who?”

“Matthew thinks it's Bobby Merrill.”

Joanna hardly heard him. She was staring at him and seeing something else. “Poor Laurie,” she said. “The poor kid. She must be terrified.”

“Poor damn' fool, if you ask me. And Bobby'll be a bigger fool, if they haul him into it.”

“Who'll haul him into it, if she's not saying anything?” Joanna demanded.

Owen dropped into a chair and took out his cigarettes. “Then she's about as numb as anyone could be and live. Wouldn't you think that little idiot would want to get married right off? The kid's got to have a name. But no, probably none of us Islanders are good enough for the likes of her. So she's lookin' down her nose at us.”

He stared at the match flame for an instant before he lit his cigarette, and Joanna realized that he was really enraged; he was smoldering. Because young Bobby got there and he didn't?

“You don't know much about women, Owen,” she said. “You think you do, but you know just about
nothing
. Laurie's a kid, and she's away from home. You and the others gave her a grand rush. Now she's fallen in love and gone over the edge. Can't you imagine how she must be feeling? Scared to death, and wondering if it's a false alarm, but if it's true, how's she ever going to face her people? She's probably carrying all the guilt in the world on her shoulders and thinking she's the lowest thing in creation. Laurie's a
good
girl, Owen.”

Owen said, grinning, “Amen to that.”

“It's not your fault that she stayed out of trouble as long as she did,” Joanna flared at him .

“Oh take it easy! What I want to know is, what's she have to act this way for? So high-and-mighty?”

“Oh, you're so
stupid
about girls! Maybe Bobby Merrill, or whoever it is, hasn't asked her to marry him! Maybe she's heard of men who turn against a girl when they've got her into a mess, and think she's cheap, so she's afraid to approach him. And maybe she's so upset that she's wandering around in a sort of fog.” She took a long breath. “I think if that ever happened to me I'd want to jump off the nearest wharf rather than admit it.”

“Quite an oration,” said Owen lazily. “just goes to show what a mess a woman's mind can be. If she's thinkin' all those things at once, she's just about half there. A man's better off without her.”

“I could brain you, Owen Bennett,” she began hotly, and then Ellen came in.

Clear days in winter had a particular gloss and sparkle of their own, from the first apricot glow of sunrise until sunset, when the woods threw shadow as purple as grapes across the fields, and the harbor rocks turned red in their reflection of the west. It was this sort of gem-like day that followed the evening when Owen told Joanna about Matthew. There was a light fall of snow on the ground, and it glittered like diamond dust where the sun struck it, and reflected the skies' brightness even after the sun had gone down behind Pete Grant's house.

Joanna took Jamie out for a walk after his nap. Buttoned and zipped securely into his snowsuit, his round cheeks framed by his helmet, he marched ahead of her across the Island to Schoolhouse Cove and back again without stumbling. She watched him, thinking how much he had grown since the spring. Now he was a real little boy instead of a baby, his very walk was different, his sense of humor had enlarged, his expressions had changed. Her letters to Nils were making a record of Jamie's growing-up.

When they came to the harbor beach he wanted to climb in and out of the skiffs; but Dennis was on the lobster car, buying Sigurd's haul, and she wanted no conversation with him. She waved and smiled when the two men looked up toward the path, and led Jamie firmly away from the beach.

“We'll see what Owen's doing in the shop,” she comforted him, when his lower lip came out, and he grudgingly conceded that it would be all right.

The fish house smelled of the drying-out traps that were stacked to the ceiling, and of the roaring fire in the pot-bellied stove. Owen stood at the bench strapping bottles for toggles. Above the bench the windows faced the south-west and the late sun shone in, hot and yellow. Perhaps it was the sun across his face that made him scowl so; his brows were drawn together, his jaw was set, and he knotted the pot warp with quick, vicious thrusts and pulls.

“We came to see you, Uncle Owen,” said Joanna tranquilly, turning Jamie loose among the buoys.

“So I notice,” Owen muttered. “Don't scatter those buoys around, Jamie. Leave them alone.”

Jamie, unused to such restrictions when he visited the fish house, straightened up, his blue eyes rounding and his lower lip coming out again. This time it was trembling.

“Here, Jamie,” Joanna gathered up some lath ends, gave him Nils' hammer and a handful of wire nails that had been bought for traps and then discarded as no good. “Temper, temper, Uncle Owen,” she said lightly. “What's biting you?”

“What the hell? Does anythin' have to be bitin' me? What are you do in' down around here anyway?”

“Just out for a walk, Owen. There's no call for you to be ugly.” She walked across the shop to the window in the end that faced up toward the house. “School will be out in a few minutes. As soon as I see Ellen coming along, I'll leave you in peace and quiet.”

She stood there idly, watching Jamie hammering nails. The sound of the hammer, the snapping of the fire, the click of bottles, were serene and homey sounds she had heard all her life; there'd been times when she'd loved the atmosphere of a fish house far more than the tidiness of a house. When Nils came home, she'd come down often to talk with him while he worked, or just to watch, without speaking, like this. The thought of it was like drawing a long, refreshing breath of clean air, it spread through her like the balm of peace.

She glanced out at the village now and then. The snow sparkled, and every house and tree seemed to be gilded by the sun shine.

Ellen came by Sigurd's house, arm in arm with her cousin Donna. They wore bright parkas, gaudy socks and mittens, and their feet fairly skipped on the frozen ground.
I'd better go up and tell them what they can have for a mug-up
, she thought absently, watching them with pleasure as they turned up the path toward the house . But it was nice standing here, almost imagining that it was Nils working at the bench instead of Owen.

Then Laurie Gibson came by. Involuntarily Joanna moved back to where the traps shadowed her against any glance from the outside. Without knowing why, she said quietly, “Owen . . . look here.”

He came over to where she stood, and they watched Laurie in the interval of time it took her to go by Sigurd's and then disappear behind the Binnacle. She wore a bright pleated skirt that should have swung saucily about her knees, if she had walked as vibrantly as she'd once walked; the hood of her parka was thrown back, and against the dark wall of Gunnar's windbreak her young profile showed set and white and lost.

When the Binnacle hid her, Joanna looked up at Oweh. “Poor kid —” she began, and stopped. Owen was staring at the empty path where Laurie had just been, as if his black eyes were still seeing that gallantly straight small figure. There was a whiteness all around his mouth; he was oblivious of Joanna, he was lost in some wasteland of his own. She walked away from him then, without speaking, and beckoned to Jamie.

Her lips formed the enticing word, “Mug-up,” before he could protest aloud, and she took him home.

The two girls, who were eighth-graders in the school, were preparing to do their homework on the dining-room table. She looked at them in surprise until they explained that Ellen was invited up to Donna's that evening to make popcorn balls, and they wanted to get their school work out of the way. She nodded, and smiled at the happy excitement in their faces and went to make cocoa for them and set out a bowl of molasses cookies. But all the time she was working she was conscious of a driving urgency, as if there was some violent reason for her hurrying.

When Owen came in, scarcely ten minutes after she'd left him in the shop, she knew the reason. She was putting Jamie in his high chair, and Owen came and stood in the doorway. Across the girls' heads, one fair and one dark, he looked at Joanna long and hard. Then, with a slight hunching of one shoulder he went out again, through the sun parlor and out the back door. Joanna followed him; that was what he'd meant her to do.

She found him standing on the doorstep. His back was toward her as she came out, his shoulders were broad under the red and black plaid; his legs were braced as though he stood at the wheel of the
White Lady
in a choppy sea, and he was looking up toward the Fennells'. With one hand he was breaking the brittle lilac twigs, the snapping sounds were loud in the still cold. Joanna watched that hand for a moment before she spoke to him. There was a repressed but passionate emotion in those brown fingers, they cast the broken bits of twig away from him with something like angry revulsion.

“Well?” she said quietly.

He didn't turn around. “Start talkin', Jo,” he said harshly.

Her amazement made her catch her breath. She forgot the cold that stung through her dress. “About what?”

“Tell me what to say to her.”

“Why do you have to say anything, Owen?” But it wasn't as if she didn't know. She moved slightly until she could see the line of his forehead and high, jutting cheekbone, the flat slanting stroke to his chin. A tide of dark color was flowing under the skin.

“I'm really sold on the kid, Jo.” His voice came with difficulty, he was playing a role alien to him. “I guess I'm — in love with her all right. Joke's on me.” He didn't look around at her, he held his head stiffly high. “I didn't catch on to the love stuff till after I got her where I wanted her.” The red deepened even more. “If you don't think I know what kind of a son-of-a-bitchin' bastard I am, you're crazy.”

There was no time to be shocked, no time to criticize. “Have you been to see her at all — since?” Joanna asked.

He cleared his throat. “I went around by the school the next day, when the kids were gone. She was markin' papers and when she saw me she turned white as chalk, and wouldn't look at me. I tried to tell her . . . but she asked me in that damned stuck-up voice if I'd please go. So I went.”

Joanna saw him standing inside the schoolhouse door, immense against its child-scaled furnishings, watching Laurie, trying to say tender words with a mouth that was shaped for mockery and cynicism. “She was too upset then, Owen. You should have tried again.”

“I did, but she was so goddam stubborn . . . . She was crazy enough about me before it happened, too.”

“I'm willing to bet anything she's still crazy about you. Girls like Laurie don't do what she did unless they're in love. They're not like Thea.”

He looked at her then, or rather turned on her, like a hurt animal goaded into fury. “What are you tellin' me that for? Don't you think I know it, for Christ's sake! Don't you think I want to make it right?”

“But don't tell her that,” Joanna warned him. “Don't tell her you want to make it right. Tell her what you told me — that you love her, and you won't leave her alone till she promises to marry you.” In her eagerness she took hold of his forearm and shook it. “Tell her what she wants to hear! Don't let her think she's lowered herself, but that she'd be honoring you if she married you —”

His rigid mouth relaxed enough to twist in a faint grin. “You want to do my proposin' for me?”

“No. I'm going in and start supper.” She left him abruptly, knowing that she had said enough. The rest was up to him.

In the next few minutes she made herself very busy, trying to explain an obscure problem to the girls, taking Jamie out of his high chair again, now that he'd finished his cookie. She felt curiously light­headed and taut, she knew the suspense of the next hour would be all but unendurable.

Going out into the sun parlor once, she glanced out the back door and saw that Owen had gone. When she'd first questioned him about Laurie, she'd hoped with all her sincerity and her pride that Owen wasn't responsible; for she had never once considered that he might love the girl. His almost inarticulate confession there on the doorstep had moved her deeply. Now her chief emotion was astonishment, and not dismay. And the astonishment was tinged with satisfaction. If Owen had really fallen in love with Laurie, she was truly glad. He was nearly forty, he should have a home of his own to anchor him, and Laurie would make him a good wife.

Nora came in while she was cutting strips of dried fish for soaking.

“You look good,” Nora stated. “Happier than a lot of people I've seen lately. . . . The schoolmarm came home looking as if she'd been dragged through seven cities, and she wouldn't eat anything. She went out for a walk. Then your brother comes up, looking even worse. I told him she'd gone for a walk down Chip Cove way, and he hiked off without another word.”