The Ebbing Tide (4 page)

She could endure it no longer, and turned toward him quickly. “Nils!” she cried, surprising even herself. He got up from the washboard, smiling a little, and put his hands lightly on her shoulders.

“What's the matter?”

“A cramp in my leg—I've been standing still too long.” She reached down and rubbed the back of her knee, not looking at him.

“Then sit down for a while.” He took the wheel, and she sat down on the engine box, wanting to look at the clean, lifted line of his face as he steered, but not trusting herself to look too long. They were passing Schoolhouse Cove now, and a seal was turning over and over lazily in the surge around the rocks; the same rocks threw back the sound of the engine, magnifying it to a roar. Then they rounded a long, out-thrust point whose crest was a thick cap of tangled grass and raspberry and rose bushes. Joanna looked up, watching. Nils was watching too. They passed between the tip of the point on one side, and a rounding ledge on the other, where gulls and shags flew up in a tangle of black wings and white ones, and then the
Donna
slipped quietly into Goose Cove.

It was a long, narrow oval of a cove, walled by the point on one side and the woods on the other, the same woods that marched thickly to the very end of the Island. In the shadow of the trees the water was a glassy surface of jade and emerald; where the shade ended, the blue began, and lay hardly moving against the shelving, warm yellow rocks that slanted down from the ridge of the point like rudely cut massive steps.

And at the end of the cove, above the little pale curve of beach, the Bennett homestead stood. It was the house where Joanna had grown up, and the house to which she and Nils had returned day after day when they had once lived alone on the Island. There it stood, four-square and solitary on its headland. It was across the Island from the harbor, and its nearest neighbors were the spruce woods, the gulls that perched familiarly on the ridgepole, the crows that flew over from the Western End woods to the Eastern End woods; the swallows that made their nests under the eaves. The house was alone now, but it did not look lonely.

Nils shut off the engine, and in the sudden hush the silence was as tangible as the soundless flight of a gull's wings. Without speaking, Nils stepped upon the washboard and went lightly up to the bow. The killick made a silvery splash as he dropped it overboard. When he came back and jumped down into the cockpit with hardly a sound in spite of his rubber boots, Joanna stood up. He came toward her, and his smile was gone. There was a subtle change in his face; no longer the mask of a man who is calmly certain of death, or with the faint, warm smile of a man for his comrade. The tension showed through now, the tension that rose of his soul's need and his body's passion. The way he loved Joanna, and had always loved her, was the most powerful force of his being. Perhaps it was easy for him to view all other things with quiet acceptance.

She knew it, and her eyes didn't move from his. His hands came out to touch her shoulders; not to rest lightly but to grip hard. His mouth seemed hard, but it was not; neither were his eyes furious as they darkened. Only intent. The grip on her shoulders, biting through her jacket, drew her closer to him.

“Jo—” He started to say her name, and the word was smothered as his arms went around her in an embrace like steel, and his mouth was against her throat. She stood motionless in his arms, seeing the dark empty woods towering over them, feeling the sun warm on her lifted face. She was still, but there was a slow trembling inside of her, as if deep within the tears were beginning to well. She brought up one hand and laid it on the back of his neck; her cheek was against his fair hair, it smelled cleanly of wind and sunshine.

“Nils, my darling,” she said quietly. It was not often the word was used between them. “
My darling
. . .”

After a moment he lifted his head and his eyes blazed into hers. “It's—leaving
you
—” The words came harshly, with difficulty. But they were enough for her to understand, and she felt a fierce joy. He wanted her to be sure that nothing else mattered but her; not even the Island could have any part of him at this time.

“But not for the last time,” she told him passionately. “Nils, it isn't the last time! I know what you think, but I know what I
know!
”

“Don't talk,” he said. “Don't talk, Joanna.” He cut off her protest with his mouth on hers.

The cabin was open and waiting; the
Donna
swung gently at anchor in a globe of shining silence.

I
N THE MORNING THE RAIN
blew in from the east in gray sheets. The warmth and stillness and color of the day before seemed like a dream. The wind was strong enough to sway the birches and the alders, and edge the seaward side of the Island with surf; but there was only a faint quiver to the tips of the spruce boughs. By Island standards, it really wasn't a wind at all. Certainly, not enough wind to keep Nils from going. Owen would take him to Brigport to meet the mail boat, which had stopped coming to Bennett's when the mail did, years before.

Joanna didn't plan to go over to Brigport with him. They had had their good-byes, it would mean nothing to them, the waiting around the harbor of the other island, watching the freight being taken off, and the gulls perched on the wet ledges in the rain, feeling the chill that was not alone from the March rain but from the occasion itself.

She left Jamie with Nils' cousin, Thea, who lived on the other side of the windbreak, and walked down to the wharf with Nils. Owen had gone out already and brought the
White Lady
in. She waited at the old wharf, over by the long pebbly beach where the boats were hauled up for repairs and the skiffs and dories kept. Nils was in his uniform today as a Chief Boatswain's Mate in the Coast Guard. Until this morning he had been the familiar Nils, the lobsterman. Now, in navy blue, with the dark trim raincoat and the neat bag, she recognized once more the futility of believing that he was hers alone. He was going because he must, he would go where he was sent, and nothing she might do or say could alter his course. For the duration, neither she nor Jamie could come first with Nils.

It was nothing to cry about, nothing to brood about. She was simply one of millions of women, and the wonder was that she had come to accept it so calmly, she thought, as they walked along together in the rain, through a village that was almost deserted. She'd always had such a strong sense of her own individuality as a person that it had got in her way at times. Well, there was nothing like a war to snap you out of it.

They turned by the fish houses and walked along the shore, past the Arey house where Nils' brother Sigurd lived. Sigurd's housekeeper knocked on the window and waved frantically at Nils, who smiled and touched his cap.

“I'll try to get down to Pruitt's Harbor this afternoon and see Ellen,” Nils said as they walked on.

“She'll love that,” said Joanna enthusiastically. “Especially if you go to the school. She considers you an honest-to-goodness hero, and all hers.”

“She's a good girl. More of a lady than you were at twelve, too.”

“She takes after Mother,” Joanna said. She slipped her arm through his and tightened her fingers on his sleeve. He
would
go down to Pruitt's Harbor, too. It was typical of Nils, and the deep comradeship between him and his stepdaughter. She knew he wasn't her father, and Joanna didn't know if Ellen considered Nils in the light of a father, at all; in some things Ellen was rather a mystery to her, but she was certain that Ellen considered Nils an indispensable part of her universe.
And so do I
, thought Joanna, and tightened her fmgers even more.

Nils glanced at her sidewise. “O.K., Jo?”

“O.K.,” she reassured him. “I'm just overcome with the idea that I'm walking along Bennett's Island main street with a C.P.O. It's making me conceited as anything.”

“And everybody looking at you, too,” said Nils, pointing to the long baithouse on their right and the boatshop on their left. He nodded at the row of gulls on the boatshop's ridgepole. “The reviewing stand. Politicians, every damn' one of 'em.”

“I wonder if they have parades in the Pacific,” said Joanna. “Politicians in the Solomons ought to be a change from the Limerock brand, anyway.”

We're doing wonderfully
, she thought, and then they had reached the old wharf, by the boatshop, and the
White Lady
was waiting, her engine idling. Out beyond the shelter of the baithouse, the east wind swept in from Schoolhouse Cove, raced across the marsh, and tried to wrap them in rain. But nobody noticed it, it was Island weather. Owen grinned up from the cockpit. “You want to be piped aboard, Admiral?”

Sigurd came out of the cabin, waving a bottle of beer and whistling “Semper Paratus.” He was a big, yellow-maned Viking of a man, who gave the impression, even when he was in a roaring rage, of an utterly friendly and humorous person. “You pipe down,” he advised Owen. “You want to pipe, you can pipe down. Hi, Nils. God, I wish I was goin' with you!”

He took Nils' bag and clapped his younger brother on the shoulder with a heavy hand. Nils, however, bore up under it. “Well, you're going as far as Brigport, aren't you?” He took his bag back, and went into the cabin to stow it. Sigurd hovered hugely in the companionway.

“Sure, but my God. You know what I mean. I could kill a lot of those yellow beggars—”

“He's been goin' on like that for an hour,” said Owen. “I'm intendin' to drown him as soon as we get out by Tenpound. Put him out of his misery.”

Nils forced a smile. “Well, I guess we'd better get started—”

Joanna stood on the edge of the wharf, shivering. It seemed as if the east wind had never cut so deeply; yet her tweed coat was warm, and so was her wool kerchief.
I'm not really cold
, she thought.
It's just the excitement. After all, I'm not falling on his neck and crying, and making it hard for him. It's all right if I feel a little funny
. . . . She saw someone coming by the baithouse, and called quickly, nervously.

“Wait a minute, here come Francis and Matthew!” She met Nils' eyes and grinned, and took her hands out of her pockets and blew on them so he'd think the jerky note in her voice came from the cold. He looked back at her steadily, standing in the roomy cockpit while the others baited each other noisily behind him. She wondered what he was thinking in that instant; if he would carry this picture of her, standing there in the rain with the dark clouds scudding beyond her head, and seagulls walking on a wetly shining roof, and the wind making color in her face; or if the picture would be of yesterday, while the
Donna
moved gently at anchor in Goose Cove.

Francis Seavey and Matthew Fennell came up, their rubber boots clamping on the loose planks, nodded at her, and jumped down into the cockpit to shake hands with Nils. She stood watching the scene; now she wondered what all of them were thinking; the one who must go, the others who must wait. Francis Seavey was Thea's husband, not a lobsterman by training but a carpenter, and when the draft board turned him down, Thea had brought him out to the island where she'd grown up, moved into her father's house, and informed Francis that they had just as much right as anybody to make money out of lobstering. Consequently Francis looked unhappy most of the time. He was a slight, mouse-colored, youngish man, whose rubber boots were always tripping him up, and who was terrified every time he went out to haul. Yet there was probably nothing Francis desired more than to be going to fight Japs with Nils.

Matthew was a sturdy man in his forties, sound and good as a Baldwin apple. He loved lobstering, he loved the Island to which he had come a few years ago, he loved his young wife and his grandmother, who was very old now and who was apparently intending to live forever. He made good money, put a great deal of it religiously into War Bonds, and was completely oblivious of the fact that his wife had been having Gram around for a long time now, and that the situation in his house was as potentially explosive as a mine field.

“Good luck, Nils,” he said simply. Francis didn't say anything, but he swallowed when Nils took him by the shoulder and shook him gently. “You take care of yourself, Franny,” Nils said. “I want to see you here when I get back. When it's too bad for this big ape—” he nodded at Sigurd—“to go out, it's too bad for you. Understand?”

Francis nodded earnestly. Nils had given him a weapon. Next time Thea cast aspersions on his manhood when he was reluctant to go haul, he could quote Nils at her.

The good-byes were over. Francis and Matthew climbed out of the cockpit, Joanna cast off the bowline, and Owen maneuvered the
White Lady
delicately away from the wharf. She backed out with the engine lifting into a high, powerful roar, the wheel churning the pewter-gray water into a foaming chaos; then her bow swung around and she headed out across the harbor, her wake fanning out behind her. Joanna waited a moment, the rain beating at her back, to watch the boat and the men standing around the wheel. Nils lifted his arm in farewell, and she waved back. Then as the
White Lady
cut by the
Donna
's bow at the mouth of the harbor, and left her rolling in the wake, Joanna turned sharply and walked up to the road.

The two men who were left had gone across to the baithouse. She heard them talking in there—not about Nils, but about the respective merits of bream and corned herring for bait. No one who was left on the Island would talk much about Nils today.

She walked home alone. Out of the wind, the rain fell with a soft, shushing sound on the rocks and the dead grass. The roofs shone. Across the Island there was surf and wind, but here in the shelter of the almost empty village the roar was muted until you could almost forget it. Here you heard the giant whisper of the rain, the mewing of a gull who stood aimlessly on a ledge in the middle of the harbor and said the same thing over and over. The slight wash of the water against the rocks, made by the wake, had died quickly away, as quickly as the
White Lady
had gone around Eastern Harbor Point.