The Ebbing Tide (5 page)

Joanna found herself obsessed with the emptiness of everything; the village, and her thoughts. It was reaction, probably. Her life wasn't empty. It couldn't be, simply because Nils had gone, like so many men, to war. Even after Alec, her first husband, had died, and she was so wildly young, she had never had the sense that her life was empty. There had been Ellen. Now she had Ellen and Jamie.

She found herself wishing that Ellen were with her, not staying with her grandmother so she could go to school in Pruitt's Harbor. Well, she could wish a lot of things, but nothing would be changed. And she had enough to do to fill every moment. Gardening, sewing, berrying, canning, writing letters, reading. . . .

Feeling like the very soul of no-nonsense, she stopped in at Thea's to collect Jamie. The dog came out from under the doorstep, waving his plumy tail and looking at her from benign bronze eyes; Thea wouldn't let him in, she was too fussy a housekeeper. ‘Wait for me, Dick,” Joanna told him as she went in, and he crawled back under the doorstep again.

Jamie sat on the floor playing with a pack of cards, and Thea was peeling potatoes at the sink. She had golden hair that was too bright to be natural, always done up in bobbing curls, and she was never without high heels and brilliant rayon print dresses, even when she was faintly blue around the lips with cold.

“Nils gone?” she asked brightly. “Well, come in and have a cup of coffee, why don't you?” She bustled around, her curls dancing, her lean hips swinging under the bright print. “Gawd Almighty, you could probably do with more than coffee, couldn't you? If you was a drinkin' woman, that is . . . I know how I'd feel, sendin' my man off—if I had a man like Nils or Sigurd.” The cups clattered on the table. “No chance of Franny ever goin', with his flat feet.” She giggled. “And that ain't all that's flat. Ask me, I know!”

Joanna stood by the stove, holding her hands out over the covers. “I don't feel like coffee, really, Thea. Don't go to all that trouble.”

“I suppose you won't have much appetite now.” Thea sighed. “I don't blame you. The awful things that happen. . . . Did you see that picture of what the Japs did to a Marine?” She flicked her sharp tongue over her thin bright lips. “It was awful. They—”

Joanna, smiling steadily, buttoned Jamie into his jacket and helmet. “You've been good to look out for him,” she said.

“Any time, any time!” sald Thea airily. “He's real good, too. Not much like his uncles!” She laughed. “They were all sure-enough hellions when they was kids—the Bennett uncles, I mean. I remember how Owen was when we was all go in' to dances together.” She moistened her lips the way she did when she was talking about the Marine killed by the Japanese. Joanna felt her anger beginning in her, slowly but hotly. She urged Jamie toward the door.

“Well, thanks, Thea. Any time I can help you out in return—”

Thea followed her to the door, chattering continuously. “I like kids, but I don't guess Franny knows how to make any!” More laughter at her own wit. “Too bad Sig's my first cousin—and him livin' all alone with a housekeeper—”

“I guess she keeps him happy,” said Joanna over her shoulder, keeping her smile fixed. Once she was out, and the door was shut between her and Thea, she lifted her head and took a great cleansing breath of the damp, cool air. It smelled of wet bare trees, of the east wind, of March; it smelled wonderful.

With Dick and Jamie tagging along, she went back up through the spruce windbreak and came into her own house. In the kitchen she stood still and listened to the small familiar noises that made up the silence of the house. An ember falling in the stove; the glug of the oil stove in the sitting room. The loud, asthmatic ticking of the old-fashioned clock on the shelf in the dining room. She gathered the sounds around her as protection against the loneliness which she knew would assail her when she least expected it. Nils would take comfort in visualizing her here, and the thought gave her a sort of comfort now.

She put Thea from her mind, and took off her damp things, divested Jamie of his. He went immediately to playing, advancing upon his toybox with deep concentration. Now there was dinner to start; oh, even on a rainy day there was always something to do
right now
. She brought out salt pork from the cellerway—from their own last-year's pigs—and tore strips of meat from a dried salt fish. She realized, as she worked at the dresser, that finally she felt as if this was her own house; it was as if Nils' departure had sealed the knowledge. For so long she had felt strange here in this small house almost enclosed by the woods, except for the field beyond the dining-room windows. She had grown up in the Bennett homestead, which was all light and space and air, with the sea almost below the windows, and the sun shining in from the time it rose until it dropped into the sea. And then she had hated the man who had lived in this house; Gunnar, Nils' grandfather. He had built the house on a rocky ledge in the midst of marshy ground, and it was a tribute to his industrious Swedish blood that the house stood so firm today, the big barn so tight, and that such lushly abundant gardens could grow in the field that had once been a swamp.

But Joanna had hated him. Most of the other Islanders had disliked him intensely, but there was a special antagonism between the rosy-cheeked, indomitable old man and the equally indomitable girl. He had been dead a long time when she married his grandson, but when Nils wanted to move into the empty house, because it was his, she'd had to fight the feeling that Gunnar was still in the house. Nils had never known about that; Nils, who had hated his grandfather with a cold, impersonal hatred while Gunnar was alive, had ceased to hate him when he died. So she didn't tell him of the hours she lay awake while he slept; lay awake because the big bed with its ornate headboard had been Gunnar's. And she wouldn't sit in his chair. . . .

But little by little they had changed the furniture, and then when he'd suggested a more modern bed, or a simple maple style, the war was beginning and her natural economy had got in the way of her aversion to Gunnar's possessions. And the aversion left with the advent of Jamie.

After that she concentrated on keeping the dining room bay filled with plants, as Nils' grandmother had done; she kept Anna's beloved dishes, tureens, chocolate set, and the decanter that never held anything stronger than elderberry wine, displayed in the cupboards, and still made chowder in the old black iron kettle. She had fond memories of that kettle herself, and she'd loved Anna, who was the only mother Nils had ever known. Anna had done the best she could for her widowed son's children; she'd bathed the boys' sore backs with tears of Balm-of-Gilead lotion after Gunnar had beaten them, and she had stood between them and her husband as much as she had dared.

And yet Gunnar had thought he was right. After all, it was the way he had lived from the time he was a cabin boy on a square­rigger at the age of eleven. Joanna knew that now, and she could understand why Nils had been so quick to forgive, once his younger sister and brother were out from under the old man's thumb.

It was good not to hate anyone. It was good to be getting a dinner made from pigs you'd raised yourself, and dried codfish you'd caught on a handline in the lazy blue trough of the sea on a warm, tranquil September day, you and Nils. It was good to be holding the fort for Nils, knowing he was proud because you'd proved yourself to him, and he had a right to be proud.

It was good to be in the house that was yours and his. . . . Joanna lifted her chin unconsciously as she thought it, in the old gesture of pride and self-assurance. Nothing could ever violate the security that she and Nils had built for themselves and each other in the years of their marriage.

O
WEN TOOK HIS OWN GOOD TIME
about coming home from Brigport. Dinner was on the back of the stove, and Jamie was asleep when he came in. “Get me some water before you take your oilskins off,” Joanna called to him.

“What do you do—pour it right down the sink?” he demanded, but it was a good-natured growl. He prowled through the kitchen, big in his glittering yellow oilskins and sou-wester, and grabbed up the pails with a great deal of loud clashing.

“Give me the mail first,” she said as he started out again.

“Oh, hold your pucker,” he answered and kept on going. She watched him stride down to the well. He was the brother next oldest to herself, and the most troublesome of all; once he had disappeared for seven years, and had returned without a word of explanation for anyone but Nils. And Nils had never told. There was nothing at all to be certain about, in those lost seven years, and everything to conjecture. Joanna still wondered sometimes, but not so much as at first. Now she was faintly amused that she and Owen had been thrown together, to be the last of the Bennetts on Bennett's Island. The two older boys lived prosperously at Pruitt's Harbor, the two younger boys were in the service. Owen had tried to get into the Navy, but he had been rejected; his heart beat too fast. No one had ever dreamed it would be his heart that would keep him out; it had always seemed to be a strong and perfect mechanism operating in a body of steel.

It was impossible not to love Owen, but sometimes even sisterly affection couldn't condone his behavior. She found it safer not to wonder what he did when he stayed a night at Brigport, or a week on the mainland twenty-five miles away. . . . Nils had told her to be patient with Owen. For Nils, she would be patient when her own store of tolerance was exhausted.

He came back, whistling, and set the brimming pails on the dresser. Then he peeled off his dripping oilclothes and pulled off his rubber boots. She stopped moving between the kitchen and the table to watch his black head with a narrow gaze as he leaned over to put on his moccasins.

“Did you ever take Thea out?” she asked.

“The Dutch heifer? No, thanks,” he drawled. “I never wanted anything that'd been pawed over by the population of two islands. . . . Why?”

“I just wondered. She was hinting around this morning. If I thought you'd ever been out with her, even twenty years ago, I'd stop speaking to you.”

He looked up, his eyes squinted reminiscently. “Nope, Thea never looked very enticin' to me. . . . I can tell you everybody that ever rolled her under a spruce tree, though,” he offered.

“No, thanks,” she said dryly. “Where's the mail?”

He took it out of his hip pocket, a newspaper and two or three letters. “Here . . . Well, I set Nils on his way. Probably he'll just about get out there and they'll send him back.” She knew he was offering her reassurance and so she nodded.

“I don't expect it to be for long,” she lied casually, looking over the envelopes. “Do we want an encyclopedia? Here's an ad. . . . Letter from Ellen . . . and Aunt Mary!”

She gazed at her brother in astonishment. “What do you suppose she wants?”

“Most likely she wants me to shingle the barn roof or something. . . . Tell her I got more women with wants than I can handle already.” He took the cover off the kettle of squash and breathed deeply. “Lord, there's a lot of yearnin' females in the world these days, you know it? If they don't want their roof shingled, they want some­thin' else—”

Joanna laid the envelope down without opening it. “I want my dinner first. I need to be fortified.”

“The old witch,” said Owen amiably. He sat down at the table, and opened the newspaper. Joanna set the food on, put coffee and water in the percolator and put it over the flames. Her mind worked as rapidly as her hands. It was true, she didn't trust Aunt Mary, who was not her aunt but had married her Uncle Nate. The comfortable set of buildings over against the Eastern End woods, a good part of the woods themselves, all the fields between Long Cove and Schoolhouse Cove down to the schoolhouse, and the two coves, all this belonged to Uncle Nate's Place, and in Joanna's childhood it had been a well­ordered and prosperous farm that supplied the rest of the Island with vegetables, eggs, and milk. Then, because of his wife's mysteriously bad health—which was pure legend as far as the other Bennetts were concerned—Nate Bennett had left and gone to the mainland to live. His sons hadn't cared about the farm, and for a good many years now the Place had stood empty, the golden cow on the barn as empty a symbol of the past as a forgotten flag flying over a deserted fortress.

Uncle Nate was dead now, and Aunt Mary was blooming; and for whatever reason she had written, Joanna was suspicious. Of all her relatives by marriage, Aunt Mary had liked Joanna the least. The boys would blarney around her with their bold charm, but Joanna would never stoop to charm anyone whom she despised.

She read Ellen's letter while she ate, and saved Aunt Mary's letter to go with her coffee. “Put down your paper,” she ordered Owen. “If you're still behind it. I'm about to read out Auntie's letter.”

“If it isn't the roof, it'll be a paint job. Tell her I've got a defense job. I'm defendin' myself from graspin' women—”

“Can you get your mind off that one track it's been on for thirty­seven years, and
listen?
”

He flashed her a glowing grin, white against ruddy brown. “Darlin' mine, read on.”

“‘Dear Joanna,'” she began, and scanned the pages quickly. “‘I am writing in haste, but know you will forgive me . . . when you hear . . .'” Her voice trailed off unbelievingly. “‘I have been lucky enough—'” She felt a chill going through her that was quickly replaced by burning heat. “‘I have sold the place.'” She read, her voice clearedged and expressionless. She laid down the letter and looked at Owen, who was not grinning now.

“
The old witch
,” he said softly, but not amiably. “Ornery old witch.” His long arm shot across the table and he picked up the letter. “Who's she sold it to? Rich New Yorkers? They want to turn it into a summer resort?”