The Ebbing Tide (6 page)

He scowled at the letter, his brows drawn ferociously. “Can't read her scratchy writin'. . . Let me see . . . Sold it to a man, she says.” He snorted. “That tells us a great lot. Hey, you didn't read the rest of it. She wants you to feed and sleep him for a week when he comes out to look it over.”

The impact of her outraged astonishment pulled her out of her chair. “I won't do it,” she said softly, knowing that if she lifted her voice she would storm. “I won't do it. I won't even answer the letter.”

“She'll send him anyway. You know the old buzzard.” He crumpled the letter savagely in one big brown hand.

“She can't do it.” Joanna came to a stop by the window, and stared out past the geraniums at the tawny field fenced in by a fringe of spruces. But she saw nothing. “She
can't!
I know she always hated us—and all the Bennetts—but even at that she'd give us a chance to buy, wouldn't she?”

“You still surprised at what people do?” Owen cocked an eyebrow at her. “People that hate us? Listen, kid, she's been waitin' for years for a chance to say, ‘To hell with you beggars.' Now she's said it. She's sold out Bennett land to outsiders, and this one time you can't do anything about it, so relax.”

“And asking us to look out for the—” She put her hands against her burning cheeks, trying to cool them. “I can't imagine what he'd be like except that she'd be sure to find somebody that would be horrible—he'll shut off the road—he'll—Oh, I wish I had her by the throat! Darn her smug soul!”

“Say ‘damn,'” Owen advised her. “Damn her soul. It tastes better. Damn Jeff and Hugo too, for my money. Even it they don't want to live here, they could at least hang on to the land.”

She stood by the windows, gazing out at Uncle Nate's Place, that had been Bennett property since Grandpa Bennett had bought the Island from the State of Maine. Was it for this those earliest Bennetts had toiled, living in a log cabin through their first winter on an uninhabited island twenty-five miles from the rest of the world; building the homestead with the sheer strength of their hands and shoulders; was it for this that her grandfather, and then her father, and then herself, Joanna, had fought to hold the Island community together? So that a Bennett's wife could betray him as soon as he was in his grave by selling his and his children's birthright?

If Jeff and Hugo hadn't wanted it, Jamie might have had it some day. But it was a stranger who had the deed. He owned the barn where she'd played, and the dose-cropped meadow land above Long Cove where the cows had come home at night, with all the western sky and sea ablaze with sunset behind them. He even owned the wild roses that grew against the seawall above Schoolhouse Cove. He owned the fields that were spangled in June with blue flag, red and white clover, daisies, buttercups in a shimmering sheet of gold, the sudden hot flame of devil's paintbrush; he wouldn't care about the strawberries that came in July, sweet and small, in clusters of rubies among the tall grasses; the Queen Anne's lace that made the field look frosty in the late August moonlight, the blackberries, and in October the glossy purple-red crop of cranberries. A stranger would claim the great pink pond-lilies that Uncle Nate had planted one year in the ice-pond, among which the seagulls came down to drink, settling themselves like white blossoms among the pink ones.

Her throat constricted. She wanted to cry, to swear, to go out and walk for long furious hours in the rain until she could wear out this passion of rage. She wanted Nils terribly, but even as she wanted him, she knew he couldn't help her.

She swung around accusingly on Owen. He sat at the table, his arms folded before him, his dark face set in harsh lines.

“I won't have him in my house!”

Owen shrugged. “I don't want him either. But we've got the little end of the stick and about all we can do is find out about the gink. We won't know much if he stays with Sig—or Thea.”

That decided her. Whoever he was, and whatever he was, it was certain that he'd heard a good deal of nonsense about the Bennetts from Aunt Mary, and he'd hear even more—of an unmistakably low caliber—from Thea. Out of self-defense, she would have to take him.

“I'll write to her,” she said.

“He might not be so bad—how do we know?”

She gave him a look and didn't answer; neither of them spoke of the letter again that day. When she wrote to Nils, she didn't tell him about it. Nothing was certain. Perhaps he hadn't bought it yet, anyway. Who ever heard of anyone with money to spend paying it out on something sight unseen? No, he was coming out to look it over, and then decide, and for a Mainlander the Island in March would be a bitter, barren place; the buildings needed repairs and it was next to impossible to get materials. For a little while, just before she went to bed, she felt a faint stir of relief, a lightening of heart. And then, when the lamp was out, and the finality of Nils' absence was a flat, irrevocable fact, the heaviness came back and stayed with her, pressing on her like the windy dark, until she fell asleep.

A
UNT
M
ARY'S FINAL WORD
, ornamented lushly with many thanks, said that “the man” would arrive on a date set in the first week in April. He was simply “the man” to Joanna and Owen, since they couldn't read the writing when she told them his name. Variously, Owen called him “that gink,” “that son of a gun,” and “that beggar,” until Joanna felt constrained to tell him it wasn't really the stranger's fault. In all fairness, he wasn't to be blamed. But she knew even while she was speaking that she resented him as furiously as Owen did and perhaps more, for Owen's rages burned up in him like a fire in dry driftwood, and went out in a cloud of steam like the very same fire when smothered with wet rockweed. Her own anger burned long and steadily . . . and she had always had a more ardent, deep-rooted kinship for the Island anyway.

No one else knew what was about to happen. Joanna forebore from writing the news to her older brothers and her mother at Pruitt's Harbor. She prepared Ellen's room for the boarder, and because there were certain rules of hospitality that had to be followed, her most beautiful quilts came out of the chest to blow for a day in the sunshine and wind.

Nora Fennell, Matthew's wife, came down on one of her rare visits that day, and her eyes widened at the sight of the prismatic colors glowing against the dull background of the barn.
“They're beautiful!
Are you cleaning house so soon, Jo?”

“Just airing quilts,” Joanna said briskly.

“Gram's made some nice ones.” Nora stood by the line fingering the corner of the Log-Cabin quilt. In her slacks, and with her thick glossy chestnut mop tied back by a ribbon, she looked barely twenty instead of almost thirty. Her gray eyes and wide, laughing mouth had made her irresistibly attractive when she had first come to the Island. Now there were two little dents at either corner of her mouth, from holding it so firmly, and her laughter came slowly. “Gram made some really lovely ones, but I won't use them.”

“Why?” Joanna shooed Jamie off the rug she wanted to sweep, and he stepped doggedly to one side.

“Because she made them, of course. Anything to annoy the old—” She stopped, and took out her cigarettes. “She hates this too. I'm a scarlet woman. Married, smokes, and won't have children.”

“Because she wants you to have children,” Joanna added, and Nora nodded. Joanna went on sweeping, aware of the aura of helpless resentment that hung around Nora. There was a hardness, too, about the girl that she didn't like. At first Nora'd been hurt or embarrassed by Gram's frankness. This was much worse. And Matthew was apparently unaware.

“I've heard about having children since before I married Matthew. She started talking about it then. Well, I wasn't going to have one at the end of the frrst nine months! If she'd kept quiet . . . honestly, Joanna, I think the devil's in her! She's eighty-eight, and she can make me mad enough to want to strangle her!” Joanna looked up, because the hardness had been replaced by something like panic. “She about drives me crazy! I don't know what it's like to live alone with Matthew! It's not my house, it's Gram's. When I go home she'll start in, telling me I wouldn't have time to run around if I was doing my wifely duties.” Her eyes filled suddenly. “She hated Bosun, and after he died I knew I hated her, because he'd never done anything in life that was bad, poor little feller. . . . But I couldn't even cry for him, because she'd made it sound as if I was . . .
crazy
. . . somehow, loving a dog that much. I'd have had a baby, once. I wanted one. But not now.”

Her voice hardened again. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, ground her cigarette into the dirt. “Excuse me, Jo . . . huh?”

Jamie put his arms around her knees, and looked up. “Hurt finner?”

“He thinks you've hurt your finger,” Joanna said, and understood when Nora put the child away from her without answering him or looking directly into his anxious face.

“I'll go back and put the potatoes on, I guess. Gosh, I envy you, Joanna. Even if Nils has to be away, you know what you've got is yours, and nobody's telling you or criticizing—”

Joanna wanted to say something reassuring to Nora, but there was nothing to say, so she let her go.

The small room looked pleasant enough when she was done with it. She washed the wide, blue-painted floorboards, and made up the old spool bed with the quilts, set a blue-and-white pitcher and basin on the white washstand, hung fresh curtains. She put several books on the stand beside the bed, and an ash tray.
He'll see that we know how to read, anyway
, she thought grimly, knowing that Aunt Mary was prone to describe her Bennett relations as something akin to a gypsy encampment or a settlement of half-breeds.

On the morning of the day he was to come, she awoke before dawn and wondered about the weather. A trip across the bay in the
Aurora B
., and then the final three miles from Brigport Harbor to Bennett's, had been enough to discourage some visitors from ever trying it again. So if it were a very bad day today, it would help. On the other hand, Owen had to go to meet him, and she still had stomach-wringing moments of apprehension when a boat set out for Brigport in really bad weather.

But there was no wind; the silence before dawn was a heavy and absolute thing. Perhaps it was going to be a day like the one before Nils left, so beautiful that it hurt. She would have to wait a while to see. She watched for the sky to pale above the saw-toothed wall of spruces, and she must have dozed, because almost before she knew it the sky had turned a flaming and treacherous red. The bar of color ended abruptly against the rim of the cloud ceiling, which reflected faintly rosy waves. Then, as she watched, it faded and she knew this would be a gray, still day with a raw-edged cold that seeped into the bones and permeated every corner of the house, even with two fires. At this time of year, without the saving grace of snow on the spruces, or the evident beginnings of spring, this sort of day could be the most dismal and discouraging of all.

Faintly ashamed of her elation, she slid out from under the warm covers, put on her robe and slippers, and went down to build the kitchen fire. The dog padded down the stairs behind her.

Owen went out to haul before he went to Brigport, and when it was almost time for him to come home, she took Jamie and went out. She had her dinner started, a substantial lobster chowder and a thick squash pie. There would be hot biscuits, too, apple jelly, and coffee. She hoped he'd enjoy it, because she wouldn't. She wouldn't relish any meal eaten while he was in the house.

She walked down to the shore, pacing her step to Jamie's. Now he was ahead of her, now behind her, and the dog Dick was all around them. In the sullen quiet Jamie's voice was loud, and the harsh cries of the crows flying over the woods were thrown down to earth by the low, dense ceiling of cloud. The woods looked black, the fields below were dun-colored; the empty houses looked desolate, like people who are waiting in bleak loneliness, with their shoulders hunched up and their hands driven into their pockets, their faces passive and blank. She felt a chill of homesickness for the old days, when the established things were safe. Now nothing was safe; neither the Island nor the world.

She turned to the left by the fish houses and walked around the shore toward Grant's Point, twin to Eastern Harbor Point; the two high, spruce-crested arms of rock made the harbor. The Grant house, long empty, stood drearily against a dreary sky. Below it, half on the wharf and half on the solid ground, the building that had been the store and post-office for so many years huddled against the shelter of the point. The shingles were curled at the edges, and there were scarred places where the shingles were gone altogether. The wharf itself was in worse repair. No one ever used it now, preferring the Old Wharf across the harbor.

Jamie pulled hard on her hand. “Come on, Mama . . . come on.” He wanted to go out on the wharf, and she shook her head.

“It's not safe, Jamie. We'll fall into the water.” Jamie pulled his brows together, looking comically like Owen, and stared down through the long shed at the forbidden territory. Until Pete Grant had closed up shop and gone to the mainland, the mail boat had landed passengers and freight on this wharf for over forty years, and the lobster car, where Pete had bought thousands of pounds of lobsters from Island fishermen, had lain in the shelter of the wharf. Before the war, Nils and the other men left on the Island had put the wharf in fairly good shape, but two years of storms had undone their work.

She thought with a blend of humiliation and pleasure that the principal wharf of Bennett's Island wouldn't present a very favorable impression to a stranger.

A chill struck through her coat and seemed to permeate her very thoughts. She turned restlessly, still holding Jamie's hand, and walked back along the shore. “A boat!” Jamie shrilled, and she listened, her heart quickening unpleasantly. But it was Sigurd's boat, coming in around Grant's Point. Against the sleek, gunmetal sea the long line of the wake gleamed with unnatural whiteness. The big boat cut swiftly across the harbor toward the Old Wharf, and Jamie listened raptly to the engine. He waved, and was not discouraged because Sigurd hadn't seen him. He was waving to the boat and not to the man.