High Tide at Noon (10 page)

“I wish you would,” said Joanna.

Nils looked out for a moment at the white foam on Goose Cove Ledge. Then he shrugged. “Come on, they'll be yelling at us,” he said.

They walked along over the white beach rocks, surf tumbling toward them and retreating with a deep, sucking roar. The water was pale green and gray in the faint sunshine.

“I can't put up with much more of it,” Nils said. “When my father comes back from the mainland I' m going to have a talk with him. We could have a place of our own—Kristi could keep house, and we'd all be a damn sight happier.”

“Oh, golly, yes,” said Joanna with enthusiasm. She had never seen Nils quite so angry; she had certainly never heard him call his grandfather an old bastard. Always he had been silent on family affairs, he had been patient with the old tyrant. Too patient, Joanna thought sometimes. . . . “Do you think Karl will listen?” she asked doubtfully.

Nils laughed, without amusement. Oh, he'll listen. But he'll listen to Grampa too. And Grampa always comes out on top. Father's so used to letting Gunnar live his life for him I can't figure out how he ever managed to get married. Grampa named Sigurd and Kris and me as it was.” His voice softened abruptly. “All but David. My mother had her own way for once—and then she died.”

Joanna put her hand on his arm, but she didn't speak. Words were needless between her and Nils. He looked down at her hand; at the same time Owen hailed them over the sound of water and wind.

“Cripes almighty, are you two with us or taking a walk by yourselves?”

Nils' austere face broke suddenly into a youthful grin. “The rooster's sounding off. We'd better drive 'er!” They ran, longlegged and fleet and young, across the cove toward the wet dark woods.

They climbed a wooded slope, over fallen spruces and dead branches, and lichened outcroppings of rock. The young trees were brilliantly green among the old ones; here and there a birch stood alone, slender and very white against the darker trees, its bare branches spread in a delicate tracery tinged with amethyst. Little streams of water ran down the slope, across pads of emerald-green moss, to disappear into the ground before they reached Goose Cove. In the sheltered hollows there was ice, but in open places where the sun could reach, there were patches of new green grass, and tiny leaves that meant violets to come.

They scaled the rocky steepness and came to the cemetery, with the orchard beyond it; the wind-racked apple trees were bare, but there seemed to be a faintly rosy tint along the gray trunks. The buds on the big maple that towered above the cemetery were beginning to show red. In a week they would gleam like so many brilliant candle flames against the dark firs.

“My tree,” said Joanna briefly, touching the trunk. Nils nodded. “Pretty,” he said.

“Who is?” demanded Hugo, swinging around. “Hey, what are you saying to my cousin, you Svenska?”

Owen was inspecting a clump of well-grown spruces with narrow, speculative eyes. “Not much here,” he said. “Five or six limbs out of the whole bunch, maybe. Not worth the time.”

“He looks at those trees the way he looks at a bunch of women,” said Hugo. “You should've seen him last time we went ashore. Looked down that big Bennett nose at everything in skirts. I don't know what in hell he wants for a woman, anyway.”

Owen grinned. “Some day I'll show you, son,” he promised lazily.

They attacked the next slope, sodden and dark under trees whose branches matted so closely that no sunshine ever struck through. It was cold and damp here, but suddenly they were on the rise, and overhead the sky had cleared all at once to a sunlit, luminous blue. There was warmth and light all around them, and enough trees of the right size to cut limbs for a hundred pots. Later, in the shop, the limbs would be arched into the bows that were the skeletons for the new traps.

Hugo, the slightest of the boys, went up into the first tree. He was incredibly nimble in his heavy rubber boots.

“Looks natural as hell, don't he?” said Owen.

“Anybody that don't believe we come from monkeys ought to see that,” said Nils. “Clear proof, just as sure as you're born.”

“All he needs is a tail to swing from,” Joanna chimed in, while Hugo shouted from the treetop like an embattled eagle.

“Get that saw up here, goddam it! Laugh, you fools, while I'm stuck in a mess of pitch I'll never get free of!”

“We'll leave you there for a monument to something or other,” Joanna consoled him. Nils handed up the saw and Hugo began on the nearest limbs. Nils lopped off the choice boughs that grew close to the ground; Owen trimmed them smooth with his hatchet. They worked well together, with no wasted motion.

Joanna sat on a sun-dried stump, listening to the busy “yank­yank” of the nuthatches, an occasional hawk's sharp cry, the trilling and tuning-up of sparrows in the woods. She felt contented here; if only she too could have had a hatchet to cut limbs, she would have been completely happy. But it was pleasant to look for signs of spring around her, and watch the boys at work. Owen was really handsome, she thought with pride; it was nice to have a good-looking family. His every motion was strong and vigorous, his very pose was suggestive of controlled but endless energy.

Nils, tying up a bundle of limbs with potwarp, lifted his yellow head toward her; his faint smile came and went, and then he was absorbed again. With the smile gone, his thin face was taut-lipped, and Joanna felt a pang of angry sympathy.

Life was no easy business for Nils, who must watch his younger sister and brother grow up in the shadow of a viciously domineering old grandfather. His father was a weak wraith of a man who had escaped from the unkind reality of life by simply ignoring it. He worked from day to day in a waking dream. Sigurd, the oldest son, could laugh at everything, even his grandfather. There was a time when he had laughed once too often, and now he lived alone—and right merrily—in a camp on the beach. Nils could have gone to live with him, but he was not of the stuff that looks for an easy escape. He chose to stay with David and Kristi. Loyalty was not just a word to him; loyalty was the very substance of his being, stubborn, patient, and enduring.

Her mind came back suddenly to the sunny clearing, with the nuthatches' busy voices and the pungence of fresh-cut spruce wood, the mild wind stirring her hair on her neck. It must have been Hugo who broke her train of thought.

“You guys—you don't have any technique,” he was saying, leaning precariously out from the tree.

“Look at the trash that fish is throwing down,” said Owen. “He's thinking so much about his technique he don't know what he's cutting. He's no more use than a flea.”

“And just as big an itch,” said Nils dryly.

“Go ahead and chew,” Hugo invited them. “My shoulders are broad. Anyway, I feel so goddam good I don't care how much you crod.” He looked irrepressibly merry. He waited, saw poised in air, and Joanna wanted to chuckle. Hugo was bragging again, and his audience was extremely unhelpful.

“Of course I understand how it is,” he said generously. “When a man knows he just can't get anywhere with a woman, cripes, I'd be the last one to blame him for looking ugly.” “Put him out of his misery, boys,” said Joanna. “Ask him who it is.”

Owen drove his hatchet into a stump and cast a resigned glance heavenward. “All right,” he said on a sigh. “Whose leg you been feelin' now?”

Hugo came down the tree, attempted to look nonchalant, and failed. Nils sat back on his heels and lit a cigarette. “I suppose we got to listen to his childish prattle.”

“You'll laugh off the other side of your face when I get through telling you.” Hugo settled against a warm tree trunk, looking dreamy. “Well, I was drivin' 'er along from the store about sundown one day last week—a Tuesday, it was—or was it Thursday? Well, here I am, and there's a lady going to the well with a bucket. So, being a gentleman like all the Bennetts, I carried the bucket home for her.”

“Who was it—Susie Yetton?” said Nils. Owen chuckled. And Hugo, with an elaborate indifference that couldn't possibly hide his triumph, said, “Well, boys, I carried that pail of water into the Binnacle.”

Owen said incredulously, “The Binnacle?
Leah Foster?
”

“Surprised, ain't you?” Hugo's mouth twitched with excited laughter. “Well, it's true. You could've knocked me stiffer'n a maggot . . . Old Neddie watches her like a hawk, but he'd gone to Vinalhaven, and I guess the lady was lonely.”

Owen was frankly scornful. “My God, you're kind of hard up, aren't you?”

“Lemme tell you, chummy!” Exultant color burned on Hugo's cheekbones. “She's got something you'll never find the like of!”

“You been back since then?” Nils asked.

“Sure. Just last night.” Hugo looked dreamily into the cigarette smoke, shook his head, and sighed deeply. It was a blissful sound. “I guess it's no picnic for her, married to that old man, and her still a young woman.”

Owen straightened up, lower lip prominent and eyebrows a scowling black bar across his brown face. “Let me get this straight. You mean you just carried a pail of water home for her and that was all there was to it?”

“Sure! Asked me to stop a while, in that nice little voice of hers. Welcomed me right in. And you can't blame a fella for trying to be friendly . . . if she acts like she'd like some friendliness.” Hugo twinkled, and Joanna stood up.

“He's getting set to tell you all the details. I'm going for a walk before I get embarrassed.”

“As if you never stood around and listened with all ears to his crazy yarns,” grunted Owen.

“And believed all he said about his technique and just how he gets his women,” added Nils.

Joanna rumpled Hugo's head. “Never mind, darlin', if it wasn't for you and your women, I'd never have learned the facts of life. Give me your knife, Owen. I'll get some spruce gum for Mark and Stevie.”

As she walked away, she heard Hugo begin, with a deliberate drawl, “Well, when I went into the kitchen . . . “ His voice faded as she entered the cool sun-spattered gloom under the great spruces that abruptly walled her in. The path was black mud underfoot, but the gently swaying treetops touched April's cloud-dappled skies.

It was too early yet for the small song birds that would come in migration time to spend the warm months in the Island woods, but the crossbills, the nuthatches, and an early robin were noisily industrious all around Joanna. From the topmost branches of a dead fir, a crow made hoarse inquiries, challenging Joanna's presence here in his domain.

This was the highest part of the Island. In a little while the path turned steeply downward, there was a scent of salt water edging the breeze, and a deepening roar from not-distant surf. Joanna, whistling under her breath, filled her pockets with spruce gum. She wondered if the younger boys, when they opened the box, would remember how the woods looked in spring, how the mud squished around your feet and small coins of sunlight slipped through the green boughs and were warm on your face.

A freshening wind, a glimmer of light beyond the dark trunks, and she knew she was coming out to the water—Old Man's Cove, on the west side. It was hardly more than a gash in the towering red-brown rock. As Joanna went down on the beach the blown spray fell on her cheeks with a cold light touch. The mouth of the cove was choked with foam; beyond it the whole western sea was a sheet of rippling silver, and the world was full of the vast roar. Tiny and shrill came the cries of the gulls as they floated high on the wind.

It was a moment before Joanna's eyes saw a man knee-deep in the surf. His boots were pulled up to his hips, and the foam swirled about his legs as he watched a plank drive toward him through the creamy green and white froth. He was dark against the sun as he caught the plank and waded shoreward, dragging his catch up over the rolling beach stones. Then Joanna saw the coppery gleam of hair that meant Simon Bird.

Almost at the same moment Simon saw her. It had been three years since she had spoken to him. Meeting him on the road or at the store, she looked past him with remote dark eyes. Even in the rush and laughter of a square dance, she would be silent in his arms, as if he didn't exist, and sometimes he would tighten his fingers around her hand until she bit her lips to keep from crying out; but her silence always held, and when he let her go his mouth would be thinned and hard, his face drained white with fury beneath his red crest.

Now he was coming up the beach toward her in long rapid strides, and he was smiling a little. Because I'm not running away, Joanna thought. Because he knows he could catch up with me if I did run . . . Her hands in her jacket pockets had unconsciously clenched, and her face felt cold, as if the blood had quite left it. Watching him, knowing he would presently be close enough to speak, she wondered if anybody else in the world possessed a hatred like this one. When she met Gunnar Sorensen, her resentment boiled and bubbled inside her, and swift turbulent words fought to come out instead of the civil, “Hello, Mr. Sorensen.” But it was different when she saw Simon. It was a cold and soundless thing . . . And deadly.

“Hello, Joanna,” he said, and it was as she remembered it, the narrow, smoky-gray eyes looking at her with an odd concentration in spite of the easy smile; the voice that was soft as a cat's tread when it stalked a bird. “You're far from home,” the voice said.

She looked at him wordlessly, with a black and insolent stare; her bold cheekbones, whipped red by the wind, her strong Bennett nose, her very chin, expressed her supreme contempt.

So they faced each other.

“Mad, ain't ye?” he said. “You've been mad for a hell of a long time, and I don't know as I blame you.” She didn't answer, and he went on, “I've been wanting to tell you for a long time,” he said, “I know I didn't do right. But I was crazy wild . . . You're grown-up now, you're smart, you're not one of these narrow ones who don't understand the way a man is when a girl's got him hogtied.” It was soft and it was beguiling, the way he looked into her eyes. Once, Joanna had been beguiled. But only once.