High Tide at Noon (25 page)

Her mother, setting the table, said, “Joanna, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.”

“Why?” Joanna put down her bundles and stared.

“Mark's got a girl.”

“Oh, Mother!” Joanna began to laugh. “Are you surprised? He's sixteen, and you know the Bennetts! Stevie's got a new love, too.”

Donna sat down. “That
baby?
Who is it?”

“Basketball.”

They laughed together as they put dinner on the table for themselves and the boys. Philip and Stephen wouldn't be in from hauling till midafternoon. And Owen—

“They must be there by now,” Joanna said absently, trying to see the boat in her mind, and the three boys eating dinner in the cuddy, laughing, joking, talking about the money they were going to make.

“Who? Oh, you mean this Cash's business.” Donna shook her head. “I don't mind admitting I'll be glad to see that boat come into the harbor again, money or no money.”

“Mother—” Joanna began, and hesitated. To her mother's inquiring blue glance she said briskly, “Do you want the cake or the pudding for dinner?”

No, it was too early to tell her about Alec. He had only come in April; they would think she didn't know him well enough, or that she was too young. As if love didn't tell you everything! As if time or age made any difference! But you couldn't explain to anyone how it was when he kissed you there in the dark entry, how it was as if you had always known what would happen. . . .

“Pudding, I think,” her mother was saying. “Your Aunt Mary brought up some heavy cream this morning.”

The boys were gone all afternoon. They came in at supper, sunburned, sweaty, noisy; wrestling at the sink, filling the house with their healthy and impudent chatter. It was their first day home, and no one put a damper on them. Time enough to calm them down tomorrow, when their regular tasks would begin. There was baiting­up for them to do, painting, weeding in the vegetable garden, wood to chop and water to fetch ; they would go fishing with their father during the Closed Season, and be paid for their share.

After supper Joanna walked around Schoolhouse Cove to get the milk at Uncle Nate's, and the boys went with her, Winnie an adoring shadow at their heels. As they went through the gate, Mark said abruptly, “Listen, Jo, what's Charles done? Sure, I know Mateel got caught on a stump—”

“Mark, if you say that again I'll slap your face.”

“All right, then.” He laughed. “I won't say it. But Charles married her. Does that make him an outcast?”

“He made himself an outcast if you want to call it that. He knew how Father felt about the Trudeaus.”

“Mateel's no worse than anybody else.”

“She's not a bad girl. It's the family. Oh, when you've got boys of your own, you'll understand better.” She couldn't help being very adult, and Mark flushed under his dark skin.

“I understand enough. I know Charles hasn't set foot near the house since he got married.” He flung up his head in the familiar defiant gesture so like Owen's. “I'm going down there and see him tonight.”

He waited for Joanna to answer, his eyes very bright. Quite suddenly, she smiled. “Golly, hell be glad to see you.”

Stevie chuckled. “Fooled you that time, Marcus Aurelius. You were all set for a fight.”

“Gripes, I'm going to have one, too,” said Mark, and Joanna went suddenly sprawling over his foot. She reached up and caught him around his knees, and for a moment there was unbounded confusion in the midst of the evening primrose and beach peas, with Stevie helpless from wild laughter, and Winnie running in frantic circles around them all. All at once Joanna found herself sitting on Mark's chest.

“Can you breathe?” she asked him anxiously.

“Sure I can!”

“Then I'll sit here till you're cold and lifeless.”

“Like hell you will!” With one mighty heave he rolled her off, and Stevie pulled her to her feet. Slightly out of breath, they continued across the pleasant meadow, their shadows long before them in the mellow sunset light.

Mark left them where the road turned off to the barn. He went on toward the Eastern End woods. Stevie looked wistfully at the vast bulk of the barn against the brilliant western sky and sea. “We could play basketball in there, if Uncle Nate—”

“Well, he won't,” Joanna assured him. “And they've milked already, so we can just leave our jug on the doorstep and take our milk, and go home again.”

“That's good. I don't want to talk to Aunt Mary tonight.” Stevie was frowning. He picked up the warm full jug, and they went back to the road. “Nice gardens Uncle Nate's got laid out this year. Jo—”

“Mmm,” she said absently. There was something on his mind, and she mustn't seem too eager.

“Know where I was this afternoon?” he said. “I went down and helped David clean up the barn. Gunnar was over at Brigport, or I couldn't have stayed.”

“You had a good chance to talk, then.”

Stevie nodded. His face was absorbed, he didn't know how closely Joanna was watching him. Mark had already taken on the taut, reckless look of Owen and Charles, but Stevie's long lashes, which he hated, and his shyness, gave him a very young air. It was an anxious air at the moment. Joanna waited.

“David's going to run away,” he said at last.

“Tonight?”

“No,” said Stevie, “but the next time Gunnar gives him a whipping.” There was nothing childish about the dark rage across his face. “Gunnar beat him this morning, and it was awful. Right after the boat, it was—right after we were talking. That old bastard! He only did it because Nils was gone.”

“What did he whip him for?”

“He told Dave to clean out the barn this morning, and when Dave heard the
Aurora B
. whistle, he beat it down to the wharf—just to say hello, that was all. So you could say it's really my fault,” he added flatly.

“Maybe. But that wasn't bad enough to whip him for. So David's going to run away.” She looked out across Schoolhouse Cove, dark blue in the lee; far out on the horizon there was a line of gold, and the Rock towers still caught the sunlight.

“He's desperate, Jo. Golly, every time he moved, it hurt him. Anna came out and brought us some lemonade, and she looked at him and began to cry, and Kristi was white as that schoolhouse there. They hate it when Gunnar lights into him, but they can't do anything about it.” Stevie's mouth was tight. “Jo, I'm telling you this, because you'll take it right, and not make a fuss about it. When David runs away, I'm going with him.”

Her heart gave a sickening lurch, but she said evenly, “Why?”

“He isn't fit to go alone. He'd get lost, and into all kinds of messes. He's so
little
, Jo.”

She smiled at that. “He's older than you.”

“But he doesn't know so much,” said Stevie seriously. “He wasn't brought up like me, and he doesn't go to high school. Gunnar won't let him read anything but the Bible—remember when I lent him
Under Two Flags
, and Gunnar threw it in the fire? Gosh, Jo, David doesn't know half as much as I do.”

They stopped by the gate to wait for Winnie; she was flushing ground sparrows in the marsh. Stevie said, “You see what I mean, don't you?”

“Yes, only promise me something, will you, Steve? Come and tell me before you go.”

“I can't do that. I already promised David I wouldn't tell any body, only I figured I'd better tell you a little about it. When we go, you can tell them up there.” He nodded toward the house. “I wouldn't want 'em to think I wasn't happy, or something.”

She wanted desperately to take him into her arms and hug him hard, but instead she snapped her fingers at Winnie and turned toward the house.

“You understand, don't you?” He was anxious. “I just have to go with him.”

“Sure I understand, Stevie!” She looked back at him smiling. “Race you up the hill!”

The anxious look went out of his eyes and he began to run, overtaking his sister, with the dog nipping happily at their heels.

T
HREE DAYS WENT BY
, three days of June at its loveliest. Overnight the daisies came out and whitened the fields; the barn swallows came back to Nate Bennett's barn and Gunnar's—sleek darting shadows, with eyes like tiny gems. The lobsters were crawling thickly, as if to give the men one magnificent series of hauls before the Closed Season began, when the lobsters could carry on their shedding and breeding without interference.

“The boys ought to do well out there,” more than one man said, and Hugo talked urgently to Jeff and Philip about making the trip while the weather held good. Joanna hardly dared to think what it would mean if the boys came back with eight or ten hundred dollars' worth of lobsters. She only knew that the thought of marrying Alec in the summer filled her with a rapture that was almost too great to keep secret. And it seemed to her that the whole world unknowingly shared the happiness that burned in her like an unfaltering flame.

There were three days of beauty and richness and promise, and on the fourth day the wind rose. It came from the northeast, a cold, howling, wet wind without mercy or respite.

The Bennetts didn't talk about the storm, and to Joanna the silence was worse than talk. To see her father or Philip pause by the seaward windows and look out through the streaming glass, to see them turn away with only blankness on their faces, was enough to draw every nerve to unbearable tightness. The hours were endless, from the moment she awoke to the familiar assault of wind and rain against her window; not only for Joanna, but for them all.

Mark and Stevie came in at noontime, their cheeks fiery red from the cold rain, and hung up their streaming slickers and sou'westers in the entry, talking all the time. “Jeeley Criley, it's a humdinger!” Mark said with enthusiasm. “Pete Grant says he'll call the Coast Guard any time you say, Father.”

“The boys can find their way home quicker than the Coast Guard can find them,” Stephen said. Nothing else was said. The family sat down to dinner and talked casually about Island affairs. But Mark was obsessed with a desire to talk about the storm.

“They're all worried, down at the harbor. You know what that goddam—what Aunt Mary said when I was up there this morning? She says—” He minced into a crude but realistic caricature of his uncle's wife. “She says, ‘I don't know why your father let Owen go. Then they'd none of 'em gone. Owen's the ringleader in all the deviltry, always was!'”

He broke off as he met his father's eye, shrugged, and began to eat busily. “I felt like kicking her someplace,” he observed in muffled defiance to his plate.

Stevie grinned, but it was an anxious grin. He was too young and too sensitive to hide his worry behind an impassive face or a swagger. Joanna forced herself to eat. They were all thinking of Owen, and the Sorensen clan was thinking about Nils, but while she thought of her brother and her old friend, there was also Alec.

The younger boys were out again when dinner was over, and Philip went down to the shore.

“This weather will drive them in from Cash's,” Donna said cheerfully. “I'm glad there's plenty of chowder left.” She chuckled softly. “I'm thinking Cap'n Owen's going to know what it is to be seasick before this gale blows itself out.”

“Take him down a peg or two,” Stephen murmured. “He's a mite too cocky, that one. I wonder how Alec's taking it.”

Joanna, wiping dishes, had an instant picture in her mind of Alec being washed overboard, lost at once between mountains of gray water, of the others circling vainly, calling against the howl of wind and the beating rain. No, he'll have to come back, she thought, setting her lips like steel. This can't happen to us, when we've just found out. But in the next breath she knew it could happen, and suddenly it seemed the most real thing in the world; almost she could see the boat limp into the harbor in the silence after the storm, she could see Owen and Nils, gaunt, unshaven, hollow-eyed; she could hear the way they would tell it.

I'd have to run away, she thought in panic. I couldn't listen to them. I couldn't tell them about us, knowing he'd never come back again.

She hung up the dish towels. “I'm going out for a while,” she said.

“Put on your boots,” her mother said. Joanna wondered if they would talk after she had gone, if they would speak of their anxiety.

Schoolhouse Cove was choked with breakers and foam, the air was filled with the heavy waves' thunder. The rain was needle-sharp on Joanna's face as she went down the road. By the Binnacle she met Kristi, on her way to Karl's fish house. Her face was pale under her grandmother's shawl, her blue eyes wider than ever.

“Jo, d'you think they're all right?”

“Of course they are,” Joanna said scornfully. “Nils' boat is seaworthy, isn't she? It'll take more than a northeaster to hurt them.”

“That's what I keep thinking.” But Kristi's smile wavered. “Only Gramma's going around singing 'Precious Name,' and crying, and it gets on my nerves.”

“Why don't you come up to the house?”

“I can't. David's waiting for me in the shop. I'm going to help him clean it up.”

“Come up when you get a chance, then.” Kristi nodded and went over the wet beach stones, splashed with black where tar had been spilled; the dripping wild caraway fronds and chicory made wet lines on her coat. She waved to Joanna from the doorway, and Joanna waved back from the path.

It was sheltered here at the harbor, but all around was grayness and a wet smell, from the drenched ground and green stuff and the little rocky beach between Karl's fish house and Pete Grant's big wharf. Somewhere in the misty vastness overhead a gull was crying; more gulls poised tranquilly on the shining tarred roof of the store. White water jetted high at the mouth of the harbor, and the roar of wind and surf seemed to fill the world.