High Tide at Noon (36 page)

By May, Owen's boat was well under way. The
White Lady
was shaping up to be a beauty; the whole Island was agreed on that, and almost every family felt a proprietary interest in her, since the Sorensen boys, the Grays, the Birds, the Trudeaus, and Alec spent most of their leisure time in the boat shop. The older men stopped by to look on and smoke and offer casual advice. But it was the young men who built the
White Lady
.

Owen's feeling for her made the family bear with his black moods, which seemed to them blacker than usual. If something went wrong, if some new tool or material didn't come when he expected it, if one of the older men implied that he was a raw amateur at boat-building, and that the
Lady
would probably show him up, he was almost insane with fury. He would walk away without speaking and tramp for hours through the woods or over the steepest, ugliest rocks on Sou-west Point, until he had walked some portion of his rage out of his system and could endure people again.

He took to wandering around the Island long after everyone was asleep. What he thought as he wandered, no one knew. But his walks always ended in the boat shop, and there in the darkness the
White Lady
loomed above him, a pale and towering shape. The air was warm, and aromatic with new wood, and shavings were soft under his rubber boots. He would walk around his boat, needing no light to show him the gallant, lovely line of her stem, the smooth, perfectly proportioned flare of her bow.

If ever dreams were built with timber and nails, it was during those months when the
White Lady
was coming into being.

There was a long fog mull toward the end of May. For a week the Island was shrouded in mist that blew back and forth as the wind shifted. Sometimes in the morning the sun burned through, and showed a patch of luminous blue. Sometimes at night one saw the stars. But always the fog stayed, and after a while the Islanders hardly heard the foghorn out at the Rock, they were so accustomed to it. The grass was wet and the woods dripped. In the harbor, the water was a motionless silvery gray; in the patches of slick, the trees on the point were perfectly mirrored, as if in the most tranquil lake.

At night, Owen walked in the muffled silence. Leaving Joanna's house one evening, he took the long way home, through the village, so that he could stop in the boat shop. There was a faint chuckle and swish of the incoming tide around the old wharf's spilings that hid the slight sound of his feet on the path. The shop door was usually ajar, and he stepped inside without moving it—stepped into the warm, wood-fragrant darkness to see a slowly moving light playing over the
White Lady's
rounded side, far aft.

He stood motionless, watching the flickering light, the play of shadows around it, until it glinted on something red. It was just for an instant, but he recognized in that instant Simon Bird's red hair.

He moved forward through the muffling shavings until he could see the hands working swiftly and deftly in the circle of light. Simon's hands; he could tell by the ring on the hand that held the knife. Then it would be Ash who was holding the light. He could see its faint glow on the front of the red and black plaid shirt Ash wore. That was why the light jumped so. Ash was always nervous, afraid of his own shadow. But Simon worked steadily, his knife driving the oakum deep into the seams, the long ends of oakum that Nils and Hugo left trailing when they finished their day's stint of caulking, so they could tell where they'd left off. A boat whose caulking had been persistently tampered with would cause trouble from the moment she was launched.

There was no rage in Owen, only a cold elation that he had caught them. He walked forward through the shavings, noiseless as an Indian, and with one powerful surge he drove his fist into Simon's intent face.

Simon reeled backward, swearing from a bleeding mouth. Almost simultaneously Ash dropped the flashlight, and it went out. But Owen had a grip on the front of Simon's shirt that no one could shake, and in the pitch blackness he hit again and again, without speaking. He heard, through Simon's hard breathing and the scuffling of their feet, young Ash running for the door. He chuckled, and his hard hand made one more contact with the side of Simon's head before Simon wrenched himself free. Owen let him go.

“The bastards,” he said softly, stepping over to the
White Lady
and stroking her with his hand. “The sons o' bitches.” It was almost as if he were trying to comfort her.

In June, the
White Lady
was launched. They had a pretty day for the event; a blue and shining day, when the tide was high in midafternoon, the wind northwest, the sky flawless. The whole Island came down to the beach to see Nate Bennett's tractor haul the
White Lady
out of the shop and into the light of day.

Joanna stood by the anchor, near her mother and Mateel, watching the men as they worked around the boat. She felt a constriction in her throat, her eyes smarted. How lovely she was, how big, how shining and white and untouched. She saw Alec straighten up from adjusting a roller; his thin face was gay and proud and excited. There was pride and admiration in her father's face too, and in the other brothers'. But Owen looked stern and dark, and hardly spoke. It was no time for talk.

Every man on the Island, with the exception of Ash and Simon Bird, was gathered around the boat. Even George Bird was there, lending a hand. Not working very hard at it, but still, he was there. Old Gunnar stood on the wharf, hands on his hips, and said nothing; it was an Island proverb that when Gunnar couldn't find anything bad to say, he didn't say anything.

The
Lady
was on the sloping beach now, she wouldn't have far to go to reach the water. Stern first, that was it; her bow towered above Joanna and the others who watched from the road. Launched bow first, she'd bring bad luck to everyone who ever owned her. Out by the end of the old wharf, Philip's boat idled; there was a line from the
Gull
to the stern of the
White Lady
.

The men lined up on either side of the new boat to hold her upright, rubber boots digging into the beach stones. Owen and Alec put the heavy pole under her bow and leaned all their combined weight on the other end of the pole, lifting the boat enough to give her a start. There was a creaking and a rumbling, and the
Lady
moved on the rollers. Lifted hands on either white-painted side held her steady when she would have heeled. Slowly, yet irrevocably, she moved down the faint incline of the beach, until the clear green ripples lapped against the coppered bottom. As she slipped easily into the water, Owen scrambled over the side and into the cockpit.

The
White Lady
was afloat. Like a gull resting, she lay on the water, her white sides reflecting below her. For a moment she was uncertain, dancing slightly, moving timidly with the current. Then Owen shifted the line from her stern to her bow, and Philip headed the
Gull
out into the wide harbor. She followed, gliding docilely across the bright water.

Something like a sigh went up from those on the beach. Joanna tried to force the mist away from her eyes. Behind her, Nathan Parr blew his nose.

“With all I seen la'nched in my day,” he muttered to Johnny Fernandez, “it always gits me just the same. They seem so young­like—scairt, and yet they knew they was goin' where they belonged.”

He blew his nose again. Out in the
White Lady
Owen stood by the wheel. His face was set and grim, locked lest his fierce exaltation should show through and be seen. But Joanna knew that it was beating like drums through his body.

I
N
J
UNE
, S
TEVIE GRADUATED
from high school. The Bennetts were all together on the Island, and true to form, Stevie began to build his pots for the fall. He recaulked and painted Owen's old peapod, and seemed perfectly happy and contented. Joanna and Donna, picking the wild strawberries on the point, talked about it.

“We're all alike,” Joanna said. “We want to be on the Island.”

“Still, I wish one of the boys had wanted to go to college,” Donna mused. “I had an idea Stevie—oh, well, if he didn't want to be a fisherman, people would think he was a queer sort of Bennett.”

“It's not so much being a fisherman as it's staying where you belong—in your own kind of air, along beside your own special piece of ocean.” Today that ocean was a tranquil Mediterranean blue beyond Goose Cove, dark green in the shallows where the rocks loomed above the still, cold water, and the spruces came down to the very edge. The sky was the lovely tender color Joanna had dreamed about all winter long, and it seemed as if wild strawberries had always a warmer, more melting tenderness than she'd remembered. She sat cross-legged in the grass, eating berries from a cluster, and said, “Stevie knows he'll never be any happier than when he's rowing his own peapod across that water, and hauling traps he's built himself. Maybe it isn't ambitious, but it's darned satisfactory.”

“And it's one more to worry about when the Closed Season's over,” said Donna briskly. “There are times when I just don't feel romantic about the lobster industry.”

They laughed, and at the sound of their laughter, Winnie got up from where she lay panting under a wild pear bush, and came over to them, amber eyes and waving tail asking to be let in on the joke.

With the Closed Season, the men were busier than ever. Their traps had to be brought in, dried out, repaired, and stacked in trim rows around the shore. They brought their boats up on the beach to be painted and overhauled. They helped in the gardens, reshingled their roofs and painted their houses, built new chicken yards, and managed to keep busy until the Season was over.

But most of the men, either through necessity or choice, went fishing. Alec went trawling for hake outside the Rock, so far from the Island that
The Basket
seemed like a brave little cockleshell alone on the sea. Joanna went with him sometimes; she liked the feeling of being suspended in a great and shining blue world. She lay on the bow, feeling the gentle and persistent motion of the boat as it drifted on the smooth water, and shut her eyes against the sun as she listened to Alec's contented whistling.

The summer was like a long breath after the winter. The biggest debts were paid, and the fishing was good, so that they could order something new from the catalog once in a while. Alec worked hard and long, came home to go to bed early and get up at daylight. Joanna and the rest of the women picked water pails of wild strawberries that would bring a breath of summer sweetness into the next winter. They weeded their gardens, they guarded—unsuccessfully—their cucumbers from the young crows who had considered cucumbers legitimate booty since time immemorial. They cooked their husbands' meals, washed the blue shirts and scaly dungarees and thick socks worn under rubber boots. They sewed, and talked, and dressed in fresh prints to go to the dances in the clubhouse on Saturday night. Owen planned to go deep-sea fishing, now that the
White Lady
's massive marine engine had been installed, and he wanted Alec to go with him on shares, out to the Blue Ground and Jeffrey's Bank, far beyond the Rock. No idling for Owen this summer; he had to pay for that engine, which was one of the most expensive the Island had ever seen. Stephen Bennett shook his head over it, but the
White Lady
now had enough power in her to outrun every boat in the harbor, and to Owen, that justified any expense.

Joanna didn't begrudge the two or three days at a time when Alec was out on the banks with Owen. Sometimes he came home unexpectedly to wake her out of a sound sleep and tumble money into her hands, his eyes tired and excited, his beard two days old. Having him come home, money or not, was always such a joyful experience that it was almost worth missing him for a few days.

And so the summer went on, in the way all Island summers went, punctuated with occasional fog or a bad blow. But always in between those times there was the sun-drenched brilliance, the glitter of dew, the sweet scent, the procession of dawns and sunsets that shook the heart and soul and could never be forgotten, so that years later you might say to someone who had been with you, “Remember the night the sky was —”

You could go on and tell as best you could of that unearthly blaze of red-gold and violet and of the evening star shining serenely in an apple-green lake above flames. You would find it had been remembered, not just this once, but many times. And the blackberry blossoms had been remembered too, and the song of the white-throat, and the way the gulls called over the harbor in the early morning.

There had been many summers that Joanna had thought were her happiest, but it was this one that she
knew
was the loveliest. When she looked back on it, it seemed to her that all the small and exquisite delights of an Island summer had been intensified for her and Alec; there was a deepening, a sharpening, a more luminous quality to all that they said and saw and did. Even their lovemaking shared it. And it seemed to Joanna that the Island must spread out from its very heart some mystic force that caused all these things.

The Island . . . As long as she never left it, there was nothing that could harm her, or hers.

The lobstering was always good after the end of Closed Season. After the dreamlike pace of summer, there was a quickening of tempo all across the Island, as the traps went overboard again and freshly painted buoys dotted the water in vivid bobbing shapes red and yellow, blue and white, orange and green—every conceivable combination of color.

The earliest morning silence was broken by the sound of engines in the harbor as the boats went out, one after the other. Between midmorning and noon, when the nip was driven from the air by a kindly warmth, the boats came back again, and Pete Grant went up and down the ladder to the car, cursing good-naturedly.

Fog hung around the Island persistently, melting away at noon each day, dissolving in luminous trailing tendrils. In the morning sometimes it was thick and opaque against the windows. Joanna awoke to stifle the alarm clock and prod Alec.