High Tide at Noon (54 page)

J
OANNA WAS STANDING ON
the front doorstep shaking rag rugs briskly into the wind, and wondering if it was really spring in the air, or only the way the February thaw always smelled, when she saw Nils coming from the alder swamp that divided the Bennett meadow from Gunnar's land. He walked swiftly in his larrigans through the marshy space where the cranberries ripened in October; his faded shirt was a soft spot of color against the sodden meadow and the dark woods.

It had been two weeks ago, the afternoon in the kitchen, and Nils had been his quiet and natural self ever since. But Joanna, watching him come, felt a twinge of pity and guilt. No, the pity was wrong: Nils didn't need pity. You felt pity only for the weak, and Nils was anything but weak. Guilt? That was wrong, too. Foolish to feel guilt. But it wasn't wrong or foolish to respect him, to realize what a rare privilege it was to know a man like Nils.

She waited now until he came, and they went into the house together. It was then that Nils told her father and mother that he was leaving the Island. David was to have his boat. He hadn't decided what he would do, but he'd find something very soon. Work on a tanker or a freighter, maybe; he'd see some of those places he'd heard his grandfather tell about, from his days at sea.

If it was a shock to Stephen and Donna, it was more than that for Joanna. She sat rigidly still, her coffee untouched, and looked at him as if he were a stranger. Nils, leaving the Island. Nils, of all people. His roots here were as deep as hers—how could he bear to pull them up in this cold, matter-of-fact way, to leave his boat, to walk out?

It's not because of me, she thought. I'm not that important. Nils always knew how to put first things first. It's because he's lost faith in the Island, she thought. But I never thought he'd lose faith in it.

She watched him unbelievingly, and once he looked directly at her; his blue eyes stayed on hers for a moment, and she saw there no answer at all to her unbelief.

So Nils left Bennett's Island.

In March his uncle, Eric Sorensen, lost most of his traps in a storm, and couldn't replace them without going heavily into debt. He was in debt already, and it weighed on his tidy Scandinavian soul. There was only one thing to do; move to the mainland where a man conld haul his traps all winter long, even while Bennett's was lashed by gales. The traps for inshore fishing didn't cost nearly so much as the big deep-sea pots with their fifty and sixty fathom warps. There was some talk of lifting the Closed Season, and if he went lobstering all summer, he'd do it in some kind of comfort, by God! A man deserved a little peace of mind once in a while, and lobsters didn't pay enough now to make life on Bennett's worthwhile.

That was Eric's notion, and it was echoed around the shore. Eric was known as a man of sound ideas. If he didn't think lobsters would ever go up again in price, it was worth considering. Eric and Mrs. Eric and Thea—the latter radiant at the thought of working a new territory—left before the middle of March, and Eric's son-in-law, Forest Merrill, and his family, followed in a week. Forest still had plenty of traps, and he and Eric would work together till Eric's new string was built and set.

Two more empty houses. The Areys wrote that they wouldn't be back this spring. Another empty house . . .

Joanna walked down past her house and Alec's, past the clubhouse that had been used so little this past winter, past Jud Gray's house and George Bird's—all empty.

She looked across at Eric Sorensen's blank windows, and the Areys' neat, shuttered place. They'd miss Mrs. Arey's garden this year; she had wonderful luck with her gladiolas and larkspur. Across the harbor, Forest Merrill's house was closed up.

But the empty moorings were even more lonesome than the houses that would be locked against the Island spring.

There were always definite signs of spring on the Island. The robins came, and the bluebirds stopped for a while. Gunnar Sorensen always appeared on the scene with a resurgence of youth in his apple cheeks and twinkling eyes. He visited all the fish houses, whose doors hung hospitably open, and made sardonic little comments in his most agreeable voice, smiling all the while; when he had made the rounds and thoroughly ruffled everybody's temper, he went home to his coffee, smiled benignly at his wife, and said this spring he felt younger than ever.

And this spring Mark and Stevie left the Island. Joanna had hoped in vain that Mark would forget his lobster business. But he presented to his father a comprehensive plan, built on sound common sense. Stephen had to admit that. He agreed that if the spring crawl were good, they'd be able to pay for a second-hand truck. Yes, there was no reason why David and Pierre couldn't supply them with lobsters to peddle, and when they began to see a profit they could buy from Pete Grant, too—they'd already talked to Pete about it, Mark informed his father.

Mark was champing at the bit, and there was no way to hold him. He was twenty-one, and he'd saved enough money to make a good payment on a truck, and rent some sort of shack on one of the big wharves for his headquarters. Stevie wasn't twenty yet, and they could have kept him home. But the family had a good opinion of Stevie's level-headedness; he would act like a sea-anchor for Mark.

Hard as it was to see the two youngest Bennett boys leave the Island, Stephen wouldn't make one objection. In a grim, tight-lipped way he was proud of their initiative. But Joanna, feeling like a traitor to the brilliant ambition that burned in the Little Boys' black eyes, hoped secretly that the business would fail. Then they'd come home, satisfied to be Islanders again.

The house was oddly silent after they had gone. Donna said cheerfully, “It's like the days when they were in high school, only better—they can come across the bay whenever they want to.” But they were much too busy to come across the bay.

The Fosters still lived in the Binnacle, going their quiet way. Ned did his work, moving about the beach like a shadow, speaking civilly in greeting but never joining the other men in their yarn sessions or their long post-mortems over defunct engines. Leah Foster was seen strolling about the Island on pleasant days when the ground wasn't too muddy or the wind too strong. She took a great interest in birds, and the older people on the Island considered her a very respectable little woman, neat as a pin. Odd, maybe—she didn't mix much, and she hadn't made any close friend among the other women—but she lived the way she wanted to, and wasn't it her own business?

Of the younger crew, what they knew about Leah Foster they kept to themselves. There was no sense in dragging things out in the open just to liven up the place, especially when they might be asked embarrassing questions. They hardly ever talked about her among themselves; it was only by accident that they ever found out who was the favorite of the minute. Sometimes they didn't even know if there was a favorite.

The state of the nation and the price of lobsters were of no concern to the Island itself, which burst into its usual froth of white blossoms and bird song. It happened like this every year, and each spring Joanna wondered if it had ever been so lovely. This year she thought: How could they go away and leave it, when they knew spring was coming?

But it was in this radiant May that two of Marcus Yetton's youngsters, wandering through the woods after school in search of trailing arbutus, found Leah Foster crumpled at the foot of a rocky slope in the darkest, deepest part, where the sun hardly ever struck, and the soil was damp and soft with its accumulation of dead spruce needles. There was an ugly bruise on her temple, where she'd struck against a rock.

Stephen Bennett, Charles and Philip, and the other men who came when the children told them, decided she'd been wandering through the woods following the hawks who lived in this dark sunless part, and tripped at the top of the slope. The expensive binoculars Ned had given her at Christmas lay on the ground beyond her outstretched hand.

Joanna was down in the meadow picking branches of wild pear when the men came out of the woods above Goose Cove, carrying Leah on a door. They had covered her with a blanket, but Joanna, standing motionless by the wild pear tree, saw a corner of the blanket slip just as they went by her, and she saw Leah's face, wearing a new pallor and the old, faint, ironically serene smile.

The men entered the short cut through the swamp, but Stephen went back to where Joanna stood. He had always been direct with her. “Leah's dead, Joanna. Go up and tell your mother, ask her to come down to the Binnacle. Stella Grant will come down, and between them they can take care of laying Leah out.”

“Where's Ned?” Joanna asked him.

“Out to haul, but I think I heard him coming down the west side. I'll have to meet him at the beach.” He sighed, and looked away from her, up at the high luminous sky with its little white clouds skipping airily across it. “The prettiest day we've had this year, and I've got to meet Ned with this.”

“It's tough,” Joanna said. She meant it was tough for Stephen. How tough it would be for Ned, she didn't know.

He'd been out hauling. She wondered if he'd taken a punt along. He usually did, in case he saw a trap washed up on a beach and thought it might be one of his. . . . Her father walked on through the alder swamp, and she went home, sniffing absently of her wild pear blossoms, and trying to make it seem true that Leah was dead. Death for Leah was a different thing from death for Alec.

She remembered, as if it were a hundred years ago, as if it were something seen through the wrong end of a telescope, the day she'd gone to call on Leah Foster. She had been so terrified at her own daring behind the cool insolence of her manner. But Leah had been terrified too—and Leah couldn't hide it. That nineteen-year-old Joanna had known a brief pity for the woman she faced.

But Leah was dead. Looking for birds in the woods, with the glasses her husband had given her.
He gives her everything
, the Island had said.

Joanna remembered something else; something that had happened just today. While she stood by the stove fixing Ellen's cereal at noon, she had looked down across Goose Cove and had seen Jeff Bennett going over the rocks to the woods. He had his hatchet in a sheath at his belt, and a coil of potwarp. Owen, looking out too, had said casually, “That boy's sure been cutting a hell of a lot of pot limbs this spring. He's forever legging it into the woods.”

When Jeff came back again, an hour or so later, he'd stopped in for a drink of water. Jeff was always inclined to be morose, but today he'd been pleasant, and quick to laugh; he spoke to Ellen in her bassinet, scratched Winnie's ears, and sat down long enough to pass the time of day with Donna.

Joanna, going into the house now to tell her mother she must help lay Leah out, thought: A man might look like that if he'd been with a woman he was in love with.

She walked into the house and told her mother about Leah. When Donna had gone, she took Ellen into the kitchen and began to peel the potatoes for supper; there were fresh dandelion greens too, dug this morning. Owen would bring home a fish, if he found any on the trawl he'd set outside the harbor.

As she worked, her mind saw over and over again Leah's face when the blanket blew aside; and Ned, coming up from the shore like a gray shadow, tipping his hat politely when he spoke. And Hugo, lying in Johnny Fernandez' camp, telling her Leah was afraid of Ned.

Ned, a gray shadow. She wondered how many times, unseen in the other shadows of the fish houses across the path, he'd watched them go through the door of the Binnacle, Hugo, Owen, young Ash, Maurice . . .
Jeff
. Again and again she saw her cousin as he went up over the rocks into the woods beyond Goose Cove. She saw other things: Leah setting out for an afternoon's ramble in search of birds, her hair like silk, her dress starched, her shoes brushed and neat. Ned starting out to haul, and always taking his punt along . . . in case he had to row ashore for anything. What if he had rowed ashore this afternoon?

That part of the woods where the trailing arbutus grew was on the hillside above a tiny, sheltered cove far down toward the Western End. From a boat, hauling close to the shore, you might glimpse a light dress moving up the slope, you might row ashore—if you were Ned—to go up that slope like the gray shadow that you were, and hear voices beyond a granite outcropping, and wait patiently till you knew Leah was alone—

Joanna awoke with a shock from her speculation, as Ellen dropped her rattle on the floor. She finished fixing the vegetables and put them on to cook, vastly disgusted with herself. Someone on the Island had died, and she must imagine murder. The very word chilled her, and she knew she must not think of it again, lest it gain too much hold on her mind. Leah was dead,
by accident
, and her father must be the one to tell Ned. They would have to go through another funeral, and it was less than a year ago that she had stood in the cemetery and watched the apple blossoms drop down on Alec's grave.

Philip and Owen came in soon, with the promised fish. They weren't talkative, and neither was Joanna. When Stephen and Donna came home, supper was ready, but it was a silent meal. Donna's eyes were set in shadows, she looked white and tired. The lines in Stephen's dark face were carved deeply tonight, and the whiteness of his temples stood out. He made only one remark about the Fosters.

“Ned took it like a soldier,” he said, and that was all.

T
HE FUNERAL WAS SIMPLE
and moving; the minister, who had come from Leah's town, spoke tenderly of Ned's bereavement, of the Island's loss. Joanna was thankful that the apple blossoms were still buds, so that no petals could drift down.

The next day Ned went out to haul. He didn't take his punt this time.

A week later Jeff left the Island. He said he'd heard of some good jobs down Connecticut way, and he'd like to see a little of the country.