High Tide at Noon (60 page)

She walked toward the corner of the house, and came out into the flood of sunshine again, and there was the sea before her, the ledges serene and yellow in the light with a little edge of white tumbling easily around them, the towers of the Rock gleaming on the horizon. The thick dark woods of the Western End marched from the shore to the sky. The sea moved lazily into the little coves, as lazily as the gulls rested on the glistening water, their white breasts reflected below them.

The Cove itself brimmed with a high tide that washed quietly at the base of the rocks whose reflections were a tawny shimmer across the blue. She started to walk down to the beach, walking among lichened boulders with wild roses blooming pinkly against them.

And then she saw the traps on the beach. She stood still, her mouth drying, her heartbeat seeming to shake her body. Traps on the beach, new traps, of yellow laths that gleamed in the sun. A peapod pulled up above the water's edge.

A man was sitting on his heels with his back to the sun, Painting a buoy. It was yellow, and he was painting a black stripe around it with painstaking care. She looked down at the squatting figure in dungarees and blue shirt and peaked white cap, every detail fantastically sharp in the brilliant air, and the colors of the buoy seemed to be printed indelibly on her brain.
Black and yellow, a stripe around the middle
. A brush wielded carefully by hard and square-tipped fingers.

How many times had she watched a brush in those fingers, making a black stripe around a yellow buoy? She hardly breathed as she walked down over the slope. The grass muffled her feet. She reached the pebbles and went across them, and they moved under her shoes; in the noontime hush the sound was very loud. But even before the man turned his head and saw her, she knew it was Nils.

It seemed like a long time that they stood looking at each other, not speaking. Then she said, “Hello, Nils,” and put out her hand. His own closed around it, and he smiled for the first time, a smile that began in his deepset blue eyes and finally reached his mouth.

“Hi, Jo.”

“It's been a long time, Nils.”

“Six years.” He added surprisingly, “Ellen must go to school now.” “First grade,” Joanna said. Sensation began to creep back into the numbness of surprise and shock, her voice gathered color. “Nils, where did you go when you left the Island? And how long have you been back here?”

“I've been everywhere, just about, Jo. And I came back in April, back to Grampa Gunnar's place.” His smile deepened. “Couldn't miss the spring crawl. I've been doing well, too, hauling from a double­ender. The cove here's a mite smaller than the harbor—lots less lonesome for one little peapod, anyway.”

Joanna said with a suddenly shaky laugh, “I don't know what to say—I—”

“Don't say anything. Sit down.” With those few words she knew Nils was exactly the same. He'd grown older, and he'd been around the world. But he was still Nils. She realized with a great upsurge of gladness that he hadn't lost faith in the Island. It had called him back, and he had come to it.

Sitting there on a warm rock in the sun, watching him as he went back to his painting, she had a curious delight in imagining how he had lived here alone since April, working the way he had always worked, at the same steady pace from daylight to dark.

“Nils, are they really crawling?” she asked him suddenly, and he nodded.

”They've been crawling for me, anyway.”

They were quiet until he had finished the buoy, and then he came and sat down beside her, taking out his cigarettes. “I'm sorry about your father,” he said at last. “I didn't find out till I landed in Port George last March—my father told me.”

Joanna could talk about it to Nils, as she had always been able to talk to him. She had never talked to anyone else about Stephen. “It was queer—we were always worried about Mother's health and never thought about him. He seemed so young and strong, even when his hair began to get a little gray at the temples. But it was as if losing the traps in the fire broke his heart—that, and leaving the Island. As if he couldn't live anywhere else. He died before we'd been gone a year.”

She looked back at the house above them, against the sky. “It was real enough over there on the mainland, but out here it's just as if the mainland didn't exist, and we never went to it—as if it was all a dream, and he'll come down over the slope in a minute.”

Nils watched her steadily. “I know. But what about you? What did you do over there?”

“I went to work. We live with Charles and Mateel—Mother and Ellen and I.” She looked down at her firm, strong hands. “I've cut the heads off more herring than I ever knew existed, Nils.”

“Sardine factory, huh? Like it?”

“There were the boats coming in all the time, and the harbor. It was the sea, after a fashion. Only it was pure hell for a while.” She could talk to Nils about that, too. No one else had ever known, or even guessed. She had been a good actress. “I felt like a wild gull shut in a cage. Then I got so I could stop thinking about it, but sometimes a little thing would bring it all back again.”

“What brought you out here?”

“That was one of the little things, Nils. I'd been almost contented for a long time—I've made friends over there, and Ellen's in school, and she's such a funny little mite, Nils—and then, yesterday, I was going home from work and two men came around a corner in the dusk, talking, and I heard just one word . . .
Bennett's
.”

“I saw it on a chart,” said Nils briefly. “It rose right up and hit me in the face . . . same thing, I guess. What then?”

“They were going out by here in their dragger today. I knew them, because the boys know them. So I spoke to them—I guess they thought I was crazy—and today, instead of going to work, I ran away.”

Nils turned his head and looked long and hard at her. “Jo, are you glad you ran away?”

“Glad!”
For a panicky instant she thought she was going to cry. After all these years of a lifted chin and a steady mouth, she was feeling weak and trembly and undone. She had a dreadful suspicion that if she spoke her voice would wobble and the tears would well out like a spring. She said, very carefully, “Nils, what made me run away? Why didn't I just stay over there and figure that it was best not to come back here and make myself miserable?”

“You had to run away because it was stronger than you were, Jo,” Nils answered her. “And maybe there was something in you that knew the Island wasn't alone any more. Jo, it'll never be alone as long as it's above water. When I went away, I knew I'd be back, sometime. And there'll be others coming here, too—maybe not the same ones, but there'll always be people here.”

He paused, his brows drawn in thought as he watched the shimmer of high tide in the cove. “Jo, the people who came out here and settled when there wasn't anything here—your grandfather and mine and the other old-timers—they were like the folks who settled this country. They wanted to make something big out of it, so they put everything they had into it. That was why the Island meant so much to them. That was why my grandfather couldn't leave it, and that was why your father couldn't live away from it. The others, they came afterward when they began to hear about the Island. They came for what they could get, they took it, they didn't give anything back, and then they walked out on it.”

She listened, her breathing light and quick. Why hadn't she thought of it before? Nils could be right about it. Wasn't he always right? He went on talking in the slow, quiet voice she'd always known.

“Jo, I used to think about the Island in the damndest places. Calcutta, Liverpool, Rio. In the hot countries it was like a vision, you'd call it—always in my head. The wind and the woods, the sound of the water on the rocks, and the feel of a gaff grabbing a toggle. Then I came back, and it was just the way I remembered it, without the people, of course. So then I did a different kind of thinking. And when I saw you coming across the beach today, I knew my thinking'd been right.”

He stopped and watched his cigarette as he knocked the ashes from it. “Maybe I've been wrong all this time, Jo. It's for you to tell me. But I've been wondering if maybe out of all the folks who've belonged to the Island there were any special ones who were supposed to lead the way. Building up again, starting from scratch the way your grandfather did. And it seemed to me that if I was right, they'd show up out here—be the first ones to come back. Well, here I am. And here you are.”

Their eyes held for a long moment before he went on, in his unhurried way. “Jo, when I talked to you the last time, I never said I wouldn't ask you again. Maybe we both thought we wouldn't be talking together again. But the way it looks to me now, it's like it'd all been planned out without us knowing about it.” His smile flickered up warmly. “A man gets to thinking a lot of strange stuff when he's alone with just the wind for company . . . Joanna, what kind of a life do you think we could have together out here, helping the Island start all over again?”

She sat there without moving or speaking, looking at him and the unflinching steadiness of his gaze, the calm and kindly purpose in his face. No, she couldn't deny it, no matter how she tried; Nils and herself together could do great things for the Island, they could do even more than Stephen and Donna had done, they could bring life to Stephen's dreams.

She looked out at the sea, her hands lax in her lap, and Nils said, “Ellen would be here, too. Joanna, everything I said that other time about making it the kind of a marriage you wanted it to be—that still goes. But we'd make a good partnership out of it. We've a mighty lot of work to do, and the best way we can do it is together.”

“Together,” she repeated. Together after all these years. Maybe Nils was right and it was meant to be like this. Maybe you had to go through just so much, and then you reached the place where you were supposed to be. “The longest way round is the shortest way home,” Stephen used to say.

She looked up at the trees marching over the slope to the cemetery in the woods. It was seven years that Alec had been dead. When she had felt him slipping away from her, retreating farther and farther into memory out of reality, she had tried desperately to keep him close, but there was no holding him. When she found herself telling Ellen some funny thing Alec had said or done, and laughing wholeheartedly with the child, she knew it should be like this. You must live for the living, and not for the dead. Was it wrong to remember Alec with a smile because she had known and loved him, instead of with pain because she had lost him?

She thought of all this as she sat on the rock with Nils beside her; she thought of all the times in the years gone by when she had wondered about Nils, if he were alive or dead, if he ever thought about the Island, if he ever thought about her. And she thought of the great and almost suffocating gladness that had welled up in her when she realized that it was no stranger on the beach, but Nils.

It wasn't hard to tell him. After all, they had never needed many words, herself and Nils. She said in the clear, confident voice of the young Joanna Bennett, “Nils, will you go back with me on the dragger tonight, and see the family? And Ellen?”

There was a question in the way he glanced at her, without speaking, and she answered it swiftly and directly.

“We'll make it a good partnership, Nils. The way you said we could. And we'll make it the kind of marriage we both want.”

He didn't touch her. But the look in his eyes was a real caress, as if he'd taken her in his arms and kissed her. Then he went back across the beach to his paint and his buoys.

Joanna took off her jacket and rolled back her blouse sleeves. “Nils,” she called to him, “I'm going back up in the meadow and get my lunch box—there's plenty for both of us. Be right back!”

She ran across the beach stones and up among the granite boulders where the wild roses were. Quite suddenly she stopped. She felt tranquillity flooding through her, a great high tide of content, a noontide richness of peace. She stood without moving, and let it take possession of her.

Elisabeth Ogilvie lives for the better part of each year on Gay's Island, Maine. There she enjoys long walks among the rocks and woods of the island, reveling in air and space and sky. The remainder of the year is spent across Pleasant Point Gut, at her nearby mainland home, where plumbing, a telephone, and other amenities await. Her interests include the Nature Conservancy, Foster Parents Plan, reading (“a necessity of life!”), and music of just about any kind
.

Miss Ogilvie's latest book is a historical romance, the second of a planned trilogy. Despite some thirty-six books for children and adults produced over the past forty years, though, the author is still caught up in the spell woven by Bennett's Island and its inhabitants and is presently at work on a fifth installment (the fourth
, An Answer in the Tide,
was published in 1978) in the continuing story of Joanna Bennett
.