Storm Tide (18 page)

She started violently as she heard a knocking overhead. Then she remembered Randy. He was awake, and pounding on the floor for attention. Well, he'd get it. . . . She took his clothes from the drying rack over the stove. Except for his heavy trousers, she had washed the salt water out of everything last night, before she went to bed, taking no chances on his having an excuse to hang around. Stevie had contributed a pair of pants and some woolen socks. She had pressed Randy's shirt this morning while the beans were wanning and the johnnycake was baking. With the clothing on her arm, she went upstairs. The morning light had flushed the walls of Mark's room a delicate warm tint; as she paused in the doorway she had a glimpse of the pale silvery unreal blue of the quiet sea beneath the blackness of the forest; and of the sky above it, pure glowing gold, flushed with rose, shading through clear yellow to apple green and thence to an unclouded transparent blue like that of the sea below.

Randy looked very comfortable in the four-poster, under Donna's quilts. He smiled at her, as if he didn't notice the line of her mouth and the set of her Bennett jaw.

“Mornin', Jo. What kind of a day is it?”

“If you'd lift your head an inch or so, you'd see. It's a perfect day for a trip to Brigport.” She laid his clothes on the chair beside the bed. “Your breakfast will be ready when you come down.”

Randy stopped smiling. A look of indefinable distress crossed his narrow brown face. He seemed to sink lower among the pillows.

“Honest, Jo, I don't see how I'm goin' to do it. Get up and dress, and then make that trip home. . . . Golly, I couldn't even set up, the way I feel now.”

He stared unflinchingly into Joanna's unsympathetic dark eyes. The small dressing on his temple was very white against his skin. Skeptically she put her hand on his wrinkled forehead and felt the furrows dissolve; also, she felt the faint moist warmth of normal, healthy, young flesh.

“Where do you feel the worst?” she asked.

“All over. Achey. Like I was havin' the grippe.” He shut his eyes and his smile was beatific. “Golly, your hand's cool, Jo.”

She took her hand away. “Let me feel your pulse,” she said briskly.

“If I pull my arm out from under the covers, I'll freeze.” He shuddered. “You don't think I'm lyin', do ye? Honest, ever since I was a little tike, it don't take no more'n gettin' my feet wet to give me a good chill.”

He turned his tumbled brown head languidly on the pillow. “They always been afraid of pneumonia.”

Joanna went downstairs.
I'll ignore him
, she thought.
Nils brought him here, Nils can handle him
.

At another time she could have laughed at her predicament, appreciated its irony, and decided on a strategy to rout Randy. But not today. She was too taut and restless. If he managed to make her lose her temper, that would be his victory.

Downstairs she tidied her room and the sitting room, turned on the radio and turned it off again, paced through the kitchen like a caged animal. . . . Someone knocked at the back door. Eagerly she went to open it, and found Vinnie there. She had never been so glad to see the bright-eyed, birdlike little woman.

“Ain't this an ungodly hour to come callin'?” Vinnie said apologetically. “But I jest took a chance on it—seemed like I felt like talkin' to somebody this mornin'. Caleb's an awful silent soul.”

“I've been up for hours,” said Joanna. “I was just thinking of another cup of coffee. Will you have one too?”

“I guess I will!” Vinnie sat down in the rocker by the harbor window. Her bright amber gaze flew around the kitchen. “Look, Joanna, ain't that the Fowler boys' boat in the harbor? Caleb said it was. Now what do you suppose—?”

“I don't suppose, I know,” said Joanna grimly. “Randy fell overboard last night, and Nils brought him up here.”

“Oh,
my!
” Vinnie dropped her voice. “Imagine that! Randy's the pleasant-looking one, ain't he?”

“Yes.” Joanna poured boiling water into the drip coffeepot. “He's going home today, if he ever gets up.”

They both looked toward the ceiling as Randy pounded hard on the floor. “There he is!” Vinnie said brightly. “Jest wakin' up. And hungry too, I'll bet!”

Joanna had welcomed Vinnie, but now she wished she hadn't come. She couldn't very well ignore Randy's pounding now. Making pleasant conversation to cover up her inner grimness, she fixed a tray for Randy.

When she came into his room, he smiled at her with a reasonable facsimile of meekness and said, “Gosh, thanks, Jo.”

“Don't mention it.” She set the tray on the chair beside the bed, and turned to leave. Randy's voice followed her hungrily.

“My God, Jo, I can eat more'n that!”

“Sick as you are, toast and coffee are enough.” She paused in the doorway, a secret glint in her eyes. “I'll bring up your medicine in a little while.”

Randy pulled the covers around his neck. His thin pointed eyebrows lifted apprehensively. “What kind of medicine?”

“Castor oil,” said Joanna serenely, and went downstairs. When she rejoined Vinnie she felt in a much better mood. The sun was high now, above a sea so blue as to hurt the eyes. On the horizon, the ledge and towers of the Rock rode like some great bronze ship. On the Island itself every rooftop glittered, every tree was haloed with light. The melting frost sparkled on the fields. All the boats were gone from the harbor now, and Joanna, while she talked children, husbands, and Christmas with Vinnie, thought of Nils out there, guiding the
Donna
from trap to trap, across a sea no bluer than his eyes. Those eyes would be scanning the water. But what lay behind them?

Anyway, when he came in tonight, she'd tell him about Randy and the castor oil, and they would laugh together, and this morning would vanish as if it had never happened. As if Stevie had never reminded her about Gunnar. As if . . .

She said, with a sort of angry desperation, “Vinnie, are you having goose or turkey for Christmas dinner?”

“Whatever Marston's has.” Vinnie giggled. “You know, I got a list already as long as my arm for Nils. You sure he don't mind?”

“Of course he doesn't mind!” said Joanna heartily. But she was glad when Vinnie left.

She waited a little while for Randy to show up, but all was silence from above. She took the castor oil bottle from the cupboard where the medicines were kept, and looked at it reflectively. She'd brought it from Pruitt's Harbor under protest, but Donna had insisted on it. There were other things easier to take that would serve the same purpose, but Donna said no one could live on an island without a bottle of castor oil on the shelf, and that the time might come when Joanna would be grateful to have it.

She patted the bottle now, and her mouth twitched. She could imagine how her mother's gentle blue-gray gaze would suddenly break into sparkles of welling mirth, when she heard how her prophecy had come true. Joanna took a dessert spoon from the drawer and went upstairs. Now that the duel had reached its climax, she was sure of victory.

Randy, reading a western story magazine, looked at the bottle without alarm. “I can't take that stuff,” he told her glibly. “Makes me sick. You mix me up some hot buttered rum and I'll be fine.” He smiled at her with all his charm. In the sunlit room his eyes were full of sunlight too.

Joanna uncorked the bottle. “I'm sorry, there's no rum in the house. This shouldn't make you sick. It's only your imagination.”

Now he was vanquished. She was sure of it, as she poured the thick, viscous liquid into the spoon, conscious that Randy's gaze was on the thick glugging stream too. Now he would say he was ready to get out of bed and go home.

“Well,” he said in a resolute voice, and sat up, “if you say I should take it, Jo, all right.”

He shut his eyes and opened his mouth. Mutely, with a definite conviction that she herself was the vanquished, she put the spoon in his mouth. He swallowed convulsively, his thin face was agonized, and then he opened his eyes and stared straight into hers. He smiled.

“By Jesus,” he murmured thickly, “you was right, Jo. Guess it
was
my imagination.”

She turned to leave him again, and he caught at her arm.

“Stay and talk to me, Jo,” he said wheedlingly. “I'm lonesome as hell.”

“There are a lot of people on Brigport,” she said, “who would probably be glad to talk to you, if you were over there.” She left him.

After an interminable morning, she got herself some lunch. Then she put on her outdoor things and went out. It was the warmest part of the day. All color was at its highest peak, and as she felt on her face the mingled warmth and sharpness, and breathed the clean, coldly fragrant air, she felt her tenseness relax and float away. She walked around Schoolhouse Cove, past the schoolhouse and along the ruined seawall built of boulders smoothed and rounded by the seas that had tumbled over them into the very schoolyard and flooded the marsh. In the sunshine the boulders were pale blue, silvery gray, warm pinkish-brown, and lavender; they were picked out with the diamond sparkle of quartz. Over the wall, in summer, the wild roses bloomed, and the morning glories entangled their vines; beyond the wall the beach peas and evening primrose grew, and the beach, white in the noonday, slipped gently to an un-urgent, lazy-edged sea. And between the wall and the sandy road, where it was always sunny and sheltered in July, there would be wild strawberries, the first ones of the year.

Now, the places where the wild roses, the morning glories, the beach peas and vetch and evening primroses, and the strawberries, grew, were tangles of brown and yellow. In the cove there were loons swimming, and the winter sharpness of detail was in the air; the spruces marching over the hill to the Eastern End stood out in the sunshine, each one green and sharp among its fellows, and Uncle Nate's buildings looked as white and dazzling against them as if they didn't need paint. And over all mounted the sky, palely luminous along the horizon as if there were a hidden light behind it, deepening, as the eye climbed, to azure.

It was a day to wear forever on your heart like a diamond, Joanna thought, and indeed the world might have been sprayed with diamond dust.

She walked up through the Eastern End gate, but it was cold in the shadows of the trees, and she turned to go back again, into the sunshine. Caleb's boat was working her way home past Green Ledge, a throng of gulls fluttering down in her wake like blown scraps of paper. She wondered where Nils was.

She came out of the shade of the trees into the cleared rocky ground by the gate, and saw a man standing there. At first the sun was in her eyes. Then, as she kept walking, she recognized Randy. He came through the gate to meet her, a slight wiry figure in his boots and pea jacket and Stevie's trousers. He walked with a quick, conscious, self-assurance that was almost a strut. She thought that now he had decided to give up his annoying behavior and go home, and had come to tell her.

“Hello, Randy,” she said. “Feeling better?”

He shoved his cap back, and she thought he looked a little drawn. Perhaps the castor oil
had
made him sick.

“Joanna,” he said in a strained, husky voice. “I saw you goin' up this way. . . . Look, you know why I been hangin' around, bein' a nuisance. You know, don't ye?”

“No, I don't know,” Joanna said evenly. But something in the steady darkening of his eyes and the whiteness at each corner of his mouth warned her. She felt the familiar signals, the quickening heartbeat, the flush along her throat.
Trouble
. She said, “Let's talk about it as we walk along.”

Randy barred her way to the gate. “We'll talk about it here,” he said.

“I'm going home, Randy,” she answered him as if he were a child. But it was no child's hand that came out and seized her wrist.

“Not till you listen to me, by God!”

This was no laughing, clowning Randy. She was not afraid of him, almost she felt pity for him. But even in that instant of tolerance, he caught her off guard and pushed her back against a lichened wall of rock under the spruces, and his mouth was on hers.

She was as tall as he was, but her strength didn't equal his. His muscles were rock-hard; his mouth was fiery hot against her chilled lips, and it clung. She couldn't rid herself of it. One of his hands circled her left wrist in a fantastically unbreakable grip, the other held her right arm at the elbow. His slim, tough body held hers immobile. She swung her head from side to side to escape his mouth, but his lips were everywhere, voracious on her cheeks, her eyelids, on her throat.

After the first shock of pure astonishment, she was furious. She said between her teeth, “You
fool!
You
damn
fool!” To open her mouth was a mistake—he kissed it with a violence that left it smarting.

He pressed her back against the rock; a low branch caught in her hair and pulled it with every motion of her head. She heard the peacefully industrious sound of Caleb's engine chugging home, and the crows calling in the woods, and she was conscious of her thudding heart, her incredulous rage, the hard rock against her back, and of Randy's body against hers. She looked straight into his thin strained face, pale under the tan, and eyes from which all sunlight and laughter had gone. They were tormented eyes.

“Randy,” she said gently. “Let me go. I'll give you a head start and you can be out of the harbor by the time I reach the house.”

“You called me a damn' fool,” he said. “Well, that's what I am. Damn' fool about you. I'm like to go crazy every time I see you. The way you walk, the way you hold your head, like you don't give a damn—I'm crazy about you, Jo.” He took a breath and moistened his dry lips. “You could be nice to me, Jo. You gotta be. It won't hurt you none. You're a married woman, you—” He swallowed. “Jo, if you knew how I feel about you, you'd be nice to me! Please, Jo—”