The Whiskey Tide (24 page)

     
"I don't know, actually." It embarrassed her. "She's always kept to herself and my mother's relieved to have it that way, I think. She says the poor woman's addled."

     
Joe laughed, his mood matching the clear skies of the autumn day. "Odd, anyway. I guess you made it in okay that night?"

     
"Yes. You?"

     
"Yes." He hesitated. "Anything wrong? You look upset."

     
Kate flung herself down on a piling.

     
"Upset? When I've just been offered a splendid job tutoring six or eight hours a week for forty cents an hour?" She scooped a stone from the beach and slung it into the water. "I thought, since we couldn't sail anyway in the winter months.... I applied at almost two dozen places! And this is all I have to show."

     
She hurled another rock. Joe's silence formed a backdrop to her anger. As she became aware of it, uncomfortable insight crept in.

     
"And I suppose I've no idea how many others encounter the same thing every day." She closed her eyes and expelled a breath.

     
"It's why so many are bringing in booze. The money."

     
"Is that why you're in it?"

     
"Sure." He thought a minute. "Partly. I don't even know what I'll do with the money, to tell the truth. I guess I like the adventure. Or maybe just the chance to do something different. Make that trip to Canada and back. Pilot a boat like yours." He looked at her directly and gave a small smile. "You ought to know, though, forty cents an hour is a damned good wage."

     
Kate found a flat stone and flung it with more composure, watching it skip twice before it sank.

     
"Not good enough to make me regret going north."

     
He selected a stone of his own and launched it from nimble fingers. It touched and touched again, again, again, swallowed by a lowering lip of surf. "May I ask you something?"

     
Kate nodded. His shirt was finely mended in several places and darned at the elbows.

     
"Your sister the flapper, did she ever skip school?"

     
The change of subject was so unexpected Kate laughed.

     
"Aggie? She'd have been too afraid she'd miss out on something. She was far more interested in seeing her pals than she was in scholarship, but wild horses couldn't have kept her away. Why?"

     
He rested one foot on the dock and leaned against it, a man more accustomed to standing than sitting.

     
"I have a cousin, fifteen, who's sneaking off somewhere else. Says she's sick of school. My aunt drafted me to talk to her. I might as well have saved my breath."

     
"That part sounds like Aggie, once her mind's made up."

     
Unaccountably, he laughed. He darted a look at her.

     
"I was hoping you might have some ideas. Part of the problem is I can't even understand her not liking it. I did. You must've. It's not that the work's too hard for her. She's smart enough."

     
Kate smoothed her skirt in concentration. "I think it comes down to people finding something that interests them. If they do, well, they have a sort of a lighthouse. If they don't, they flounder."

     
Like Theo, she thought. He'd started at Princeton only to please Uncle Finney, who had married his widowed mother when Theo was an infant and reared him as a son. He'd left with relief to answer the clarion call of the battlefield. Now he merely drifted, drinking too much and directionless.

     
Joe was mulling her words.

     
"And with your sister the interest is what — emancipation for women?"

     
Kate laughed. It felt odd to sit here discussing something that was at once so abstract and so personal. And it was, she realized, the most interesting conversation, she'd had since Pa died.

     
"Just breaking rules, I think. No...." She struggled to analyze it herself. "Aggie races around because she hasn't found an interest yet. But she feels the need. So she's... I don't know. At loose ends."

     
"I haven't the least idea what interests Rose." Joe stretched. "I've got to be finishing up here. Thanks."

     
"I was no help at all," Kate said in surprise.

***

     
Woody sat by the table making wobbly attempts to sand a piece of wood he'd unearthed from the kindling box for a sword.

     
"Look, Kate! It's getting smooth. But I can't make a point. And it needs a handle. Peg won't let me twist a spoon around it to make a handle the way I wanted," he said in a rush.

     
"We'll cut off part of the top to make a handle. It's too long anyway. And here—" She took it from him, noting his efforts at sanding had produced small results. "It shall have a point."

     
"Don't you dare — that's not a whittling knife!"said Peg as Kate appropriated the paring knife the cook had been using and began to nick off bits of wood with marginal skill.

     
"Well, I don't have a whittling knife, nor does Woody. There. When that's sanded, you'll have a point." She returned the wood to her brother.

     
"Poke his eye out," Peg grumbled, whetstone already in hand.

     
Voices welled in the parlor. Her uncle, angry. Her mother, upset. And Rosalie was away today, doing something with Arthur's mother.

     
"It's not really a point. It's more curvy," Woody objected.

     
"Curvy points inflict the most grievous injuries."

     
Her uncle's voice rose again. The thought of Mama trying to hold her own against him made Kate uneasy. She moved toward the parlor and slipped in. Her mother sat on one of the twin settees that flanked the fireplace. She was twisting her handkerchief and her eyes had the glazed look of a cornered animal.

     
"You're being impractical!" fumed Uncle Finney. His arms flapped in frustration as he paced. "Whoever put such absurd ideas in your head? Kate, I suppose."

     
"What about me?" Kate asked quietly.

     
Her uncle whirled. His color deepened. He scowled, waiting for her to leave. When she didn't, his anger dissolved into desperation.

     
"Ginny, it's not only your financial safety I'm worried about," he pleaded. "Boats filled with unsavory men land all up and down this coast. And here you sit with the girls and Woody, easy prey!"

     
Mama wavered visibly.

     
"I know where Pa's revolver is and how to use it," Kate interjected.

     
"Good God!" Her uncle was close to panic now. "I wasn't suggesting — whatever you do, don't go poking around outside at night!" He caught one of Mama's hands between his. Tears threatened his eyes. "Please, Ginny. I'd never forgive myself if your good name—. What I mean is, you need to unload this place before it gobbles every cent you have left. And you need to be somewhere more suitable. Soon. Please — I beg you."

     
He seemed genuinely beside himself. Resurrecting a preoccupied glare for Kate he clamped his hat on his head and hurried out, too agitated even to say good-bye.

     
"He never even looked at my budget." Mama's voice was as small as a child's. She smoothed her hands over a long black ledger she held in her lap. "We can live on what we have for a year if the bank will give us some leeway, and still have a hundred and twenty set aside for Rosalie's wedding— I know we can! We'll economize, and surely I'll find some sort of work...."

     
Kate took the ledger from her and saw neat columns of numbers. She tried to hide her surprise.

     
"Mama, this is very efficient."

     
The glaze in her mother's eyes receded, but she was defeated now. "Your father and I didn't have a great deal the first few years we were married. He'd borrowed to go to law school, you know. I thought.... But perhaps your uncle's right. He wouldn't be hounding me if he didn't have our interests at heart."

     
Kate suspected otherwise.

     
Her uncle was the one to blame for their financial troubles. His sudden concern for their welfare was baffling. Why, apart from the guilt it might engender in him coming here, was he in such a hurry to get them out of this house?

***

     
Zenaide Cole watched the small lights bob along the water's edge. Two, three. Smugglers again, she thought with delight. But not her neighbor. The Hinshaw schooner had still been moored at sunset.

     
Her forehead wrinkled in concentration. There had been lights five nights ago, too. Or perhaps six. She had seen them twice now since the night her young neighbor and the Portuguese man saved her from drowning.

     
Her neighbors must be letting other people use their cove. It was a perfect smugglers' cove, with no near neighbor on the opposite side, and on this side only a house with two old women, who everyone would expect to be asleep. Tonight's smugglers weren't as smart as her neighbor, though. Her neighbor took care to land in the dark of the moon. Tonight's smugglers were more likely to be spotted by the authorities. Perhaps she would see an arrest. That would be exciting. There had been very little excitement in her life for years.

Seventeen

     
Kate's laughter drifted down to Joe as he awakened. He stretched and as his knuckles hit the wall, discovered again that the bunk where he lay was too short for him. The month that had passed since the trip when they rescued old Mrs. Cole had turned nights on the water chilly. He'd elected to sleep below when he gave the wheel to Kate at two in the morning. Going into the head he washed his face, appreciating the convenience which his uncles' fishing boat lacked. He filled a tin cup with coffee in the cramped galley and went on deck to encounter a bright October day with wisps of fog.

     
Before he could even draw breath, Billy turned to him in indignation.

     
"She thinks I'm gullible, Joe! She's saying where we live used to be under water, and up here too, and that land formed from hot stuff coming out of the earth and seaweed grew into trees."

     
Joe smiled. "Miss Hinshaw's telling you the truth, Billy. Scientists who have ways of proving it say so. If I recall right, big mountains of ice came through next and flattened things. The seaweed and trees... it's more like they're related." He looked uncertainly at Kate.

     
"That ain't how the church teaches, Joe, and you know it!" Billy stalked below.

     
"I didn't mean to upset him." Kate looked dismayed. "It's just that the shores along here are so wonderful, and the thought of the process that shaped them, the millions and millions of years...." Her innate reticence overtook her enthusiasm.

     
"He'll get over it," Joe said mildly. "It's a hard thing to grasp when you've always heard that God made it all in a day. Where are we?"