The Dawning of the Day (27 page)

“Sweep us to where?” Kathie asked coldly. The smallest Percy began to cry. Philippa, still holding Daniel in one arm, reached down to the child's tense bony shoulder. “Look, Frances, they're coming for us in dories. I didn't expect a boat ride this morning, did you?” The younger children moved eagerly; only Frances Percy was frightened. Philippa said, “No school this afternoon, I guess. We'll have our party Monday, even if Halloween's gone by. Come on, everybody, let's get our things on.” She handed Daniel to Rue and tapped Ralph's back. He came reluctantly from the window.

“You started the stampede, Ralph,” she said briskly. “Now you can tell your little sister there's nothing to be afraid of.”

Ralph glared at Frances. “Gorry, if you ain't the
biggest
bawl baby I ever see!” Frances butted him in his solid middle without a word.

The fright was over. They became busy with boots and jackets. A pleasant air of emergency pervaded the schoolroom. Almost everyone knew there was no real danger, but they could happily imagine that it was a thoroughly perilous situation.

“Jeeley, we don't get out tonight,” Ralph mourned. “What a Halloween!”

“I been saving a swell trick on Gregg,” Rob Salminen said. “Wish I'd done it before instead of saving it for tonight.”

Clare Percy burst out, “I hate this island! I wish we'd stayed in Limerock! My father does too!
He
don't think it's so wonderful to be a fisherman!”

“Aw, shut up,” said Ralph.

There was a dory coming fast over the rippling silver water. “Cheer up, Clare,” Philippa said. “After all, this is a real adventure.” Everyone crowded out onto the platform in spite of lashing rain and strong gusts; there was no use in trying to keep them inside to await their turn. In the schoolyard the water swirled around the flagpole and lapped at the steps. Out in the marsh, where dead grass should have been, a sheet of water spread a blurring mirror to the sky. Nils Sorensen's white lap-streak dory slid by a cluster of spruces and half-drowned wild rosebushes.

Behind Philippa there was a cry and a splash. She turned, still holding Daniel by the hand, and saw Kathie and Ralph down on their knees at the end of the platform hauling Faith up from the water. She was not crying, but she was drenched and shuddering violently. Her eyes seemed abnormally wide and black. Her old beret had gone and her pale hair was plastered, dripping, to her narrow skull.

Rue was already taking off her own skimpy coat, but Philippa stopped her. She wrapped her raincoat around Faith, and Kathie, not speaking, contributed her wool kerchief for the wet head. Philippa tied it under Faith's chin and looked fixedly into the child's face.

“What happened, Faith?”

Faith's teeth chattered in a new crescendo of chill; she didn't answer. Philippa looked around at the rest of them through the whip and bluster of rain. Their blankness infuriated her.

“What happened?”—she asked it of them all. After a moment Kathie said, “I guess she wasn't looking and stepped off the edge.”

In the circle of Philippa's arm, Faith was shaken by fierce tremors. She had been tripped or pushed; it was as obvious as if she had cried it out. But no one would tell Philippa anything; she belonged in another world, an adult world, a mainland world. If Peggy had done it, Kathie might catch her later and twist her arm, as Perley had once done to Kathie, but Philippa would not know of it. If Peggy hadn't done it, who had? She looked once more at the ring of entranced wet faces and was relieved to see the dory slide alongside the steps. Nothing was solved; it was merely postponed.

“Faith will go in the first dory,” she said. She handed the children down the steps to Nils, who lifted them in; most of them were sea-bred, they sat without moving where he placed them. “We had an accident,” she said to him when it was Faith's turn.

He smiled at the child and said in his slow, even voice, “So you went for a swim, did you, Faith?”

Her lips moved nervously, but her eyes didn't change. She sat hunched in the stern like a small, bedraggled, and terrified bird.

Jude Webster's dory was already nudging the platform and came along to the steps as Nils left. The children got in while Ralph held the dory steady. Jude stood amidships, balancing awkwardly with his rain-streaked glasses in one hand while he fumbled with the other inside his jacket for a handkerchief. His oilskins were dirty, worn to the nap in some places and torn in others. The strap of his sou'wester hung loose, whipping in the wind. His eyes were narrowed as if they ached. Suddenly Philippa couldn't bear his futile motions; she was chilled to the bone, and Faith's accident had disturbed her unpleasantly. She took a clean handkerchief from her blouse pocket and gave it to him.

“Oh—thank you,” he said awkwardly, looking at her blindly from slitted eyes. He began to clean his glasses. His thin features had a classic cut; they should have been scholarly and ascetic, but instead the whole effect was that of nervous indecision.

When he put on his glasses again, his high forehead smoothed out. He spoke to the children mildly, rearranging them so he could take one more. Rue took the handkerchief from him.

“I'll bring it back washed and ironed, Mis' Marshall,” she said. As her father took up the oars and pushed away from the steps, he raised his voice with some effort above a gust of wind; it was not a voice for shouting down the gale.

“I'm sorry I wasn't home the other day, Mrs. Marshall. I'd like a talk with you.”

“We'll have one,” she called heartily. She wondered if all persons who seemed too heavily enthusiastic were driven to it by similar circumstances.

Kathie and Ralph were left with her, but they didn't have long to wait before the third dory came to the steps. Young Charles shipped his oars and swept off his sou'wester in front of Philippa. “The gondola awaits. Do we have to take all those old retainers too?”

“I never go anywhere without my train,” said Philippa.

“Climb aboard, then, and get situated. They can stow themselves around ye.” He took her hand firmly to balance her. His eyes, meeting hers, were smiling and friendly. She had not seen him at close hand since the night of the dance, and the thought of his grievance had sometimes bothered her.

He held out his hand to Kathie too, but she ignored it.

“O.K., Aphrodite,” he said. “Well, if it isn't Pistol Pete with the tissue-paper drawers!” He slapped Ralph on his plump seat.

“That's fine, chummy,” Ralph said calmly, “but you don't want to trust me to bag up for you next time you're looking for free help. I can fix them herring so they'll scare the lobsters ten miles away from your pots.”

Charles grinned, and crowed like a rooster. “That's a bantam,” he explained to Philippa. “We got an awful lot of 'em around here.” Ralph scrambled aboard, swinging himself into the stern.

Charles first beached the dory in front of the long fishhouse, where there was a slight rise in the ground. Ralph and Kathie climbed out. “By Gorry, we made it,” Ralph said, panting. “Once back there I thought we was going to swamp, but we had a good man at the helm.”

“What's he good for?” asked Kathie, and they burst into raucous adolescent laughter.

Young Charles rowed Philippa back across the marsh toward the flooded camps. They were blackened by the rain; their steep roofs seemed to huddle like bent and shivering shoulders. There was no living thing in sight, only the rush of the wind, the slop of the high tide around the lower shingles and the bottom traps in the stacks, and always the low roar of the sea on the windward side of the island. Young Charles rowed the dory past the traps and went aground by the board-walk on the other side of the camps.

“Thanks for the ride, Charles,” Philippa said.

“I'm available with my dory any time, ma'am. Bad weather or fine. He held her eyes with an easy, sardonic defiance. “Special rates on dark nights when the water's firing.”

She ignored the reference. “Good-by,” she said, and set off around the curve of the harbor. Rain ran down her neck and pelted through the back of her suit, making her slip and blouse cling unpleasantly to her flesh. Her stockings were tight and cold. The wood smoke from Foss Campion's parlor stove blew down on the wind, catching her in a sweet-scented eddy. The harbor waters surged around the rocks close to her feet, speckled with scraps of rockweed and dancing chips. She felt as if she were one of the chips, swept loose in a world of wind and flood.

Because of the wind she didn't hear Charles running behind her until he was close enough to touch her. She swung around to him, startled and angry. His expression was at once resentful and strained under the narrow yellow brim of the sou'wester.

“When are you going for a walk with me?” he asked accusingly.

“When you ask me.” She was thoroughly annoyed; she had never been so cold in her life. “You've never asked me. You've never come to the house.”

“And have Deacon Asa breathing down my neck, making homespun remarks? But I'll come. There ought to be a pretty day after this.”

“All right, then,” she agreed, a little wildly. “On a pretty day after the storm.” She added in a sudden burst of laughter, “Oh, go home, Charles! We'll both have pneumonia!”

He laughed too, excitedly, as if her half-promise had intoxicated him, and ran back along the boardwalk.

W
hen the tide turned, the wind came off northwesterly. The rain stopped, but gale-force winds kept up. Sometime in the dark hours Gregg's boat sank at her mooring; she was a round-bottomed little craft with an exhaust pipe pointing straight upward. Her mooring was to the leeward of Randall Percy's and Mark Bennett's. Their mooring had dragged, allowing Percy's boat to come down on Gregg's, and a night of pounding had finally driven a hole in the small boat's elderly planking. At least that was how the island construed it in the raw, wretched dawn of Sunday.

Philippa walked around the shore and watched from Nils's wharf with Joanna Sorensen while two dories, each with three men, went off to bring in Mark's and Randall's boats. The harbor was a heaving, bouncing mass of waves, tossed in by the strong northwester. To Philip-pa, it was an exciting battle of flashing oars and strong arms against the lifting white-capped waves. She caught her breath as Randall Percy watched his chance to leap into his boat from the small, prancing dory. When he was safe inside the cockpit, Philippa turned to Joanna, “Wouldn't it have been terrible if he had slipped and gone overboard!”

Joanna agreed seriously. “They're really very sure-footed,” she said. “And it looks worse from shore than it does out there. It's when something like this happens in the winter that I hold my breath. When a northwester rips in here and everything's covered with ice and they have to go out like this, it turns my stomach. That's when I curse whatever it was that turned me into a lobsterman's wife.”

Philippa nodded but did not speak. This was an ordeal of which she knew nothing. Joanna—at first merely an attractive and vigorous woman—seemed to take on greater depth and stature every time Philippa saw her.

“But it's like having a baby,” Joanna was saying in an easier tone. She was holding Linnea on an overturned barrel and looked around her at Philippa, laughing. “While it's going on you swear it'll be the last time, but when it's over you forget the agony.” She gave Linnea a squeeze. “Look at Gregg over there on Mark's wharf. He's one of the casuals of the storm. There's always someone.”

Gregg was a fidgeting potbellied figure stumping from one group to another, talking and gesticulating.

“What will he do till he gets a boat again?” Philippa asked.

“He can go with Sigurd or Nils. For that matter, almost anyone would take him around to his pots. He's lucky, he still has traps to haul. Jude hasn't. He's about the only man who hasn't moved his traps offshore into deep water.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there isn't much left of them. In the last few days they've been dragged on bottom and smashed to pulp against the rocks. The undertow does it. Nils said this morning they might as well be called a total loss. And I don't suppose Jude has a cent put away.”

Philippa felt sick. She was not seeing Jude, but Rue's face pinched with understanding, and the mother's voice going on and on in that frightening, febrile gaiety. “I don't know whether to be sorry for Jude or not,” Joanna was saying. “He's been in love with the island since Cap'n Charles brought him out here, but it's like some hopelessly inadequate man being enslaved by a horrible and beautiful woman. Jude just can't take it, that's all. Not forever. But he'll keep trying. He's got more stubbornness than brains.”

“Maybe this is his deliverance, then,” said Philippa.

“I don't know. Nils says you have to let some people go on until their backs are broken as well as their hearts. He and Steve were saying this morning that Jude's likely to break up over this like one of his traps. He adores this island. If only there was enough carpenter work to keep him busy.”

In a little while Philippa walked home. She was depressed; suddenly she wished that there was some place on the island where she and Steve could spend this long bleak windy afternoon alone, thinking only of each other, talking and dreaming; she found herself aching for it.

At dinnertime Asanath and Terence talked about Gregg's boat. She barely heard them for thinking about Steve. How can we carry on with this, she thought angrily, if we have no chance to be alone . . . ? She heard Jude Webster's name then and came back to the kitchen, the darkly varnished cupboards, the smell of the boiled dinner, the pattern of the oilcloth on the table.

“He's a sick pigeon,” Terence said with neither satisfaction nor pity. “He looks like he's been dragged through a knothole.”