The Dawning of the Day (39 page)

They hardly spoke until they were halfway, when they opened up the thermos bottle of hot coffee and the dozen fresh doughnuts Jenny had given them. Philippa sat eating and drinking in what seemed a state of nirvana. The boat slipped forward over a sea that might have been timeless and endless.

“I saw a lawyer yesterday,” Steve said suddenly.

At first she could not connect his words with herself and looked at him blankly. Then her mind cleared of its detachment, and she waited for him to go on.

“I've filed suit for divorce. Desertion.” He reached out and moved the wheel a degree, sighting a mark invisible to Philippa. “It will come up in the February term of court.”

“It's not a very pleasant thing to have to do.” She put her half-eaten doughnut down on a paper napkin, no longer hungry.

“It's just a formality.” He was sitting on the engine box. Philippa sat near him on the washboards, and he touched her cheek with his finger. “Do you want to get married on Washington's Birthday?”

They reached the island just before noon. Everyone else was out to haul, and gulls had possession of the skiffs at the moorings. They were finishing dinner with Joanna and the two children when Nils and Charles came home from hauling. Nils greeted them pleasantly, washed up, and sat down at the table. But Charles was flushed and blazing-eyed, as if with fever. He paced nervously around the table, the children watching him curiously, until Joanna said, “For heaven's sake, Charles, sit down and eat!”

“Eat!” His voice was too loud, his motions violent. He stared hotly at Nils. “Let
him
eat! Good Lord, nobody'd ever think he'd just found at least half his traps cut off!”

Joanna put her fork down and looked at her husband. The children were suddenly silent. Steve, too, turned toward Nils. Philippa's throat closed against food. She felt a little sick.

Nils spoke softly. “Sit down, Charles. Don't make a fool of yourself. It's not the first time I've lost traps, and it's probably not the last.”

Finally the meal was resumed, and the conversation, somewhat awkwardly carried on by Steve and Joanna and Nils, didn't touch at all on island affairs.

Joanna refused help with the dishes, and Philippa was glad to leave. The others would want to talk about Nils' traps without an outsider listening; what concerned them now was not to be discussed lightly. And she wanted to get away, to stifle the stir of dread, and try, if she could, to remember the trip this morning, the perfection of those two hours alone with Steve when they had belonged neither to the island nor to the mainland, but solely to each other.

On the island nothing had changed. The evils still went on. The important thing was not to let her dismay become as strong a poison as it had been before Thanksgiving. It should be easy to be courageous now, she thought, to fight off the damning sense of failure; there was her new and incorruptible agreement with Steve that they could not be parted again.

When he came in the evening, she asked him what would happen now, and he shrugged. “I don't know. Nils is one of these slow-to-anger guys. But when he does get mad, he's pretty deadly, and he likes to do his fighting in the open.”

“Maybe that's what we need,” said Philippa. “Something to bring it all out in the open where everybody can see it.”

They had no more chance to discuss it then. Kathie and Terence came in, and they talked about other things. Young Charles showed up briefly; Philippa told him how everyone had enjoyed the lobsters, and he nodded and left. “Guess he was surprised to see you had company,” Kathie said maliciously.

“That's enough for you,” said Terence. “Time you went home, anyway. Come on.” He herded her out. Steve went over to where Philippa sat on the couch, and sat down beside her. He put one arm around her tightly, and took her chin in his fingers, pulling down gently with his thumb until her lips were parted. Then he kissed her. “Let's not talk any more about the neighbors,” he murmured.

On Sunday there was no escaping the fact that a really serious situation was upon them all. It had been another good hauling day, and by nightfall everyone knew that Asanath Campion's traps had been bothered.

“Do you think Nils did it?” Philippa asked Steve.

“It doesn't sound like him.” His frown made him look tired. “But maybe he's changed his tactics. Anybody could have done it. Foss could have, to get Asanath to join in on the mess. Maybe they think I'm the one. The only one who knows is the one who did it.”

That night Philippa dreamed of faceless figures reaching out from boats to slash off buoys; everything was shadowed by a strange twilight except the knives, which flashed with a burning brightness.

T
he whole island was uneasy. There was only one topic of conversation wherever Philippa went. Conflicting theories came from every side; the stir spread to the school, and there were loud arguments and threats at recess, with the boys telling what they would do if they caught anyone messing around
their
traps. Philippa felt a twist of dismay when she saw Sky and Rob going home separately. Sky was such a lonely boy, he couldn't afford to lose his friend.

Kathie, staying after school to help tidy up, wanted only to talk about the trouble. “Imagine being caught in a lobster war!” she exclaimed. “That's what it is. Mark says it's no use beating around the bush, it's a lobster war, all right. Did you know the Campions stopped selling to him? They take their lobsters over to Brigport and sell to Freeman. All but Terence. He says he'll do as he pleases. I asked him who he thought cut off his father's gear, and he just gave me a look, without saying a word.”

“Let's talk about something else,” said Philippa.

Kathie looked at her in honest astonishment. “You mean when something like
this
is happening on Bennett's Island you don't want to
talk
about it? But golly, nothing ever happens here very much, and when it does, you have to make the most of it!”

“Not me,” said Philippa. “And I don't think we should have so much talk about it in the schoolyard. It's split up Rob and Sky already.”

Kathie sighed. “I told Rob he shouldn't have called Foss a hypocritical louse in front of Sky. He heard Mark say it. Rob didn't mean anything by it. Nothing against Sky, I mean. He's sorry for Sky.”

“Sky is loyal to his father,” Philippa said. “He loves him. He wants to think his father is the most wonderful man on earth, any son does. It's cruel to tell him anything else.”

“But Sky
knows
!” Kathie spread out her hands. “That mess with Perley and Rue and Edwin, when Foss wouldn't come!” She thought Philippa was becoming stupid and conventional; her angry disappointment was plain.

“Don't you think that hurt Sky enough? Now he's lost Rob.” Philippa went to the windows; the island was russet with coming winter, but in the afternoon sun the sea had a gemlike blue. The meadow grasses bent in the cold wind like rockweed in the tide. “I don't suppose there's any chance of stopping the children's guesses and suppositions and rumors. It's all that they hear at home these days, and it's exciting, I know. But it's not exciting to the grownups, Kathie. It's a terribly involved thing that pulls at your nerves and makes you suspicious and always angry. It's like any kind of war.”

“I know,” said Kathie with one of her sudden switches from a garrulous childhood to maturity. “I listen around. It's already cost Mark plenty, with the Campions and Percys and Syd selling at Brigport. And Mark's got some big bills to meet, so he's worrying. Terence won't talk about it at all. We always used to have an awful lot to talk about, but now we can't think of anything. If his father wins out and gets him to sell at Brigport, Mark'll clamp down on me faster than you can spit through a knothole, and I won't be allowed out of the house, even to come and see you.” She stared down at the window sill where someone in the past had carved initials. Years of paint work hadn't quite filled in the rough letters. Her face had a look of sadness Philippa had never seen on it before. “I don't know what Terence will do without me. I'm his only friend.”

“I believe you are, Kathie,” Philippa said softly.

When she was leaving, Kathie said, “I'll try and get Rob to tell Sky he didn't mean it.”

Philippa gave Kathie a chance to get well ahead of her before she left the schoolhouse. December was beginning, but there had not been too much wind yet, and the men had had an almost uninterrupted spell of good hauling weather. As she walked across the marsh, the sounds of homecoming boats were borne to her loudly on the northwest breeze. It was a time she loved, the time when the boats came home, gliding in past the harbor points on a pearly stillness of sea or plunging spiritedly across the tide rip. Sometimes she had been at the store and walked down on the wharf to watch the tubs of lobsters being weighed out and dumped into the car, where they lived in a dark-green tangle, moving with slow, deliberate motions. She liked to look down at the boats; into the cockpits wet from dripping warps and littered with the clean sea-soaked litter of the business; the bait tubs covered with old canvas; the bucket of used bait bags that had been emptied of their old herring on the way home, bringing the gulls in a crowd of wings over the wake; the gaff lying handy along the washboard; the oil clothes hung up inside the cuddy. She had watched Mark put the brass measure to a lobster which had caught his eye and might be an eighth of an inch too small; she had watched him punch the tail of a seed lobster, which could not be sold but must be returned to the water.

Sometimes she had felt herself to be a real island woman when she watched for Steve's boat to come in. Now she dreaded it, and wondered if the other women felt the same way, anticipating with this quick cramp of dread what their men would have to say. A trap cost five dollars at its cheapest, if a man made the bows and funny-eyes himself, from supple spruce limbs which he cut in the woods on the gale-swept winter days, and if he knit his own trap heads. He could reduce the cost even more, perhaps, if he owned spruces he could cut and saw into laths. But most of the men had to buy their laths through Mark. Some had their heads knit for them, and a few used nylon instead of marlin. Only a few, however, for out in the exposed waters around the island a trap's life was short enough by due process of nature without the interference of a human agency. A bad storm could wipe a man out overnight, but that was part of life out here. It was either feast or famine, and most of them were ready to endure the spells of famine for the days of feast.

But what a devastating experience, Philippa thought, to go out to haul and find nothing, when there's been no storm to do it but just someone who got out ahead of you. To come back to the beach and look around at the other men, trying to read behind the calm, pleasant faces, thinking you knew whom to suspect but having no way to make sure. If you were one man, you fought down your suspicions; if you were another, your knife was sharp when you went to haul again. And so the vicious line of battle was spun and pulled taut to make a hard cord that wouldn't fray. That was a warp nobody knew how to slash once it had been drawn tight around the island.

As Philippa came to the beach, the harbor moved and glittered in the late sun. The days were cold now, and there was hardly any loitering at the shore for the sake of talk. But there were men baiting up in the long fishhouse. Someone was whistling, and she guessed it was Charles. Smoke came up from Jude Webster's shop. Gregg's boat was high up on the beach alongside the wharf. He had replanked the place that was damaged when she sank and now was caulking the new seams. Seeing Philippa on the path, he waved a handful of caulking cotton at her.

“Kind of late gittin' out, ain't ye? Teacher keep you after?”

“Yes, and she made me clap
all
the erasers,” said Philippa virtuously. Gregg cackled. There was a skiff coming in through the shady lee of the wharf, and she stopped to see if it was Steve. It was Randall Percy and Fort. Fort was rowing, and his father sat hunched in the stern of the shallow boat. The plaid hunting cap looked incongruous above his round, puckered face; he was red from a day in the wind, and so were Fort's ears.

“Wondered what kept 'em so long,” Charles said from behind her. He was standing in the doorway of his part of the long fishhouse, wiping his hands. “Thought maybe they'd had a breakdown somewhere and I'd have to go out after 'em.” He held up his hands. “Don't you think I need some real expensive perfume to get the stink off?”

“I think anchovies smell worse, and they're a delicacy, supposedly,” said Philippa. “I wouldn't say this bait smelled bad at all.”

“That's because it isn't rotten. Good corned herring, that's what tolls the lobsters in. If you've got any traps left to catch 'em in.” Charles watched Fort beaching the skiff. “Randall looks real worn and miserable now, doesn't he? Never saw a man hate lobstering the way he does. He's so scared in a boat he won't even look aft to see the following waves when the wind is behind him.” His whistle pierced Philippa's ear. “Hey, Fort! You got flatirons in your boots to make you drag your feet like that?”

Fort didn't even look up. His father seemed a little unsteady getting out of the skiff with his dinner box under his arm. He glanced toward Philippa and Charles with a sickly smile and stood uncertainly by the bow of the skiff while Fort walked up the beach with the painter. Fort's head was down, as if he were counting beach stones.

“He must be thinking up something real good,” said Charles audibly. “Something that'll really cut the legs out from under me.”

Fort tied the painter to a bolt in a rock. His father came up the beach, moving heavily. “Fort,” he said in a winded voice. “Listen to me, son.”

Fort straightened up; he looked neither at his father nor at the others. His chubby face was smoothed to a stolid indifference. Randall reached out his hand in a tentative gesture; the fingers fell just short of Fort's sleeve. “You don't want to go off without giving me a fair chance to explain, son,” he said pleadingly.