The Ebbing Tide (10 page)

I might like him
, she thought,
if he hadn't bought the Place
. It was the last thing she thought before she fell asleep.

She woke up violently, to a harsh, rasping sound. Her heart was pounding, her mouth so dry that her tongue felt thick and swollen. The sound went on, sharp, rough, rhythmic. . . . She realized with a sickening sense of relief that it was Dick barking. He'd gone out with Owen and had come home again. She felt for her robe and slippers in the dark, and made her way across the room, surefooted and noiseless, her one aim to let the dog in before Jamie woke up.

The rooms downstairs always looked strange when she came down in the middle of the night to find the lamp still burning. The furniture had an expectant look; things that were friendly and familiar in the day stared in a hostile fashion at night. The folds of the tablecloth, now. . . . She didn't look at them, but went swiftly out through the sun parlor and opened the door.

Dick was whining between barks. “Come in, you idiot,” she said sharply. “Standing out there yammering like a gorm.” The dim light from the kitchen lamp shone out through and cast a faint glimmer on the doorstep. The wind was rising, it made a sound like surf in the windbreak, and there was a sibilant, muted roar in the air all around. Dick came into the whisper of light, eyes shining, tail apologetlc and anxious, and stopped.

“Come on, Dick,” Joanna insisted. The tail went faster and he made a little whimpering sound in his throat, and turned away, leaving the light for the darkness. She was conscious that she was afraid. That wasn't like Dick, and it caused an instinctive stir of alarm in her senses, too sharp to be ignored. She went out on the doorstep and stood listening for some informative sound through the Island's familiar night voice, wind and surf. Her ankles were cold; involuntarily she tightened the sash of her robe. The stars had moved a long way since just after supper.

Now it was Dick who was saying, “Come on.” He said it with little noises; she heard him near her, making a great stir in the thick shadow beyond the lamplight. And it would be only by getting away from the lamplight that she could see. . . . She left the doorstep and walked slowly along the path between the white lilacs, toward the windbreak. The damp ground wet the soles of her slippers and a chill went through her. It turned to abrupt and sickening cold when her toe touched something that shouldn't have been there.

Owen lay huddled in the tall dead grass under the first spruce in the windbreak. It was his foot she had touched. She knew it was Owen; that was her first thought and she confirmed it when she knelt, her hands quick and sure on his head and face. That was his hair, thick and crisp, and his face. His skin was warm, and when she leaned closer she smelled gin on his breath.

She went back to the house, furious to the verge of tears, and disgusted. “You get in this house,” she ordered Dick. “Leave him there. If he doesn't know any better . . .”

“Mrs. Sorensen, is something wrong?”

She started. Dennis Garland was there, he had come into the kitchen and turned up the lamp. He was still dressed, she observed dispassionately, while she was hating him for being there, hating Owen for being drunk out in the path.

She lifted her chin. Her eyes glowed somberly in the lamplight.
No, nothing is wrong
. Her mind framed the words; but she heard herself saying aloud, in a clear, proud voice, “I'm afraid there is. My brother is outside. He's very drunk.”

He made a movement toward the door, and she shrugged. “Leave him there. If he doesn't know any better than to drink cheap gin, it'll teach him a lesson to lie out in the field all night.”

“Pneumonia would be too much of a lesson, wouldn't it? And you'd be the loser—you'd have to take care of him.”

“If you weren't here, I'd have to leave him. I can't manage him alone.”

“Well, I'm here, and I can help with him,” he said seriously. ‘“Let's get him in, before the neighbors discover him and want to help.”

Neighbors
. Thea. A fine thing for Thea to behold when she got up in the morning. She'd love that; she'd relish it for months, and serve it up whenever she got a chance, with innovations. And Owen wouldn't care. It would be Joanna's pride that would burn, and the rest of the family who would be shamed, when the news reached Pruitt's Harbor.

She followed Dennis Garland outdoors, and together they got Owen into the house. He was an inert weight, and they were both out of breath by the time they put him on the sitting-room couch. Garland brought in the lamp from the kitchen; they stood and looked down at Owen, and Joanna was shamed as her brother had shamed her so many times before. Tonight she had reached the end of her rope, but Garland had been there, and so once more she had “done something.” But not because she wanted to. . . .

“Attractive, isn't he?” she said. Owen slept heavily, his face putty­white except for a bloody scratch on his temple. “It'll be worse before morning, because gin makes him sick.” She glanced at Garland defiantly. There was nothing but defiance left. But she dreaded his sympathy.

He wasn't sympathetic. She couldn't read his face, except that it was intent and impersonal. “I'll clean that cut up,” he said. “And he ought to get out of those clothes, they're damp. If you'll get me some dry pajamas for him, I'll attend to it.”

She started toward the stairs and he called after her. “Have you any bandage and tape?”

“All my first-aid stuff's in the first cupboard, second shelf.” She went on up the stairs and into Owen's room. Coming back with the heavy flannel pajamas, and a blanket, she was faintly amazed at herself. It was almost funny . . . as quickly as that her tension broke. She couldn't help it, but she was glad Dennis Garland had been here tonight, because she couldn't have left Owen out, after all; she might have gone to bed, determined, but she'd have been up again in fifteen minutes, and the vision of the struggle with a dead-drunk weight wasn't a pretty one.

When she came downstairs, there was a pungent, biting whiff of alcohol in the room, and he was just placing the last strip of tape over a small bandage on Owen's temple.

“That was a nasty little dig,” he said. He began to pull Owen's boots off. Joanna unzipped the jacket and unbuttoned his shirt.

“Don't you mind this?” she asked. “Undressing a—a drunk?”

He shook his head, and for the first time his slow smile touched his eyes. “But you do. Look, why don't you make some coffee, and I'll finish this job? It's nothing to me, but I know how you feel.”

“You know a lot,” she said without rancor, and went out into the kitchen. By the time the coffee was made, Owen was in his pajamas, and tucked efficiently under blankets. Garland and Joanna sat down to coffee; the clock said ten minutes before two.

The coffee was strong, and boiling hot, and Garland looked at his with pleasure. “You make wonderful coffee, Mrs. Sorensen.” He was as serene as if nothing untoward had happened, and it was breakfast time. Joanna looked down at her cup. Her throat felt closed and tight, because she knew what she must say, and it was never easy for a Bennett to apologize. Yet she would do it before she touched her coffee; else the coffee would not go down.

She lifted her head, folded her arms composedly on the edge of the table, and said, “Mr. Garland—”

He glanced up, but his hand still moved, stirring his coffee. For the first time she could put words into his expression. Kind and sensitive at once. It made it somehow easier for her to speak, that kindness that tempered his weariness and kept it from being harsh.

“You were right when you said I resented your buying the Place,” she said. “I did, at first. But I don't now. . . . If I've been rude, and not too hospitable, I'm sorry.” Her jaw tightened, and her eyes stayed on his without faltering. “I really mean it. And I don't know how to thank you for helping me out tonight. I don't know what I'd have done if you hadn't been here.”

“You don't have to say all that, you know.” His expression was quizzical.

“Yes, I do.” A faint warm glow of red came into her cheeks. “And I want to apologize because this happened tonight.”

“Why should you apologize, Mrs. Sorensen?”

“It's a sure thing Owen won't! He drinks too much, but he's proud of it.”

“I doubt that. It's probably just self-defense. It's more likely that he's ashamed of himself, but he thinks he can't do anything about it.”

Joanna could drink her coffee now. It tasted better than her coffee had tasted for a week. She found herself eager to speak; now that the barriers were down, and Garland had seen Owen at his worst, there was no sense in skirting the subject and she wanted badly to talk to someone. With Nils gone, she had to keep so much to herself.

“Owen always drank, but not the way he's drinking now. It's bad for him, and he knows it. Sometimes I think he's doing it deliberately.” She paused, listening again for that harsh breathing from the sitting room. “He had pneumonia once, when he was away from home. What you said about pneumonia tonight—well, I've thought about it more than once.”

“A big man like Owen can go down like a felled ox,” Dennis Garland said. He looked at her seriously across the table. “What's on his mind, anyway?”

“I think it's the war,” said Joanna. “They wouldn't take him. He was drunk for days after they turned him down.”

The man took out his pipe and tobacco. “Heart,” he murmured. “I listened to it while I was putting him to bed. He looked so bad I thought we had something worse than a drunk on our hands. His pulse was very slow—and uneven.”

Joanna felt a certain dread grip her like nausea. She watched Dennis fill his pipe with strong, square-tipped fingers, his head bent, almost fair in the lamplight. The moment was dream-like, but it was a bad dream. First Nils had gone, and then this stranger had come, and it seemed as if she had taken one blow after another since then. Common sense told her that he had nothing to do with the floating mine, the nightmare, Owen. But he had been here through all of them, and in her mind he would be irrevocably a part of them.

She moistened her lips. “Is he all right?” she asked him steadily, but it was as if her steadiness didn't deceive him. His head came up quickly, and across the table his eyes considered her, tired but perceptive. She felt herself clinging to that gaze as if it were a tangible support. “Is he all right?” she asked again.

“He's all right for now. But he isn't all right as far as his life's concerned. It's not pleasant to be getting on for forty with only a sense of your own failure to live with. Maybe he
is
drinking deliberately. That's his escape. Everybody has an escape—”

“Even you?”

He smiled faintly. “Even I. Even you.”

“Escape from what?” She straightened her shoulders even more.

“Don't be offended. It's no disgrace . . . it's the only sensible way, sometimes. It's wrong only when you try to run away from the ordinary realities of life, instead of facing them, or finding a way around them.” He leaned back in his chair, and the scent of his tobacco smoke was aromatic, like the kind Nils used. “And then it's a disgrace to choose the wrong escape.”

“Liquor is wrong—” she began quickly. “I know that. I know Owen's unhappy. But if he'd stop drinking long enough to put himself into good condition, he'd have a new slant on life, and he could figure out what to do.”

“ ‘If he'd stop,' ” he quoted gently. “Do you realize what that entails? He's got to
want
to stop, so violently that the desire will carry him through that horrible period of cure and readjustment. He won't—and can't—stop just on the chance that he might discover some reason for living.”

“You say that as if right now he had a reason for dying.”

“He has. He's wretchedly unhappy, with nothing to live for.”

She looked at him with pain, knowing that he was right, wondering why she hadn't seen it in all its merciless clarity before. It was what Nils had tried to tell her, but she wouldn't believe it until this stranger came and told her. Who was he, anyway? It became suddenly imperative that she should know.

“Who are you?” she said. She leaned forward, her dark eyes luminous with their questioning, her strong round chin in her hands.
“What
are you?”

He didn't answer her at once, but watched her quietly. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth, and looked down at it. “Right now I'm a wanderer. I've no roots, unless buying your uncle's place is an attempt to put down roots in Bennett's Island soil. Until last winter I was a Navy doctor. A surgeon.”

“I saw the button in your lapel. But you're still a surgeon, aren't you? I mean—a man doesn't simply stop being—”

“You're wrong there.” He was smiling, but she couldn't read the smile. “It's the simplest thing in the world to stop being anything, or just to—stop being. I said I was an escapist, didn't I?”

Suddenly she felt embarrassed, as if she had gone too far. It was as if she had touched a scar, and realized that the scar was a surface thing, that underneath the wound was still festering. She stood up.

“More coffee? . . . Yes, and you said I was an escapist. I've been waiting for you to explain that.” She went out into the kitchen, and came back with the coffee pot. He pushed his cup across the table.

“When your husband left you to go overseas, you made up your mind that you wouldn't brood—didn't you?”

“If I did, I'd go mad. My imagination is too vivid.” Her hand tightened on the handle of the coffee pot, and she loosened it with a conscious effort, but already he had glanced down and seen the whitened knuckles.

“You've got all sorts of things to do to make the time go fast and to keep your thoughts moving constructively. . . . That's a form of escape, but a sensible form. A creative form . . . Do you understand?”