The Ebbing Tide (26 page)

“There's a lot of folks wouldn't take it too kindly,” Thea went on, “with my cousin out fightin' and maybe dyin', and you carryin' on the way you are. I wonder how Nils would like it, if anybody was to drop him a line—”

“Like what?” Joanna felt sick—sick at the sight of Thea, but she wasn't afraid. The woman was raving, that was all. Face her down, and she'd crumble. “Like what, Thea?”

“Like Garland sittin' in his chair, and maybe layin' in his bed!”

She wasn't expecting it, and so it was like a blow in the stomach.

And yet, curiously enough, she wasn't too amazed. It was just the sort of thing Thea would throw at her, like a hoodlum throwing manure. It was just the sort of thing Thea would
think
, because her mind couldn't function in any other terms.

This filth can't hurt Dennis or me
, she told herself, and the fact spread coolingly over her rage and disgust. She looked back at Thea as if from a great distance. “You're babbling, Thea. You'll make yourself sick.”

“Babble! I'll show you how I can babble!” Thea was choking on her own violence. “I
thought
somethin' was goin' on, you and Garland bein' such close pals. But you bein' so much of a
lady
, and always bein' too good for the rest of us bastards, and him supposed to be so much of a
gentleman
—but I found out what I wanted to know, the day Jamie was lost. You're nuts about him and his fine ways, and no man'll turn down what's offered him so free and clear!”

Joanna slid quietly through the door and shut it behind her. She waited for a moment in the shed, holding the knob, and heard a savage crash of china that meant Thea had thrown her cup against the wall. Then she went home.

When she reached her own doorstep she was trembling. She felt as if she would never be able to shut out the sound of that voice and the words it had hurled at her. And she knew too that she hadn't straightened things out so well, after all. For Young Charles, yes. She doubted that Thea would ever trouble him again. But if she had ever wanted to strike back at Joanna, she had done a complete and devastating job, without actually knowing it.

There was a ghastly humor in the situation. But laughter was an unknown element in Joanna's world at the moment.

I
T WAS RIDICULOUS
. It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard of. She should have been able to discount it for what it was worth; yet—what was it worth? She thought she had crossed it off, eradicated it as Thea's perverted mouthings, by the time she went to bed that night. But when she had propped herself up in bed, writing tablet on her knees, the yellow lamp flame flickering gently in the night breeze that stirred the curtains, Jamie's breathing soft and even from his crib, Dick sighing in his sleep—when she was all ready to write to Nils, she found herself unable to write. She leaned back and stared at the velvety dark square of the window with eyes that were as dark, trying to form words in her mind. The strawberries, the jam she'd made and put away for him, Jamie's new words, the lobstering, the news from Pruitt's Harbor—there were all these things but they were nothing, they could be encompassed in a few lines. She realized then how much of Dennis there had been in her letters. He was news, he made news, Nils always asked about him and was interested in his progress as lobster-buyer, and besides, her consciousness had never been clouded as far as Dennis was concerned; she had known no reason why she shouldn't write about him as freely and frankly as she wrote about anyone else.

Then why this reluctance tonight? She looked at her competent fingers holding the pen, and drew her peaked black brows together as if the fingers were responsible, as if they were holding back the phrases.
There is absolutely no reason for this
, she told herself in clear, cold, silent words.
If he is in love with me, we've both decided to ignore it, in the interest of our friendship
.. It was rather a fine sentence, and she was proud of it. She contemplated it with some satisfaction. Why, already she'd half-forgotten that instant in the orchard, she rarely remembered that he considered her as anything but a friend; and to say that
she
was in love with
him
—all her hard-won serenity suddenly deserted her, she was aware of a wash of heat rising over her body, so that the room was stifling.

The day Jamie was lost
. She heard Thea's voice, the indescribable venom of it; and at the same time saw Thea standing in the doorway of the sun parlor. She smelled the clean-laundered scent of Dennis' shirt and remembered its coolness against her hot cheeks, and the hardness of his shoulder against her, blessedly hard for her to press her forehead against; she remembered the relief of her crying. And then Thea had been standing in the doorway.
She must have seen more than I realized
, Joanna thought dully. But if Owen had been there, she would have been grateful for his shoulder as well, if she couldn't have Nils. But Thea would never think of that. Thea went by what Thea did.

I'm not in love with Dennis
, said Joanna, and the wave of heat came again, burning and infuriating.
How could I be? Women like me don't fall in love with other men when their husbands are gone!

One thing was certain, Thea had begun t o make life difficult for her. She had nothing to feel self-conscious about, but it wasn't pleasant to think Thea was watching her every move. If she, Joanna, weren't a strong-minded person, the memory of Thea's remarks would cast a shadow over her association with Dennis. But she didn't intend to let anything or anyone taint something that had become so valuable to her. Not if she could help it.

She wrote the letter to Nils eventually, but Dennis wasn't in it; she was beginning to wonder if she weren't going into too much detail about him. She filled up the pages with descriptions of the Island, July, and local gossip, and went to sleep secure in the knowledge that to ignore Thea was the right course.

In the morning, she was setting the kitchen to rights after breakfast when she saw Dennis coming up the path from the shore. She felt a sudden and hitherto unknown confusion, and a swift onrush of fury against Thea who had caused this to happen, and then she went upstairs quickly. She was making beds when Ellen called to her innocently.

“Mother, Dennis is coming! Do you want me to make some more coffee?”

Joanna pounded a pillow into new fluffiness before she answered. Then she called back calmly, “No, never mind. He probably won't stay but a minute!” She wanted to wait quietly, and hear him come in, but instead she snapped sheets with great vigor, pulled out the blankets and made new mitered corners, and was deeply absorbed when Ellen hailed her again.

“Mother, have you got any mail? Dennis is going to Brigport with Sigurd—”

Joanna went t o the head o f the stairs then. “Hello, Dennis!” she called down to him cheerfully. “Thanks for asking. There's a letter for Nils —it's on the sideboard, Ellen.”

He answered from the dining room, and for an instant she felt as if she had never heard his voice before, its deepness and ease, its own particular timbre. “Good morning, Joanna! Do you want to go over with us? It's a superb morning for a sail—”

“I wish I could,” she said with convincing regret, talking t o the picture of the Infant Samuel that hung where the stairs turned. “But I'm as busy as a three-legged cat with fleas!”

“A pretty way to describe yourself, I must say. . . . Well, what about this child of yours?”

“She can go if she wants to. Ellen, take a dollar from my pocketbook and see if they have any candy in the store.”

“O.K.!” said Ellen rapturously.

There were sounds downstairs, of Ellen's quick feet; and the ghostly fragrance of Dennis' pipe floated up the stairs to Joanna.
This is silly
, she said to herself. But she could not go down there, any more than she could write about him to Nils last night.

“You won't reconsider?” Dennis' voice came after a moment, and she felt her heart jump. But of course he wasn't reading her mind. She answered him almost gaily.

“Don't tempt me, please. I'm a busy woman.”

“Far be it from me to lead you from the path of virtue, then. Ready, Ellen?”

“Ready!” Ellen was in seventh heaven, Joanna could visualize the shine in the blue-gray eyes, and the unselfconscious happiness that is possible at twelve. She felt a pang of sadness as she went back to her work. She would have liked to have gone. It had been a long time since she'd been out in one of the boats. But because of Thea there was this new barrier. It was true, she didn't intend to let Thea spoil anything. But today was too soon, the ugly words were too fresh in her mind.

The dance was Young Charles' and Ellen's idea. They had disappeared on a walk one afternoon, with Owen's .22, and had come back at supper time to admit, unabashed, that they'd climbed through a window into the clubhouse and had banged on the old piano, and played the old records. Everything was just standing there going to waste, Young Charles pleaded eloquently. Here it was July, and in a week or so there'd be a full moon—perfect night-sailing weather for a crowd to come over from Brigport. Ellen chimed in with unexpected fervor; her cousin had been teaching her how to waltz,
why couldn't they have a dance?

Owen shrugged and looked at Joanna. Sigurd, Thea, and themselves were the only club-members left on the Island. “If people that are so damn keen on dancin' feel like washin' lamp chimneys and cleanin' the dance floor, I s'pose we can do somethin' about it,” he said gruffly but with humor in his eyes.

It turned out to be a gala affair after all. Sigurd volunteered to play his accordion for some square dances, and when the notice was posted at Brigport, one of the Pierces said he'd bring his fiddle, since they didn't have a fiddler on Bennett's any more. Young Charles ordered some new records to come out on the lobster smack. The preparations went on and caused a pleasant stir in Island life. Joanna had a moment when she was stung with homesickness for the days gone by, when her brothers were all home, and a dance was something more than a dance; it could stand for almost anything, especially on a moonlit night in July.

And the fiddler of Bennett's Island had been Alec Douglass. But that was a long time ago, and life was as worth living now as it had been then. She would not willingly give up the present to have the past again.

Just before supper on the great night, Young Charles and Ellen begged her and Owen to come up and see how they had cleaned the clubhouse. It had been a perfect day, it promised to be a perfect evening. In fact, the perfection was almost too much; in a few days there would be rain and wind. There was always a price to pay for such effortless warmth, for such a richness of color and purity of outlines, for the exquisite clarity of air that seemed to edge every spruce spill with gold-tinged light, and strike through every bird-song with an added, more poignant sweetness.

They walked up through the lane, cool and shaded now that the sun was behind the trees, and the scent of late wild roses was around them, and the robins were making their liquid-throated evening songs from the big spruces that stood over the clubhouse. Jamie and Dick went on ahead, Ellen walked beside Joanna; she stood as high as her mother's shoulder now. Young Charles and Owen came behind, talking shop.

“Mother,” Ellen murmured, with a quick glance backward at her cousin. “Guess! Dennis asked me for the first waltz! I wish it could be Nils, but if it can't be, I'm glad it's Dennis.” She didn't require any comment. “I don't want Young Charles to know, he'll plague me. He says I've got a crush on Dennis. Mother—“ She tilted her head, her young brow creased anxiously.

“Mother, can't you just
like
somebody without having a crush on them?”

Joanna looked steadily into the worried eyes. “Of course you can. Only cousins and brothers who want to tease say things like that . . . or trouble-makers.”

Ellen's frown smoothed out and she hugged her mother's arm happily. At the same time something smoothed out in Joanna. Her own words, made simple and short for a child, had placed the facts concisely for herself. Almost at once she felt a lightness come over her, she was looking forward to the dance for the first time.

In the clubhouse she admired the lamp chimneys that Ellen had washed and polished, listened to Charles' new records, and praised him for the way he'd cleaned the expanse of hardwood dance floor. Owen looked at everything with a hypercritical eye, while his niece and nephew waited in badly controlled impatience for his words.

“Looks all right,” he said at last, one eyebrow lifted fiercely. “The talkin' machine's got enough dust on it to plant a garden in, and you swept all the dirt into the corners, but a man gallopin' by pukin' wouldn't notice it.”

“Oh,
Owen!
” Ellen burst out, turning red.

Young Charles gave him a Bennett scowl. “You know what you're full of, don't ye?” he said belligerently.

Owen grinned suddenly. “It's all right. Looks fine. Now come home and get your supper. It'll take you an hour to scrape that top­soil off yourself.”

It was a good dance. The crowd that came over from Brigport, except for the summer people, were old-timers and they gave a sense of familiarity to the proceedings. And it was like the old days to have Sigurd playing for square dances again. Inspired by whiskey and his own talent, Sigurd played tirelessly in a long and dazzling stream of jigs and reels that he had kept somehow in his merry yellow head. The square dances, Lady of the Lake, March and Circle, Portland Fancy, were almost the romps they'd been in the old days. If the older people's enjoyment was set in a minor key by memory, and their perpetual consciousness of the war, the youngsters had an unqualified good time.