The Ebbing Tide (35 page)

By this time Mateel had sent Young Charles and Donna down to find out what was happening; Joanna ran downstairs to find them waiting in the kitchen, their dark eyes wide and glowing with horrified excitement. She gave them each a hug.

“You're just the people I wanted to see!”

“How is he?” said Young Charles hoarsely.

“He's able to walk, kids. Now you've got to buck up and not worry, because I want you to stay here and keep house with Ellen tonight.” She looked long and somberly at each one in turn. “Have fun, and cook up anything you want to, and stay up late if you feel like it—but don't chew about Owen. Ellen was the one who saw him first, and it was a terrible shock to her.”

“Sure, we'll take care of her,” Donna promised. “We'll have a keen time—huh, Charles?”

“Yep!” Charles was very much the young rooster left in full control of the barnyard. “You care if we dance, and stuff?”

Joanna laughed, thankfully. “You know how crazy Ellen is about waltzing. . . . Now help me carry these things down to the shore.” She put on her reefer and tied down her hair under the bright wool kerchief Ellen had given her for Christmas.

“Jeest, this is hotter'n the hinges of hell,” said Young Charles, wincing, as she filled his arms with a blanket-wrapped bundle.

“It's hot-water bottles. . . . You take these blankets, Donna, and I'll carry the bag.”

She gave a last look around the house, remembered to turn down the Aladdin so it wouldn't stream up, put a thick piece of birch in the fire to keep it until the children came back; and then she was ready.

The sun had just gone down, and the sky in the west was a luminous apple-green, its clear pale color intensified by tiny, motionless clouds flushed with violet and coral. The air was pure and still and cold; it seemed to Joanna as if she had not had time for a deep breath in the past hour, and she took one now, as if it would be a long time before she could breathe so freely again. The worst was not yet over, perhaps it had not really begun.

There was no time to waste. In the echoing hush they could hear the
White Lady
's engine idling at the old wharf. When they reached Sigurd's, she sent Young Charles and Donna ahead with the blankets, and took a moment to kiss Ellen and Jamie, to say that Owen would be all right and she'd be home in a day or so. Ellen accepted it calmly, and Joanna got out of the house before Jamie had a chance to pucker up.

It was while she was hurrying the last few steps between Sigurd's house and the wharf that she remembered Laurie, and involuntarily she looked back. If Laurie knew what had happened to Owen, surely she'd be here by now. But there was no other moving thing in the shadowless light cast over the village by the white eastern sky and the afterglow in the west. And there was no way to tell Laurie—not now.

She ran the rest of the way to the wharf.

The
White Lady
swung slowly away from the spilings, her engine responding as silkily as if Owen were at the wheel instead of Charles; her propellor stirred the shadowy smoothness of the water into bubbling foam, and sent small lacy wavelets up the beach. Sigurd, Franny, and Matthew Fennell stood on the wharf watching, and Young Charles—Donna had gone back to stay with Ellen. Joanna waved to them all, and saw them turn away as the
White Lady
headed out among the moorings with gathering speed. She didn't join Charles and Dennis at the wheel, but went down into the cabin. Owen was established snugly on a locker, hemmed in with blankets. He appeared half-asleep, as she studied him in the dimming light. His color was better, he seemed relaxed and fairly comfortable. That was a good sign, wasn't it?

It was warm in the cabin; they'd built a fire in the stove. She sat down quietly on the opposite locker. There was a change in the engine's tempo as they reached the harbor mouth and Charles opened the throttle. The
White Lady
would have a chance now to show what she could do.

Joanna drew up her knees and laid her head down on them, and made herself think of the
White Lady
instead of what was going to happen to Owen's hands. But it was impossible to think of the boat without remembering how Owen's hands had first drawn the plans for her, and then built her; and how, when he had lost her for a while, it was the work of his hands that had gained her for him again. Owen's hands, so quick at striking out, at teasing, at working, at loving—

Her eyes stung with tears; and in the same instant Owen said quietly, “Jo—”

She lifted her head, knowing he couldn't see her wet eyes in the shadows. “What is it? Do you want a cigarette?”

“No. Jo, I didn't get to where Laurie was. I saw that thing on the beach and like a fool I had to see what it was.” His mouth was sardonic. “She won't want me now. But I—God, Jo, it's my kid, too, isn't it? If somethin' goes wrong, and I don't pull out O.K.—she's got to marry me, even if she don't want to.”

“If she isn't in Limerock tomorrow, she's not the girl I think she is,” said Joanna. “But you're going to pull out all right. Dennis said so.”

“You think he's God Almighty on a stick, don't ye?” he teased her faintly. “Well, light me a cigarette, Brat, and tell me a dirty story to cheer me up.”

“Why, Owen Bennett, you don't talk fit to eat! You know I don't know any dirty stories!” She bridled like Aunt Mary, and put a cigarette in his mouth. In the brief bright flare of the match he winked at her.

She was standing beside Charles at the wheel when they came into Lime rock Harbor. Owen's discomfort had mounted steadily, and he had finally ordered her profanely out of the cabin, saying that he couldn't stand to look at her. “I'm gonna say words I wouldn't say even in front of you, Brat. So get the hell out of here, will ye?”

She went out of the dimly lit cabin into the cockpit. The dusk was pierced with stars, Orion swung in the sky as the
White Lady
swung on her course across the wide bay. Charles was a tall silhouette against the spangled sky, but Dennis spoke to her just outside the companionway.

“How is he holding up?”

She turned toward him eagerly in the dark. “Maybe you'd better go in to him. He's pretty uncomfortable.”

“I wish I had something to give him. But I can't do a thing.”

“Just the fact that you're here counts for a lot. Owen trusts you.”

“Do
you
trust me?” Dennis said.

“Of course I do. I trust you so much that if you told me Owen wouldn't lose his arm, I'd believe you completely.”

He sighed, and turned away from her to look out across the sea. To the westward the lights of Two-Bush and Whitehead bloomed against the dark. The faint wind blew against his face in a cold, steady stream, and the water rushed by the side of the boat, chuckling endlessly, gleaming with phosphorus.

Now Joanna was accustomed to the dim illumination of the stars; in this world through which the
White Lady
beat her rhythmic way, half was the black sea, the other half belonged to the stars. The lights along the horizon seemed to be the product of no human agency, but bigger, more brilliant stars. In the day, the bay was strewn with islands, but at night there was nothing but an apparently limitless sea, a half-globe of starry sky arching down to meet it, and the boat.

And in the cabin Owen swore softly and steadily; he was aware only of pain and fury, not of Orion swinging over the sea. What Charles thought, standing by the wheel, his cigarette tip a glowing coal, there was no knowing. The boat moved under him as the wind freshened, his legs shifted his weight easily and automatically, the wheel was responsive to his faintest touch. He would not be thinking about the boat, it wasn't necessary. But no one would ever know what he thought about Owen.

And just outside the cabin Dennis leaned on the washboards and watched the lighthouses without speaking, and Joanna still heard in her head her last words.
I'd believe you completely
. And she wondered in deepening dread why he didn't answer her.

“Joanna, I can't tell you that he won't lose his arm,” he said at last. “But I've seen cases that looked worse, and healed perfectly. I didn't have the facilities to examine his arm, or his fingers.” He straightened up, and she could see his face dimly. “I don't want you to stop trusting me, Joanna. But I can't tell you what you want to hear.”

How do you know what I want to hear?
The words broke through the surface of her mind as suddenly and violently as a porpoise breaking water. They left her shocked and uncomprehending. She drew back from Dennis, shamed, as he moved past her. “I'll go in and stay with him now,” he said.

She stood for a long while in the shelter of the cabin. Then she went after to the wheel and began to talk with Charles about lobstering, the Island, the last letter from Nils.

When they were in sight of Limerock Harbor, the whole mainland seemed alight. It was the first time Joanna had come in past Owl's Head Light since the blackout had been lifted, and the city lights seemed strung along the shore like incandescent beads, each one sending its long bright streak of reflection across the harbor's sheltered waters. The
White Lady
ran across a surface that was like polished black glass until her bow shattered it into splinters of green-white light, sending the bubbling, unearthly radiance rushing aft along her sides to die out in a wake that reached back endlessly into the dark.

Just inside Owl's Head a small Coast Guard craft bore down on them and slowed up alongside to identify them. Charles was well-known; the skipper waved him on with an “O.K., Cap'n!”

In just a little while now they'd know. The ambulance would be at the wharf, and Owen would be taken away from them, and then someone would tell them—
what?
For the first time during the two-hour trip she began to feel cold. Her bones ached with it.

J
OANNA SAT GAZING AT A PAINTING
of a windjammer rounding the Horn and remembered the other times she had waited in this room at the Limerock hospital; when Ellen had her tonsils out, for instance, or when one of Mateel's babies had been born. She'd thought then it was a rather lovely room, she'd enjoyed the marine paintings, the deep chairs, the thick carpet, the lighting; she'd watched with admiration the nurse at the desk, who so obviously knew just what was going on all over the hospital at the moment. Now those other occasions were so alien to this one that they might never have existed; instead of comfort in the room, there was an atmosphere of hushed terror. Terror for what they would say about Owen, terror for Owen himself when he found out.

She saw her mother looking at her, and she tried to relax, muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve. She even smiled. Donna moved closer, her blue-gray eyes resolutely calm.

“After you've raised five boys, you're never really surprised at anything, Jo. You simply learn to hope for the best.”

“The whole thing was so sudden, though,” Joanna said, wondering, as she had always wondered, at her mother's inner serenity; it glowed through her worn, strong face like a candle behind a window. Perhaps this tranquillity was a defense. She'd had to learn it early in life, when she first married a Bennett, or be overwhelmed. “The way Ellen screamed at me, then finding Owen like that, and then the trip —” She caught herself quickly. “But it must have been even worse, the way Young Charles told you. I didn't tell him to call you up, Mother. I could shake him.”

“I admit I expected that Owen would be in worse condition than he is. Young Charles didn't leave out any details, and I guess he added a few.” She shook her head, smiling faintly. “Thank goodness for Helmi. I think she'd be calm if the sky fell. She called up the Coast Guard to locate Philip—the
Four Brothers
was up near Isle au Haut when they found him—and then she loaded me into the car and drove me up here.”

Helmi, Mark's wife, sat across the room from them, a little apart from Philip and Charles, who were smoking furiously and talking shop with the concentration of escape. She was knitting, and the light fell across her bent, silvery-blonde head. As if she sensed that someone was looking at her, she glanced up and nodded. Her eyes were the same pale ice-green as her sweater, they were startling color set against her white Finnish skin. Her wide mouth was as composed and disciplined as it had always been, her long slim body in perfect repose. Joanna had known Helmi to be emotionally upset just once in the years since Mark had brought her Horne to his family. Since then she'd respected the girl's poise; she knew it to be made of fine steel, and not stolidity.

Tiredness seeped over Joanna, dulling the knife-edge of tension. She sank a little deeper into her chair and shut her eyes, but she saw Owen against her lids, the red fingers at which she had been afraid to look, the stained snow.

Her mother's voice came quietly, “I don't know how we can ever thank Mr. Garland.”

“We'll never be able to, Mother.” She shook off the heaviness that wanted to seal her eyes and looked over at Dennis. She had not looked at him directly since the moment on the boat when the darkness had half-hidden them from each other, and her brain had uttered strange and incomprehensible words. . . .
How do you know what I want to hear
?

The orderlies from the hospital had helped get Owen out of the cabin and into the ambulance, and Dennis had ridden up with him. Charles had to find an anchorage for the boat, and Joanna had gone to the hospital, alone, in a taxi, to find her mother and brother and Helmi there. Dennis had come to them after a while, from some other part of the hospital, and she had not looked at him frankly even then, but covertly, through her lashes, while he talked with the others. But she had taken in the details of his tiredness, the tinge of weary grayness in his skin, the lines around his mouth, the slow way he'd pulled off his trench coat and sat down, the grateful gesture with which he'd taken out his pipe.