The Ebbing Tide (28 page)

I
N
A
UGUST
, C
HARLES
B
ENNETT
came back to Bennett's Island to live in the Bennett homestead. He brought his wife, the other five children who came after Young Charles, and a schoolteacher.

Whether he had made up his mind suddenly to abandon seining and go back to lobstering, or whether he had been planning it for a long time, Joanna didn't know; Charles wasn't one to tell his ideas, he simply confronted the family with the facts. That was how he had left the Island, back when Young Charles was a baby.

The little community was practically revolutionized by the thought of his return. For one thing, it meant a school, and everyone looked forward to that, even if all the pupils would be Bennetts. And the teacher was one that Charles himself had hired. To have the State send a teacher meant a great deal of red tape. But if the families of the pupils wanted to share expenses, to pay a girl and supply her board, the State was agreeable.

Joanna spent a happy week getting the homestead ready. Ellen and Young Charles helped, but she liked to go up there alone, or with Jamie and Dick, and open all the windows to the ripe, full richness of August. She liked washing all the small square panes, remembering what a miserable chore she'd always thought it in the old days. She'd slatted and sulked on window-washing days, and now she was taking positive delight in it. Each pane framed a different picture, a brilliant little scene of water and sky, of glistening rocks and white beach, or grassy point, or spruce woods; sometimes a bird flew through the scene, crow or gull or barn swallow—the old barn was full of them.

Jamie would wander around behind her, making dusting motions with a piece of rag, or else he'd play on the big granite doorsteps, or he'd go down into the meadow and rove among the raspberry bushes in his bright jersey and overalls, eating what fruit he could find. Dick moved patiently behind him, lying down whenever he could in the aromatic shade under the bay bushes.

In the house Joanna washed white paint, and swept, and aired, brought down quilts from the chests where they had been carefully stored and laid them on the dry grass to be sunned; and she spent moments of inaction kneeling by the upstairs windows, looking out at the sea beyond Matinicus Rock, or in toward the mainland and the blue Camden hills, at Vinalhaven and Isle au Haut, which had always seemed to her to be an enchanted cloud-blue mountain rising out of the sea.

While she looked, she dreamed, hearing boys' voices in the lowceilinged rooms behind her, noisy young feet on the stairs, the big kitchen ringing with its mealtime clamor. It was all going to happen again.

She remembered how she had hated it when Charles married Mateel Trudeau, whom he had “gotten in trouble,” and whom he loved. The whole family had hated it, until they realized why Charles loved her and they began to love her too. Now she was coming back to the Island as mistress of the Bennett homestead, and Joanna was making the house ready to welcome her, with no tinge of resentment at all. This was Mateel's place, because it was Charles' home, just as the other house was Joanna's place because it was Nils' home.

There'd be lights in the Bennett homestead at night now. There'd be children spilling out of the back door, a dog or two, chickens in the barnyard, trap stuff piled up in the barn for the two Charleses to build their new gear.

The schoolhouse would be opened again, too. Nora Fennell was to board the teacher. She had volunteered for the job. “Maybe she'll take walks with me,” she explained. “It'll be sort of fun this winter, too. I hope there's lots of courting going on.”

“There's only Owen to go courting,” said Joanna.

“Well, maybe some of the Brigport boys will give him some competition.” Nora was excited, and Joanna hoped for Nora's sake that the teacher was as young and congenial, and as susceptible to courting, as Nora wanted her to be.

Charles had plans, too. He was going to put sheep on the Island. He'd already bought them, a hundred ewes and two rams, and he wanted the Bennett meadow fenced in so he could keep the sheep there until after lambing time. Then he would turn them out on Sou­west Point, in the early spring. When Owen had come back from the mainland, with the
White Lady
loaded with fencing materials that Charles had sent in advance, she cried out at first.

“Oh, the strawberries!”

Owen gave her a darkly ironic glance. “You women and your goddam strawberries! They don't amount to Hannah Cook. There's plenty more places on the Island to pick ‘em, anyway. Listen, wool is over a dollar a pound now, and it'll stay high. Charles splits with the rest of the family when he sells the wool. There'll be a sight more profit in sheep than in strawberries.”

“Well,” Joanna began doubtfully, and then grinned. “It'll be exciting in a way, won't it?”

Owen grunted. “Puttin' up that fence'll be excitin', too. Where's that long-legged gandygut?”

“If you mean Young Charles, he's down in the fish house.” Owen went out, and Joanna began to tell Ellen about the days when Grandpa Bennett had raised sheep on the Island. There'd been the time when her father and Uncle Nate, as young boys, had camped out on Sou­west Point with shotguns to find out whose dogs were chasing and killing sheep. It had seemed like the loftiest pinnacle of adventure to Joanna; she had begged for the story so much that she'd half-believed she'd been with them, crouched on a grassy slope above the sheep who filled the hollows like snow in the moonlight. Telling it, she saw the rebirth of her own passionate interest in Ellen's eyes.

“They felt pretty good, being down there alone with shotguns, she said. “Your grandfather used to tell me just how the stock of the shotgun felt, and how the barrels gleamed, and how the food tasted. I used to think nothing I'd ever eaten could taste as good as those cold biscuits with thick slices of veal and Red Astrakhan apples from that tree up in the orchard.”

“I'll bet they were good,” said Ellen rapturously.

“And they had gingerbread too—Grandma Bennett used to make a good solid kind that stuck to their ribs—and cold tea in a jug.”

“Gosh,” Ellen breathed. “Sometime I'd like to have some cold tea in a jug, just to know how it tastes.”

“It sounds lots better than it tastes,” said Joanna briskly. “Now let's get up there and black the kitchen stove like new for Mateel.”

A sardine boat, skippered by a friend of Charles' from Pruitt's Harbor, brought the hundred Cheviots, and Charles moved his family in the
Four Brothers
. Another boat came along too, with Philip Ben nett at the wheel; a thirty-four-foot lobster boat, the
Dovekie
. Philip would take the big seiner back to Pruitt's Harbor and continue to work with her, and a new crew, and Charles would go lobstering in the
Dovekie
. Her name belied her, for she had long, racy lines, and looked nothing at all like the plump, round little bird.

The dinner that Joanna and Ellen had ready for the family when they arrived was something monumental. The big kitchen at the homestead was full of light and air, with windows wherever you looked; the breath of August blew in, and the breath of lobster chowder, baked potatoes, baked stuffed lobster, with green peas from Joanna's garden, blew out, sweeter than all the perfumes of Araby to a crew who'd been on the water for three hours. Afterwards there was green-apple pie and good strong fishermen's coffee.

Walking home afterwards through the alder swamp with Jamie and Ellen, after helping with the dishes and delivering the schoolteacher to her boarding place, she felt tired and somewhat stranded. For weeks now, ever since Charles had written he was coming, she'd been on the crest of a wave of industry; there'd been hardly any lying awake at night because she was so tired when she went to bed. Now they were here, the house was cleaned, the sheep were in their meadow, everyone was established . . . and Joanna felt like a dory beached at flood tide and left high and dry when the water went out.

Now, all unbidden, as if it had been waiting for this very moment of inertia and reaction after the momentum of the last weeks, the night of the full moon and the blackberry blossoms came back to her. Worse was the memory of her bitter and futile weeping.

At the edge of the barnyard she stopped and looked at the house. Jamie was running, scattering the duck family, Ellen was trying to coax the drake in a soothing, comforting voice, Dick stood on the back doorstep, waiting for someone to open the door so he could get a drink.

I don't want to go in
, Joanna thought.
Not when Nils isn't there. I don't want to sleep alone any longer
.

S
EPTEMBER WAS A LOVELY MONTH
. Sometimes it was as pastel, as silken-hued and textured as mid-summer, sometimes there was a procession of warm bronze-and-sapphire days when the nights were powdered brilliantly with frosty stars; the northern lights spread their rosy fan above Brigport, the dawns were clear and chill. Joanna thought of the thick tropical stars that blazed over Nils and Mark and Stevie, the warm winds, the nightmare sense of fantastic beauty mixed with the perpetual threat of attack. Somehow Nils had conveyed that sense to her.

Here at home, while her brothers and her husband were at war, there was more money being made along the coast of Maine than had ever been known by the lobsterman. Usually the lobsters slacked off in the summer, but this year they'd kept up, and in September the hauls were phenomenally high. So were the prices. In a way, it was a little frightening. You felt like bracing yourself for the crash; this couldn't go on forever.

The strawberries had been long gone, the blueberries had ripened and been picked, and then the raspberries; in late August and early September the blackberries were heavy and rich on the trailing bushes, shiny as lacquer, bursting with purple juices. And while you picked them you saw cranberries turning waxy pink against the thick, glossy green carpet their vines made along the ground. In the orchard the Yellow Transparents gleamed among the leaves, and when you stood under the twisted trees you could see golden fruit against the hot hard blue of the Maine autumn. The crickets chirped in the windless hush at noon, the asters bloomed along the paths in chalky-lavender drifts and the little blueberry bushes turned red as fire in the fields.

School started, and one afternoon Miss Gibson, the teacher, came to make a formal call on Joanna. She laughed about it. “I always call on my pupils' parents right off,” she said, “as a teacher. After that I hope I'll be considered as a friend.”

“You've been considered a friend ever since we found out you were willing to come out here,” said Joanna. “You don't know what it means to have Ellen home with me.”

“And Ellen's a darling. I love her already.” It didn't sound like saccharine gush from Miss Gibson. She was young, and she'd come from Aroostook County. Her body was compact and strong under the yellow skirt and sweater, her movements were vigorous; her hair was vigorous too, hanging in a thick, shiny, brown page-boy bob. She looked at Joanna with unreserved friendliness in her bright blue eyes.

“I didn't know what Island people would be like,” she admitted. “I took the job when your brother offered it to me, because everybody told me the Bennetts were fine people—and because I wanted an adventure.” She grinned diffidently at that. “I had no idea what the Island would be like. I thought of little camps hanging onto bare rocks by their toenails. But this is so different—and everybody is so easy to like.”

“I think everybody likes you, Miss Gibson,” Joanna said.

“My name is Laurie, outside of school.” She rubbed Dick's head, and admired the truck Jamie showed her. “He's about two, isn't he?”

“His birthday's next week.”

“That's his father?” Laurie Gibson had discovered the photograph of Nils on the sideboard. “He's the image of him.” The bright eager face sobered abruptly. “I wish it were all over! I wanted to join the Wacs or the Marines, but Mr. Maxwell—he's the principal of the Normal School—kept telling me that I was needed as a teacher-that people were neglecting the generation who would inherit the world after the war. So here I am. Still a teacher.”

“I'm glad you didn't go into the service,” Joanna said sincerely. “The children need somebody like you. The teacher's a very important person here.”

Miss Gibson glowed. She had abundant, lovely color and a quality of becoming radiant in an instant. “I want to do my best, and I've got a lot of ideas. I'm qualified to teach First Aid, so I thought I'd do that, and have Home Nursing—most especially for Ellen and her cousin Donna, but anyone who wanted to could join that. And then I think children should have more music in the schools, so I'm going to have that, and teach them handicrafts—” She blushed suddenly and beautifully. “There I go again, getting enthusiastic.”

The girl was a fresh, springlike, uncomplicated presence in the room. Joanna brought out apple pie and made coffee, wanting to keep her there for a while longer. She loved to hear her talk. For her, Bennett's Island was an adventure, she probably slept as deeply as Jamie at night and awoke as eager and hungry for the day's activities as Jamie did. She had what she wanted, she didn't know anything about the torment of dreams or of twisting restlessly at midnight, or tears that meant nothing because they could gain you nothing; perhaps she would never know what Joanna had known only recently, the swift awakening to the sound of weeping, and the realization that it was yourself who wept, without understanding why.

Owen came in while they were drinking coffee. It was too windy to haul, and he'd been working all day in the fish house, heading pots. Now he stood in the doorway, smiling, running a hand through his hair.

“Afternoon, ladies. You bein' hoggish with that pie?”