High Tide at Noon (58 page)

If he saw her looking at him, he waved and whistled, and she could catch the white gleam of his grin in his brown face. He had been very agreeable around the house ever since the day in the hay­loft; it was almost as if he were trying to win Joanna back to the old comradeship.

A little less charm and a little more work would make me think more of you, brother, Joanna thought.

Stephen came in one day from a long morning at the shore, to fmd Owen already home, where he had been since ten o'clock. Stephen had been up since daylight, and he moved a little slowly as he hung up his jacket and took off his rubber boots.

“Working hard?” he asked pleasantly. Owen, trotting Ellen on his knee, grinned back at him.

“Yep! How d'you like my new girl?”

Stephen touched Ellen's silky head with his calloused fingers and sat down as if he were tired. “At the rate you're patching pots, the spring crawl will be done before you get them overboard.”

“I'm in no hurry,” said Owen, and Joanna, setting the table, paused to look at him.

Stephen said carefully, “Did I hear you say you're in no hurry?”

“You did,” said Owen. He put Ellen in her high chair and went to stand by the stove, one foot on the hearth. His voice came slowly and easily, as unhurried as he was.

“I'm about fed up with lobstering. Seems to me I can't drive myself to put another trap out. I'm young and healthy—what am I doing, creeping along from day to day, making a dollar here and losing it there? There's more to life than that.”

“I don't see that you've been driving youself overhard.” Stephen appraised his third son from head to foot.

“I'm goddam tired of it, Father,” Owen said. He was smiling, as if he liked talking about it. “Ever get tired? No, I guess you never did, else you wouldn't have hung on to it this long, but I'm a different breed of cats. When that northeaster came along, and I got a look at my pots, I knew I was through.”

“Through with lobstering—or with the Island?”

“With both of 'em. With the whole shootin' match. I'm clearing out of this, Father. You'll be better off without me, anyway. I'm no help to the Island, nor a credit to the family.”

“Don't talk like that, Owen,” Donna spoke up. “Please don't.”

“Mother, you know it as well as I do.” He went to her and put his big arm around her shoulders. “Ever since I could walk you've been worrying about me, a hell of a lot more than you worried about the others. Well, it was a waste of time. I'm the sport of the litter, and it's time you and Father admitted it.”

Stephen stood up. His face wore the iron-dark look that Joanna knew of old, and his words came level and hard. “Owen, maybe you've helled around and given us a lot to think about, but I never thought I'd raised up a fool. So don't talk like one. You're a born lobsterman—I knew that when you put out your first fifteen pots. Right now you're becalmed. I've felt like that, son, many a time. Your mother can tell you that.”

Stephen's warm smile touched his eyes, as he put his hand on Owen's shoulder. “Go up and stay with your brothers awhile—ship out with them, go seining, and come back when you're ready.”

Owen said slowly and distinctly, “I'm tired of the sea and all that goes with it, whether it's lobster pots or seines or the Island. I'm fed up, Father. I've been wondering for a hell of a long time what was ailin' me, and now I know.”

Tired of the Island
. When Joanna shut her eyes she saw those words burning against her lids. She opened them again and looked full at Owen, and felt it rising in her—the scornful anger she'd felt so many times, when she looked at Owen. But she'd never felt exactly like this before, because she had never heard, or dreamed she would hear, those words from a Bennett's mouth.

Donna said quietly, “What are you going to do?”

“I don't know, Mother. Just get out of here as quick as I can. I aim to see a little of the country before I'm too old. If I don't go now I'll never go, and I'll end up like Nathan Parr or Johnny Fernandez.”

“Just go without shaving a few more days and you'll look like them now,” said Joanna. She turned and walked out of the room.

*
*
*

Stephen bought Owen's traps and Marcus Yetton bought his punt, Ned Foster bought a few things and so did Jake. Owen left the
White Lady
on the mooring, and wrote out a paper empowering Stephen to sell her if the chance arose. He was very cocksure about the whole business, as if the feeling of the money in his pocket had set him on top of the world again. Joanna, remembering how he had dreamed for so long of the
White Lady
before he built her, and how he had lived in alternate torment and exaltation while he was building her, wondered how he could give her up so easily. Boats weren't like the automobiles people owned on the mainland; boats had hearts and souls, and if you built your own boat, your own heart and soul went into it.

But it was as if he could hardly wait to go. In fact, he was ready a week after he had talked to them in the kitchen. On the last morning he was his old charming self, making Donna laugh in spite of herself, making Stephen's mouth twitch and his eyes crinkle. Joanna herself felt a sudden rush of affection for him. It was impossible to stay mad with Owen when he was so merry and so superbly sure of himself. No wonder those Brigport women were crazy about him. There'd be tears over there today when the mailboat had gone.

The world lay before Owen—the whole, great, wide, enchanting, lusty world, and it was his. He was going out to it with money in his pockets, his big handsome body, his young and vibrant health. They might have known the Island would some day be too small to hold him.

There was only once that his face shadowed. It wasn't when he lifted Donna off her feet and kissed her good-bye, or when he rumpled Joanna's hair and kissed her too, or shook hands with his father. It was when he lifted Ellen from her high chair and she put her small hands on his brown cheeks and touched her brief nose to his—a trick he had taught her.

“Don't grow up too fast,” he said to her, and put her back in her chair. A few minutes later he had gone; he didn't look back when Ellen called to him, and waved her hand in vain.

I
N
J
UNE
, P
ETE
G
RANT CLOSED UP
his store. He had kept the store and bought fish and lobsters on the Island since long before Joanna was born; she couldn't remember a time in her life when he wasn't there. When he gave up, it was somehow shocking.

Stephen went his calm way, working hard from early morning till dark. When she talked bitterly about Pete Grant, Stephen hushed her.

“Pete's been a good friend to us all out here—the best friend some of us ever had. He's stivered it out as long as he could, but you can't expect him to try to live on the few cents' worth of trade he gets here. He thinks the place is going under, and he'll get out while he's got a little something to take with him.”

“Abandoning ship,” said Joanna. “It'll be a surprise to all of them when they find out the ship isn't sinking, after all.”

“No, I don't think it's sinking.” Stephen looked out across the broad blue waters, placid under the June sun. “It's about time the lobsters hit us again. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a big difference, come fall.”

It was something to think about during the summer that followed. There had never been such a quiet summer on Bennett's Island in all Joanna's memories, nor for the others, except for her father, who had been a child here when his family first owned the Island.

Now they went back to that old way of doing things. They took their lobsters to Brigport to sell, bought their supplies there, and collected their mail. This life had a strange serenity unbroken from day to day. Now that the
Aurora B
. didn't come any more, and Pete wasn't there to buy lobsters, his wharf was seldom used. The old wharf was the center of activity—such activity as there was, with only Stephen, Marcus, and Ned Foster to bring their boats in, and Jake Trudeau coming up sometimes from the Eastern End.

Joanna walked to the shore daily with Ellen, who trotted along ahead of her on sturdy brown legs, with occasional side trips into the marsh to pick blue flag or morning glories. When they reached the water Joanna sat on an old dory in the sun to wait for Stephen to finish his morning's work on his traps, or to come ashore from the mooring. Ellen threw stones into the water, watched the gulls squabble over a dead fish, or gravitated like a needle toward a magnet to where the Yetton children played in and out of the water and over the rocks.

Sitting there in the sun-drenched silence, a faint breeze stirring her hair, and no sound but the gulls and the children's voices, Joanna thought of the time when the beach was deserted only at noon, when everybody had gone home for dinner; and even then there was always somebody coming in late, rowing ashore to haul up his punt and tie it with the others. Maybe he'd be carrying a fish, or a bucket of forbidden short lobsters, and he'd look around cautiously to be sure a Bennett wasn't about to step out from behind a fish house . . . Joanna smiled at the memory.

It hadn't been such a long time ago, at that. It hadn't been so long ago that she couldn't look up without seeing Charles, or Philip, or Hugo, or the Little Boys. The thought made her sigh a little, but not deeply. She was still young enough to see this hushed and dreamy summer as the neap tide, a pause, a moment of silence. In a little while—perhaps sooner than she thought—the moment would break, the world would move again, and the flood tides would come.

If she turned her head she could see her father's pots stacked in long rows against the walls of the boat shop, Marcus' pots beyond them. Her father had only a few traps out this summer; he hadn't approved of lifting the Closed Season, he wouldn't have lobstered during July and August if he hadn't been driven to it. But when the fall came he would have two hundred and fifty traps to put overboard.

Joanna looked at the long ranks upon the wharf, all ready to be set; ballasted with flat rocks, the warp coiled neatly inside and the freshly painted buoy, black and white, set on the coils. Those traps represented the future for Stephen and Donna Bennett, for Joanna and Ellen, for the Island. He had added Owen's string to his own, patching with infinite pains. He had put almost all that was left in his money box into new laths and rope and nails. Joanna had knit up the new heads, and she was still making bait bags whenever she sat down for a moment with nothing to do.

Yes, there was going to be a difference this fall. And those who'd stayed with the captain would be riding the crest of the wave. The others—Joanna shrugged. They'd come flocking back, the boys and all. They might keep up their seining—the Robey boys still lived at Brigport, and they did all right. Of course there was a sardine cannery over there where Charles and the others were. But Joanna was willing to bet that if the lobsters struck Bennett's again, and the price went up to normal and above, there was nothing that could keep her brothers away from the Island. They might be getting rich on herring, but they still belonged to the Island, wherever they were. Owen, too, in spite of what he'd said—that he was tired of the sea and the Island both.

He'll be back, Joanna said, and at the thought of having them all home again, and the boats back in the harbor, the punts and dories on the beach, the hammers going in the fish houses—there was no scorn left in her, only a steady warmth spreading outwards from her heart.

Stephen sat back in his chair after supper one night, lifted Ellen to his knees, and said casually, “Guess I'll set another load of pots tomorrow. Want to go with me, Joanna?”

“Are the lobsters starting to come?” she demanded.
“Thick?”

“Well, no, I don't know about the thick part.” Stephen's eyes smiled at her eagerness. “I know they're about done shedding and they're poking their heads out to see how the wind is. About the time I get the whole two hundred and fifty set, I'll be able to tell you how they'll be. Did you say you were going with me?”

“You bet I am,” said Joanna emphatically. “I'll get my dungarees out tonight. I haven't had them on for a hundred years.” She looked down at the table, her lashes hiding her eyes, and felt a swift running flash of pain. The last time she'd worn her dungarees had been down on Pirate Island, when she and Alec had speared flounders for bait. Except for Ellen across the table there, her head a soft glow of gold against Stephen's darkness as she rummaged through his shirt pockets, that day on Pirate Island was a dream, a story she had once heard.

“You'll have to be up at daylight then,” her father was saying. “Maybe I'll get to set two boatloads tomorrow.”

“I used to think,” said Donna, “it was a shame that Joanna wasn't a boy—she'd have made a good fisherman. But we wouldn't have had Ellen, then. Stephen, don't let her drink out of your cup! You're getting as bad as the Yettons.”

There's nothing in the cup,” said Stephen, but he took it away from Ellen and gave her a cookie instead. “Speaking of the Yettons—young Julian's a bright kid, if he is a mite on the scrawny side. Wants to put some pots out—I told Marcus the boy could use that peapod of Owen's.”

“You going to give him the pots too?” Joanna fixed him with a stern eye, and Stephen laughed.

“You're a hard one. Don't you believe I ought to lend the boy a hand, if he's willing to work?”

“I give up,” said Joanna. “You're hopeless. Now you'll be supporting Julian and his descendants for the next twenty years.”

Winnie let out a salvo of barks that all but shook the stove as she crawled out from beneath it. Ellen wriggled down from Stephen's lap and reached the door before the old dog did, trying to turn the knob. She looked back at her mother and her grandparents with a sparkling blue gaze. “Owen?” she said. “Owen?”