High Tide at Noon (7 page)

“What else did Gunnar say?”

Charles scowled. “That was all he said.” She caught the faint emphasis on the
he
, and pounced on it.

“Who else said anything?” she demanded.

“I'll tell you, kid, because I hate to see you walk in there and not know what it's all about.” He looked straight ahead at the creaming surf around the harbor ledges. “It's just more wind, like Gunnar's chew, and we all know it, so don't let it bother you. Only Mark brought home a story from the shore and sprang it when we were having a mug-up, and it's got 'em all by the ears up there.”

Her lips were very dry. “What is it? Where'd he get it?”

“I don't know. He just said he heard it, here and there . . . about you and Nils rammin' around in the dark last night.”

“He walked home with me from the clubhouse.” She looked at Charles steadily. “What's that to talk about?”

“Nothing. Hell, you don't think any of 'em at home believed Mark's yarn, do you? Only they—” Charles looked embarrassed. “You know how the Island is. You're a kind of a pretty kid, and they've been waiting to get something on you, something to talk about. It's a way of getting even with the old man, that's what it is, if they can spill a lot of dirty chew about one of his kids.”

She felt sick inside. “Tell me all of it,” she commanded.

“Well, somebody—Mark couldn't find out who—was hanging around outside the clubhouse last night when you fellas came out. And they started the talk around about seeing something. That damn little scavenger picked it up and brought it right home.”

“Seeing
what?
” she said relentlessly.

“Seeing you fool around in the bushes,” said Charles, looking straight ahead at the wharf, and then Joanna knew.
Simon
. Strong above the cold furious nausea that gripped her rose the certainty that if she only said his name, by nightfall there wouldn't be much left of Simon Bird. She turned toward Charles, her face ablaze; she opened her mouth, and shut it again.

The tiredness that came was worse than the nausea. She couldn't tell who it was. She couldn't let them know how she knew without telling them of that shameful meeting there in the darkness, and then they would look at her and know her cheapness and her disloyalty.

The
Sea-Gypsy
was slipping across the harbor now, setting the other boats to rolling, and she saw Nils' peapod rocking at her haul­off. Nils couldn't do anything, either, except take Simon over, and she knew, with a weary wisdom, that a beating wouldn't help. They were caught. . . . It's a trap, she thought, and I made it myself.

Charles said, “They don't believe it, kid. At home, and plenty of other places on the Island. They know how you and Nils are, just chums, that's all, ever since you were big enough to tag after him and Owen. But there's a lot of dirty-minded sons o' bitches on this place who can't understand this chum stuff—they go by what they used to do in the bushes.”

The
Sea-Gypsy
glided to the car. Two other boats were there; Jud Gray and Jake Trudeau were selling their lobsters to Pete Grant. For a moment she hesitated on the gunwale, dreading to pass them. The world and the Island lay around her, so beautiful as to break her heart, but people were dirty and hateful and cruel.

Jud Gray's amiable face smiled at her, and Jake Trudeau said “ 'Ello, Jo,” looking, as always, like a very good-tempered pirate. It made it easier for her to cross the car to the ladder, even though she knew they'd been out hauling all morning and hadn't heard the story yet. For she knew that over every Island dinner table Joanna Bennett would be the chief topic of conversation. From her they'd go on to other Bennetts, to her father and mother, to the boys with their arrogant heads. It was a knowledge to make her feel like dying inside.

Charles stayed on the car talking shop with the other men, and Joanna walked up the wharf, and past the group lounging in the sun outside the store. She carried her head with a splendid assurance, though her ears were supersensitive to the sudden pause in voices that would begin again when she had passed.

They'll talk, she thought, but they'll eat every word they say about the Bennetts. And I'll make Gunnar and Simon pay, if I die doing it.

It was a promise. And some day, when the right time came, she'd keep it, as the Bennett boys always kept their promises. She walked through the village with her chin high and her mouth steeled against this new and vicious world, and turned at the road that led to her father's gate.

J
OANNA CAME INTO THE KITCHEN
, a thin straight girl in dungarees arid shirt. She knew that a tiny muscle jerked at one corner of her mouth, but she couldn't unclamp her teeth. The rest of the family were at the dinner table. As she dipped cold water into the wash basin, she heard Philip's mild voice.

“Tom Robey at Brigport has a seine he'll sell cheap. The way the dogfish rammed around in the net at the end of seining last fall, we ought to have a new one before we go again.”

“Listen,” young Stevie piped up. “Why can't I go with the seinin' crew this year?”

“You ain't old enough,” said Mark, with the superiority of thirteen over eleven. “What would you do with them little pindlin' arms?”

“What do
you
do?” said Stevie truculently.

“Boys,” said Donna, and they subsided.

Stephen said in his moderate way, “I'd want to see any seine Tom Robey's selling, before I bought it.”

“He's the lyin'est bastard that ever feet hung on and was called a man,” said Owen cheerfully, “but does he make money bootleggin'!
Cripes!
”

“What's bootleggin'?” inquired Stevie.

“Never mind, son,” murmured Donna. “Owen, eat your dinner.”

“The Robey boys told me they'd make me a partner . . . meet schooners outside the Rock—”

“Owen, you heard your mother.” Stephen sounded final. At another time Joanna would have grinned. Owen was trying to stir things up a little, and nobody would be stirred. They only told him to shut up and eat his dinner, as if he were Mark or Stevie. But today she felt as if she would never want to laugh again.

She couldn't keep on drying her hands indefinitely. She must go in there, and when she sat down they would see her, and in spite of their love and their belief in her, a silence would settle heavily upon them.

For one breathless instant she thought of telling them the whole story. But she knew at once that it was impossible, that she couldn't stand there under the searching gaze of all those masculine eyes and her mother's cool and measuring glance. The very thought of it sent color rushing hotly over her neck and face—a wave of heat across her whole body. Now, for them, she was innocent. But not after she told them about Simon Bird. They would never understand it in a thousand years; even she couldn't understand it now. The moment in the orchard seemed a moment in a shameful dream a long time ago.

They could forgive her for being talked about, lied about; but they couldn't forgive her for meeting Simon Bird.

She pulled out her chair and sat down. The younger boys kept arguing, and Philip, beside her, said, “Ahoy, Tiddleywinks!” Owen said, “Hi, brat,” and went on eating baked haddock. Her mother smiled, her father nodded pleasantly, and they continued discussing the probability of the mailboat's running every day this summer instead of three times a week. Joanna looked at her heaped plate; baked stuffed haddock and mealy potatoes, swiss chard canned last summer. It was her favorite dinner but she couldn't eat it with that twisting, tightening knot where her stomach was. And she couldn't eat hot gingerbread with whipped cream, either.

Somehow the meal passed. Charles came in, and the eternal shop talk began again. Joanna made herself relax. It would be a good hour before she could escape either to her room or to the woods beyond Goose Cove. A vision rose before her eyes, a vision of a place she had found deep in the woods, where the silence was walled in by great spruces and she could walk in a cool green gloom pierced by thin, infrequent spears of sungold. A place where the soundless flight of hawks through the branches only increased her solitude.

Never, it seemed to her, had the Bennetts been so gay, so talkative, so noisy. Almost as if they were making a special effort to show her nothing bothered them.

At last she could clear the table and wash the dishes; at last the house was emptied, and Donna went to her room to lie down. Joanna worked mechanically, her mind absorbed in putting her thoughts in order. This story that Simon had begun from spite—he'd keep it going until someone stopped him. But here was the wall again, and she was already bruised from crashing against it.

Only Nils could try to stop him. But Simon would make no secret of it, if Nils split his lip or blackened his eye; he'd flaunt the marks around the shore, and she could almost hear his easy, silky voice: “Guilty conscience, that boy. Tryin' his damndest to shut me up. Hell, I bet anybody could take that Jo out, if they played their hand right. . . .”

No, Nils mustn't do anything. She washed and wiped dishes in a fury of speed. They must pretend Simon wasn't real. Those who wanted to believe him would believe him anyway, and the others would only laugh at him. Let it die, if a story about Joanna Bennett could ever die, she thought with the desolate woe of fifteen.

Owen came in with an armful of wood and dropped it in the box. “I guess that'll hold ye for the rest of the day. It's damn hot splitting spruce. Know it?” He drank a big dipperful of water and turned to go out again.

“Wait a minute, Owen!” she said impulsively.

“Hell, sis, I'm in a hurry.” He scowled and pulled away as she caught his sleeve.

“Charles told me, out in the boat . . . Owen, aren't they going to say anything?”

“What is there to say? They don't believe any of that trash—no sense getting goweled about it.”

“But the whole Island's talking!”

“We can't do anything about it, Jo. They'll always talk about us, and it can't hurt us so long as we know we're all right. Talk's cheap.” He broke away. She stood watching him, her eyes wide with imminent tears.

At the door he turned back. “I been thinking, Jo. You didn't chance to see anybody hanging around the clubhouse last night, did you?”

She shook her head dumbly, her hands fumbling with plate and towel. He was already out. Through the screen door she saw him, poised against the glittering afternoon, eager and impatient to be off across the meadow to shore. “Owen, if you see Nils—”

“What about him?”

She turned back to her dishes. “Oh, nothing! You're in an awful pucker for anybody as lazy as you are.”

She heard the peculiar crunch of rubber boots going away through the grass. The silence pressed about her, a silence made up of familiar sounds: the old clock on the shelf, the constant gentle rote of the sea on the rocks, the faint far-off clamor of gulls, the sleepy noonday talk of Donna's chickens under the windows. And in this silence the world suddenly righted itself. She would find Nils, talk it out with him, and that would be all. Her heart lifted with a swift buoyancy. Owen was right, talk was cheap, why should she listen to it or worry about it as long as it was lying talk? The family wasn't worrying.

In a sudden joyous reaction from despair she put away the dishes and hung up her apron.
Talk's cheap
, she repeated, as if it were a magic formula, which somehow it was. Of course it was hard, knowing you were being talked about like Thea Sorensen, or Marcus Yetton's wife, who was always making pies for Johnny Fernandez. But she wasn't Thea or Susie. She was Joanna Bennett.

“Joanna,” said her father's unhurried voice, and she whirled with a gasp. He stood outside on the doorstep where Owen had just been. “Come out and sit with me a few minutes.”

She sat down beside him, cross-legged in Indian fashion. The doorstep was in shadow, but out in the sun the grass was a green sea, while in the distance the ocean matched colors with the sky. Her father's pipe smoke mingled pleasantly with the lilac's dreamy fragrance. He looked thoughtfully at a lone spruce out on the point, his profile dark and somehow austere.

“Your mother tells me I don't know how to talk to a girl,” he said wryly. “Maybe so.”

“You do all right,” said Joanna with an appreciative grin.

“Thanks . . . well, what I want to say doesn't take a lot of words.” He turned his head and looked down at her, his smile warm in his eyes. “Jo, I'm asking you to do something—something to help your mother and me.”

“Sure, what is it?”

Stephen Bennett sighed, and Joanna's fingers tightened around her ankles. All at once she knew what was coming.

“I'll be short about it,” he said. “It's this. We don't want you down around the shore any more. We've let you run with the boys and their crowd all over the Island, in and out of the boats, because we thought it was a child's right to be free. But you're not a child now.”

Not a child, but a frantic thing, wild and protesting as the cage doors shut. . . . I didn't know they'd do this! she thought passionately. They can't! . . . And her father's voice went steadily on.

“You're too big to be running around in dungarees and hanging on the boys' coattails. Remember when I sent you home yesterday? Well, a girl of your age always around the shore like that—it makes talk.”

“Talk's cheap!” she said violently. But it wasn't magic any more, not against her father's words.

“Maybe, but it's not the way of our family to go about asking talk to be made.” He sighed again. “Joanna, this is as hard for me as it is for you. But your mother and I've been thinking about it for quite a while, and this latest mess—do you know about it?”