The Ebbing Tide (16 page)

“A bomber's moon,” Dennis said.

“Yes, we can't even enjoy moonlight any more, because it helps the enemy.” But tonight the enemy seemed far away and not actual, because the Island in the moonlight was such a familiar thing. She stood there in the cool stillness, trying to make it seem possible that it was daylight where Nils was, that he had actually gone from the Island. A little shudder touched her flesh.

“You're cold,” Dennis said. “I'll be getting along. . . . And speaking of that, I wonder how Owen's getting along. It'll be a great hardship to go right up to my room and not peer into the kitchen on the way.” They laughed, softly, because in the silence their voices were so clear. He knocked his pipe against a tree and put it in his pocket.

“Good night.”

“Good night,” she answered. She waited in the black pattern of shadow thrown by the spruces while he walked down the path toward the harbor, and Sigurd's house. The moonlight was so clear and bright that he was recognizable all the way. Dick materialized from behind her, coming back from his evening prowl. When she spoke to him his eyes were liquid light.

There were the last minute things to do in the kitchen before she went to bed. The house was close with the heat of the stove and from the Aladdin lamp; she left the sun parlor door open to allow the cool fresh air to come in, while she moved around on her late tasks. Owen had done his chores at supper time, filled the water pails, brought in wood and split kindling. There was not much for her to do, but since Nils had gone she found herself roving around the house at night, not wanting to go to bed.

When the warm weather comes, and I can start my garden
, she thought,
I'll be so tired at night I won't feel like this
. To climb the stairs, to get into bed and never think, but to slide instantly into deep sleep. . . . It was right now a heavenly idea, when she was so wide awake and there was nothing to do. Or rather, nothing that she wanted to do except lie beside Nils holding hands in the dark, her head against his shoulder.

Dick had been waiting for her patiently as she moved from one thing to another. Now he went out into the sun parlor, his toenails clicking on the linoleum. Deep in his throat there was a mutter, more of a vibration than an actual sound.

“Come on, Dick,” she said to him. “You know there's nothing out there.” She walked through the sun parlor to shut the door on the rectangle of pale field, dark harbor, and moon-washed sky. Dick reached the door before her and ran out on the doorstep, his growl unmistakable now. At the same time she heard the voice. It sounded hardly human; she felt her scalp prickle as if her hair was standing on end like Dick's hackles. It splintered the dreamlike silence with merciless clarity, there was no escaping it.

The voice came again. It was Leonie's, lifted in shrill fury. Joanna's scalp pricked again and she went out behind Dick, catching at his collar before he could charge off down the path. They moved through the lacy pattern made on the turf by the bare white lilacs, and reached the safer, blacker splash of shadow that came from the windbreak, and stood still.

There were two people in the field, and in the bright pale light there was no missing them. Owen and Sigurd; Owen stood very still with his feet planted apart, his hands on his hips. He said very distinctly, “Shut up, Leonie. Don't be such a gorm, Sig.”

Sigurd went steadily toward him, his great shoulders crouched. The moonlight was so intense it was possible to tell his hair was yellow. There was something animal in his slow advance.

“Oh for God's sake,” said Owen, sounding annoyed rather than angry. Then there was Leonie again. She came out past the corner of the porch, her light dress glimmering; her glasses caught the moon in their lenses and Joanna saw them flash and gleam.

“Don't you call him a gorm, Owen Bennett!” she shrieked. “You know what you are? You're a cheap lowlife!”

Leonie is drunk
, thought Joanna with interest.
So this is how she acts
. Sigurd would be drunk too, but Owen wasn't. She could tell by the level tone of his voice, which was scarcely raised above normal. “You've already called me that, Leonie,” he said patiently. “And you told me to get out. Well, I
am
out.”

“Why don't you go home where you belong, then?” she railed at him. Impossible that this was the trig Leonie of the polished shoes and horn-rimmed glasses. Screaming in the moonlight like a fish-wife, while all the time Sigurd moved steadily toward Owen, slowly but irrevocably.

“Why don't you git, then?” she repeated. “We don't want any of the likes of you around here!”

“If you think I'm intendin' to turn my back on that Neanderthal man of yours, you're crazier than he is,” Owen returned. “Get him in the house, will ye?”

Sigurd said nothing at all. “Yellow-belly,” jeered Leonie. “I knew you was a connivin' son of a gun, trying to steal a man's woman when he was drunk. Now I know you're yellow, too.”

“Sure, I'm yellow as a goddam buttercup,” Owen agreed. “I'd as lief turn my back to a fifteen-foot sea as to him.”

“I hope he murders you,” sald Leonie with loud relish.

A movement at Thea's front door attracted Joanna's attention; Thea and Franny were there in the doorway. The moonlight spared no detail of Thea's avid attention and Franny's befogged wonder. Joanna was invisible in the heavy shadow, and Dick wouldn't growl as long as she held his collar. It was not possible, she thought sardonically, that this affair could take place without Thea's presence; and then she remembered Dennis. It was incredible that he should be sleeping through this. But that was not half so annoying—that he might be watching—as the thought of Thea, who took every such incident to add substance to her insidious campaign against the Bennetts.

Sigurd was only a few paces away now. Owen didn't step back. “I don't like knockin' out a drunk,” he said. “But by God, if you don't call him off—”

“Even if he's drunk, he can knock your head off!” She pranced around them light-footedly, as if she had never set her feet down flatly and firmly on the wharf. “Take him on, if you ain't soft as—”

“You like shoutin' those words out for the whole Island to hear?” Owen inquired with ominous politeness, and his right fist came up. It was smooth and swift. There was no sound or outcry. Sigurd's head snapped back; for a moment he was motionless, appearing to look up at the moon, and then he crumpled. Owen caught him.

“Get hold of his feet,” he told the transfixed Leonie, “and we'll take him into the house.”

For answer Leonie leaped at him like an embattled wildcat. Owen was holding Sigurd by the armpits when Leonie struck at his face, and Joanna suppressed a gasp, while Dick whimpered, and pulled against his collar.

“My Gawd,” Thea hissed. “You see that, Franny? He won't have an eye left in his head!”

Owen dropped Sigurd and for the next instant there was a chaotic struggle over Sigurd's body. She was an avenging fury in horn-rimmed spectacles, she was kicking as well as scratching, and Joanna prayed silently that Owen wouldn't lose his temper and strike her down as he had struck Sigurd. But he'd never get free of her without hurting her, and Joanna's fingers were already loosening their grip on Dick's collar; the dog wouldn't hurt Leonie, but he would startle her into sanity.

There was no need to let him go. Dennis came out past the corner of the porch, moving with speed and purpose. He walked up behind Leonie and took her by the arms, pinned her back against his chest.

She raged incoherently, but she couldn't move.

“
Jesus!
” said Owen. “Thanks.” He wiped his face. “Good God, talk about thunderbolts. What am I goin' to do with this?” He touched Sigurd lightly with the toe of his boot.

Dennis' answer wasn't audible, but after a moment Owen turned and came up toward the house. Thea seized Franny, who was now craning his neck with unabashed fervor, and pulled him back. The door shut with an obvious click. Thea was never one to be surreptitious about her eavesdropping.

When Owen came abreast of Joanna she spoke to him, and as he turned his head, she saw the dark trickles of blood streaking his face. “You here? I wonder who else is sittin' in on this?” he said dryly.

“The Seaveys have been watching. And I shouldn't wonder if the Fennells
heard
it.” They walked together toward the house. With remarkable self-control Joanna said nothing more. In the kitchen she turned up the lamp, and Owen ladled cold water into the basin and splashed it over his face. Joanna moved quietly behind him, getting out cotton and alcohol. She handed him a clean towel, worn thin and soft by years of wear, and he dried his face tenderly. The scratches showed up viciously now, as they began to swell; they raked his brown skin from cheekbones to chin.

“She went for my eyes,” Owen said. He was angry now; his fury, repressed while he tried to deal with Sigurd and Leonie, smoldered in his voice and glinted blackly behind his lashes. “She went for my eyes, the damn' cat. I should have got her around the neck and strangled her.”

He took the alcohol bottle savagely from Joanna's hand and shook it with the same violence over a wad of cotton. “Probably I'll get rabies . . . or worse!” In front of the mirror over the sink, he swabbed at the scratches, wincing and cursing. Joanna leaned against the dresser with her arms folded.

“What happened, anyway?” she asked calmly.

“Oh, Sig was on the bottle—practically out—and I got a little close to her, and that was hunky-dory till Sig came to.” He leaned over the sink to examine closer a deep dig near the corner of his eye. “So he told me to get out. Bein' too much of a gentleman to point out that the lady was willin', I got out. But she didn't have to come waggin' out on his coattails actin' like she was so damn' chaste and I'd raped her, or somethin'.”

He swung around and added with quiet rage, “There was a time when I thought she was a very interestin' woman. Now I know what she is. She's what every woman is, except you and our mother.”

“And what's that?” said Joanna with interest.

“A perverse little witch.” He prowled past her, his eyes slitted, his lower lip eloquent, and went upstairs to his room.

Dennis Garland had come quietly through the sun parlor and was standing in the kitchen doorway. He and Joanna looked at each other. His thin face was concerned, but there was something like a twinkle in his eyes.

“Disgraceful, isn't it?” said Joanna. “But when you've lived on the Island as long as I have, you'll take it without batting an eyelash.”

“I'm not batting one now. Leonie's asleep, I gave her a bromide that's guaranteed not to cause internal combustion when it meets up with all that cheap vodka they've been drinking down there.”

“How's Sigurd?”

“Oh, he came in under his own power while I was looking out for Leonie. Do you suppose she'll be the perfect lady tomorrow?”

“She'll be so lady-like that Thea will be snorting about it for the next week.” Joanna couldn't help chuckling. “In a way I admire Leonie. When she's a lady, she's a lady; and when she's the other way, she's a—”

“Trollop,” he supplied. “No dithering around for Leonie. No shilly-shallying. She's either one thing or the other.”

Joanna sighed. “Well, Owen's off the liquor, now he's off women. I wonder where he'll break out next. . . . How about some coffee?”

I
T WAS
M
AY AT LAST
, and all at once everything seemed to hurry. The green spread like a pool of tender color over the fields. It would be June before the lilacs and apple blossoms and violets were out, but by the end of the first week in May there were strawberry blossoms like white stars in the sheltered, sunny places. The crocus ringed the heavy, twisted trunks of the old lilac bushes with purple and gold, and Joanna's few hyacinths released an exotic sweetness into the wind­cleansed air.

The birds were coming; in the early morning Joanna awoke to the valiant trilling of the song sparrow, full-throated and blithe even through a raw, beating rainstorm. In the spruces that towered beyond the alder swamp the nuthatches called back and forth all day, and in the alders there was a continual flash of movement as the early warblers arrived. There was a wood peewee who would answer as long as someone whistled to him. And there were the days when the field was dotted with robins, chipping and pecking like so many chickens; the rainy afternoon when five Baltimore orioles, in a glory of black and gold and orange, stayed around the windbreak for hours. And one early morning, when the sun cast long shadows across the dew-silvered grass, Joanna watched from the kitchen window the courting dance of the flickers.

The gulls were busy. From the first moment of dawn they were noisily active, their clamor was music to Island ears. They worked all day, dropping to rest on the harbor ledges, meeting the boats that came in from hauling, settling on the water in a vast whipping and rushing of big gray wings as the bait bags were shaken over the side. In the evening they flew in silent groups to the outer ledges where they lived, until the last of them had patterned the violet air over the harbor and then were gone.

There was so much to see and hear and smell, and the half-pagan urge that had always been a part of Joanna stirred in her now. It had been subjugated through the years by the responsibilities of maturity; but it was there, a nostalgic something too ephemeral to be called happiness, too restless to be called peace, and it was made poignant by the ache that never quite left her; the ache for Nils, that she must be seeing the spring come in without him, and that he must be so far from home when May came to the Island. She wrote it all to him in detail, trying to see it as if it were all new so that every impression was fresh and vivid; and to do that, she tried to see it through Dennis Garland's eyes.