The Ebbing Tide (25 page)

She whistled “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer” and began to dig her way toward a little low chair that would do for Jamie. Scrub it and sandpaper it, and paint it blue—

“Aunt Jo, you out here?” Young Charles' voice had a hollow sound in the echoing spaces of the barn.

“Right here! Come and help me move this stuff, will you?”

He came, but not very quickly. She watched him move across the wide, cleared floor of the barn, a slim silhouette against the gold and green light beyond the open doors. His rubber boots seemed to be dragging at him, his shoulders drooped.

“Jamie said you were here. . . . What do you want me to do?”

She was shocked, but managed not to show it. His face was gray where there had been rich color, and when he reached out to move a table, his fingers clamped on the edge as if he were holding onto life itself.

“What is it?” She had to speak then. “Are you sick, Charles?”

“No, I'm not sick.” His eyes clung to hers desperately. “Aunt Jo, did you ever do anything and think it was pretty good, and then afterwards you just about turned inside out with thinking what a goddam fool you made of yourself? You feel like pukin', and you almost wish you could die—so you could get rid of thinkin'.”

“I know all about that,” she agreed. “It's probably the worst feeling in the world. I guess everybody has it, at one time or another.”

“It's bad enough when it's just yourself you've got to think about,” said Young Charles. “But when somebody else won't leave you be—Aunt Jo, I hate like hell to bother you with this. But I don't know what to do!” His voice cracked, but it was tragic rather than ludicrous. “I knew right off, the other night, that I had to haul myself clip ‘n clean right out of this. I'd been thinkin' proud of myself till you told me I wasn't such a hell of a guy. But—” He stopped to swallow hard, and to reach with nervous, jerking fingers for his cigarettes. “I thought if I just didn't go near her again it would be all right. But she come after me. Just now, when I was haulin' my peapod on!”

“Then what?” Joanna asked calmly.

“She asked me when I was comin' up again. She said Franny was going to the Main in the lobster smack when it come. I guess I didn't put it very good, but anyhow, I got around it—I said I couldn't come up again.”

“And she was mad,” said Joanna, outwardly tranquil, inwardly knowing how Thea's face could turn into a vixen's mask, slit-eyed, the lips drawn back from the teeth.

“Sure she was mad.” He wiped his face. “Like to turned my stomach, the way she looked. And then she said she—she liked me.” He was dark red with embarrassment, looking away from Joanna. “I can't tell you how she said it. But anyway, she said that after Franny I was—well, anyway, she said I had to come up again .” He was talking too rapidly now, trying to spill it all out while he had the courage. “She said she knew I was scared of my father, and if I didn't come, she'd fix it up so he'd find out. Only he'd think I'd been chasin' her around and botherin' her.” His eyes came back to Joanna's, wide and liquidly dark, all black pupil like a frightened animal's. “She even said she'd tell him I come after her while she was pickin' strawberries, and—well, you know.”

“I know,” said Joanna softly. It was all she could trust herself to say. She took hold of the other side of the heavy table; together they moved it aside, and she brought out the little chair.

“I'll paint this up for Jamie,” she said as pleasantly as if there had been nothing else said. “I think it used to be Nils'.”

“I'll take it in for you.” He lifted the chair and they walked across the barn into the sunshine and the warm breeze and the color of the afternoon. The air was brilliant, flecked first with coolness and then with warmth, the sky beyond the spruces held the blue of turquoise, dappled with tiny puffs of white clouds. The scent of grass and of flowers was everywhere, but the sea dominated it all, even here where there was no glimpse of the sea. The sound of the combers rolling up on the back side of the Island, the smell of rockweed and of salt—there was no escaping them, there would never be any escape from them.

Jamie ran across to meet them. “Is that for me?” he shouted, pointing at the chair.

“That's for you,” said his cousin, managing a smile. They went into the house, Jamie leading the way. Ellen wasn't home, and Owen was down to the shore. Joanna dusted off the chair, since Jamie was determined to sit in it. While she started supper, Young Charles sat behind her on the woodbox; his unnatural silence conveyed his forlorn depression. She worked for a few minutes without speaking, wanting to reassure him and yet not quite sure how to proceed. “Your father's known Thea for a good many years, Charles,” she said at last. “I don't think she'd be able to put much over on him, or on any of us.”

“But I'd have to tell him what I been up to!” the boy protested. “And you don't know how he is. It wouldn't do any good if I told him I knew I'd been a proper damn' fool, he'd still give me hell.”

“I think the best thing for you to do is to keep on working. Thea's a lot of noise and brag, but that's all she amounts to. She'd never dare to go to your father.”

Young Charles argued with her miserably, and Joanna herself didn't believe what she was saying. Thea was capable of almost anything. She'd had her hands on Young Charles once, and if she lost him she'd be beside herself with fury and disappointment. The result might well prove to be one of the biggest hell-brews ever stirred up on Bennett's Island.

But still, she talked down the boy's doubts with a fine, brisk air of self-confidence, wishing all the while that Nils was here. Nils would know what to do. “It'll be all right, Charles. Now how about going out and splitting up a lot of nice fine kindling, enough for tonight and tomorrow morning? And I need plenty of chips if we're going to have biscuits for supper.”

He gave her a feeble grin and went out the back way. Jamie deserted his new chair and tagged along behind him.

Alone, Joanna began to mix up her biscuits. She looked down toward the harbor, a glory of burnished silver now that the sun was sliding toward the west.

T
HE HOUSE WAS QUIET
. She sifted flour, measured out sour milk, her strong hands moving swiftly and automatically. How brave a rooster Young Charles had been a few days ago, she thought with a blend of regret and humor. Now his comb was crumpled, his fine tail­feathers bedraggled, he wanted the safe enclosure of the yard and the familiar hands throwing corn, and shutting him in at night. Oh, once this was over he'd be strutting as finely as ever, and crowing the way young roosters crow when they discover their voices. But at the moment . . . At the moment she wasn't too angry with Thea; Thea was an incident, a milestone in the boy's growing-up, and if you considered her impersonally, you weren't as icily furious as you'd been a few days ago. If the thing were nipped in the bud now, it couldn't harm Young Charles, any more than Leah Foster had harmed Owen.

Leah Foster's name came suddenly into Joanna's mind, and she saw it with an actual sense of shock. Why, she'd
forgotten
Leah; she'd forgotten her for years and years, and once she'd thought she could never forget that pale, bland face, topped by the silken-smooth hair; the small, secretive smile, the meticulously shod feet, the smell of starched cleanliness and lavender. Because of her tidiness, Leah had been all the more horrible—for Joanna, at least. She had been more monstrous than the whores who'd walked openly on any street in any land.

Joanna hadn't been much older than Young Charles when she found out what Leah Foster really was. From the harbor window she could look down now and see the Binnacle, the house where the Fosters had lived; Leah and her husband, who looked as if he had been carved from a piece of gray driftwood. Not a man at whom you'd glance twice, Ned Foster. He came and went on the Island's horizons as silently as a shadow, as soundlessly as the cuckoo flying through the shade beyond the orchard. But not so Leah. Leah was quiet too, but not like a shadow. The boys knew her; the Trudeau boys, and Hugo Bennett and Owen. . . . They'd all carried water home from the well for her. When Joanna was certain of Owen, she had been sickened, she had seen Leah as a fat spider in a silken web. Now she knew her picture had been a trite one, and she could even feel a certain pity for the middle-aged woman who had tried to draw some sort of vitality from the boys' rich youth.

But she had stopped whatever there was between Owen and Leah Foster. She had been afraid of it, and so, with a calm courage born of her nineteen-year-old desperation, she had stopped it, in such a way that no one but Leah ever knew. It had ended almost as soon as it began, before it had a chance to start a fester in Owen that would have tainted his whole life. She had never regretted what she had done. She was as sure today that she had done right, as she was sure then. She had gone to Leah—

Gone to Leah
. Funny, the similarity in names . . . Leah, Thea. She had gone to Leah, and had ended it. . . . Young Charles came in, he kindled the fire without speaking; when the flames were snapping, he went out again. Her hands still worked, but inside of her everything had come to a stop, on the threshold of a new idea. The house was quiet, there was a moment of quietness all around her, as if for an instant the world was holding its breath.

She found herself cutting biscuits, placing them delicately in the pan. She adjusted the dampers in the stove. The oven wasn't hot enough yet, the biscuits would have to wait for a moment. Just long enough for her to cross the yard.

Thea was getting supper. Her kitchen blazed with late sunlight, it winked from the rounded surfaces of the teakettle, kindled little fires in the lamp-chimneys on the shelf. Everything sparkled; good housekeeping was as much a part of Thea's heredity as the dangerous streak of Old Gunnar she had showed the boy. Of course it wasn't all Old Gunnar, there was something there that was pure essence of Thea, as she had always been and always would be.

Since Franny had gone to the mainland on the lobster smack, supper consisted apparently of tea and a sandwich. “Hi, Jo,” Thea said listlessly. Her face was blotched, and her eyelids swollen so thickly that it changed her whole appearance. “God, I'm a mess. I got an awful cold. Or hay fever, maybe.” She sniffed hard, as if to convince Joanna of the truth. “Sit down.” She waved at a chair, her hand seeming scrawnier and more claw-like than ever, but Joanna shook her head.

“I've only got a minute. Go on with your tea. You look as if you need it.” She made herself sound briskly sympathetic. Thea must have been crying all day—ever since she'd approached Young Charles on the beach. She looked old and ugly, there was no resilience to her.

She took a swallow of strong tea, and then looked at Joanna with a sharpening glance. “Did you come in for somethin' special, Jo?”

“Well, yes, it is something special,” Joanna said slowly. “Maybe you know what it is. You couldn't expect it to stay in the dark forever. . . . It's about my nephew, Young Charles.”

The cup clattered into the saucer as if Thea's wrist had suddenly given out. Tea slopped brownly onto the table cloth. Thea stared at Joanna, her eyes hard and shiny. “What do you mean? What's he done?”

“You know what he's done, don't you?” Joanna asked her with a curious remote gentleness. “And what you've done? We don't have to say anything more than this about it, Thea. Just don't speak to him again, and it'll all clear up.”

The vixen's mask was there now, all the uglier because of the thickened eyelids, and blotchy cheeks. Thea got up and moved around behind her chair, gripping it until the knuckles shone white.

“I'd like to know what in God's name you're drivin' at. It sounds pretty nasty to me.”

“It is nasty,” Joanna agreed. “And I think you ought to know that Young Charles didn't tell me until I asked him. I have eyes in my head, you know. And what I can see, others will be seeing after awhile. So, don't you think it would be wise not to speak to him again?”

Thinned lips, pulled back, didn't scare her, or slitted eyes. She thought impersonally,
The woman's half-insane. Of course she hates me for this. . . . And she's not much the way Leah Foster was
. . . . She'd been terrified at Leah's manner when she'd told her to leave Owen alone. The woman's poise had been inhuman, to the nineteen-year-old girl who'd been as raw and as fiery as a colt. But she wasn't terrified now. It was like getting the witch grass out of the garden, a tiresome job that had to be done.

“Thea, I thought you'd be glad to pull out of it, before the talk started. You should know Charles well enough not to take any chances on having him drag the truth out of Young Charles. He wouldn't hesitate to go to court, and
you
know how much chance you'd stand there!” She added as a quiet reminder, “Young Charles is a minor, you know.”

“You got no call to be stickin' your nose in my business, Joanna Bennett!” Thea said viciously. “You're as deep in the mud as I'm in the mire, any day!”

Joanna said distantly, “If you're wise, Thea—” She moved toward the door. Thea's voice flung after her, as crudely shocking as a slap across the face.

“You want to get out before I turn the tables on ye, don't ye? I notice you ain't so good at standin' around lookin' stuck on yourself when it's your turn to listen!”

“Explain that, will you?” Joanna said, without lifting her voice.

“I don't have to do any explainin'! You know better'n I do what you been up to—only I know enough to stir up the biggest stink
you
ever smelled!” She straightened herself, her cheeks flushed purple under the blotches, and her smile was a sort of crooked leer that sickened Joanna.