The Ebbing Tide Read Online Free PDF Page B

that instant; if he would carry this picture of her, standing there in the rain with the dark clouds scudding beyond her head, and seagulls walking on a wetly shining roof, and the wind making color in her face; or if the picture would be of yesterday, while the Donna moved gently at anchor in Goose Cove.
    Francis Seavey and Matthew Fennell came up, their rubber boots clamping on the loose planks, nodded at her, and jumped down into the cockpit to shake hands with Nils. She stood watching the scene; now she wondered what all of them were thinking; the one who must go, the others who must wait. Francis Seavey was Thea’s husband, not a lobsterman by training but a carpenter, and when the draft board turned him down, Thea had brought him out to the island where she’d grown up, moved into her father’s house, and informed Francis that they had just as much right as anybody to make money out of lobstering. Consequently Francis looked unhappy most of the time. He was a slight, mouse-colored, youngish man, whose rubber boots were always tripping him up, and who was terrified every time he went out to haul. Yet there was probably nothing Francis desired more than to be going to fight Japs with Nils.
    Matthew was a sturdy man in his forties, sound and good as a Baldwin apple. He loved lobstering, he loved the Island to which he had come a few years ago, he loved his young wife and his grandmother, who was very old now and who was apparently intending to live forever. He made good money, put a great deal of it religiously into War Bonds, and was completely oblivious of the fact that his wife had been having Gram around for a long time now, and that the situation in his house was as potentially explosive as a mine field.
    â€œGood luck, Nils,” he said simply. Francis didn’t say anything, but he swallowed when Nils took him by the shoulder and shook him gently. “You take care of yourself, Franny,” Nils said. “I want to see you here when I get back. When it’s too bad for this big ape—” he nodded at Sigurd—“to go out, it’s too bad for you. Understand?”
    Francis nodded earnestly. Nils had given him a weapon. Next time Thea cast aspersions on his manhood when he was reluctant to go haul, he could quote Nils at her.
    The good-byes were over. Francis and Matthew climbed out of the cockpit, Joanna cast off the bowline, and Owen maneuvered the White Lady delicately away from the wharf. She backed out with the engine lifting into a high, powerful roar, the wheel churning the pewter-gray water into a foaming chaos; then her bow swung around and she headed out across the harbor, her wake fanning out behind her. Joanna waited a moment, the rain beating at her back, to watch the boat and the men standing around the wheel. Nils lifted his arm in farewell, and she waved back. Then as the White Lady cut by the Donna ’s bow at the mouth of the harbor, and left her rolling in the wake, Joanna turned sharply and walked up to the road.
    The two men who were left had gone across to the baithouse. She heard them talking in there—not about Nils, but about the respective merits of bream and corned herring for bait. No one who was left on the Island would talk much about Nils today.
    She walked home alone. Out of the wind, the rain fell with a soft, shushing sound on the rocks and the dead grass. The roofs shone. Across the Island there was surf and wind, but here in the shelter of the almost empty village the roar was muted until you could almost forget it. Here you heard the giant whisper of the rain, the mewing of a gull who stood aimlessly on a ledge in the middle of the harbor and said the same thing over and over. The slight wash of the water against the rocks, made by the wake, had died quickly away, as quickly as the White Lady had gone around Eastern Harbor Point.
    Joanna found herself obsessed with the emptiness of everything; the village, and her thoughts. It was