The Ebbing Tide Read Online Free Page A

Eastern End land looked barren, if one didn’t know what strawberries grew in the deep grass in July, what birds nested in the low bushes, and how incredibly lush the field could look when there were people living at the Eastern End, and stock to keep the land shaven and green from one shore to the other.
    The fish house built up against the steep bank above the cove wore sunshine on its weathered shingles, and wavy ripples of light from the water that lapped around its spilings. A line of gulls sat on the ridgepole and were not alarmed by the Donna ’s calm purring progress; but on the high rocky ledge that rose outside the cove like a seabound castle the gulls started up in a cloud of harsh cries and beating wings when the boat went by. The young gulls circled with the old ones, gray-brown wings only slightly less graceful, but already as strong.
    â€œRemember the day we went ashore there?” said Nils. “Rowed down from the harbor in a skiff—”
    â€œNobody would have known if Owen hadn’t been down to the Eastern End playing with the Trudeau kids, and went home and told ,” said Joanna.
    They were silent again. She turned the wheel and the Donna began to round the Head, which rose up from the fields as a rocky hillside and ended in a bold, massive face of tawny-red rock below which the Donna looked tiny but indomitable. There was always a surge here, even in this fine weather. Glittering sheets of water swelled in long slopes, and the boat rode gently with them. Nils was looking up at the Head against the sky. The softness that had been around his mouth and eyes when he remembered the forbidden trip in the skiff was gone. Joanna felt a gradual tightening in her chest; it was reflected in the way her strong brown fingers tightened on the spokes of the wheel.
    Remembering was no good, because the present was upon them, and there was no escape. Tomorrow he would be going. It would be bad enough for her, but at least she could remain with the Island. Nils would be leaving everything, and the Island was as much in his blood and bones as in hers. Their grandfathers had come here together.
    In all the years she had known Nils, since her earliest memories began, she had had to make up for herself what he was thinking. Now, because she knew him as well as anyone could ever know Nils, she was almost certain of his thoughts. She longed to cry out to him that she knew what he was thinking; but Nils never wanted to burden anyone, even herself who was waiting, with the things that lay heaviest upon him.
    If she knew Nils, and she did know him, she knew that nothing could ever take him by surprise. Not even death. He had taken death into account from the moment he had received his orders. All these ten days at home, when he had let her think it was an ordinary furlough, he had been taking death into account, and because of that, everything he had done and said had been for the last time. When he was talking with Owen, there must have been the quiet certainty that he might never again set or haul a trap, or take his own boat out of the harbor.
    When he was rocking Jamie at night. . . . Her throat began to ache; she kept her eyes straight ahead over the cabin roof, though they were filled with a burning mist of blue, and glittering light, and wavering rocks. She wanted to hold Nils against her breast as he had held Jamie. It seemed at once a hideous monstrous thing that she could not comfort Nils as simply as she could shelter Jamie and stop his crying. She held herself rigid there by the wheel, without looking at his face. He mustn’t know what she knew. He would want her to think he was like her brothers, who went out into the blue hell of the Pacific with their self-assurance around them like armor. Other men were killed, other men came back maimed. But not they. Wait and see! That was the Bennett of them.
    But Nils came of a different strain. The knowledge of death, and sin, and punishment, and