The Ebbing Tide Read Online Free Page B

hell, had been his since he was little older than Jamie. Night after night his grandfather Gunnar had read the Bible to his wife and his grandchildren—the Old Testament with its grandeur and terror; and he had added his own warnings of the doom that awaited all human flesh. It was true that Nils had taken it stolidly, and Sigurd had all but laughed in the old man’s face, and it was their sister who cried and had nightmares; but it was now, when Nils was a man of thirty-seven, that Joanna recognized what part of Gunnar’s teaching had borne fruit.
    In the room where Nils had slept as a boy there was a framed verse on the wall at the foot of his bed; it had been there always, he had told her, and he knew it by heart. Morning and night for almost all his life he had read it. It must have become deeply, irrevocably ingrained in his being.

    She could endure it no longer, and turned toward him quickly. “Nils!” she cried, surprising even herself. He got up from the washboard, smiling a little, and put his hands lightly on her shoulders.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?”
    â€œA cramp in my leg—I’ve been standing still too long.” She reached down and rubbed the back of her knee, not looking at him.
    â€œThen sit down for a while.” He took the wheel, and she sat down on the engine box, wanting to look at the clean, lifted line of his face as he steered, but not trusting herself to look too long. They were passing Schoolhouse Cove now, and a seal was turning over and over lazily in the surge around the rocks; the same rocks threw back the sound of the engine, magnifying it to a roar. Then they rounded a long, out-thrust point whose crest was a thick cap of tangled grass and raspberry and rose bushes. Joanna looked up, watching. Nils was watching too. They passed between the tip of the point on one side, and a rounding ledge on the other, where gulls and shags flew up in a tangle of black wings and white ones, and then the Donna slipped quietly into Goose Cove.
    It was a long, narrow oval of a cove, walled by the point on one side and the woods on the other, the same woods that marched thickly to the very end of the Island. In the shadow of the trees the water was a glassy surface of jade and emerald; where the shade ended, the blue began, and lay hardly moving against the shelving, warm yellow rocks that slanted down from the ridge of the point like rudely cut massive steps.
    And at the end of the cove, above the little pale curve of beach, the Bennett homestead stood. It was the house where Joanna had grown up, and the house to which she and Nils had returned day after day when they had once lived alone on the Island. There it stood, four-square and solitary on its headland. It was across the Island from the harbor, and its nearest neighbors were the spruce woods, the gulls that perched familiarly on the ridgepole, the crows that flew over from the Western End woods to the Eastern End woods; the swallows that made their nests under the eaves. The house was alone now, but it did not look lonely.
    Nils shut off the engine, and in the sudden hush the silence was as tangible as the soundless flight of a gull’s wings. Without speaking, Nils stepped upon the washboard and went lightly up to the bow. The killick made a silvery splash as he dropped it overboard. When he came back and jumped down into the cockpit with hardly a sound in spite of his rubber boots, Joanna stood up. He came toward her, and his smile was gone. There was a subtle change in his face; no longer the mask of a man who is calmly certain of death, or with the faint, warm smile of a man for his comrade. The tension showed through now, the tension that rose of his soul’s need and his body’s passion. The way he loved Joanna, and had always loved her, was the most powerful force of his being. Perhaps it was easy for him to view all other things with quiet acceptance.
    She knew it, and her eyes didn’t move