A Running Tide

by Ann Swinfen

  As soon as the freezing weather had set in, Tirza and Simon had started skating on the ice-pond at the farm. During the coming weeks, before the thaw began, Tobias and Sam would finish cutting the ice into blocks a foot square and storing them in the underground ice-house, packed around with sawdust. All through the warm weather the ice would keep the ice-boxes cold at the farm and at Nathan’s house on the harbour. Tobias also sold ice to a few of the other Flamboro families, any he could spare. Every other evening he or Sam would drive the Ford truck, loaded with blocks of ice, down the farm track to the county road opposite Swansons’ gate, then round Tremaynes’ place and along to Flamboro. Simon and Tirza sometimes went for the ride. They sat at the back with their legs dangling over the lowered tailboard, enjoying the bounce and bang of the pickup over the rough road and the cool rush of air after the heat of the day.

  Last fall, Simon had discovered he was strong enough to lift the heavy blocks of ice with the ice-tongs – like a huge pair of scissors with claw ends. He was a year older than Tirza, thirteen just a couple of months ago, but until last year they had been much the same size. Then Simon had begun to pull ahead and now he was three or four inches taller. Tirza had struggled with the ice-tongs, but although she could just raise a block of ice from the ground she could not hold it. She had tried again and again, resentful at being beaten by Simon at anything, but she had given up at last when she dropped one of the blocks on the end of her foot and went about limping for the rest of the week. Perhaps she would be strong enough this year.

  Tirza swooped round in a circle and looked back to the end of the lake. She had already come further than she realised. The figures of the other skaters were small and distant against the dark woods. The fire was roaring now and she could see the column of smoke rising straight up in the frosty air. She was too far away to smell the burning wood, but the scent of the trees hung about the lake, and the ice had its own smell – sharp and slightly metallic. She supposed she shouldn’t go any further. The deep hole in the lake bottom was not far from here and she knew how dangerous it was. But she was reluctant to go back to the others. There were times when she craved solitude, especially after being cooped up with her father and grandmother in the small house during winter. At such times she did not even want Simon’s company.

  She swung round again and began to skate slowly backwards in the direction of the shore. This way she could watch the dark distances of the lake retreating from her, instead of the human figures drawing near. She was a strong skater. She could feel the muscles of her legs and abdomen tightening and thrusting, and the balance of her arms swinging in rhythm with the stroke. Her back was arched slightly as she leaned backwards into her own movement. The co-ordination of her whole body, she suddenly saw, was something wonderful, everything working together without any real thought on her part. A great sense of her own power flooded through her, heating her blood and sending it throbbing into her cheeks. It ran like an electric shock through her stomach and down her legs, where she could watch the exquisite thrust and lift of her feet as if they belonged to someone else.

  ‘Just in time,’ said Charlie Flett as she staggered on to shore with her skates still on. ‘Get yourself a bowl for your aunt’s soup.’

  He had a skillet balanced on stones at one side of the fire and was turning pork chops in the spitting fat. The smell of food made Tirza suddenly dizzy.

  ‘Here.’ Simon thrust a bowl of soup at her and squatted down on the ground near Charlie. ‘Thought you weren’t coming back to eat.’ He pulled a big hunk of bread from the front of his windcheater jacket and tore a piece off for her. She crouched down beside him and began spooning up the soup, which was thick with onions and cubes of browned potato and flecks of herb.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise I’d gone so far.’

  ‘Want to watch you don’t skate off the end into the mushy ice.’

  ‘I know,’ she said crossly, wiping up the last of the soup with her bread. ‘Gosh, that was good. Do you think there’s any more? I wish Grandma would make soup like Aunt Harriet’s. It’s always some thin kind of stuff that people like the Tremaynes would eat. You know, Boston Society.’

  She crooked her little finger in the air and pretended to sip soup daintily with a look of exaggerated rapture on her face. Simon laughed and pushed her over into the heaped pine needles.

  ‘Quit fooling about, the both of you,’ said Tobias. ‘Or don’t you want more soup?’

  Replete with soup and bread and chops and corn pickle, Tirza and Simon made off with their mugs of cider and slabs of cake to a cluster of rocks away from the rest of the party. Tirza was still hobbling on her skates.

  ‘Why don’t you take those off?’ said Simon.

  ‘I’m going to skate again in a minute.’

  ‘I can’t move. I feel as tight in my skin as Joey in his snowsuit.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Tirza licked chocolate icing off her fingers and washed it down with cider. Tobias’s cider was unfermented, but it was very concentrated. You felt you could chew on it.

  ‘Is Martha really coming home?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard your mother telling Mary Flett that she and Billy might be coming home.’

  ‘Only if Will goes overseas.’

  ‘We don’t want that drip Billy underfoot. When they stayed last summer he was whining round us everywhere.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, we’ll just dodge him. It’ll be OK.’

  Tirza didn’t much like Martha either, but felt she couldn’t say so to Simon. In many small, insidious ways Martha had made her life unpleasant in the past. She had never bullied Tirza physically, although she pinched her a lot, on the sly. What hurt was the sneer on her face whenever she looked at Tirza or spoke to her. Tirza was skinny as a rabbit, with short-cropped dull brown hair, and she knew she was nothing to look at, but most of the time she forgot about it. When Martha was around, however, she became self-conscious and clumsy, banging into furniture and knocking ornaments over.

  Martha was a beauty. Even in her baby photographs it was there. Her bones were slender, but perfect, not like Tirza with her chicken-wing elbows. Her skin had a translucent glow, and her fair hair fell to her shoulders in heavy waves. Last time she had come to Maine from Washington she had rolled the hair on top of her head into large sausages, in the style the movie stars were wearing now. Tirza wasn’t sure that she liked it, but it made Martha look very sophisticated. She had also taken to smoking with a long cigarette holder, which showed off her white hands. Remembering this, Tirza looked down at her own hands, brown and callused, and criss-crossed with tiny scratches and scars from farm work and mending Dad’s nets. She frowned. The thought of Martha back at the farm for more than just a short vacation depressed her.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, wiping her sticky fingers on the seat of her dungarees and pulling her wool hat down over her ears. ‘I’ll race you to the big pine on that point over there.’

  As she shot away over the ice, she could hear Simon shouting after her.

  ‘Not fair! I haven’t got my skates back on yet.’

  They stayed at the lake until the sun crept down behind the woods. Nathan had managed to teach Joey to balance on his double-bladed skates, and he was skating solemnly round and round in a small circle near the shore. His mother had warned him so many times about the dangers of falling through the ice that he had been paralysed with fear until Nathan took him in hand. Even now he watched the other skaters apprehensively as they swooped and shouted out in the middle of the lake.

  Her cooking done, Harriet donned her old-fashioned runners and took to the ice. For the first few minutes she moved a little uncertainly, but soon she was manoeuvring Tobias through the steps of a skaters’ waltz. Thirty years ago Harriet had won prizes and ribbons for skating, even had her picture in the paper. The others gathered at the side of the lake to watch her, but this made Tobias more clumsy than ever and at last she let him go, laughing.

&nb
sp; ‘Come here, Tirza,’ she called. ‘Let’s show them how it’s really done.’

  Putting on a show for their audience, they skated, linking hands, turning together with a flourish in a shower of ice particles, cutting across the first reflections of evening stars in the darkening ice.

  ‘Land sakes,’ said Harriet at last, gliding up to the shore beside the dying fire and gasping. ‘Look at the time! Tobias, Mary, Charlie, Walter – we’d best be on our way. I can’t think what got into me!’

  ‘Don’t fret, Harriet,’ said Mary. ‘The food’s all packed. We just need to dowse the fire and we’re ready to go. At least it’s downhill all the way back.’

  Tirza took off her skates and slung them round her neck. Her face was burnt with the cold and her calf muscles throbbed, but she felt exhilarated even in her tiredness. Lingering after the others started off down the path through the woods, she laid a hand on a balsam fir and took one last look across the lake, glinting silver-black and mysterious and alone under the rising moon. Later, she would remember herself listening to the silence, breath suspended, as if to catch the first whisper of all that was to fall across her path in the months to come.

  There was a hard frost that night, laying silence and stillness over the farmland and the harbour town. The only sounds Tirza could hear, waking cold in the middle of the night, were the howl of the towering blocks of ice grating against the shore and a distant groan from the woods, where the sap was freezing in the trees and the timber writhed. Overhead the brown rafters of the open roof space leaned above her in the dim moonlight reflected off the snow. The inside of her window was thick with ice in patterns like the Persian carpet that lived in the front parlour of the house occupied by the Penhaligon sisters. Their father, one of the last of the great Maine sea captains, had brought it back from one of his voyages some time in the last century. No one had ever been allowed to walk upon this carpet, which was protected by an archipelago of hooked and braided rugs, and shrouded from the morning sun by heavy drapes at the window.

  Tirza turned over and huddled her arms around herself, trying to get warm. Her pink and white patchwork quilt, a gift from Miss Molly Penhaligon when she was seven, crackled as she moved, where the moisture of her breath had frozen into a thin layer of ice on the cotton. She could not stop shaking with the cold. At last she leapt from the bed, ran across the bare boards like a cat across the top of a stove, and grabbed a sweater and a pair of thick socks from her chest of drawers. Jumping into bed again, she pulled them on over her pyjamas and prised the sheet of ice off the quilt. It smashed on the floor with a satisfying sound. Tirza pulled the bedclothes right over her head and hugged one of her pillows to her for warmth. Gradually she stopped shaking. It had been a good day up at Gooseneck Lake, but the news that Martha and Billy might come back to the farm had marred it some. Still, she thought, warm and drifting, it might never happen.

  On Sunday mornings, barring atrocious weather or absence at sea, almost the entire population of Flamboro and the neighbouring farms attended service at the white clapboard church which had been built two centuries before and not much changed since. It lay on rising ground at the north end of the village, past the turn to the school, where the coast curved round at the far side of the bay. It thus faced Nathan Libby’s house, across the top of the lobster smacks and trawlers moored along the two wharves built on either arm of the harbour. Deceptive at a distance and well proportioned, it looked much larger than it really was. It had the classic simplicity and symmetry of eighteenth-century New England churches; its porch was supported by four wooden Doric pillars, and above the roof a slender spire soared against the dark firs and bayberry bushes behind. Its white paint was renewed every second year, and it served as a clear marker for fishermen making their way home in bad weather.

  On a bright day the gilded weathervane, shaped like a clipper in full sail, glinted and flashed, somewhat to the embarrassment of the conservative population of Flamboro, who thought it gaudy and somewhat unseemly for the house of the Lord. It had been presented to the church half a century before by Mr Oliver Tremayne during one of his summers down from Boston, and the selectmen, in the face of this dilemma, had been too polite to refuse it. They had supposed that the weathervane was brass and its glitter would tone down with salt air and tarnish. It was only after some years that they learned the thing was gilded with real gold – an extravagance which made the gift even more of a frippery – but by then it was too late. It would have been insulting to return the gift to Mr Oliver’s son.

  Tirza liked the weathervane, sailing up there over the church, defying the storms and somehow promising a careful watch over the men at sea. She always looked out at it from her bedroom window in the morning, after studying the ocean, the instinctive first action of the day for everyone from a fishing family. The morning after the skating party she scraped the ice off the inside of her window and saw a world transformed from the glitter of the day before. She could just make out the pale gleam of the church through the beginnings of a winter fog rolling in off the ocean. Overhead the sky sagged down, heavy with cloud. The first flakes of another snowfall drifted past outside the glass.

  By the time Walter Pelham, trawlerman and church sidesman, rang the bell for service, it was snowing heavily and relentlessly. The wind blew from the north-east and the weather was coming straight from the Arctic. The townspeople fought their way into church, with the Libbys and Swansons from the two nearest farms, but no one from further away. Despite the two stoves, the church was bitterly cold and the minister, a practical and kindly man, cut his sermon short and sent his congregation off to their Sunday dinners before frostbite set in. He stood beside the porch pillars, shaking hands briskly, as they struggled out into the driving snow, turning up their collars and winding mufflers more tightly.

  ‘Fine sermon, Reverend Bridges,’ said Nathan, with a grin. ‘One of your best. Every point clearly made.’

  ‘Well, Mr Libby,’ said the minister without rancour, ‘to everything there is a season, and today is not the season for a long disquisition. I will save that,’ he added gravely, ‘for another occasion.’

  Miss Molly Penhaligon, coming out of church on the heels of the Libby family, exclaimed, ‘Why, Harriet Libby, I never thought you would get through today.’

  Harriet, in decent Sunday navy blue, with a severe felt hat of ample proportions pinned over her grey curls, smiled comfortably.

  ‘Nothing we couldn’t manage with good boots and a little care, Miss Molly. Besides, Nathan and Mother Libby invited us to Sunday dinner today. I couldn’t miss the chance to sit down to a meal cooked by someone else.’

  Miss Molly turned to Simon and Tirza, stamping their feet against the cold and waiting for the grown-ups to come along.

  ‘Well, now,’ she said, ‘talking of visiting... We haven’t seen the two of you round for tea, not for weeks. Would you like to come this afternoon? About four?’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Molly,’ said Tirza without waiting for Simon to speak. ‘That would be great.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Simon, beaming. Sunday afternoons after one of these big family meals were the most boring times in their lives. Abigail did not approve of any frivolous activities on the Sabbath, but tea with the Penhaligon sisters was permitted, and would be a lot more lively than sitting around stuffed into the small parlour of Nathan’s house.

  Tirza, catching sight of Miss Catherine coming out of church alone, asked, ‘How is Miss Susanna?’

  ‘She’s just fine,’ said Miss Molly reassuringly. ‘But we thought she was best not out in this weather. She’s minding the roast lamb and keeping warm. We’ll see you about four, then.’

  The two sisters walked off together to the big old house built by the sea captain. Tirza and Simon knew Miss Susanna had some mysterious illness, but such things were not discussed in front of them. She was, in fact, the only true Miss Penhaligon. Miss Molly had married a doctor and gone off to live in Boston, and two years later Miss Catherine ha
d married a businessman from the same city, but when they were widowed within six months of each other ten years ago, they had moved back to Flamboro to share the family house with their youngest sister. Miss Susanna Penhaligon had never married, giving up (it was said) a romance with an English sailor to stay at home and nurse her increasingly cantankerous father until he died at the age of ninety-two, shortly before the other two sisters came home. Collectively, the three sisters were known in Flamboro as ‘the Boston ladies’, though Miss Susanna had visited Boston only once, twenty-five years ago.

  Abigail gathered the Libby clan about her and set off at a brisk pace, down the stone steps from the church gate to Shore Road and along the harbour to home. The snow was driving so hard now that the ends of the harbour walls were hidden. Along the street each house loomed into view like a solitary iceberg. Even breathing was difficult, and although the wind blew from the north-east it howled and wheeled about the buildings so that, whichever way you faced, it hit you square between the eyes. Breastplates of snow built up on their coats, and drifts slithered down the narrow gaps between mufflers and collars. At last they stumbled up the steps and across the narrow porch of Nathan’s house, into the warm smell of roast pork. Nathan slammed the door behind them and leaned against it with relief.

  ‘Lord help us,’ he said. ‘I’ll be thankful all my days that I’m not a whaler like Great-uncle Henry was!’

  3

  Maine: Winter 1942

  Simon watched his parents, his uncle and his grandmother eating their way through their Sunday dinner and he felt as though he was drowning. The air in the room was thick with greasy smells – fatty meat, a whiff of fumes and hot metal seeping from the Franklin stove built into the fireplace, the camphor odour of clothes brought out only for Sundays. It was like swimming through the farm pond on a sullen August day, when the water was so sluggish it dragged at your limbs, gelatinous, clinging. His elders moved in slow motion, their mouths opening and shutting like sea creatures, wallowing slowly through the depths of this torpid pond. He felt his lungs struggling for air. He wanted to shoot to the surface and gasp.