A Running Tide

by Ann Swinfen

  Three men were nominated for the two vacant posts. The votes, written on slips of paper and deposited in a tin pail, were counted amidst a soft buzz of conversation and the two winners were announced – Hector Swanson and Walter Pelham. There was a brief, polite round of applause as the two men took their seats. Charlie and Eli, the retiring members, shook them by the hand and joined their families in the main audience.

  Nathan invited Captain Tucker to explain to the people of Flamboro the army’s plan for coastal defences in the area. No one was unduly disturbed at the thought of the row of foxholes. However, they were not ready to accept a gun in the burying- ground so easily.

  ‘We must have at least one gun along this stretch of coast,’ said Captain Tucker earnestly. ‘It’s for your own protection. You don’t want Nazis coming ashore from submarines here, do you? Or Nazi planes flying over to bomb your homes? With a gun located up on the high ground beside the church, our gun crews will be able to defend you against either.’

  He smiled reassuringly.

  ‘The only other possible site is at the end of one of the harbour walls. There’s two arguments against that. First, being lower down the gunners would have a narrower area of visibility and range of fire. Second, if any fire is returned, the gun position would be just too close to the houses along the harbour front. I do urge you to choose the burying-ground rather than the wharf.’

  He sat down, looking patient and attentive. You would almost believe, thought Nathan, that he is really giving us a choice. And, of course, we could argue that the gun could be placed down on Todd’s Neck or further north, round in the next bay. But that would be a lot less convenient for them, with no tar road to bring men and ammunition in and out. The argument and the questions went on for some time, but eventually even the dissenters agreed, grumbling, to locating the gun in the burying-ground.

  The meeting turned to several smaller matters, then the report on the annual accounts. Restive children were sent to amuse themselves outside until supper was served. The army officers withdrew and some of the women excused themselves to start heating soup and making coffee in the kitchen attached to the hall. Simon and Tirza joined the exodus, having no interest in the discussion of a year’s income and expenditure.

  ‘Where’s Billy?’ Tirza asked Simon as they came out into the mild evening air which smelled of seaweed and tar instead of the hair oil and Woolworth’s perfume wafting from the teenagers who had been sitting behind them. Wayne’s fifteen-year-old sister Clarice, in the officers’ honour, had painted her mouth in a Cupid’s bow of Ruby Delight lipstick and dowsed herself in a perfume which smelled to Tirza like sheep-dip mixed with very cheap candy.

  ‘Patience Warren came to baby-sit for the evening. She wanted to come to the dollar supper, but Martha paid her extra.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Wayne, who was sitting on a bollard at the water’s edge.

  ‘Hey,’ said Tirza. They joined him.

  ‘Hope they don’t take too long,’ said Wayne. ‘I’m starvin’. Ma brought meat loaf and some great brownies.’

  Tirza stood flicking flat stones and oyster shells across the harbour while the boys discussed food. The tide was up and just on its breathless moment of turn, so the surface was calm in the lee of the harbour wall, but she could not achieve more than three bounces. Growing bored, she perched on another bollard, swinging her legs and watching the hall for any sign that the meeting was finished. She noticed that Martha was standing just at the edge of the light from the door, smoking and talking to Lieutenant Benson and Captain Tucker. Then Miss Bennett came to the door and clanged the school bell.

  In the well-mannered but urgent scramble for the head of the supper queue, Tirza managed to find Christina.

  ‘Was it very boring?’ she asked. ‘All that money stuff?’

  ‘All that money stuff, Tirza, is part of the responsibility of every citizen. If we don’t take the trouble to participate in community decisions, we have no right to consider ourselves part of it.’

  Tirza thought about this.

  ‘But you live away from the village, in the woods.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I have forgotten my responsibilities. Mind now, move ahead. It’s our turn to help ourselves.’

  As always, the Flamboro dollar supper was a feast, with all the contributors striving to outdo each other. Captain Tucker and Lieutenant Benson departed at ten, feeling well satisfied with their evening’s work. They had persuaded the people of Flamboro into believing the location of the gun was their own choice, they had eaten an excellent meal in return for a nominal contribution to the local church, and they had persuaded the glamorous Martha Halstead to come to the movies with them in Portland on the following Saturday, on a double date.

  ‘Have you got a girl lined up for yourself?’ Tucker asked as they climbed out of their jeep just inside the gate of the camp.

  Lieutenant Benson, who had been the first to ask Martha out, and thought she was his date, looked surprised. But he supposed the captain could pull rank on him.

  ‘I dunno. I’ll need to look around. I guess I’ll find somebody.’

  The following week the army started work on the foxholes. As Tirza was riding her bike over to the farm on Tuesday after school, she found three jeeps parked where the farm track met the coastal path. She laid her bike down on the rough grass and walked along the ledges above Libby’s Beach. At regular intervals, the land had been ripped and torn. In the sandy ground just behind the rocks, holes about six foot square and five foot deep had been dug and then lined with large burlap sacks filled with sand. On the seaward side more bags were heaped up to form a parapet, three bags in height, as additional protection. Tirza peered down into the first one. As she watched, the soil settled, trickling between the sandbags and dusting the floor of the hole.

  She walked along in the direction of Todd’s Neck and reached the group of soldiers shovelling sand off the beach into sandbags to line the latest hole they had dug. One of the soldiers seemed more slightly built than the others. When he turned and heaved his bag on to the barrier in front of the foxhole, she saw with a shock that it was Simon. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. When he saw her he jumped, choked, and began to cough. He spat out the cigarette and ground it out on the rocks with his heels. Tirza could only stare in astonishment.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just lending a hand.’

  But he knew that was not what she meant.

  ‘I promised I’d come over and help with the milking today. Have you done your chores?’

  He grunted incomprehensibly and began to fill another sandbag.

  ‘Hey there, little lady,’ said one of the soldiers, ‘you wanna help us too?’

  Tirza looked at the havoc they were wreaking on this quiet place, until today untouched and uncultivated by any man’s hand, and shook her head. The systematic way they were desecrating the land made her feel physically sick. She turned away and almost ran back to her bicycle.

  It was the last day of school and Miss Bennett had abandoned any hope of serious lessons. She handed out the eighth-grade report cards and then gave them a short lecture on the future. Some of them were going on to high school in Portland in the fall, amongst them Tirza, Simon and Wayne. Most of the girls and many of the boys who lived on the inland farms were leaving school for good. This grieved Julia Bennett, and she had tried when she first came to Flamboro the previous year to persuade their parents that the children would have a better future if they were allowed to continue their schooling. She met a mixture of responses. Some parents were genuinely regretful. They wanted a better life for their children than they had had themselves. But many of them were still hanging on to their farms precariously, after the lean years of the Depression; some who had once owned their own farms were now tenants. Other families regarded all schooling as a waste of time, especially for girls.

  ‘Don’t see no need for all this schoolin’ myself,’ said Mrs Potts, Eileen’s mother. ‘Onc
e they can read the instructions on a feed sack and know enough arithmetic to figger out how much to charge for eggs, ain’t no reason to learn more. It’s always bin enough for me. I coulda done with Eileen helpin’ round the house these last two years, but her pa said as how we should let her stay to the end of grade school.’

  The fishing families seemed less reluctant to allow their children to go on to high school. Julia Bennett could not work out why this should be so, but in the end she put it down to the fact that, although Flamboro was small, it was a town of sorts, with plenty of social activity amongst the citizens. The fishermen listened to the radio for the weather forecasts and they listened to the news. Flett’s Stores, too, was a great centre for discussion about the wider world and the progress of the war. While the more remote inland farms, cut off from their neighbours for much of the time, might still be living in the nineteenth century, Flamboro and its fishermen were more in touch with today. Although to Julia Bennett, who had grown up in Philadelphia, Flamboro often seemed old-fashioned to the point of quaintness. She had intended to spend just one year here, until she could find a job teaching somewhere more exciting, but Pete Flett had changed all that. To her surprise she had grown fond of the town and as absorbed by its daily activities and gossip as any of the long-time residents.

  ‘So whatever you decide to do with the rest of your lives,’ she wound up her little speech, ‘I hope you will retain happy memories of your time at Flamboro School. Those of you who are leaving school, remember that learning goes on for the rest of your lives. You should go on reading books on your own – history, literature, science, there’s nothing you can’t tackle. And if you decide in a year or two that you would like to go back to school, it’s always possible to approach the high school authorities to see if you can attend.’

  She glanced round at the smaller group who would be catching the bus to Portland every day from September.

  ‘As for those of you who are continuing with your studies, remember what a privilege it is, and make sure you make the most of the next four wonderful years. By the time you leave high school you’ll be almost grown-up, with all the work and worry that entails. Enjoy these years, and use them well. Now, off you go, and have a good summer.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am! And you, ma’am,’ they shouted. Some of them left small gifts on her desk – flowers, half a dozen eggs. Simon brought one of his mother’s cakes. Tirza had selected and polished up some large oyster shells to use as pin trays, and had filled each with fudge Miss Catherine had helped her make. Let loose on the bright May morning they went careening out of school half an hour ahead of the younger pupils, drunk on the knowledge that they had put a large span of their childhood behind them.

  Simon and Wayne started a mock wrestling match in Schoolhouse Lane. Eileen and Johnny were walking along with their arms blatantly wound round each other. Eileen looked at Tirza patronisingly.

  ‘I really pity you, Tirza Libby,’ she said, ‘havin’ four more years of schoolin’ ahead. Sakes, I’m glad I’m done with all that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tirza defiantly, ‘at least I’m not so behind at school as you. When I’m the age you are now, I’ll already be halfway through high school.’

  Eileen was determined to have the last word. She smiled graciously. ‘Of course, I was fergettin’ you’re such a child, Tirza. Only twelve, ain’t you? What a baby!’ And she sauntered off with Johnny, her nose in the air.

  For a minute Tirza was furious, then she laughed. Who cared about Eileen Potts? She slung her bag over her shoulder and went leaping up the hill over the heath and through the blueberry thickets to Christina’s wood. The bushes were covered with masses of their waxy bell-shaped creamy flowers. There would be a good blueberry harvest this year. During the last two weeks the heath had burst into spring flower, so that she danced through golden ponds of cinquefoil and woolly gold heather, and skirted the spreading constellations of white stars where wild strawberries could be found later. Fuzzy ladies’ tobacco brushed her bare feet and she stopped to pick a bunch of violets, whose purple black reminded her of the dark colour of the deep ocean. Nearby a sprinkling of tiny white blossoms marked out the clumps of gold thread, whose roots Christina said could be used to stop a wound bleeding.

  The clearing around Christina’s cabin was filled with dappled light and shade where the sun slanted down through the surrounding balsam firs and pines and oaks and reflected upwards from the cove where Tirza laid her crab lines. Christina had a small rectangle of herb garden along one side of her house where she grew lemon balm and sage and borage, southernwood, thyme and marjoram, pennyroyal and thoroughwort, and half a dozen different kinds of mint. She was not much interested in garden flowers, despite her knowledge of their wild relatives, but a few of the old cottage flowers grew by the door: hollyhocks, climbing garlands of morning glory, and the wild eglantine rose, all surging into growth with the warmer weather. The rest of her cultivated ground was taken up with a vegetable plot and the traditional mounds planted in the Indian fashion, each with corn, beans and squash, an ancient tradition in which every crop supported and nourished the other. The early leaves were just poking through the rich, crumbly soil of the mounds and there was new growth on the perennial herbs.

  As Tirza came nearer to the cabin she caught a clean sharp scent on the air which pricked in the back of her nose. She put her head inside the open door, where the scent became intense enough to make her eyes water.

  ‘You’re making spruce beer!’

  ‘Yes. Come in and you can help me strain it off.’

  The mixture, made of the green tops of the black spruce, with spices and treacle, fermented with yeast, needed to be strained into a large bowl. Tirza held the sieve steady while Christina poured, then she held it aloft, shaking out the last drops of the spruce beer. There was a row of pottery flagons on the table beside the bowl. Tirza inserted a funnel into the neck of the first, then Christina ladled the beer in till the flagon was full.

  ‘There are some stoppers over there, on the shelf.’

  Tirza brought back a handful of corncob stoppers and sealed the first flagon. The bowl of spruce beer filled five of the flagons, with a cup or two left over.

  ‘Can we try some?’

  ‘It’s better when it’s had a little time to mature, but I guess we can taste a bit to see if it’s all right.’

  The spruce beer, sharp and tasting of spice, was pronounced a success as they drank it from two mugs, accompanied by a slab of buttered cornbread. Later, it would become slightly fizzy.

  ‘You’re the only person I know who makes spruce beer,’ said Tirza, wiping the foam from her upper lip on the back of her hand.

  ‘Doesn’t Catherine Penhaligon make it?’

  ‘No. She does make root beer, though.’

  ‘I’ve always preferred spruce beer. Seems to me it has a cleaner taste.’ Christina smiled across the table at her. ‘So, is school over for a while?’

  ‘Ayuh. Nearly three months of vacation!’

  ‘Then you’ll be off to high school in Portland.’

  Tirza pulled a face. ‘Don’t particularly want to.’

  ‘Nonsense. Make the most of your chances while you can.’

  ‘You sound like Miss Bennett. She was preaching at us today.’

  ‘I expect she talked a lot of sense.’

  ‘Girna,’ said Tirza slowly, ‘have you seen what they are doing up along Libby’s Beach? Those foxholes the soldiers are digging? Seems to me they’re wrecking the land. No one’s ever touched that land, Indian or settler. Those marshes have always been there, haven’t they? And the fishing pools and cranberries?’

  ‘So I’ve been told. I had a walk along there yesterday evening. I think, in time, the land will heal itself. The soldiers are only using sandbags, remember. They aren’t pouring in concrete or lining them with corrugated tin. In years to come, when the war is over and folks have forgotten why they were dug, the burlap of the bags will rot away and the sand will s
ettle. Then the holes will gradually fill up with blown soil and sand. After that the sea grasses and the marshy reeds will grow over them so you’ll never see them. Why, by the time you are grown-up, they’ll have disappeared.’

  She smiled and laid her hand on Tirza’s.

  ‘Don’t you worry your head about the land. The land knows how to heal herself.’ Her smile faded. ‘No, it isn’t the land I worry about, it’s the people.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Damage to people isn’t so easily healed, and it leaves scars that can mar a life. I think changes are coming which Flamboro will find difficult to manage.’ She gazed away from Tirza, out through the open door of the cabin towards the lower end of the clearing and the sea. ‘I think people may get hurt, and I don’t just mean our young men who have gone away to the war, like Pete.’

  She sighed. ‘Still, no use grieving for what may never happen.’

  At six o’clock on a Saturday evening, Harriet tapped hesitantly on Martha’s bedroom door. She had left Billy playing in the bath with three celluloid ducks which had once been Simon’s and to which he had taken an unexpected fancy. Martha was in her room getting dressed up to go to the movies again with Captain Tucker. For the last two Saturdays she had gone out as part of a group; tonight she had a date with Captain Tucker on his own.

  ‘What is it?’ called Martha. She sounded as though she had a mouth full of bobby-pins.

  ‘Can I come in?’