Free High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie

home, she thought. The boys can ram around and drink, and raise hell, but talk doesn’t matter if you’re a boy. I’ll stay home, and there’ll be no cause for worry, or for any talk about Joanna Bennett for them to bring home.
    But some day the Island will belong to me again.
    Someday I’ll be free.

7
    J OANNA’ S ROOM WAS A SMALL ROOM under the eaves, with a window looking over Schoolhouse Cove and the point, and impertinent little boats with red sails on the wall paper. It was a bare room, with its narrow white-painted bed, the chest with the faded red flowers, and the mirror over it.
    Bare it was, but not if you garlanded it with the heartsinging hope or the heavy burden of despair that alternately lived in it along with Joanna, who came home from school across the bay so many times to unpack her suitcase on the narrow bed. . . . Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. There were plenty of homecomings in three years, until that final June; plenty of times to kneel by the window, her arms on the sill, and breathe rapturously the scent that was the Island’s own, or watch the snow slant blindingly across the winter-barren point and hide the gray sea, but never its voice.
    But when she stopped in her unpacking, a dress in her hands, to watch a boat cut swiftly through the plunging water outside the cove like a gay and living thing, the rapture of return would be gone; the unspeakable delight of coming home to the Island, of which she had dreamed since the last departure, would disappear with the knowledge that the time was past when she could wriggle hastily into her dungarees and be off to the shore and the boats even before dinner.
    With slow fingers she could put on a gingham dress and a starched apron, and go down to set the table, and tell Donna all the important things that were for her ears alone; then the men came in, and if they hadn’t seen her at the wharf, she was kissed and hugged, and they were all happy together. But all the time, under the laughter and the eager talk, she remembered how it was when there was something urgent and satisfying to do that first afternoon; buoys to paint, or a sail in somebody’s boat to try out a new engine, or a long lazy afternoon in the sun, with the boys painting or whittling, and talking about their latest hell-raising.
    Then graduation came, and in her seventeenth summer on the Island, she discovered a new truth; that when boys begin to ask you to go to dances, and walk you home the long way—with a stop under a tree somewhere to tell you how sweet you are and pant passionately down your neck—when all this happens, you have lost forever the fine free comradeship of the shore. Stephen was right when he said it couldn’t have gone on forever. She tried them all, but in the end it was Nils who took her to dances in the clubhouse and church in the schoolhouse. Nils alone was the same chum he had always been. The story had died, as as far as Joanna knew, no one even remembered it now. If they talked about her, it was to call her stuck-up and say she thought herself too good for the Island boys. But Joanna tilted her chin at the talk, and made sure they’d never have anything less harmless to say about her.
    Donna’s health was increasingly bad. Time was beginning to take its toll of the frail but indomitable woman who had brought six lusty Bennetts into the world. While Joanna was at school, Nils’ younger sister Kristi worked at the big house as hired girl, with Nate’s wife and daughter coming to help with the heavy housecleaning.
    By fall of that seventeenth year, Joanna herself had decided her future. It was to be here, on the Island, with the family. No need for cousin Rachel or Aunt Mary to come up and help out any more, she told her parents arrogantly. Kristi could go home and help her grandmother. She, Joanna, already had the reins of the household in slim but very strong hands. All the stern promises she had made to