The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  The girl’s hands were still for an instant, then resumed their work with the dishmop. She too was casual. “Last night?”; and then with a little rush of impatience, of irritation at the indirect approach, “Oh, you know who it was, Mother.”

  Eva lifted a plate from the dishpan and slowly dried it, as if by making speech incidental to action and movement she could reduce the conflict and still speak her mind.

  “It’s not sensible, you know, Hazel. It’s nothing that can do you any good.”

  The girl turned abruptly and faced her. Hazel had in her a directness that made it almost impossible to dissemble. Eva returned the direct look and for a moment their glances held: the tall girl, her cheek-bones flushed, the lips of the wide mouth parted in impatience; the woman, dumpy with middle age, her face a mask of resolution and patience and authority.

  The silence was brief, no more than a hesitation. Hazel broke it. “Oh, Mother” — irritation touched with resignation edged her voice— “you sound as if we were thinking of—oh, getting married or something. I like Anse, that’s all. You never said anything— “

  In the instant of silence Eva had felt a disturbing sense of strangeness, an illusion that the girl she faced was a stranger. This was lost at once in the unquestioned consciousness of parenthood.

  She interrupted. “I know. Maybe I should’ve. I’m saying it now. You go to a supper with a man back from overseas; well— that’s all right. A person c’ld hardly— But it don’t mean you can act like you belong together.” She paused. ‘You’re getting yourself talked about.”

  Hazel laughed, her voice a light sarcastic parody of understanding. “Oh, I see- It’s what Hat Wilmot said-”

  Eva was silent for a moment, fighting down exasperation, annoyed by the girl’s quickness and the edge of truth in what she said. She had watched with a kind of nagging worry the way in which Hazel and Anse Gordon were drawn together. She had felt a sharp irritation, for instance, hearing their laughter and muffled talk at the back door last night. But it was not until this morning that the nagging had hardened into the need to speak.

  Hat Wilmot had meant to be funny, calling out to them after Sunday School: “Well, Eva . . . Hazel, I’d ‘a thought you’d ‘a gone to Mass.” But there had been an edge of malice behind the fun. And what Hat Wilmot said others would hear and say.

  Eva sighed. She was tired of sparring. Her voice hardened.

  “It’s not what Hat Wilmot said. And I’m telling you now, I won’t see you wasting time with somebody that’s not worth . . . Who’d be no good even if ...”

  She halted to find words and went on more quietly. “Lord knows nobody’s got any right, any business, finding fault with religion. Anybody’s religion, as long as they don’t . . . It’s not that. There’s more to it than that. I wouldn’t have that one hanging round if he was John Wesley’s grandson. Oh . . . I’m not worrying about you— not really worrying; You’ve got too much sense to . . . But other people don’t know that, and . . . He’s no good. He’s wild. You know it as well as I do.”

  Hazel shook her head. “Mother— it’s just fun. If you know I’m not serious— why d’you bother about it?”

  Eva’s voice rose. “Because it’s wasting time. As I said. Because it don’t look right. Because I don’t know what Anse Gordon- Nothing good, if— ”

  In the bedroom off the kitchen Richard grunted in his sleep. Hazel shook her head again with a warning “sh-h-”.

  The antagonism went out of her manner. She glanced at the clock and turned to smile at Eva. She said lightly, “Don’t worry, Mumma. I won’t— “. She finished the sentence wordlessly, in a ripple of low-toned laughter, almost confidential, and put a hand against Eva’s shoulder. She pushed playfully. “Get out of here. Get away from the sink. Go over to Marshalls’ and take it easy.”

  Eva’s face slowly softened. She turned away, twitching off her apron. Hazel had sense. In spite of her impatience with the normal ways of living, she would see what was right ... A vague faint uneasiness troubled Eva for a moment, a recognition of the unusual in her daughter’s sudden friendliness and implied surrender. Usually Hazel never gave in. She would argue briefly and then go silent, brooding. Eva brushed this thought away. The girl was too straightforward for deceit.

  She smoothed her satin dress and her greying hair, stepped out on the back porch and turned east to take the pasture path to Marshalls’.

  Hazel washed and wiped the remaining dishes, working quickly, singing to herself in a soft undertone:

  There’s a long— long— night of waiting— Until my dreams all come true—

  Till the day— when I’ll— he going down ...

  She would have liked to be a singer. She could have put her whole self into a thing like that. But it wasn’t practical. Music had no place on the Shore except in church concerts— if you could call that music...

  No. You stayed on the Channel Shore to work and marry. Or you got away from it to go into household service— but that was beneath a McKee. Or to do stenography or teach school. Not to sing.

  Hazel had no chance of getting off the Channel Shore by any normal procedure. She had neither the inclination, nor the ability to concentrate on what did not interest her, to qualify as a teacher or a stenographer. So for years she had expressed her impatience with her surroundings in an outspokenness, a spasmodic irritation, an abruptness designed to impress on others an independence she had never been able to prove to herself.

  Unless, in this wild secret summer, she had proved it.

  Her mind met and faced with a sense of wonder and exhilaration the thing that for this last month had been woven through all her thought. Wonder that it should have happened at all, exhilaration which was partly the re-experience in memory of bodily sensation and partly a sense of triumphant daring. And now, far back, a faint insistent uneasiness, and the puzzlement that grew from it.

  Her voice dropped to a half-whisper, as if she had simply forgotten to continue her low-toned singing while her mind ran on. She hung the dishmop on its hook behind the sink, finished wiping the dishes with the sodden cloth, and stood for a moment motionless, looking down.

  In this moment there was nothing as clear as thought. She was conscious without seeing them of the range and stove-pipe, the clothes-pole over the range, the floor-boards worn down round polished spruce knots, the hooked mats on the floor, the blue-and- white-checked oilcloth on the table; the front hallway and the stair-posts, and the dim plush of the parlour through the open door beyond. The slow ticking of the clock on the shelf behind the range broke into this mindless reverie. She shook her head as if to clear it of the small inexorable sound, and moved abruptly. She crossed the kitchen, reached for an empty baking-powder tin on the shelf by the clock, and turned toward the door of the downstairs bedroom.

  Richard McKee, in sock feet and the faded blue serge trousers of his Sunday suit, stirred and turned his head on the pillow, unconcerned with anything but the rare luxury of rest. Now that the women’s voices had partly roused him, he was holding to the bare edge of wakefulness to enjoy this drowsing peace.

  Hazel leaned inward around the door. “Father, Mumma’s gone over to Marshalls’. When she gets back, if I’m not here, I’ve gone up to Lowries’. See if there’s any strawberries.”

  “All right,” Richard said. “Sunday, though.” It was merely a caution, a suggestion that Hazel was old enough to know for herself that Eva wouldn’t like berry-picking on a Sunday afternoon.

  The kitchen door closed, fathoms up in the world of waking, and left him alone.

  Hazel left the house, walked across the flat grass of the front yard, and up the slope of the field to the road; crossed the road, and took the cart-track uphill through the thin browntop of the upper field.

  At the top of the hill the land levelled out. From there a person could look east and west along the northern fields and pastures of
almost all the places at Currie Head, separated by line fences and the untidy hedges of young wild-apple trees the years had grown there. You could look west to the cross-roads, where the school-house road branched north from the shore to the school and the church, and beyond the cross-roads to the farms stretching away to the neighbouring district of Leeds. You could look east across the fields and woods of Currie Head to the district of Katen’s Rocks. Or let your sight drift out over the down-sloping lower fields and clusters of pitch-roofed farm buildings to the stretch of sea they called the Channel. And beyond it to the Islands; west to the Upper Islands opposite Morgan’s Harbour, or east along those island coasts, merged by distance, to the mist of the Lion’s Mane, thirty miles away to the southeast where Channel met Atlantic.

  Hazel turned only once, at the top of the hill. She stood there for a moment, her brown cotton dress blown lightly about her by the southwest wind, looking back. Her glance drifted eastward across James Marshall’s place with its white house and red-stained barn, across Alec Neill’s ill-kept buildings, and Hugh Currie’s, half-hidden in clustered apple trees. Across Grant’s Place, the stretch of woods that belonged to James Marshall’s nephew, and Frank Graham’s. Beyond Grahams’, the Gordon place, its house, north of the road, also hidden by an ancient orchard, the last house eastward in Currie Head; more than a mile from where she stood. Her glance came back to the home fields directly below her. She scanned them briefly for a sign of young Joe, for assurance that her brother, normally a welcome companion, was not following her today.

  The fields were empty of life. She turned north again and climbed the worm fence separating this upper hayfield from the back wood-lot, and began to go down the reverse slope of the first fold in the land.

  This was the frontier of an old prosperity. By the opening years of the nineteenth century all the land along the water from Copeland to Findlay’s Bridge had been taken up. Later, having served its first purpose by freeing its settlers from the bonds of Europe, the Shore was to become a breeding-place for migrants, men and women who were born there, raised there, and who left the Shore in youth for the States and the West.

  But during one golden period, the forty or fifty middle years of the century, it had prospered by the standards of the time in its own right. For a while it had exported products other than its flesh and blood, prospered on the basic economics of salt fish, enhanced at times by lesser pursuits— by vessel-building and coastal trade, cattle and sheep and squared hardwood timber. It was a harsh prosperity, based on circumstances that were not to last; but while they lasted the Shore overflowed, up its small and crooked water-courses, over the fold in the land, into the standing woods. Younger sons and new settlers chopped out and burned and planted new fields, a mile, two miles and more, from salt water.

  A few side roads like the school-house road remained, leading back through places stubbornly kept in cultivation. But most of the back fields had returned to woods. Two and three generations later you could still find them: a stone pile among the spruce, a rock-walled hollow, an apple tree still putting forth a small hard fruit among spruce and fir and second-growth birch. Areas of almost unbroken woods, unmarked except for the grey scar of a corner-blaze on an ancient beech; still known by the names of men who had planted life and left a crop of winter firewood. Lowries . . . Kilfyles . . . McNaughtons . . .

  Places to search for small fruit grown wild, to explore for no reason at all, to name for a meeting-place.

  As Hazel walked down the crooked hauling-road her ears caught the slight rushing murmur of the Black Brook, riffling across a stretch of stony bottom in its course eastward to Graham’s Lake. Just west of that riffle a log bridge crossed the brook and beyond it a path rose through the woods to the pasture field that was known as Lowries, all that remained of a farm. Not even a streak of rot was left, zigzagging through the growth to remind you of a fence. But in the little open break, retreating in on itself with each year’s growth of young spruce, wild strawberries grew.

  As she climbed the slope beyond the brook she was touched again by the breath of her uneasiness, her faintly growing puzzlement.

  When a girl crossed from innocence to experience the fact was supposed to have a mysterious importance, almost like birth and death. This was implied in every attitude of the women and girls she knew: the care for reputation, the fuss over weddings, the tight- lipped shock at transgression. And there was the outgrowth of that, the story-book thing about love, shared tenderness, lasting as life. . .

  Hazel had never believed this. She had never believed in the attitudes. She had never believed the step out of innocence had any mysterious importance. It was simply the end of curiosity; and, in her own mind, a kind of rebellion ...

  She had seen nothing on the Channel Shore, nothing in Richard and Eva, nothing in James and Jane Marshall and all the rest of them, to show that anything but the habit of living together had grown up in the soil of intimacy. No . . . Whether you found it once or a thousand times, in marriage and a home or a hollow in the woods, experience was a physical fact; important for what you found in it in the moment of its passing. Or, if you stepped aside to find it, for the secret satisfaction, the private rebellion.

  Yet, just now, just in these last few days, there was this uneasiness; despite the exhilaration, this sense of something missed, and the puzzlement of why it should be so.

  It touched her mind with a light curious insistence. She shook it away as she reached the clearing, the stream’s hurry growing fainter in her ears.

  Now again the wonder, memory and anticipation, yesterday and tomorrow, merged in the flowing now. Curiously, at the edge of sharper memories, one from the long past. Once for no reason except to try something new and daring, she had walked through the woods to a hidden inlet of Graham’s Lake, had stripped and waded shuddering into cold spring water until it closed around her shoulders. Later she had sometimes repeated the experience, approaching each repetition with the remembered shock of that first submergence quickening in her flesh.

  What she felt in her marrow now, a thousand times intensified, was the dark excitement, the chill of the lake, its cold insistent meaningless message along the nerves of the lower body, the breast, the mind.

  There was no one in the clearing. She crossed it to the cradle- hills along its northern edge and crouched to search for berries while she waited.

  Anse turned slowly in the door-yard, scuffed out a cigarette and glanced around him, half noticing with a mild contempt the hen-house, the wood-pile, the manure-cart tipped with its shafts high against the barn wall. There were times when he lived on the juice of his own feelings. At such times he could look with amused tolerance, almost with liking, at the commonness of life and things at Currie Head. At other times his mind ranged with a hard scorn on the whole of it.

  Today his mind was light, controlled and expectant. After the novelty of return from overseas had worn off he had begun to feel the impatience and restlessness, the old contempt for the Shore and everything on it. He had let his instinct rove restlessly for the outlet that would restore the inner feeling, the evidence to himself of the power he was.

  It was this that had turned him to Hazel McKee, sensing some spark of life or daring or discontent that livened to meet him. In a sense he had found the outlet. Discovery was complete. It remained only to confirm possession, prove mastery, establish a continuing relationship that could give him a lasting sense of triumph. Until he should tire and go on to something else.

  He stepped out abruptly and headed north through the fields. At the edge of the woods he took the hauling-road that led back to Graham’s Lake.

  On either side of the track lay small clearings where four years ago, in the last winter before his enlistment, he and Stewart had cut box-logs. Fallen tops and old brush made a scattered tangle and through these skeleton branches young raspberry canes were pushing up. For a moment, as he remembered, Anse’s mood darkened.
Four cents for a seven-foot stick, five inches across the small end. Work, from cold sunrise to raw dark, and after. Night and morning the barn to tend. Work, and nothing else, except for hanging around at Katen’s and once in a while a dance at Forester’s Pond.

  It was all part of the Shore picture, the dullness of it. Hugh Currie . . . Frank Graham . . . Stewart Gordon ... the lot of them. He grunted in bitter amusement, thinking of Stewart and the boat.

  Three years before, while Anse was in the army, his father had built a twenty-four-foot two-master for the mackerel fishing— when everyone knew the Channel run of mackerel was done for good. Through some cycle of habit of which the secret was lost in tidal time, the fish had ceased to follow the Channel in their great migrations. At a time when even the last die-hards had come to see this, Stewart built his boat.

  For two springs Frank Graham had continued to sail with him and fish an empty sea. But now even Frank was through. The two-master lay in a disused sheep-shed attached to the barn. Once this spring, as they put the horse away after hauling top-dressing to the fields, Anse had nodded sideways through the stable door: “What you keepin’ her for? A souvenir?” Stewart had merely looked baffled and reproachful.

  Stewart and all the rest of them . . . The boat was a final foolishness. Foolish, because they couldn’t see beyond the Shore.

  They lacked the sense to see that what had been done by their fathers could be done again.

  Anse grunted in his mind. This whole shore once had looked toward the sea. They had trawled for cod and haddock and in the spring the two-masters had gone far beyond the Channel. Men had sailed east from here to the Cape Breton coast, to shack on the beaches and fish the waters off Petit de Grat and L’Ardoise and Port Hood.

  But when the mackerel failed in the Channel the backbone had gone out of them.

  Down-shore where the land was hard to work they still stuck to the trawling. But from Currie Head west they had turned inward to hay and oats and sheep, cattle and butter and eggs, strawberries and vegetables. Only the single month of herring to remind them of another time. A time when there was pride in owning your own boat, a time when the back places where men stuck to the land were known contemptuously as Bogtown, a time before the beam trawlers, when there was money in in-shore cod. A time before the mackerel went away.