The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  All this moved through Anse’s mind like shadow. The Shore had gone soft. No one thought of the possibilities ... No one saw that what was foolishness in Stewart, for instance— foolishness as long as you looked only at the Channel and the Shore— could be carried beyond that into something new and strange. New in this generation.

  Put a gas engine into a boat like that and you could still do it. Sail again to the Cape Breton coast, or through to the Atlantic side of the Islands. Shack on the beach there. Go where the fish were.

  The odd thing. The unexpected. It was something to think about, a break in the dullness of the close future, as this thing of Hazel McKee was a break in the flowing present.

  His mood was light again. Presently he came out on the shore of Graham’s Lake and began to walk west up the beach of small uneven stones until he reached the shallows where the Black Brook enters the lake. He picked his way across, the shallow water splashing the work-boots he was wearing with his brown serge Sunday suit. He tramped a short distance north then through ferns and alders to the old back road.

  Here the going was easy. This had been designed as a wagon- road to serve the back places, paralleling the shore road and meeting the school-house road a mile or so north of the crossroads. Now it was nothing but a track for woodsleds in winter, but it was clear of brush and its swampy spots were bridged with corduroy. The road followed the brook and he could hear the faint sound of it off to the left behind the spruce as he walked west, and occasionally see a loop of it in its shallow valley where softwood gave way to open stands of young birch, or an old clearing remained. As he crossed the back of Frank Graham’s land and then the northern edge of the strip known as Grant’s Place, his controlled excitement began to grow.

  Suddenly, from the direction of the brook, voices. Just ahead the road widened and sloped down along a little intervale where the stream was wide and slow. Boys. Four boys squatted there on the narrow ledge of bank between the road and the water— Frank Graham’s Dan and his cousin, the kid from Toronto. Stan Currie. Joe McKee.

  Anse halted, irritated. He could leave the road and circle through the woods, but one of them might look up at any time. Absently through his annoyance he heard young Dan’s voice.

  “. . . Kilfyle’s . . .”

  And Bill’s question, “Kilfyle’s? Why?”

  Dan was indifferent, staring down into the pool.

  Stan Currie said, “Fellow called Tim Kilfyle farmed back here. Eighty, ninety years ago. More, maybe. The land’s no good. Swamp and rock.”

  Anse felt a flicker of contempt. Stan Currie. The only son old Hugh had produced. A quiet one who took care to stay out of mischief. Hugh Currie had gone away to Boston as a young man, failed in the grocery business, and come back a widower with a baby son to raise and educate and send away again. When Anse thought of the Curries he was touched with an inner contempt for admission of failure, for regular school attendance, for gentle ways.

  He considered. Too noticeable to hurry past. He parted the alders and walked to the edge of Kilfyle’s Hole.

  Dan Graham grinned. “Anse! Where you cruisin’ to?”

  He squatted by the Hole, running his glance from boy to boy, and laughed. “Nowhere much. Takin’ a short cut to church, maybe . . . Where’s your hooks-and-lines?”

  He said this with a teasing drawl, knowing that for the Grahams, the Curries, the McKees, for all the Methodists of Currie Head, fishing on Sunday was forbidden.

  Dan Graham recognized this with an apologetic grunt. “No trout in the Black Brook anyway.”

  Anse sprawled into a more comfortable position, his back against a dried and barkless stump. “Don’t fool yourself. There’s trout all right. Watch the holes when the water’s middlin’ high.” Irritation at the break in his journey was passing into something else— a kind of private satisfaction in the deference these boys had for Anse Gordon, the wild one. In their minds when they thought of him would be their knowledge of his doings before the war. The time he had left home, telling no one of his going— or where he had spent the two weeks of his absence. The time he and Lon Katen had made a midnight bonfire of James Marshall’s backhouse. The time he had chopped Fred Marshall down with his fists, on the road one Sunday night, when Fred jumped him for a word said about Lola Fait.

  The legend was there in their minds. It amused him, even, to sense Stan Currie’s subdued dislike, a dislike edged with embarrassment and the fear of malice. Stan was carrying on his conversation with Bill Graham about the woods, in a low-toned aside to Dan’s talk of trout and mushrats and rabbit-snaring.

  Stan was saying, “We own it now. We’re directly back of our place, here. The next one west’s McNaughtons’, back of the Neills’. McNaughton was a blacksmith. There’s another old place behind the Marshalls’, belonged to a man they called The Frenchman. Next to that’s Lowries’; the woods there belongs to Mr. McKee. Part of it’s still cleared off. Joe’s father used it for a horse pasture up to a few years ago . . . Didn’t he, Joe?”

  It amused Anse to glance at Joe McKee and to know that these boys suspected nothing of what brought him to the woods today. There was almost a touch of regret in that. Whatever satisfaction you felt, the final satisfaction was in the thing known . . . He put that thought away, feeling the mounting of his present excitement. On the whole he was pleased now at this momentary delay. It was better not to be too eager, too soon at the place.

  He got up lazily and brushed spruce needles from his clothes. “Well, stay out’v trouble.”

  He lifted a hand and turned back to the road. Behind him was silence, then low-voiced talk. He could make out Dan Graham’s words, spoken in answer to an indistinguishable something from Stan Currie. “Aw, you been listenin’ to the women,” was what Dan said. Anse grinned.

  He caught himself hurrying as he crossed McNaughtons’, and cut his pace to a saunter. He crossed The Frenchman’s slowly. Less than a stone’s-throw short of Lowries’, when he could see the open of the clearing through scattered spruce and birch, he halted. No sign of Hazel. He lit a cigarette.

  Her mother, perhaps. A chore she couldn’t escape. Or Sunday visitors from up the Shore. He had recognized the possibility of such snags when he had talked to her last night in the dark . . . “I was through Lowries’ today. Lot of strawberries there. You better go picking tomorrow.”

  One thing he hadn’t thought of seriously was the possibility that she would stay away of her own will. They couldn’t do that when you made the arrangement in words that shaped a statement, not a question. When you had the hardness to back it up. Anse had the hardness. He wasn’t worrying about any hesitancy in Hazel McKee.

  The whole thing, though, had taken him by surprise.

  A little more than a month ago he had asked Hazel to accompany him to a church supper at Findlay’s Bridge. It was not the sort of thing he would ordinarily have gone to, and Hazel McKee was certainly not the kind of girl he would ordinarily have asked to go with him anywhere. It was this impulse to the unusual, sprouting in a mind already beginning to feel the nagging of the humdrum and the habitual, that had caused him to ask. As it turned out, he had enjoyed the attention paid him as the first Shore boy back from war, and the glances exchanged by the up-shore women, seeing him there in the Methodist Hall at The Bridge with Eva McKee’s daughter. He had enjoyed hanging around the church at Leeds the following Sunday night and walking home with her. He had enjoyed the wild imagining that crept into his mind then. He had enjoyed the craftiness with which he had dropped behind the others, spaced out on the road in the dark, and the audacity with which he had drawn her up the school-house road and into Clem Wilmot’s hayfield above the school-house.

  But it had taken him by surprise. Particularly her response. For he had found an eagerness that matched his own, that lacked his calculated control. An eagerness that did not wait to be drawn into a protesting shivering surrender. And no tears after
ward. No pleading for assurances. And yet . . . without experience. An awkwardness, a momentary tension, had made him sure of that.

  No tears. Only, in their wild hazardous meetings since, the beginning of something else. Anse frowned, thinking about this. Softness annoyed him. He couldn’t respond to it. Flattering, perhaps. But vaguely dangerous. And out of character with the forthright way in which she had met his calculated urgency; tenderness was a thing that developed in the frightened or the weak, and Hazel was neither.

  Anse glanced at his watch. If she hadn’t come in half an hour he would go back along the hauling-road. If he felt like it he would walk up to Leeds church again in the evening, about the time service was getting out. When she made excuses, he could say he had come to Lowries’ and waited till dark, or he could say he hadn’t come at all.

  Then he saw her. She had moved out from behind a clump of low bushes and was crouched on the slope, moving her hands in tall grass where the long-stemmed berries grew. She rose suddenly and scanned the woods openly. Anse grinned. He himself could be furtive in a manner that seemed direct. It was almost impossible for Hazel to be furtive at all. He rubbed out his cigarette carefully against a tree trunk and walked out of the shadow of the spruce.

  Hazel watched him approach, feeling the tingling in her flesh, the fascination.

  He said, “Hello. Finding any?”

  She said with faint mockery, “Where’s your dish? Anybody hangs around here has got to help.”

  Anse laughed. “I don’t work Sundays. That’s my day for the girls.”

  “From what I hear, then, every day’s Sunday.”

  He laughed again.

  But boy-and-girl sparring didn’t come natural to her. She said abruptly, “Glad you got here, anyway. Drives me crazy, sitting around the house.”

  “Me too.” He made it sound sincere. “Give me the can.” He tucked it between the roots of a sun-dried stump, humorously contemptuous. “Quite a size, that. Take all of ten minutes to fill it, once we get to it. Let’s look around ... I snared rabbits here, one winter when I was a kid. D’you ever see where the old house was?”

  She nodded. “Years ago, I guess. I’ve not been any farther in than the berry patch for a long while, though.”

  “Come on, then. It’s back here a-ways.” He took her hand.

  They walked slowly toward the fringe of trees at the northern edge of the clearing. There he slipped an arm round her, drew her gently round and kissed her briefly but long enough to feel the beginning of her body’s answer. He dropped his arm indifferently, as if the caress had been a wink or a careless word.

  “Come on,” he said. “Up here.”

  Something that once had been a path slanted up through spruce and fir and birch to the level place, itself partly overgrown, where the house had stood. The cellar walls had fallen in and been covered by encroaching earth and the yearly fall of leaves until nothing remained but a hollow, a grass-grown cradle in the woods. Anse slid to the edge of it, leaning on an elbow with Hazel beside him.

  The cold excitement and the eagerness were here, but not the tension. And even now in this renewal of revelation, while her flesh responded to a kind of remorseless insistence, there was something that remained aloof.

  This was the underlying thing in her consciousness, that even while her senses dulled and quickened in waves, in a slow mounting frenzy, a person now remained aloof and alone in her mind. And the person was Hazel McKee.

  Anse lay on his back in leaves and grass, eyes closed. Hazel examined his face with curiosity. The long dark hair had fallen back from his forehead. The features had lost some of their arrogance in the peace of accomplishment. Even in fulfilment her blood stirred at the pull of his physical attraction.

  And yet. . .

  In what she felt, despite the answer of the flesh, there was nothing now of tenderness. She did not know why this was so. Was it memory? Memory of the controlled irritation with which

  he had met the softness and the yearning that had surprised even herself, the last time they had lain in grass together? Or was it simply the lack of that, now, in herself? An answering hardness?

  Whatever it was, there was no impulse now to move the lips gently along the plume of the eyebrow, or trace with a finger the dark curve of the lips.

  The puzzled uneasiness troubled her again.

  Why should it matter?

  She sat brooding, arms around her knees, chin down. After a little Anse stirred, sighed and sat up grinning.

  “Well... I s’pose we got to pick strawberries.”

  Hazel said nothing, and he turned to her slowly, taking in the

  silence, the brooding, the withdrawn expression on her face.

  He said, lightly, “What now?”

  After a little further silence she spoke. Not as if she were answering his question but as if she had come to a conclusion in her mind. “Its no good, you know, Anse . . . We might as well admit it. You don’t give a damn.”

  Soft protest, perhaps, or angry denial, were what she had expected. She got neither from Anse. His face hardened. She had taken him, again, by surprise. But this was as good a time as any to make things plain.

  He laughed. “What is it you want, Hazel? A ring or something?”

  She turned to look at him, curiously, studying his face, and shook her head. “No. Anybody can buy a ring. And get a dispensation, I s’pose. If that’s what you call it. No, I’m not looking for a ring...”

  He said sharply, “Well, what do you want, in the name of Christ?”

  Her anger flared at the callous shape of the question.

  “Nothing ... I won’t tell you. I won’t bother . . . It’s not worth it. Because—if you want to know—I don’t give a damn about you.” “Oh!”

  Anse put understanding into the word, and irony. He rose and put on his coat and slapped away clinging needles and tags of moss.

  “You don’t, uh? Well, Hazel, you’re a pretty fair hand at make- believe.” He said matter-of-factly, “Come on, now, we’ve got to get busy.”

  He reached down and pulled her upright and pushed her playfully toward the clearing.

  They picked berries without talking much, making casual conversation now and then about the unusual size of the berries, other places one or the other had picked in other years. Conventional talk that ignored the thing between them. Anse whistled softly through his teeth. They could hear distant voices, boys getting close to the clearing. When the can was full he walked with her as far as the juncture of the old back road with McKees’ hauling-road and kissed her briefly over the heaped can at parting.

  He said pleasantly, “Next Sunday if it’s fine—oh, I’ll be seein’ you before that. Won’t be up to church, tonight, but. . . Anyway, next Sunday we’ll take a walk on the east side of the Head. Nobody goes to the beach on Sunday. You know where Rob’s House is, don’t you?”

  Hazel looked away. “Yes, I know.” She had tried to say, “I won’t be there.” But honesty and indecision had intervened.

  2

  Off the beach at Currie Head small sounds stirred and drifted in morning dusk: the Channels slow and even breathing, the soft thump of rowlocks, the slight hollow sound of an oar hauled inboard, the whispered echo of a voice.

  There in the shadowed calm before sunrise men leaned across the gunnels of flats, grasped the tail-buoys of herring nets; peered downward, while they hauled on dripping head-ropes, to glimpse the shifting flash of silver; and hauled out of tidal darkness the black wet mesh, studded with twitching fish.

  This was secret from the Shore, a ritual of the Channel and the calm dusk before the morning wind.

  Later, in early daylight, the Shore would see them rowing in, their flats low in the water, and the first faint flaws of wind beginning.

  There on the beach they would clean the fish while gulls skirled and dived around them.
By the time the herring were salted in the huts, the summer-long southwest wind would be making up and the Channel flashing under the climbing sun.

  By then the Shore itself would be alive. Inland from the Head and the low ridge of beach the sunlight blew on hayfields patched with oats and the narrow strips of root crops, dull green on brown. Potatoes in drilled rows along the brows of hills were coming into blossom. On the branches of ancient apple trees where a seething foam of petals had bloomed and faded and vanished on the June wind, the tiny knobs of small hard fruit were forming, lost in a sea of leaves.

  In this time now between planting and haying, from almost anywhere at Currie Head a man could see here and there a horse- drawn cultivator moving along side-hill turnip rows, smell the land and the smoky rumour of distant brush fires, hear the echo of an axe, a shout from house to barn, and the small far-off snarl and whine, down the road at Katen’s Rocks, of Rod Sinclair’s mill.

  A mile and a half up the school-house road, far back where the fields finally gave way to woods, old Ed Kelley lazed in his kitchen, waiting for his latest batch of home brew to mature. Down past the church toward the shore road, Sam Freeman puttered at the job of replacing sleepers under his barn. Next door, just above the school-house, Clem Wilmot was patching a worm fence between his front hayfield and his horse pasture. On the main road itself, now that school was over, children hoed and sprayed potatoes, weeded gardens, and loafed. Or picked cultivated strawberries for James Marshall at two cents a box. From Marshall’s fields, from anywhere here at Currie Head, they could look out over the Channel and see, far off, Anse Gordon’s dory crawling along its line of trawl in the range of the Rocks; and closer in, if the hour was early, the herring flats, rowed by Richard McKee and Hugh Currie and Frank Graham or their sons; or by Stewart Gordon, alone. Closest of all, the star-shaped design of Alec Neill’s salmon net, anchored by its leader to the shore.