The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Day by day this desultory activity went on, in blowing sunlight or under clouds heavy with unshed rain. And in the evening men and women sat in kitchens, lighted lamps for a brief while between late dusk and dark, and went finally to bed. Boys and girls and younger men and women called at McKees’ for the mail, drifted down the road to Katen’s store for cigarettes and strawberry pop and laughter and pursuit, and went home together in the dark.

  There was about all this a sameness, a pattern repeated with small differences through the seasons, month after month and year after year. Snow, sun, cloud and frost. Planting, haying, digging, woods work, and for the few at Currie Head who still bothered with the Channel, the brief season of fish.

  School, church, the mail, Katen’s. Now and then a picnic on the Head in summer, and in winter a box social at the school . . .

  This was the sameness that for years had eaten at the core of Hazel’s mind.

  Now, she hardly thought of it.

  There were times in the week after the meeting at Lowries’ when she wished she had said it, clearly and finally—I won’t be there. When you made a statement it was something you could stick to. And yet.. .

  She had put it off. She had put the time of decision away.

  The week was gone, now, a blur of puzzled thought, of memory and anticipation, of inner argument and counter-argument. Now the time was here.

  Richard and young Joe had gone to the pasture bars to milk. Eva came through the back porch to the kitchen, stopping to sniff in distaste at the tub of soiled clothes in the corner of the porch, ready for tomorrow’s wash.

  She said, “Fish! You can’t wash out the dirty smell of it. What your father sees . . . What anyone sees ...”

  She went on, repeating the old complaint. There was nothing now in fish, except perhaps for salmon. If they’d stay home, away from the beach. If they’d fix fences and roofs, tend to the farms . . .

  Hazel made a wordless sound of acknowledgement, one woman’s recognition to another of a situation neither one could help. She felt a sense of shame about this. Last year, six weeks ago, she would have said, “Oh, it’s only one month a year. And it’s Father’s business. not ours. Let’s just put up with it.” But now she was going out of her way to be agreeable.

  This realization sharpened further the acrid humour of her mind. You went out and established your independence, a secret dark independence, and found yourself sacrificing the little independences you had taken a kind of pride in. Covering up. Saying “m-m-m-m-” to opinions you didn’t agree with. She felt a flush of exasperation. Just this morning she had hidden in the shop the snapshots of herself and Anse at Katen’s Creek, snaps they had borrowed Ede Graham’s camera to take . . .

  Covering up. Because perhaps you had some idea of paying for deceit with pleasantness. Or because, when you didn’t openly disagree, there was less chance of anger, less chance of temper lost, less chance of a probing watchfulness.

  And then after all, in spite of the secret independence and the physical release that went with it, and beyond the small shame of subterfuge and the shadowy fear, you faced this sense of something still unsettled and unsatisfied. And what to do about it.She said, “Mother, I think I’ll run down and see Ede Graham for a while.”

  Eva said indifferently, “All right. If you want to. It’s kind of a long walk, though.”

  Inwardly Eva was pleased. Hazel was getting—manageable. The slight shiver of doubt that had crossed her mind a week ago touched her again. That was the kind of thing you might think was . . . But Hazel hadn’t the art to be deceitful. Anyway, there was nothing now to hide. She hadn’t gone down to Katen’s in the evening for a week or more. The Anse Gordon thing—a kind of whim. She was all right. The girl was all right.

  Once out of the door-yard, Hazel began to walk quickly. Walking solved no problems, but it helped to quiet the mind. Alone with Eva she could never escape uneasiness. Alone with herself she could at least face it, face the lack of purpose, the dissatisfaction, the new and puzzling discontent that displaced the old.

  With a kind of calm desperation her mind ran over the possibilities and the alternatives.

  What is it you want? A ring or something?

  Marriage hadn’t even crossed her mind in the course of their first wild meetings. But during this past week she had considered it, as she had considered everything which might in some way help to the decision she had to make.

  She considered marriage, not as a likelihood or even as a possibility, but as a theory, an idea, a starting-place for the range of her speculation.

  Did she want to marry Anse?

  No. Not Anse or anyone. Not even if that were what Anse wanted. Marriage with Anse . . . she didn’t care about “turning”. People got used to it. That part of it wouldn’t bother Anse, either. He’d just as soon be a Protestant unless he thought someone was trying to turn him into one. But marriage with Anse ... It might get a person off the Channel Shore, in the end. But she couldn’t see herself tied for life to Anse Gordon.

  What, then?

  Well, there was the future Vangie Murphy had found, years ago, after Dolph Findlay got her in trouble. A broken-down house, a couple of kids with different surnames, a wild kind of calculated abandon when someone got drunk and came to call. And hand-outs of second-hand clothes from the Grahams, the Wilmots, the Marshalls, the McKees.

  The McKees. Hazel laughed out loud at the crazy picture she had been painting in her mind. Hazel McKee . . . No.

  For a moment she had thrilled with fear, and it was new to her. Fear, outright fear, was something she had never felt about those wild and secret hours. Somehow when it was you, and the other one was there, down the road, a person you could touch and see . . . Anyway, for every one who was caught, ten went their way unscathed. No; that kind of fear hadn’t come into it. Even now, it merely touched her flesh and vanished.

  The thing would go on for a while, then, and—peter out.

  That was all you could expect. That was all she had ever expected. Anse had been, what?—the opportunity to prove something to herself. A thought shocked her a little. It might have been anyone, in Wilmot’s field that night. Anyone with the boldness to match her mood.

  She had no right to expect from Anse a thing which she herself had not been seeking. Something that even now she could not put into words, could think of only as a lack, an emptiness. Something toward which her tentative tenderness had been exploratory, a groping beyond the moment.

  She thought: we’re alike. Anse and I are alike.

  The difference was in the questioning, the groping toward something missed. Something that Anse Gordon had never looked for and would never need, and that she perhaps had lost the chance to find.

  Reason told her to forget it, to accept the things she had looked for and found and forget this puzzled wonder about a thing she could not name. Her trouble was that she could not forget.

  She walked on, past Marshalls’, Neills’ and Curries’. Between Curries’ and Grahams’ lay the stretch of woods known as Grant’s Place, the woods, never cleared, which old James Marshall had bought for his nephew. Before his enlistment Grant Marshall had done a little chopping there; he had swamped a hauling-road into the middle of the stretch that lay south of the shore road.

  Hazel told herself that when she reached the spot where the hauling-road turned off she would have to make a choice. There she would have to end her indecision—go on to Grahams’, or turn down through Grant’s Place toward the beach and the Head and Anse.

  Supper was over and cleared away. Anna Gordon sat on the back steps, smiling to herself. Gordons’ back door, like others at The Head, was really a side door, opening eastward. She let her glance run down the southern slopes of the lower fields toward the edge of woods where the land rose before it fell away to the beach and the Channel.

  Behind her in the kitchen Josie sat placidly
, the outdoor light falling on the work-shirt on which she was replacing buttons. In this first week of July the days were still long with light, but indoors a grey dusk was gathering.

  Anna looked back over her shoulder, through the open door, and said idly, “You’ll hurt your eyes, Mama.” She said the words merely for something to say, to make an idly affectionate contact. There were times when you wanted to share light-heartedness, and now the special moments of inner excitement were becoming more frequent. You went along as usual, only happier, and then this happiness would be alive and tingling.

  Josie shook her head. “Plenty of light yet.” She glanced at Anna a little curiously.

  Anna made a small laughing sound. She supposed something of what she felt showed in her face. Certainly when the moments came she must seem to Josie a little absent-minded. Stewart wouldn’t notice, anyway. But Josie had said nothing. Nor had Anse.

  Anse. When she turned to speak to her mother she could see him, across the hall in the parlour, sprawled on the lounge. It amused him, she supposed, to lie there alone in the curtained room that was never used except for company. But she had long ago given up bothering about what Anse thought or did, except as it affected Stewart and Josie. Let him do as he pleased. For a moment it worried her a little, but she put it away. Nothing ever worried Anna long.

  She had a little ridiculous thought. If she were to sing out: Grant’s coming home! Grant’s coming home!

  What would Josie say?

  What would anyone say?

  The thought tickled her; she giggled as she met Josie’s glance.

  Actually it was ridiculous. She had no idea just when Grant would get back. But the return from overseas was well along. First, in early May, the Artillery, and Anse. Then a little later Dave Stiles and Jim Katen, with the Twenty-fifth. Then three weeks ago, the Highlanders-the Eighty-fifth-Will Marshall, and Jack Laird from up past the cross-roads, and a dozen more. Grant would be among the last because he had reached Army age late and never got past England. But he would come. Before the end of summer he would come.

  Across the hall Anse got up and stretched and threw a cigarette butt at the Franklin stove. She turned to watch him as he walked to the open front door and through it, not turning to look at Josie. For a little he was lost to sight. She heard Stewart speak to him on the front porch and felt a twinge of irritation; he hadn’t bothered to answer. Then he crossed the road, tall and indifferent, and went lounging down across the fields toward the beach. He vanished from her mind.

  After a little she got up and strolled across the kitchen and out through the narrow hall to the front porch. The low insistent grumbling of the Channel, never entirely still, was pleasant to her ears, too familiar to be noticed. A faint smell of barns and fields and gardens hung in the warm, almost windless, air. A mile away, beyond Grahams’, beyond Hugh Currie’s and the Neills’, she could see James Marshall’s windows winking in the sun-down light. She laughed again and glanced down at her father.

  Stewart Gordon sat on the small porch in a rocker, his head bent in frowning concentration. Anna touched it playfully with her left hand, running her fingers through the thinning silver hair.

  Stewart looked up over his glasses in faintly embarrassed response. The outward signs of affection were not in common fashion along the Channel Shore.

  He voiced a mild complaint.

  “This Marx. Trouble is, you have to learn a whole new language. Listen to this: The two phases, each inverse to the other, that make up the metamorphosis of a commodity constitute a circular movement, a circuit: commodity-form, stripping off of this com- modity-form, and return to the commodity-form.’ Now I’ve got to go back and figure out commodity-form again.”

  Anna laughed. As she went down the path to the gate and turned up the road she was still laughing to herself. Josie must know that she and Grant had a liking for each other. Probably they all knew. But if they knew that on this Sunday evening she was walking up the road just to sit on a stone and look at Grant’s Place, they’d think she was crazy.

  Her mind went back in amused wonder, remembering the little things. The closeness they had shared in spite of the long intervals between their meetings. In spite of the differences . . . In spite of the fact that one family was Methodist and strait-laced and dry-footed, the other Catholic and born to oilskins.

  What was it they had had, when you looked at it? Brief meetings at Katen’s store. Chance walks together, if both happened to call at McKees’ for the mail at the same time. Perhaps a row on the inlet on The Holiday. Occasional meetings at Frank Graham’s, sometimes, when Grant came over after chopping in The Place.

  They had never put into words the current of light-heartedness that ran in them when they were together. Anna was not sure she had even thought about it until he had gone away. But the memory of it, and the thought of having it again, were real and clear in these moments when the dream of his home-coming rose in her heart like tide.

  She glanced toward Grahams’ house. Young Dan and Bill were perched on the veranda railing. She waved a hand and went on.

  A line of gnarled old cherry trees fronted Grahams’ and straggled to an end at the line fence where Grant’s Place began. There, along the road, maples grew on a stony plateau, but south to the

  Channel the place was thick with softwood, touched here and there by the lighter green of hardwood clumps. From the road you couldn’t tell where the clearing was in which Grant used to work. North of the road the slope went back to the skyline in unbroken spruce.

  Midway along the stretch of main road that passed through these woods, Grant’s hauling-road turned off. Opposite the turn-off a silver birch stood, and at its foot a flat smooth boulder nested in a bank fringed with ferns. One evening just before Grant had sailed, he and Anna had sat on this rock in silence, content in being there and in being together.

  Anna crossed the road-side gutter. Seeing the rock, touching it, was like meeting a friend. She sat down and let her mind go out to Grant.

  Hazel walked slowly, her eyes on the packed dust and gravel of the road. Now that she was nearing the place she could feel the excitement, the quickening of her heart, in the knowledge that now she must choose. Here and now she must give in to the logic of her mind and her body’s urging or finally reject them for the sake of a feeling, a feeling blurred by strange mists of pride.

  She glanced up and saw Anna Gordon and halted.

  She felt at once an angry annoyance that for the time being her power of choice was gone. She could not turn down along the hauling-road with Anna watching, if that was what her choice was to be. And a forced decision to do otherwise would settle nothing.

  She thought quickly of turning back. But Anna had seen her. She would have to go on now. Realizing this, a slight sense of relief touched her, mingling with frustrated anger.

  Anna sat on the smooth rock, leaning back against the trunk of the birch, one raised knee clasped in her hands. She watched Hazel coming and smiled slowly and quizzically.

  She said lazily, “Hello, Hazel,” and added indifferently, “You headed for Ede’s?”

  Hazel said, “Yes.” She stepped across the gutter a little hesitantly and let herself down on the verge of grass. She did not quite know why she was doing this. The thing to do was halt for a minute, exchange a word, and go on. Go on to Grahams’. Make the choice there. Wait for Anna to go home, and then decide. To stay the evening with Edith Graham or find an excuse to get away, to the beach and Anse.

  But she found now that she had a curiosity about Anna Gordon, an interest stronger, momentarily, than her impatience. This sister of Anse . . . The moment was suspended. She was pulled away from private preoccupation, and the sense of this was pleasant.

  She said, making conversation, “Well, I s’pose Grant’ll be home soon.”

  Perhaps it was an association in thought, the fact they were sitting there looking int
o the woods that belonged to Grant Marshall, or a memory of the boy-and-girl attachment between Grant and Anna.

  Anna was looking at her gravely, a little wonderingly. She said, “Yes. He will. But not for a month or more, he expects.”

  Hazel said, “Expects? Oh, you hear from him, do you?”

  This was a little startling. Still, a lot of girls wrote to boys overseas as a kind of community duty, and the boys replied. There could hardly be more to it than that. Considering Grant, silent and shy and almost as unsociable as his Uncle James. And Anna Gordon, lively and full of careless mischief. And the difference in religion.

  Anna said, “Oh, yes.” She laughed a little, almost to herself. “They’re kind of funny letters . . .”

  Suddenly Hazel realized that Anna wanted to talk about Grant Marshall, and she felt the oddity of this. Letters. Love letters, maybe, between Grant Marshall and Anna Gordon . . . Passing through her own house, date-stamped by Eva McKee, or by herself; and she hadn’t noticed . . .

  She said, “Funny?”

  Anna was hesitant. “Well, there’s nothing in them anyone couldn’t see, but . . . Oh, things over there’re always reminding him of home.”

  She had in fact received four letters from Grant in the year or more he had been overseas and it was not until she had got the second that she had caught on to what he was up to. Casually, as if searching for something to say, he had made it a point to mention days and places and people that recalled to her the times they had been together. A lane in Sussex was like the stretch of road between McKees’ and Grahams’. A beach on the coast near Bournemouth reminded him of The Holiday. The Regimental Sergeant Major had a moustache like Adam Falt’s.

  Her mind forgot Hazel McKee, remembering these little things.