The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Hazel saw the withdrawal and self-possession and above all the serene confidence in Anna’s face. She looked away. Grant Marshall and Anna Gordon. Whatever there was between them was more than anyone imagined, then. More than . . . more than . . .

  She looked again at Anna with a feeling close to intimacy and realized the strangeness of what was happening in herself, the sprouting of sympathy with others, the recognition—in the strange soil of her own problem and her private indecision.

  Anna Gordon. She had never really considered Anna as a person. Anna was just a girl younger than herself, at an age when a couple of years could make the difference between intimacy and mere acquaintance.

  She looked at Anna now. At the rounded face and honey-coloured hair, the girlish body that was somehow mature and entirely womanly for all its youth.

  Hazel felt a flush of envy, almost of anger. But it was not envy of the physical.

  She said meditatively, “You’re fond of him.”

  Anna was silent for a little. Hazel’s tone had taken her by surprise. On the Channel Shore any reference to a boy-and-girl relationship was likely to be cloaked in banter. She didn’t quite know what to make of Hazel McKee. Now and then lately she had thought of Hazel, knowing there was something between this girl and Anse and idly curious about it. But she had not thought of her as the sort of person who would say “You’re fond of him” in that curious voice of discovery and understanding.

  She said, “Yes. Yes, I guess I am.” They sat for a short time without speaking and finally Anna rose and brushed her skirt.

  She was about to suggest they walk down to Grahams’ together. She had an impulse toward closeness, the wish to talk about Grant. But there was something in Hazel’s manner. Hazel was thinking of something else. It was as if she had withdrawn, gone away. Anna said, “Well ... I think I’ll go on up to Curries’. See you later.” She turned and was gone up the road.

  Hazel watched her until she was hidden by a curve in the road and then sat on for a while alone. Once she glanced down the hauling-road toward the beach. She could not have said that the look on Anna’s face or the tone of her voice as she spoke of Grant Marshall had proved to her that there was a gentleness that could grow between people; that there was a tenderness, linked with bodily attraction or simply there, existing, with which and in which the physical and all other relationships grew together. It was not as clear-cut as that.

  But something glimpsed in this half-hour with Anna had created in herself a mood that was like sadness, as though discontent had been transformed into a sorrowful certainty; a mood in which there was a quiet almost impersonal envy, but nothing now of indecision. She got up, crossed the gutter to the dust and gravel of the road, and turned east toward Grahams.

  Later, she sat with Edith Graham on the back steps of the house, idly talking in the dusk. Somewhere behind the barn there was laughter. Dan and Bill, their voices mingling with the cowbell sounds of late evening. In the early darkness she saw Anse, an indistinct figure, lounging up across the slope of Gordons’ lower field, going home from the Head.

  3

  Felix Katen’s store stood on the south side of the road a half-mile east of Gordons’. Behind the store and just east of it the Katens had built a new house on a steepish knoll, a square mansard-roofed structure that looked more like a town place than a farm-house. Its back door faced south across pasture and spruce bush to the Channel and out to the low thrust of rock a mile off-shore which had been named for Felix’s great-grandfather and which in turn gave a name to this district of the mainland.

  Not everyone at Currie Head had seen the inside of Katens’ house. This was the beginning of down-shore, different country from The Head and Leeds and Riverside. Here at The Rocks began the stretch of shore on which men still gave most of their time to fish—trawling for cod and haddock, netting salmon, and setting their herring-baited pots for lobsters. And it was Catholic country. From The Rocks to Forester’s Pond the Protestant families could be counted on one hand—Sinclairs at The Rocks, Browns at Mars Lake, Foresters at The Pond—just as, up the road, Catholics were few and far between.

  Down-shore there was dancing and card-playing and a church with a cross on a steeple at Forester’s Pond, lip-shore there were box socials and strawberry festivals and small white box-like churches at Currie Head and Leeds.

  These differences were matters of inheritance, something a man couldn’t help and which couldn’t be held against him. But apart from this there was the character of Felix Katen and his sons. As a young man Felix had worked as a street-car conductor in Boston. It was generally believed that he had palmed enough fares, eluded the spotters long enough, to come home and build his house and store.

  There was something worse than that. The Canada Temperance Act was in force in Copeland County; Felix Katen had been tried three times, though never convicted, on charges of selling rum. That was all in the past, but it was still believed that if you searched Katens’ Woods down by the Channel you would find a cache—and risk a smashed face or a broken arm at the hands of Lon or Jim or even young Wilbur.In Lon particularly the bad blood was dark and obvious. Vangie Murphy had sworn to Lon as the father of her second child, the little girl Etta. Her word was worthless and she could prove nothing; but you couldn’t mistake the Katen look. Lon had refused to help support the child and Felix wouldn’t even let Vangie or her children inside the store.

  In the view of Currie Head the Katens were “not even good Catholics”. So, except for Anse Gordon, hardly anyone from The Head climbed the knoll to Felix Katen’s house.

  The store was another thing, a public place. The Shore bought most of its necessities at Copeland or Findlay’s Bridge. Felix Katen had no wish to be a harassed general merchant with half the county owing him money. He did a steady trade in tobacco, candy and pop and his store was there if you ran out of kerosene oil or molasses, sugar or tea. He even kept a small amount of bagged flour and feed in a shed at the back. He made money.

  The store was a low pitch-roofed building, long way to the road, with a single front door between small-paned windows. Its shingled outside walls were labelled with tobacco advertisements of stamped and coloured tin. The door in warm weather stood always open and in the evening the white light from a big gasoline lamp overflowed on the verge of grass outside.

  Inside, a long oak counter, hatched in the middle, stood out from the back wall. Behind this Felix lounged in vest and shirt-sleeves, a small man, almost hunched, with wispy grey hair curling on his head and shrewd eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. He said little.

  At the west end in front of the counter the sugar barrels and molasses cask stood, and at the opposite end the oil barrel. Three or four years ago Felix had bought a gramophone; it sat on the counter by the hatchway, a square walnut box with flaring horn attached, and wax cylinders which gave out a variety of metallic sound.

  A round-bellied stove stood in the middle of the long room. Round this in winter customers and casual visitors pulled stools and boxes. But in warm weather the gathering-place was outside on the grass. When new varnished pews were installed in the Methodist church at Currie Head, Felix had bought the discarded benches. Five of these were arranged in front of the store for convenience. Sometimes the church trustees, James Marshall and Sam Freeman, regretted this. There was something disturbing about seeing in

  front of Katens’ place these benches on which generations had sat to sing and pray and listen. But it was too late now. Secretly James Marshall had made Felix an offer for them. The offer was refused.

  Inside, summer and winter, the place smelt of kerosene, molasses, tobacco, lead-foil and tea.

  This was where the young people of Currie Head and Katen’s Rocks, and now and then their elders, gathered at random in the evening. Katen’s store was a place of casual companionship, rough hilarity and political argument.

  It was a place, too, from which boys
and girls, on those evenings when something seemed to draw them to Katen’s in numbers, walked home together in the dark, paired off or in little groups of a single sex. Almost as they did from church, but with more hilarity. Katens’ was in fact a little piece of Town, set down by a patch of woods on the Channel Shore.

  Anse went down the road to Katen’s on Tuesday evening.

  During the week between the afternoon at Lowries’ and his futile wait on the Head he had dropped in at the store only once. It was just as well to leave a few chances missed and let her wonder a little. He did not know whether or not she had come down the road during that time, and there was no one he felt like asking, and he didn’t greatly care.

  The wait on the Head changed that. Monday night he stayed at home endlessly smoking in the parlour, his long body drawn up on the lounge, living again that hour when he had sat on the grass-grown rock pile of Rob’s House, watching through the trees.

  By Tuesday night some of the anger had burned out. There were reasonable explanations. Any one of many things might have kept her from coming. It was best after all to be careful; there was plenty of time. He told himself this, but a doubtful uneasiness lay at the back of his mind, and a kind of anger—that anyone should give Anse Gordon cause to doubt.

  He put on the brown serge suit and left the house. There was no land breeze; the day’s heat lingered. He walked slowly, his mind on Hazel. He would treat her casually and make no effort to draw her apart from the others until he was ready. He would walk home with her then, listen without comment to her explanation, and take in the end what chance and darkness offered.

  Thinking this, he came to the rutted lane that led in to the Murphy place south of the road. The hayfield there had grown up in spruce and fir until you couldn’t see the house. Whole panels of roadside fence had rotted and fallen away.

  He saw now that Vangie herself was standing there, leaning on the bars that served as a gate across the lane.

  He stopped and grinned at her. “Well, Vangie—waiting for somebody?”

  She said indifferently, “Well, Anse.”

  On impulse he turned up the stony lane and leaned back against the bars across the fence from Vangie, hooking his elbows on the top rail. It pleased him to think that if anyone passed they would see him there talking to Vangie Murphy.

  There was nothing wrong with it. Vangie lived on the Channel Shore road. A person’s name might be entered on the books in Hell, but as long as she was a neighbour, dealing with the same earth and weather and people as anybody else, she must be, in some sense, acknowledged. But they’d talk about it all right, and it pleased Anse to think of the conjecture. It would be nice if Hazel should see him there.

  He said casually, “Nice night,” and turned his head to listen. Somewhere up the road, the sound of buggy wheels.

  The rig rounded the turn below Gordons’, the horse walking now, and he saw that it was Sam Freeman. The thought of this added to his mild and casual pleasure. Sam Freeman was one of those solid likeable people who are dogged always by small things, the slightly ridiculous. He was hard-working, intelligent, upright and respected. But he spoke with a slight lisp, exaggerated in anger— and he was quick to anger; and he had fathered five daughters. No one would say anything deliberately to hurt Sam Freeman’s feelings. But even gentle and unmalicious people like Frank Graham and Hugh Currie laughed a little, privately, and referred to his family sometimes as Tham Freeman’th girlth.

  Two of the girls were beside him on the buggy seat.

  Sam nodded. Anse could see him flush as he chirked to the horse, and could sense his discomfort in the presence of his daughters, at finding Anse Gordon and Vangie Murphy together. This Anse enjoyed. He glanced round at Vangie and laughed.

  She was following the buggy with her eyes. She said, “After something at old Katen’s, I suppose.”

  Anse grinned at the tone, a tone almost of outraged righteousness.

  He said indifferently, “I guess so,” and then, on a note of confidential daring, “Was it really Lon, Vangie?”

  She turned to look at him. “You shut your mouth, Anse.”

  He was surprised to see that she had reddened. Vangie Murphy blushing.

  He said, “I know. But a man can be curious, can’t he? Can’t help it. The youngster looks like the Katens.” He changed tone and said evenly, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Vangie. ... I been mixed up in a war, and it changes the way you look at things. I’m not making fun of you. I wouldn’t do that.”

  After a little silence she said, “Well-maybe you wouldn’t, Anse. But-”

  He said, “I know-”

  In the small silence that followed, he knew what she was feeling, resentment softening to accept a basis of conversation that was strange to her. In his matter-of-factness there had been neither the cold reserve with which she was habitually treated, nor the rough obscenity to which her position sometimes made her subject, and to which he supposed she responded as a matter of course.

  He turned on Vangie a smile of understanding, feeling in his bones a wonder that in years of growing up next door to her he had never noticed the fact that if you disregarded the charity clothes, the baggy sweater, the sagging skirt, the chopped-off men’s rubber boots, you might consider Vangie Murphy a good-looking woman. She was older, of course, must be over forty, and he had not been much more than a kid when the war took him away. And there had always been the feeling that she was not as other people were.

  Now he felt the stirring of excitement and power, knowing that simply by a careful friendliness he could get freely the favour that Vangie Murphy, when she was up against it, was said to sell for cash.

  He smiled again, and thought with a bluntness he was careful to keep out of his speech: hooked; she’s hooked like a fish.

  He considered calmly whether to press this experiment now, and decided against it. No good being in a hurry, and tonight there were more important things to think about.

  Hazel. Hazel McKee. The oddness of their relationship ran in the mind, the strangeness of the fact that it should have happened at all. It was really something, to possess a Currie Head girl, one of the holy ones, under the noses of the righteous people who shook their heads over Anse Gordon. To do what you wanted...

  But the thought of Vangie tickled him. He took his elbows off the bars. ‘Well—I guess I’ll go on down and see what’s going on. See you again, Vangie.”

  Dan and Bill Graham were sprawled on the grass in front of Katen’s, drinking strawberry pop. The two Freeman girls sat prim and silent in the dusk, away from the pool of light falling through the door, silently waiting. Anse ran his eyes over the boys, faintly grinning, and went on through the open door.

  Lon Katen in dusty overalls sat tipped against the wall at the oil barrel end of the store, a wad of tobacco making a knobbed wen in one stubbled cheek, a straw between his teeth. Dave Stiles from down the road occupied the end of a grocery box beside him, elbows on knees. Sam Freeman, gathering together his tied-up bags of sugar and rolled oats on the counter while Felix figured on brown paper with a stub of pencil, was the only customer.

  Anse had been looking forward to Katen s. He wanted to hear meaningless talk and laughter while his mind stood aside on its private hill. He wanted to sense the deference—uneasy and mixed with dislike but still deference—of the Currie Head youth who came there. He wanted to see Hazel. But now—the place might as well be empty.

  An ugliness found its way into speech. He walked down the store toward Lon and Dave Stiles, and as he passed Sam Freeman he spoke.

  “Well, Tham. Howth thingth in Bogtown?”

  He didn’t halt, but he could see the sudden reddening of Sam Freeman’s face, the impulse to violent speech, and the smothering of the impulse.

  Dave Stiles glanced up, his face loose with surprise. Felix Katen frowned. Even Lon stopped chewing the straw and shifted
his wad of tobacco from port to starboard cheek.

  Anse squatted on a backless chair, got out a cigarette and let the moment lie, taking a small satisfaction in the little cruelty. They never knew what to expect from Anse Gordon and that was the way he wanted it. Liking was a soft thing. The other thing was better, the hard dislike painted into a reddened face by simple words, sudden and sly and unexpected. Anse grunted. He had been pretty easy-going since coming home. Perhaps they thought he had tamed down, these holy people at Currie Head. He laughed aloud, a brief ugly laughter.

  Sam Freeman gathered up his parcels and went out, and the girls got up from their bench and followed him in silence to the buggy. Outside there was casual talk. Anse could hear Dan Graham chattering and then the sound of a girl’s voice, laughing. He tensed, listening, but it was only Edith Graham and Anna; they came into the store with Lol Kinsman. Lol bought cigarettes and

  Anna came down the store to set the gramophone going. The metallic music boomed from the horn, accompanied by an unctuous wheezing voice relating an encounter between a negro preacher and a grizzly bear. Anna stood there, tapping a toe, and then with a laugh and a look at Anse and Lon and Dave Stiles, turned and followed Edith and Lol out of the store.

  Grunting a curse, Anse got up and turned off the machine. He went back to his chair scowling. It was almost fully dark now. Outside, the Graham boys went off up the road. After a little he saw Anna, with Lol and Edith, vanish from the circle of light outside and turn toward home.

  They sat in silence, Dave Stiles saying and doing nothing, Lon tilted against the wall, occasionally devoting himself to his cud. Finally Lon stirred, expelled the tobacco into a sawdust box, and said:

  “Guess she ain’t comin’ tonight, Anse.”

  Anse controlled the impulse to cut Lon down with his tongue. That would be the natural thing to do. Or he could treat it lightly, laugh it off. But either thing would be a kind of admission. And Lon didn’t worry him; he had always been able to handle Lon.