The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  He said evenly, “Well now, I guess maybe she ain’t.”

  There was neither anger nor lightness in his voice, merely interest and a touch of disappointment. Let them try to figure it out.

  He rose after a minute or two, bought cigarettes and strolled out of the store. For a moment he had an impulse to call Felix aside and wheedle a drink out of him. But liquor had never greatly appealed to him.

  He walked off up the road, humming to himself. At Vangie Murphy’s lane he halted. No light shone from Vangie’s windows. He laughed and turned in and climbed the bars.

  Anse stayed away from Katen’s for the rest of that week.

  He spent the days running trawl and hand-lining, splitting fish and turning them on the flakes he had set up behind Stewart’s hut on the beach. Stewart worked alone at the herring. As he rowed out to his trawl beyond the herring grounds Anse would see his father there in the morning dusk, bending over the dark coils of dripping mesh. Sometimes they walked to and from the beach together, Anse silent and Stewart talking endlessly about small details of the herring run, endlessly regretting the days before the mackerel had vanished, when a man could make some money out of fish.

  Sometimes after his cod were split Anse would lend a hand at cleaning herring. At other times as the mood took him he would squat on the warm stone of the beach or fall asleep on the bunk in the hut while Stewart cleaned and salted alone.

  Now and then his mind returned to the half-formed ambition he had considered for the fall ... an engine in the boat, mackerel- gear, the beaches beyond the Islands . . . But the taste of the idea had been washed out, staled in the tides of his dull continuing anger.

  He spent the remaining evenings of the week in the hut on the beach. On Friday and Saturday nights he slept there. But on Sunday he returned to the house for supper and set out to walk the three miles to the Methodist church at Leeds.

  On the Findlay’s Bridge circuit service was held in alternate weeks at the two mission churches, in the morning at Currie Head on one Sunday, in the evening at Leeds the next. The fortnightly evening service at Leeds was the one from which the courting couples of Leeds and Riverside and Currie Head walked home in pairs.

  As a Catholic Anse would stay away from the service itself. He had gone into the church on a couple of occasions for no reason but the talk it would cause, but the novelty had gone out of that. He would wait, along with the four or five up-shore youths who didn’t care what their elders thought and so remained outside the church till service was over. Then he would see.

  The road was empty as he walked past Grahams’, Curries’, Neills’, Marshalls’, McKees’. Past the cross-roads and the Laird and Kinsman places beyond it, and up the long slope to the church, the first building in the district of Leeds.

  Service had already begun. Through open windows the music of the cabinet organ and the voices of the congregation singing one of the opening hymns were a blended sound, husky and low and sweet, not quite melodious.

  Anse, turning in to cross the wooden platform across the gutter, half listened as the blended voices brought the slow tune to an end ...

  My gracious master and my God, Assist me to proclaim, To spread through all the earth abroad The honour of Thy name ...

  A brief silence followed the long-drawn-out Amen, and the minister’s voice began, keyed to the conventional plaintive pitch of supplication in the long prayer.

  Anse walked round the building. Sprawled there on the grass under the windowless back wall were the usual loungers who came to church for nothing more than something to do. He grinned at them, let himself down to the grass, and lit a cigarette.

  There was little talk. The members of this group were quiet enough, knowing that any interruption of service would not be tolerated. Anse glanced at the buggies tied up to the churchyard fence. James Marshall’s double-seated buggy was there, and Frank Graham’s brown mare, but not Richard McKee’s rig.

  Perhaps this was another place to which she had not come . . .

  No. You couldn’t figure it that way. She usually walked up with one of the other girls. If Lol Kinsman were there to walk home with Edith Graham, he could pair up with Lol and overtake the two of them as they walked down the hill.

  It annoyed Anse to find himself concerned with these details, planning a thing, doubtfully, that was as simple as rolling off a log.

  Behind the whitewashed wall of the church the routine of the service went on, faintly muffled. Collection . . . sermon . . . benediction . . . doxology ...

  Now there was the creaking stir of the service over, voices at the front door as routine devotion lapsed into social intercourse. Anse and the others with him came round to the front to watch and wait.

  He saw among the forty or fifty people coming out of the church that Will Marshall was still wearing on Sundays the dark blue- and-black tartan of the 85th Nova Scotia Highlanders. He was coming out flanked by old James and Mrs. Marshall, and shaking hands with the minister. Anse spared a moment to indulge his contempt for the bearded figure of stern piety who was Will’s father, and the whole idea of people like the Marshalls. What Anna could see in the young one, Grant. . . The incidental thought vanished. Hazel was there, with Mrs. Graham and Ede, but apparently Lol Kinsman was not. Mrs. Graham had stopped on the steps to speak to Mrs. Jack Graham, one of the Graham cousins from down the side road to Riverside. She said to Ede, “Bring the horse round, will you, Edith?” and turned back to Mrs. Jack.

  Edith said, “All right, I will,” and hooked a hand in Hazel’s elbow. They walked past Anse, toward the fence where the horses were hitched, without a sidelong glance. What Anse felt, perhaps in imagination only, was the boring of curious and contemplative eyes. The eyes of young men and women and boys and girls, waiting for him to follow Edith and Hazel, to take Hazel McKee by the arm, pull her away from Edith Graham, and turn her with casual arrogance toward the road.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He could not take the chance ...

  Cold with anger, he watched with outward indifference as Edith and Hazel brought the buggy round and Stella Graham climbed in beside them. A little later, when the crowd had cleared away, straggling off on foot and behind horses to Currie Head and Leeds and Riverside, he went down the hill in the dusk with the aimless young men who came to church for something to do.

  Lee Wilmot was the last of these; after Lee turned up the school-house road, Anse was alone and glad of it.

  The feeling he had was something outside his remembered experience. He had lacked the confidence, the gall ... He had lacked the guts to take the chance of a public turn-down. The sense of this fused with an anger at the circumstances and people responsible that flushed through his mind in sickening waves.

  He glanced at the lights in Richard McKee’s house down the slope of the field from the road. A figure moved across a downstairs window, but he barely noticed this. He was not thinking directly of Hazel. For the time being his mind was concerned with an inclusive anger against it all, the Shore and its people.

  Lights still burned in the houses; Marshalls’, Neills’, Curries’, Grahams’. Frank Graham’s front windows were open and he heard laughter from the front room in the dark, and Anna’s voice, talking to Edith. Grahams’ buggy, its shaft-tips on the ground, stood by the barn where someone had unhitched and left it after the women came home from church.

  Anse went into his father’s house by the back door. The kitchen was dark. Across the hall Stewart lay on the lounge in the parlour. He had been reading, but the book lay face down across his chest and faint snores escaped him. Josie had turned down the lamp. She looked up from her rocker as Anse went upstairs. He did not return the look, but groped his way straight to his room and changed into old clothes.

  A little later he came down and went out and stood for a little in the door-yard. Dark scud crossed the sky slowly, moving east, momentarily letting moonlig
ht through. The Channel’s endless sighing was heavier than usual, a deliberate grumble, and

  although it was mid-July, the air had a chilling cold. Anse was conscious of these things, but he did not think about them, or watch or listen.

  For a moment, standing there, he had an impulse to turn east to Vangie Murphy’s. He put the thought aside with a hard impatience. The need in him was more than physical, a bitterness beyond the reach of Vangie’s promiscuous favour.

  He crossed the road and went down the path to the beach, lit the lantern in the hut, and reached down from the beam where he had hidden it a bottle of Demerara rum he had bought in Copeland weeks ago and never broached. He prised the cork out with a knife blade, set the bottle on the floor, and reached for the water-jug and cup. He sat on the bunk then, letting the rum slide back over the roughness of his tongue, feeling the hot bite of it as he swallowed. As usual with him, the black rum left no mellowness; it merely heightened the rankling in his mind.

  Outside, the Channel’s grumbling was broken down by nearness into separate sounds, the rising phrase of the swell’s edge reaching up the slant of gravel, the low roughened sliding of moving pebbles as the swell withdrew.

  Once Anse rose and went to the door. Everything now was overcast. He could see only the faint recurring spark of Princeport Light a dozen miles away. He returned to squat on the bunk, communing with the rum ...

  To want and not to get. That was one thing, and a thing you could deal with. You could plan and see a plan fail and there was still the ambition, the chance of achievement in the end.

  To win, to make the grade, to take; and to treat possession lightly. That was another.

  But to take and fail to hold ...

  To see the fact of belonging to Anse Gordon held worthless and disavowed...

  There was no answer to this failure, none that he could see, on the Channel Shore. Some gesture that went beyond anything possible to him here was needed now to restore the sense of well being and of private power. Toward daylight, he thought he saw what it was.

  He did not row the dory off to pick and bait his trawl. Instead he curled up on the bunk and slept.

  At some time in his sleep he sensed Stewart in the hut, and heard his tentative voice, “Anse!”, and grunted “All right; I’m sleepin’ in.” It was early evening when he finally got up for good and stretched the sleep out of him. He went home then to eat and wash and shave. When it was dark again he put on the brown serge and walked down the road.

  4

  In nine years of driving the Channel Shore mail Adam Fait had seldom travelled farther west than Findlay’s Bridge or farther east than Copeland. Those were the limits of his route, twenty-four miles down on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and twenty-four miles back on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

  As a young man Adam had left the Shore and worked on the ice-teams in Boston and later sailed out of Gloucester. He was one of those matter-of-fact men to whom the various parts of the world are places in which to make a living. His father had driven the Shore mail for years and when the old man died Adam had simply come home to carry on the route.

  Since then he had not thought much of going anywhere and the idea of boredom had never occurred to him. His wife and boys and girls ran the place in Leeds where he had been born and where he had brought them back to live; Adam spent most of his time behind his horses, on the road. The variety of people who lived along it was wide enough to satisfy his interest and every one of them he knew by name.

  Most days there was nothing new. The same men and boys, harrowing and seeding in the spring, making hay in late July and August, digging potatoes in October, ploughing in October and November, working in the woods when the snow fell. The same women, seen against a background of blowing sheets on distant clothes-lines, or swinging hand-rakes in a sweeping motion behind the hay-rack.

  The same weather, cold and windy in March, bright with sun under tall clouds or overcast with brooding rain, from June to fall; frosty or wet or white with snow in winter.

  In all these usual things there was something to interest a man.

  But now and then there would be a change in the pattern of the usual and for this he had a special eye.

  Adam’s first thought when he caught sight of Anse Gordon on the station platform at Copeland was hardly a thought at all;

  merely a quickening of interest at seeing someone from up the Shore at an unexpected place. Then he frowned, puzzled, wondering how Anse had got there. Must have gone up to Morgan’s Harbour last night or early this morning and taken the steamer down the Channel, Adam thought.

  He rested for a minute from his work of pulling mail-bags from the postal car of the up train.

  He called, “Hey! Anse!”

  Anse ran his glance up and down the platform. A grudging grin creased the annoyance in his face.

  He said, “Oh, hello, Adam.”

  “Where you bound for, Anse?”

  “Nowhere much, Adam.”

  “Nowhere much, eh?” Curiosity persisted. Adam said, joking, “Not leaving us, are you, Anse?”

  Anse laughed. He said, “Just a trip, Adam.”

  “Just a trip, eh?”

  Anse didn’t reply. He walked off down the platform. Adam took the last Channel Shore bag from the mail-clerk; the coach jerked, its wheels slowly turning and slowly gathering speed. As the passenger coaches swung past, he eyed their windows. Behind dusty glass, Anse ignored him as the train pulled out.

  Adam stowed the bags from the up train under the tarp on the back of his waggon and went into the station restaurant to eat and wait for the down express from Halifax. He checked in his mind the list of errands he had to do. Pick up a pair of barn-door hinges for Will Francis at Steep Brook, a keg of shingle nails for Rod Sinclair at Katen’s Rocks; for Bert Miller’s wife at Millersville, three bars of Surprise Soap.

  His mind stopped there for a pleasant minute. He and Bert Miller had bunked together in the eyes of the same Gloucester banker, twenty years before. Passengers on the mail waggon sometimes noticed that Adam stayed longer than necessary when he took in the Millersville bags, and came out sucking his moustache. Bert Miller was a comfort to him on raw days when the wind blew off the Channel.

  But today, all through his lunch and the down train’s brief halt and his preparations for departure, the figure of Anse Gordon kept getting mixed up with the errands and the people. Adam talked to himself a little on the road between post offices, and he was muttering as he swung the horses down the single street of Copeland for the slow drive up-shore.

  . . just a day or so, I s’pose.” He lapsed into silence, and then pulled from a pocket the copy of the Herald the mail-clerk on the Halifax train had tossed him. Tuesday, July 16. He scanned the headlines:

  Politics . . . New Dominion Cabinet Soon to be Announced . . . Sir Robert Borden Tells What Canada’s Industrial Needs are . . . Adam skipped it; he voted Conservative by inheritance and didn’t have to read about it. Aerodrome Needed Here . . . Handley-Page Bomber to be Repaired where She Lies at Parrsboro . . . His mind drifted, encompassing for a moment the world beyond the Shore, this passing summer . . . flying . . . Hawker and Grieve . . . Alcock and Brown . . . the R-34 . . . That fellow who hung head down; what was his name? . . . Locklear . . . peace ... and old men talking in a hall outside of Paris . . . And Germans, sinking their own boats at a place called Scapa Flow ...

  Dull paper today, though. During two summers on the Boston ice-teams Adam had developed a mild interest in baseball. He turned to the sport page. Ty Cobb looked out at him, brandishing a bat . . . tough customer, Cobb . . . drops to fifth position in batting race . . . The Red Sox had lost at Chicago, 9-3 (Williams and Schalk; Jones and Schang); and the Cubs had trimmed the Braves...

  He put the paper away and sat hunched and wordless while the horses made their own gait up the long grade through Steep Brook. When h
e spoke again it was to say a word or two without conscious meaning, a reflection of the play of his thought. Not thinking, really, but the absent-minded observation of a pattern, woven of memory and experience traced in the fabric of his brain by years of human contact on the Channel Shore road. He said without emphasis, “poor old Stew ...”

  Stewart Gordon carried a load of wood into the house from the pile in the yard and dumped it in the wood-box and glanced hesitantly at Josie. He said irrelevantly, to himself or the world at large, “I guess I’ll mow tomorrow, anyway.”

  Josie filled the kettle from the pail in the porch and said nothing. No answer was called for. Stewart was a poor farmer; he hated horses and machinery, had no touch for either. He still mowed the place by hand. She had persuaded him to get an early start, even though the herring run was still on. To get a little done, anyway, in hours that would have been spent idling on the beach, so that they would still be making hay when it was time to mow the oats. But a man can’t make hay alone and there was no sign of Anse.

  Her mind dwelt on Stewart. He had been brought up to study for the priesthood, but in the end it had been necessary for him to quit school and look after his ageing parents whose small prosperity had faded away.

  Sometimes Josie wondered what it would have been like, the relationship of priest and parishioner instead of husband and wife. But always she realized that the qualities that made Stewart an indifferent farmer, the indecision, the gentleness, would have un- suited him also for the hard life of the glebe. Father Gordon. No. He was too soft. Too soft. But his presence had something comforting in it.

  Josie always checked herself at this kind of thinking when she caught it flowing through her mind. Checked herself with a little half-formed apology to the vague saints. Such thinking was almost blasphemous, she supposed. And irritation with herself would fuse into exasperation with Stewart, for the sheep that roamed the pasture unshorn into June, the wood-pile used up by mid-summer, the two-master built for deep-water fishing when deep-water fishing was a thing of the past. Or the endless reading. She was sure that a lot of the stuff Stewart read would be condemned to the stove by Father Morrison if he knew about it.