The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  And Anse. There had been a time when she nursed the faith that the dark first child of their marriage might go on where Stewart had left off. The priesthood. She was glad her thought had remained unspoken, except to Anse himself. Anse hadn’t even finished grade nine. There was something in Anse you couldn’t reach. Josie was not a demonstrative woman, but something in her had broken, three years ago. Anse. . . . They had known he was free on embarkation leave. She could still see Stewart in his cane-bottomed chair at supper-time, starting up at the sound of wheels, hurrying out to watch Adam Fait approach from Cope- land. But Adam’s waggon had not stopped at the Gordons’ gate with the dark grinning passenger they watched for.

  And yet, when he had come home this last May, first to return to Currie Head from the German War, the pain of that earlier time had been almost forgotten for a little while. Something unreachable, but a quality in him that kept you reaching.

  Josie sighed. It was better perhaps not to worry; to leave your troubles with Holy Church and the saints and the Mother of God. You could do that, but the ache remained, a silt in the mind. And

  the little nagging worries, the things you could hardly bother a saint with.

  For a moment her mind escaped, back to childhood. The Reilly place at Mars Lake—others owned it now—and her father and mother, who were saints of God and pictures on a parlour wall. . . . Herself and Mamie. They’d been the youngest. Crazy, the way scraps of memory came to you. She was thinking suddenly of how proud they’d been, she and Mame, of the brothers who had gone away. Sylvester who was a fireman in Boston, and Martin, skipper of a vessel out of Gloucester at twenty-three.

  But even in the memory of childhood there was no real escape. There was that morning in early fall, when she and Mame had gone barefooted across frosty pastures, and come home to learn that Vesty was dead. Smothered in smoke in a warehouse fire. The scene was clear as life: she and Mame warming their feet where the cows had lain, and coming home, and their mother’s face . . . It was later that consumption had taken Mart; they had known for months that was coming. Curious. It was hard to think of Mame, married long ago in Halifax, as that little girl . . .

  Anna came in behind her father, carrying a small pitcher filled with the year’s last strawberries and pressed the door to with her back and shoulders. Josie was almost startled, caught again by a feeling that had come to her at unexpected moments lately—a feeling that she had never quite realized Anna’s beauty as a person apart from her character as a daughter. This was not quite the girl who washed dishes and made the beds with whimsical complaint that she’d rather be hoeing potatoes. This was a friendly lovely stranger wearing a smile that was all open happiness, and in the fact that the happiness was all hers, all Anna’s, the smile in spite of its openness was therefore private and secret too.

  There was something in the way Anna used to look at the Marshall boy and speak to him that in memory sent a vague fear coursing through Josie. Grant Marshall. He was all right. A good boy, but—the fear pulsed and shivered—a Protestant . . . Well, James Marshall would never . . . But things had a way of happening on the Channel Shore sometimes, a way contrary to all the rules of living. And after the first startled talk, a way of being accepted and absorbed into the pattern of the place. Even sin and remorse, heresy and regret and failure, were dark colours in the pattern.

  Anna glanced from Josie to Stewart and said, almost with a touch of impatience, “Don’t be so down-in-the-mouth. He’ll turn up tonight or tomorrow. ‘Tisn’t as if he hadn’t done it before.”

  Josie sighed. Anna had a kind of cheerful common sense that was close to tactlessness but somehow left no sting.

  She said, “I guess that’s right.” Actually, she believed this. Even when he had stayed away, that time before the war, he had come back.. .

  Possibilities occurred to her. One of the Mars Lake boys back from Newfoundland or Lunenburg with a gallon of rum in his clothes bag. Or a trip to Forester’s Pond, where, they said, the Johnson girls . . .

  Well, that was the kind of thing a man came back from, wasn’t it? Without harm, really. But she didn’t like to remember the anger she had sensed in Anse in this past week, a grown-up version of the sulking violence that had gripped him as a boy when his will was crossed.

  Stewart crossed the kitchen and stood irresolutely on the back porch. Anse ... he thought impatiently of Anse, with irritation and annoyance and a querulous immediate concern, but without much tenderness. He went round the corner of the house then to sit on the front porch and watch the steamer crawling west, far away, up the Islands’ shore.

  He was still there, musing, when Adam Falt’s horses slowed for the turn east of the house. He saw with surprise that Adam was pulling up at the gate, and went down the path to see what he wanted.

  Adam said, “Hello, Stewart. I picked up a Herald in Copeland. Not much in it, I guess. But it might help to pass the evening.”

  Stewart reached up mechanically and took the paper. “Well, thanks, Adam, I . . .”

  The mail-driver went on, casually, “Saw Anse at the station today, Stew. Taking a trip, is he?”

  Stewart looked up, twisting the paper in his hands. “Anse? Did you? Station . . .?” He was silent for a little, then mumbled something meaningless, confused words—”Sydney . . . mines . . . steel works ...”

  Adam nodded. “Never been down that way myself. Well . . . So long for now, Stewart. See you later.”

  He spoke to the horses, turning it over in his mind. Anse Gordon. Where had he heard Anse’s name—in connection with some girl? Hazel. Rich McKee’s girl. His mind mused on Richard, and the stiffish woman who was Richard’s wife. A Laidlaw. Eva Laidlaw from Morgan’s Harbour. Adam had been in the States at the time of the marriage, but he remembered hearing about it, and wondering how Rich McKee had come to hook up with a girl from Town. His mind came back to Anse and Hazel, vaguely.

  He thought he had better tell Richard McKee about this, anyway, when he stopped to change bags. Richard had a kind of a way with him, for all his quietness. He would know how to handle the telling of it to others, tell it in the proper way, so they’d know how to act to Stewart and Josie ...

  Richard broke this news in his own home at the supper table. He spoke diffidently, hardly looking up from his plate.

  “Adam says Anse Gordon’s . . . well, skipped out again.”

  Richard was habitually silent as if suspicious of words. It was not shyness so much as impatience with needless talk. People spent their lives chattering, telling each other things that anyone with sense must know already. They debased the coinage.

  Anse’s desertion was a piece of news that had to be told, but he told it without drama and with a flat reluctance.

  Eva had gone to the stove for the teapot. She paused in the act of filling her cup and set the pot down.

  “Skipped? . . . Skipped out?” Her voice was incredulous. “What? Why?”

  Richard shook his head. “I don’t know.” He added drily, “I guess he didn’t say.”

  Eva said, “But—” She glanced down the table at Hazel and across at young Joe. Hazel’s face was serene, but Joe was grinning. The fact that youngsters of Joe’s age, most of them, had an admiration for Anse Gordon exasperated Eva. She said sharply, “It’s nothing to laugh at,” and then, “Some kind of trouble, I expect.”

  She questioned Richard. “But—skipped? How did Adam know? How does he know it’s not just—”

  Richard said, “Well, he was talking to him at Copeland. Stewart said something about the steel works. But it was the Halifax train Anse left on.”

  There was nothing more to be got out of him. Eva resigned herself to thinking that after supper she would have to go over to Stella Graham’s. The Grahams would know, likely. She glanced covertly again at Hazel, but the girl’s face showed only normal interest. That was over, then. But if it was something shameful that had driven A
nse away—the possibilities crossed Eva’s mind: something shady, like theft; or a girl in trouble down the Shore— if it was something shameful then some of the shame would linger round Hazel, who had gone around with . . . some of the shame would linger round the McKees.You couldn’t touch dirt without getting smeared. It was something to be thankful for that Anse was gone, if he stayed away. But the relief in that was balanced by the irritation that, for a while at least, when people thought of it they would think of Hazel too.

  After the dishes had been cleared away Hazel and Joe went down to the pasture bars behind the barn to milk. Richard usually shared this chore with Joe but tonight Hazel took the pail from his hand. She was aware of his dislike for milking, for many of the small things a man had to do around a farm at fixed times; and now she felt a little sense of pleasure in giving him this small relief. This in its fleeting way was evidence again of the new thing that seemed to be sprouting in her, the thing she had felt consciously little more than a week ago as she sat by the road with Anna Gordon, looking into Grant’s Place.

  She did not really consider this. It was only after taking the pail from Richard’s hand that she thought of it at all. Her motive had been to get away from the kitchen, away from Eva’s speculating tongue with the edge of accusation in it and the hint of triumph and of prophecy come true. Away where she could let this news lie in her mind and consider what it meant to her.

  The two cows, Bess and Spot, ruminated under the ancient apple tree on the pasture side of the bars.

  Joe said, probing, “What d’you think of it, Haze?” He up-ended a box and squatted to strip the milk from Spot.

  She said absently, “Think? About what?”

  Joe said, “You know. Anse.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know. What’s anybody s’posed to think? It sounds kind of crazy.”

  There was only the sound of the milk, hissing and splashing in the pails, the thin whining of insects, the swish of Bess’s tail, the small dragging sound of a hoof shifted on sod, the sound of rhythmic chewing, of a far-off motor somewhere up the road. Joe was silent, and Hazel wondered how much he knew or guessed. How much anyone knew or guessed. From the Rocks to Leeds now, the talk would start.

  She didn’t much care about that. What mattered to her, about Anse, were her private feelings. These now were a blend of relief and emptiness. Relief that temptation was gone. Temptation. She hated the churchy sound of that word. It was not temptation in itself, the yielding to something called “sin”, that she had feared. It was the thought of weakness, of being beaten, the possibility that her body could still betray the pride of her feelings. Never a night in these last weeks but her flesh had urged her out to the road, to the smell of the fields, the laughter and talk at Katen’s and the chance of an hour alone with Anse.

  That was gone and there was relief in its absence. Relief—and emptiness. And now again at the edge of consciousness, fear. Now she had time for fear.

  Joe had finished with Spot. He turned away up the path to the house, the full pail in his hand. Hazel rubbed the coarse roughened silk of Bess’s flank and stood for a moment looking down the pasture to the beach. Under all the small sounds of summer, rose and fell the old deliberate murmur of surf on stone, the voice of the shore. She turned and followed Joe.

  Later after Eva had gone down the road to Grahams’ and Joe had disappeared in the other direction, to spread the news to Lairds’ and Kinsmans’ she supposed, Hazel spoke to Richard.

  He sat as usual in the corner beyond the range near the bedroom door, where the lamp’s light scarcely fell. Hazel found herself thinking that between her and her father there had never been, as far as she could remember, a harsh word. When she was a little girl, before Joe was born and while he was still a baby, Richard had sometimes taken her to the beach. Never out to the nets, but sometimes hand-lining or picking net-rocks or just to play around the fish huts in the sun. In a sense he had treated her like a little boy.

  All long ago. After Joe came it had ceased, or almost. Probably to Eva’s relief or at her orders. The beach was no place for a girl. And she . . . she had almost forgotten. The memories came to her now with a peculiar newness, so long had they lain unregarded behind the growing up, the immediate discontents.

  What had there been between them, since then? She couldn’t remember ever having talked seriously to Richard about anything. When a question had to be settled—oh, something like the buying of a dress or whether you stayed in school another year after grade nine—Eva had settled it. If it were necessary to talk to Richard about it, Eva did the talking. The only relationship between herself and Richard had been a surface thing, off-hand and casual.

  And yet, she told herself now, there was some kind of alliance, some kind of closeness.

  As she came up the path with the milk she had thought the small ridiculous thing she wanted to ask of Richard would be hard to find words for. Now it was natural and easy.

  She said, “Father,” and waited until he lifted his head to look

  at her. “Father . . . when d’you—when re you going to start the hay?”

  Richard said after a small pause, “When the herring’re over, I s’pose . . . Marshalls’ve not even started yet,” and then indifferently, “Why?”

  Hazel stirred and shifted on her chair. “Oh”—she laughed a little —”I’d kind of like to work at it.”

  Richard let another small pause fall. Then he laughed. “First time I ever heard of anybody wantin to make hay.”

  Hazel shook her head, joining in his low indulgent laughter.

  It was hard to explain, this restless wish to be active, in the open, away from the house, in sun and wind. She groped for words but Richard spoke before she found them.

  “Be all right, if your mother ...”

  No need to explain that. Years ago hay-making had been a month-long job at which everybody worked, men and boys with hand-scythes and pitchforks, women with forks shaking out the heavy green swaths, turning the spread hay to the sun, raking-after behind the loaded racks. Now horse-drawn mowing machines and rakers were getting common. A farm could be made in a fortnight or less and it was becoming unusual to see a woman in the field.

  Richard still liked to take things slowly. He had taught Joe to mow with a hand-scythe and if he had had his way would probably have made the place by hand still. But Eva had argued him into exchanging work with the Marshalls, and the Marshalls used machines. For years now after James Marshall made his own place he had brought his horses and machines to McKees’.

  Hazel said, ‘You tell her you need me.”

  Richard looked at his hands and half-nodded. He said, “Well, we’ll see . . .”

  After a little while he got up and went outdoors to look at the sky and came in to go to bed. At two o’clock he must get up and rouse Joe and heat the tea and beans. They would go down to the beach then and row the flat out to the nets on the calm of the darkened channel.

  5

  Along the Channel Shore from Copeland to Findlay’s Bridge timothy and browntop moved in the wind on the low breasts of fields, divided by fences and brook-water and fingers of dark woods reaching toward the sea.

  Between the low beach and the upland forest the places lay, a patchwork of green and green on the county’s edge, tilted toward the salt south-west wind in the afternoon and dark at night under a land-breeze light as breath.

  Down-shore they were not thinking of haying yet. On the banks off Millersville and Forester’s Pond, cod and haddock nosed the baited hooks of trawls in seven fathoms. Closer in, the painted buoys of herring nets lolled on the moving swell. At high tide off Steep Brook the markers of lobster pots stood up and swayed like scattered bean-poles rooted in the sea.

  Ashore, at widely separated intervals, small clusters of men in yellow oilskins streaked with blood stood in the land-wash at gutting tables, splitting fish, stripping t
he guts from cod and haddock and sending the cleaned fish on to the wash-barrels, the brine and the drying flakes on the hump of the beach.

  But up-shore at Currie Head, except for the few who were still concerned with herring, haying had begun.

  On James Marshall’s place James himself sat the double-mower, pulled by his two work-horses, while the shuttling blades laid down a widening ribbon of mown hay on shaven ground. Gradually the chosen square of grey-green timothy narrowed inward from its edges until only a scalp-lock remained. Then James would raise the cutter- bar, back the clicking machine, and make his final sweep before going on to assault another square or oblong of his wide upper field.

  In the moments when the bar was up and his own blades silent, he could hear across these northern pastures the small swift cricket- chirring of other machines: Clem Wilmot’s and Sam Freeman’s off to the northwest, up the school-house road, and Kinsman’s and Laird’s between the cross-roads and the hill at Leeds.

  On the level top of this first fold of land above the shore road, one seemed measurably closer to the white cloud-banks around the horizon, and the arching blue of sky, than when one worked below. From this ridge the land sloped away in both directions, south to the Channel and north to flat woods of the abandoned places along the old back road. Beyond that again one could see the far shallow slopes of a second northward rising, the wilderness of tangled barrens and forest stretching away to the gulf.

  James did not indulge in undue fancies about clouds and distance, but there were times as he worked in the fields when he felt a kind of exalted pride. Now and then he grew faintly uneasy about this, but the uneasiness vanished when he reminded himself that it was a righteous pride, tempered with thankfulness to a power other than himself. Hard work and careful figuring and virtue. The Lord helps those who help themselves—if they serve Him. There was a justice in this which James understood. It was only fair.