The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Resting a moment, he let his mind run again to the northwest, beyond the cricket-sound of Wilmot’s and Freeman’s machines. When haying was done here on the front place, they would move the machines and horses back to the old farm he had bought there, from some people named Scott who had gone away. Again he felt that little sense of power. A home farm here in full cultivation, another back there from which he took the extra hay he needed for his sheep and cattle, and down the road a piece of woods that stretched from the Channel north.

  He glanced eastward, thinking of that wooded land he had bought from Frank Graham’s father, and of his purpose in buying it, but almost at once his mind was caught by other things.

  Along the eastern line fence between this field in which he worked and the northern stretches of the Neill place, Fred, with a hand-scythe, was mowing out the patches of hay along the fence where a machine could not be brought to bear. James frowned. Alec Neill . . . They had the usual arrangement about line fences. Each built half the fence between the Channel and the road and between the road and their back lines. James, years ago, had put up wire. It annoyed him now to see his clean lines of six-strand wire joined to the staked zig-zag of Alec Neill’s worm fence.

  Across the field to the west, between his land and Richard McKee’s, Richard at least had serviceable post-and-rail. In that direction Will was working behind Polo, the road-horse, turning with a tedder the hay James had mowed that morning.

  An odd mixture of thought and recollection drifted in James’s mind. Foolish to keep so fast and fine-drawn a horse as Polo . . . But Polo between the shafts of the rubber-tired two-seater gave one a feeling of—position, perhaps. He thought of the turn-out driven by Bert Stevens, the Morgan’s Harbour merchant: two horses and a rig with a green fringe round the top.

  Will—it was good to have Will back from the war unharmed. But Will would go away to business college. Fred was the one who would work this land when James was gone. Fred would be the Marshall on the shore then. Fred, and, of course, on the place down the road, Grant ...

  Grant ... A wave of something indefinable flowed through James as he dropped the cutter-bar and spoke to the horses. Grant ... It was right here, here in this upper field that Harvey, laughing, had announced his decision, years ago.

  Harvey. The thing James thought of was an overcast day in May with a raw wind blowing and Harvey heaving at the side of the stone-drag. Dumping in a fence corner—it was worm fence then— the load they had picked from a ploughed and harrowed strip in this upper field. Harvey laughing. “By God, Jamie boy, when it warms up I’m getting out of here.. I’m bound for Boston.”

  Across the cluttering activities of nearly thirty years, James still could feel the mixture of his own sensations. Inner disturbance at the blasphemy; secret warmth in the fact that Harvey always called him Jamie; recognition that Harvey meant it, meant this light- hearted threat to leave the Channel Shore.

  Grant. . .

  James returned to the present and glanced down the slope of land and westward along the shore road. In Richard McKee’s lower field two small figures moved, slowly, one slightly ahead of the other, along a selvage of standing hay. Each to the left of him was leaving a narrow humped wake. Richard McKee and young Joe, swinging scythes in the slow mower’s march. And behind them, shaking out the green wavelike swaths, a girl.

  James shook his head and raised a hand to his beard in irritation. He had always felt the oddity in Richard McKee. But to make his hay by hand, when in a week or so James Marshall would be ready to turn his mower to the job ... It was worthy of people like those who lived down-shore, neglecting the land for the endless gamble of the Channel. Worthy of someone like Stewart Gordon. He turned to his team in controlled exasperation.

  Richard swept his scythe through standing hay where the swaths ended at the edge of a strip of oats, tidied away the last tufts of timothy with a short thrust of wrists and blade, and straightened, flexing his shoulders. He brought the scythe up then until the snath stood upright, rested his left elbow on the heel where the blade was bolted on, and reached into a back pocket for his whetstone.

  The stone rang thinly on tempered metal, crinch-cxinch, crinch- crinch, crinch-crinch, while the numberless concerns of life ran idly in Richards mind.

  He was not particularly a worrier. It was just that the mind was never empty. You tramped along, hunched behind the moving scythe, and the distant sound of James Marshall’s mower and the ache in your own shoulders reminded you again that this was needless labour. Reminded you of Eva’s tight-lipped unpleasantness about it. Carried you along from that into the old knowledge, submerged far below the outward things of living, below church, town, sleep, work, and the talk you had with neighbours. The old knowledge of aloneness and the conflict between a mind concerned with paint on the house, shingle-stain on the barn, walnut in the parlour, and Sunday serge and satin; and a mind concerned with the feel of wood, and what your hands could do with it, the smell of net-tan, the look of the Channel, the drift of seasons, the sound of certain voices ...

  Richard never dwelt on this if he could help it. He did not blame anyone. Long ago he had achieved a sort of open-mindedness, a private stolidity close to fatalism. But there were times when he could not stop the condition that underlay his life from breaking surface and coming up to be dealt with in conscious thought.

  It had reached the surface more than once in these last few days, borne up on the tide of Eva’s annoyance and the uneasiness that seemed to have touched both her and Hazel. That somehow had even touched himself. Everyone but Joe . . .

  Richard grinned slightly and tossed the whetstone to his son. Joe had finished his swath and stood now sweating at the edge of the oats, wiping his scythe-blade with a twist of hay. He was a big boy for fourteen, Joe. Fourteen? Nearly fifteen, now, and ready to quit school. The thing about Joe was that he didn’t mind anything. He liked work. Joe would go away, in the end. There was nothing at Currie Head to hold him. But in the meantime he was learning to mend nets, splice rope, shave staves and caulk a row-boat. Just as he had learned to handle a mowing machine at Marshalls’, and a double-bitted axe. And he didn’t mind getting up in the morning to go to the nets.

  Richard’s mind drifted as he walked back to begin another swath . . . Himself and Hugh Currie and Alec Neill and Frank Graham and Frank’s brother Andy, who had gone away . . . Gathering net- stones and ballast-rocks for the whale boats. The boats in which their fathers sailed, far down to the Cape Breton coast in early spring, after mackerel. Even though the fishing had almost vanished, diminished in these last summers to nothing but the four or five weeks of herring, something about the beach remained . . .

  Richard’s living was taken from his land and the timber of his wood-lots. But the part of his life that was made up of pride and affection and boyishness, the thing in him that regarded as unimportant so many matters that meant so much to Eva, was coiled like a net’s head-rope round the weeks of early summer that somehow stretched themselves across the drifting seasons . . .

  In winter after a day in the woods he would bring in from the shop the brown bun of a tied-up herring net, loop its coils to a nail in the window-sill, and mend. When he chopped box-logs for Sinclair’s mill, his eyes would be alert for a straight spruce that might make up into a pair of oars, or a white pine to watch and hoard until it was big enough to be sawed and planed into planking for a lap-seam flat.

  In spring he would steal a sunny day or two from harrowing and seeding to caulk and paint the boat, with Joe learning how. This craftsmanship would never be of any use to Joe, as Eva complained, any more than it had been to Richard. The thing was like an instinct.

  Soft darkness at three o’clock, before the morning wind. The tail-buoy inboard, and then the anchor, and then the glimmer, far down, sliding, vanishing, sagging to the surface: the net alive with twitching fish. Ashore, the gutting-knife flashing under the sun, while gulls screa
med and the sou’west wind came up to set the Channel marching. The bite of coarse salt on chapped hands. And sixty dollars perhaps, from Bob Fraser’s fish company at Princeport, at the season’s end.

  All this drifted at the back of Richard’s mind. To him there was nothing illogical or impractical about it. He really didn’t think about it much. Salt slop on thwarts. The mean job of fish-cleaning. The back-breaking labour of lugging hand-barrows over the hump of the beach. Long half-silent conversations with Frank and Alec and Hugh, or Stewart Gordon . . . the core of a life that for eleven months a year was concerned with chopping wood, cleaning stables, ploughing, getting in the hay ...

  He halted in the middle of the swath and glanced down at the Channel. They might as well haul, soon. Already he had beached four of his eight nets. Couldn’t fish and make hay at the same time. It was too tough. They would haul another fleet in a day or two, and leave the last for a while . . . He thought of this with regret. The last days of July, when all that was left of fishing was to pick the dirt out of drying nets and stow them in the loft- it always left an emptiness.

  He began to mow and his mind turned again to Eva. This was the thing in him, the unreason of the beach, reflected in everything he did, that exasperated her. He sensed this, felt it with something in him less precise than thought. As he halted at the swath’s end he glanced up over the fields toward the toy-size plodding of James Marshall’s horses. James came of people who were all clerk and farmer, who didn’t know a gunnel from a thole-pin. Respect, yes. You had to respect James Marshall. Liking was another thing. He had a sudden thought that Eva should have married somebody like James. Wryly, he grinned and was momentarily light of heart.The grin was still on his face, playing lightly there, as he loafed, leaning on the scythe, and watched Hazel approach, shaking out the swath behind Joe. And again, the scattered wisps of memory: mackerel-fishing, years ago, with Alec Neill. The row in from the anchorage where the two-masters were; the beach, and a small girl, straightening, dropping handfuls of coloured stones as she ran bare-footed on wet sand to be on hand when the flat crunched in to a landing ... Richard felt an ache in his throat. It was all past, he hadn’t thought of that for years. It was, now, like something that had happened to another person, in another country. But . . . that person was himself, the running girl his daughter. He had a curious illusion, here in the hayfield, of time long past, forgotten, drawn close around him. Immeasurably far away, and yet close. Of old things new again in an intimate strangeness, touching his throat with recognition that was a kind of pain.

  Hazel thrust the fork into the green wave of the swath and scattered fresh hay over mown ground. Outdoors in sun and wind with space around her it had been possible during these last few days to feel at times that nothing much had changed. She did not know why this was so, or consider it very deeply. The sweep of the Channel, the banked clouds, the side hills quilted in varying shades of dun and green, the shape of the land and the colour of flashing water . . . They were unchanged, and in them she had found a kind of comfort.

  Indoors, with the earth and sky and sea shut out by walls, and life a thing of people, habit, talk, of guarded glances and idle chatter and sudden silence, there was no defence . . .

  When she sat in church with Eva now the speculative eyes were on her. Behind the good-natured words of boys and girls, dropping in for the mail, she could hear the undertone of words unsaid.

  Last week, just after Anse’s departure, she had gone down to Katen’s one evening with the Lairds. The Lairds had a new Ford, the first car at Currie Head, the first on this part of the Shore, except for Katen’s truck. Edith and Lol Kinsman had gone down with them; and Dave Stiles and others were there, others from The Rocks. But not a word, in her hearing, had been said about Anse. Not a word about the one thing you’d think they’d talk about. . .

  Probably, she told herself, some of this, some of this thing she felt, was imagination. But not all. Last Sunday after church a little knot of women, Hat Wilmot and Ida Freeman and Sarah Kinsman, had been talking about Anse. Nothing unusual in that. What was unusual was the silence, the sudden silence touched with embarrassment, when she and Edith Graham had edged round them, through the churchyard gate, to take the road home.

  That, and Edith’s obvious considerateness. Edith hadn’t mentioned either the talk or the silence.

  So now in the open air and in bodily exhaustion, Hazel tried to find relief from this sense of being watched and considered, and from the fear that was overtaking her.

  She was not sure when this sense of fear and foreboding had become definite. At the time of Anse’s disappearance, there had been nothing but the vaguest sort of doubt. It had hardly been in her conscious mind at all at the moment when, half-laughing, she had asked Richard to let her help with the hay. Gradually it had grown, was growing, in her mind and flesh.

  She felt the flush of it now, amid the heat and the insect- singing and the smell of hay, and found herself imagining . . .

  Easy enough to get to Morgan’s Harbour. The Lairds’ Ford was on the road nearly every night. She saw herself slipping away from them, away from the crowd at Carter’s ice-cream parlour, slipping down the street to Dr. Brickley’s house. Confiding in the old doctor. Hearing his brusque voice—Go on home, there’s nothing ... Or seeing the veiled eyes, hearing the voice, the other verdict. . . Well, it looks . . . we’ll have to talk to your mother . . .

  She couldn’t do it. If her fears were groundless, then she’d have put herself in the position—What if you told, laid the secret bare, and for no reason?

  If they were not, if the worst were true, then the telling would have to be done over again. Over again. Endlessly over again.

  She washed the imagined scenes out of her mind. Even doctors couldn’t be sure. Not this soon.

  It came to her now that after all there wasn’t much real relief in the sky and the land and the Channel. In these things there was only temporary escape from people. And from yourself. That, and the chance to achieve a tiredness of flesh and bone that brought the troubled ease of sleep.

  6

  Hazel woke one morning and knew she could not bear, alone, the burden of her fear.

  She had fallen asleep earlier than usual and wakened several times throughout the night. Her first thought on rousing finally was that she had slept late; she could hear Eva moving about the kitchen below. She lay in bed a minute, watching squares of sunlight on the yellow spread. For the last few days she had felt sick in the morning. She knew now that when she threw back the spread and drew herself upright the sickness would begin. She got out of bed, and it was there.

  She dressed quickly, conscious only of the sickness, which would pass, and the long fluttering apprehension. Eager to get downstairs and force herself to eat something, and escape to the fields where there was work with which she could try to deaden the waiting and the fear.

  Then, between slow strokes of a hairbrush, the waiting was over. The fear was final and realized, and something she must share. There was in this a sense of something like surrender and the beginning of a strange relief.

  She stood for a little with the brush in her hand, looking into the mirror. The face that looked back at her was calm. The brown eyes showed little of the tumult in her mind. But the wide mouth was pinched and the cheeks colourless. She thought her mother was right. She didn’t look too well.

  Eva was busy with breakfast when Hazel came through the door from the hallway. The damp warm porridge-smell hung in the kitchen like faint mist. Eva said, “Morning. You’re a little late. A good thing. Why you have to—”

  She broke off, shook her head, and glanced directly at Hazel as the girl took her place at the table.

  For an instant she stood there with a plate of porridge in her hand, her eyes on Hazel’s face. A vague alarm and something close to sympathy edged her voice. “Hazel, you’re—you look— you’re white as a sheet . . , Sick? Are you sic
k?”

  Hazel stumbled to her feet, grasping the edge of the table. She said, “No. No. Oh, Mumma, hush.” She walked quickly from the kitchen, out through the porch to the yard.

  Behind the barn, out of sight, she stopped to retch. For a moment there all the torment of her mind and body were blended in a gasping helplessness. She straightened and went on slowly, weak and unsteady. A kind of hard calm was taking possession of her mind.

  As she crossed into the lower pasture she glanced back, once, and saw Eva standing in the porch door, and felt a sense of sorrow. She waved her hand in a gesture of attempted reassurance and went on. Eva would not shout or follow. Hazel almost wished she would. Wished she would break down and forget appearances and come rushing after her, even though it were in anger . . .

  Richard had his own road to the inlet shore, but the scow he and Joe used to cross the inlet would be on the other side . . . The long walk round, then. She climbed the fence and crossed Marshalls’ lower field to Alec Neill’s land. A little farther on she saw Christine Currie, far up the slope of Curries’ field, moving between house and hen-house. Christine stopped to look, across the quarter-mile of field and pasture.

  Across Grant’s Place she could hear the rushing of Graham’s Brook. Farther east the faint rattle of Sinclair’s mill, just starting the day’s work, came into the blend of morning sounds, of bird- song and crow-caw and the sighing of the Channel on its thirty miles of shore. She turned down Currie’s road and walked through Rob’s yard, on across the neck and up the inlet’s southern shore to the beach.

  There was no wind here, but somewhere far to the southeast, unseen beyond the Lion’s Mane, the Atlantic heaved and swayed, and the Channel stirred lazily with the muted echo of that heaving. Its glassy movement was slight and regular and slow, hardly perceptible except on tide-packed gravel where the shallow edge of sea ran in and up and forever slipped away.