The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  East of the Head the Grahams were rowing their flat in to the beach with Frank in the stern and one of the boys at the oars. Farther out Hugh Currie and Stan were still at the nets, hand- lining after having picked their fish. Hazel could hear a word spoken, a far unbodied indistinguishable ghost of a sound. She looked up the beach toward Richard’s hut. He and Joe had landed and were cleaning herring in the land-wash under a cloud of screaming gulls. Even as she looked she saw Richard glance up and realized from his sudden momentary stillness that he had seen her. He turned to say something to Joe and turned back slowly and began to climb the beach toward the hut.

  As she faced Richard by the door of the weathered building she felt a moment of reaction. For a little she saw only a man, middle- aged and slightly stooped, with a stubble of yellowish whisker on his face, in ragged shirtsleeves and oilskins stained with blood.

  Nothing . . . There was nothing here to end aloneness . . . For this instant her mind swam in the depths of a blind sea, lost and without hope, and there was nothing she could say.

  Then Richard spoke to her, and fear vanished in the sound of his voice.

  He said evenly, with a casual quietness, “Come into the hut, now, girl, and tell me what it is.”

  7

  The green and ochre and gold of August smouldered along the Channel Shore. Even down-shore, now, haying was in full swing. At some of the Currie Head places, James Marshall’s among them, it was over. At others the fields lay half cleared and half standing, or heaped with bundles ready for the rack. In mown fields the green oats waved in separate patches, like islands surrounded by flat stubble. Along the side hills early sown with oats for ripening, the faintest haze of yellow began to tinge the greyish green. In roadside gutters the darker yellow of ragwort was dull with time and dust.

  Except for the floats of Alec Neill’s salmon net, nothing broke the smoothness of Channel water off The Head. The last herring nets had been hauled, cleaned and dried and stowed in the lofts of huts.

  In early evening of the second Sunday in the month the three Marshall boys were lazing in the last mellow sunlight at the back of the house. Will sat on the porch steps in shirtsleeves and sock feet, polishing his shoes. Fred tipped his chair against the house wall and grinned up at Grant, squatting on the step between kitchen and porch.

  Fred, the eldest, had been forced to stay at home while first Will and then Grant went into the army. But there was no resentment in Fred about anything, Grant thought. Fred was the sunny one. He could get a laugh out of anything, even the precise and serious way in which Will shined his shoes. It was Fred who had fried the ham and eggs for supper and washed the dishes afterward. Suddenly Grant felt a little rush of feeling, dumb and indescribable, for these cousins, for this family which treated him like a brother and a son. Fred, the barrel-chested farmer, who worked like a horse and laughed and never worried. Will, the silent shrewd one, who would make a place for himself soon in some city or other, far from The Head. Aunt Jane, Uncle James. He thought of the three half-grown ash trees set out on the flat grass in front of the house. Set out there, years ago, by Uncle James, in some unusual moment of whimsy, to represent the three boys. Momentarily this family feeling blurred for Grant the other thing, the slow excitement growing in his mind.

  Fred said, “Ain’t you puttin’ on your uniform for church, boy?” and Grant felt a little inward laughter. Uncle James had tried to bring them all up to be painstaking in their speech, but it hadn’t had much effect on Fred. The friendly bantering voice went on, “We fin’ly got the plaid peddycoat off Will; but they’ll expect brass buttons up at Leeds, your first Sunday home.”

  Grant shook his head. “Nope. I took her off for the last time.” He had worn his khaki serge to Sunday School in the morning, had sat through Bible Class because Uncle James expected that. He said, off-hand, “I don’t think I’ll be going up with you tonight, anyway, Fred.”

  Fred said, “What? Why? . . .” and was silent. Will began to put on his shoes. A slight constraint gathered round the three of them, a kind of doubtfulness.

  Fred said, “They’ll be to church there, on the way home.”

  Grant said, not in answer to this observation but as if he had not heard it, “I think I’ll take a night off.”

  He knew what was in their minds. Uncle James and Aunt Jane had driven to Findlay’s Bridge after dinner to visit cousins. On the way back they would go to church at Leeds, and Uncle James would expect to see them there—his two sons and most of all his nephew on his first Sunday home.

  Fred laughed, breaking the small odd silence. ‘Y’heard that, ‘d’ya, Will? He’s got somethin’ on his mind. Well, good luck to him.”

  It was hearty and clumsy but it ended the brief constraint. Will knotted a shoelace and said contemplatively, “Maybe he’s going down the road,” and Grant laughed.

  A little later he watched from the northern windows of the kitchen as Fred and Will walked off up the lane to the road and turned west. Shortly afterward Dan Graham and Bill, Harry Neill and Stan Currie sauntered past and halted at Richard McKee’s gate. Joe was going up the slope to the road to join them.

  Grant wondered whether Richard and Eva would be driving up, and felt a pang for Richard and Joe and Hazel. Regret lay at the back of his mind, faintly troubling, faintly clouding what he felt at being home.

  He had heard the story yesterday in Adam Falt’s mail waggon, somewhere between Steep Brook and Millersville. Adam had been silent for a little when Grant asked him, merely making conversation, what was new at The Head. Then he had told the story.

  Grant shook his head, remembering Adam’s words: “No, not together. He just vanished. Hazel—she’s gone to Toronto. With relations, so Eva says. Dress-making. Nobody knows exactly . . .”

  He was thinking of this, and of the talk that would be going on, and the disquiet he had felt at Adam’s words, when Frank Graham’s rig went by. The mare was travelling at a walk, and Mrs. Graham and Edith were in the buggy. Grant felt a small amusement; they hadn’t been able to argue Mr. Graham into going.

  He had seen Mrs. Graham and Edith and the boys at Sunday School, but not Frank, yet. It was a little strange to him, the inner glow he felt at seeing again each familiar face. Through the time away when he thought of home three things had made everything else seem dull and formless: the place here, and the family—and related to that, the strip of woods between Hugh Currie’s place and Grahams’; and the girl. Now he was finding in these first days at home that everything wakened a warmth, a response. It was all a pattern, growing clear again, and even the background threads of it were pleasant...

  He took the jacket of his blue serge from a hook in the hall and slipped into it and felt the tightness across the shoulders; must have grown a bit, he thought, in his year and a half away. “Filled out”, was what Stella Graham had called it when she shook hands with him at Sunday School this morning. Well, he could stand that. He had always been conscious of being just a little smaller than average, and slender. He glanced at himself in the hall mirror. His shoulders were heavier, all right, but his face had lost its chubbiness. It was lean and tanned under the crisp, short, brown hair. He looked into candid blue eyes and had a small wish that he didn’t appear so serious; even when he felt finest, his feelings didn’t show, and even Anna sometimes teased him about it.

  He went out through the front door, and halted, and considered crossing the lower pastures, then rejected this in favour of the road. The strip of packed dirt curved away in front of him, past Alec Neill’s and Curries’, a friendly brown ribbon roughened in the centre by the impact of innumerable hooves, with strips along the inside of its low shoulders pressed smooth and hard by the passage of iron-tired wheels.

  No sign of life at Alec Neill’s. Perhaps Mrs. Neill had persuaded Alec to go to church. Grant thought of turning in to find out; the wry laughter that ran like an under-current in men like Hugh Currie and
Frank Graham was almost a tide-race in Alec. He felt good, thinking about it.

  The other impulse was stronger. He went on, past Curries’, to the stretch of woods beyond. Opposite the big birch he stopped, musing a little. It would not have surprised him to find Anna sitting there, but he felt no disappointment in the fact that she was not. Things didn’t often turn out by chance the way you wanted them. Sometimes they did, and up to now he had been satisfied with that. But now he was thinking that maybe things could be given a little help, a little arranging.

  He turned down the hauling-road. Fifty or sixty yards from the main road he came to the clearing. Here, two years ago, he had made a start; had begun to turn spruce and fir and yellow birch into box-logs and fire-wood. But concerned mainly with laying the land open to the sky. He found the level stump of a spruce they had sawed down, one evening when Fred had come along to lend a hand, and sat on it now, feeling a grave elation.

  This fall and winter he would chop, and next spring burn a new field and plant potatoes in the ash-covered cradle-hills. Probably if you wanted to farm it would be more sensible to go to Boston and haul ice or do carpenter-work until you had saved the price of a place. There were places you could get, on the back roads, now that the younger people were drifting away. But Grant didn’t want to go to Boston, or anywhere. He wanted to work land that was new, to bring it into stumps first and then pull the stumps, and grow the first hay and oats himself, as the settlers had done a hundred and fifty years ago. He was twenty years old. Not quite twenty-one. There was plenty of time . . .

  He didn’t linger long in the woods of the Place. Time now stretched endlessly ahead, the days in which he could work here, clearing ground, burning stumps, fencing off a pasture and field. Years away, he could see a house on a concrete basement, with running water; a big high-shouldered barn . . . He didn’t have to stay in these woods to think of it. This was a picture that slipped into his mind whenever he thought of this wood-lot, and it stayed with him as he turned east out of the clearing and picked his way through the woods in the deepening dusk toward Frank Graham’s line fence.

  Before his enlistment he had worked in the clearing in the evenings, ignoring the banter he had had to take for doing winter work in summer, for working at all when you didn’t have to. Before going home at dark he had sometimes crossed to Grahams’ to sit on the back steps with Frank or young Dan. Sometimes Stewart Gordon would come up the road, for Frank’s companionship. Or Anna, to talk to Edith ... The houses were barely an eighth of a mile apart, the Grahams’ south of the road and the Gordons’ north of it. Between these families the differences seemed to be ignored; there was no feeling when you saw Frank Graham and Stewart Gordon together that they were different because one was Catholic and the other Methodist.

  Grant’s mind ran for a moment on the differences there were, even in a place as small as Currie Head. Not only in religion and politics. In his own time in school they had called the youngsters from up the school-house road Bogtowners. And they in turn had called the kids from farms fronting on the Channel, the Fishguts . . . He grinned in the dusk. The Marshalls lived out front but he couldn’t remember that anyone had ever called Uncle James a FishgutIt was nearly dark as he picked his way between the trunks of spruce, on green moss prinked out here and there with the salmon- pink of pigeon-berries. He climbed Frank’s rail fence, dropped into the pasture and went on across its hollow and up the slope of the mown hayfield to Grahams’ back door.

  No one was about, but he could hear voices. He went round the house and found Frank and Stewart Gordon on the veranda, and pipe smoke faintly acrid in air laden with the smell of hay.

  Frank got out of a wicker chair and came to the steps and put out a hand.

  “Grant! They told me you was home. Come up and siddown.” The hand pulled him up the steps.

  Grant laughed, a little shyly. “Hi, Mr. Graham. How are you, Mr. Gordon?”

  Stewart Gordon peered over his glasses with his slight habitual air of bewilderment. Anything unusual seemed to puzzle Stewart until he got used to it. He was silent for minutes while Grant and Frank exchanged casual talk. Then, his mind recovering from the surprise which had jolted him out of preoccupation, he settled back in his chair with a gentle pleased interest.

  He said, “Grant. Well. Didn’t know you were back . . .”

  “Yesterday, Mr. Gordon. We landed at Halifax Friday and I came up yesterday with the mail.”

  Again the rush of regret ran thinly in his mind. As he talked idly with Frank and Stewart Gordon, he found himself quick with a painful sympathy for Stewart. And Mrs. Gordon. She must be . . . But he didn’t really know her. It was Stewart who wakened the laughter and love in Anna’s voice.

  Anna. The vague disquiet whispered in his mind. He had never thought of her really in relation to anyone but himself, and as Stewart’s daughter. But—she was Anse Gordon’s sister. She too would be touched and troubled by anything Anse did. He had felt this vaguely from the moment he had heard the story, but now the sense of it was clear and sharp. Troubled and hurt and talked about. He felt a cold hard anger. At Anse Gordon, at circumstance, at the malice of talking tongues.

  He hardly heard Frank Graham say, “Here’s Anna . . .”

  She came through the gate slowly and up the short path toward the veranda, a careless girl in a white middy-blouse and dark skirt, friendly and casual. Grant got down to meet her, his flesh tingling.

  They did not touch hands. Anna said, “Hello, Grant. You’re back ... I caught sight of you . . . How are you, anyway?”

  He said, “Fine, Anna. I’m fine.” And then in his own shy tone, the conventional words he would have said to Edith Graham or Lottie Kinsman or any other of the girls his own age he had known for years, “You’re looking good.”

  She laughed, light and careless, and spoke to Frank and Stewart: “He’s got to come over to say how-d’you-do to Ma . . . Come on, Grant.”

  There was nothing to say. It was all said in the fact of being together. But as they walked down the short stretch of road the fingers of her right hand slipped into his. She left them there until they turned in at the gate.

  Josie was lighting the lamp in the parlour. She turned toward them, the burnt match in her hand, the yellow light gradually flaring out to make a luminous pool round her as the flame rose on the wick. For a moment Grant felt a diffidence that was close to fear. In this dark-eyed woman with the lined placid face he could feel no warmth of welcome. Only a tolerance, a doubting reserve.

  They said the conventional words. Josie remained standing; and before constraint could settle, Anna said: “Let’s not sit around, Grant. It’s too nice outside.” She tucked a hand under his elbow and turned again toward the door. He let himself be led, feeling the capability of Anna. Over his shoulder he said, “Good night, Mrs. Gordon,” and heard her expressionless “Good night.”

  But once they were outside, alone together, he felt all sense of trouble vanish. Again Annas fingers found his own.

  She said, “Lets go down to the bridge.” “All right.”

  They began to talk now a little. About meaningless things. The things that had been going on along the Shore while he was away, and his time in England. Again Grant felt the curious wonder he had always known, since the moment of first sensing it, in the presence of Anna Gordon. His shyness vanished whenever he was with her. For all the urgent sense of her as a girl, a woman, there was between them none of the sparring, the mock pursuit and the feigned retreat of courtship.

  Suddenly out of a moment’s silence she said, “I s’pose you heard about Anse. And all that...”

  He said “Yes ...” and let it lie.

  She said, “Well, then, you know as much as we do,” and added on a little note of irony, “maybe more.”

  She was getting it over with. Washing away the sense of things unsaid. He pressed her fingers lightly and said nothing.


  Vangie Murphy’s place. Katen’s ...

  A mile east of Gordons’ a railed wooden bridge crossed Katen’s Creek. The road there was screened by hardwood growing in the creek valley. An ancient beech and a giant maple overhung the bridge itself, darkening even in daylight the sliding water.

  Night had fallen. The bridge was a pocket of darkness under the trees, but a moon approaching the full rode the sky, and stars half-hidden by faintly stirring leaves. Below, the creek slipped almost soundless down-valley toward Sinclair’s mill and eventually the Channel; from somewhere in that southern distance they could hear the whispered rumour of swell on gravel, and far up-stream the slight ceaseless hurry of brook-water over stone.

  Grant stood leaning back with an elbow on the railing. Anna came into the circle of the elbow, looking down across arm and railing toward the almost invisible water, a hand on his upper arm. There was no urgency or embarrassment or expectation in the contact. Simply a kind of recognition, wordless and unemphasized.

  Grant laughed, and felt the question in her slight stirring.

  He said, “Oh, nothing. I was just remembering the first . . . When I started feeling ...”

  Anna let the pause last a moment. “That’s not nothing.”

  “No.” His tone matched hers for lightness. “Oh, it was the Holiday, one time. The way you looked.”

  He let it go at that. He could think of it and of all the moments they had ever spent together; could call them up to be lived again when he was by himself. But to talk of them to Anna . . . No, there was something childish about that, and something that seemed to him vaguely like the disturbance of another’s privacy. Not his, but hers.

  How could you explain it, anyway? The moment when he had first felt knowingly the beginning of this private excitement was one without importance, a scrap of time, an incident that must have passed unnoticed by any but himself, that must have left no impression even on the memory of Anna.