The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Three years ago. That was where it always started in his mind. The Holiday. The summer Saturday when the people of Currie Head and Katen’s Rocks and Leeds got together on the beach for an afternoon of sunlight and rowing and eating in the open. Nominally it was a children’s picnic, but it brought to the beach all ages.

  He had arrived at the beach late. Most of the youngsters were rowing on the inlet under the Head’s western slant. Their mothers were already setting out plates on plank tables, their fathers squatting on warm beach rocks, talking of the days when mackerel had swarmed in the Channel, when fishing had been a way of living instead of something to fill the pause between seeding and haying time.

  Some of the older boys and girls of what Frank Graham called “sparkin’ age” were standing around the two tall spruce between which an ox-yoke had been slung as a swing. Grant saw that Tarsh Findlay, Vangie Murphy’s twelve-year-old, had been left behind there by the children of his own age. This was unusual, because they had been taught to treat him with consideration. But there was a perverse streak in Tarsh. He would stay out of things sometimes unless urged directly to come in. Grant wondered for a moment whether there was some unobtrusive thing he could do, and could think of nothing.

  The swing slowed. Elsie Laird and Lee Wilmot slipped to the ground laughing. Anna turned to pull herself into the seat and Lol Kinsman dropped the rope on which he had been pulling to jump up beside her. Bantering argument began then. Grant had picked up one of the ropes, but Lee Wilmot and Fred Marshall each insisted the other should take the one on the off side.

  Anna said, “You fellas—what gentlemen!” and then, “Hey! Tarsh! . . . Get busy. Give us a hand.”

  Lee Wilmot said, “Yeah. That’s it. Come on, Tarsh. Get to work.”

  It was simple instinct. Anna’s eye had caught the boy’s aloneness. As the swing gradually gathered way, the chains creaking, she glanced down at Grant and winked.

  Nothing that Anna would ever remember. But Grant had felt the wink in his backbone. In that moment Anna had become for him something more than a figure of flesh and blood. Something more than a girl who stirred you, the way girls did, when you thought about them. There was nothing in this quiet elation to be ashamed of. Bodily disturbance, certainly. But this seemed part of something that was long and slow and inevitable, not a thing to be brushed out of the mind. He had grinned across under the soaring swing at the dark face, intent with effort, of Tarsh Findlay, Vangie Murphy’s bastard...

  But he had said now as much as he wanted to say. The Holiday, one time. The way you looked . . . How could you put it into words, anyway, this quality of hers, this feeling for people? This thing he felt himself, sometimes, deep down, but could not really show?

  Dimly perhaps Anna understood. She did not need words. She moved close and turned to him, and he took her in his arms. Her body lay pliantly against him, without reserve, answering the pressure of his own. Her mouth was soft and suddenly troubled with a breathless hunger.

  After the first long kiss they stood for a while relaxed and without tension, lightly touching, his mouth moving along her eyebrows, searching the channel in her parted hair.

  Anna said casually, “What makes it this way for us, Grant?”

  “Oh ... me and you.”

  Far down the road there was a faint humming; light touched the high branches of the hardwoods and flickered and held. Anna said, “Car coming.” She sighed, “I s’pose...”

  ‘Yes,” Grant said. “Best be getting back.”

  The car passed in a swish of gravel, vanished along the road westward. Grant and Anna walked up the road alone.

  At the gate she turned to come into the circle of his arms again. Then as if answering some unspoken doubt, she said: “It’ll be all right, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “All right. Good night, Grant. Take care of yourself.”

  “Good night... Good night, Anna.”

  He walked up the road alone now, thinking of Anna. This was something he could do. He could go back and relive the time he had spent with her, bringing his mind up through each of the moments as one does with the lines of a familiar poem. But for him there was a special meaning, a sense of anticipation, because it was unfinished. For him the poem was unfinished. The phrases still unknown, the living lines, must continue as long as time remained in which they could meet and talk and touch . . .

  This absorption was not exclusive. In the dark ahead of him near Grahams’ he could hear voices. Boys. Dan and Bill, the kid from Toronto ... The Place, next, and Hugh Curries lights. The whole incidental living detail of Currie Head and the Channel Shore was a shadowy background to his thought of her.

  But now, there was a difference. They had lived on moments, remembered moments and the dream of time to come. But now, a difference. They had learned something tonight, he and Anna.

  He walked up the slope of the road past Alec Neill’s. The lights of home, of Uncle James’s house, were bright behind the ash trees.

  Home. He turned down toward the house, toward familiar things and people. A ridiculous thought came to him. If he were to be placed blindfold in any kitchen at Currie Head he could tell in whose house he was by the smell, the blend of wood and paint and year on year of cooking. The central scent that clung to Aunt Jane’s kitchen was that of molasses cookies. It bothered him briefly that he couldn’t recall the smell of Josie Gordon’s.

  He walked down the lane toward the lights, not thinking; feeling his long affection for his family and the Shore, and love, and a vague misgiving.

  8

  James wakened to the sound of softwood thumping gently against cast iron. For a moment he lay relaxed, conscious at once of a sense of pleasure and of something else, an irksome nagging that merged with pleasure and dulled the edge of it.

  That was Greant, out there in the kitchen. He could tell from the quietness, the sensed movement. Grant, who had come back and picked up where he’d left off . . . Mr. Marshall sat up in bed. Grant. His mind was warmed by memory. Grant, the cheerful early riser, and a thousand kitchen fires; in bland daylight or the cold dark of winter mornings before sunrise. The moment of wordless companionship before sunrise. The moment of wordless companionship before the rest were up.

  Grant. He frowned and moved his head as if to shake away the complex irritation that troubled him: a person loved and a small unworthiness; the need to speak, to make it clear; a kind of anger at his own reluctance . . .

  He swung night-shirted legs to the floor. On the Channel Shore most men slept in drawers and undershort, as do men who work in the open anywhere. Nut not mr. Matshall. He nrought a kind of diginity to the hard business of farming dubious soil. Flannelette nighshirts, a tended beard, grammatical speech, a big downstairs bedroom in which his wife having passed the age for conceiving children, he slept alone.

  He dressed methodically, pulling on drawers, undershirt, grass-stained grey trousers and socks; working his feet into ankle-high work-boots, criss-crossing leather laces round brass hooks above the eyelets. This done, he walked through the kitchen and back porch without a word to Grant, and down the path, wet with dew, to the outhouse behind the workshop; returned to the porch and splashed water on face and neck; dried himself on the roller towel and returned to the bedroom to don a shirt. Until the private routine of backhoise and basin was comleted, Mr. MNarshall never spoke to anymore.

  He opened the bedroom door and came into the kitchen again and said, “Good morning.”

  “Morning, sir.”

  Grant closed the damper a half-inch, judicially, and listened to the small cheerful rush of sound in the fire-box, the sound of flame getting out of the kindling, into the bigger wood, and drawing.

  His uncle stood with dignified nonchalance by the kitchen table, his eyes apparently concerned with the things he could see through the north windows. The three ash trees that fronted the house, the s
weep of his upper field beyond the road, or just the thin morning light. Grant sensed uneasily that in a moment he would speak.

  Mr. Marshall turned and said evenly, “You were not at church last night.”

  “No, sir, I...”

  Grant hesitated. Fred’s feet were on the stairs. Aunt Jane’s footsteps lightly crossed the floor above.

  “Never mind.”

  Fred pushed open the door between hall and kitchen and came in, whistling.

  Mr. Marshall turned again to the windows. He spoke over his shoulder, “Fred, you and Will can go on cleaning up at Scott’s. I’ll go to work on the barn today, I think. With Grant.”

  Fred said “Yes, sir”—casual acknowledgement from one who knew that work on the Marshall place was laid out ahead, and had no particular interest in the fact that his father, uncharacteristically, was outlining it again.

  Grant merely noted that his uncle was giving notice that he would return to the interrupted conversation when they were alone together, later in the morning.

  Jane Marshall crossed the kitchen, removed a stove lid with the lifter and poked at burning wood. This was habit. The fire was blazing steadily, the kettle beginning to give off the faint tuneless note of water in the grip of heat; but it was necessary for this small competent woman to assert her own concern with all the phases of life in her house. A pail of water on the sink must be moved a quarter-inch, a pair of boots by the wood-box must be shifted to the corner by the coat-closet.

  If James Marshall had ever noted this in his wife it was long ago. He was no more conscious of it now than he was of the fact that Jane accompanied everything she did, floor-sweeping, cooking, bed-making, with a casual commentary, a sentence addressed to one or all or no one, a hymn-tune half-muttered and half-hummed.

  She was singing now in a not uncheerful undertone, “When mothers of Salem, their children brought to Jesus . . She slipped plates from the dish-cupboard to the red-and-white oilcloth of the kitchen table. “The stern disciples . . . Fred, that shirts a sight, you’ve got to . . . the stern disciples . . . and bade them depart . . . But Jesus...”

  No one listened. Fred and Will and Grant, straggling out to milk, were conscious of Jane’s fussiness merely as something that blended with a thousand other things to make a person, a small compact woman with drawn-back hair, still unaccountably black.

  As for James, he would have dismissed with puzzled contempt any suggestion that Jane’s mannerisms were traceable to himself— were the slight persistent reaction of a personality that must develop some kind of self-assertion when faced for a lifetime with the immovable, the impervious.

  His present difficulty was that he was not impervious. Without thinking of it directly he had come to recognize again a crack in the granite of hard sense and righteousness.

  This had nothing to do with Jane, moving from stove to table now, halting to glance out of the porch window at the speck on the Channel that was Alec Neill’s boat. It was something else, this other thing that had bothered him at times for more than sixteen years. Something that went back to a Boston-and-Maine day coach, clicking through the dark, and a four-year-old boy asleep on green plush.

  Duty was another word for life to James, a straight road, uphill, between the fences of labour and religion. It worried him to find his eyes drawn by the grassy by-ways of affection.

  His meditation was interrupted by the sound of the young men’s voices, their boots on the steps, the drone of the separator.

  There was little talk over the oatmeal porridge and fried eggs. Only Jane’s commentary, unlistened to. Grant’s mind turned back in rueful amusement to the wisps of thought it had played with last night, the smell of kitchens. What was it, now, that Gordons’ kitchen smelt of? He would mention it to Anna; it was the kind of absurdity she liked to laugh at.

  The sense of difference . . . More obvious than ever now, since Anse—Grant wondered how things were between James and Richard, now that Hazel . . . Fred had asked him if he knew the story, but no one else in the house had mentioned Hazel or Anse.

  He thought about this as he and James went to the workshop for carpenter’s aprons, loaded the pockets with shingle nails, and climbed to the scaffold across the north gable of the barn.

  Other considerations vanished then in the crawling excitement that had always assailed him at the knowledge that his uncle was about to speak to him alone. It went up his spine in waves. A Mend of obscure emotion: gratitude, fear, pride and the fear of pride, respect; something like love, perhaps. He knew only that it was a feeling he couldn’t help. Couldn’t help, any more than Uncle James could help withholding speech instead of saying what he had to say before the family, as he would have done if it concerned Fred or Will.

  He began carefully to lay shingles, thinking absently that there was a good deal to do around the place. A shed to build, a machinery shed. Uncle James had said there was too much stuff cluttering up the threshing-floor in winter-time. Already sand and gravel for the concrete lay in heaps near the east wall of the barn. Building. The kind of work he liked ...James waited until they had got into the staccato rhythm of the work, adjusting edge against edge, driving nail after nail. They had laid a full course across the barn before he spoke.

  “You were not at church last evening.”

  Grant said, “No, sir. I intended to go up, and then, well—sort of, I didn’t feel like it.”

  That was all he could say. James wouldn’t know about the meeting with Anna, and that was something Grant felt he must keep back. Partly through the secretiveness of personal possession, partly through a caution he had not quite defined.

  He had an impulse to laugh and blurt it out: “I’m sorry, Uncle James. But I had a girl to see. You know. Anna Gordon.”

  That was impossible. It was the sort of thing Fred could do, or even Will. Because James’s sons, when they broke the rules, could take what was coming simply as the other side of a bargain. Could take the cold rebuke without hurt, like punishment from a school teacher, whose approval or wrath meant equally nothing. But, just as James could not call Grant down in the presence of others, could seldom be blunt and forthright even when they were alone together, so Grant could not speak frankly to this man who was less than a father, and more. Reluctance to hurt and to be hurt; something like affection, perhaps . . . tempered in the frost of pride.

  James laid another shingle. Grant wondered whether he would speak of this again, this small thing that irked him. Perhaps he had had his say.

  Through the association of wood and nails and work, a scene from his childhood came to him. An evening when Uncle James had been coopering in the shop. Young Will, nine or ten years old then, had overstayed chore-time, down the road at Neills’. James had cut him across the bare calves, coldly and repeatedly, with an unbent barrel-hoop. Will had howled in pain, not humiliation. But Grant remembered how he himself had trembled with shock, partly on Wills account but partly from an imagined conception of the shame that would shake him if he were guilty of conduct that called forth such treatment. At times since then, through carelessness or bravado, he had been guilty. Uncle James had always corrected him privately, verbally, indirectly. Nearly always . . . Once, in the presence of the family, he had cuffed Grant sharply for persistent noisiness. Grant remembered his own numb surprise and the sense of resentment this had left until he realized the inwardness of that blow: James Marshall’s sudden impatience at his own sensitivity where Grant was concerned, the need to establish as fact before his family the fallacy that all were equal in his sight.

  When James spoke now he used a pattern of indirection with which Grant was familiar, the formula that time will teach.

  “You will come to learn in time that obligations are more important than whims . . . more important than inclinations.”

  Grant thought, irrelevantly, that James’s courtly speech could be irritating at times, like an affectation.r />
  “You have just come back to us, Grant. I don’t intend to . . . If you have some proper reason for something . . . for doing something other than what is expected, I think you will always find me reasonable. But it distresses me to think you would choose a time when your aunt and I were away—to follow a course—to stay away —to follow a course you might have explained beforehand.” He added, “If there is an explanation.”

  Grant thought, That I might explain now if I could, but he knows I can’t ... He knew what it was that rankled in James’s mind. More, perhaps, than the simple fact of staying away from church when James wanted him there, wanted him there to be seen, was the suggestion of underhandedness. Deceit, and the hurt to pride. The fear that someone at Currie Head or The Rocks or Leeds could say Grant had picked a time to carry on some pursuit of his own while the old man was away.

  James’s words worried him without stirring his conscience as once they might have done. His regret was that the circumstance was there, a difference in outlook you couldn’t get round.

  James went on: “I am responsible for you, you know.” He added clearly, “To God and others.”

  Grant was startled. James was inflexible in religion; he held family prayers at night and would not hire a man who swore or drank. But it wasn’t often that conscious piety crept into his daily speech.

  To God . . . and others. For a moment Grant felt a sad humility, remembering. Remembering what he knew more by hearsay than experience. Humility touched with envy. For Uncle James had known Harvey Marshall. Had possessed with a brother’s intimacy something that was known to Grant, except for a picture on the wall, only as the shadow of a face whose living lines he could not even trace in memory. A face like the imagined features of a character in fiction, and a man’s voice, low and gentle, singing, almost whispering, a childish lullaby of which neither tune nor words remained.

  And somewhere, another voice: impersonal, careless, without malice or rancour, or feeling of any kind. The words were clear: “Sure. I guess that’s best. He’s a good brat. If there was any way . . . But take him. Take him. It’s better—”