The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  It was only a play seen, a book read. Life as life began a little later. Days or a day or perhaps only hours later, in gaslight on green plush. The backward rush of clicking drumming darkness and a face that was neither vague nor distant. Seen across the years it was somehow gentle. He glanced up now and searched it again for the kindness he could not find.

  James had left the subject poised, awaiting a reply, but while he sensed this, Grant was deep in the old and private dream.

  A picture of Harvey Marshall hung in the parlour, fuzzy with enlargement and tinted like the face of an embalmed corpse. He couldn’t connect it with the imagined features and the lullaby that lay in memory behind the rushing darkness. But James had said, once, “You’re the living image of him.”

  The living image. What was it Harvey Marshall had been, in the late seventies, in the eighties, in that other century? A boy who laughed at James’s dour silence? A boy whose careless laughter as they nested apples or set their rabbit-snares had been light and a song to James?

  Grant didn’t know. He could only guess. Except for a rare reminiscent word, years ago, James had never talked about Harvey. Had let Grant’s questions go unanswered, as if he hadn’t heard. And long ago Grant had ceased to ask.

  But as he thought about it now on the scaffold across the barn’s gable he felt himself again a part of something he didn’t try to explain or understand. Something old and continuing, a blend of today and the past and the future. The future. For a moment the other thing, the pervasiveness of Anna, almost vanished from his mind.

  The prodding words came, then. Sharper than any he had heard in years.

  The words were like a blow.

  “Did you hear me? While you live with me you will fit yourself to the conduct of this family. Do you understand me, Grant?”

  He felt the flush of an old resentment, sudden and unfamiliar. He said, “Yes, sir. I understand you.”

  “Then that’s all there is to be said.”

  The hammers tapped their repeated rhythm, a slow step-dance along the barn wall. The sombre sense of belonging was dimmed and blurred. But no resentment could wholly drown that contact with the generations. Anger itself was proof of this. This was a feeling that came from the roots of family. Otherwise, there would have been only impatience, a kind of indifferent dislike.

  He turned slowly once to look out across Alec Neill’s pasture and across Hugh Currie’s lower field and the wooded valley of Graham’s Brook. Across his own land. Uncle James’s land. The Place. Beyond Frank Graham’s barn he could see the Gordons’ apple trees, at the edge of the woods, and the remote grey square of the house.

  What was it Anna had been thinking of?—”It’ll be all right, you know.”

  He had said, “I know.” The thing that pierced him now, for the first time really, was the fact that when you wakened from the dream ...

  Of course, you couldn’t know.

  9

  A week went by before Grant again crossed the pastures to The Place.

  By Wednesday night they had finished shingling. On Thursday the Shore woke to an overcast sky; Grant and James rode the hayrack up the school-house road, with Fred and Will, to cock up the mown hay at Scotts’. By mid-afternoon rain had begun to spit and at dark was falling steadily. Friday dawned in a drizzle that turned to a watery sunlight in the afternoon. Fred and Will took it easy while Grant and James worked in the shop, glazing window- frames for the porch, shaping felloes from a piece of dried birch and fitting them into the rim of a manure-cart wheel.

  On Saturday the grass was dry before noontime and James judged the weather had settled enough to risk shaking out the cocked hay; by Monday it should be dry enough to haul to the barn.

  Next day was Church Sunday at Currie Head. Grant walked up with Fred and Will. The weather was holding fine, banked clouds and sunshine and a light west wind. On Monday they bundled up the last of the hay at Scotts’ and hauled it home.

  Throughout this week of concern with ordinary jobs and usual chores, James did not mention the thing that had driven him to passionate speech on the scaffold across the barn gable. Then there’s nothing more to he said ... It was as if with that closing word all memory of the moment had vanished from his mind.

  Except perhaps for an unusual softness, a kind of considerateness. Less than an hour after that stormy moment Grant had sensed his uncle observing him briefly, sidelong, watching the way he joined shingles and drove the nails. There had been something in James’s face, something like a reflection of that remembered face in gaslight leaning down over green plush. In the shop, later, as Grant tapped a .felloe into the rim of the wheel, James had said out of nowhere, “Your father was good at things of this kind; good with his. hands . . .” The voice had been almost regretful, touched with a reminiscent affection that yet had something grudging in it.

  He had gone on to talk of the fixing-up there was to do. He and Fred had let things slide a little while Will and Grant were away . . . Too much to do on the land to bother about other things, James said. But now there was time. Fences that needed seeing to, and brush to clear. A dozen things that wanted catching up with. The unfinished room upstairs to sheathe and ceil. The machinery shed, against the barn’s east wall . . .

  For Grant the week had been a time of drift. After the first resentment he had slipped into the groove of habit, almost unworried, putting the time of worry away. He had not seen Anna.

  That was not unusual. They had never tried to arrange meetings. A time would come.

  But on Monday evening, with the last of the hay from the Scott place in the barn, he felt a restlessness and a need to be active. He took his axe from the chopping-block by the shop, grinned at Fred and Will on the porch steps, and headed east across the fields.

  While he walked, across Alec Neill’s pasture and into Hugh Currie’s, a slow excitement began to grow. Should he go on over to Grahams’, toward dark? Would he find Anna there? A sense of troubled subterfuge invaded the excitement: the shadow of a barn wall, the sound of tapping hammers.

  He found himself thinking of his time in England and the dreams that had lived then in his mind: the family, and his life as part of it, Aunt Jane’s fussy kindliness, the warmth of winter fires, the feeling it had given him to find approval in Uncle James’s eyes or voice, the blunt companionship of Fred and Will, The Place. And Anna, the laughing and the foolishness, and the deeper something you could feel but never say or even form in thought; the feeling...

  Both real. Both realities. In memory and in looking forward the dreams had merged and blended, become one, the shape of life imagined.

  It was one thing to blend the shape of dreams. Another to merge the two realities.

  When you saw that, the thing you felt about that lonely time across the sea was curiously like regret, the memory of a lost happiness.

  Memories of memories . . . Grant grunted in impatience at this kind of thinking. When he reached the rutted grass-tufted path that led from Hugh Currie’s to the neck of land connecting the mainland with the Head, he turned up it on impulse toward the Currie house. The sound of voices came to him as he topped the rise of land. He saw that Hugh was sprawled on the door-sill, with Stan and young Bill Graham below him on the steps.

  Stan called “Hi, Grant!” as he came into the door-yard. He walked over to join them, acknowledged a word from Hugh, and let himself down on the grass, his back against the porch wall.

  Young Bill grinned at him, shyly, but went on with a question he was pressing on Old Hugh.

  “. . . but the cellar; where’d the cellar come from, Mr. Currie?”

  Grant sensed Hugh turning slightly to look south across field and pasture toward the Channel where the land rose in the wooded ten-acre hump of the Head.

  Hugh considered. “Rob’s House?” He gave a small meditative laugh. “Uncle Rob ... He was red-headed. Like Stan. Rob didn’t care much
for in-shore fishing; the farm either.”

  Grant had a curious feeling. Hugh was living back for a minute in a time unknown. Part of this would be direct memory of a man in leather knee-boots and oilskins, part of it the memory of words, scraps of taciturn conversation, overheard as he worked at his copy-book or listened idly in candle-light. His mind would be running back, picking up the faded colours of things all but forgotten; remembered little by little at the insistence of listening boys.

  Grant’s own interest was caught. This thing Bill and Stan were after—it was like his own probing in childish memory. Hugh would be thinking back to boyhood, of what he had seen and heard of older Curries, Grahams, Marshalls, McKees. People who had left the Shore as the families branched. Branched into brothers, nephews, nieces, grandsons. People whose flesh and blood were third and fourth cousins now, in Gloucester, Quincy, Haverhill, in California and on the western plains.

  Harvey Marshall, too, had gone . . .

  It crossed his mind that Hugh Currie would have the simple answers that were all he cared to know. What was he like, Mr. Currie? My father? Like Uncle James? Like . . .? But, as always when he had felt this impulse, in the presence of Frank Graham or Alec Neill or Richard McKee, he knew he could not ask. How could you ask, bluntly, of outsiders, a thing you should have learned by your own kitchen fire, in your own woods and fields?

  After a short interval of silence Hugh was speaking again.

  .”Uncle Rob was father’s brother. Sailed in trading vessels. That was before the railroad hit here, and steamers weren’t common. Not on this shore. Vessels used to take cured fish down to Halifax and bring back stuff like rope and salt. Anything people needed.

  Uncle Rob built one, the Star of Egypt, down on the neck. The place they call Robs yard. That was before I was born. Bought a bigger one, later. But he got tired of that, too. Ambitious, I s pose. Began going foreign. I can just remember the winter they cut timber for his house. He’d cleared a place on the Head and planned to build there. Growed up since, of course. The cellar was dug. They’d started to build. He was due to get married, the next spring, and finish it up.”

  Hugh was gazing out across the hump of the Head toward the Islands, squinting distantly at the little coastal steamer working slowly up the Channel out of Princeport on her course for Morgan’s Harbour. His voice was impersonal, almost disinterested.

  “He took a three-master out to Sierra Leone, one trip. Freetown. Crew of seven or eight, all from ‘round here. That was the end of it. She was never heard tell of.”

  Grant, watching, realized now that all this was known to Stan. An old story. He had staged this scene so that Bill Graham should hear it in the voice of Hugh Currie, in which no boyish bragging could be suspected.

  Old Hugh went silent, and then began to talk again, mild and contemplative.

  “So Rob never did get married, and they never finished the house. One of the Grahams. Old Frank Graham’s sister. Your great-aunt, Bill. Her father, that’d be your great-grandfather—Long George, they called him. Long George Graham. He bought that place . . .” Hugh glanced across at Grant’s land. “Grant’s Place, now. He bought that from a fellow that took one look and left the country. Never even took an axe to it. Long George give it to the girl for a kind of a wedding present. They planned to live on the Head and clear that piece if Rob ever got time, I guess.” Hugh paused and added thoughtfully, “She was a handsome woman, Fanny Graham. Married, later. Ran away with the mate of a Yankee barque, in here for ton-timber ... It was quite a thing, at the time.”

  Grant heard Bill Graham sigh as the story ended. The story of great-aunt Fanny and Rob Currie. Rob Currie, who had sailed his tern schooner down the Channel, long and long ago . . .

  As he rose and picked up his axe, Bill slipped off the steps and they went together down the road toward The Place. Aunt Fanny’s . . . Grant had heard Frank Graham use the term, but had scarcely thought to wonder. He had never heard the story. He hadn’t known that this land Uncle James had bought was a part of history, of tradition at The Head. What had the land meant to Bill Graham’s great-aunt Fanny, with Rob Currie forever gone? The Yankee mate. Was that romantic love, or escape from the piercing reminders, the familiar things? No one would ever know. But what they knew was enough.

  Grant walked without hurry; his mind returned to the sense of trouble and subterfuge, and was bothered by a ridiculous irritation. At The Head men rarely talked about the past. Their long concern was with the present, today and tomorrow. But when they did look back, there was a warmth in it. They talked of ships built, farms cleared, women who ran away with Yankee mates. But Uncle James—the past to him was not the warmth of people and a place, but the cold pride of family. Only that softness, when, rarely, he spoke of Harvey. And even that had in it something else, a curious undertone of shame.

  Bill took the axe from Grants hand and hefted it and they exchanged grins. Without asking, Bill turned down the hauling- road when they came to it. Grant had a hint of what must be in the boy’s mind. This was land that had been his great-aunt Fanny’s, land a red-headed man had planned to clear in the times between his voyages. He felt a little of it himself. Last week this had been merely a big wood-lot which people called Grant’s Place. Now it was land with history, land with life. Aunt Fanny’s and Grant’s Place, merged in a marriage of time. Land with a past and a future.

  Bill said, “Where you going to build the house, Grant?”

  Grant halted as they neared the clearing and took the axe from Bill’s hand. He considered.

  “I think we’ll put her up close to the road, on the flat where the maples are. Leave enough of them standing to make a row along the road. Useless. But nice in summer.”

  The Place, like all this land, sloped toward the Channel. From where they stood bemused in the August evening they could hear the steady rush of Graham’s Brook, and nearer by the small intimate treble of the branch that ran through Grant’s land itself.

  Grant said, “I think we’ll dam the brook under the slope some time, and have a trout hole.”

  For the first time in his life he was talking about The Place. The sensation was strange and satisfying. Odd to be talking this way to a kid from the city, a boy you’d known less than two weeks. But perhaps that was it. You could talk safely to a youngster who would be going home in a month or so; you’d never see him again. James Marshall was not the sort of man you went to with talk of dreams, even though it was his generosity, his sense of family, that made the dream possible. Fred and Will were all right. They were fine. But they had other interests. And Anna . . . They had never really talked about the future. The present was always too golden and clear. He had always avoided the future until that moment of revelation by the bridge. It came to him now that there must have been something instinctive, deliberate, about that avoidance. For almost in the moment when he had ceased to avoid it, truth and certainty had begun to merge with the beginnings of uncertainty. He could not talk of it to Anna. He could not talk of a dream and a common future while his mind heard a precise and certain voice, the rap of iron hammers on a barn wall.But he could talk to Bill, almost as if talking to himself, knowing that no flicker of amusement would cross that intent young face. And if—the thing he talked of—if it faded and vanished, Bill would never know.

  He said, “The house there, where the maples are. We’ll clear fifteen acres or so, next the road, for hay and oats. And some for pasture. The rest of it, down by the Channel and back to the Black Brook, can stay in woods. For now, anyway. There’s some beech trees down there, about the middle of the pasture. We’ll let them be . . . How d’you think the place’ll look, when we get the grass-seed and oats into it?”

  “Wonderful,” Bill said.

  No one had worked at The Place while Grant was away. In earlier winters he and James had cut firewood there and hauled it out over the wood road he had swamped, and up the main road, home. The place
was heavily timbered in red spruce, balsam fir and occasional clumps of hardwood.

  Grant glanced along the southern edge of the clearing, marking with his eye the middling-size spruce he could fall with an axe without trouble. Box-logs. He had to be thinking now about money. There was money in the bank, he didn’t know how much. They had saved his pay and the next-of-kin’s allowance for him. But when you were planning a house ...

  He cut his front notch, stepped round the tree and went to work. When the spruce fell, he began to trim, using short competent strokes, the axe held near its head. Bill began to pile the brush.

  They were working on the second tree when Anna came down the hauling-road. Grant was startled, and a little confused. And even in this confusion, a childish thought came to him. There was no way of describing her. If you paid special attention to her nose, her mouth, the shape of her face, it broke down the wholeness. It had taken him months, when he had first been conscious of her as a person, to notice the colour of her eyes, a dark and laughing blue.

  She sat down on the flat stump of a fir he and James had sawed down more than two years before, and laughed at them.

  She said, “Hello, boys; and how are they usin’ you?”

  Grant said, “Hi, Anna,” in a tone of mild questioning surprise. “Who let you out?”

  She laughed. “Well, I don’t know as I have to be let . . . It is kind of a nuisance, though, when you got to come scratchin’ through the woods to see a person’s friends.”

  Grant laughed and went on trimming. “Oh, Bill and me . . . we work for a living.”

  “Yes, I noticed that,” Anna said. “Bill manages to get across the road now and then, though. There’s work over at our place, too. We’ve got Bill trained so he can milk, now. He’s pretty good. You ought to come down some time and take a hand. I think we could make a milker out of you.”