The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  So now, listening to Dave Stiles mention the clearness of the weather, the fact that they were early through with digging, he felt the fear for an instant and felt it pass. He summoned up a grin as Dave put his horse in motion, and went on down into the field with Stewart, confident again.

  They sorted potatoes, filled tubs, loaded them into the cart; and he was close to happiness. At the edge of thought the shadows lurked, the fading fear of talk and people and distrust of his own competence; and the darker shadow which would never wholly fade. But in work, in talk with Stewart, he could feel the hard and forward-looking peace at the core of his existence. Numberless things, besides his single-minded resolution, came into this. The firmness of the turf beneath his feet, the strain of heaving up a loaded tub, the look of Frank Graham’s house across the field. The weather, even.

  He straightened and stretched the kinks out of his back and looked eastward along the shore, at the dark slopes of spruce and fir, scarved with red and yellow. He had learned long since that nothing in nature could close the wound of loss, that familiar things, familiar beauty, could be a shame and a reproach. But the shore today, the simple look of it, was part of what he felt.

  They were loading the cart for the last time when he caught the faint sound of a distant tuneless whistling and looked around. Dan Graham had climbed the line fence and was crossing the field toward them, looking oddly dressed up. He hadn’t changed into overalls from the knickerbockers Mrs. Graham insisted on for school.

  Grant picked an apple from the grass under an ancient tree at the corner of the patch and threw it hard. Dan plucked it out of the air and bit into it and crossed the dug-up ground, chewing. There was something about Dan . . . small for his age and cocky and talkative. Grants mind ran briefly on the Grahams. Young Bill was gone, a part of that previous existence . . . But Frank and Dan . . . There was nothing in their manner, except perhaps a pointed friendliness, to suggest that anything he had done or was doing was unusual. In a way this brought home the oddity, because it was unusual, and to ignore this was to emphasize the strangeness. But ... no touch of fear, no test of poise ... It was good to have the Grahams.

  Dan stood for a little, crunching the apple, viewing the cleaned- out potato-patch judicially until he got round to what he had come to say. They were going back to the lake that night, he said, finally. Himself and his father and Hugh Currie and Stan and Alec Neill and Harry. There’d been a north wind all day, what there was of it. The trout should be biting. “Thought you fellahs might like—”, Dan said. “You got any gear?”

  Grant laughed, Dan’s adult mannerisms rippling the surface of his mind.

  Stewart said thoughtfully, “Pole in the shop loft, somewhere. Used to be, anyway. Hooks in the chest, I sh’ld think. You could rig a line with net twine ...”

  Grant laughed again. “All right. Maybe we will, Dan. See you up there, if we get around to it.”

  As they crossed the road behind the loaded cart he glanced back once to watch Dan climbing the fence into Grahams’ field. Except for Frank and Dan, his contacts with people in these last three weeks had been deliberately sought out, a test of fortitude, or faced in that spirit. It was strange and pleasant to look forward with no such purpose, no such bracing of the mind . . . forward to the evening . . .

  The woods round Graham’s lake stopped abruptly some twenty feet from the water’s edge at the top of a low bank. From the foot of the bank to the water and on out until it fell away steeply into depth, the shore was a shallow rim of stones. No surf beat there: the stones were small, dark and angular, un- rubbed by the violence of water and unbleached by sun.

  Along the western stretch of the lake’s southern beach the water deepened sharply fairly close to shore. Here earlier Curries and Grahams and Gordons had pulled together narrow stone standards, on each of which a man in rubber boots could get within casting distance of trout-water. Each fall in early digging-time, and the weather fine, men and boys would come at nightfall with shaven fir poles, twine lines rigged with hooks and whittled net-cork floats ...

  Grant found the Curries and Grahams and the Neills already on the beach when he emerged from Gordons’ hauling-road. He walked up the stony strip toward them. Alec was still rigging his line; the others stood half-way to their knees in water on the standards, motionless and silent, peering out at their bits of cork on dark water. Now and then one would lift his pole, let the hook swing in to a waiting hand, examine his bait and whip the line out again. An air of wind still blew from the north, setting up the smallest suspicion of a lop at the water’s edge, drifting the corks gradually shoreward. Grey froth stirred in the slight land-wash, the dried foam of yesterday’s wind.

  Alec Neill said, low-toned, as he baited a hook, “Hello, Grant. . . You got here . . . Where’s Stewart?”

  Grant said, “Decided he’d stay home ... I’m wearing his rubber boots...”

  Alec grunted. “Well, he’s not missing much. Nobody’s got a bite yet.”

  They waded out on adjoining standards, Grant thinking idly that there would be no point in explaining to Alec that Stewart was deep in Nicholas Nickleby. The fact that Stewart was taking to reading again in idle moments, that he no longer followed Grant with his eyes when some small circumstance called them apart, was a thing for private satisfaction, a step forward in the task he had set himself. It was not a matter for talk.

  The last of the wind died. The lake lay smooth and dark in a kind of fluent stillness, circled by darker woods ragged against a scarcely lighter sky, where slow cloud blurred out the risen moon. It was good to stand in rubber boots on piled stones in the falling dark, straining to see a floating cork on shadowed water; with other men, on other jetties of stone, and water chill round booted ankles ...

  Far out beyond the corks scarcely discernible circles began to appear. A trout leaped clear of the water and splashed back.

  Frank Graham grunted. “Flies. They won’t go for worms when they’re jumpin’.” Almost at once he whipped back his rod. There was a sound of tearing leaves in the alders on the bank above the beach, the small thumping on stones and moss of a landed trout, the flash of its belly ...

  Now it was Alec Neill’s rod springing back, a commotion as Alec splashed ashore, and good-natured cursing: “A damn eel! Hold still, you slippery bastard; if you swallah me hook—!”

  Frank Graham said “Sh-h” and made a small sound of disapproval and then laughed. Somehow when Alec Neill swore it wasn’t swearing.

  Here in the chill of an October night, in this renewal of an old pursuit, Grant came close to living in the moment. Felt the cold, heard and felt the slap of water, sensed companionship. Memories of other nights like this, and the warmth of kitchens afterward, merged with this, were part of it. But regard for the past and concern for the future were very faint, low-lying at the mind’s horizon.

  The tiny circular ripple of his cork going down wakened him from the stillness of this endless moment within the present. Instinctively he whipped the trout out of the water and through the air, stumbled ashore to unhook and string the small threshing body on an alder-fork. As he turned to bait up and wade out again, Stan Currie’s rod arched and swung ...

  The night grew dark and lightened. The rim of clouds drifted to show an edge of moon; a loon laughed. And all at once the time was over.

  They stowed their rods among the stumps of trees along the bank, compared fish, began to pick their way single file up Grahams’ hauling-road. There was scant opportunity for talk as they felt their way through the woods, but once they had reached cleared land at the top of the rise, it began. Talk of digging, ploughing, threshing, and of the men and boys engaged in these pursuits.

  The darkness here was a silver light, deep as the sky, the Channel luminous, the stubble barred with black shadows. They made a little knot of men and boys for a few minutes by Frank Graham’s gate, saying almost nothing, reluctant to go indoors.Ev
entually Hugh Currie said, “Well-Alec?” He turned homeward with Stan.

  Alec Neill said, “No, I’m out’ve chewin’, Hugh. I got to go down and see if my credit’s good with Felix . . ^ You go on home, Harry.”

  He fell into step beside Grant as Frank and Dan went into the house.

  In an atmosphere faintly altered by absence of others, he said, “How’s old Stewart anyway? Better?”

  Grant said he thought so. He thought Stewart was coming along all right.

  Alec said, “Sure. He’s all right. He’ll be all right. But they need somebody there. Him and Josie, both. It’s a good thing, you stickin’ around ...”

  Grant was startled. This was close to putting into words what must remain unsaid. Anyone but Alec Neill ...

  But Alec left it at that. When he spoke again it was about the work around the place. Stewart had never been much of a farmer, Alec said. No system. He asked casually, “What d’you think you’ll do with that strip by the woods? You ploughed up quite a piece there. That field ain’t been broke up for years.”

  Grant’s mind halted. The ploughed strip ... He hadn’t even thought of what they would put into it. All he had been thinking about was the occupation the ploughing afforded.

  He said, “Oats. Oats, I s’pose. With a grass-seed and clover mix.”

  They had reached Gordons’ gate. He could see Stewart sitting by the lighted window, bent over the table, reading.

  He said, “Good night, Alec,” and went in.

  There was something in this, some small thing Alec had said . . . Like a light coming on in a room far-off, revealing against the lamp the shade of hoped-for things.

  He could not tell at once why this was so. The faint pleasant puzzlement lived in the back of his mind as he crossed the doorstep and put his three trout in the wash basin and carried them into the kitchen to show Stewart and Josie.

  He went out to sit on the back steps then and cleaned the fish, and when this was done came into the porch and pumped cold water into the basin. After he had washed his hands he stood for a little in the open back door, letting his sight run over the moonlit fields and woods, hearing the soft grumbling murmur of the Channel. Josie, behind him, was closing the damper of the stove, preparing to follow Stewart to bed. Grant turned, shut the door and hooked it and said to her, “This kind of a night—it’s nice enough, you could soak in it.”

  Josie turned away and closed the book Stewart had left open on the table and placed it on the window sill. She took a small lamp from the lamp shelf over the table and lit it and blew out the larger one Stewart had been reading by. Her voice was expressionless as she said, “Good night,” and turned and went down the hall toward the bedroom.

  Grant stood by the table for a moment, the faint vague pleasure ebbing from his mind. Josie . . . never a light word, a friendly glance, a smile . . . He shook his head and picked up the lamp and went into the hall and carefully upstairs.

  He was touched again by the thing he could almost forget at times: the tight-rope feeling; and with this a small unreasoning anger. He shook this away. There was nothing in the deal he had made with Josie that implied warmth, that said she had to like it. . .

  The thought drifted from him as he undressed and got into bed. His mind calmed. As he lay at the edge of sleep the things he had to do marshalled themselves before him. Drains to dig . . . firewood to cut . . . more land to plough . . .

  The faint indefinable pleasure he had felt at Alec Neill’s words flowed back . . . and now he saw what it was. What d’you think you’ll do with that strip by the woods? That wasn’t the kind of question . . . That wasn’t the sort of thing you asked a man, if you were doubtful. You didn’t ask what he planned to plant or sow unless you took it for granted . . . Unless you knew, without thinking, he’d be here to do it . . .

  Meetings on the road and contacts at Katen’s had hardened his sensitivity, shown him that he fitted into the pattern of day to day, the present. This was something that went a little beyond that, a further step.

  His spark of thought leaped a gap in the moving mind. Without knowing how he had got there, he found himself thinking of The Place, letting himself think of it. Feeling not shame and revulsion but interest and anticipation, anticipation and doubt; and finally, something like resolution. James. No sense putting it off. He would have to talk to James.

  18

  Grant stood by the gate and watched the buggy disappear round the turn; Sunday morning, and Stewart and Josie off to Mass. He waited for a little, his hands on the gate-pickets, his mind almost empty of thought, consciously idle, concerned with surface things—clouds banked behind the Islands, wind flattening the smoke from Grahams’ chimney, hardened mud ruts in the road— but knowing that in a moment it must return to a harder reality, the past and present and the future, the immediate thing he had to do.

  He flexed his shoulders finally and made an impatient movement and turned toward the house. In the porch he threw off his mackinaw, pumped water into the basin and washed face and hands and neck. Upstairs, he drew the flowered curtain back from the alcove in his room, took down the blue suit, and began to change his clothes.

  Church . . . This was a harder thing than any he had yet attempted. To appear among the gathered men and women of James Marshall’s generation . . . But the need to see James had been growing in him since Thursday night, the night at the lake. And the way to see him, first, was casually and in public. This was, in a way, the last thing left unfaced.

  He wedged a collar-button into the neckband of his shirt and affixed the collar, thinking momentarily with a twinge of affectionate regret about Aunt Jane. She had been careful to include the one white shirt he owned and two starched collars in the suitcase of clothes Fred had brought down the morning of the funeral ...

  He frowned as he worked his arms into the shirt, dissatisfied at a memory, ashamed of it; and irked at himself for feeling this way, for caring, now, about the way in which he had confirmed to James the decision voiced in Gordons’ hallway ... A brief written note, given to Dan Graham to mail at McKees’. Childish to do that, to write, formally, through the post office. He shook his head. What else could he have done? Once the word was said any deliberate attempt to explain had become impossible . . .

  He uttered a wordless sound of exasperation as he hunched into the tight serge coat. You made a clean swift decision that freed you from doubt and fear, lifted you out of anger and remorse; in one clear moment you saw the answer, saw it all . . . And then, you learned that decision in itself was not enough; that whatever new plane your life was lived on, there were still people you must meet and talk to, relationships you had to make, customs you had to follow. And an inner something, almost as persistent as the hard resolution that shaped your days, that checked you, kept you questioning your acts . . . Was there, he wondered, anyone in the world who could step free, not caring . . .? He thought suddenly of Anse Gordon.

  The thought of Anse startled him. For no conscious reason, then, his mind began to run tranquilly. If he could have cut clear, gone away, he thought, none of these problems would live to plague him. Only the other, the endless guilt ... He saw now almost as a new thing that he had never thought of departure, had seen no answer anywhere but on the Channel Shore.

  Well, that was that. And now there was something to be said. Life to be lived. Meetings with people in ones and twos and at Katen’s had given him a sense of precarious ease. The evening at the lake and Alec Neill’s words had carried him beyond that to the sense of having reached a definite objective from which the view was longer, the steps of life from season to season instead of from day to day. Well, some sort of relationship with James must be established. You couldn’t live in a place . . .

  He had realized this from the first. Now he could afford to think about it; almost look forward to it, to getting it done.

  He went downstairs slowly and crossed the road
and walked up the verge of grass toward Grahams’. He could hear Dan’s voice in the barn: “Get over there!” and the clink of harness.

  He went into the house in the usual way by the kitchen door and heard Mrs. Graham making her regular Sunday morning effort: “You’ll be coming up with us this morning, won’t you, Frank?”

  And Frank’s voice: “Well . . . look, now, Stell. If I go up in the buggy it’ll just mean Ede’ll have to walk—”

  Frank was lying on the lounge in the dining-room in vest and trousers and socks. He looked up and saw Grant grinning in the doorway between dining-room and kitchen and swung his feet to the floor and sat up.

  “Well—I s’pose I could walk, if I had to. You goin’ up, Grant?”

  “I was thinking about it,” Grant said.

  As he passed the Marshall place with Frank and Dan, Grant had an absurd apprehension. He glanced down the slope from the road and saw that the three ash trees were there, their leaves turning slightly in the wind. He had had a reasonless feeling that one of those trees might have been chopped down ...

  At the cross-roads they caught sight of Fred and Will ahead of them. Fred looked back and saw them and waited, and they walked together in a group, up past the school-house, edging over to the shoulders of the road now and then to let a buggy pass. One of these was driven by James, with Jane on the seat beside him. He lifted his whip in greeting, going by at a jog.

  All the way up the hill to the church Grant was conscious of that buggy slowly climbing ahead of them, hardly faster than they walked. When they reached the church James was hitching Polo to the fence of the surrounding yard. They passed him and went through the gate and up the narrow gravel path toward the building. It was not quite time for service to begin. The women had gone inside and Grant could hear Ida Freeman coaxing lugubrious parts of tunes out of the organ, but a knot of men and boys stood around the open door. Sam Freeman, Clem Wilmot and his brother Lee, Alfred Laird ... In a moment he would be one of that group, and so would James.