James crossed the grass outside the fence and came up the path behind them. He nodded to the Wilmots and Sam Freeman and Alf Laird, said, “Good morning, Frank,” and, precisely casual, “Well, Grant.”
Grant said, “Good morning, sir.”
Politeness. Indifferent recognition, neither warm nor cold.
Whatever passion of sorrow or anger lay behind the even glance of James’s eyes, or hardened the face masked by that careful beard, there was no open hint of it. For a moment, meeting that glance, Grant had been shaken by fear, regret, all the old sensitivities he had tried to banish from his flesh. The moment ebbed away and left him poised and quiet.
He would not have cared too deeply if James had glanced at him without words, as if he did not exist. Not too deeply. In’ some ways there would have been relief in that. But this was best, this outward indifference and cool recognition and surface calm. Let them look at that and make what they liked of it.
He knew enough not to try to talk business on a Sunday. When the service ended, in the bustle around the door as the congregation shook hands with the minister and gathered outside to linger and gossip and depart, he moved to James’s side on the steps. He said, “Uncle James—some time it’s convenient . . .”
James said, “Come to the house tomorrow night.”
Tomorrow night.
He entered the house through the back door. Jane was alone in the kitchen, mending a dress in the lamplight at the table. The room was overly warm from a fire in the range and he caught the fresh smell of molasses cookies. Oddly, at this moment he realized that he now knew what the smell of Josie Gordon’s kitchen was. A dried-soap smell, the smell of a woman’s house dress.
Jane smiled at him and he noted that at a time like this when you might expect fussiness, she was quiet and self-possessed. She said on a note of chiding friendliness, “Well, Grant . . . It’s about time . . . Your Uncle James is in The Room.”
A cheerful fire was going in the Franklin. James lowered his paper to his knees. Grant saw that as usual he had changed from working-clothes to a suit for the evening. He said, “Sit down. Sit down, Grant,” and raised the paper again and appeared to read it for a moment before he put it aside on the table by his chair.
How to begin . . . There was no point now in explanation. All that was done with. Let it go. James would want no explanation. Whatever conviction and condemnation already lay fixed in James’s mind were not to be changed by words.
Grant said, “Well, sir, I was thinking about The Place.” In spite of his resolution his voice was hesitant, full of doubt and deference. “I’d like to—like to make some kind of arrangement. Like to buy it, if—”
James said nothing for a minute. In this small period of silence a curious insight came to Grant. It was almost as if he were inside James’s mind. And what he felt was this: that James would never be able to think directly of a certain moment in Stewart Gordon’s house without a surge of hate. But hatred of what? Circumstance, perhaps. Grant could not feel hatred for himself in James. What James felt for him now, he thought, was a kind of sad revulsion.
He heard James’s word, matter-of-fact and half-thoughtful, “Something could be arranged, I suppose.”
James had been on the point of asking, “Do you plan to stay here, then? On the Shore?” He caught the question back. He could not afford the indignity of curiosity.
He thought: I could stop this boy. I could refuse the thing he wants. Refuse to see or speak to him. There would be a hard satisfaction in that. Not revenge. Revenge was beneath the dignity of one who . . . Revenge was unrighteous. Not revenge, but the application of a stern and sudden justice. He had a disturbing thought that perhaps there was an obligation on him to apply that justice. He rejected this. Mercy. There was such a thing as mercy. His mind began immediately to question this rejection, as he had questioned it in all the bitter endless wrangling that had gone on in the dark of his thought for days. If he cast out Grant completely, he would go down in the estimation of his neighbours, these people here at The Head. Not in their surface dealings with him, but in their hearts when they thought of him. Was he being swayed by this? Was he letting this determine his acts and colour his belief in what was right?
He shook it all away in a hard impatience, angry at all of it, angry at Harvey Marshall across the years, angry at himself, angry at this boy with Harvey’s face, with nameless blood in Marshall veins, who sat there opposite him across the flickering fire.
He said evenly, “The place cost five hundred dollars—back in nineteen-eleven.” He meditated a little. “The wood itself should be worth close to that now. If you want it at that price, I can deed it over. You can give me a note if you’re pressed,”
Opposite the hauling-road into The Place, Grant met Joe McKee going home from Katen’s. They lingered a little, talking in the dark. He recalled that Joe had finished grade eight and dropped out of school this fall. Before they parted, Grant said: “Joe, I s’pose there’s a good deal to do around home. But. . . Well, if you’ve got any time to spare, maybe a little later we could get together. I could use a man with an axe, now and then.”
When Joe had gone on up the road, he went down the hauling- road into the clearing for the first time in many weeks. In the dark there was nothing he could see, but he could visualize the stumps, the piled logs, the brush; and the way it would look as the clearing widened. He stayed only a little while, getting the feel of it.
19
On a mild morning in late October Grant stood by the shop door, for the moment idle. The last of the roots were in, the turnips and the garden stuff. He had fashioned and hung a new outside cellar door and located and patched a persistent leak in the porch roof. The drains were working, the cellar dry. For a little there was time.
Behind him in the shop Stewart busied himself with twine and net-needle. Grant glanced at his face and his moving hands and away again, with something catching in his throat. For days, weeks, the attachment had been growing.
He thought again with a sense of thankfulness of Stewart’s peculiar insulation from the effects of this bitter year.
Once, as they walked the hauling-road back to the lake, looking over the spruce and fir that still stood there, and which they would get at later for winter firewood, the old man had said, conversationally: “We cut quite a bit of stuff in here from time to time, Anse and me.” The oddity was not in the words but in the tone. As if time and the companion he spoke of were half a lifetime away.
This curious illusion of time drawn out was there also in his manner toward Grant. It was as if Grant had been around the house and the woods and the fields for years. Stewart had never questioned his presence, never taken thought, for all anyone could tell, except perhaps in those early moments of shaken puzzlement, of the strange circumstance that Grant Marshall should be sleeping upstairs in the Gordon house, doing the barn work, chopping the wood.
He took an almost childlike satisfaction in everything they did together. As he watched him now, Grant was startled by a thought that seemed to sum the image of this present Stewart: for the first time in life he was enjoying the help and friendship of a younger man, living in his house. A son.
But Josie . . . Grant put that thought away. Thinking about it got you nowhere. It was something time would have to solve, and there were other things that claimed his attention now. For the dream was back. A dream austere and realistic. He was not thinking now of a house like James Marshall’s and a high-shouldered barn, but of a single storey, three rooms perhaps, and for the time being no barn at all. A place for a man alone, a man who must be free within the limits of the Shore to move where the business of making a living called him. To Morgan’s Harbour to work at loading the pulpwood steamers; to Forester’s Pond if they started dredging there; to Rod Sinclair’s mill, cleating box ends, when nothing else offered. Even beyond the Shore, perhaps, to the timber-cutting in the west end o
f the county, if a man could do that and still fulfil his duty here ...
But at the moment there was no task that immediately pressed. He said meditatively, “May as well haul eel-grass this afternoon, I guess.”
Stewart glanced at the sky and the Channel and nodded. “Yes. All right. It’ll soon be time to bank ...”
After noon Grant harnessed the mare to the manure cart and turned up the road. He walked beside the cart, the reins loose in his hand, glad for once to be alone. Feeling his body’s strength and lightness. Glad to be on his feet instead of riding the jolting cart; but aware of the wheels jolting in the ruts, the faint smell of dried manure-dust, the brown shining of the mare’s flank.
Only one thing troubled him. The thought he had put away returned, faintly nagging, and for a moment he let this occupy his mind. At dinner he had met again the cold reserve in Josie. He had made a remark about Dan Graham, laughed a little about Dan—he’d stopped complaining about being kept in school. The new teacher had them all working for her, Ede said . . .
From Josie there was no response.
Many times in the course of these last weeks he had tried to draw her into the casual circle that enclosed himself and Stewart, and at its outer edges, people like the Grahams. Comments on day-to-day incidents, facts, conditions, that were woven into the formless pattern of the Shore. Josie made the answers necessary to close the subject. She avoided open curtness, but that was allAgain he told himself he had no reason to expect more than that. There was nothing in the agreement he had won from Josie, the day after Anna’s death, to lead him to expect the warmth of friendliness. His mind went back to it . . .
He had been on the watch for a chance to speak, from the moment he had faced the clock in Josie’s kitchen that bleak morning and known what he had to do. But in the end the opportunity had come by accident. He had been filling up the kitchen wood-box, carrying in armloads of split softwood while Frank Graham looked after Stewart in the shop and Stella Graham and Mame McDonald and Josie made whatever arrangements they had to make in the room where Anna lay. He had turned from piling wood in the box, quietly so as not to make a disturbance, and found Josie standing in the kitchen, watching him.
She said, as if the words were drawn from her grudgingly by some instinct of courtesy, “It’s been good of you—”
Earlier he would have been embarrassed but by then his resolution had given him a sense of presence, a kind of poise.
He had said, “No, it’s the least—,” and then, carefully, “I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. Thinking about Mr. Gordon. There ought to be someone ... If you wouldn’t mind—I’d like to stay here a while. Give him a hand, a few weeks perhaps. Or somewhere handy. * At Grahams’, if—”
She had said, after a pause, “Your people—,” and gone on to try to find the words to explain the impossibility of the thing he planned.
He had shaken his head. “No. That doesn’t come into it. It’s time . . . Well, I’m getting—I’m on my own now, anyway. That doesn’t come into it.”
She had said, finally, “Well—,” and made a movement of the shoulders. When he returned to the kitchen with another load of wood she was gone.
There had been nothing in that, and nothing in the wordless way in which she had directed him to an upstairs room when the night watch was over, to lead him to expect anything more than the bare tolerance he found in her now. And yet he felt a disappointment that no warmth was there. It was not merely that this was withheld from himself. There was no warmth now for anyone.
There was something in it and beyond it which he did not fully understand. The fact of grief. That was understandable. Now and then he had surprised on Josie’s face a look of lost and utter desolation. That was understandable. Anna . . . The dream of Anna. But ...
He knew something of that. He could share that. The room they had put him in was Anna’s. Someone had cleared away all evidence of her one-time presence. Closets and bureau drawers were empty. There were only hooked mats and a home-made wooden bedstead to show that this room had ever been inhabited.
He knew it had been Anna’s from the fact that the only other upstairs room which was finished and papered had been occupied by Anse. The gunner’s uniform and other odds and ends still hung in the closet.
Once in settling away the few shirts he owned he had noticed a faint ridge under the yellowing newspaper pages with which the bottom of the drawer was covered. He turned the paper up, idly, and faced his own handwriting. An envelope, the envelope in which he had enclosed his last letter to Anna from the transit camp in England. The letter itself was gone.
The thing that he had resolutely accepted and thrust into the background of his mind had caught him by the throat then and held him stricken . . . Dead ... No longer a face, a voice, a dream in the past and a golden urgency in the future . . .
There had been other moments like this. There still were. There still would be. It was the same thing, he supposed, that drew that look out of Josie Gordon’s heart and carved it on her face. And yet ... people who had known sorrow—they accepted it. They might feel that never again could they know joy—and yet they achieved somehow a pleasantness; they let the little companionships, the quiet jokes, come into the habits of day to day.
The moments of visible grief he could understand, but not the continuing iron calm.
He shrugged this out of his mind again as he turned the mare down Currie’s road. The weather would harden soon, and he could then get to work in the woods. In Gordons’ woods between the fields and the lake first, for fire-wood and fence rails. Then, The Place. Long straight butts for lumber, tops for pulpwood and box-logs.
He would mark out soon the place where he would build, and in the spring . . . Some of the stumps were too tough for a hand- puller or even a horse. Simpler and faster with dynamite. Sam Freeman knew about dynamite. He would get Sam down.
He moved up to walk* beside the cart, down through Rob’s yard and round the inlet shore, hardly conscious of the familiar landscape he was passing. He slapped the mare’s rump with looped reins to urge her over the hump of Currie’s beach. There, on the southwesterly slope of the Head, the eel-grass lay in tide-rows, thrown up by the wash of seas, grey-brown and dry on the surface of its ragged folds, green-black and heavy to the fork beneath.
For generations men along the Shore had come to this beach in the fall of the year to harvest eel-grass, pile it in door-yards, pack it into low plank-walled tunnels round the foundations of their houses as winter approached.
He had filled the box of the cart and was heaping it with the heavy dark grass when he heard a sound from one of the huts. Richard McKee had closed and padlocked his hut door and was walking slowly down the beach toward him, rubber boots crunching in the stones.
Must have been straightening away something left undone last summer, Grant thought. Fishing at Currie Head had ceased months ago. He thrust his fork into the cartload of wet eel-grass and brushed his hands and turned to speak to Richard.
Richard said, “Bankin’ . . . Hows Stewart?”
Grant said, “Oh, he’s fine, Mr. McKee. Fine.” On a faintly mischievous impulse he added, “He’s knitting a hen coop.”
Richard raised his head and said mildly, “He’s what?”
Grant said, “Knitting a hen coop. Josie complained. The old coop was—Well, we’d no laths or poles. Wire either. Mr. Gordon made himself a mesh-board, smaller than the one he uses for the nets. We got some twine, coarse stuff, and he went to work on it.”
A slow grin flickered over Richard’s face. He said with a kind of wondering sigh, “Knittin’ a hen coop,” and then, curiously, “That your idea, Grant? ... Or Stewart’s?”
Grant grinned, “Well-”
Richard threw back his head in a short gust of laughter. It came to Grant that he had rarely heard Richard McKee laugh, had seldom shared words with him at all, for that matter
.
Before his time in the army it had been usual to see quite a lot of Mr. McKee in haying time, and when he called for the mail, or at church. But not to talk to. He had always felt a warmth, an instinctive liking, but the reticence in them both had come between. And always when they had worked together at haying, there was James in the background, dignified and humourless.
It was strange to find laughter in Richard, particularly now. Grant thought: this was the pleasantness, the acceptance of small laughters, despite grief and the memory of grief, that he could not find in Josie...
Richard had lapsed into silence, resting an elbow along a wheel of the cart. He said, “A hen coop . . .” He seemed to wander in thought for a moment and then said, meditatively, “Harve . . .” He shook his head slightly. “That kind of a thing—some way ... it reminds me of Harve ...”
Grant glanced at him and waited and said, “Harve . .
Richard came back out of his thought. “What? Oh—your father. He was a great one for . . . You never knew what to expect . . .”
Grant said carefully, “My father was—a friend of yours, was he, Mr. McKee?”
Richard glanced at him a little quizzically. He answered slowly.
“Friend?” He seemed to be turning the word over in his mind, like an unfamiliar thing. “Harve used to come over to the house to bunk with me, when old Henry’d—when your Grandfather’d let him . . .”
He paused, searching in thought for some memory, some incident, that fitted the meditative mention of Harvey Marshall that had come to his lips in the presence of Harvey’s son.
“We had mushrat traps out back of the lake, one fall. Mr. William Freeman—before your time; you wouldn’t remember him; Sam’s grandfather—old Mr. Freeman used to trap too. A mean man, kind of. He’d spring our traps with sticks if we set too close to him—that kind’ve thing. So Harve—” Richard stopped to examine the memory—”So we took a dozen or so salt herrin’ out with us one mornin’. We sprung old Mr. William’s traps and left herrin’ in the jaws and got down in the bushes to watch. It was comin’ on light when he got to the line ...”
The Channel Shore Page 19
