The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Richard shook his head, “Mister man! . . . We couldn’t keep still. Harve had to laugh. Couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop. Not even when he took after us, him with a shotgun . . . All Harve could do was run, and fall down, and whoop with laughin’ and get up and run ...”

  He fell silent, and after a moment began again to speak.

  “I remember one time ... Do the kids still nest apples? I s’pose they do.”

  Grant said, “Sure, I guess so. We did.”

  Richard nodded. “They taste all right when you’ve left ‘em wrapped in grass . . . Henry Marshall had trees, along the back slope of his upper field. They wasn’t supposed to be picked, but Harve and me—we’d sneak a few, now and then.” He made a small laughing sound. “James couldn’t make up his mind. To tell on us or not. Never did, though . . . We had nests half a dozen places along the road to school, and through the back pasture. Half the time we’d take the long way, through the woods. S’posed to be a short cut. ..

  “Now and then we’d get to work eatin’ apples behind a slate, in school. Till Macnab caught up to us. Maybe you wouldn’t know about Macnab, last man teacher they had around here. Here for years. Here when I was born. There was a clump of alder out behind the school-house. When Macnab tanned anybody he’d send him out to cut his own switches. Half a dozen or so. Macnab’d swish them up and down and make a show of it, and pick out a good limber one and lay it into you. Cross the legs, if it was early fall or spring and you was barefooted . . . He sent Harve out to cut the switches for him and me.” Richard halted, remembering, and laughed. “What Harve did—there was a dead corner in that bunch’ve alders. Harve brought back a bundle’ve switches and laid ‘em down on Macnab’s desk. Macnab gets up and picks one and makes a swipe in the air. Breaks off in his hand, ‘v course. He picks up another one and slaps the desk with it. Breaks into three or four pieces.

  “Harve’s standin’ there, all the time, waitin’. Interested and all surprised, y’know. Sort of polite and regretful. By this time the whole school’s begun to snigger . . .”

  Richard meditated. “We must’ve got it proper, then, I s’pose. With the pointer, likely. But I don’t remember. All I remember’s the look of Macnab, and the look of Harve ...”

  They talked briefly of other things. Grant said he hoped it was all right, his speaking to Joe about cutting in The Place, if he ever got around to it and Richard could spare Joe.

  Sure, that was all right, Richard said. Eva’d wanted the kid to stay in school, but he wasn’t cut out for it. He’d be glad to have Joe chop with Grant. After a little he said almost abruptly, “Well, I mustn’t keep—,” and walked off to his row-boat on the inlet side of the beach.

  Grant walked home behind the jolting cart with a light pulsing elation singing in his flesh. His thoughts were careless, a drifting web of simple things ...

  Alders. He laughed in his mind. There were alders still, out back of the school-house.

  You couldn’t nail this feeling down to any sense of logic. One laughing glimpse or two across the darkness of a generation. But this was enough.

  He did not really think of it, but he could see, hear, feel, the colour and light. The talk, the laughter and the anger. The work, the sweat, and the wind cooling the sweat. Burning hayfields and spring freshets, the snow and the frost. The whole moving dream of the Shore, a generation gone.

  And in this at last he saw the face and heard the laughter of Harvey Marshall. Harvey, a Marshall, touched by the thing that pulsed in the Grahams, the Curries, the Neills, the McKees. The thing that was not exactly warmth, not sentiment, not . . . The thing that was alive, that was not cold doctrine or property or measured pride, but simple feeling. Life and death and achievement and failure. Laughter-wrinkles in a man’s face, and the taste of tears. He was not thinking consciously of all this as it touched himself. This was not thought, but feeling . . . From this day on he would know without thinking that all he did, and all he dreamed of, were woven into that.

  20

  By the third week in November Grant was at work along the fringes of the clearing in The Place, with Stewart and Joe McKee. It was early for work in the woods but he could not be fully satisfied with small tasks about the farm buildings and he did not feel ready yet to look for work in Copeland or The Bridge or The Harbour which would keep him away between Sundays from those daily tasks and from Stewart.

  Through the early part of the month they had cut fire-wood as the weather permitted. The swamps back of Graham’s Lake were still soft in spots, pooled with standing water from intermittent fall rains, but the rising land between the house and the lake was dry. A good deal of spruce and fir stood there. In the upper reaches of The Place, also, streaks of hardwood grew. There they had chopped birch and maple to lend staying quality to winter fires, and piled the cut wood beside old hauling-roads to be sledded out on snow.

  After ten days of this Grant had switched to his clearing south of the road and enlisted Joe.

  This was heavy stuff they worked in now, close-grained spruce and ancient hardwood that required back-breaking labour with the cross-cut. He was careful to include Stewart in all they did. The old man’s strength was up to swamping out roads and trimming and it was necessary that he have both the occupation and the companionship of work. But on the other end of a cross-cut Grant needed someone young and wiry like Joe.

  He made a simple deal with Joe. For every day they worked together in The Place they would work together later in McKee’s lower woods; Richard had told Joe he could cut pulpwood there. Joe, in the surge of eagerness to rush into manhood that went with his release from school, had a mind full of schemes for making money, of which that was one.

  The odd thing about it, Grant saw, was that Joe’s schemes were practical. Not mere dreams, but workable plans. Joe’s mind was fixed on getting away from Currie Head eventually, but he did not talk much about that. What filled his talk was the immediate future. He already had a job lined up at Sinclair’s mill when Rod Sinclair should be ready to saw shooks. Next spring they would tackle the pulpwood, and in the summer . . . Well, there was a salmon berth vacant off Gordons’. Frank Graham had an old net he’d probably sell reasonable. If Joe could persuade Richard to let him buy it with the mill money, and help him mend it, and there was a good run of salmon . . .

  Good plans. Plans compounded of small certainties and the eternal gambles of wind, weather, markets, the run of fish . . . the chances that added up to life on the Channel Shore.

  Grant listened to Joe while they chopped and sawed in The Place, and found in listening a quiet continuing enjoyment. His own life, too, was a blend now of certainties and gambles. In years past it had been all certainty. Almost all. On James Marshall’s place life came down as close to the rock of certainty as James could make it. The army, too, had been like that, unless you got into combat, and that was something he had missed. He had got used to certainty.

  But now the moorings were cast off. He was afloat on the same sea as Joe. Joe and all the rest of them. It seemed to him now that this was what he must have been looking forward to, this tingling sense of life half plan and half chance, in the days when he had traced his dream of the future here in The Place. But—he had been dreaming in terms of certainty or something close to it. He had not seen the contradiction.

  It was on the last day of the two weeks they worked in The Place, a Saturday, that Joe mentioned Hazel. The reference was incidental. Grant could not decide whether it was merely casual, made without thought, or made out of something like Eva’s pride of face, or made as a kind of confidence, a pledge of trust . . .

  He was to recall the remark days and weeks later, and years later. Years later, when all that remained of Joe McKee on the Channel Shore was memory. Memory, and an envelope now and then addressed to Richard and Eva in purple pencil, postmarked from northern Alberta. He would recall Joe’s voice and wonder. But it didn’t matter. Motiv
es—you couldn’t always pin them down. And it didn’t matter.

  Joe had been talking about his own scheme for getting out pulpwood. He said, “Look, Grant; why don’t you go after the trustees to let you cut the wood for the school-house? There’s a few dollars in it. And next year . . . Instead’ve foolin’ around, why don’t you get stumpage on a lot of places? Put in a crew and go after pulpwood big? You could make a go of it . . .”

  Grant laughed. “Maybe I will. Pulpwood . . . Would you give me a hand?”

  Joe said, seriously, “Sure,” and added, “If I’m still around here.”

  Grant said, ‘You’re really set on leaving, are you, Joe?”

  Joe said, a little self-consciously, as if this were something secret and privately important, something he hesitated to talk about, “Yeah. I’m goin’ all right, some time. West. Next year or the year after. That’s what I want a stake for. That’s all a man can do around here—raise a stake to get somewheres else.”

  Grant laughed to himself. “Well, maybe you’re right.”

  “Sure I’m right,” Joe said. “I’d’ve tried to get them to let me go west on the harvest excursion this fall—you can get clear to Saskatchewan for fifteen dollars—I’d’ve tried to go this fall, if it hadn’t been for Hazel ...”

  He stopped, not in embarrassment, but as if what he had already said carried the explanation far enough.

  Grant said, “Yes. It’d be hard for your father and mother to get along alone.”

  Hazel ... he had been on the point of asking how she was, how she was getting on. But he could find no words that would not sound like curiosity, probing, prodding.

  The moment lingered in his mind. Hazel. The oddly matter-of- fact way in which Joe had mentioned her. If it hadn’t been for Hazel ... As if Grant would understand the rest of it. And the flash of sudden wonder: Hazel, a girl he had known from babyhood; a girl who long ago from the height of her year or two of greater age had taken his hand sometimes on the way home from school when he was six or seven. In a city now which he had never seen, among people he did not know. People she did not know. He felt his mind astir again with the thing he had begun to see months ago. Years ago, it seemed now, on the steps at Frank Graham’s. The fatality in Stella Graham’s voice: what she can do—there’s nothing—

  This feeling remained in his thought. A sharp regretful consciousness of the things people had to face, other people as well as himself and the Gordons. Next morning, as he walked to church with Dan Graham and Stan Currie, joined at the cross-roads by Joe McKee, and as he listened with half his attention to the sermon, and as he stood around the church afterward, he was nagged by a troubled absent-mindedness.

  It was there when he got out of bed next morning and saw with the active part of his mind that the weather had hardened. A thread of strange sadness, woven into the fabric of private pain that lay there, far back of the day’s concerns. And yet, separate ...

  He went out to do the barn work and returned to the house for breakfast. Stewart, after eating, went out after his habit to scan the sky. With frost had come a break in the steely greyness of late November. The morning dusk was lightening; cold sunlight struck thinly through the kitchen’s east window and glanced along the crockery on the shelves of Josie’s cupboard.Grant finished his tea and rose and went to pick his cap and jacket from their nail near the window. He shrugged into the jacket, thinking that this morning he and Stewart had better fix up the hauling-road that led across Frank Graham’s land from the fire-wood they had cut in the back reaches of The Place. One or two soft spots needed poles put down. He felt the early sun on his face and glanced across the room. Josie sat by the table, her face lighted by the single window in the south wall.

  He had continued now and then to light for Josie small candles of conversation which might wake an answering spark in the grimness of her mood. He was careful in this. He dropped into light conversation only when some circumstance made the fact of speech natural and easy. Pressure could raise an awareness in them both, recognition of a barrier that must remain unrecognized if he were to continue doing what he had to do. Besides this, a small inward stubbornness had begun to grow. You couldn’t go on forever being sunny to a blank wall. He could feel at times an impatience with Josie, an irritation that wryly amused him.

  But he spoke now without any design at all, the thought feeling its way into words from the simple image in his mind.

  He said, “You know, next spring-we might put a couple of new windows in, here.” He glanced speculatively at the single windows in east and south walls. “Make it brighter.”

  His eyes ranged, seeing in imagination new frames set close to those already there so that two narrow windows would make in effect one wide one. Experiment. People didn’t put in windows like that on the Channel Shore. It would look attractive, and give Josie a wonderfully sunny kitchen. He could feel the satisfaction in working with wood, cutting through the brown old boards, fitting new frames, re-shingling around them, painting.

  Josie said nothing. Presently he became aware of her silence and turned his head to look at her, and realized that he had spoken out of the thought within him, without design. Her fingers lay idle in her lap. She sat erect, head slightly lifted and slightly turned to the window, and on her face the look withdrawn, hard, unnameable.

  He was suddenly at a loss, feeling his forward-looking imaginings darken and drain away. He moved toward the door and stood at the opposite end of the table from Josie, not looking directly at her, and when he spoke it was out of his long impatience, though his words were soft.

  “It’s—I know how you must feel about Anna.” He thought, how I feel . . . But that was something not to be said, not when you had lost the right . . . “But—well, she’d hate to see you . . . she’d hate . . . it’s . . .”

  He shook his head, feeling for a moment the relief of speech but no longer able to find the words for what he was trying to say. Vaguely sorry now that he had spoken at all, that the thought had broken through.

  Josie’s voice startled him. She spoke shortly, with a kind of anger. The words sprang like beads of blood in the track of a knife-graze: “Anna’s dead. There’s no shame—” She cut the sentence off abruptly and went on, the only expression in her voice a grudging exasperation, a thin contempt; an impatient astonishment that this should need saying, that anyone lived who could not guess: “There’s a girl alive ... a child, maybe . . . Don’t talk about it . . .”

  Grant stood where he was for a second, his hand on the latch, and then went out quickly to join Stewart. There was nothing he could say.

  Hazel McKee . . . Josie Gordon . . .

  Death among earthly things was final. In time there would come a placid acceptance, about Anna. Years from now Josie would reach the sort of peace that enclosed Stewart, mercifully carried in a space of days far down the healing road of Time.

  Shame was another thing. To Josie, shame was another thing. This now he understood. A time would come when the sound of Anna’s name would be a small and distant bell, a sweet faint ringing in the mind. But what of Hazel McKee?

  There was more in this than a revelation of Josie. He had been thinking of Richard and Hazel as people caught in the snare of a hard disgrace. The thought of them as people, known and liked, was an ache in the heart. But the nature of the disgrace . . . he had seen it as something on the screen of a motion picture, in the plot of a story. Now the heart of it was clear, a thing of flesh and blood, as much a part of life as the people who faced it: There’s a girl alive ... a girl alive . . . a child . . .

  21

  Afterward, when the detail of things planned and done that fall and winter was blurred by time, and other memories, and crowding labour, Grant could never recall exactly when it was that the final resolution formed itself. Nor was he conscious of a definite motive.

  The earlier decision to free himself of the ties of blood and to t
ranslate this freedom into service to the father and mother of Anna Gordon had been clear and sharp. He could say where the sun stood in the sky when Bill Graham crossed the turnip rows with the word of Anna’s death. He would always remember the face of the clock in Gordons’ kitchen as he touched a match to fire. Clumsily, he could have put reasons for those decisions into words.

  But years later when he came to talk of it all, once, to Renie Fraser, he could not say when it was that this further decision became the shape of something he must do. Or why, exactly. Many things came into it. Things seen and heard and felt over many days. The face and voice of Richard McKee when he spoke of Harvey Marshall, and of Hazel. The face and voice of Josie Gordon. The look and manner of young Joe. The memory of a hand in his on the road from school. The memory of words heard through a kitchen window. The imagined voice of the Channel Shore ...

  The thing that happened in his mind was like the discovery at last of meaning in a sequence of events imperfectly understood. And the development of understanding was such, that, looking back, he seemed always to have known.

  But he did not feel the urgency until he was embarked upon it, and his motive lay submerged in feeling, deeper even than the feeling that had freed his heart from James. He was never sure even after he had talked to Renie that he had snared the truth in words.

  The only certainty in his mind in the days following Josie’s revelation of her heart was the need to see Richard McKee. That, and a current of inner excitement, like the thing he had felt as he faced the clock in Gordons’ kitchen. But far less well defined, and purged, or almost purged, of grief and the dregs of anger.

  There were things he had to know that only Richard could tell him.