The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  He had walked up to McKees’ for the mail several times since his meeting with Richard on the beach; with Dan and once or twice with Joe while Joe was working in The Place. He had sensed in Richard a private welcome. But always there had been others there. Eva, silently dispensing papers, breaking her silence now and then with a little rush of talk, remembering her pride and the front she must put up. People from up the school-house road, or Alec Neill. Or Fred or Will. Now and then Aunt Jane.

  He wanted to see Richard alone, to share again in the companionship sensed on the beach. And he wanted to ask a question.

  In the afternoon of the last day in November he left Stewart splitting wood in the door-yard and went up to McKees’ alone.

  A raw day. The road’s muddy shoulders were hardened, the ruts and gutters skimmed with ice. Light snow fell thinly and he noted this with satisfaction. A decent snowfall, and he could get going, get the fire-wood to the door-yard and logs to the mill. He felt an urge to have this done, to get this place of Gordons’ set for the siege of winter, and the stuff for his own house ready for the saw. The logs for the house lumber could wait, for that matter. But he had to have snow. He glanced up at the sky, muffled in a high dark sea of grey, and saw the snow was there.

  There were sounds from the shop—the dull thump of a wooden mallet on iron. Richard was splitting out staves. He glanced up as Grant came into the little building and again he saw the nameless welcome. A pot-bellied iron stove stood in the middle of the shop. Richard had a fire going. He put the froe and mallet down, waved a hand in the direction of the heat, moved toward the stove and squatted on his chopping-block. Grant perched on the shaving-horse and stated his errand. He had come to borrow Richard’s brace and a quarter-inch bit, he said; and felt suddenly foolish. He had thought himself fairly smart, planning ahead the exact size of the bit he would ask for.

  Now he realized that he could have borrowed the tools nearer home, at Grahams’, Curries’, Neills’ . . . and he hadn’t even figured out a reason for needing them . . .

  Richard merely nodded sideways at the array of tools hanging over the work-bench. “Anything you want.” He spread his hands to the stove. “Everything all right?”

  They fell to talking as men will whose days are not fixed to schedule but filled with work that has to be done, making of blended talk and silence a pleasant link between the periods of labour. Grant looked around him curiously. Richard’s stave- junks were piled in a corner of the shop. His eye noted the truss-hoops on pegs, the implements of cooperage on the bench: draw-knife, crumbing-knife, compass for marking out barrel-heads.

  He said, “Uncle James used to set up barrels, but he gave it up a while ago. I never could get the knack.”

  Richard gave a small chuckle. “Joe can’t, either. But don’t let on.”

  Grant echoed the laugh. “Joe don’t have to worry. He’ll get along all right. Anywhere.”

  Richard said, “He’s all right.”

  Grant said, “Pity there’s not more—” and hesitated, made a small movement with his hand. It was a pity there wasn’t something to hold people like young Joe on the Shore. But that was the sort of thing you expected to hear, like a kind of ritual, from older men, not from Grant Marshall.

  Richard said indifferently, “Yes. It’s a pity . . . How’re you comin’ on with The Place?”

  Hadn’t done much lately, Grant said. He’d been working at the wood. If enough snow fell to make hauling he might get it to the house and then get out and look for a job some place else for a while. For a couple of months or so. If Stewart was all right to leave alone. Something better than chopping box-logs. He’d been thinking of making a trip to Boston, or maybe Upper Canada—Montreal or Toronto. Boston wasn’t so good any more. The Americans, their immigration people, were getting fussy at the border.

  Richard nodded. “You’re not thinkin’ve pullin’ out for good, though?”

  No, Grant said. No. He couldn’t do that, and didn’t want to. Just something to put in time. A while away.

  He turned to Richard with a small show of casual interest, as if thinking of that, the world outside, had brought something to his mind.

  “Hazel . . . Its Toronto where she is, isn’t it? She getting along all right, Mr. McKee?”

  The question was a matter of form. Anyone who left the Channel Shore would be getting along all right—in the conversation of their relatives back home.

  He felt cold as he asked the question, and suddenly a hypocrite. He knew Hazel’s story and Richard knew he knew it. Yet—this indirection, this way of saying things, was necessary—if you had to say them at all . . .

  Richard said, “Yes . . . Oh, all right, I guess.” He spoke almost indifferently. Too indifferently, perhaps. Grant had a feeling that Richard recognized his distaste for hypocrisy and the impossibility of asking after Hazel in any terms but these. And yet, was not displeased that Grant had asked after her.

  Richard went on meditatively, “Dress-makin’. She don’t say much. Says she’s all right. But I don’t know . . .” He hesitated, frowning a little. “She wasn’t—I didn’t think she was any too well when she left. Still, we’d hear, I guess.”

  He paused, but Grant felt he had not quite finished what he had to say. After a little he went on: “She’s with a cousin of Eva’s. Stays with her. The one that . . . what’s-her-name . . . Mason. Married a man by the name of Mason. Lives on some street”—he shook his head—”what is it, now? Peter Street, I think it is . . . Peter Street.”

  Grant went on to talk of other things. When he got up to go the brace and bit had slipped his mind. He caught himself in the doorway and went back for them.

  22

  It was not till he stood on the station platform at Truro that he was gripped by a sense of utter urgency.

  He had driven to Copeland with Adam Falt and ridden the Sydney-Halifax train west to catch the Maritime Express for Montreal. All the way down the Shore with Adam and all the way up through the eastern counties with train-wheels clicking under him, his mind had turned inward and backward, still concerned, for the sake of Stewart and Josie, with the public appearance of the thing he had to do. The thing conspicuous and unexplainable and still not quite defined.

  On the morning after his hour in Richard’s shop he had wakened to a sense of things altered, of something new and difficult and desired and within reach. He had cast off the drag of sleep and gone to the window to peer into morning darkness, and seen that from the woods to the Channel the earth was white.

  By half-past eight that morning he and Richard, with horse and sled, were on the way to their piled fire-wood in the clearings between the fields and the lake. The snow had lasted a week, firmed up by frost and an additional fall. When a wave of warmth moved northward in early December, the winter’s wood was already in the yard.

  Until this was done Grant had said nothing to Josie. It was going to be hard to talk to her at all. Impossible to make this journey sound reasonable to anyone. A trip to Upper Canada. It was a thin story he had told Richard. Somehow he knew that to Richard this mattered not at all. But others ... He could not stay away, or announce an intention of staying away for a period of more than six weeks or a couple of months. More than that and it would seem ... he would seem to be dropping the things he had set his hand to. But two months . . . the money a man could make in two months would barely keep him and pay his train fare back. That also would cause talk. On any basis, it was all a piece of craziness.

  Personally he didn’t care. The deed to the place was in his bureau drawer. Since the land had become his own, bought and paid for, he had lost his last fear of the unusual as it concerned himself. Let them think and say what they liked. But there were Josie and Stewart to think of in connection with his going, and with the curiosity it would arouse.

  He had thought of taking Josie into his confidence. He could armour her privately with a frank adm
ission. He could tell her why ...

  He had pulled up sharply at the thought. He could tell her —what? He had no certain plan. Only an urge that tingled in his blood. To bring reassurance to Richard McKee. Somehow to soften the haunted look of Josie Gordon. And beyond that an indefinable ambition, disturbing and queerly tender, in himself.

  In the end he had decided not to break the surface. To let things lie. He told Josie less than he had told Richard. He was going to Upper Canada to look around. He’d be back by the first of February. He would leave things in good shape, and get the fire-wood sawed before he left.

  He told Josie this one evening when Stewart, after the night barn work, had gone up to Grahams’ by himself. Grant and Josie were alone in the kitchen, with a hardwood fire singing in the stove.

  When he had told her, he sensed her looking at him steadily for a moment. All she said was: “Well, you better tell Stewart yourself.”

  You better tell Stewart yourself ...

  A moment of understanding came to him in which he could see as though he shared it the weight of pain on Josie’s spirit. More clearly even than when she had spoken of Hazel, it came to him in the tone of this thought for Stewart.

  Disappearance and death, and shame, pity and fear. All submerged from day to day beneath the hard calm of her resolution; hinted only in simple words, rarely, on the tongue of impulse.

  The moment lightened his heart a little. There were things more important to Josie than any conjecture, any gossip, his going might cause. And she had handed over to him a responsibility. Behind her words, half-querulous, almost irritable, a grudging recognition ... You better tell Stewart yourself.

  He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell him.”

  That small scene came back to him now as he stood on the station platform, waiting for the west-bound express. The pool of lantern light swinging round his moccasined feet and Stewart’s as they came in from the barn after feeding the cattle. His own words, as he glanced at the towering wood-pile in the dark: “Enough to last till March, anyway. I may have to make a trip, Mr. Gordon. But I’ll be back long before that . . .”

  Stewart halting in his tracks, the pool of yellow light on the mud-streaked snow of the yard: “A trip? Away?”

  Again, his words of explanation: “Yes. It’s a piece of personal business. Something I can’t help. I wanted to tell you about it because I’m a little worried . . . Just—I wouldn’t want Mrs. Josie to think—well, that anything’d be neglected. So we’ll have to explain to her . . .”

  And Stewart: “Sure . . . You’re not—you’ll be back, Grant?”

  His own words, his reassuring laughter: “Oh, yes, Mr. Gordon, I’ll be back. I’ll be back, all right. This is where I live . . .”

  He had done his best. Nothing could make it reasonable, but that he couldn’t help. He stood here alone now on the station platform at Truro, in the chill of a winter evening; under the lights, under the restaurant sign projecting from the long brown- stone station building, his suitcase at his feet.

  On the far track where the Sydney-Halifax train still stood there was a bumping and shunting as a car was dropped. Grant knocked one foot against the other. The snow was gone, but the air was cold, the night wind raw. His feet, used to woollen socks and work boots or moccasins, were cramped and cold in Sunday shoes.

  The comings and goings of men and women continued. Walking off to buggies and automobiles, entering the station, lining up on the platform.

  He walked out to the platform’s edge and up and down a little. Most of the waiting passengers remained in the warmth of the waiting-room, but a few like himself had deserted the thickness of that atmosphere. His eyes ranged over them: % bulky man in a black overcoat and derby hat and spats, carrying in a grey-gloved hand a green tasselled bag, angular with books; a boy and girl self-consciously holding mittened hands; a short middle-aged male figure with dwarf-like bowed legs, in a blue yachting cap; an elderly woman in Hudson seal, a polka-dotted veil, and hatpins ...

  They stood in little knots along the platform, waiting for the luxury of sleepers, the green plush of first-class coaches, the leather-seated seconds.

  There was not among them a single face he knew or had ever seen before.

  For the first time in life, a stranger. Even in the army he had never faced the full impact of this feeling. Even in the darkest days of his indecision, even on the day of Anna’s death, around his aloneness there had been known faces, voices, hands . . .

  He tried to shake this away. It was ridiculous and childish . . . And in his flesh he could feel a turning tide. At one moment behind this feeling of aloneness was the old concern for appearances, fear of talk, the conjecture of the Shore. Suddenly this was gone. In his flesh and nerves there was, suddenly, the urgency ...

  The door of the waiting-room opened behind him. Men and women began to come out and move toward the platform’s edge. Over a ridge of trees down the line a desolate hooting rose and died. In the well of following silence he could hear the beat of wheels.

  1945

  Anse sat hunched forward with elbows on thighs, the beer glass clasped in his hands. He straightened, raised the glass and took a thoughtful swallow and half-turned toward Bill, faintly grinning. The words and voice were careless.”

  The Head? How the hell would I know? I should be asking you.”

  Bill felt his mind go still and falter and begin to race. He said, “You never went back?”

  Anse drained the glass and shook his head. A suggestion of finality edged the tone of his indifference.

  “No. I never went back. Never wrote. Never heard . . .”

  This chance contact was coming to an end, petering out. Whatever interest Anse Gordon might have had in Bill Graham was running down. All it had ever amounted to was a moment of surprise on the palace lawn; and now, this small moment of understated drama. This pose—or was it a pose?—of disinterest. This obscure satisfaction in an incurious reticence.

  For Bill the oddity in this meeting, stranger even than the coincidence of seeing a Channel Shore face in the palace gardens, was that Anse Gordon knew even less than he.

  He felt a sharp brief anger, the impulse to pierce this self- possession, to say: “For Christ’s sake! Ask, then! Don’t you want to know?”

  As if in answer to his thought, the question came, light and sardonic: “. . . Did your

  Bill checked a rising impulse. No. Leave it to Providence, whatever she might have in store.

  “No,” he said. “No . . .”

  He got off the bench and carried his glass to the bar. Anse rose behind him.

  “Well,” Bill said. “If you’re around London—I’m living in Eaton Mews. Number 24. It’s not far from here. Or call me at C.M.H.Q. Any time.”

  “Sure,” Anse said. He drawled absently, “Seeing you,” and walked off, leisurely and arrogant, toward Sloane Square.

  In the days that followed, Bill lived much with the Channel Shore. At his desk in Cockspur Street; at night, in the converted chauffeur’s quarters where he slept; anywhere, doing anything, he would find the movement and the colour coming up through the sameness and the hurry of later years. At such times it was the nearer past that seemed vague and distant, while that single summer of his boyhood was lively, vibrant, increasingly distinct. There was nothing in this of the absent mind, nothing that distracted him from the routine of his work. It was simply that after years in which he had rarely thought of it, the Shore was part of him, a habit in the flesh, like breathing and sleep.

  Back of it all, the recollection of discovery. One scene was particularly clear—the scene that had flashed in his mind at the sight of Anse Gordon’s face. Four boys at Kilfyle’s Hole, and Stan Currie talking of settlers who were dead and gone, leaving their names on the land . . . Lowries . . . Kilfyles . . . McNaughtons . . . Clearer even than Stan and Joe and Dan and the dark amber water and Anse
Gordon, was the thing he had felt that day.

  A curious thing had been happening to him in those first days of his summer at The Head. He could feel it happening. Andrew Graham was a professor of mathematics. He had all the austerity of the country boy who achieves academic honour through work and denial in the time of youth. He did not often talk of his boyhood. But sometimes, in the house in Toronto, he would lapse into a diffident mood of reminiscence, a speech coloured by irrelevant allusion: “Frank and I were after trout at Kilfyle’s . . . Used to be good rabbit country around Lowries’ ...”

  These notes on the margins of memory were brief and rare and Bill as a boy of nine, ten, eleven, had stored them up with a special regard, had fashioned round them a Channel Shore of the imagination. By that Sunday at the hole, the first strangeness of the Shore had begun to wear off, but his growing familiarity with the fields and the water was in itself strange and inwardly exciting. It was like exploring in fact a land that had existed only in story. And finding in the shape of an actual hill, the sound of a stream’s voice, the lines in a face, the truth and light and colour—the confirmation of a personal hearsay.

  That was the explanation of this sense he had now, a quarter- century later; this possession of a knowledge, a familiarity, more pervasive surely than anything you could trace to a single summer.

  It came to him in a slow flash of recognition, definite as the inner revelation of love. He was back on the Channel Shore in the hot days of July and August. And again it was not simply the inlet at Currie Head that he saw, and the fish huts on the beach there, but these things lighted by something farther back: his father’s voice when he was eight or nine or ten: “Your grandfather fished mackerel with Joe Currie. Frank and I and Hugh and Rich McKee used to pick net-rocks . . . We had a boat on the inlet, a kind of scow.”

  That was how he had known the Shore in his fourteenth year. The Shore was more than a summer holiday. It was a country that had been explored for years in a boy’s mind, a timeless country. In this country people lived in a setting of cleared fields and wooded hills. There was the quick sound of brook water, the slow sound of sea heaved by tide and wind. In this country lived not only old Hugh Currie and old Frank Graham and old Rich McKee, but young Andrew Graham and young Hugh and Frank and Rich, a fellow named Tim Kilfyle and Bill Graham himself.