The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  This now, after a single contact with Channel Shore flesh, was happening to Bill again.

  The night of the storm ...

  The extra weeks he had asked for and got, on his promise to go to school, were almost up.

  In these last days he had found himself overcoming an earlier diffidence. Asking questions that were almost absurd: “Uncle Frank, did you and Dad ever go right up the Black Brook? Clear up where it comes from? Did he ever trap mushrats? Where’d they get the name of Andy?”

  His mind had seemed in a fever to cram into memory all he could pack there of present perception and incidental knowledge of the past. His uncle answered with off-hand care, amusement tempered in sympathy, as if he sensed a meaning in the curiosity he had previously laughed at. Something not quite clear, but worthy of affectionate respect.

  “The brook? It comes out of Round Lake. Never been up there. No call to go . . . We let the mushrats alone, but we used to shoot pa’tridge out back . . . Your pop was named after Andrew Macnab, a Scotch schoolteacher they had here before the women took over the teaching business. Drunk himself out of the church, the ministry, before that, they found out later. But a good school- teacher . . .”

  He had been thinking of it all that night in bed, the night of the storm. The sheets had a chill to them. “Fall coming on,” Dan complained. Bill was glad of Dan’s closeness under the bedclothes.

  After Dan had dropped off to sleep he remained awake, listening to the straining of the wind’s formless body against the creaking timbers. Once or twice a far-off change in tempo, a shudder, thudded bluntly in the long impersonal waves of sound.

  Lying there against Dan, listening to the soft regularity of Dan’s breathing, under the giant overtone of storm, he was part of the Channel Shore. The house in Toronto—home—the red brick school-house, even Dad . . . they seemed; less real, less actual, than this old wooden farm-house under the lash of rain. Less real than Uncle Frank, laughing and hiding his twist tobacco in the shop, because Aunt Stell wouldn’t stand it in the kitchen. Edith, friendly and remote in her young womanhood. Colin, in the west, whose picture stood on the parlour mantel. James Marshall, a bearded prophet from the Old Testament, sending the same little shiver up your spine. Grant, Anna, Stewart Gordon, Anse; Joe McKee, and Hazel. Stan Currie and his father, Hugh . . . Adam Falt and his horses ... In the little world of aloneness contrived round him by the storm, Bill was not alone. There was nothing strange in Rob Currie helping Alec Neill mend nets on the west coast of Africa, which was also Curries Beach. Nothing strange in great-aunt Fanny being Edith’s age, while Aunt Stell was still Aunt Stell ...

  Not merely the simple memory of outward things, but the memory of recognition ...

  It was this that touched him now, twenty-six years later and in another country, as the Channel Shore came back.

  He found himself on Hugh Currie’s doorstep ... Handsome woman, Fanny Graham ... it was quite a thing at the time . . . Back in the woods at Grant’s Place, with Anna teasing, and James Marshall striding down the path from the road ... Back in Stewart Gordon’s kitchen while the lines drew together in the stories of Grant Marshall and Anna Gordon, Anse Gordon and Hazel McKee.

  Back in his father’s study on Huron Street, far from the Channel Shore and at a later point in time; but still part of it, still part of summer and the Shore, the last thread in an all-but- forgotten story . . .

  He had stayed home from school with a cold, that afternoon in late December. A ring at the door.

  He listened for the house-keeper’s step, and not hearing it, went to the door himself. The shabby overcoat, the cap; a tradesman.

  “Hello, Bill.”

  “Grant!”

  Already, the Shore had begun, a little, to slip away. It was still clear and coloured in the mind, but other things were beginning then to come between. But in that instant it was back. Grant!

  He could not remember now, a quarter-century later, the things they said in Andrew Graham’s study. He could see Grant sitting there confident and quiet in the tight blue suit. Queerly out of place, away from the woods and hayfields of the Shore. He could see the black leather of his father’s chair, the golden oak desk, the paperweight in the shape of a silver stag. But except for one final sentence of explanation, he could not recall the words, or his own questions.

  Only the facts as Grant had told them. He was living with the Gordons now, Grant said. The fall work was done. He had decided to make a trip, then. He had come to Toronto. He had seen Hazel McKee.

  Hazel. Bill himself had thought of her, thought of trying to find her, and rejected the impulse. What could a boy say? What could you expect but embarrassment?

  Grant had seen Hazel. She wasn’t well. Wasn’t too well. Oh, she would be all right, but ... It was when he left, as he explained that he couldn’t stay to dinner, couldn’t stay to meet Andrew Graham, that Grant spoke the sentence Bill remembered word by word: “I ought to get back to her. It’s this way, Bill—Hazel and me—we got married this morning . . . we’re going home tomorrow.”

  The word in his mind was wrong. It was not a story.

  That was how he had thought of it in that first hour with Anse, walking toward the Antelope, looking forward with excitement to the finish of a tale.

  There, with Anse on the bench beside him, learning that Anse knew less than he, he had begun to see that nothing is ever finished.

  This no longer was a tale heard. This was life, and woven into it were living threads of his own youth, alive again in this older body, crossing Trafalgar Square, taking the underground at Charing Cross, climbing a narrow stairway from the litter of Eaton Mews.

  On the Shore they knew. A postage stamp, words on a page, would bring him the truth, or at least the facts. But what he was thinking of were the voices, the faces, the gestures. The look on faces he had known and faces he had never $een. Through years of which he knew nothing, life on the Shore had flowered into impulse, motive, act At this moment it was going on. In the woods and on the beaches. In fields, work-shops, kitchens, barns . . . At Felix Katen’s, Grant’s Place, Josie Gordon’s, Frank Graham’s, James Marshall’s.

  The liveliness and the anticipation . . . Out of the far past he was looking into a nearer past and a present. Both unknown to him. But alive on the Channel Shore.

  PART TWO

  Winter 1933-1934 ALAN GRANT RENIE MARGARET

  1

  Alan Marshall halted on the road’s frozen shoulder and turned to glance down past Grahams’ to Gordons’ turn. An hour ago, just after breakfast, Grant and Dan Graham had gone that way to follow the hauling-road out back.

  Alan grunted to himself. He didn’t dislike school; with Renie teaching, it was all right. But school interfered with other things . . . He turned again and glanced west along the road and north along the snow-covered hills, and thought about the crew Grant had working in the woods back of Ed Kelley’s, far to the northwest. With the Christmas holidays beginning Saturday . . . But the Kelley lots were old stuff. What he was hoping for was a chance to see new country, the uncut woods back of Felix Katen’s.

  He looked back, and grinned. Margaret’s small figure came pelting through the gate, the tail of her red stocking-cap absurdly wagging against the intent face. She brushed it aside impatiently and reached for his hand.

  “You go without me, Lan ... I hommer-hommer-hommer.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you, Mag?” Alan said. “01’ Lan? Anyway, you’re not big enough. Or too big. You’re pot as tough as y’were when you could really hommer-hommer-hommer.”

  He closed a fist and brought it down in a series of quick soft blows on the stocking-capped head.

  Margaret let out a small roar. “I am, too!” and burst out laughing. There were times at home when they could hold a pretended quarrel all day, to the exasperation of Grant and Renie; Alan teasing Margaret with the repeated claim that the girl was g
etting soft since she had grown out of a furiously active babyhood. But when they were alone together they lapsed quickly into a mood in which each regarded the other seriously—the protective thirteen-year-old brother, almost fourteen now, and the going-on-nine sister who found in him an adult she could talk to without losing the fellowship of childhood.

  Alan squeezed her cold hand. “Mag, you’ve forgot your mitts again. I ought to send you back . . . You’d lose your head if it wasn’t sewed on.”

  “ ‘s not cold,” Margaret said “Listen! You can’t talk. You’re bare-handed.”

  “I’m older and tougher. Stuff your hands in your pockets.”

  He disengaged his fingers. It was time, anyway. Bert Lisle would be popping out of Hugh Currie’s any minute. Alan liked the feeling of being the fellow in charge that Margaret’s hand gave him when they were walking alone, the two of them, but with others around it was different.

  Margaret pocketed her fists and walked slightly behind him, a little rebellious, but knowing her place.

  Bert Lisle clicked Currie’s gate and said, “Hi, Alan . . . Hi, Mag.”

  “I am not Mag.”

  Bert grinned. “You are, too, Mag. Little Mag.”

  “I’m—.” Margaret lapsed into a furious calm. She said coldly, “Fatty. Fatty. Fatty.”

  Berts plump body shook with laughter. “Mag. Mag. Mag.”

  Alan said, “For Pete’s sake! Cut it out!” He added, off-hand, in a tone that recognized the small girl’s crotchets and asked indulgence for them, “Lay off, Bert. Le’s have a little peace.” He didn’t know why Margaret resented being called Mag by anyone but himself, nor why she called him Lan, a special name, when they were alone together. But that was the way she was, and her wishes were entitled to respect.

  Bert slouched along on the opposite shoulder of the road, out of the frozen ruts grooved into the surface of packed snow.

  He said, “Didn’t know if you’d be coming today. Mr. Graham was over last night. Mentioned your Dad and Dan were headed out back today.”

  Alan said briefly, “Yes. They went early. Katen’s back lot.” No point in saying more than that. If Bert hadn’t noticed that you were never kept out of school to help in the woods or around the place, so much the better.

  His mind went back to Grant’s words last night: “Dan and I’ll do the cruising tomorrow, but I’ll need you Saturday. And through the holidays, maybe. Likely be some roads we’ll have to swamp.” Grant always seemed to know what you were thinking, what you wanted; always went out of his way to make things clear, to answer the question in your mind and give you something to look forward to.

  Bert said, “They’re still workin’ back of Kelley’s though, ain’t they?”

  Alan laughed, keeping the pride out of his voice. “Well, you know Grant; he’s just looking ahead . . . What it is, we’re not chopping. He’s thinking of a dicker with Felix. They went back to cruise it, see how long it’ll take to clean her off when we get around to it.”

  “Later on, you mean. Next summer, maybe. You’ll be choppin’ next summer.”

  “Guess so,” Alan said. “Same as last.”

  He spoke with satisfaction. It might be that you were kept in school when the winter woods work was on, and steered away from other responsibilities you would like to take a crack at, but working with the pulpwood crew in vacation time was all right. Peeling pulpwood in hot weather is nasty work. Wear all the mitts you like, the fresh balsam cakes the skin till you have to scrub with kerosene to get clean for Sunday. But it was sharing a man’s work, Grant’s work, a known enterprise on the Channel Shore.

  They slowed, dawdling, at the top of the slight rise where Marshalls’ gate opened on the drive sloping down to Uncle Fred’s house. Fred’s two school-age kids, Jackie who was twelve, and eight-year-old Beulah, were coming up the slope, sheepskin book- bags flapping.

  Alan’s eyes ranged the Channel while they waited, the cold blue stretch of it and the hazier blue of the Islands.

  Bert Lisle said idly, “Not a sail . . . Mr. Currie says years ago there’d be hardly a day you wouldn’t sight something . . .”

  “I know.” Alan had heard all that. Grandfather McKee talked that way sometimes, when he bothered to talk at all. “The bankers, into Princeport for bait; and coal schooners coming up to Morgan’s Harbour.”

  Directly across the miles of blue-cold water he could just make out the white dots of houses, far apart, hard to see against a land veiled distantly in snow. And farther east, the clustered specks of Princeport. Once when he was ten he had gone there with Grant and Renie and Margaret on a visit to Mr. Bob Fraser—Big Bob, everybody called him—Renie’s father, and her sister, Aunt Bess. They had driven to Morgan’s Harbour and taken the boat down the south shore of the Channel, the Islands’ shore. He had talked about that for a long time afterward, about the look of the Atlantic from the other side of Middle Island, about the fish wharves and the general store, and the invitation Big Bob had made to him to come back and stay a while. That would never happen now. Big Bob had sold out and moved to Halifax to spend his old age. But Alan still thought of that trip to Prince- port as a kind of adventure, the one time he had been away from the Channel Shore.

  His mind ran on, to the invitation Mr. Fraser kept pressing ... a trip to Halifax. It would be all right, for a week or two. To see the city and the harbour and the ships and then come home to Currie Head, a traveller with things to remember ... to brag about to Bert and Jackie Marshall and talk about to Grant.

  He was not introspective beyond the normal inward-looking of boyhood, but he wondered now as he had wondered before, whether Jackie Marshall or Clyde Wilmot, for instance, ever got the same feeling in their fathers’ presence that he did. It was like having a father your own age, except that you didn’t want to get smart, as you would with a boy. Sometimes he thought people must notice this, this about himself and Grant. There were wisps of memory; curious looks, low-toned asides . . . He couldn’t imagine how Bert Lisle felt. Bert came of people who had moved away from The Head before Alan was born. He had been sent back to work for his board at Hugh Currie’s and go to school. He was fatherless.

  It was all pretty good, Alan felt, except for the few things you were not allowed to do, and those didn’t matter in the light of the long companionship. There was one other thing, a definite apprehension that came up to bother him sometimes. It had crossed his mind just now, called up by his thought of Big Bob Fraser and Princeport and Halifax. But it was nothing close or soon, nothing you had to deal with now.

  “Come on, you bunch of slow-pokes,” he said. “I got a fire to build.”

  They trailed him across the road and took the path up through the Marshall upper field and back pasture, a short cut used for four generations, that brought them out on the school- house road just below the school.Alan snapped open the padlock on the storm door, slipped it out of the staple, and entered the hallway, a passage narrowed by piled stove-wood. The big room beyond was cold as sin. He shovelled dead ashes into a pail, piled in kindling and paper while Bert and Jackie carried armloads of dried hardwood in from the hall. When things were ready, he struck a match.

  A pleasant sense of responsibility came over him: possession of the school-house key and the duty of building fire. He touched the stove with his fingers. In the cold metal, a hint of warmth. He took his books from the bag and stowed them in the double desk he shared with Bert.

  He still felt a touch of regret that he wasn’t out back on Felix Katen’s lot, but there was no resentment in it. A few hours of Beginner’s Algebra and English History were ahead of him, and a couple more at Mrs. Josie’s wood-pile. But after that, Grant and Dan would be back.

  After that, sitting across the stove from Grant with the lamp lit and supper cleared off, he would hear about it. And after that there was Saturday, and Christmas, and the days ahead.

  By the time
Renie arrived at five minutes to nine the room was beginning to lose its chill. She noticed that all twelve of her pupils were on hand this morning, from little Syd Kinsman, the youngest, up to Clyde Wilmot, who came when he felt like it, and his sister Jennie, and Sarah Laird, who was struggling through a second year of grade ten.

  She smiled a little absently as she hung her cloth coat on her special hook in the corner and glanced into the small square mirror that hung there. A fullish face, slightly freckled, smiled absently back. She met the grey eyes briefly, ran her fingers through a mass of short rust-coloured hair, streaked with grey, and turned to the desk at the head of the room. When you were a tax-payer’s wife and the mother of two of the kids you taught, there was no formality. No Good morning, teacher . . . Good morning, pupils. Renie had never been able to go through such formalities, anyway, without the feeling she was simpering.

  The smile lingered round her mouth as she ticked off the names on the register without calling the roll. Years ago it had been different. As a first-year schoolteacher, new at The Head and fresh from Normal School at Truro, she had read off the names meticulously each morning: “Frances Freeman . . . present . . . Dan Graham . . . present . . . Stan Currie . . . present ...”

  She had thought, in those days: Currie Head. I’ll remember Currie Head when I’ve gone on from here and taken a degree. When I’m Miss Irene Eraser, B.A., principal of the High School at Morgan’s Harbour, or the Academy at Copeland . . .

  But looking back on it now she knew that even then she hadn’t believed in that particular day-dream; day-dreaming of any kind had never meant a thing. The day itself, for Renie, had always been too immediate to permit a dream to dim its realities. Was too immediate still.