The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  “On your way to Rich’s, are you?” He laughed to himself, an absent-minded chuckle at some private joke. “You’ll find him gettin’ ready to cooper up some bar’ls. He’s been threatenin’ to. Easier to buy ‘em, but that wouldn’t satisfy him. ‘D I ever tell you about him tryin’ to teach Joe?”

  Alan shook his head and glanced secretly at Margaret. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Rich don’t say much. Never did. Curious fellah . . . There was that puncheon. Puncheon’s a handy thing to have ‘round, to keep a salmon net in, or salt fish, most anything. I used to speak for the empty molasses-bar’ls from Morgan’s store. White oak casks. But they don’t use ‘em any more. Rich decided he could make a puncheon out’ve birch, and by God he did. Never said a word. I come down to the beach one mornin’ and there she was, in the hut.

  “I started to tell you about Joe. It’s tricky, cooperin’. Rich had quite a time with Joe. Couldn’t get the hang of it. Joe tried one on his own hook, when he was your age, one time Rich was away. Leaked like a collander. Joe heaved it in the Channel. Come in with the tide, later on, one forenoon while we was guttin’ herrin’. Rich looked it over and looked out at the water, and back at the bar’l, and then at Joe. All he said, finally, was, I’ll tell you ... You can’t hide murder.’ “

  Here in Alec Neill’s untidy kitchen, Alan thought of Uncle Joe McKee, growing wheat in the Peace River Block, and wondered whether he ever remembered the derelict barrel and the look on his father’s face. He could see the scene as if he’d been there; from Alec Neill’s words and his memory of Joe, the one time he had come home, and his knowledge of Grandfather. Under the laughter that stirred in him he was struck by the oddity of things, the thought of people all over the world who at one time or other had been boys on the Channel Shore, and had got a feeling of being grown up from doing the things their fathers did.

  The thought was fugitive. Alec Neill was talking again.

  “Odd people, the McKees. Mind their own business and get along with anybody, even fellahs like James Marshall.” Alec caught himself and said, “Your Uncle James used to be considered a wee bit stiff.”

  Alan grinned, “Yes. I know.”

  “A bit stiff,” Alec repeated. “You know, most people along the Shore are fair-to-middlin’ people. But now and then . . . Well, your uncle always had a reputation. Never knew the taste of liquor or tobacco, they said. No sir, he never did. That’s what they said.”

  He felt in his pocket and began to shave a pipeful of Master Mason into his palm.

  “You wouldn’t remember Fritz McKee, Richard’s father. Your grandfather’s father. Fritz always claimed he knew different. Said he could prove James did know the taste’ve booze.”

  Alec reached over to scratch a match on the stove, and began to draw on the pipe, making small smacking sounds.

  “Seems, one hot day in July, twenty-five, thirty years ago, Fritz took James out off the Rocks in his dory. Fritz was runnin’ trawl. Hot weather, too. He’d took along a pint flask of Felix Katen’s rum in his jacket pocket. Seems he’d leant over to haul trawl when the little jug fell out. Eleven fathom, off there. Fritz watched it go, sinkin’ slow, him droolin’. Couldn’t say what he thought, either, on account of James ...

  “Well, minute or so, James says, ‘It’s too hot to live, Mr. McKee,’ says he. ‘I’m going to cool off.’ Strips himself down to his drawers and dives in . . . Minute goes by. Two minutes. Fritz looks down over the gunnel. No sight’ve anything. Hitches a piece of cod-line to a net-rock, to ballast him, and goes down after James. Two fathom, four, five. No sign. He goes right to bottom. Fritz used to tell it good. ‘You know what I found?’ he used to say. ‘There was James Marshall, in his drawers, sittin’ on a killick-rock drinkin’ my rum!’ “

  Alec leaned back in his chair. He said, seriously, “Of course, I don’t believe that story. Some people do, but I don’t. There’s one thing wrong with it. Fritz must’ve made it up. James Marshall never went out in no dory. That family was all dry-footed.”

  It was odd, Alan thought, going up the road, how you could be sort of numb inside and still be able to laugh, still enjoy the fun in a man like Alec Neill. They were passing Uncle James’s now. He deliberated over going in, and decided to postpone it until after they had been up the road to Grandfather’s, until their stay at Uncle James’s could he cut short by the necessity of getting home for supper. Uncle Fred was all right, and Jackie; his heart lifted at the thought of Jackie and Jackie’s mischief; but Uncle Fred and Jackie had gone to Town ...

  He glanced down at Margaret, his mind still lazily concerned with the people who moved in it; Bert Lisle, Mr. Currie, Alec Neill, Uncle James’s crowd; but vaguely conscious of a difference in this walk up the road from all the other walks they had taken together. He realized in a moment or two what it was. She wasn’t talking. Always when they were out of earshot of others, Margaret talked. Questions, mostly. But today she was silent, walking in some sort of dream world of her own. Not even Alec Neill’s fooling had shaken her out of it.

  Margaret ... He felt the shiver of emotion he had sometimes felt when she was smaller, a baby, and he had visualized the horror ... a speeding car . . . an open well ... a sickness . . . There had never been anything morbid in this; it was more a thankfulness that she was as she was, healthy and fine. She was growing up, tough and small and strange, and that fear was something he had hardly felt for years. Now, walking beside her he thought of the Lee Wilmots. Lee hadn’t made a go of it in the States; he’d come home to his brother Clem’s with an American wife and a year-old baby. A baby with something wrong, a leg and arm that wouldn’t work right; would never work right. Alan felt a wave of thankfulness about Margaret. A wave of thankfulness and fear. In all these months away . . . how would he know . . . how would he know ...

  She walked beside him, the expression on her small face puzzled and withdrawn. Alan started to ask a question and broke off. She’d tell him in time.

  A rhythmic splitting sound came from Grandfather McKee’s workshop. As they went down the path from the road, Alan felt the eagerness that always took hold of him around the McKee place. Now, with his senses edged to special perceptiveness, he thought with a small thrill of surprise: Grandfather’s something like Dad. It was odd that Grant should be like Grandfather McKee when they weren’t even related. And different from Uncle James.

  He said, “You go in the house, Mag. I’ll come in and see Grandmother after a while.”

  But Eva McKee opened the porch door, watching them approach.

  Eva could never be an off-hand woman. Time does not change much the outward characteristics, even though it harden softness to resolution or soften intolerance to a kind of understanding. Nothing could alter the primness, the lines of habitual slight disapproval in her face. Nothing could change the habit of her speech, seasoned with complaint. But in some manner the years had turned the tone’s edge; and in some manner, though the mouth was still straight and thin-lipped, the eyes had learned to smile. At Richard and at children.

  She was thinking she was going to miss Alan this winter. So was Richard. Joe’d only been home once since he’d gone west. Anyway, Joe was grown up. Richard sort of counted on Alan. Grant and Renie were good about coming round on Sundays and letting the children come up whenever they wanted. She knew Richard had planned on asking Grant to lend him Alan for a while in July. Richard wanted to set a fleet of herring nets and have a boy in the boat again. Odd how you understood these things better when you got along in years ...There had been a period when the sight and sound, the name and thought of Alan, had meant to her a hard and bitter time. The time of Hazel’s return to the Shore with Grant Marshall, believing you could cancel shame by marriage . . . that kind of marriage . . .

  The time when she, Eva, had been forced to lend herself to that fiction since there was nothing else to do. Since only in that way could you salvage the shreds of prid
e.

  The time when pride itself had begun to lose importance . . . She was not quite sure how that had happened, but the image in her mind was that of a bare room in Copeland hospital, and Hazel there in bed, her body swollen under the bed clothes, white-skinned, but with the tell-tale spots of red already burning in her cheeks.

  The thing she remembered best was the look in Hazel’s eyes. For her, Eva, a kind of dumb regret. For Richard and Grant, tenderness ...

  It was that moment that had started the downfall of pride—Made possible humility; even in the face of the girl’s wish to be close to Grant at the last. And not in Eva’s house, but where Grant lived, at Gordons’. Made possible the curious truce between herself and Josie Gordon, as they joined their skills to bring health and strength to the tiny life Hazel had left behind ...

  All past and gone, grown dim with time. The one vividness, the one thing that would never lose its form and colour, was the year of Alan, the year she had nursed and kept and tended her daughter’s son; and returned him, when the time was right, to Grant. Grant and Renie Fraser.

  The curious thing, now, was that pride had been reborn; softened by time and children’s voices. For Hazel had been right. You could cancel shame ...

  She said, “Your Grandfather’s splitting out hoop-poles, Alan.” What she thought of that occupation was in the tone, or rather, what she had thought of it years ago. “Come in, Margaret. It’s a raw wind.”

  Richard McKee was slightly deaf with the deafness of age beginning, an access of inattention, of preoccupation with things past and present, moving in the mind while the hands work. He did not notice Alan at first.

  Alan watched him for a minute as he opened the end of a hoop- pole with a deft stroke of his adz. He moved into his grandfather’s line of vision.

  Richard looked up with an absent-mindedness that smoothed out into a slow smile as he saw who it was.

  “Well, boy . . . I’m bogged down.”

  He had obviously been working in the shop for days. The shop floor was carpeted with chips and shavings.

  Alan grinned at him and went to a corner for the broom, worn past further kitchen use, that Richard used to keep the shop floor swept when he thought of it.

  “Don’t lug all the kindlin’ to the house,” Richard said. “We’ll need some for the stove here”—he gestured at the heater, giving off a comfortable warmth—”and the cresset, when we get around to it.”

  This was the usual progression, from some common task to the mysteries of whatever craft he happened to be engaged in. Last fall he had shown Alan how to mend nets, with twine, mesh-board and net-needle. Before that he had taught him to row on the inlet, sitting in the stern of his old flat while Alan struggled with the oars. When he said now, “We’ll need some ... for the cresset,” he was laying out a course: We’ll see whether you can cooper up a barrel.

  This was one of the out-of-date crafts that survived on the Shore in Richard because, now as always, there were times when he did what he liked. Each winter he cut hoop-poles and measured and sawed into stave-junks a few fir trunks. When there was nothing else to do, or even when there was, he split staves with froe and mallet, shaved and joined them and set them up in truss-hoops, scorched and steamed them to pliability with his cresset fire, drew them into barrels with his creaking windlass, finished them off with crumbing knife and croze.

  The amusement that kindled in Alan’s memory was shadowed by the present. Last fall, as they worked on the nets, Richard had said, “Maybe you can come out, some mornings, when the run’s on.”

  Unless he got back in time, he was going to lose that chance, the chance to feel the swell of the Channel under him in the early- morning darkness before the wind came up; nets heavy with twitching fish, coming up out of dark water; the boat low, the landing on wet gravel; the blowing sun. Grandfather McKee, foreshadowing the building of barrels, didn’t mention his going away.

  There was never much talk between Richard McKee and his grandson. When you went to see Alec Neill you expected to be entertained with speech, colourful and salty and a little coarse. You expected the twinkle in the eyes and a grin behind the whiskers and you missed something when the words were sober and the face un- creased by laughter. With Grandfather McKee it was different. His presence and what he did were more important than anything he had to say.

  Richard rarely smiled and didn’t talk much. Even when he was showing you how to flip twine off a net-needle and knot it around a mesh-board, it was a matter of hands rather than speech. Broad hands with heavily knuckled fingers, the skin leathery, the creases marked with a fine graining of earth and net-tan, the inworn dust of barn floors and harrowed fields, hay seed and dried cow-manure, that soap and water could never quite erase. More than in his face, which wore an expression tolerant, withdrawn and non-committal, Richard’s character was in his hands.

  His character, his history and his skills. Once in a while, as he bent over you to re-set your grip on the scythe handle or the oar, you would feel the contact of his hands. Sometimes he would put one, absent-mindedly, on your shoulder. It wasn’t a caress; it was simply a casual communication. In all Richard’s attitudes, in his body moving or at rest, there was communication. When Eva swept the kitchen floor, round the door-sill, with a glance at Richard’s boots, his body relaxed in the cane-bottomed chair kept saying: A hit of mud Won’t hurt you; it’s all in a life-time.

  And in the shop, or anywhere else, the touch of his hands said: This is the way you do it; try it again, now. Or, rarely, on your shoulder, one of them said something that wouldn’t translate into words.

  After Alan had finished sweeping, Richard nodded at the ladder leading up at the end of the shop away from the stove.

  “Might go aloft and pass me down some staves.”

  On the loft floor where they had been piled to season, Alan gathered unshaved staves and passed them through the hatchway. When Richard gestured that he had enough to go on with, Alan turned again to the dusky space under the slant roof. He couldn’t remember that he had ever been in the shop’s loft before.

  Bundled herring nets hung from iron spikes in rafters from which the bark had dropped, leaving a surface intricately runnelled with the track of wood-worms. The wheels of a dismantled buggy lay in a corner. One of them had been stripped of its iron tire. Alan guessed that was where Grandfather had got the iron to shoe the hand- sled he had made for him two winters before. In the opposite corner a spinning-wheel stood. The place was strewn with old rubber boots, old iron, the detritus of years making a rusty litter of the past along side the present materials of Richard’s busy hands—his split staves, hoop-poles, nets and lumber.

  Alan felt the sting of curiosity, the little thrill of interest about to be satisfied, the sense of strangeness sometimes found among things so old they are new again. Nothing in the attic at home went back much beyond his own memory. The house was new, they had moved into it when Margaret was a baby. He could remember his wonder at having your own electric light plant, and water by turning a tap, and a bathroom. But it was all new. Even what they sometimes called the old house, where the truck was kept in what had been the downstairs bedroom, and Grant’s tools in the one-time kitchen, and where he himself had slept in the loft, there was nothing really old. But here at Grandfather’s there were traces of years far back of that, of time continuing.

  Under the spread legs of the spinning-wheel a sea-chest lay, its green paint scratched and flaked, blurred with dust and time, its corners blunted by wear and casual handling. Alan got down on his knees. The box was heavy; as he dragged it out by the rope handles let into its ends, one of the loops parted. Someone had locked the chest, but apparently for no reason except to keep its contents from spilling when it was lugged from one place to another. There was nothing secret here; the key was still in the hole. It grated around in his fingers.

  The box was half-full of stuff Grandfather calle
d odds and ends and Grandmother called junk. Alan lifted and held in his hands a round brass container streaked with verdigris; under its cracked and deckled glass the compass-card swayed and steadied. He set it down gently by the chest. He would have to go through the formality of asking, but this was his. He turned back to the rusty treasure of the chest. A length of shotgun barrel, sawed from the stock for some reason perhaps no one living could remember; a pair of work-boots with soles worn through and eyelets chopped out. He recalled that Grandfather had used boot-eyelets for halyard-blocks in the schooner- rigged play-boat he had shaped and hollowed and decked over when Alan was six. A ball of blue carpenter’s chalk, scarred where the cord had rubbed, and a plumb-line. A gobbet of beeswax and a hank of cobblers thread. Half a dozen door-hinges of brass and iron.

  He picked out of the litter a flattened circlet of stiff leather, studded with a brass plate pitted like a thimble—a thing he’d never seen, but recognized, out of some untraced memory of men’s talk, as a sail-maker’s palm. He slipped the hardened leather on his hand, trying the feel of it, and put it down beside the compass.

  His hands roved and probed as his eyes explored the chest. A jumble of worn objects, unrelated to each other, but all linked with some aspect of life on the Channel Shore. Linked, most of them, with ways of doing things that had changed and faded and been replaced by tools and methods of the present. He fingered again the brass-studded palm, and for a brief moment had a curious vision, a sense of knowing the past, when wind in the tanned sails of two- masters had been the Shore’s transport, when the road was a track and buggies few and gasoline unheard of. He felt a little sad, not at any sense of old things lost and gone, but at the realization that the present things, the tools they now worked with, the lumber truck, the saw-mill they didn’t yet possess, would some time go the way of these mouldy tags of living stowed in the workshop loft. But there was revelation in the feeling, and this submerged the brief sadness. When present things were gone, new ones would take their place. For the first time, he was conscious of glimpsing yesterday, today and tomorrow as part of a continuing whole. It put things in balance, and in a kind of abstract way was comforting when you thought about it.