This was new, this sense of power in this particular connection. But he knew at once, as his eyes moved again to the picture of Harvey, that there was no cutting-off in whatever Grant had in mind for Alan. And he knew at once that whatever Alan might learn of an old and miserable story, he would learn nothing from James Marshall. That was the kind of thing you left to God.
He hardly heard their good-byes. He was back in his curious introspection, glimpsing vaguely the softness, the warmth, the strength of personal relationships and shared passions; emotions he had never permitted to trespass beyond the selvage of his life. Again the slight brief touch of regret. He turned to the window. Alan and Margaret were going down the road, toward Grant Marshall’s house. In the kitchen Jane was making a needless clatter around the stove as she got things fixed for supper.
Alan always felt relief at getting away from Uncle James. Until today he had accepted this fact without thinking much about it. But now, after talking with Alec Neill and spending the best part of the afternoon with Grandfather McKee, he felt his recognition of the contrast with a sense of guilt. You were supposed to like your relatives. There was something wrong if you didn’t. At least, you were supposed to be what Mrs. Josie called “clannish”. You had to defend your family against anything.
Once on the way up the school-house road to Sunday school as he passed the Wilmot place he had seen Clem Wilmot chasing Clyde with a length of harness-leather and had heard the smack of the strap and Clyde’s howls when overtaken behind the barn. And yet, a week later when Jackie Marshall had referred to Clem as Pondwater Wilmot—a scurrilous name of which even the origin was lost in time—Clyde had smacked Jackie between the eyes without even waiting to speak.
Alan didn’t think he would feel that way if he heard someone running down Uncle James. Now that he thought of it, he had heard things. Someone outside the church at Leeds, after evening service: “. . . best place at The Head. But they’d have to bury old James before I’d want to be in Fred’s...”
Again—that odd pursuit of hidden memory. The plaguing things you couldn’t find by conscious search. They had to come up, it seemed, when the time was right, touched to life by something else, a thing somehow related.
Another time, another voice: “. . . queer about it, the way Grant changed after Anna . . . but it must burn old James, to see ... raising Anse’s kid ...”
Margaret took his hand as they reached the stretch of road screened by their own maples, and dropped it reluctantly as they passed through the gate.
6
After Saturday night supper Alan left the table quickly. There was Mrs. Josie’s barn work to do. He did not glance at Margaret. He sensed her stillness, waiting for the look of invitation, as he opened the door to go out. But tonight he had to be by himself. She would be a little hurt, but that was something he couldn’t help.
The weather had hardened again but Grant had said they wouldn’t go out back that morning; he had gone to see how Dan was getting on, back of Kelleys’. To Alan this was finality. The dream of a mill was dead.
Outwardly serene though unusually quiet, he spent the day splitting wood, in the morning at home and in the afternoon at Gordons’. The serenity was outward only. The pressure of a nameless fear, of things guessed at and half-remembered, pressed without ceasing in his mind. It was as though the aching certainty of departure had given the field of imagination a fertility in which surmise and conjecture were thriving with a nightmare growth.
As he walked down the short stretch of snow-packed road he wondered suddenly, why . . . Why he was going to Gordons’ . . . Why Grant looked after Mrs. Josie ... In these last few days all kinds of things at Currie Head, things you had taken for granted as part of life, were emerging by themselves, sudden and strange, out of the flowing picture of the whole. But their meaning —that was something you did not know.
In a curious way this new and nameless fear, vague and pervasive, made the fact of departure seem less important. That was something certain, known. But this ...
Less important, unless . . . unless departure and the causes of this growing fear were linked. There was something there, a possibility, too shattering to admit to the surface of the mind, too terrible to haul out and examine ...
He had never in his life felt anything like this pulsing pressure. There had been a time of worry a couple of years ago that no one knew about. Grant had spoken casually of an ache under his shoulder blade and mentioned the possibility of a touch of pleurisy. Renie had cautioned, “You ought to have an X-ray.” Grant said perhaps so, he’d see about it next time he went to Copeland. Until he had heard Grant say, weeks later, that the plates had shown nothing, Alan had lived afraid; almost forgetting what it was he feared, but clutched again and again by moments close to panic, and always conscious of a shadow on the heart.
What he felt now was like that, but more troubling because less definite, less able to be measured and recognized.
Scraps of talk. She said you’re the image . . . Anse Gordon . . . must burn old James to see . . . Anse’s kid ... or your grandmother . . .
Alan went into the back porch and got the milk pail and went on to the barn. Milk drummed thinly against tin. He stripped the cow, carefully coaxing the last thin streams of milk from warm and flabby teats, and wondered briefly how it was that you could do your job, well and thoroughly, when you felt like this. The smell of hay, the smell of dried manure, the warm glistening feel and smell of the cow’s side, the pail’s weight between his knees; they remained the same. Only his own insides were different, aching with fear and the need to know.
For a little while, after the cow was dry, after he had climbed the mow and thrown down hay, he stood in the door between the cow stable and the sheep shed, looking in at Stewart Gordon’s old two- master, incongruously sheltered there, bottom up, on the shed floor.
On the way in from the barn to the house he made up his mind.
While Josie put the milk through the separator in the pantry, he waited in the kitchen, sitting quietly in Stewart’s old chair. She came in, and turned up the lamp. The small yellow crown of flame diffused a widening pool of light.
He said, “Mrs. Josie ... Something I wanted to ask you.”
The tone surprised her. There was something thoughtful in it, and strained. Alan’s voice usually was edged with laughter or enthusiasm or curiosity. Rarely with nervousness or contemplation.
“Ask me ... All right, ask away.”
“Mrs. Josie—what is it—about us? About me . . . Grant and me. What is it people talk about?”
Josie sat down in her rocker.
“Talk about ... I don’t know as I see what you mean ...”
She knew as she said it that her voice was not the voice of ignorance or casual surprise.
Alan said, “You better tell me. You better tell me what it is. What it is about—Anse, when they mention Dad and me—”
The final words came in a hard halted rush. “I got to know ... I can’t stand wondering...”
Josie was not a psychologist. She was simply a woman past middle age—she thought of herself as an old woman now—who had come to know a good deal about what suspense and uncertainty can do to the mind. This knowledge was a part of her, as if memory had become an essence in the blood. The memory of days when she had wondered what it was that went on between Anna and Grant Marshall, what it was that absorbed Anse. Later, of how Hazel McKee . . . The memory of waiting, of doubt worse than certainty. The release of knowing, of the worst known. Something you could deal with and accept, because at last it was definite, lifted out of the shadows of hope and fear.
Regretful anger flowed through her.
Why? Why?
Years ago she had given up asking why. Beneath the hard immediate concern of the moment, it rankled now to find this old questioning of life revealing itself immortal in a sinking spirit and a hand that shook.
> She reached out deliberately for calmness, for the steadying pattern of sensible and common thought.
Lies. Lies were easiest. With a little sense of escape she realized that the moment could be lied away. This boy ... he was leaving Currie Head. Lies, to hold him while the mind’s questions died . . . She looked at Alan, and what she saw was a boy away from home, a week, a month, a year . . . away from the warmth of the usual, and questions that would not die ...
She knew about lying, the tragedy of lies exposed by time.
She said, calmly, “Did you ever ask Grant about whatever it is you’ve got on your mind? Grant or Renie?”
Alan shook his head. “No.”
No. It was not something he could ask Grant or Renie. You can’t reveal doubt when your whole feeling for people, and theirs for you, is based on things you never think to question.
For a moment her mind encompassed Alan’s, and the question growing there:
Is it true? I’m not your son?
No one could ask that question. Or answer it.
That was why he had come to her; someone he could ask. Someone he could come to for the knowledge that was better than fear.
It was forming in her mind. What he had to have was more than fact. Somehow it had to be truth. Somehow it had to be the way it was . . . the way it was now . . . and that was some-
thing Josie wasn’t sure she had the words for. Only the understanding, the insight that had come to her late in life; the knowledge that facts and the truth can be different. As different as black from white.
She glanced at Alan where he sat in the cane-bottomed chair Stewart had sat in. Behind the composure she could see the strain, and something that was almost eagerness. A lock of dark hair fell across the left temple. Josie felt the crawling pang of mingled love and anger and regret.
How could you give this boy the facts? And leave in his heart the truth? The truth as it was now? As time and love had made it?
She said, “Have you got a picture of your mother, Alan?”
“Mother?”
“Hazel.”
“Yes,” Alan said. “A photograph . . . And there’s some snapshots at Grandfather’s.”
“You can tell the kind of girl she was, then,” Josie said. “Good-looking . . . impulsive. I’ve never felt before or since the way I did when we began to know she wouldn’t live
Her voice halted. She had made her statement deliberately, to contrive an effect. But it was true. Now she knew it was true.
Years. It was years since she had really thought of all this. Thought of it as a whole. Parts of it at times came up out of memory . . . Grant’s letter from Toronto: he was bringing Hazel back. Bringing her home. Would it be all right if she lived with him at Gordons’? Until his house was built...Grant’s return, alone. Hazel ... a haemorrhage on the train, almost within sight of Copeland.
Days of uncertainty. Her own obedience to impulse. The long cold trip down-shore with Adam Fait. The low brick hospital. The room. The girl.
The girl, and the quick understanding ... “I know how it must’ve been for you, Mrs. Gordon.” The understanding, and the revelation. He hadn’t known; Anse hadn’t known. That was the gift of Hazel. The girl, she supposed, must feel that this fact made a difference to Josie. Even though it was not a fact you could talk about, make public in extenuation . . . because you couldn’t shatter the fiction Grant Marshall and Hazel McKee had brought to life around themselves. Themselves and an unborn child . . . But, actually, it was not the fact itself that made the difference to Josie. What Anse had known or had not known could make no difference now. What made the difference was Hazel; Hazel and her strange happiness—in Grant, in return to the Shore, in
being able to tell this small and secret truth to Josie, and in the painful and precarious life she clung to ...
It came back to her with startling clearness, Hazel’s carefully undramatic voice in a moment when the end was close. “Try not to mind this, Mrs. Gordon. I don’t, much. Except for Grant . . . And for ... But I don’t know ...”
She had minded. Hazel had minded. Had minded dying, had sought to cling to life and Grant Marshall and her child ...
Josie thought of Anna. There were times when Anna and Hazel McKee were almost mixed in her mind. Both dead, long ago. Both in their separate ways a part of an old story; a story that lived in memory, the separate memories of men and women on the Channel Shore, men and women who were sympathetic, indifferent, curious, careless, malicious. A story that lived too in living flesh and blood.
Anna. The sound of the name. She said to Alan, “I don’t know .. . Did you ever hear your dad speak of Anna?”
“Oh, yes,” Alan said. “I know he went around with her, Mrs. Josie.” He was looking at her shyly. “And then she died; and he married my mother.”
Josie nodded. “That’s right. A kind of boy and girl thing. Grant liked Anna, and Anse . . . Anse went with Hazel. They were— they planned to marry. There was trouble about religion. D’you understand those things, Alan?”
Josie thought: Lies. I lied ... No one had ever mentioned marriage. Except perhaps, in a moment of desperation, and too late, Eva McKee. She hardened her will, with no excuse to the saints. A lie was safe when no one could prove it false. When it helped to preserve the truth. What she was after was the core of truth, the truth as it was now.
“You’ve heard about Anse, I guess. The way he disappeared, I mean. I blame myself, a good deal. He told me what they wanted to do. I ... I told him ‘No’. I don’t know what got into his mind—what happened. Maybe he went to find work.”
Josie’s mind went back to the old fictions she had tried to cheer herself with, years ago.
“Work. So he could come back and get her . . . without being ... oh, dependent. Dependent on us here.”
Alan’s face was tranquil and interested. The strain had gone out of it. This was a story of the Channel Shore. He knew that into it his own life was somehow intimately woven, but the tenseness had gone out of him. This was the beginning of certainty.
Josie went on. “He didn’t come. We got word of Anna’s death. Grant was good to us. We’d always been friendly enough, religion or not. And there was that special . . . that feeling for Anna . . .”
She broke off and went back. “You know, I think he—I think Anse must’ve been . . . killed. By accident, maybe. Among people who didn’t know, wouldn’t know who to send word to—who to send for. Something like that. He and Hazel—he’d’ve written . . . There was a special reason. They thought of themselves like married people do. Like they used to in Scotland a long time ago . . . Married, between themselves. A queer thing, and not- recognized. Not done any more. And not understood. Some people on the Shore can be—narrow ...”
She spoke with a note of reminiscence, almost absently. “Hazel. It all came down on her, because they—Well, because they’d lived together. Though he didn’t... didn’t know ...”
She studied Alan’s face briefly, keeping her scrutiny outwardly indifferent. His look was full of interest and sympathy and a growing understanding.
“He never came back,” Alan said slowly. “Hazel—and Grant, then. She married Grant.”
He seemed to be trying the words over in his mind, looking at them to see what they meant; tentatively and with a certain wonder, but without surprise. And waiting for other words to make the tale complete.
Except that it would never be complete. That was something Josie knew. Never complete. And the course of it, onward from this point in time, depended now perhaps on the skill she could summon to her tongue. Suddenly she rejected skill. Blunt words, few and forthright, would have to do it. A boy’s faith in a neighbour’s word and her own faith in his will to understand.
“Let me tell you something,” she said quietly. “And don’t you forget it. Your dad and your mother—they’d been through the mill. There’s a k
ind of—love—comes from that, sometimes . . . stronger than any other kind. There was only one thing they thought of more than each other. That was the baby born while she was in the hospital, the winter they were married, a couple of months before she died ... I remember Grant coming in and looking at you in the cradle, after the funeral. It was a mean day, cold and raw, and snow blowing, even that late in the spring. He wasn’t sorrowful, you know. He’s tender-hearted, it was all a blow—but mostly he looks ahead when looking back don’t do much good. He took a squint at you. You were sleeping in the cradle he’d made for
you out of pine left over from my husband’s two-master. He took a squint at you and laughed and said to me, ‘Josie,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a son on my hands.’ Then he said to you, ‘Kid we’re on our own,’ and went out to tend the barn.”
What more could you say to plant the seed of truth, to fix belief in that kinship of the spirit? Belief in this as something warm, possessive and personal; as strong and as personal as kinship of the blood.
Alan said, feeling for words, “Then really-you are my grandmother.”
What oddity of realization had turned his mind to that? Away from the more direct revelation, the confirmation of his physical fatherhood? Josie didn’t know. The words caught her unguarded. For a moment her spine tingled with the nameless craving of earlier years, the physical desire to put her arms round his body, to press him close, once, against the beat of her heart. She fought her way back with quick fierceness to a hard reserve.
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