The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  “That’s the kind of thing you’re not to think. It’s not true. Not in any way that counts. I don’t come into it. Don’t come into it at all. The Gordons don’t come into it. You’re Grant Marshall’s son, in everything but—you’re Grant Marshall’s son . . . I’m a neighbour, that’s all. That’s all I want to be ...”

  She walked to the window and looked out at the dark, and came back and put a hand on his shoulder briefly, and returned to her chair, facing him.

  “You’re a neighbour’s boy to me . . . The reason I told you this . . . Well, you asked. And it’s better to know than wonder. If things were so you wouldn’t ‘ve ever . . . That’s the way it should’ve been, because—What I told you, it don’t mean anything. Not to you, or Grant. But people ... I’m scared, Alan. Grant would skin me, if he knew I’d . . . You’re what he lives for. You’re what he plans for. An education. A chance. But people . . .” Josie’s voice was querulous. “I know the Shore. Some time . . . They’re always talking . . . Like Vangie. You’ve got to know. So nobody can take you by surprise.”

  Alan got up out of Stewart’s chair. He looked at Josie as if she had misunderstood him, and as if he couldn’t quite explain.

  He said, “Well, I guess I’ll go home. Thanks for telling me, Mrs. Josie . . . And don’t worry. I understand it.” He turned in the doorway and looked directly at her. “It won’t make any difference, y’know ... And—thanks.”

  The air was cold, yet soft. The Channel was grumbling, a giant sighing on the winter beaches of Currie Head. A light was on

  in Grant’s workshop and Alan could hear the sound of an axe. Difference. It won’t make any difference.

  The axe stopped going in the shop, and Grant came to the lighted door. “Hello, kid. You better report in. Renie’s looking for you.”

  Alan said, “All right, Dad,” and went into the house. He spoke almost absent-mindedly. A new feeling had taken hold and was spreading through him. He put off thinking about it while Renie told him what she wanted—a gallon of kerosene oil and a pound of tea from Katen’s.

  On the way to Katen’s he walked slowly, letting the kerosene can bump his leg. A tightened ache throbbed at the back of his throat. But it was not himself he was thinking of. He was thinking of the girl who had lain upstairs in the stove-pipe room at Gordons’, that spring fourteen years ago, and the man who had lived there, working in the woods and cleaning stables, milking cows, coming in at supper-time. Joking with Mrs. Josie, going upstairs to say a word to the girl before he sat down to eat.

  And, sometimes, holding in hardened hands the small warm breathing body of a boy, lifted from a hand-made cradle.

  Hazel and Grant. They were people in a story, a sad kind of story that was not all sadness. Grant ... It was like knowing as flesh and blood the people in a book, as if you could come home and talk to someone like Starbuck, the mate of the Pequod in the story about the white whale

  A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds . . .

  Not quite Starbuck. Grant was steadfast, but not staid.

  Hazel and Grant. The child. He had been thinking of the child as a nameless character in an ancient tale, a stage property. But that was not the way it was. For the story still went on, the story was life; the child was a boy, walking beside him, taking the same steps, thinking the same thoughts.

  The cold thought that was not a thought, the apprehension he had never quite admitted to the lighted spaces of his mind, could be taken out and looked at now. Looked at and utterly rejected.

  Grant. Grant would never send the child away because it was not the child of his body. Some stupid fool might think that. Might say that. But that was not the way it was. Not when you knew...

  He felt for a moment a kind of enlarged view, as if he could see the other side of the Islands, and past the woods, north to the railroad. As if he could talk on equal terms with Alec Neill or Grandfather McKee or Uncle James. The Channel Shore-it was not a little world, now, from which people went and to which they sometimes returned, but a living part of a larger world, a part of the whole thing, like Halifax or Boston or Montreal. He saw the Shore now not as the one place loved and friendly and known, but as his own particular part of something larger, embracing all, the bright and the ugly, the familiar and the strange.

  Grant . . . Closer, now, than ever. That winter, fourteen years ago, and all the seasons since: more than woods work, more than farming or snaring rabbits or going after trout together. It was something hard and bitter they had shared.

  No one was in the store yet, under the gasoline lamp, but Felix Katen and one of his grandchildren, Lon’s son, a ten-year-old they had christened Burford. The youngster came out from behind the counter eagerly, calling, “Hi, Al!”

  Alan said, “Hello, Buff,” and punched him lightly in the chest. He had helped little Buff Katen set rabbit snares in Felix’s lower pasture one Saturday before Christmas; and even while his mind was fixed on other things, he felt a brief amused lightening of spirit at Buff’s obvious devotion.

  Felix looked up from a newspaper and peered over his glasses.

  While the kerosene gurgled into the can, his mind came back, to Halifax, the trip away. He waited until he had the full can in his hand, until he was on the way up the road, to think about it.

  He never asked me if I want to go; he just said I’m going . . .

  For days the resentment had quivered through his mind, swirling at last along the surface of a darker tide, the clouded sea of a darker apprehension. Now he could look at this boyish hurt with a curious detachment.

  That afternoon in Katen’s woods: The smart ones leave. Renie and me —we’ve been doing some thinking about it . . . This was still something he didn’t understand. But in his new maturity it was a problem to meet with calmness, not something to be nursed and worried over.

  He asked himself, once, “If that’s what he wants you to do, why don’t you do it . . . take it, without griping, and go?”

  But that was not the answer. A series of curious pictures, all one picture really, came into his mind. Alec Neill, limping out from behind his wood-pile, alone. Limping into a cold house with a salmon net in the corner, and a pile of old magazines . . . Grand mother McKee, hurrying to unlock the mail-bag, fingering through the thin sheaf of letters for one with a Peace River postmark.

  Mrs. Josie...

  The flowing pictures moved on the surface of his feeling, his certain knowledge. The answer was there. The answer was in something that bound him to Grant in a kind of exalted sonship. Resentment and frustration and unquestioning acceptance belonged to childhood. In their place now was a strong arid growing purpose. To live according to the story. To hold in the heart, secret and sharp, the knowledge of a kinship stronger than blood. And holding that, to be Grant Marshall’s son.

  How could you make it certain, acknowledged, visible?

  All right, perhaps, for sons who were really sons to leave, to go away; the tie of blood remained.

  But when you were not. When you were not. When the tie was another thing, private and tender, its source unshared by word or glance between you ...

  How could you make it true? How could you affirm it in the sight of all, by action, manner, habit? How? How—except with him; working, talking, belonging to his life and purpose, and on the Channel Shore?

  If he had never gone questioning to Mrs. Josie Gordon . . .

  That thought, now, was like considering the possibility of never having known a person loved.

  He was passing Vangie Murphy’s, watching for the gleam of Mrs. Josie’s lights round the turn, when he began to feel a new slow excitement.

  He had the courage, now. If he could find the place, the words, the moment.

  It might not change the hard necessity. But he could try.

  7

  On the
morning of New Year’s Day there was no talk of going to the woods. Grant went out to the barn, absent-mindedly, without telling Alan what he wanted him to do. Renie saw the omission for what it was—an absorption so complete in a problem without solution that for once he had simply forgotten that he had to try to be natural, had to try to play a natural part.

  She said to Alan, “You might clean out the shop if Grant doesn’t need you for a while. Anything that’ll do for kindling, put it in the porch.”

  He was glad to be alone this morning. He carried in and dumped in the kindling box the odds and ends of boards left over from Grant’s work in the shop, and when this was done built a fire in the shop stove and patched a couple of inner tubes for the truck. After that he sat on the shaving-horse for a little, whittling and working on the purpose in his mind.

  He was going to get it said. How, he didn’t know. The difficulty still was how to say it. The only words he could think of were as awkward as Grant’s had been in Katen’s woods. All day Sunday he had tried them over in his mind, on the way to Sunday school, at dinner, and while they idled in the house in the afternoon.

  I’d like to talk to you a minute ... I don’t know whether you know it or not, how I feel, but what I’d like to do ... I don’t want to go ... I want to stay here, for a while anyway . . . Till I see what I want to do ...

  No matter how you varied them they were stilted and awkward and unconvincing.

  As he sat on the shaving-horse he worked it over, testing and trying sentences, imagining situations that would make the saying easy.

  Nothing could make it easy; and it had to be right. He was haunted by the spectre of thought that waited in ambush if his spoken words should fail: the sense that somehow he had missed, bungled the moment and left the telling words unsaid.

  The soft compelling impulse brushed his mind again: let it slide, take it and go. Go as the rest of them go. Stan Currie, Dave and Harry Neill, Col Graham. That’s what their fathers wanted for them, a chance away. That’s what it means, on the Channel Shore, to be father and son.

  He shook his head. That was the argument of fear and of reason. The truth he felt was deeper than reason, a knowledge in the blood and bone. He was not a boy, now, fretting at separation from known and pleasant things, but a man avowing a way of life. The chance he chose was to live and work with Grant, the chance that belonged to those who planted life in the rock and earth and woods of the Channel Shore. This, for him, was the single way of sonship. There were hard things to be done. To speak this word to Grant was first and hardest.

  As noon approached, while Renie was getting dinner ready, Margaret came over to the shop. Bert Lisle was with her.

  Alan felt a slight annoyance. What he wanted was a chance to go on working it over, reaching for the way to do it right. He heard Bert asking cheerfully whether he could borrow the bucksaw to use on Mr. Currie’s wood-pile, and said, absent-mindedly, “Sure,” nodding toward the saw hanging on the wall.

  Bert lingered, leaning on the saw, blind to Alan’s impatience.

  “Well, I better get back to work,” he said, standing in the open shop door in thin cold sunlight. And then, curiously, “When you goin’, Al?”

  “Going?”

  “To Halifax. You’re really goin’, ain’t you?”

  “Next week, I guess. First of the week, likely.” Alan spoke quickly and indifferently, unable to think of anything to pull Bert’s mind away.

  Bert continued with his questions. “When’ll you be back, though? D’you really mean it? Bein’ away all winter? How long’ll you be, really, Al? ... When’ll you be back?”

  Exasperation was piling up in Alan: the pressure of accumulated brooding, annoyance at the interruption in this present effort to find the words be had to say to Grant.

  He barked, “Oh, for God’s sake! How do I know? Never, maybe.”

  Bert looked at him in astonished injury. He said, finally, “All right. Keep your shirt on. You don’t have to ...” He picked up the saw and stepped out of the doorway and started for the road, wearing a kind of baffled dignity.

  Angry at his own anger, Alan said: “Oh, cripes!” He drove his knife hard into the head of the shaving-horse.

  Behind him then he heard the sound of crying.

  Margaret sat on a pile of sash-wood, crouching forward with her elbows on her knees, hands clutching her face. Her body shook with short stifled gasps.

  Alan walked across the shop floor and sat down on the pile of planed boards. He put an arm round her, his fingers hard against small hard ribs. The feel of her, while his anxious mind turned to her trouble, made him think of something almost ridiculous. Years ago one of the ewes in lambing time had refused to mother one of her twin lambs. They had had to raise it by hand, starting with warm milk in the kitchen. He remembered the way the lamb felt, the trembling ribs under skin crinkly with infant wool. He thought, just by looking you didn’t realize how small she was.

  He said, “Mag . . .” At the sound of his voice and the touch of his hands her will let go. She threw herself across him, burying her face in his sweater with an exclamation oddly wild with relief, crying without restraint. A minute, two minutes ... he didn’t know. She straightened and said, sniffing, “H’ndk’chief, Lan.” He felt in his sweater pocket and gave it to her. She dried her eyes and wiped her face carefully, gave the handkerchief hack to him, and marched out of the shop.Alan watched her go through the porch and into the house. He could hear a metallic tapping. Grant, working on something in the stables.

  He stepped down from the shop doorway and headed for the barn.

  Grant was alone. There were no animal sounds, even, to give the place the feel of life. He had left the cows free, after turning them out to water earlier, to ruminate in the sunlight on the snow- covered pasture slope along the brook, and forgotten to turn them back to the stable.

  Dan had both horses in the woods back of Kelley’s. For something to do, Grant now patched the horse-stable floor, inserted new planking in the old partition between the stalls.

  He thought idly that a barn without life in it was an empty place, almost as dismal as a house without people. The stable door was open, for light, but here on the north side the sun didn’t strike. And it was cold.

  He wiped his hands on an empty oats bag, standing there in the inside stall, and considered the changefulness of human feelings. One day you felt like a man on horseback; the next, you could crawl underground.

  For nearly fifteen years changes in mood had not much bothered him. He had put that kind of thing away. There was always so much to do. Josie and Stewart and Hazel, first, and Alan. Renie and Margaret, and still Alan. A place to look after, a house to build, pulpwood to cut and haul and boom. Pay-rolls to meet. Not much time to be moody. Was that why it was, he wondered, that he’d always kept moving? To avoid brooding, to keep thought away? Was action the answer, the reason he had been a cheerful man?

  Perhaps. He didn’t know. He said, conversationally, “You don’t know a damned thing about it,” and made a small sound of disgust: he had known some ups and downs in his time, but this was the first time he had got to the point of talking to himself.

  The barn’s damned emptiness was inside him. He threw the oats bag away, walked to the open door, and glanced along the cart track to the road. Over toward his own house and Hugh Currie’s, then down past Frank Graham’s to Mrs. Josie’s and Gordon’s turn.

  If he could bring it up, if they could talk about it naturally . . . things would be better. Not all right, but better. He hadn’t been able to get near it. He hadn’t been able to say, “How d’you like the Halifax idea, anyway? You’ll have a good time at Big Bob’s when you get used to it.” He hadn’t been able to say, “Write a fellow, will you, when you get settled.” He hadn’t been able to say, “We’ll get down to Halifax in the spring, likely; Renie’ll want to see her father.”

  T
hinking did no good. Some kind of block in the mind made speech impossible. How could you ask him what he thought about it when it had to be done anyway? How could you discuss it easily, like something natural and agreed, like a trouting trip up the tidewater behind Findlay’s Bridge, when the whole thing was forced and unnatural, an expedient you couldn’t explain?

  This was the first important course of action he had ever imposed on anyone without an explanation. Without a real explanation. The things he had said in Katen’s woods were thin and artificial. The only explanation worth a damn was the true one, exposure of the thing you feared. Again Grant felt the faintly sickening sweep of doubt along his nerves. Something he had heard rang in his mind: It’s a queer feeling; not to have doubts.

  With eyes that noted the small incidents of life and movement around the place while his mind still turned inward, he saw Margaret emerge from the shop and walk to the house. Alan came and stood in the shop door, and stepped down, turning toward the barn. Even now, you couldn’t fight down the feeling of lightness and warmth, the place living in the surface of your sight, the children moving through the small activities of life there. Grant turned back toward the inner stall, not to be caught standing aimless, empty-handed, glooming at the yard.

  After a moment he was conscious of something odd, a feeling of being watched. Alan, standing in the stable door, hadn’t said anything. Grant straightened. “Dinner-time? I’m just about through here.”

  Some intuition caught him. He walked across the stable floor to the door, the past and future slipping from his mind. All he saw was Alan, in this present moment, and what was in his face.

  He spoke out of himself, not out of reason or prudence or fear, but out of love without caution.

  “Alan, kid-what is it?”

  He never asked me if I want to go; he just said I’m going . . .

  Alan gulped. All he could think of was that Grant at last had asked. Not in the words he had dreamed of, but in words selfless and all-inclusive; words and a tone that were not concerned with this moment only, but probed for the source of all trouble and of every hurt to a person loved.