The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  But Margaret shook the hand off, lightly, without looking. An unconscious, meaningless act; she was listening intently to “Sleepy- time Gal”, looking at something far away, her hand in Alan’s arm. They slipped into the step together.

  Over her shoulder he saw the other’s face turn dark. Someone near him laughed. “You nearly had her that time, Del.”

  When the dance ended Alan led Margaret back to where Buff waited near the door with Dan and Bill Graham.

  Behind them someone said conversationally, “Y’know, it’s too God damn bad we’re not good enough for these up-shore people.”

  Alan turned slowly, puzzled.

  Someone said, “Shut up, Del.”

  The voice went on, pointed and provocative. The man in green tweed was looking straight in front of him, talking to no one, or to a figure set up in imagination, so that all could hear”Too bad their — women can’t get loose from their own damned pretty-boys...”

  He used a word to qualify “women”—a word as common in the army as a drawn breath but completely shocking on the Channel Shore.

  Alan felt the shock of it and the curious rancour in the voice. Someone said quickly, “Rum . . . rum talkin’. Pay no attention to...”

  Black anger shook him. He turned.

  He had time for nothing. Buff had moved in front of him. He sensed rather than saw the blow. The man in green tweed folded, crashed backward through the doorway, fell on back and elbow across the porch railing and sprawled on the gravel beyond.

  Buff Katen, his face white and contorted, walked out to stand on the porch, looking down at him.

  As he drove home, past black stretches of woods and fields vague in after-midnight dark, Alan was concerned with one thing. Quickly, in the morning, he would have to tell Grant. Before someone else did.

  He had been careful to play it down for Buff’s benefit, touching Buff’s shoulder lightly with a hand. In the midst of the little crowd that formed round the hall’s entrance while the Copeland man named Del was being helped to a car, he had given Buff a tempered grin with a touch of admiration in it. But it wasn’t anything you could dismiss with a grin. This was the sort of thing the women of The Head had meant, years ago, when they said with loathing in their voices, “a down-shore dance.”

  This was an incident blatant and public. Even in the old days when there had been nothing unusual in fights at dance halls, they had occurred among the hangers-on, the youths with caps slanted over one ear, who came to a dance to watch, brag and drink. They had taken place in a moment’s passion, sometimes simulated, half-theatrical, behind a building or on the road. Tonight Forester’s Pond had seen a piece of old-fashioned rowdyism on the dance floor, and brought about by others than its own. Buff in a sense belonged. Perhaps the green tweed man did also. Alan and Margaret Marshall did not.

  This was what Grant had meant when he said it wasn’t much of a place for Margaret, and added, “You either.”

  Alan heard Dan Graham in the back seat say a reassuring word to Buff. Buff had come out of a glum silence to mumble a word of self-blame and regret. “Oh, hell,” Dan said. “What else could y’ do? . . . Talk? Sure, they’ll talk about anything. But what else could y do?”

  What else could you do? Behind the disturbance in Alan’s mind was a realization and a small regret that had nothing to do with his distaste at the prospect of telling Grant. He had never been able to fathom the drives that set the thud of fist against face between neighbours. The necessary team-anger of men fighting for life against a common enemy he could understand; that was something he had shared. But hatred of an individual . . . Now, he realized with surprise, he understood it. He had been slow. What Buff had done was his own impulse, in action. He had been slow...

  What else could you do? Well, Grant would say—no, he might not say it, except with silence. You could stay out of; false positions, situations in which you either had to be less than a man or act with scandalous violence. Except . . . you couldn’t stay out, always, and be yourself.

  He stopped the car at Katen’s. Buff got out and stood hesitantly, his hand on the door. Margaret said evenly, friendly and casual, “Good night, Buff. Stop worrying.”

  It came to Alan that in his own personal worry, he hadn’t given much thought to Margaret.

  She was curiously tranquil. There had been a brief moment at the door of the hall when she felt her body trembling and afraid, and had found herself, surprisingly, clutching Bill Graham’s hand. She had a confused memory of voices, placating and understanding; of other voices, competent and profane, in the background.

  Now the trembling and the fear were gone. She began to feel small responsibilities. In some way she would have to make clear to Buff that he was not to blame. She would do that, later; Buff was the kind of boy who would need assurances. Margaret

  knew Buff Katen. Knew that what he felt for her was merely a focusing of what he felt for all her family. For Alan, particularly. People who were different from his own. This was not disloyalty in Buff. It was a recognition of different qualities in others and a willingness, almost an anxiety, to know about these; to be familiar with different people and other ways of behaviour. A kind of receptive admiring curiosity. The best thing she could do for Buff was simply continue being natural.

  She wondered, worrying a little, what Alan was thinking, how she could ease the anxiety she knew must plague his mind. At that moment he withdrew his right hand from the wheel and let it rest on her forearm. She slipped her hand back until his fingers rested on the back of it, turned it and held him by the hand. Not with the grasp of one either seeking or giving comfort, but with a light almost indifferent pressure, a contact conveying no special understanding, a reminder that between them the obvious symbols of understanding were unnecessary.

  The wide garage doors Grant had cut in the side of the old house were propped back. Alan ran the car in and braked and let his dimmed lights flood the wall for a moment. The family had moved into the new house in the fall of ‘twenty-seven, when he was seven years old and Margaret was a baby. In that time of young boyhood it had seemed odd, for a while, to find the old house being used as a workshop and storage-place, but after a little the strangeness went out of it. Like everything else, it was something you got used to. Now without warning his heart was brushed by a tenuous recognition; not the boyhood excitement of moving across the yard into a new house with electric lights and running water, a house fresh with paintwork and the smell of lumber, but something farther back. With his hand on the light-push he waited, letting it come.

  The pattern of the wall-paper: this had been Grant’s and Renie’s room. Once when he had wakened screaming in a nightmare of whirling wheels, of a car that travelled like lightning yet did not move, Grant had taken him into the big bed between himself and Renie. Across the lapse of more than twenty years he remembered it: the sweat-dampened flannel sleeping-suit, the hard comfort of Grant’s arms around his shoulders and under his thighs; the soft warmth of Renie: the drowsiness, and after the relief of oblivion, sunlight streaking the pattern on the wall.

  When Grant got his first truck, Alan himself had bracketed up the shelf that ran across the wall to hold oil-cans and car tools. He had patched inner tubes here, changed spark-plugs, filled the

  cups with grease. He had used this room a thousands times; but not till now had he noticed the smeared remains of wall-paper with anything but the most careless corner of his mind.

  An endless formal pattern of white-sailed ships on dark-blue waves, against a lighter sky. The cars head-lamps in some manner created an illusion of freshness, restored in the reality of memory the repeated pattern, and with it the feel of the mattress, the half-fearful relief of nightmare gone, and the morning sun.

  A moment of truth that flowed imperceptibly into pther moments: Richard McKee’s attic and the sense of old things useless and rusted, yet having in them the colour of vanished
life; the road to Katen’s, and the vision of a girl in the Stove-pipe Room at Gordons*; a door-step, just beyond this dark partition with the papered wall, and Bert Lisle’s question on a cold day white with snow, and the feel of Margaret’s smallness in his arms.

  Alan switched out the light and got out of; the car and followed Margaret to the garage door. The night was dark; a young moon had long since set. Halting in the door,; Alan laughed, a low laugh with something like a question in it; a wondering, almost a deprecation of this mood that unwilled; had possessed him briefly with insight and sadness and a sense of flowing time.

  He felt Margaret turn toward him, questioning his laugh, and said affectionately and faintly self-mocking: “Wall-paper.”

  It was this about Alan that you didn’t understand. With Grant you expected the laughing shrewdness and the casual word that revealed the subtle understanding. With Grant you had to be careful, you had to watch yourself; underneath, the two of you were too much alike.

  But with Alan ... It had always been the open frankness she loved, the unsubtle companionship, the hard masculine strength. And yet, at long intervals, he would let fall a word, his face would reflect a glance, that showed you the existence in this active flesh of something you hadn’t known was there. It was when this happened that the tranquillity of love was displaced by a wild wanting excitement; and the control, the recognition of the need to wait, by passion and the need to know.

  Alan said, “Wall-paper,” and laughed again; and in her answering laugh he heard a note that was strange to him, a recklessness, a casting-away of reticence, a careless delight.

  She turned to stand against him and her hands went up to close behind his neck. He drew her close, hard, for a moment beyond thought or reason, the flesh informed only with instinct and feeling and emotion; tenderness and a kind of wondering passion, an emotion he could not name.

  4

  Grant shook his head when Renie glanced at him at church time. After she and Alan and Margaret had driven off he took the county map from the wall-closet and spread it on the dining-room table. The action was almost aimless, like that of a man opening a book read long ago and known by heart.

  The map’s crossed lines, its small figures indicating elevation, its streams and roads and headlands, were merely reminders. On linen-backed paper the county did not change. But in his mind the county lived as earth and rock, still lake and running water, barrens and clearings and standing timber, never quite the same from year to year. Behind the fringe of front lots the best of the woods had been stripped for miles. Hardly any place within easy hauling distance where you could set up a mill and feed the saw with wood from all around it. The best you could do was find a convenient spot like the one at Mars Lake and haul from far away and from scattered patches nearer by.

  Something out of time past came to him: the tide of timber. Lowries and McNaughtons and the Frenchmans now were like isolated pools in hollows of the sand when the tide drew back. Why had he thought of that? And of the picture that went with it: himself and Alan, working on the hauling-road in Katen’s woods, the winter he’d got out of pulpwood and into lumber? He felt the brief ache of passing pain, brushed the picture from his mind as one turns quickly a page black with hurtful words, avoiding the detail of memory.

  Frowning, he rolled the map and tucked it back in the closet, and walked out through kitchen and porch to the yard. Warm, sunny and windless. His eyes travelled down the slope of the lower field, the slanted pasture with the beech trees in the middle of it, the spruce along the spine of land that bordered the beach. The Channel was like glass this morning.

  Restless, he wondered whether the whole Graham crowd had gone to church. Probably not. Frank liked to loaf on Sunday mornings.

  And if Bill were home ... He hadn’t yet seen Bill. With Alan gone down-shore, he hadn’t gone across to Grahams’ Friday night, and last night, troubled by other things, he had lacked the heart for it.

  He climbed the bars in the line fence and crossed Frank’s pasture now.

  Bill came down off the front steps to meet him, sticking out a hand and mixing a grin with a cautioning nod toward Frank, stretched on the veranda lounge.

  With Stell out of the way at church, unable to nag him about making himself conspicuous in full view of the road, Frank had made himself comfortable. His eyes were closed. Something between a sigh and a snore escaped him. His thin frame was clothed in baggy blue serge pants, an unbuttoned vest and a clean white tieless shirt. The serge had faded until it was more brown than blue. Frank’s shoes lay by the end of the lounge. One hand hung over the side, thin and brown, big-knuckled and mapped with blue veins. The throat was sinewy and hollowed; the bristling grey moustache had a mock ferocity, and about the nose there was something almost hawk-like. The silky grey disordered hair on Frank’s head reminded Grant of the first soft hair on a blond infant. Seventy-six years old. Colin in the west, Edith married and away, Stell and Dan and Bess and little Frank at church. Frank Graham’s body, slouched on the lounge, stirring within itself in the slight rhythm of breathing, expressed an ultimate placidity.

  Grant and Bill stood for a moment, their eyes on Frank in a communion of amusement, and walked quietly round the house to the back steps, looking east and south to the Channel.

  There wasn’t much to say, Grant found. It was pleasant to see Bill Graham again, to ask him what he’d been doing for twenty- seven years, to consider that here was flesh and blood, grown to man size that had known the Shore briefly as a boy. There was none of the constraint he sometimes felt still at making a new acquaintance, the search for something of common interest to talk about. The Shore and their common knowledge of its people were enough to make reunion easy for two who had known liking long ago.

  There was not, of course, any resumption of that peculiar intimacy. It was too soon for this, and they were not now a man and boy. Time had levelled up the years and made improbable that kind of sensitive confidence. But the knowledge that it had existed was there, leaving no sense of embarrassment. Lightening, rather, the mere conversational attitudes of re-acquaintance without breaking down the reticence men owe each other.

  In the midst of talk, casual talk about surface things, Grant’s mind ran idly on how, years ago, he had talked to Bill about The Place. He had no wish to recall those days, nor did Bill mention them. And that, perhaps, was a little odd. Bill knew the story, or part of it. It was woven into the intimacy of their first acquaintance. Was it delicacy that kept this conversation in the nearer past and the present?

  Grant watched the smoke haze behind the Islands. There were forest fires there, on the Atlantic side. He flexed his hands. Two things . . . He had an impulse to cut through the avoidance of a subject, to talk to Bill about Alan. Not of the heart of the story, but of the surface, of Alan Marshall, his son. He had an eagerness to talk to Bill Graham, who remembered, casually as one might talk to a friend who did not know . . . The other thing was a commoner craving. He wanted to know whatever there was to know about the fight at Forester’s Pond.

  He admitted this, the core of his disquiet, to the front of his mind. It was accompanied by a wave of anger. This was partly directed at himself—in his morbid curiosity he was like a lover jealous of a woman’s past.

  He said, “I hear you were down to The Pond with the kids.”

  Bill said, “Yes, I was there.” He laughed.

  Grant said, “Alan was kind of close-mouthed when he told me about it. What . . . What did happen, anyway?”

  Bill grunted. “Oh, a fellow started swearing. He’d wanted a dance with Margaret and she hadn’t noticed him. Simply didn’t notice . . . Buff slugged him. He cracked a rib or two on the porch when he fell, I guess. That was all.”

  Grant said meditatively, “It’s about enough. I don’t like that kind of thing. I don’t like the Katens. They’re violent people . . . But you can’t give orders.”

  He thoug
ht: you can’t give orders. If your son’s ways are reckless and loose and on the edge of violence, a laughing arrogance . . . Of what use are orders when . . . He let the bitter thought take form: of what use are orders when the qualities that make behaviour are horn into you, brewed in the blood?

  Bill said doubtfully, “I don’t know exactly why, but I kind of like Buff Katen. When you come down to it, the way he . . . Well, how else could you handle a thing like that? I thought what Buff did was, oh, a kind of natural courtesy.”

  Grant was lost in thought, a bitter private abstraction. He said nothing. Frank Graham came round the house then, in his sock feet, walking gingerly, yawning and running fingers through his hair. He said, “Hello, Grant. Thought I heard somebody talking. You skipped church with the rest of the heathen.”

  Grant straightened and rose, all the meditation in his manner gone. He said, “If you can risk purgatory I guess I can . . . I’m taking Bill home to dinner with me, Frank.”

  He did not want to let go of this companionship. The thought of his own house filled him with a kind of loneliness.

  It was a relief to Renie, home from church, to find Bill Graham on the veranda with Grant.

  Throughout the drive to church and back Margaret had been silent and Alan carefully talkative. Renie felt like telling him to hush, he was betraying the uneasiness he tried to hide.

  Something was wrong. The scattered wisps of feeling she had sensed these last few days were being spun into tightening threads. She did not know what it was. Something you couldn’t say was due entirely to Friday night’s brawl at Forester’s Pond. Though that, perhaps, was a surface symbol . . .

  Something off-key in the radiations. The personal radiations. Wrong, whatever the combination—herself, Grant, Alan, Margaret.

  It was a relief to shake hands with Bill Graham, to sit on the veranda a few minutes while Margaret laid the table in the dining- room, to find the combinations altered by another person, a new face and voice breaking up the habitual patterns. And it excited her interest to meet again, as a man, someone she had forgotten, and identify him with a youngster who now came back into conscious memory, a kid who had studied under her in grade eight for a single month in that far time before she had known Grant.