The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Once, after they had gone inside to eat roast lamb in the breeze- cooled dining-room, she looked up and noticed that when Bill turned to speak to her the look he gave her was a studying look. She did riot mind. There was something easeful in his presence.

  The men were talking with casual interest about the back lots. In his boyhood summer at The Head, Bill said, he had got back no farther than Graham’s Lake and the Black Brook. In those days there hadn’t been a clearing that you could see, in the hills beyond that.

  Grant said no, that was before the pulpwood-cutting, even. But now there was hardly any timber worth going after; not within easy hauling distance.

  Some of the cut-over land, though, Alan said, would soon be up to pulpwood size again. Spruce would grow anywhere in this country; faster here than anywhere else in the world . ..

  Only Margaret was silent. Only to Margaret was the presence of an outsider an annoyance. She knew that having Bill at table was making Grant pleasanter and more talkative than he had been for days. It seemed also to have taken the tightness out of Alan’s manner. But as far as she herself was concerned, the presence of a visitor did nothing but force her own presence at dinner. If only the family had been home she could have pleaded a headache, a sick stomach, anything, and shut herself in her room.

  Through the shield of her private knowledge she heard the meaningless words go on. Then suddenly they were close and clear. Alan was talking to Bill, off-hand, without emphasis.

  “Oh, there’s still a lot of timber in the province. I’d like to see what it looks like over west. Like to have a look at the way they do things over there . . . Maybe I’ll take a shot at it, some time soon.”

  He meant it, then. She had not doubted that. But it created in her an aching hopelessness to hear him preparing the way.

  It went against the grain to be less than forthright, Alan found. He had been forthright with Margaret this morning while they sauntered around the yard before church, talking casually, as far as anyone who watched could tell. He had been forthright while they stood by the barn with their eyes on the swallows, home from Peru, house-keeping in the shadow of the eaves. He had tried to get across to Margaret the sense of impasse that was woven into the exultance of discovered love. The thing he had felt, seen, heard in his blood as he lay in bed in the room next to hers, thinking of her and of himself and of Grant.Lying in bed there he had tried to face it. There were moments in those first hours of revelation when all he could feel was the wonder and the exultance; the memory of Margaret’s small body in his arms. The memory that went back to that other day, when he had held her briefly, crying, in the shop and had gone out to the barn to say what was in his heart to Grant.

  Grant and Margaret. Always, for him, it had been Grant and Margaret.

  The thing he felt for Grant was clear, defined long ago in flesh and nerves and brain, rarely thought of, like a religious faith, a part of him.

  And now, Margaret.

  Last night, yesterday, the night before ... As the moving scenes came up he had found that in all of them was Margaret’s image, a small repeated figure in the pattern of time.

  It was Grant, years ago, his realization of what Grant was, that had fixed his purpose to stay on the Channel Shore. And it was Margaret, the protective tenderness he felt for Margaret, that had broken his final fear, sent him to the barn that winter day to assault with feeling the barriers of reason.

  Margaret and Grant.

  But this, now, was something he couldn’t take to Grant.

  He had moments of recurring panic, hearing in his mind the story they would tell on the Channel Shore. Of Grant Marshall’s boy who was not his son but Anse Gordon’s bastard. Hazel McKee ... He had a wry twinge of regret that he had never known her. Mrs. Josie long ago had softened that story. He knew enough now, he had heard enough allusions to Anse Gordon, enough reminiscent words of Hazel, to guess how it had been. Hazel... a wilful girl who had grasped at what she wanted. He felt he would have liked her. Her problem, in another version, survived in himself.

  The story of Margaret Marshall’s brother who was not her brother.

  This was something that must come before they could talk or think of love.

  For the second time in his life he faced a thing he was afraid to do. And afraid not to do.

  There was no such simple answer as to blurt from the heart to Grant his own desire. He had tried to make this clear to her. All he could do was go away. Take refuge in time. He had told her this. She had said nothing.

  He had been forthright with Margaret. But he could not see himself going to Grant, without preamble or explanation, and saying: “Pop, I’m going away.”

  Now at the dinner table he had voiced his intention casually, as a possibility, an inclination. Voiced it to an outsider while Grant was there.

  “. . . the way they do things over there. Maybe I’ll take a shot at it, some time soon ...

  Grant hardly seemed to notice.

  He mentioned his own years in the Queens County woods, and along the Mersey and St. Mary’s rivers as a timber cruiser, and went on to question Bill Graham about the advertising business.

  On the veranda when the meal was over, he filled his pipe. He found himself biting the stem of it, holding hard against a rising impatience. When Bill Graham got up to leave he schooled himself to walk slowly across the yard with Bill to the bars in Frank Graham’s fence, and slowly back. He dropped to the steps, waiting a moment. Through the open window he could hear the homely clatter of the table being cleared. He spoke with a casual abruptness over his shoulder.

  “You really want to try it . . . somewhere else, away from here?”

  Alan said, “Well, I’ve been thinking about it, Pop. Just for a while, y’know. I’ve been thinking it over ...”

  He did not add to that. He could have said lightly, “I think you were right; I ought to take some time off . . .” But it was not time for play he needed, or planned to take. And he could not carry his acting quite so far as to pretend that it was.

  Grant nodded. “All right”

  In each of them was an emptiness like long hunger.

  5

  The mill was idle. They had sawed the last of the logs in the yard on Monday and Grant had turned to trucking from a lot back of Millersville they had logged the previous winter. Alan spent the early forenoon of Tuesday hauling slabwood to Josie Gordon’s back yard and began cutting it up, in the hour before dinner-time, with a buck-saw. Today he preferred to work by hand, putting his back and shoulders into it.

  The chore was his by choice. The Katens and the Wilmots, with some local help loading, were enough to handle the trucks and his instinct told him he was better off alone. He had always liked working at Mrs. Josie’s anyway. On coming back from overseas he had picked up again where he had left off years before, relieving Grant of the small necessary jobs around her place.

  Shortly after noon Josie opened her back door, stood looking out for a moment, and walked across the yard to him. To Grant, to anyone else, she would have called out dinner in the normal way from the door. What she felt for Alan, the private half realized relationship, was singular and different. There existed between herself and Grant a strong adult respect and a silent understanding rooted in the sharing of a bitter time. What she felt for Alan was blended of tenderness and a kind of continuing excitement. So now, she walked across the matted chips and grass toward him.

  She said, “Come on in, Alan. It’s ready.”

  He leaned the buck-saw against the saw-horse and straightened.

  “All right, Mrs. Josie. So am I.”

  He laughed, teasing, and slipped an arm lightly around her as they walked to the house.

  “What’ve we got? Herring? I smell ‘em frying.”

  To Josie the small easy ways of obvious affection were always a sense of wonder. They were something she could not herself
achieve. In some people she saw them with an inward doubt. But in Alan ... In Alan they were right; she could feel the light warmth of them, and in her heart, in little things like the easing of her tongue’s restraint, she could respond.

  He had come down the road alone, the afternoon of his return from overseas, taken her in his arms with a quiet laugh and kissed her between the eyes. In the months since then she had watched with interest the new and casual manner, the way in which he found laughter in the smallest things, even small annoyances; his offhand attitude with people of any age, even in Grant’s presence.

  It was not new, really. As she watched him slosh water over hands and face at the kitchen sink, running wet fingers through the dark straight hair, Josie’s mind repeated the realization that this was Alan’s natural person, the kind of person that had been hinted in his early boyhood. Through the later years of a secret knowledge, of the caution bred from it, of thinking toward a single purpose with a boy’s devotion, the lightness and charm had been covered up, held back, the voice and gesture harnessed in a boy’s deference to the presence of his father.

  Now it was free. Freed by war and the sense of full manhood and the fact, perhaps, that whatever of sonship and fatherhood had to be proved was proved.

  Josie dished up the fried herring and boiled potatoes. Alan pulled his chair in to the oilcloth-covered table.

  “Grandfather?”

  Josie nodded. “Richard sent them down by Adam this morning. Makes it handy, mail making both trips the same day now, what with cars and the road fixed.”

  Alan put his fork into the crisped herring skin and uncovered the white flesh beneath.

  “Good eating. If they weren’t so darned bony . . . Every time I eat ‘em, though . . .”

  He hesitated and let it go. Every time he ate fried herring he thought of a day during the summer when he was fourteen. A day when he’d been out to the nets with Richard. A cold wet morning, for July. Rain sloshed down in torrents on the hut’s roof after the catch was cleaned. Rather than go out into it and home to dinner Richard had made up a fire in the round iron stove, a relic of a time when men at The Head would spend all day at the beach and sometimes sleep there. They fried herring in an ancient pan from which Richard scoured the rust with sand and an old newspaper, using butter from their morning snack for frying-grease. That was the one July he had fished with Richard. The next summer he had spent in the woods and the bunk-house back of Katen’s.

  In the thought now of that day under the drumming roof, a thousand thoughts were drawn up and mingled. He could feel again the wonder of that summer, the exultation, the purpose, the pride and the fear.

  Exultation at remaining on the Shore; the purpose—to be as Grant wanted him; the pride in a story learned from Josie Gordon’s lips; the fear that in some way—his own resentment at a veiled sneer, thoughtless words, betraying knowledge—the fear that he, or anyone, should break the long illusion.

  Josie’s dry voice cracked the crust of his abstraction.

  “Must be something kind of weighty.”

  He said, grinning, “Well, now, maybe it is. Would you like to take a guess?”

  Josie said, “Oh, a girl, most likely . . . Its natural. They all come to it.”

  Alan pushed back his plate, laughed, and went to the stove for the teapot. It was curious, the effect Mrs. Josie had on him. Here in her house, with her, he was careful to keep up an easiness, an exchange of banter, as though the ache in his heart did not exist. The curious thing was that this was no effort to him; he enjoyed it. At home was Margaret, and in the woods back of Millersville, Grant. The problem of his love for both was all his life. And yet here, with this drying apple of a woman, he could be himself. Something in the sense of time. Josie, flesh and blood, seventy-five years old; the mind alert, the heart courageous and, for all its reticence, affectionate.

  He poured tea into Josie’s cup and said, while he filled his own, “They grow them pretty down the Shore, Mrs. Josie.”

  She buttered bread and raised the cup to her lips.

  “Heard you were down. News travels, around here.”

  Alan said, “Always did . . . Did you go to dances, Mrs. Josie?”

  “Yes . . . oh, yes.” She considered. “They were big affairs in my time.”

  Her mind drifted . . . Images of Stewart Gordon, stiff in broadcloth . . . buggies tied at the hitching-rail back of the hall . . . satin puffed out at the shoulders . . . Lord Macdonald’s Reel and The Irish Washerwoman ...

  She said, meditatively, “Grant wouldn’t like that kind of thing much,” and had a moment of misgiving. Never except on that one evening years ago had she talked to Alan about anything but surface matters. The self-revelation they had shared that day was woven into the background on which the pattern of their everyday relationship was traced, giving it strength and substance, but it was not a part of that pattern. Now, she thought, she had gone a little deeper. She had intruded into the wordless world of feeling.

  Alan seemed not to notice. He tipped back his chair and fished out a cigarette. He said with a short rueful chuckle, “He didn’t,” and continued: “Well, I guess it won’t happen again. Not this

  summer, anyway. I’m thinking of going down around the Mersey ...”

  “Are you?” Josie seemed mildly surprised. “You know, I’ve never in my life been farther away than Sydney. I s’pose the more you see the more you want to. I’d ‘a thought . . . Wasn’t France, those countries . . .?”

  “... enough, like?” Alan finished the sentence for her. “Too much, sometimes.” He let the chair’s front legs drop to the floor, got up, and began to clear off the table. “Let’s get these dishes washed.”

  At the sink by the east window he stood at Josie’s left, wiping while she washed, stacking dishes on the sink-board and looking out over the summer fields and woods.

  There it was again, the thing you couldn’t quite explain. The separate existence. He didn’t know how it had been with the rest of the Canadian army; except for the members of his own family he had never tried to look into the minds of others. But for himself ...

  Suddenly he laughed, and in answer to the question he could feel in Josie, said: “You know, over there, this was one place I tried not to think about. The Shore. I didn’t know about the rest of them. You heard it said, about guys living on—oh—hope. The thought of home and so on. That was never any good to me. Had to put it out of my mind. Think of what I was doing. What I had to do next. That way, you got through today and first thing you knew it was tomorrow ...”

  That was it. From the day he had put on khaki he had belonged to a world different from the world of home. Whether by home you meant the Channel Shore or Copeland county or Nova Scotia or the whole idea of the future. He had kept no more than an open mind about the chance of getting home. If you didn’t count on anything except what you felt and smelt and tasted, if you didn’t look past tomorrow, you could stand the army and the war. Not otherwise. Let the long future take care of itself.

  Looking back on it with a kind of curiosity he saw that in a way he had written the future off. Once you did that you could go ahead with what you were doing. Your mind would be keyed up, alert, but still in working order. But it was not the kind of standpoint from which you could afford to look forward or back. That was why, morning and evening at the mill, he had wanted to laugh. He had come back, unbelievably, to a reality that was both old and

  new. The world he had left in nineteen-forty. But now every word and act and gesture that went into it, every log and piece of machinery, every man and woman and farm animal, every moment, had a sharper outline than before.

  “First thing . . . it’s tomorrow,” Josie said. “Killing time. I know what you mean.”

  Alan felt a quirk of amusement at the old-fashioned saying which expressed so tersely the truth. There was something else in her voice. For a moment he felt shar
ply what the old ones must have felt, and the young, the ones who were left behind: Grant, Renie, Margaret, Josie. What they had felt, onward from the dawn of a June day over the French coast . . .

  And Josie—did she mean too that other waiting, years ago, the waiting that never ended, that was edged with shame, and that now must certainly be finished? His mind played with a strange thought: had Josie dreamed, ever, in these last years, of Anse Gordon alive? Returning, perhaps, to stand in her kitchen door? And in that dream, what feeling would be uppermost? Love? Hope? Fear?

  He shook the fancy away and his own moment of insight with it, and gestured at the window. He said, lightly, dismissing it: “All gravy. You couldn’t count on it, so you tried not to think about it. It was all gravy, when you got back.”

  It came to him as he lit another cigarette, sitting by the window with the dishes done, that instead of making up a story for Josie to explain his going away, he had been talking as he had talked to no one before, not even Margaret, about his war-time battle with dreams of home. Talk like that added up to a question: Why don’t you stay here, then? But if Josie noticed the inconsistency she said nothing. She had got out her knitting and relaxed in the rocker by the south windows, across the room from him.

  He felt lazy and could see no reason why he shouldn’t indulge the feeling. The day was reasonably cool and an air of wind through the screen flowed over his face. He sat, feeling little, letting his body relax and his mind note that when he wanted to he could go out and get to work with the buck-saw and then go home.

  After a little he heard the throb of a motor below the turn and saw Grant drive by, headed homeward, and noted that he must have left the crew in charge of Dan.