The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Grant. And now again, Grant was going to be hurt.

  Richard found with something like surprise that there was little pain in reverie on these matters. They had mellowed and blended.

  Old pain was distilled into present interest and sympathy. For Grant, who had taken the brunt of it years ago. For Margaret and Alan . . .

  But still, there was that little flush of irritation. Margaret. Not satisfied with the comfort of talk, impatient for . . . impatient . . . His mind returned to that bleak day, the stairs to the room in Stewart Gordon’s house . . . That was something he would not talk about, to Margaret, now.

  He said, brusquely, “You don’t need to worry . . . You wait till the time comes. Anybody can prove that.”

  The meal was a quiet one. No one seemed anxious to talk and Grant was glad of that. Even then, Bill Graham’s presence disturbed him a little, at first. Bill by this time was simply one of the Grahams, a person you didn’t have to entertain with words; but even with people you knew well, it was hard to be at ease without making an effort and it seemed to Grant that the effort must be obvious.

  Tonight, however, no one laboured to make conversation and Grant let his mind drift in what had now become an endless preoccupation. He would glance up, now and then, and see his son’s face, cast in the mould of Anse Gordon’s.

  He looked inward with a kind of wonder, telling himself how small had been the causes of his worry, his irritation, a month ago and less: the nonchalance, the casual independence in Alan. How small compared to this present apprehension. And yet the difference was in degree, not in kind. For he admitted to himself, and must always have admitted it, consciously or not, that the root of his fear was Anse Gordon—his survival in the Shore’s memory, the conjecture of his survival in his son’s blood.

  The only change was that the fear was sharper, was definite, was made hard and immediate by Anse’s emergence out of memory to become a presence on the Shore.

  All this had come home to Grant particularly since seeing Anse and Alan together on the evening they had hauled the boat to Rob’s Yard. The question that had plagued him then was never absent from his mind. Why was Alan still at The Head? Was it the fascination of Anse? And if that were true, was it merely the fascination of something new, a stranger from the past? Was it that, or a groping instinct? Or did Alan know? Was it the fascination a son must feel for a lost and fabulous father, appearing by miracle out of vanished time?

  And now also, whatever the truth, the apprehension was twofold. First, the fear of something that in a sense must be a personal and private failure, the failure of fatherhood, the failure to overcome by habit and manner and example his son’s inheritance. Now to this was added by Anse’s presence the old fear of exposure, multiplied and made definite. The fear of an end to the long kindly conspiracy of illusion along the Channel Shore. An end to fatherhood itself.

  As he went out to the veranda with Bill Graham, Grant was aware of a feeling that had touched him vaguely earlier, in the days before Anse Gordon’s return had sharpened his doubts and fears into definite outline: a sense that there was something missing in his thinking, some truth he had missed. Oddly when this sense touched him he had felt the shadows lighten. But since Anse’s return he had not felt it until now.

  The moment of unreasoned lightness passed. He lit his pipe while Bill got out a cigarette, and they fell into a wordless quiet.

  Someone was coming up the road, round Gordons’ turn. Grant said, “Buff Katen,” meditatively, in a tone of slight curiosity edged with something faintly contemptuous.

  Buff turned in at the gate. He called “Hello, Mr. Marshall; hi, Mr. Graham,” and crossed the yard to the shop. They could hear him talking there to Alan, the sound of casual laughter.

  A little later Alan and Buff and Margaret came through the house from the back.

  Alan said, “We’re driving to The Harbour, Pop. The movies.”

  Grant said, “All right.”

  It irked him that Alan made the flat statement without asking whether anyone else planned to use the car; and he knew his annoyance was unreasonable.

  He stirred restlessly after they had driven off.

  “I don’t like . . .”

  Bill said, “What don’t you like, Grant?”

  Grant was silent for a minute. He said slowly, as if thinking in speech, “Damn it, I don’t like the Katens. I can work with them, in the mill, because they belong to the place. But damned if I can like them.”

  Bill said, “Well, if you don’t like someone you don’t like him, that’s all . . . But you sound kind of like someone talking about Jews, lumping a race or a family all together. You can’t like or dislike on the basis of a whole race. Or a family. It’s the person. I don’t like Lon much myself. But I think quite a lot of Buff.

  Don’t you think —well, nobody’s a copy of his father, good or bad. All kinds of things get scribbled in, from other people, other generations. Or edited out. You can’t figure inheritance on a slide rule . . .”

  Absently, Grant said, “M-m-m, yes. I guess you’re right.” He was only half-listening, his mind busy with tags of thought, images from the known past and the conjectured future.

  10

  Behind Alan the house was quiet. Grant had stretched himself on the chesterfield when supper was over. By now he would be asleep. In a little while Renie and Margaret would clear the table with a subdued clink of dishes. But at the moment the only sound was the slight intermittent knocking, faintly echoing from the inlet shore, where Anse was working on the boat.

  Working . . . Alan grinned, a little wryly. Working or making a pass at it. Anse and Lon had spent two weeks puttering over two or three days’ work. They had soaked the hull, hauled it out and patched, caulked and painted inside and out, taking their time. The old boat-yard now was a place for the young ones of Currie Head, and occasionally some of the elders, to lounge in the evenings. He had gone there several times himself, to avoid the appearance of staying away and because the whole thing was fascinating. A sailboat at The Head in his time was something new.

  He glanced down over the slope of Marshall and Currie land and walked leisurely past the barn to the path across the pasture.

  Three weeks since Anse’s return. Looking back, he could see hardly any outward indication that Currie Head had been reminded of the story of his birth or was aware of its renewal. He knew that the awareness was there, sharp and alive. But there was nothing you could call an outward sign. Nothing more noticeable than a gleam in Lon Katen’s eyes, as he glanced from Anse to Alan. A slight awkward hush, once or twice, among people waiting for Eva McKee to sort the mail, when Anse walked in. The hurry of Eva’s fingers ...

  And through it all an acceptance of Anse Gordon that was just a shade too careful. Alan felt his heart gripped, as he walked down Curries’ road, by a hard admiration. For Frank and Stella Graham, Buff Katen, the Freemans, the Wilmots. For people up and down the Shore, not relations or even close friends. People who took care to be casual with Anse Gordon, who met him with friendliness, careful that no word of theirs should rouse the sleeping anger and open the gates of grief for Grant Marshall and Josie Gordon and Richard and Eva McKee.

  A care almost like his own care . . .

  The curious thing about himself was that he still felt almost nothing about Anse Gordon, as a person. This was so, partly, perhaps, because the heart of his concern was not with Anse himself but with a situation—with possibilities resurrected and made urgent by Anse’s return, and the care he must take, the part he must play within that situation. And yet, it was not entirely that. There were times when, alone, he let the essential fact strike him. He could find in it no true sense of reality. No sense of kinship. Nor any sense of hate. He could condemn this man, this Anse, for wrongs done long ago to Josie Gordon and Hazel McKee, but the feeling had in it none of the peculiar hatred of blood for kindred blood. The f
eeling was impersonal.

  As for what Anse might be feeling . . . Well, as far as he could see, Anse had never once implied by word or look a knowledge of the tie between them. There was only that sense of the confidential in the rare moments when they were alone together. Wordless, more like an assumption, an understanding that intimacy existed, than intimacy itself. And when with others, that wordless manner of equality, an equality Anse would grant to no one else.

  Nothing, really, you could put a finger on ... He was beginning to feel a tentative lifting of the heart, the thing he had felt the first day of haying . . . Perhaps before long he could do what he had planned to do. With the Shore’s help the fabric was holding. Perhaps he could go away, away for a while from the sight and sound of Margaret.

  There were no loungers in the yard tonight except Anse and Lon themselves, through for the day. The boat lay moored in the tide-channel with masts stepped and standing rigging up. They sprawled, the two of them, on the moss-grown lip of bank above the narrow beach, smoking, lazing there until the impulse should strike them to get up and head for home.

  Anse looked up and grinned slightly as Alan’s feet crunched the chips and shavings of the yard. He said, “Well, Alan . . . What d’you think of her now?”

  Alan stood on the bank, running his eye over the boat. In the days when he had rowed to the nets with Richard and sailed the flat in the inlet he had learned something about handling small boats. But this was different. This boat belonged to a more spacious tradition, deep water and straining sailcloth. He could not have explained the fascination she had for him: the curve of pine planking round her timbers, sweeping back from the rise of the knockabout to the grace of her narrow overhang. But the fascination was there.

  He said, “Fine. She looks fine. You’re about through, are you?”

  Anse said, “About. We’ll bend on the sails tomorrow. Have her out there in a day or two. Plenty of time for the Holiday.”

  Alan nodded, glancing absently over what he could see of Anse’s workmanship. The planking was patched here and there, inside, between the timbers. The whole painted over, a medium green. The hull, outside, was a glistening white with a black ribbon and green washboards.

  The Holiday . . . Except for the war years he had attended every picnic held during his time at Currie Head, and found them dull, most of them, except for the fact that he liked people, anyhow and anywhere. Excuses mostly for the school-house road families and others back of the first line of settlement to have a day on the beach, the youngsters paddling around the inlet in Alec Neill’s and Richard McKee’s row-boats, wading on the clam-beds at low tide. This one, perhaps, would be different; this one would have the atmosphere of years ago, when the two-masters raced to a flag moored off the Upper Islands, out and back. He had heard Frank Graham talk about it.

  Anse got up and brushed his pants. He said, off-hand, “You might as well come down when we tow her out. Lend us a hand.”

  Alan said, “Sure. If it’s in the evening.”

  Anse laughed. He turned to Lon, “Lon, you got the jug? We’d best be getting home.”

  Lon rose and spat tobacco juice. He walked to the tool-chest, reached in, and brought out a flat twenty-six-ounce flask.

  This surprised Alan. Lon was a drinker, but Anse, according to the legend about him, never hit the bottle much. Even among men who did drink, you didn’t often see liquor produced except to mark occasions—a dance, a wedding, an election.

  Anse looked at him speculatively, hesitated, and said, “Like a short one?”

  He shook his head and grinned, “I guess not, thanks.”

  Lon drew a sleeve across his tobacco-smeared stubble and held out the flask. “Come on. After you.”

  Almost automatically, Alan reached for the bottle, grinned foolishly and gulped a quick drink. He had done a little drinking in English pubs and had shared an occasional bottle of Calvados in Normandy, but since then had never thought of it, simply because The Head was not a drinking place.

  The alcohol meant nothing to him. He was not afraid of it. But as the bottle passed between Anse and Lon and as the three of them turned to walk up Curries’ road, he was irritated and uneasy. Not at the fact of taking a drink but at the fact that in some way not quite clear to him he had entered into a relationship with Anse and Lon that was closer than he liked. He had a sense of annoyance and cautioned himself not to show it.Anse was still talking about the boat, the fun he was going to get out of her. It seemed to Alan that in his voice and manner he was including him, with Lon Katen, in something like a conspiracy.

  Lon came out of one of his customary baleful silences, surprisingly, to prod Anse. He said, “Hell! The way you talk you’d think the damn boat was a woman.”

  Anse laughed. “Get your mind off that, Lon. You’re too old . . . A boat’s better than any woman. Easier to get along with. You don’t have to talk slush to get round her. And you know where you stand.” He added, reflectively. “Damned if I know why they name boats after women.”

  A thought seemed to come to him out of that observation. “They never bothered putting names to boats around here. Maybe we ought to do something about that. Just for a change.” His voice took on slyness. “What d’you think we ought to call her, Lon?” He paused. “The Vangie?”

  Lon Katen grunted and spat a short word with his cud of twist. Anse chuckled, glanced sidelong at Alan, and fell to humming to himself.

  Alan made a small indistinguishable sound of amusement: even while a puzzled anger grew in him, he must continue to act, careful not to repel this assumption of intimacy. First, he had been drawn into the circle of Anse and Lon. Then into a smaller circle by the jibe at Lon, the old story of Etta Murphy’s disputed paternity ... A jibe in which he was expected to share.

  Almost without thinking, he had shared it.

  He examined his feeling as the three of them crossed over to the lower pasture of The Place. The time was past, suddenly, in which he had felt nothing about Anse Gordon. What he felt now was anger. Anger and a curious shame. Odd . . . That it should come to him this way, at last, the sense of kinship: in shame that a man should talk coarsely, joke coarsely at the expense of another, in the presence of his son.

  Margaret walked down the road toward the Gordons’. Since her hour on the beach with Richard a week ago, a kind of active tranquillity had taken hold of her. Not resignation, or even patience; it was more like the discovery that she could put time behind her methodically by a continued busyness. In the times between dish-washing, cooking and bed-making, she looked for things to do.

  Tonight she was going to see Mrs. Josie; and as she walked the short familiar stretch of road she found herself touched curiously by the warmth of anticipation she had known years ago, as a little girl, looking forward to an hour with this quiet woman who was like a member of the family and yet wasn’t. A person you almost took for granted but never quite.

  A stray thought lingered in her mind as she turned in at the gate, a momentary preoccupation with the old people whose lives seemed always to have been woven into hers and Alan’s. Aunt Jane, the fussy woman who was all that remained of Uncle James . . . They had hardly noticed her at all, except sometimes with amusement; and now Margaret realized with a flicker of surprise that she liked her, the thought of her was gentle . . . Uncle James, whose fierce wordless affection she had sensed and with whom she felt a vague affinity, a recognition. Eva McKee—she had never been able to feel much except a formal surface acquaintance with Mrs. McKee. Richard. Richard and Josie. It was curious that when you thought of abstract things like human understanding and friendliness the concrete images that came to mind were those of Richard and Josie—quiet people who rarely smiled and hardly talked at all.

  Josie as usual was sitting by the south windows of her kitchen, the windows Grant had cut years ago, the windows through which she had seen the life of the Shore pass and re-pass for a generat
ion . . .

  Outside it was only early dusk, but the kitchen was dim. Josie turned slightly in her chair and spoke to Margaret. “Well, Marg’ret. I saw you coming, but I’m too lazy to light a lamp.”

  With Margaret as with Alan, although the two were little alike, she sometimes felt the restraints go down, found herself talking, as if Margaret were a little girl again, come down the road to help her wind the yarn.

  Margaret said, “I’ll get one down,” and turned to the shelf over the sink in the kitchen’s southeast corner. She reached down a lamp, set it on the table, removed the chimney and touched a match to the wick. The yellow flame cast a dim unsteady light on checkered oilcloth, steadied and flowed out to the corners of the room as she slipped the chimney back into the prongs of the burner.

  Josie said, “Kerosene. Grant wanted me to put in hydro, but it’s too bright for me. I don’t read much. Specially at night. I could get along with a slut.”

  Margaret said, “What?”

  Josie gave her short dry chuckle. “A slut. Saucer of fish-oil and a lit rag.”

  Margaret said, “Oh.”

  Josie said, “I don’t s’pose anybody’s used a slut for fifty years. More, maybe.”

  Margaret said, “I don’t think I ever heard of that.” She turned to the stove in which Josie had allowed the supper fire to die, and dipped a finger in the kettle of water sitting there. It was still warm. She had noticed that the dishes were still unwashed, piled on the sink-board. She took the dishpan from its hook, sloshed in water from the kettle, and carried the pan back to the sink. Josie watched her idly and said, “You don’t need to do that; I’ll get around to it,” but it was not a protest, merely an acceptance of the helpfulness.

  Over her shoulder Margaret said, “They had pretty—expressive names for things, didn’t they?”

  Josie again gave her faint derisive chuckle. “Expressive? Yes. Rough. Life was a little rough.” She sighed. “Y’know, when I was a girl—I used to help father with the fish. Cleaning. On the beach, in bare feet. When I was fifteen, sixteen.” She paused, said irrelevantly, “People thought it was a wonderful thing, I s’pose, when kerosene lamps began to get common.” She paused again. “Oh, it was, too, I guess. But people were independent, years ago. Not much money, but they didn’t need it. Caught fish and farmed. Always a market for fish, and all they’d need to live on was the oats and potatoes and pigs and cows you could grow yourself ...”