The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Margaret washed and wiped, listening to Josie’s voice, the words between pauses. She thought idly that Josie, the silent one, was more than usually talkative tonight. The words hardly penetrated. What they were doing was calling up in Margaret’s mind scraps of conversation heard in childhood, bits of talk heard from the few people who talked about the past in rare moments of expansiveness, of relapse from the present. Not Frank Graham or Sam Freeman. Alec Neill, perhaps. Hugh Currie. Once or twice, Richard McKee.

  Words remembered, and the memory lost of who had said them . . . Years ago things changed in this part of the country.

  We got into hard times. It’s like a tide, only it’s years between the high and low. The tide went out because the nature of things changed . . . Fish got to be business, and the mack’rel scarce . . . More money for day labour and less for what you could catch and grow. Cheaper to buy than to make . . . When a man made wages and spent them there was more to show in the house. Boughten carpets, parlour organs . . . but after a while there wasn’t enough work for wages to go ‘round. You can’t turn the tide, so people had to leave to find what they wanted . . .

  Margaret had a picture of young men cutting white pine for two- masters, gathering chips for their cresset fires, shaving staves, bending hoops, shingling roofs, replacing sills, fashioning window- frames, cutting sails, caulking seams, cleaning and salting fish, knitting and mending nets ... they had known it all, all the skills. They were dead, and the skills gone on a turning tide.

  And yet, people remembered. And people still lived on the Channel Shore, people with other skills, newer crafts, that somehow were related to and grew from the old. The story of the Shore was the story of a strange fertility. A fertility of flesh and blood that sent its seed blowing across continents of space on the winds of time, and yet was rooted here in home soil, renewed and re-renewed.

  The thought turned. All these people had faced circumstance, had known love, anger, compassion. Some of them had faced frustration as hard to bear as that which faced herself and Alan. The sense of time and home and people could do nothing to ease the sharpness of that private hunger. But there was something, a feeling strange to Margaret, a feeling almost of companionship . . .

  For the first time since she had come to young womanhood she felt an identification with Currie Head and the Channel Shore that could be traced to something wider than the blood call of three people—Grant, Renie, Alan. The sense of home. And with it the sense of time. Time took care of everything, one way or another. But the manner in which it took care of things depended on people . . . time in itself was not enough. Life was shaped, slowly, by the character of people, but it took time. That was what Richard must have meant, time and people. You had to put some faith in both. Margaret shook her head in her old habit of trying to find words in which to pin a thought. If people were all right, time would work it out ...

  Josie was saying, “You can’t stop change, though, and maybe things are better as they are . . .” She lapsed into silence, and Margaret thought a little guiltily that she hadn’t really been listening to what the old woman said. And yet she had no sense

  of anything missed. She had been listening to many voices. Josie’s was one of them.

  Footsteps sounded on the back steps and Anse Gordon came into the lamplight.

  The inner anger had hardened in Alan as he turned up toward the house, leaving Anse and Lon to cut across the lower field to the road. The sudden disgust was under control, becoming now not a surface thing that set the nerves shaking, but something he would live with, a part of him.

  Woven into it was a kind of resolution.

  Whatever the future as it concerned Grant and Renie and Margaret, his own people, and Anse Gordon, he, Alan, was part of it. To leave the Shore was impossible. There was nothing in going except escape for himself. Well, personal escape was not enough.

  Something like the resolution that had come to him twelve years ago . . . But no clear-cut course of action was possible. It was not as simple as that. You simply had to stand by. You simply had to he there when you should be there, when you were needed.

  Renie was reading in The Room. He asked her, carelessly, “Where’s Margaret?”

  She looked up. “I don’t know. She said something about going over to Mrs. Josie’s.”

  He turned and went back through the kitchen, unreasonably let down. He recognized the unreasonableness. For weeks he had been careful to be together with Margaret as little as possible—no more than was necessary in order not to seem to be avoiding her, not to seem unnatural. Now he wanted to see her. Not to talk about anything, merely to feel again in her presence the closeness, the alliance; and the understanding that went beyond that, the recognition sensed on the road to Richard McKee’s. In the face of what he felt now he did not fear the hurt or the temptation. The need of Margaret as a person was stronger in this moment than the fear of love. He wanted her with him, and he felt an unreasonable anger because she was not here.

  He stood irresolute for a little and then crossed the yard and climbed the fence into Grahams’ pasture. He crossed Frank’s land well south of the house, through the bush. On the still air he could hear the chattering of Dan’s kids, and Bessie calling them inside. Graham’s Brook was low from the dry weather. Little more than a series of still pools linked by a trickle. He crossed this and went on across Gordons’ land and into what had been Vangie

  Murphy’s. Between the remains of Vangie’s house and the Channel a good deal of young softwood was getting up to pulpwood size again. In a few years it would be worth looking at.

  He crossed Katen’s below the house and store and came to the creek. Despite the dry spell, considerable water flowed over its rocky bed. Sinclair’s mill hadn’t been running for years. The dam was gone. He found a spot on the bank and sat there, lulled by the creek’s guttural song.

  Margaret was finishing the dishes when Anse entered. He said in pleased surprise, “Why—hello.”

  Margaret murmured an offhand greeting, slipped the last plate into the rack, and dried her hands on the roller towel. Both Grant and Alan, she supposed, must be uncomfortable in Anse’s presence, but there was nothing in it to disturb herself, at least when others were around. What she felt mainly was curiosity, and something like bravado.

  She took a chair by the table and said, “I s’pose everything’s getting familiar to you again, Mr. Gordon.”

  Anse laughed. He said, “Oh, yes,” in a tone implying that a good deal of it was too familiar, too well-remembered, too dull. There was something about this girl, in a way the same sort of difference there was about Alan, that set her apart from the rest of Currie Head. The contempt he felt for the place, always showing slightly in speech or manner, though carefully veiled, was not for them. Not for Margaret Marshall, or for Alan, his son. He was eager to talk to Margaret, as though by talking he included her and himself in an area of experience and knowledgeability apart from the Channel Shore.

  From the starting-point of Margaret’s work in Halifax he went on to the Merchant Navy, recalling the times he had been in port there while convoys were making up. Prewar voyages came to life in his talk, and the ports he had seen—Batavia, Curacao, Georgetown, Aden . . .

  Margaret listened, and when he fell silent, questioned. She listened for an hour or more before the irony of it came to her. Across the table Josie sat by the open window, silently knitting, and hearing—related casually, in a whim of friendliness, for the ear of a girl—the story of those years which for her had been years of doubt, of not knowing, and of a fading pain that now pulsed again, a bitter burning.

  Margaret looked up at the alarm clock and was suddenly anxious to get away. She said, “It’s getting late; I’ll have to be going.”

  Anse went with her to the door and stepped out, closing it behind them. The soft night was almost as light as dusk, the Channel luminous.

  Standing by
the door, Anse laughed and said, “You’ll be safe, will you?” in faint intimate mockery.

  She laughed. “Oh, I think so,” and started toward the gate.

  A light shone in Katens’ house, but none in the store, and there was no sign of Lon or Buff, or old Felix. Alan walked up the road. He had walked the woods aimlessly without admitting any purpose to his own mind; but when the lighted windows of Josie Gordon’s house came in sight round the turn, it was like the reaching of a goal. He slowed, wondering on what pretext he could go in, and then heard the closing of the back door, and laughter.

  Indistinguishable words, and Margaret’s voice: “Oh, I think so . . .” He saw Anse turn and re-enter the house, the tall figure outlined in lamplight.

  Margaret was moving across the front of the house, toward the path. He went up the path to meet her.

  She halted, startled. “Oh — it’s you.”

  He faced her silently, his nerves tight with a black unreasoning anger, the check-rein of caution ravelled at last. Margaret half turned toward him, silently questioning. He did not try to speak. His right hand closed hard round her bared left arm between elbow and shoulder.

  For a moment, quietly, he shook her, moving the fist that gripped her arm in short savage thrusts like those of a fighter panting against the body of his foe. She made at first no movement of defence at all, letting her body jolt to the thrust of his arm. Then her free hand came up and closed over the hard sinews of his wrist. Her small figure steadied. She looked him in the face.

  The look and the touch ... He found himself looking into a face in which there was neither fear nor anger. What he saw there incredibly was understanding. Understanding of the fact that the heart and nerves can stand so much, and then . . . That torment can thrive beneath a surface calm with the normal glance of eyes, the usual voice, the small familiar habits. That, sometimes, it is the small thing, irrelevant almost, that will touch to violence the aching deeps of feeling.

  The look and the touch . . .

  Alan was suddenly conscious of where he was, standing with Margaret in the luminous late dusk of a summer evening on Josie Gordon’s path. Conscious of the still shadow of Josie’s body between lamp and window, not thirty feet away, before she moved and was gone. Conscious of the soft interminable low-toned sound of the Channel, rising and falling but always low, weaving its faint background to night sounds of farms, and far away, a dog’s bark.

  He saw the hand on his wrist, the child’s hand with short nails and dimpled knuckles. He picked it up, rubbed the knuckles across his mouth, balled it into a fist and tapped it once against his jaw.

  On the short walk home neither spoke. Once, their hands touched and Margaret’s slipped into his for a moment. There was no shared pressure. It was merely a confirmation.

  11

  Grant came through the open shop door and stood for a moment in the yard, brushing his hands. He had just dismantled the raker; haying was finished for another year. He glanced out over the shaven fields, across Frank Graham’s to Gordons’ where a shadowy sea of browntop and timothy moved in the wind, and had the thought that perhaps he’d started putting the machinery away too early. He would have to talk to Josie and see what she wanted done.

  He and Alan or he and the Grahams had always made Josie’s hay. Now Anse was supposed to be looking after the place but he hadn’t started haymaking or even mentioned it. A small thing, perhaps; there was plenty of time, but Grant felt the need of getting it settled. If he were going to have to work in the hayfield with Anse he wanted it done with. Small things, like unmade hay, were what people noticed and talked about.

  As if in answer to his thought, Anse crossed the road as he watched, went through Grahams’ yard, climbed the fence and headed across the slope of Grant’s lower pasture toward Curries’ road. Heading for the inlet and the boat. Watching him, Grant felt again all the dark dislike, a numbness, that stretched his nerves whenever he saw Anse Gordon near or far.

  Well, this was a chance to see Josie. He closed the shop door and headed for the road.

  Josie was sitting on her back steps, shelling peas. Grant dropped to the step beside her, picked a handful of pods from the basket and began absently to split them, forcing the green pellets out with his thumb. She looked up at him sharply once and returned placidly to her shelling.

  He gestured at the fields. “How about it, Mrs. Josie? The hay?”

  She said, “Anse claims he and the Katens are making it, together.”

  Grant said, “That’s all right, then. I didn’t know.”

  He sensed a little awkwardness in the silence that followed; he was thinking of what to say, how to spin the visit out a little, how to get up and leave without being abrupt. Josie settled it for him.

  She said, “It’s a worrying time for you, Grant. I’m sorry.”

  He continued to shell peas, feeling out the meaning of her words. They were out of character. Years ago he and she had lived in this house and talked in the most commonplace terms of the events and circumstances and people who were woven into the core of their lives. Commonplace was the word for it —for the outward seeming of their behaviour toward each other and the words they had used. Never that he could remember, except for that moment long ago . . . There’s a girl alive ... a child, maybe . . . Never that he could remember, except then, had Josie laid bare to him her heart in speech. Nor he to her. All they had understood, the respect they had for the patient endurance and hard courage they recognized in each other, was overlaid with the common and the casual. Now for some reason of her own Josie was reaching out to him in words.It was odd that these words should be so ordinary, spoken in so even a tone, placidly flowing out from the commonplace into the realm of feeling. Perhaps because this was so he did not find them shocking. Perhaps it was because of this, and because she was Josie Gordon, that he felt none of the hard refusal with which, years ago, he had met and turned away any attempt, by anyone, to probe this region of his heart.

  He said, “Yes, it is, Josie,” and then, disarmed a little by her casualness, “Nothing’s ever settled, is it?”

  She said, “I don’t know . . . Settled for a while, maybe. Then some time —you find that what was right a while ago won’t stay right. Isn’t right now. Has to be fixed some other way.”

  He turned to look at her, frowning, and tossed the last podful of peas into the pan. An incredible idea came to him. He said harshly, “You’re not —”

  “No,” Josie said. “I’m not thinking Anse Gordon has any claim on . . . Any claim on anyone.”

  She paused, considering. “In case you thought I might know — I’ve got no idea. What he plans to do, I mean. What he wants. What he’s got in his mind. He might leave this house tomorrow, tonight. Without saying good-bye. And still I wouldn’t know.”

  Despite the quiet voice, Grant caught something of what it cost to say this. Not even an old desertion and the memory of shame could still entirely the call of blood.

  Josie went on.

  “No. What I’m thinking about . . . It’s got nothing to do with Anse. Nothing directly . . . It’s something different. Something I think you might give some thought to.” She paused for a little. “Does it ever cross your mind that Alan and Margaret are no relation? No relation to each other at all?”

  Grant said, “What d’you mean by that?”

  Josie set the pan of peas aside. “What I say. No relation. I mean —how would you look at it? What could you do if they started thinking about each other —as a man —and a woman—”

  Grant looked at her curiously. He said, slowly and low-voiced, “Josie, you must be crazy.”

  She was silent, and after a moment Grant said, wonderingly but carefully, as if dealing with the notion of a child, “What in — what in the name of God made you think of it? They’re brother and sister in their minds. Brought up together. How could anything like that? — When they don
’t even know?”

  Josie sighed. “Grant, you’ve been around the Shore a long time, but not as long as I’ve been. I’ll tell you something straight. Alan knows. He’s known for years. They both know.”

  Grant sat without speaking for a minute. It didn’t occur to him to doubt Josie. He had never known her to state a conjecture as a fact. For the moment his mind passed by the question with which she had begun the revelation. The fact of Alan’s knowledge was all it could hold. Not, oddly, the fact of that knowledge as it related to the present. That, now, seemed curiously beside the point.

  What seared his heart were images out of time past.

  The shock to a boy, learning, years ago . . . Learning, how? From one of the Wilmots? From Lon Katen, incautious with rum, probing with words shaped in leering curiosity?

  He saw that Josie’s hands were shaking slightly. He said, “God damn them all. They couldn’t keep . . .”

  She interrupted, shaking her head. “No. You can’t blame — I’m through blaming, Grant. Long ago. Except for . . . Long as people have tongues in their heads they’ll talk. Even decent people. They can’t help it.”

  She hesitated. It had taken will-power to go as far as she had gone. More will-power even than she had been forced to call on, that winter evening years ago when young Alan had come in from the barn with the question in his face. The scene came back to her as vividly as present experience. The question, the careful answer and the careful acceptance.

  She said, “He’d heard enough to worry him. Make him wonder. He asked — And it wasn’t fair. He had to be told.”