Alan said, “All right.” It was a small thing, but there was nothing further to do aboard the boat. The flat was loaded, but since the wind had moderated they could have gone ashore as well as not.
Anse sat by the tiller, felt in his pockets for cigarettes and handed the packet to Alan, relaxed on the ballast. For a moment they watched Lon taking the flat in over the last slow swell to the beach, and Frank and Sam and Dave climbing the slope of stones to the grounds.
Toward the bulge of the Head, on the strip of sand between the water and the stones, a group of children walked slowly, apparently looking for shells. Colour moved behind the distant spruces surrounding the grounds: women’s dresses, men in their shirt sleeves. Here in the boat now, barely swinging to the lift and fall of the Channel, there was a sense of isolation, as if the life and movement observed on the beach and in the grounds, the vaguely echoing sound, and shifting of toy-sized men and women, were the life and movement of strangers on a foreign shore.
Anse turned to look across the Channel, toward the Islands. He said, “The fall mackerel’ll be along soon. May be summer mackerel there now. It’d be a chance, a gamble. Something new ... A lot of work, but fun ...”
Alan pulled himself up and sat on the fore-thwart and glanced toward the beach. Lon had the flat launched and was hauling round to row back to the sailboat.
“... A lot of fun. Couple of men and a boat with an engine in her. Fellow could go on from that, too. Maybe get hold of one of those little draggers that scrape up everything. The flat-fish we never used to look at; they’re all worth money these days . . .”
Alan hunched on the thwart, looking down, gripped by a strange embarrassment, tense and almost frightening. Expectancy.
Of what? He didn’t know. Lon was half-way back; all he knew was that he had to be casual, normal, until the flat arrived.
He moved his head in a nod of interest. He said, “I guess they are, at that,” and stood up and flipped his cigarette butt far overside. He said reflectively, “I’m so hungry I could eat the drumstick off a skunk. Must be the Channel air . . .”
The silence held. He reached down to grab the flat’s gunnel as Lon came alongside.
The children had long since finished their suppers and scattered again to the swing, to wander up and down the beach or row on the inlet, to lurk on the fringe of the group of men lounging around Buff Katen’s fire. Some of the older people were still at the tables, with younger women serving them. Matted grass was strewn with paper wrappings and pop-bottle tops. Small mountains of unwashed dishes rose from pails.
Stella Graham, seated at the table with Frank, looked up and around as Anse Gordon and Lon and Alan passed. She said, “Better not wait too long, boys. Sit in while there’s something left.”
Anse nodded, “Before long, Mrs. G.”
He felt the need of a pull at the bottle. He glanced over the group sitting behind the fire, on the inlet side. Someone had dragged a bench out of the grounds and the men and women who were through with supper had left the tables to sit there, watching while the kettle boiled for the day’s last batch of tea. Anse jerked his head at Lon Katen and walked on toward the Currie hut.
A peculiar anger burned in him. He had gone as far as he could go, in the boat out there. Gone as far as he could go, and waited for the word. The word from Alan: “Well, why don’t you try it? If you want a hand, I’ll try it with you ...”
He re-lived now that moment of waiting for the word that did not come. Powerless. He had been powerless to go further, to make the invitation and risk the shaken head, the casual regretful No. In that moment and his memory of it there was a sense of the dreadfully familiar. An afternoon long ago at Rob’s House, on the Head . . . And a night, a Sunday night outside the church at Leeds, and Hazel McKee walking past him with Edith Graham . . . And Anse Gordon, powerless ...
He unhooked the door of the hut, following Lon into the gloom where late sunlight leaked through weather-cracked walls, and stretched to bring down the bottle he had hidden in a corner of the loft. Holding it a moment in his hand he said, “God, I’d like to put a hot poker up that crowd of . . .” He broke off. In all his life he had never bared in words, to anyone, the impulses that shaped his acts, the emotional mechanics behind the sneering smile. He drank deep, shuddered, and held the bottle waist-high in his hand. Lon took it, held it up to the light, grunted, and swallowed.
He was reaching up to return it to the loft when Anse said, “Not so fast,” and took it in his hand and gulped again.
Alan sat hunched in front of the fire, backward on his heels, feeding the red coals with split sticks of driftwood. He did not look up as Anse and Lon returned.
Half the crowd had drifted away from the grounds to lounge around the fire. The last of the tea was made, but Buff had propped on the hot stones a final pot of clams. Dan and Bill Graham with Stan Currie and Richard McKee sat on a log on the beach side of the fire. Frank Graham stood opposite them, fresh from the supper table, a cup of tea in his hand, with Sam Freeman beside him. Margaret was among those on the bench behind them, and Grant sat beside her, elbows on knees, his down-turned face absent and thoughtful.
Sam Freeman puffed tobacco smoke. He said, cheerfully, “You better eat, Anse.”
Anse said, “I’ll eat when I get ready . . . How’d you like the feel of her, Frank?”
Frank Graham looked puzzled. “Oh . . . the boat, you mean. Good enough. Seems to handle all right. Sailed in her myself, years ago, y’know.”
No one was paying any particular attention. Small odds and ends of talk went on. Bill Graham and Stan Currie were planning a walk up Graham’s Brook tomorrow, to try for trout. Bill was saying he wanted one more try before he had to leave for Toronto. One of the Stiles kids from down-shore and Dan’s boy, young Frank, were tugging at opposite ends of a string of amber kelp.
Alan rose and stood looking down at the fire. He prodded it once with the toe of his boot. He had an impulse to get out of here, away from Anse Gordon, away from all these people whose lives had shaped his own. He was conscious of a curious studied moderation in Anse’s voice as he talked to Frank and Sam. There was almost a note of sorrow in it. Anse was saying the Shore should have stuck to fish.
“Should’ve built and gone outside, or east, the way they did years ago.” His voice was reasonable, calm, as if he had at last condescended to companionship with all these people whose lives
were rooted in commonplace work and everyday good will. He talked as old men sometimes talked, grumbling at their own generation. “Outside the Islands. That’s what they could ‘a’ done. But they hadn’t the guts, they had to quit. And what’ve you got? A bunch of farmers. Sheep manure and sawdust . . .”
Frank Graham said nothing. His face reflected the fact that he was very carefully saying nothing.
Anse repeated, “Sheep manure and sawdust...”
He said it with the broad suggestion of a lisp, and waited.
But Sam Freeman stood red-faced and quiet. It was his wife’s voice, Ida’s, that broke the silence, strident and sharp and full of an outrage at last set free:
“Sawdust . . . guts . . . Talk comes easy to them that can’t . . . That won’t work . .. that skips the country . . .”
She choked on her own words.
Anse said softly, “You’re right, Mrs. Freeman.” He raised his voice slightly, putting into it a hint of reckless contempt — contempt and an odd possessive mockery, a mocking affection. “You’re right. And I’ll tell you this. If I’d known I’d planted a crop here, I’d have stayed to watch it grow.”
Someone made a short, indrawn, hissing sound. The reaction to unexpected pain, or the sight of hurt to another.
Alan’s action was unwilled, in the sense that reason had nothing to do with it. Only the years of living that had shaped his impulses to what they were, tuned his nerves to pride in people loved, to action at
the touch of insult.
He had just been looking across the fire at Grant’s averted face. He had slipped away from the present for a moment, thinking of Hazel McKee, and the days when she and Anna Gordon had come to picnics here. And young Grant. And Arise.
He heard the words and behind them the studied mock- sorrowful provocation. And the possession — or the mock-possession.
He turned and swung his opened right hand, backward, against Anse’s face.
Someone - Grant thought it was Eva McKee-said, “Oh, dear God!”
Alan swung the open hand again, sharp and hard. There was no other sound except the long sighing grumble of the Channel.
A white triangle from nose to mouth-corners grew in Anse’s face. He stepped forward and dropped his hands at his sides. The voice came clear and toneless in its venom.
“Well — I can’t cut down my own flesh and blood.”
Alan’s voice was hard with a fierce exultance.
“No. But I can.”
He stepped in and threw his left fist at Anse’s mouth. Head lowered, Anse came at him, clawing. Alan struck through the flailing arms, stepped in to strike again. Anse fell, stumbling sideways, and dropped on elbow and hip. He lay there looking upward for a moment before the obscenity began to flow.
15
Richard and Eva were late going to bed. Fred Marshall drove them home from Alec Neill’s landing and Jane came into the house with Eva. Just to he there with an old friend, Richard thought. There wasn’t much anyone could say. But it was good for Eva to have Jane sitting there to talk to if she felt like it, while she began to get used to the feeling . . . The Shore knowing, openly at last...
Richard was glad Jane was there. He went to the pasture bars to milk and as he returned to the house and put the pails down in the pantry, Jane rose to go. She turned a deliberate glance toward him in the dusky kitchen. It was placid and almost expressionless, a glance of reassurance.
He knew what this meant, when Eva got up from her chair by the west window to light the lamp, without haste or nervousness. Eva was all right.
For some reason they sat late, talking hardly at all. When Eva did speak, he was startled by the thing that came into her head. She said, “I wonder if Alan —D’you s’pose he’s blaming himself? D’you think we ought to go down there, Richard?”
No reason to worry about Eva, Richard thought, if her grandson’s peace of mind was the thing that bothered her. The living. A wonderful thing, that was-the instinct to put the living first, ahead of pride, beyond a shame that was long ago outlived.
He shook his head. There was no reason to take reassurance to Grant’s place. He had seen Grant’s face.
In the end it had been Lon Katen and Buff who hauled Anse to his feet and got him out of the grounds. Richard lived again that moment of violence. The shock of it would stay with him, the hushed embarrassment of men and women and the still, lively curiosity of boys and girls. Seeing and hearing the truth at last in the thud of fist against flesh and the torrent of raging words. But it was not this, really, that engaged his mind. In the instant of its happening he had turned away from it; away from
Anse Gordon sprawled on the ground with blood trickling from a mouth corner. He had turned to look at Grant.
Grant’s face was tense, controlled, expressionless. But Richard had seen the stillness change, the subtle flow of expression. What was it? Still controlled, still hard, but at ease. Lively with something like elation.
Eva got down a book she had been re-reading lately, something by a fellow called Sheldon, and read for a while. But Richard, sitting in the shadow of his corner, noticed that for long minutes her face would be raised from the page, her expression absent- minded. What her face held was a kind of relief. A relaxation.
They sat long, without speaking. Later, Richard went outside. The air was cool, a slight wind was blowing out of the southeast. He could sense high clouds, high and dark, travelling inland over the Channel, over the Head, inland from the Atlantic. The lights were out next door at Fred Marshall’s, but far to the east he could see a faint spark at Grahams’.
The final satisfaction in Richard’s mind was that in the end Anse Gordon had destroyed himself. In the end the word and the act that pronounced his claim and established it had destroyed whatever threat there was in it. Established the emptiness of fact in the face of warm and living truth. Established the link between Grant and Alan, and perhaps Hazel, as a thing deeper and more telling than the accident of blood.
There were questions in Richard’s mind. Alan had struck after that leering hint by Anse Gordon, when nothing could have kept the story dark ...
Would he have struck if by striking, the story could have been forestalled?
Would he have struck if the insult had been some other? If the blow itself had been the spark to end the long illusion?
Richard smiled in the dark. He didn’t know.
Just then his ear caught the faint thump of oars in rowlocks, carried on the inshore wind. He waited, listening. It was too dark to see, but he thought he could hear the creak of gear, the slight whicker of canvas, from the anchorage where Anse Gordon’s boat was moored. It would be like Anse, to take this way of going .. .
He went back inside the house. Eva had turned the lamp low and gone to bed. In recent winters she had slept with him in the downstairs bedroom for warmth, and for the past year or two had continued to sleep there the year round. Richard blew out the lamp, undressed and lay down beside her.
He did not sleep at once, thinking of what he must do in the morning. No one knew about the paper but himself. Not even Josie Gordon. Not even Grant. He had never looked at it since that winter day when Hazel had sent for him. Sent for him and written, while he sat by her bed, the story of her revolt with Anse Gordon and her fear and her child and her rescue.
Why?
An apprehension? A fear that the child of her body, in the years none could see, should prove unworthy of Grant Marshall? Or simply a nagging need to leave the record straight?
This again Richard didn’t know. All he knew was that in the morning he would get the paper from the locked rosewood box in his bureau and take it down the road. To Grant and Alan and Margaret.
It had no legal bearing, he supposed. That part of it would be up to the lawyers; even after the lapse of years, an easy thing to prove. But it had a certain value, none the less. Insurance in the face of talk, far in the future. A value in the records of the Shore.
He dropped asleep, half-dreaming of Hazel on a Sunday afternoon, telling him softly she was going berry-picking, back to Lowries.
1946
On the Friday after Anse Gordon’s second disappearance, Bill left the Channel Shore.
Stan Currie drove him to the station at Stoneville to take the train away.
As the car topped the steep hill at Leeds, Bill leaned back to glance past Stan’s shoulder. The road swings inland there. From this height the fields and pastures, rimmed and crowned with spruce wood-lots and hardwood clumps, slope away south to the Channel and southeast to Currie Head. He could see Lairds’, Kinsmans’, McKees’ upper field, and south and east of that, drawing in with distance, the tiny bluff, the Head ...
They rolled out on level road at the top of the hill. Stan glanced south and turned again to the road.
He said, meditating, “God, I used to hate this country.”
Bill jerked his glance back from the fields. “What!”
Stan laughed. “Startles you, does it?” He broke off on a note of light dismissal, “Oh, not any more ...”
His tone changed. “You’ve seen Grant and Alan and the rest of them, have you?”
“Yes,” Bill said.
Tuesday morning, and Alan working with Buff Katen in Josie Gordon’s hayfield, and Margaret raking behind the rack.
Dan had gone over to give them a hand, but not Bill
. That afternoon he had taken the path through the pasture to Grant’s.
He found them lazing on the veranda. The mill would be starting up any day now, and Grant cared nothing about the appearance of idleness if that was the way he felt. Renie greeted Bill and turned to go into the house. Grant said, “No, sit still.” She smiled, shook her head, and went inside.
He said to Bill, “You know about those kids? What’s happened to them?”
It was like him, Bill thought, to speak in this fashion, without leading up to it. But what startled him was the tone. Interested, touched with a curious light astonishment.
“Well... I was wondering about it.”
“Hard to realize, yet.” Grant was silent for a little, and when he spoke he had gone to the heart of it again. “He 11 be living there, at Gordons. Best way to ... Don’t you think?”
Bill nodded. “Yes.” Best way to begin the new design, woven of the old. Best way to begin the change in the pattern-in the memory and imagination and knowledge of the Shore.
“Well, that’s the start of it.”
The start of it. That was how Grant saw it, then, not as an end but a beginning. And yet, how often, in time to come, would his mind again go back . . . ? How often while Grant Marshall and Alan Gordon worked together at the mill, the old relationship surrendered, how often would the questioning mind go back? Go back, and wonder ... if somehow he had never known?
How often, no matter how the new parts were played, how often must the old peculiar warmth, a curious possession, take hold of both in the run of common tasks ... the memory of snowbound woods and fields and kitchen fires?
A start, Grant said. A beginning, not an end. But it was neither. It was past and present and future, eddying here in the flow of time.
Bill realized that he had answered Stan with a single word, and that this was all Stan expected. For the time being it had all been talked out —dealt with. Stan’s attitude was a foreshadowing of what must happen in the lengthening run of time.
The Channel Shore Page 47
