The Channel Shore
Page 48
Talk? Certainly. Time would deal with it. In thirty years there would be those along the Channel Shore who would never know that Alan Gordon had once been Alan Marshall. Or would hear of it perhaps through chance words, spoken in thoughtlessness or malice or admiration. In a hundred years the tale would be part of that long hearsay, a thread in dim forgotten fabric, one with the story of Rob Currie and Fanny Graham, linked through tenuous blood-lines to the moving Now.
Stan slowed, lit a cigarette, and turned north on the paved highway that runs through The Bridge from Morgan’s Harbour to Stoneville.
He said, “Not hate, maybe, even then. Heading away, and wanting to go. A lot of things come into it when a kid leaves home. His father’s ambition for him. His own—well—sense of venture ...
“This place, the Shore . . . ‘d you ever wonder why they came here, first? Some of them didn’t like George Third. Got put into the army and sent out so they couldn’t raise hell . . . Ended up here. Some got pitched off the land when the lairds began to see more money in sheep than people. I’ll bet you most of them ended up here because they couldn’t stand being pushed around. Highlanders, lowlanders, Irishmen, Catholics, Protestants, loyalists, all kinds . . . Only one thing they all had. They will not take a pushing ‘round. Not for ever. They’ll stand most anything from land and sea. That’s all right. Nobody else is telling them . ..”
Bill had been watching the country as he listened. Bush country this, with a few poorish farms scattered along the road, and stretches of barrens. Frontier country, fencing the Channel Shore off on the north and west as on the east and south it was fenced by the Islands and the sea.
Stan was still talking. “What they did, getting out, was pull off a kind of rebellion. The only kind they could. Personal independence . . . For a while it opened out on this Shore . . . Then steam came, and other things, and it wouldn’t work any more. A lot went to the States, and west, and some did all right. Then at last there was nowhere to go but cities. When you go to a city, Bill, unless you’re good, in a profession or the arts, you put yourself under a boss. You’re back where you were a hundred and fifty years ago. The sad thing is, you got there by following the same urge they followed when they rebelled against it . . .
“That’s why I’m back, if you want to know . . . What could a man do, that had venture in it, and independence? I looked at what I’d got by leaving. Running water and central heat and something — oh, cultivation . . . Well, they seemed to me to be cancelled out by the pulling and hauling, the pressure to say ‘Yes’ when you wanted to say ‘No’. . . There was venture in coming back...”
He broke off and glanced at Bill, his faced amused.
“What brought you back, Bill?”
Bill shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m just a visitor, anyway . . . I wanted to come. I like the place. It’s hard to say ...”
Stan put back his head and laughed.
“You just said it. That’s all I was trying to tell you. I like the place.”
He went on. “It’s the fashion now to rule out ... to forget the past. The living past, I mean. A virtue not to know who your grandfather was or where he came from or what he was like. Not to care. That comes, I guess, from living in rented places. No one gets identified with a stretch of land, a park, even a street-corner . . . Nothing but themselves. They don’t know they’re a part of the last generation or that their kids are a piece of them. No sense blaming people ... not their fault. But I’m sorry about it, Bill. Look, I can go down on the Head and see the ridges in the ground where Ed Currie made bricks about eighteen-ten. I can show you where Sandy Currie found a spring and walled it with rocks. Maybe I got the same kind of kick out of putting in running water and a new foundation that Ed did when he dug his first well. Or Sandy, finding a spring to save lugging water to the beach ... I can go and take a look at Rob’s cellar if I want to bother. In the parlour closet there’s a tin-type of Hugh in a coat buttoned up to his chin. Taken when he went away to Boston. Every bit of it, adventure. On the Shore they don’t think about those things. But it’s in them. If they go away they know where they came from. They come back to have a look, or they look back. They look back, sometimes . . . Some of them stick to the hard living, because, whatever else, there’s still the independence . . . Some of them leave, try to get comfort, ease ... Or just for the sake of going. The best of them, now and then, take a look back . . .Stan’s voice changed. “That’s what it is with you, Bill. You got a touch of it through your dad and Frank and a little, maybe, from old Hugh and me. It hit you young and it hit you again. So you like the place.”
Stan laughed. They pulled up beside the dusty red station at Stoneville, with the train hooting down the line behind them.
Bill watched the marshes come to him out of low cloud and slide by, their tall grass moving wavelike under wind from the gulf. His mind turned to the Marshalls and the Gordons and back to Stan, caught by his rambling talk. There was something satisfying in it. Stan had found words that came close to what the Shore meant . . . tor Stan. Bill had a sense of regret that all he had ever been was a visitor. But this was fleeting. He had the feel of something done and yet continuing. He had also the knowledge that in blood and spirit this was the country he belonged to. He would never live on the Channel Shore. But it was home.
Already a forward-looking excitement was beginning to stir the depths of his content. He was thinking of Jock and of other summers. Fall, the time of mellowing apples. October. They said it was always fine in October along the Channel Shore. But first a summer. July and August for the beach, and Rich and Alec drying nets there. Or others, if they were gone. Summer was the time for Jock to see it first, as he himself had seen it.
The train jarred to a halt at a little red-walled station and again began to move. Bill sought with his eyes the line of the gulf, beyond that waving grass. A newer memory touched him and he tasted for a moment the curious enjoyment of remembering a baseless fear. That hour of doubt when he had last watched these marshes, travelling east. . . Andrew . . . Helen . . .
How would it be, for Andrew? A week, a month, a summer, after more than forty years? The thought filled him with a tender warmth. But with the thought, odd and startling, a flash of questioning insight.
How could he know it would be right, for Andrew? How could he know that what was right for Andrew was not whatever living dream the mind held now? A sense of conscious scholarship, of austere achievement; only, perhaps, a dimmed incurious memory of the Shore...
You couldn’t tell. You could look a little into the minds of others, but outward with no eyes but your own. This came to him as something like discovery. He found himself thinking of Helen, without resentment or apprehension now, and wondered, again with that little start of insight, if that were true of Helen’s thoughts of him.
People differed, and there was little you could do but accept the fact the difference was there. You could perhaps achieve a private integrity, an inner stature, and be alert to recognize these qualities in their differing guise in others. Preserve an evenness of mind ...
He shook his head. He had let himself run on, building, dreaming ... a planned future. And the essence of the Shore was that you couldn’t foresee anything. All you could see were the following waves of time.
Nothing is ever finished.
He let it go. He watched the gulf shore slide by, then woods and hilly pastures as the train swung inland. But even though he had turned his thought from plans and problems and speculations, back into dreamlike communion with the living Shore, he could not keep his mind away from people.
For he was one of them. One of thousands who had taken this road away. To Boston, to Montreal, to the western prairies. To Denver and Winnipeg. To Dawson City and San Francisco. To Vimy and Dieppe and Caen.
Idly he thought of them. Of their minds turning, sometimes, to the Shore in waking dreams. Wondering, perhaps, as he would wonder, how
long a time must pass before they saw this land again, and heard its voices.
A long time ...
Already it was passing.
Toronto, Ont.—Port Shoreham, N.S. 1946-1953.
Copyright © 2018, 1954 by Charles Bruce
First published by Macmillian of Canada in 1954
First published in trade paper by Formac Publishing Company Limited in 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Formac Publishing Company Limited recognizes the support of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our cultural resources for all Nova Scotians. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bruce, Charles, 1906-1971, author
The Channel Shore / Charles Bruce.
Originally published: Toronto : Macmillan, 1954.
Previously published: 1988.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4595-0510-0 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4595-0511-7 (EPUB)
1.Title.
PS8503.R91C4 2018 C813’.52 C2017-906887-3
C2017-906888-1
This digital edition first published in 2018 as 978-1-4595-0511-7
Originally published in 2018 as 978-1-4595-0510-0
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