She walked off up the road, and looked back once, laughing.
Grant swore to himself. The good moments had slipped away. Everything had fallen flat and so quickly he had had no chance to do much about it. Something more than irritation plagued him as he walked back into the store. A sense of futility and failure. He wanted time to think it out.
Homeward bound in the buggy, Grant set himself deliberately to keep part of his mind free from the impact of Hat Wilmot’s running comment. This was something he could do through long practice in listening half-consciously to the flowing conversation of Aunt Jane, though Jane’s talk was usually free from gossip. Hat’s required more care.
He was glad to have Bill and Dan Graham standing in the fly with the feed bag, their hands on the seat-back to steady themselves. With the kids there Mrs. Wilmot’s attention would be divided; the chance was less that she would say something that demanded thought, something he would have to find a sensible answer for.
He sifted the chatter as it came.
“Look at that . . . Bushes from one fence to the other. You’d think she’d at least make that Tarsh keep the front clear, wouldn’t you? You would now, wouldn’t you?”
Grant grunted assent.
Anna . . . But who cares? . . . What’s that matter?
She was right. Unless you were ready to acknowledge affection, acknowledge it with pride before everyone, you had no right to run to the warmth of it. If you disregarded that, if you sought the warmth anyway, in hidden moments, in a private look across a roomful of people—
You couldn’t do it, if you wanted to keep your self-respect.
No. You couldn’t taste the sweetness of day-dreams unless you were doing what you could to make them true. In the slow exaltation of these dreams he had forgotten the facts. Before he could dream again and believe in what he was dreaming, there were roads to clear in the mind, roots to tear up . . .
He had kept Polo to a walk, not wanting to overtake Anna. Now he flipped the reins and set the road horse into a trot. Hat Wilmot for the moment had run out of talk. Suddenly Dan Graham said, “Hey! Grant!” He realized he was jogging past Grahams’ and pulled up to let the boys down.
As he put the horse into a trot past The Place, Mrs. Wilmot said, “You doing much work here these days, Grant?” She went on, a prodding invitation in her voice, “I s’pose you’ll be thinking of building for yourself before long.”
He laughed, “Oh, there’s lots of time, I guess.”
He thought: By God! The truth is I didn’t want to take Anna driving because I didn’t want Uncle James to hear about it.
That was the blunt fact and the sum of it, and it was something Anna’s open heart would never understand. Oh, she would come close to understanding. She would see his concern about the hurt to other people. But not the fact that there was something hurtful, for anyone, in the affection that bound them.
He didn’t blame her. The thing that gnawed him was the circumstance. The fact that it was both necessary and impossible to cross the will of Harvey Marshall’s brother. To cut through pride and harsh kindness, the melancholy sense of position and family.
They were passing the home place now, going up the slope toward Richard McKees and beyond that, the cross-roads. Hat was talking again. Looking down toward McKees’, talking with an insinuating wonder about Hazel, away. She didn’t mention Anse Gordon, but it was in her voice, the curiosity, the sympathy, the odd unrealized malice.
He thought: I must have known. I must have known there was this, in Uncle James, all the time . . .
And yet, it was only since the knowledge had been formed in words, hinted on the barn wall, stated flatly in The Place, that he had begun to feel the real force of it in himself, destroying the common poetry of remembered moments and the present music of moments shared.
He turned up the school-house road, past the school. Polo slowed to a walk on the uphill stretch toward Clem Wilmot’s place. The buggy wheels jolted a little in the ruts.
If he could make it clear to Anna . . . But she would never really understand. And it wasn’t good enough. The things they should be having now—long walks in the evenings, and on Sundays; Anna close to him at the box socials, the winter skating on Graham’s Lake; and a slow looking-ahead, a confidence ...
You could know that, you could reach that truth in your heart, but that didn’t tell you what you were going to do about it.
He pulled in by Clem’s gate and cramped the wheels. Mrs. Wilmot got down, clumsily, gathering her parcels to her.
He said, “Oh, don’t mention it, Mrs. Wilmot,” in answer to her thanks, and backed the rig round. As he trotted down the road past the school-house the answer to one vague puzzle came to him: the shape of what it was he had half-hoped for in the clearing, failing the laugh and the voiced “Good luck!”
How simple it would have been if Uncle James had left no choice but a break. If Uncle James himself had cut the bonds of pride and family. If Uncle James had come out with one blunt sentence: Stop fooling with this girl, Grant, or I’ll ... or you’ll regret it.
11
The hay was made and in the barns. The days were somnolent, the nights closed in with an early chill. This land now began to slip unnoticed into the long pause between the end of haying and the beginning of digging-time, between late summer and the cold of fall. This was the beginning of the mellow season, a time of sunlight and haze, splashed now and then with windy rain, the pause when men took in the oats at leisure, patched roofs, fashioned storm windows. Working slowly, halting to look down the slopes of fields, to note the wavelike growth of aftergrass, the ripening of apples ...
On Sunday afternoon, the last day of August, Anna left the house and took the road of rutted grass through Gordons’ lower field toward the beach. It was nine days since she had walked home from Katen’s with exasperation growing in her heart.
Conspicuous . . . What else should people he, if they felt like it? You didn’t have to make it obvious. Being together sometimes, as often as you could, would do for now. But the idea of caring because people knew . . . Silly. It was simply silly. You couldn’t hide ...
That was the way she had felt about it. For a day or two her mind had played with dreams of hurting Grant. Dreams in which all hurt vanished when he learned, finally, that only one thing mattered.
There were fantasies in which she left home, drove down to Copeland with the mail, and took the train to Boston. Sometimes in this imagined drama Grant would hear of her intention and come down the road to plead with her not to go Sometimes she slipped away proudly, saying nothing beforehand. She had pictured herself in a black dress and a white apron, setting out linen and silver on polished mahogany in a house in Back Bay. And a ring at the door ...
There was nothing impossible in the locality and circumstance of these imaginings. The kitchens and factories of Boston, the forecastles of Gloucester, were full of Nova Scotians. Couldn’t toss a penny in Scollay Square, they said, without hitting one. But Anna’s mind was too realistic to take the dream seriously. How could you get away, anyway? How could you leave Stewart and Josie, with Anse gone?
As the days passed the practical side of her nature had taken charge. She would see Grant and talk it out. She began to realize then that this was not as simple as it seemed. He did not come to Katen’s any more. Each evening she had made it a point to drop over to Grahams’, but he did not come; there was no sound of axes in The Place. To ask him why he was avoiding her became as important as the necessity of asking him about his manner, his troubled caution when they last had met. Yet that, she thought, was silly; it was all part of the same thing . . .
So, last night, she had crossed to Grahams’ as soon as she had finished an early supper, and walked up the road with Edith for the mail. This was a small adventure. Since Hazel’s going, by some tacit agreement the Grahams had been bringing down the Gordons’ mail,
when there was any.
Anna missed making these trips. In earlier summers they had given her a chance to see Grant, in McKees’ kitchen while Mrs. McKee sorted the letters and papers, or on the road afterward. Now, without saying anything to Josie, she had decided to go again to McKees’. You couldn’t go on forever avoiding people because of something someone else had done.
Josie . . . Anna didn’t want to discuss it with Josie, to open up subjects better left as they were. She had noticed Josie watching her lately, and had felt a little thrill of fear that her mother was about to speak, to ask questions. She did not want to talk to Josie yet.
She had crossed to Grahams’ before the mail-team went by, so that she could be there before Edith or the boys left to go up the road; so that she could say, without stressing it, “If you’re going up, I guess I’ll go along with you.”
There was a certain sense of ordeal in this. She wondered whether McKees’ kitchen would be crowded as it used to be on mail nights, as young people from the two roads came in. They would stay and talk after the letters were sorted, before going home or down the road to Katen’s. Now with Hazel gone there would be a constraint among them. Less talk, less lingering. Except for those who would ask Eva or Richard, curiously, what they heard from Hazel, how she was getting on, away . . .
As she and Edith passed Marshalls’ she glanced down over the slope of the field. She saw no one except James, going from house to shop.
No one was at McKees’ but Alec Neill, and he was standing up to go as the two girls came through the back door. He said, “Well, girls,” and regarded them from under shaggy eyebrows, pausing before he slouched out, with a look that was like a friendly embrace. Anna had an impulse to giggle. The look of Alec Neill was laughter; it relaxed the tightness in her throat. She took a chair beside Edith.
Alec’s grin and presence made it unnecessary for Eva McKee to say anything by way of greeting. She got up from the table on which the mail lay in small heaps and handed a letter to Edith and the weekly paper to Anna. That was all. No look, no word, no gesture to suggest the thing that lay between the Gordons and the McKees.
Young Joe came in then, said, “Hi, Ede; hi, Anna,” and clattered through the kitchen and upstairs. Edith glanced at Anna and together they got up to go. There was nothing in any of it to indicate anything except a casual call for the mail.
As they started up the lane to the road Edith said, “There’s Grant; wait a minute.” He was climbing the fence between Marshalls’ pasture and the field. They lingered until he came up to them by the corner of McKees’ house. Edith glanced from one to the other and said, “Well, Grant . . . You can overtake me, Anna,” and went on up toward the gate.
There was no coquetry in Anna. She waited a minute for Grant to speak and said bluntly, “Grant—what is it? What’s the matter?”
“It’s hard to explain, Anna.”
“Well, you might try, anyway. Get it off your chest. You ought to know by this time, you can—tell me anything.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that easy. That’s what—Look, I don’t know whether I could get it straight if we had all day. But I’ll try. When can I— Where can we—?”
She said, “Tomorrow, about three. Come down to our fish hut. Nobody goes to the beach on Sundays; not this time of year.”
So, now, she walked through rutted grass toward the beach.
Grant took the path through the pastures. In earlier years it had been usual for him to follow this route on a Sunday afternoon to spend an hour or so in the Place, alone or with one of the youngsters who might happen to join him—Dan Graham, Stan Currie, Harry Neill, Joe McKee.
But today he veered south, short of the line between Hugh Curries and The Place, and followed Currie’s road down across the neck connecting the little cape of the Head with the mainland. He went on through the black spruce swamp there to the beach.
He passed the seaward edge of The Place, walking east, crossed on stones the shallow estuary where Grahams’ Brook meets the Channel, and scanned the long curve of the beach, stretching away eastward. The day was almost windless, with hardly a curl of surf on the Rocks. On the hump of the beach the small grey shape of Frank Graham’s hut was half-hidden by spruce which had sprung up in the years since Frank had used it only for salting down herring. The flakes were gone. Only a capstan, rotting away with time, to remind a man of the mackerel fishery. Farther down he could see Stewart Gordon’s hut, with Stewart’s small herring-flat and Anse’s dory bottom-up behind it.
This was strange country to Grant, even though his own land, the land James intended for him, came down to salt water. Strange not in physical fact, but in its atmosphere and in the talk of his neighbours when they used it. The Marshalls came down from English officials who had followed the first settlers to Nova Scotia when the province was still a colony. They had never worked under circumstances that demand continual adjustment to the never-quiet pulse of the moving sea, nor experienced the thing known to every fisherman or seaman, however unimaginative: the sense of flesh and bone shifting with that immeasurable movement, of kinship with all others whose lives are tensed or relaxed to meet it.
There was no sign of life. Fishing for the year was over at Currie Head. Even Alec Neill’s salmon net had been hauled up two weeks ago. The curious calm of Sunday, a different climate from weekday wind and weather, lay over the shore. Grant approached the plank door of Stewart Gordon’s hut with hesitation. He finally seated himself on the warm beach rocks sloping down to the falling tide.
Now that he was here his mind was quiet, like the mind of one who has forced himself to a doctor’s waiting-room, certain that no medicine can cure his ill but ready at last to speak of it.
He did not hear Anna come down the path through the fringe of woods; he was not aware of her until she called.
It struck him as odd that she was laughing. She said, ‘You looked funny from behind, Grant. Hunched over staring at the Channel. Like an old man.”
Her easiness put him at ease. “I feel kind of like an old man these days.”
“Well, come on in.”
An ancient whale-boat rudder propped the hut door. She threw it aside. The door sagged open.
One small four-paned window had been set into the end of the hut away from the door. It was curtained with cobwebs and polka-dotted with dead bluebottles. The tied-up brown buns of old mackerel nets hung from wooden spikes in the rafters. A dozen bundled herring nets had been flung along the wall. Half-barrels full of salt herring were tiered across the building’s end wall; the air was acrid with the smell of brine, cutch, tanned rope and dried fish-scales.
“Sit down and make your miserable life happy.”
Anna squatted on a coiled net. She went on, “If I’d been a man I’d be a fisherman . . . out of the house and away from the stone-drag—”
In the run of her uncomplicated talk, he was possessed by the illusion that this unworried ease was the only reality; the hard facts of relationship and religion and family loyalty a shadow moving with the sun.
The fact that her presence could do this to him, could almost shut out the aching truth, perversely seemed to make it easier to say what he had to say. He wanted to speak now, quickly; as, when a small boy he had not been able to sit idly by the kitchen fire while a chore remained undone. He turned his head and his eyes caught Anna’s. Her voice stopped; her own eyes sobered, waiting.
He said abruptly, “Did you ever think of what it means? I mean . . . How would you go about telling your father and mother, say—that you and I were—well, wanted to get married?”
Anna laughed, and sobered quickly. She thought about it. Finally she said, casually serious: “Oh, I don’t know. It’d be a little ticklish, I guess, with Mother. Let’s see—perhaps I could— I can tell Father on the quiet, and get him to talk to Father Morrison and get him to fix—a dispensation, I think they call it. Get it f
ixed up. Then I could ask Mother to ask Father Morrison what he thought of—well, of you and me. That’s kind of a long way round. But no sense looking for trouble. You know Papa. I could marry a nigger if I liked him. He likes you.
Mother 11 kick. Kick like the devil ... I s’pose you wouldn’t turn, would you, Grant?”
He said, “Would you?”
A moment slipped by.
She said, “Why-I hadn’t thought about that. Things don’t . . . Things don’t happen that way, usually. Do they? It’d be . . . Even Papa wouldn’t . . . Mother ... I guess she’d try to forget I was even alive.”
She turned, slowly. “You weren’t . . . were you thinking . . . it would have to be like that?”
“No,” Grant said. “No. I just asked. I didn’t figure you could. Any more than I could. It’s just one of the things—Oh, as far as I’m concerned, personally . . . Suppose families didn’t come into it, Anna. Didn’t come into it at all. How’d you feel about it?”
She turned, on the cushioned net, and said, “I’d feel the way I do now; I’d feel this way.”
Her arm was around him, her face drew close to his; he could feel the pressure of a full breast against him; the eyes were dark with affection. He stiffened, turned his face slightly away and took her elbows in his hands. There was something in him, a streak of puritan denial, that would not permit a lapse into tenderness. He could not steal for a moment something he was not sure he could have openly for life.
He saw Anna withdrawing into herself, hurt and baffled. He said, “That’s the way it is with me, too. Sometimes I wish I was an orphan.”
She said bluntly, “Well, aren’t you?”
Grant flushed. “I s’pose so, actually. But not really. That’s the trouble, Anna. It’d be easier, a lot easier, if I had a mother and father living. They bring you up, and that’s expected. If there’s something you want to do when you’re grown up, something they don’t agree with, well—you can go ahead and do it, without feeling you’re cheating. What they’ve done for you’s nothing more than usual. But Uncle James . . .”
The Channel Shore Page 13