Anna interrupted. “That’s what it is, then, is it? That’s what’s been making you keep away? Stewing by yourself . . . Your Uncle James.”
He said, “He didn’t have to look after me. He could have left me in the States. I could have been raised by my mother’s people. He went out of his way to bring me up. To make a son of me.”
“Well,” Anna said, “where does that put us? Did you talk to him about it—about us?”
Grant said, “Yes. Its hard to . . He tried to find the words that would make understandable to Anna that brief conversation in The Place. The conversation itself and its continuing echo in his mind. You couldn’t communicate the meaning of Uncle James without going back for generations.
He said, “He took the attitude—seemed to think—the whole thing . . . Well, that it’s something not to think about at all. Out of the question.”
“Is that what you think?”
“No. Of course it’s not what I think. But I don’t feel right. I’m no damned good at acting. I can’t go on seeing you, being with you, counting on things coming out all right—unless I’m able to figure how. Do you see—a little—what I’m up against?”She said nothing for a moment. When she spoke again the argument was not with Grant but with James Marshall.
“But—it’s not good sense. What’s he got against us? Against me? If two people—no one’s got the right to come between . . .”
Grant shook his head. “How can I explain that? It’s just the way he sees things. Feels things. Feels about it.”
“Well, my Heavens,” Anna said, “it’s not the right way. What right has an old man got, who’s never laughed in his life—or loved anything, as far as I can see . . .”
Grant could feel the protest growing in his mind; the response to common origins, a thing that may be overlaid even with anger and dislike for one of your own blood, but comes welling up to meet the threatened blow or the caustic word of others.
“Wait, Anna. He’s—Uncle James is all right. He’s a good man.”
She laughed shortly. “A good man? You can say that when he’s trying to run you? When—the way you feel . . .?”
Grant moved his head again, shaking something off. “Yes. It’s not his fault.”
Anna said, “I guess Lon was right.”
“Lon? . . . Right about what?”
Her face was drawn with exasperation. “I didn’t know what he meant. I do now. He asked me if I thought I was worth as much as ninety acres of woods.”
Grant felt the anger flushing along his nerves. He could see Lon Katen, the amusement he would take from the planting of that sly seed, the crop of belief growing in the softly-spoken conjecture of the Channel Shore.
He said, “Anna, you don’t believe that.”
She flared out, “Well, what am I supposed to believe? What is it, Grant? Are you going to do what he wants? What the old man wants?”
Ridiculous words came to the surface of Grants mind. He had an impulse to shout: Stop calling him old! He’s fifty-four! He managed to achieve personal dignity. “That’s the whole thing, Anna. I don’t know what we—what I can do. All I’m trying to say is that whatever it is, somebody’s bound to get hurt. Can’t you see it’s not easy?”
Anna said nothing. She realized that Grant’s mind was full of trouble, but the trouble was not entirely real to her. In her straightforward soul there was little struggle with doubt. You did the best you could. The thing to do was find the easiest, the least bothersome way, and go ahead with it. She could understand some part of James Marshall’s attitude, but not the depth of Grant’s concern for it, the implications of his little private hell; the silent voices, the alternatives that nagged at him; the urge to take her on any basis, the new impulse now to prove that The Place and its possession had no bearing on himself and her. And on the other hand the restraints of a knotted loyalty.
She had no way of knowing that James Marshall’s arguments had no weight with Grant, since argument is addressed to reason and Grant’s only logic was that of feeling; she had no way of knowing that it was almost the same thing in him that responded to herself that was torn also by its ties with James.
The struggle was in his mind, the whole mind of flesh and nerves and blood. James Marshall’s reasoning counted for nothing. His life, his pride, his iron kindness and sense of family, for more than Grant could say.
In the back of her head the question was still ringing, angry, insistent and unspoken: All right, then. Does that strip of woods mean more to you than I do? She did not believe it. She was angry at having allowed the thought to live. But it was there.
The low grumble of Katen’s Rocks was a slow distant undertone to the soft lapping of swell on packed sand at the Channel’s edge. Grant sat without speech or movement until the sombre rise and fall of it seemed like something inside his skull, without beginning and without end. Anna rose abruptly and walked out of the hut, into the sun.
Grant followed, and in the open searched her face. It was non-committal, impersonal, the face of a casual acquaintance.
She said, “Well, Grant, let me know what — When you work it out. What you decide.”
As if, he thought, he could decide anything.
She hesitated and went on, her voice controlled and expressionless, “Whatever it is, you know, things won’t be quite the same.”
Grant said, “No. No, I don’t suppose they will.”
What depressed him most as he walked up the beach was that he had failed to say what he might have said. It could have been done. Briskly: “Look here, Anna. You and me — nothing’s changed. In the end we’re all that counts. I’m sorry I’ve been ... I should have tried to tell you, right away, there’d be things to think about that bother me more than they do you. It’s just that it may take time.”
If he had said that, and taken her in his arms. He turned once, to look back. But he knew he could not have done it.
12
The need to talk to Anna ...
Many times in these last days Josie had felt the resolution form. Sometimes she had come so close to words that in imagination she could sense the minds release. In those moments she could feel the spectre vanish; or at least take shape as something known and actual that could be met and dealt with.
The imagined relief faded always in a renewal of fear. She had not been able to take the cold plunge into words. She had not been able to question Anna. She had not been able to say, “What is it? What is it that bothers you?”
If she could have done that, and if she could have put into words the things that haunted her own heart, perhaps that frankness would have induced an equal frankness in Anna, would have opened Anna’s trouble to sympathy and advice. But Josie had not been able to do it. She had not been able to share pain.
Why, she did not clearly know. Except that she had always been an ingrowing woman. And on the few occasions when she had followed another impulse, laid bare her heart — well, the scars were still there.
She thought of this with part of her mind as she lay in bed beside Stewart in the room behind the parlour, on the last night of August. The times years ago when she had spoken, a little, to Anse about their hopes for him. The priesthood; or if that were a thing he had no heart for, anything. An education, a training, that would get him away from the gurry-barrels and the beach, the shore and the commonness, make him a man to be proud of . . .
She could see now the composed face of the fourteen-year-old, listening. Listening, while his mind planned. In those days Anse had planned: schoolbooks hidden by the roadside while he circled through the woods to find the Katens . . . Sudden sickness on Sunday morning when it was time to take the buggy down the road to Mass. In was only later, when time had ravelled finally the ties of family authority, that he had abandoned guile in his dealings with her.
And Stewart. There was no guile in Stewart. Only the endless absent-m
indedness, the something that was almost shiftless. Nothing she had ever said had altered this in Stewart. And now, since Anse had gone ... It galled Josie to think of the Graham boys, always around; always around to help. Getting the cows or carrying in the wood. As if Stewart were sick, or something. Her heart thumped under the assault of a sudden fear. Tonight, at supper, she had reminded Stewart about the porch roof; rain a week ago had begun to drip through until she had to set out pans. Without lifting his head, Stewart had mumbled something about getting Anse at it . . . She had let it pass, refused to think about it. Now, alone in the night, she faced it. Absent-mindedness, simple and complete, or something more? A crumbling in the mind?
She stirred in bed, and sighed, and prayed for sleep. Anna. Anna was the opposite of herself. Anna could talk and laugh about anything. Anna’s off-handedness had been almost an exasperation. Until lately. But no longer ...
Josie searched her mind again for the time when Anna’s silence had begun. Anse’s disappearance, the root of her own grief, was not the core of Anna’s trouble. Through the bitter first days after Anse’s going Anna had kept her head up and her laughter alive.
It was through Anna, really, that Josie had come to realize the link between the departure of Anse and that of Hazel McKee. Her mind went back. There was Vangie Murphy, halting by the gate; Vangie saying, “Well, Mrs. Gordon, and what d’you hear from Anse?” And her own reply, “Nothing. We’ve not heard from Anse yet.” And Vangie, her voice unaccountably bitter and vaguely sly, “They tell me Hazel McKee’s gone, too. Gone away to be a dress-maker. That’s what they say ... “
She had asked Anna, “Hazel McKee; has she left home?”
Yes, Anna said. Mr. McKee had taken her to the train at Stone- ville, the day before. And then, into a silence, “You knew Anse used to chase after her, didn’t you?”
Josie hadn’t known. For a moment she had felt a queer hope. If it were true ... If they were together . . . But that wasn’t possible. Not when you knew Anse. She had felt the waves of shame wash through her, the revelation of an enormous and furtive cruelty.
That was Josie’s shame, but it was not Annas. It was since then that the light careless voice had lost its lightness. It was only lately that the sparkle had faded to a dull abstraction. Or become a parody of itself, forced and affected. There was something more important to Anna than Anse,
For a moment, once, a shocking possibility had occurred to Josie. That friendliness in Anna for Grant Marshall ... Was it possible there was something that wouldn’t bear thinking of? As there had been—as people said there had been—between Anse and Hazel McKee? She had dismissed this almost at once. Not Anna, her instinct said. And not Grant Marshall. She realized with something like surprise that instinct told her this also: not Grant Marshall.
Her mind kept drifting back to Anse. It was like the knowledge of unbearable pain, blocked off by the mind’s busyness . . . Anse. This present Anse. She had faced it fully weeks ago. She had let her mind speculate unshielded in the talk she could not hear. In the kitchens and parlours, the workshops and fields of the Channel Shore. On the wonder in the minds of men and women, the curiosity of children. The wonder, the malice and the pity.
She had faced it all then, and felt love die, and turned away. Now she did not face it directly any more. It was a thing that must be recognized and accepted; but it was not a thing to hold in the heart and examine, except when you couldn’t help . . . Let the knowledge lie in the shallows at the far reaches. Let the heart turn away.
She felt the burning flush of it, dangerously near, and moved her head abruptly in the hollow of the pillow, forcing her mind again to Anna. It was Anna she was thinking of, Anna and Grant Marshall, as she fell asleep.
She woke to kitchen sounds and the indistinct sound of voices. Morning; but the light was lifeless, the reflection of a sunless overcast. Josie put out a hand, flat on the lower sheet. Stewart was up and gone. She thought about that. Her own troubled mind kept her awake till all hours, left her dull in the mornings; Stewart’s wakened him early, got him out to build the fire and roam the yard before sunrise.
She could hear the voices again, but could not distinguish the words, except that she recognized the one word “Anse” in Stewart’s monotone. Then Anna, answering, and a little later the closing of a door.
Her heart lurched again, remembering the porch roof, the little scene at supper. She threw back the patchwork quilt and sat up on the edge of the bed, a bent figure in a white cotton frill- necked night-dress, with disorderly greying hair. She dressed quickly and then deliberately took her time, washing face and hands, tucking in hairpins. She was outwardly placid when she went up the hallway and into the kitchen.
Anna sat on her heels, facing the open door of the stove. She held close to the red wood-coal a piece of bread on a long-handled fork. Her face was flushed with heat.
Josie said, “You’re up early.”
Anna said indifferently, “I heard Papa.”
Josie crossed to the east window. Stewart was standing in the middle of the yard, watching the Channel. The sky was a sea of high grey cloud, roofing out the sun, the Channel its darker reflection, ridged here and there with white. After a long moment he turned and walked slowly toward the barn.
Josie returned to the stove, picked up the teapot’s glossy earthenware and filled her cup at the table. Anna dislodged the piece of toast from her fork, closed the stove door, straightened, and ladled her mother a plateful of porridge. When Josie said, “You’d better have another cup of tea,” she obediently poured it out for herself and sat down at table opposite her mother.
Josie began to eat her porridge. Deliberately she spread preserved strawberries on toast and drank the hot strong tea. While her mind was busy with the thing she wanted to say to Anna, her eyes observed the toast-crumbs round Stewart’s empty plate, his cup with sodden tea-leaves in the dregs, the table-cloth with its little stains of food from last night’s supper. She found her mind changing focus, concerned now with sorrow and anger and shame, now with the dirty dishes on the table, the dreariness of little things. And suddenly they were all one, all parts of the same thing. She had an impulse to shout ...
Get out of this, Anna. For God’s sake get out of it! Away from the whole of it. Dirty dishes and crumbling minds, the curiosity, the sympathy, the sneers . . . Away from Grant Marshall, away from hurt and temptation, away from the Shore.
She controlled that impulse. It had never been more than a thing of the imagination. Violence would not do.
She felt she could talk calmly to Anna, now. But she no longer wanted to carry on a discussion with Anna. Somewhere in the night and the morning she had lost the impulse to question, to probe, to search her daughter’s inner feeling. What she wanted for Anna was—freedom.
She said indifferently, frowning, “When was it your Aunt Mame was here last, Anna? Trying to think . . . Five years ago? Or was it six?”
Anna glanced at her mother’s face and saw only abstracted curiosity, a looking back.
She said, “Six. Year before the war started. Why?” She was faintly curious.
“That long? Oh,—I don’t know. Been thinking about them lately, sometimes. We ought to keep in touch more, but—”
She continued, indifferently, “It’s too bad we don’t see more — Maybe you might visit them for a week or so, Anna. It’d be a change.”
Again Anna searched her mother’s face; there was nothing in it but that looking-backward, a casual quietness.
She said slowly, speculatively, “I s’pose I might.”
Excitement and puzzlement began to mingle in her mind. To go away ... to let Grant see she could do without . . . To make him feel what it was like, her absence from the Shore . . .
The fantasies began to form. She had dismissed all that. Even after their talk on the beach yesterday, she had refused to think of it as something she could do. Boston wa
s impossible.
But a visit, that was another thing. A visit to relatives, less than a day by train away. She wouldn’t have to let on it was only for a week or two. Her mind skipped. Maybe it wouldn’t be . . . Perhaps she could find work for a while in Halifax. Doing housework. She’d be near if they wanted her, and— her mind slipped again to the edge of dream—it would be easier for Grant ...
She looked toward Josie again, feeling something like suspicion. What was in Josie’s mind? What was behind it?
Josie had risen and was clearing off the dishes, stacking them to carry to the sink. Her face was placid.
Anna remained seated, thinking. She remembered Aunt Mame McDonald as a tall woman, dark and good-looking, a year or two younger than Josie. She had never seen Uncle Howard. There were pictures of him in the parlour closet—a big heavily-moustached man. Worked in the shipyards or some place. But Jesse and Gladys . . . Glad was her own age. Jesse and Glad had been along, that summer six years ago when all of them were kids.
Funny they’d never visited back and forth again. She’d hardly thought of them.
There was bitterness in this reflection. For—how long was it? —she had thought of hardly anyone but Grant. Bitterness and loneliness, and despite that, the lure of something new.
She said, “I don’t know . . . There’s Papa.”
Josie said, “Well, if we get around to it, I’ll talk to your father. A visit—he won’t object to that. There’s only train fare. It don’t amount to much.”
Anna said, “No, I guess not; I guess it’d be all right.” She wondered whether Josie had deliberately affected to misunderstand. It was not any objection of Stewart’s she had feared. It was the ache in her own throat at the thought of him, that aimless figure, bewildered and alone.
She did not try to explain this to Josie. Her mind was ranging, on to Halifax, the McDonalds, and back again to Grant. ..
The Channel Shore Page 14