The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  13

  Anna sat with young Bill on the shop steps at Gordons’. Down by the wood-pile Stewart bent over the grindstone, holding a scythe to it while Dan Graham, squatting on one knee, turned the crank. Now and then Stewart would straighten and raise the scythe, peer closely at the curved blade’s edge, brush it with his thumb, and apply it again to the turning stone. Scythe and stone and the wooden axle of the crank made a small gritty screeching sound as Dan laboured.

  Anna was thinking of the friendliness of people. How friendly they could be, some of them, without making a fuss about it. Gradually in the seven weeks since Anse had gone it had got so that one or other of the Graham boys, sometimes both of them, was always around when there were things to do; the casual man-and-boy jobs that add up to half the work of one-horse farming, and which Stewart more and more forgot.

  Without being obvious about it, Frank Graham was keeping an eye on Stewart. Frank and the boys had helped him finish hay-making after their own fields were made. Frank had told Stewart they would swap work; Stewart could help him later on with the oats.

  Even the Katens. Lon, sent by Felix probably, had turned up to help Stewart haul Anse’s abandoned line of trawl, and Stewart’s herring nets. And Rod Sinclair. Rod had used his shook-boat to get Stewart’s salt herring to Fraser’s fish plant at Princeport.

  It went beyond the circle of near neighbours. They might talk among themselves, Anna thought. How could they help it? Josie was bothered by that, hating the thought of it. But there was a considerateness along the Channel Shore.

  The Shore—even while her mind turned to Halifax and a time of escape from the trouble in her heart, she could feel the familiar friendliness of it. The same thing Grant had always seemed to feel.

  She said idly, “You have a good time this summer, Bill?”

  “O, yes. I like it here.”

  “You’ll be going back home soon, I s’pose.”

  He nodded. “Pretty soon. About the middle of the month. I heard from my father. He’s letting me stay a couple of weeks more, long as I go to school here.”

  Anna said, “I’m going away too, Bill.”

  He looked up quickly. “Away? Where?”

  “Oh, just up the line. To Halifax. To visit an aunt and uncle. Not for long, I don’t expect. Couple of weeks, maybe. Then again—it might be longer’n you think for ...”

  She stopped, wondering why she had picked Bill to tell this

  to.

  It had all been settled quickly, today, with Stewart hardly seeming to realize what Josie was talking about. There was no secret about it. Anna meant to tell Edith Graham tonight, and perhaps the crowd at Katen’s if she went down. But here she was, talking to Bill first of all. Bill, who was close to Grant.

  He said, “When ‘re you leaving, Anna?”

  “Tomorrow,” Anna said. “With the mail.”

  Grant had been pulling young spruce in the lower pasture as usual. With dusk coming on he glanced up the slant of the land toward the house and saw James, a small far figure standing on the porch, and wondered if his uncle would come down to join him. And if at last he could find in himself the resolution to talk again about Anna, to argue, to try to convince ...

  He saw Bill Graham then, angling slowly across the cradle-hills toward him, and felt the little sense of liking, and a sense of shame. Young Bill—he knew more than he let on for. Bill had sensed the closeness between himself and Anna, he was sure of that, and in some slight wordless way had shared it. And it was to Bill that he had talked about The Place. This odd and likeable youngster ... He would have caught, of course, the feel of troubleGrant brushed his hands, stinging from the spruce needles, and sat down on a cradle-hill and was pleasant to Bill. They talked about a dozen unimportant things, about fall coming on, and the apples beginning to mellow; and Grant went on to talk a little, answering Bill’s questions, about how it would be later on. November, and the mushrat season open, and ice in the wheel ruts in the mornings; the first snow, and withered hay stems thinly speckling the white smoothness of it, and sometimes a cautious deer in the orchard at daybreak, nuzzling for frozen apples.

  There was something wistful about Bill tonight. In the end Grant said, “Well, some year you’ll be back, likely; and stay longer.” Then, on impulse, yet with an imposed off-handedness, “ ‘ve you seen Anna lately?”

  He wondered at once why he had asked this question and realized there was no reason except the need to hear the sound of her name, to have the sense of contact, thin as smoke, that came from talking about her.

  “Sure,” Bill said. It seemed to Grant almost as if the boy had been waiting for the question. There was a hint of eagerness and relief in his voice. “I was talking to her tonight.” And then, obviously casual, “She’s going away for a while.”

  “Away-?”

  The word caught in his throat.

  A visit, Bill explained. She’d be back in a couple of weeks. That’s what she’d said, anyway.

  Grant barely listened. He spoke, now and then, making conversation. But he could never afterward recall what he and Bill had talked about in this small interval of time.

  Away ... It was as if the sum of his senses had slipped, inched downward, crumbled and settled on a level of helpless pain. Absurdly, he could feel the ache of teats in his throat, a sense of utter and hopeless loss.

  After a little an odd sense of duality came to him, as if he were two men, two Grant Marshalls, and this was happening to one of him while the other stood aside, observing. Watching himself and Bill, and Uncle James coming slowly down the pasture . . .

  Then James was nodding to Bill and the boy was getting up off the cradle-hill to go. Uncle James was saying, “It gets cold in the evenings, now. You ought to have some kind of jacket on . . . Fred cut some apple-wood. There’s a fire going in The Room . . .”

  As he walked up the path behind James this feeling of being both watched and watcher vanished. He was one, again. The thought in his mind was pointless and trivial. Uncle James was beginning to show a stoop. Was, after all, getting old.

  By the time they had reached the house he was chiding himself for having been invaded by that unreasonable sense of shock. She was going away. For a week, two weeks, perhaps longer. What of it? And why, as things were, should she talk to him about it?

  He argued this with himself, reasonably. What, after all, was a fortnights absence? It had no importance at all. You could realize that, you could tell yourself that; but it was still true that he had himself destroyed the lightness, the openness . . . Or watched it be destroyed. The wave flowed back, the helplessness and loss.

  He stood in the yard for a little in the dark, under the ash trees, while James went up the front steps and opened the door and remained there, waiting, in the dimmed edge of light from the parlour lamp.

  If he went down there, now . . . down the road . . . But what could he say to her?

  He turned and followed James into the house.

  14

  In the fringe of red spruce between his cleared land and the Channel, Frank Graham was engaged in the beginning of a new enterprise on the Channel Shore.

  Farther west in the county the pulpwood buyers had been busy for the past two years. On small hill wood-lots near the coast, in time spared from farming, men and boys with saws and axes were attacking spruce and balsam; sawing it into four-foot lengths, peeling and piling it by the sides of roads and on the banks of streams and on the beach.

  A tramp freighter would be coming into Morgans Harbour in October to load the year’s cut. Frank had made a deal with the company. If he could put fifty cords on the beach they would pick it up. With Grant Marshall to help him and Bill and Dan peeling and piling after school, he was working long hours to fill out the contract.

  The Marshalls’ machinery shed was finished. James had not objected when Grant proposed to lend Frank a hand, t
hough he had looked at him a little oddly. Wondering, Grant supposed, why he didn’t go to work in The Place.

  Frank’s talk and easy ways made life a little more endurable. In the warm mornings and afternoons and the cool of the evenings while they chopped and sawed, Frank’s voice ranged over the Shore. They were building a cottage hospital at Copeland, and a power station to make electric light . . . Down at Forester’s Pond they were after the government to dredge a harbour entrance; always trying to get the government to do something, Frank said. The new school-teacher; a good-looking girl, wasn’t she? . . . daughter of Bob Fraser’s, over at Princeport; boarding with the Freemans; one more skirt around the house, but Tham wath uthed to them.

  There was neither time nor breath for talk while they bent to the saw, but in the easier moments, while they trimmed the felled trees, or walked up to the house for the noontime meal or supper, and in the little spells of idleness that men indulge in between bursts of work, Grant found himself listening to Frank with something like enjoyment.

  There was nothing in any of it to lessen the trouble in his heart, the mixture of guilt and self-justification and the smouldering bafflement, the anger at himself and circumstances. There were times in the depth of his aloneness when the sense of this flowed up in a dark and maddening tide. He would fight his way out of that and go back, retracing in his mind the things he might have done.

  If he had said, on the barn wall, I had a girl to see, Uncle James ... If he had said, in the clearing in The Place, Well, I don’t intend to avoid seeing her ... If he had driven with her openly up the road from Katen’s ... If he had turned back, that Sunday on the beach ...

  If he had been able to take the present for what it gave, and let the future look after itself . . .

  If he had been able to walk down the road to Gordons’, the night before she went away . . . But what could he have said to her? He could have said, Forget it, Anna; there’s nothing worth a damn hut you and me ... He could have said that, or he could have said good-bye.

  This final if was the one that touched most sharply the soreness in his heart.

  There was nothing in Frank Graham’s talk and manner that could change the fact of his own responsibility and his inability to deal with it. But there was something in it that altered a little the sense of his aloneness. People and the things they were doing . . . He began to think of himself as one of many, to think of Grant Marshall in relation to all these people on the Shore, rather than in relation only to James Marshall and Anna Gordon. One evening as they sat on the porch steps waiting for supper he heard a scrap of talk that opened a little wider the door of his inner thought.

  The boys had not turned up in the woods that afternoon. Stewart Gordon was laid up with a lame back, Mrs. Graham said, so there was more to do over there than usual. They’d be along soon. While they waited, Frank returned to a subject he had mentioned once or twice before in the course of making conversation. Stewart was in a kind of an odd state. Had been ever since Anse left, but it had been getting worse, lately. Half the time he didn’t seem to know what he was doing, or care much. Be a blessing when Anna got back ...

  Grant heard this, noting it with regret but without feeling much about it, and found himself listening absently to the kitchen sounds behind them. The boys were coming into the yard now. Stella Graham had a hot supper-fire going. She crossed the room to raise the window a little, and as Bill and Dan went up the steps into the house, Grant caught the smell of sizzling ham and part of a sentence: “—what she can do; there’s nothing . . .” Stella’s words were lost as she turned from the window and broke off at the boys’ entrance. But the words, the tone, the breaking-off, brought something to the alert in Grant’s mind. Hazel McKee. They were talking of Hazel McKee. He felt a small definite alteration in the drift of his brooding. The aloneness in the heart of everyone . . . Hazel . . . Richard . . . himself . . . Anna . . . Stewart and Josie Gordon . . . Even, perhaps, Anse . . .

  This was something sharper in the heart, clearer, more penetrating, than the sympathy he had felt for Richard and Stewart in those earlier days after his return from England. Or his formal regret, hearing Frank talk of Stewart, just today. The first had been a surface sorrow, almost forgotten later in his own pain. And his concern with himself had blunted the reality of what Frank had said about Stewart today.

  What he felt now was hardly sorrow at all. It was more a kind of iron understanding.

  Afterward, he was not quite sure how it was that he and Frank crossed the road to Gordons’. Most evenings they had returned to the woods after supper to get in an hour’s work before dark. This evening Frank wanted to see Stewart, to reassure himself. They found Stewart sitting in an armchair from the parlour, drowsily resting. There were sounds in the pantry; Josie came up the step into the kitchen with milk pails nested under an arm.

  Frank said, “Let’s have them buckets, Josie. We’ll look after that.” He turned to say, “Take it easy, now, Stewart,” as they went out to go to the little fenced yard behind the barn where the boys were barring-in the two cows.

  When they had finished milking, Frank stopped in the kitchen to talk to Stewart while Grant carried the milk on through to the pantry where Josie was preparing to separate. He said, “I’ll do that, Mrs. Gordon,” and took the crank from her hand.

  Small half-thoughts drifted in his mind, accompanied by the high seething drone of the separator. This room—there was a sag in the floor. Smaller place than the one at home; earthenware crocks and pans and platters . . . Except for the milky smell and the job itself there was little to remind you of Aunt Jane’s big spotless milk-room with its shiny neatness. The noise of separation made talk unnecessary, but he was conscious that Josie hadn’t left the pantry. She was standing between the machine and the kitchen door, watching the separate streams fall into the pans. When they thinned to a trickle and stopped, Grant straightened and glanced at her with the ghost of a smile.

  The small job had created a shared atmosphere, something in common, momentary and slight. Grant said, “What d you hear from Anna, Mrs. Gordon? She like Halifax all right?”

  A brief silence. Josie said, “We had a card when she got there. Since then we’ve not heard a word.”

  Grant’s question had been unwilled, spoken because the situation called for words, for some casual remark. What could be more natural than a reference to Anna, visiting away? There was nothing in it consciously of the craving behind the question he had asked of Bill Graham among the cradle-hills. And yet as soon as he had asked it, it seemed to him that for the last half-hour he must have been working up to it. In the little silence that followed he felt as if he had done a daring thing. The normality of Josie’s answer brought a feeling of relief.

  Yet, had her answer been wholly normal? She had spoken without emphasis, but with a suggestion of irritation. Since then we’ve not heard a word. Perhaps it was an irritation that masked an inner worry.

  Grant said, “Wasn’t planning to stay long, was she? She’ll turn up in the mail herself one of these days.”

  Josie made an indifferent sound, added, “Like as not,” and went into the kitchen.

  As he crossed the road again with Frank, Grant wondered at the thing in him that had been able to add that casual sentence. The thing that was like acting, and yet was not acting because in the moment of talking to Josie he had been one person making sincere if casual conversation with another. The thing that could come to the surface of behaviour while the mind lay captive to frustration and regret.

  After that in the evenings he went over to Gordons’ with Dan and Bill or Frank whenever he could do so without appearing to have an obvious purpose. Stewart’s back was better; there was little that needed to be done. It was just that Frank was keeping an eye on the Gordons.

  Some nights Stewart would come to Grahams’, as he had done for years, to smoke on the steps with Frank while darkness fell. Grant stayed
, listening, sharing the companionship. Now and then, briefly, he saw and spoke to Josie. It was as though he were possessed by an ambition, unformed in thought but there in feeling, to know all he could know, by these small contacts and associations, of this man and woman who were Anna’s flesh and blood.

  He had no plan. There was no change in the tangle of his loyalities. But he was no longer quite alone. There was now a kind of kinship for all others isolated in their aloneness, stricken by circumstance, caught without an answer to the riddle of living. A new sense of the future, of being one among many who must move and change with time.

  15

  When dinner was ready Josie went out on the side porch to call Stewart. For a little while she stood there watching him, across the field, as he shuffled along a swath of ripe oats with swinging scythe.

  She thought, September . . . In less than two weeks they would be into October, the season of white moonlight and clear crisp days and nights. Squirrels gathering beechnuts. Children stopping on the way home from school, to climb the fences into roadside pastures, after mullein stalks and cat-tails. For a second or two Josie tasted girlhood, the pithy flowery flavour of ripened haws.

  She called “Stewart! Dinner!” and saw him halt, glance up and around and lift a hand in a half-wave. Stewart had been a little better lately, less sunk in absent thinking, except that every now and then he would look around in a lost way, and then, remembering, ask when Anna would be back. She recognized this, a little grudgingly. It had hurt her pride to see others doing for him—for them. Now pride was—well, it was all right to have the Grahams coming around. With people about, Stewart was all right. With some surprise she realized that in her thinking about this, about the boys and Frank, her mind included with them Grant Marshall.

  In Grahams’ lower woods she could hear the axes.

  She turned toward the door and twisted again suddenly to face the fields, the Channel, the wooded slopes eastward, already beginning to colour, and was stricken suddenly by the emptiness of the house behind her. She felt again the surge of a wish that was almost violence, urgent beyond all common sense. She wished, simply, that Anna would write.