The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  After dinner Stewart got up from the table to return to the field, but halted on the side porch. Something in his manner made Josie curious. She joined him there.

  Slowly, from the east, the sky had begun to darken. A cloudless amber twilight was settling on foliage and stubble, a deepening of natural colour on the woods and the Channel. The land lay at the bottom of a still sea of dark and silent air.

  Over the rim of spruce cresting the wooded southern pastures of the Murphy place and Felix Katen’s, they could see the slowly advancing selvage of purple and grey, clouds massed in a single cloud. An air of wind, chilly with something colder than the breath of late September, brushed the headed oats, and crossed the field, and touched their faces.

  Stewart said, “Weather.” He went down the steps and crossed the field and carried his scythe to the shop, and came into the house to stand by the eastern windows, talking half to himself.

  “. . . . blow before night. When she blows up easterly you c’n expect it dirty ... No wind, much, and rollers walkin’ up like they come from Ireland . . .”

  The first splash of rain fell, a brief squall borne on gusty wind. Through the south window Josie saw Frank Graham and Grant Marshall coming up to Grahams’ from the woods.

  Stewart went out to sit on the steps of the front porch, facing the Channel, watching the odd illusion of suspense that hung along the sky.

  Around supper-time the rain came straight down and hard. Josie lit the lamp. It was odd to be eating off lamp-lit cloth when the windows should have been letting in the mellow light of evening.

  When Dan Graham came over to help with the evening chores he was wearing a black slicker of Frank’s and a round oil-hat with chin-strap wagging. Stewart put on his yellow oilskins to go to the barn.

  At bedtime the rain still fell, and the wind was up now, dashing it against the windows in dollops and streaming volleys. The house creaked and strained as the wind struck and rushed round it, not blow after blow, but with a steady and growing power.

  Josie went to bed early, leaving Stewart by the fireless stove.

  On the shadowy borderline of sleep, while rain fell in rushing torrents, her mind was alive with waking dreams.

  Anse and Anna, herself and Stewart, moving through the routine of the farm and the house. Stewart and Anse unloading firewood from the sled in the yard on a frosty morning, the horse stamping balled snow from the hollow of a hoof . . . Anna laughing for no reason, at the sight of bursting bubbles in steaming porridge . . . Slush on the kitchen floor from the men’s boots . . . She started into full wakefulness at the girl’s voice, soundless but perfectly clear, some winter long ago: “You fellas. You’re more bother than you’re worth . . .”

  There was no comfort in this dreaming thought. Over it all lay the fear of something lost. Josie’s mind went back to the little worries of early summer—so clear and touchable when compared to this vague, empty, endless hoping that was hardly hope. So simple, because the objects of it then were near, were present flesh that you could see and touch. Except for a trace of fatalism, a contempt for futile wishing, Josie would have made a bargain with the saints: Let it he as it was; I won’t complain again . . .

  Satisfaction in Anna’s escape . . . she had thought of it as that, hoping that Anna would be caught up in city life, that some way would be found ... Satisfaction in that was gone, gone with the absence, the loss of the winsome manner and teasing voice. Gone, in Stewart’s lost look, when the mood took him. Gone, particularly in these midnight hours when true sleep would not blur the shadows of the mind. She turned restlessly in bed, half-resolving to go over to Grahams’ tomorrow and try to get through to Halifax by way of the open phone line to Findlay’s Bridge. To reassure herself, to hear the voice . . . But half the people on the Shore would hear.

  Her mind drifted back to Anse. Anse and Hazel McKee. She tried to close a door on that by a pure effort of will.

  She heard Stewart moving cautiously about the room, heard him stumble over a chair, and felt the bed creak and sag as he got into it. Eventually she fell asleep and was pursued by dreams.

  In the morning the rain had slackened to gusts and a blowing mist, and the wind was down. Stewart splashed his way to the barn in rubber boots. Under the higher notes of the wind, the occasional wet splatter against glass, the desultory buffeting of walls, Josie could hear the undulant curling roar, the smothered thunder of surf on Katen’s Rocks.

  After breakfast she went out to the side steps to look. Stewart was already beginning to think of the storm in terms of the Shore’s history. He was almost boyish. “Hard a blow as any I remember. Can’t hardly recall the August gale, y’know. I bet you this one hit the whole east coast. We’ll hear about it . . .”

  The old Balm o’Gilead in the lower field was down, its trunk sprawled across a wrecked panel of fence and its top broken off in the road. The unmown oats lay flat, as if tramped down by marching men. Graham’s Brook droned full and washed into the fieldsOut of nowhere Stewart said, “We’ll likely hear soon, y’know, Josie.”

  He stepped off the porch, hesitating what to do first.

  There was no way of knowing whether he meant a letter from Anna or word of Anse. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. But his voice had been firm and full of compassion. For just a moment a small flag of respect flew in Josie’s mind, over the sense of threat that lived there. Respect for an ageing and sorrowful and bewildered man who could think to say a word well-meaning and meaningless. Meaningless; and yet, watching him walk stoop- shouldered down the muddy road to see what he could do about clearing away the shattered Balm o’Gilead top, her heart was not as heavy as before.

  She kept an eye on the road as she washed the breakfast dishes and carried out scraps to the hens. A team splashed east through the road’s mud, but the driver was a stranger to her; not Adam Fait on his way to Copeland. Not a letter, not a line, from Anna . . .

  Exasperation flushed through Josie’s worry. Maybe she was homesick. Well, why didn’t she write, then? Grant Marshall . . . Another bargain almost formed itself in her mind. She shook her head in impatience, not at the idea of coupling a Marshall and a Gordon in the same thought, but, again, at the futility of imagining time turned back.

  She watched the road for Adam Fait. Mail usually came on the up trip, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. But it was freakish. They were using the road from Stoneville now for the mail to Morgan’s Harbour, and sometimes a letter slipped through that way and reached Currie Head on the down trip.

  She thought that after Adam had gone by, she would make an excuse to walk up to McKee’s and see. No. Except at a distance, when Eva McKee came to call at Grahams’, she had not seen Eva since Anse had left the shore. Despite the shortness of that mile of road, there had never been any closeness between them, anyway. She knew that Eva now took some kind of bitter pride in ignoring talk, in going out to church, visiting neighbours, marketing at The Bridge. But her own pride was of another texture. She did not want to see Eva McKee.

  Bill or Dan would pick up whatever there was. She glanced at the clock. Only eleven. Adam was more than two hours late this morning.

  She heard his waggon then and saw it halt by her front gate, and wondered. A letter would have gone to McKees’ in the bag. She hurried down the clam-shell path to the gate.

  Adam had climbed down from the rig. He was holding a yellow envelope in his hand, and there was something . . .

  He said a little awkwardly, “Josie, it’s a telegram. They didn’t want to phone it because—well—the line’s down, anyway. But it’s bad news, Josie. I—”

  Down the road, out of the corner of her eye, Josie noted that Stewart had been able to do nothing alone about the Balm o’Gilead. Two hours and more puttering . . . Bill and Dan Graham had come across and they had finally hauled it to the roadside. They turned to look curiously at the mail-team. They were coming up the road . . .

 
; She reached out and took the envelope and stared at it briefly, reading the address through the transparent panel: STEWART GORDON CURRIE HEAD NS PHONE FROM FINDLAYS BRIDGE.

  She said, “Is it-Anse?”

  Adam shook his head. “No, Josie. It’s not Anse . . . It’s Anna.”

  She was suddenly still. Then with awkward fingers she opened the envelope and read the message. As the slip fluttered from her fingers her knees began to bend. She did not feel Adam Falt’s supporting arm, or hear young Bill Graham’s frightened shout as he ran toward Grahams’ gate: “Aunt Stell! Aunt Stell!”

  16

  The coffin lay in the small unused room at the back of the house, across the hall from the downstairs bedroom. This was where Anna had slept as a child. Tomorrow they would take her body on a spring-waggon to the church at Forester’s Pond for the requiem mass and committal to the earth; but tonight she lay in the room of her earliest girlhood. Candles burned in the room. The single small window was open, but their flames were steady in the still night air. When a breath of wind stirred the curtains, or the door opened to a new arrival at the front of the house, they would dip slightly and waver.

  Kitchen and parlour were filled with people. They would come into the house by either door, blink around to find Stewart and Josie in the parlour and walk up to them with outstretched hand to say their word of sympathy. Mame McDonald or Stella Graham would take them down the narrow hall then and into the little room with the candles and the faint scent of barns and flowers, to see the face of Anna.

  All evening they had come. Hesitant in the doorway before going on to grasp Stewart’s hand and Josie’s and speak their halting hurried words. There was a formality about it. Grant had heard the ritual repeated again and again: “Sorry . . . sorry for your trouble.” Words spoken as if they had been learned from a manual of usage in which were printed the formal salutations for luck and love and fortune and disaster.

  Perhaps that was it. Usage. Habit. Curiosity. This thought touched him, but without conviction. There was something more than that. From where he was standing, in the hall, lounging against the jamb of the parlour door, he considered all this with detachment. Frank Graham and Felix Katen sat on the parlour sofa. Stewart was between them, elbows on knees, kneading a handkerchief. Stewart, in his faded blue serge Sunday suit and a clumsily knotted tie. Josie sat across the room, with Stella Graham and one of the Clancy women from Forester’s Pond, so that when newcomers arrived they had to cross the room twice, to shake the hand of both. Some were in Sunday suits, some in working clothes. Lon Katen. Rod Sinclair. Hugh and Christine Currie. Stileses and Clancys and Reilleys from down the shore . . .

  That was natural enough. Close neighbours, or people of the same faith.

  But what caught Grant’s interest most was the presence of these others. The Freemans and Wilmots from up the school- house road. The new school-teacher, a girl from Princeport. The Lairds, Richard and Eva McKee; the bitter pride in Eva must have been very great, to bring her here . . .

  During this bitter summer he had learned a good deal about the meaning of difference. It came to him now that one thing at least could blur the difference down.

  Usage. Yes. But something wonderful and gentle when you saw through the awkwardness and beyond the stilted words. In the mind of each the hovering shadow, eternal and personal and known to all—the awareness that some day or night he too, she too, must lie apart in that strange stillness, beyond the warmth of work and talk and long companionship . . . And each ignored . . . tried to ignore . . . that shadow, banishing fear in a sorrow shared and immediate; and in a strange sweet private loss . . . the girl who moved in their world of dreams, their common memory . . . that shining careless girl . . . Despite the voiced Thy will he done, a sense of waste, a furtive human anger.

  In the parlour they talked in undertones. In the kitchen the voices too were low, but concerned outwardly with usual things. The storm. Crops. The prospect of a steady pulpwood market. Dave Stiles questioned Alf Laird about the cost of running a car. Was thinking he might get one, he said. But questions and answers came perfunctorily, with a kind of inattention . . . And now and then all talk would cease and the voices fade into restless silence.

  Grant heard Ida Freeman’s, curiously emphatic:

  “... a lovely girl; a lovely, lovely girl.”

  Edith Graham made a stifled sound, almost animal; she got up abruptly from her chair by the parlour organ and hurried through the hall, outdoors, into the dark . . . Edith, the quiet, the self- possessed; and Anna had been only the girl next door, never an intimate.

  Well, his own ordeal, the shaking anguish of it, was over. There remained the shadow . . . Not, for Grant, the shadow of

  a cosmic fear; but still, the shadow . . . endless and for him alone.

  His eyes roved over the Curries, over Alec Neill, James Marshall, Frank Graham, young Bill. Odd, that a kid—but Bill had been fond of her.

  They had all been fond of her. His glance was caught briefly by a pleasant face, hair the colour of dark rust. The schoolteacher. Fraser. Renie Fraser. She didn’t need to come, but when you came to a district to teach, you did what the people who lived there did, became for a while one of them.

  Well, he was one of them already. Even if he should leave, go away, and the impulse to that had been strong a little while ago, he would think of the Shore, in rare moments when he thought of it at all—rare, since what is part of you is a thing of feeling rather than thought—he would think of it as home. But he would not go away. The surface play of his mind merged with the deeper conviction, the decision he had come to and the bargain he had made with Josie. He already knew what he would do, and there was a kind of hard peace in knowing. Peace, and excitement. It remained only to tell James. Where and how to tell James. He wondered at his own concern about this: you reached a decision that made you a new man, gave you this sense of iron freedom, and still the tendrils of mental habit . . . Some way to tell him, to get it done with. Easier, he thought, if he could feel hate.

  James Marshall sat on a stiff-backed chair near Grant by the hall door. He moved the fingers of one hand in the smooth flow of his beard. He was thinking that he and Grant had been here long enough. It was the proper thing, and he had no doubt that Stewart and Josie Gordon found some kind of comfort- comfort, pride, something—in the presence of all these people, himself among them. But one didn’t have to linger. He supposed that some of these people would stay all night, would hold a kind of wake . . . Jane could come down tomorrow and spend an hour if she liked. They had never been close, the Marshalls and the Gordons. The formal aspects of sympathy were enough. Out of place, to try to share the rights of closer neighbours.

  Grant had been too forward, unpardonably so—hurrying down yesterday as soon as they heard the news. And again today— at daybreak, apparently. An unheard-of thing. James frowned. He had been slack with Grant lately. He hadn’t questioned his wish to work with Frank Graham, though hiring out was something Marshalls didn’t do. Grant. Anxious to help Frank, and to pick up a little money wherever he could, James supposed, since he would want to start establishing himself on The Place some time soon. Despite the queer pang he felt at the thought of home without Grant in it, he had no quarrel with that. It would be satisfying to see Grant making a home out of that strip of woods. James had been looking forward, almost, to seeing him make a start—as soon as one could be sure he no longer harboured in his heart the threads of that dubious attachment , . .

  But—working for others; it wasn’t necessary, except in the ordinary way of exchanging help. And even that — there were four Marshalls. Self-sufficient. Oh, Frank Graham was all right. But James distrusted casualness, laughter, garrulity, wherever they were found. There were things about people like Frank Graham and Alec Neill and Hugh Currie, and even Richard McKee, that he would never understand.

  But he had been lenient with Grant, yesterday and to
day. One had to make allowances. The boy had been fond of Anna Gordon. Perhaps even with a fondness that was more than the lust of the flesh. James doubted that. The carnal had a way of masking itself. But he would have to make allowances . . . even for Grant’s bluntness ...

  The scene came back to him. The washed blue of the sky, with tattered clouds slowly moving, the ground spongy underfoot. It had been too wet, of course, to think of working in the woods. He and Grant had gone into the lower field to see the damage caused to potatoes and turnips by the storm’s rushing runnels. That was where Bill Graham found them. Young Bill, rushing out of breath across the field to blurt the news . . .

  James considered that. Even now, across the room, Josie Gordon’s sister, the McDonald woman from Halifax, was repeating the story ... A shaken head, a sympathetic sound of tongue and teeth: . . no tram stop at the corner. But she didn’t remember . . .”

  She had been coming home, they said. Setting out for the station in the blowing dusk of morning. Smashed down by a street-car . . . He could hear Mame McDonald’s voice, hushed, but the hush a mere token of consideration for Josie and Stewart; the voice was clearly audible: “. . . mercy of God—she likely hardly knew—when they got to her, laying there, she never made a sound ...”

  James thought sententiously, God moves in a mysterious way. His mind came back to Grant. At last he would be free of the long temptation.

  A ripple of personal feeling and ancient affection stirred in James’s flesh. He could see Grant’s face from where he sat, without directly searching with his eyes. Its resemblance to another . . . again he thought of that overcast day in May, years ago, and Harvey.

  Other pictures drifted across that point of reference in remembered time. The woman, the wife Harve had brought home the summer of—when was it?—’ninety-seven. A city girl, full- breasted and tall, and a talker. His sense of shock, hearing the voices in Harvey’s room on a Sunday morning, the woman’s suddenly clear: “Well, all right, Harve. If we’ve got to. But church! . . . Kur-ist! ... I don’t like this play-acting.” Now, more than twenty years later, a word flickered redly in James’s mind. He brushed it away. His thought moved on, to plush and veneer in the parlour of a tenement in Boston, and Harvey dead, the crepe already gone from the door, and the same voice: “He’s a good brat. If there was any . . . But take him. Take him. It’s better . . .”