The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  No. James would not admit that he was glad Anna Gordon was dead. Put it another way. He was glad temptation had been removed. The fact that death was the agent was incidental.

  An iron freedom enclosed the long sadness in Grant’s mind. At Bill Graham’s words, panted through shortened breath in the turnip field, there had been a moment of swift and utter shock. A blow, incredibly savage. A blow that numbed the flesh . . . and yet lighted the brain, the senses, with a nightmare incandescence. In the white flash of it, there, he had felt it all— the finality and the hopelessness and the guilt.

  From that inexorable moment of reality he had come back to the reality of wet clay and watery sun; Bill Graham’s face, James Marshall’s voice. James, saying something meaningless, well-meant and meaningless ...

  Grant had said, “Well, she’s dead, that’s all.”

  His voice had been rough with hate. But in the space of a glance he had begun to glimpse the thing that now was fully realized. He felt no resentment against James. Felt nothing about James Marshall, except that here was a man, a person, entitled to the respect and sympathy of one man for another. Respect for honesty and sympathy for blindness. -Entitled to nothing more.

  He had begun to build the wall, then, against the formless world of black despair and self-reproach and something else, only hinted in that moment of flashing clarity . . . The wall between that formless world and this . . .

  He had gone down the road, after a little, with young Bill Graham. He hadn’t entered the house at once. Stella Graham was there with Josie, and Frank was looking after Stewart.

  It was curious the way old Stewart talked about Anse. All afternoon, as he moved restlessly from shop to barn and back again, fidgeting and talking. Scarcely a word about Anna. Only about Anse and Josie.

  . . . come home, if he knew. Fond of his mother, whatever they ... if he’s fond of anybody. Queer, y’know. Not his fault. . . It’s what you’re born with. Restless . . . When we’re gone . . . sell the place and go West or somewhere. Unless he’s gone for good already. Don’t believe it. We’ll hear . . . He’ll turn up . . . She feels it. I—me—I can stand anything.”

  Yes. Grant supposed that stoop-shouldered old man thought he could stand anything. But Josie knew better. And it was with Josie that he had made his deal.

  Strangely, he had slept soundly last night; and wakened early, while it was still dusk, with a sense of looking ahead, looking forward to something. He had dressed and gone downstairs and stood for a moment listening to the faint breathing of the dark house. For a moment he had faced the cold range; then he had gone out into the overcast morning and walked down the road.

  Fourteen or fifteen hours ago, that was. Time was queer. It seemed like years. And yet those moments were, would always be, the eternal present.

  He had found Stewart standing in trousers and undershirt in the open back door, his braces round his hips. Stewart had not been at all surprised to see him; he had simply said “Grant” and stepped aside to let him enter the kitchen. Grant had a curious feeling that for Stewart yesterday was half a life-time, the people he had been with yesterday the friends of years and years.

  The kitchen was steeped in gloom. He had raised the blinds a little and looked round and squatted by the cold stove to build a fire. The stove was not a modern range like Aunt Jane’s but a low affair with a big fire-box and an iron neck supporting the oven. Across the damper raised letters were cast in the iron, the word WATERLOO and the name of the manufacturing company. He remembered Anna’s telling him that Stewart had taught her the alphabet off the front of the kitchen stove.

  Now, standing there, he could feel it come. Not the guilt. That was accepted. Accepted and possessed and walled away. What he felt now was the other ... the hinted thing he had seen at the edge of that blaze of light . . . Seen; and turned away, as one unworthy ...

  Now the stone of his will crumbled. He stood with an unlighted match in his fingers, facing the stove, and met the dream of Anna. The eyes, the softness of lips, the sound of laughter ... the clutch of fingers . . . the pressure of a breast.

  The truth that never again ... It went through him and all over him, a horror in the blood. He was left shaken and fumbling, his throat crying for the ease of tears. Instinct took him. The instinct to turn and find hiding, to crouch and bury his face on crossed arms and let the flesh give way.

  He turned. Stewart Gordon was standing in the door, gazing out at the fields, his braces still round his hips. Slowly Grant turned to the stove and crouched and struck the match and held the tiny flame to paper.

  When the kindling caught he straightened and listened to the fire. A clock ticked slowly on the mantel behind the stove-pipe, an old alarm-clock with a glassless face, yellow and fly-specked. The hands stood at twenty-two minutes past six.

  The day, then . . . today, drawing to an end now in faces, men and women grouped in kitchen and parlour, moving down the little hall to the room where candles burned, and back to the front of the house, with faces fixed and solemn . . .

  Mame McDonald was talking again: “Glad tried to grab her, but she stepped right out. Slippery, y’know, and dark. The street-car . . . No chance. No chance at all . . .”

  Today . . . There was a convention about death. Until the funeral was over relatives did only the work that was necessary. They sat in the house in Sunday clothes, contemplatively, acknowledging in a hushed way the words of those who tried to be helpful.

  Frank Graham had kept Stewart out of the house. They had puttered around the workshop. Frank had got Stewart busy mending a herring net. He had sat there facing the road and the Channel through the open door, his hands moving the net-needle in and out, fashioning the meshes. The exercise of this simple skill seemed to quiet him. Even to alter his bewilderment. As he looped the twine over the mesh-board, drew the needle through and made his knots, a kind of concentration was reflected in his face.There had been one bad time when the truck arrived from Copeland and on it the plank shell which enclosed the coffin that held Anna. Stewart had looked up with an expression of puzzlement and fright. Then he had begun to tremble. Frank Graham simply said, “No need to go in yet, Stewart: that’s all looked after.” In the end the truck had driven away and Stewart had gone in with them to look on the face of the dead.

  The face of the dead. Grant had forced himself to look, with Frank and Stewart. The violence that struck her down had left the face unmarked. But—nothing there. Nothing there. A face of wax, expressionless . . . Whatever that was, it was not Anna.

  He glanced across at James now and saw his hand move from his beard and rest on his knee in preparation for departure. It came to him that now was the time. No waiting for the right time, no concern for persuasion or argument. The break, sudden and complete.

  Josie glanced across the room, at Stewart. Some instinct of dignity was bearing up that bewildered spirit and bracing the tired body. He sat between Frank Graham and Felix Katen in a simple and accepting quiet.

  Josie had travelled a long way since Adam Falt’s waggon had stopped at her gate. She wished it was all over. All over, and the new phase of life begun. If you could call it life, when all you would ever feel was pain. When the nearest thing to joy you could ever know would be a moment’s easing in the ache, a moment’s forgetfulness of guilt . . .

  She knew this was unreasonable. Anna’s going had been sane and sensible, the beginning of a way of escape. But what had the heart to do with reason? The images rose in her mind, accusing and true . . . Stewart, aimless in the cold kitchen, the morning she had gone . . . Anna, in Halifax, the day before her death: Oh, sure, Aunt Mame. It’s great. I’ll come again. But right now I got to get back. I got to get back . . .

  At the back of Josie’s mind a curious feeling flickered and was lost. Anna: Anna was out of it, young and unsullied and safe. It was as if Josie had flown forward in time to a day when, despite her present grief for Anna
and her reasonless guilt, that guilty grief was softened, mellowed, all but gone . . . And in its place, another. Here in the midst of sorrow, shame; the thing she had forced from thought; the memory and the face of Anse . . .

  Her glance strayed or was drawn to Grant Marshall. A cross-current of feeling touched her. For a moment she felt resentment at the sight of him. If it hadn’t been ... If he hadn’t been part of her fear for Anna . . . But she recognized that this resentment was not genuine. It was something induced and artificial. It would be convenient to feel anger, to lighten your burden with the relief of blame. But it was something she could not feel was true.

  He was blaming himself. Why, she wasn’t sure* He had not mentioned Anna’s name. All he had shown outwardly was concern for Stewart. It was about Stewart that he had said what he wanted to say.

  She looked across at James Marshall. Well, she had done her duty. What Grant Marshall planned seemed impossible, crazy, not to be thought of. But—he was leaving home anyway, he said. In the end it was her own guilt at the thought of Stewart that had caused her to agree.

  She didn’t know . . . she didn’t know . . . But it was out of her hands now, and she was glad of it.

  James rose. He spoke with courtesy and sympathy.

  “Stewart . . . Mrs. Gordon ... If there’s anything . . .”

  Well, this was the moment. They wouldn’t know what it meant, these people here, Grant thought. And that was just as well. They would learn in time.

  James turned. “Perhaps we should go home, now, Grant.”

  It was a direction, not a query. For one black shameful moment Grant felt a faltering, a helpless sense that despite the spirit, the flesh must follow . . .

  He answered gently.

  “No, Uncle James,” he said. “I’m staying here.”

  17

  Fall comes to Nova Scotia like the late fulfilment of a boyhood love, half forgotten for half a lifetime and then at once alive and golden, new and strange.

  The late-August easterlies and the line storms have blown themselves out. Slowly the slopes begin to blaze with reds and yellows, wild splashes of cold dramatic fire along the sombre hills of spruce.

  The days are crisp and clear, or windless under a mild and clouded sky. The nights are those a man remembers, looking upward through the murk of cities, his instinct looking back. There are nights in the full moon of October when darkness is a kind of silver daylight, when the sea is a sheet of twinkling light, the shadows of barn and fence and apple tree black and incredible, the air vibrant and alive but still as a dreamless sleep.

  This is the time when men thresh grain, pull their turnips from the ground and apples from the boughs, dig potatoes from cold clay and gather eel-grass for winter banking . . .

  Grant straightened and raised the two-pronged hoe and let the handle slip backward through his fingers till the head caught on his clenched hand. Absently he rubbed earth from prongs worn smooth and blunt by years of use. He sighed for no reason except that the job was done.

  Digging time. He had always liked the fall of the year and disliked the digging that went with it—back-bent labour in cold clay among blackened dead potato-tops, the picking and the cleaning and the hauling.

  He dropped the hoe and rubbed his hands across the bib of overalls crusted with dried earth and turned to glance up the field. Along the edge of the patch potatoes lay piled in tubs and ruddy pink in the aftergrass, drying out before being hauled to the cellar. Grant had not thought of it before but it came to him now that for the first time in his life there had been a kind of satisfaction in digging-time. He was almost sorry it was over.

  He watched as Stewart crossed the road and took down the bars and led the horse and cart across the dark fall grass to the top of the patch. Grant walked up the slope to meet him.

  Stewart looped the rope reins over the hames. “Tubs first? . . .”

  Grant nodded. “Some of the loose ones’re still damp.”

  They bent together and began to heave the tubs up to the floor of the cart, and he could feel the lift of a curious satisfaction. Ten days ago Stewart would have grasped a loaded tub with his own hands, struggled to heave it to the support of a knee with the bulk of it against loins and belly, strained to raise it to the cart by his own uncertain strength.

  In the last three weeks they had finished making the oats, picked apples, put down a new hewn-pole floor in the cow stable, ploughed a stretch of ground in the shadow of the woods behind the house. The thing Grant had noticed from the first was that if the plough-point caught in a boulder, Stewart would go at the rock with his hands. If a sleeper needed shifting he would strain at the heavy timber without waiting for help. He had never learned to work the easy way.

  Now he was learning. Grant shoved the last tub home and slipped the tail-board into its channels and let his eyes rest on Stewart as the old man made a mouth-sound at the mare and turned the cart uphill toward the house. The old man . . . odd to think of him that way . . . but years of working alone ... It was as if all those years of clumsy ineffectual effort had been added up and laid on Stewart’s shoulders. As if in this year of Anna’s death and Anse’s desertion some quality of resistance had given way, and left him at fifty-five a shaken man of eighty.

  And yet, in the soil of those gathered years, something new was growing. Something almost sprightly.

  Grant walked behind the cart and watched Stewart’s bent back and marvelled again at the older man’s serenity. The flesh might be shaken, but within a circle of work and space and time that was drawn round the present, the mind was clear and calm. It was only in idleness, while he sat unoccupied in shop or kitchen, that the puzzlement appeared ...

  Well, Grant thought, that was all right. Time on his hands was something he could not face, himself.

  The loaded cart jolted across the road and the cross-way into the yard. Stewart backed the mare to the cellar door behind the house and they began to lug the tubs down uneven stone steps to the gloom of the cellar.

  Inside, the mould of time mingled with the fresh earthy smell of potatoes they had dumped here yesterday, in the only bin, Grant thought, that looked as if it might stay dry. When they had finished setting the tubs on small platforms of brick and stone on the spongy plank floor, he straightened and looked around him and moved to the light of the doorway. He said reflectively, “I guess this’ll be next—our next job.”

  Stewart said, “Job? . . . What?”

  Grant said, “The cellar.”

  He noted again the walls built of boulders crow-barred from the earth nobody knew how long ago. Most of the mortar had crumbled to dust. Here and there a rock had come loose and fallen, and lay in the angle of floor and wall. He said “Look,” and pressed a foot on the flooring. It sagged under him. An ooze of thin mud came up through ragged cracks.

  No one for a generation had attended to the small rottings and crumblings that attack a house from the minute the last new nail is clenched. In the spring, he thought, he would floor the cellar with concrete and patch its walls. The house should be raised, by rights, its whole foundation replaced with concrete. But that was a job too spectacular to think about yet. Too provocative for Josie and too exciting perhaps for Stewart. Whatever needed doing, the important thing was to keep the climate of the household undisturbed.

  He said, “The drains. We could dig out the drains. Put down a bit of pipe to keep her dry.”

  A horse and buggy was passing slowly down the road as they rounded the house to return to the field. Dave Stiles, going home from a marketing trip to Findlay’s Bridge. He brought his rig to a stop to exchange words.

  For an instant Grant felt the familiar clutch of something close to fear. There were moments still when he experienced a childlike helplessness as he faced the fact of what he had done and what he was doing. When the task of making his way alone, of meeting an assumed responsibility, seemed utterly
beyond him. This was linked in a curious way with talk . . . the talk that must be going on . . . When these moments came they caused a torment in his mind.

  He could not explain this. At the heart of life was a hard exalted independence, an utter confidence beyond embarrassment. Almost beyond remorse and grief. At heart and for himself he feared nothing, cared nothing for what people thought and said. The sense of this was final and complete. It was almost as if the Grant Marshall of a month back had been another person, someone who had used this body in another existence, a long time ago. This was true of the heart and the spirit. The difficulty was in the habits and sensitivities of the flesh and the nerves—in these the old Grant remained ...

  These moments now were growing fewer. Early in his first week at Gordons’ he had left Stewart one evening with Frank Graham and gone down the road to Katen’s. For no reason except to see and be seen, to begin to face it out. He had gone there with his mind made up to the fact of slanted looks, the feel of talk behind his back. To make a start at getting used to it. There had been something of that in Lon Katen, and a suggestion of things unsaid behind the careful friendliness of Sandy Laird and Lol Kinsman. But from the moment he stepped inside the store, it had ceased to bother him while he faced it. He had gone to bed with a sense of accomplishment that was out of proportion to the incident. A beginning made . . .