The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  The imagined picture of herself as a spinster of thirty-four, tapping a blackboard with a pointer, was so ludicrous that Renie almost laughed out loud. There was a blackboard behind her now. The difference was that she tapped it not for a living, but as a person who lived in the place, helping out because teachers were hard to get. And she was not a spinster.

  She called Margaret and Dolly Wilmot and Willie Laird up to the desk, stood them in a line, and heard grade four spelling. Once she called “Alan!” sharply, and rapped the desk with a ruler. She knew what it was. He couldn’t afford to behave like a teacher’s pet when his step-mother was the teacher. The flipped dart and the whisper to Bert Lisle were stage business. So were the sharp word and the rapped desk. Twenty years from now, perhaps, they could admit it.

  She could see Jennie Wilmot, Clyde’s twin, stealing long sidelong glances at Alan. She could understand that, too. Good looks were on him: the wiry body, the dark hair falling in a lock over the left temple, the high cheek-bones, the dark mocking mouth, the frank brown eyes and the easy grin. There were times, thinking of Alan, when Renie came close to envy, regret that Hazel McKee’s flesh and not her own had had the sprouting of him . . .

  At ten-thirty she announced recess. At quarter to eleven she closed the copy of Anthony Adverse Grant had borrowed at the library in Copeland, and stepped to the door to ring a perfunctory recall with the hand-bell.

  Laughter, and shouted admiring mockery ... It was Alan again. There were times when all you could think was that boy! Not, as far as Renie was concerned, in exasperation, but in a kind of wonder at the impulses to original action that coursed through his mind. He had climbed the taller of two firs that stood in McKee’s pasture and was perched twenty feet above ground, feet stirruped between branch and bole, gripping the slender top and rocking in the wind.

  Renie’s nerves jumped slightly. What she felt, as Alan dropped straight down from hand-hold to hand-hold on the branches, was not alarm but a quick sense of relief that the youngster had learned not to do that kind of thing in Grant’s presence. The only sharp words she had ever heard spoken to Alan, except for her own stage business in the school-house, were curt commands that grew from

  the fear of hurt to the boy himself: the quick order to a running eight-year-old to close an open jack-knife; the refusal of permission to go hand-lining on the Channel with Bert Lisle unless Dan or old Hugh Currie were along.

  There was something vaguely disquieting in this to Renie. Once she had remarked to Grant, tentatively, “Perhaps there’s such a thing as being too careful.” He had replied, “Maybe. But he’s my son.” The slight accent had been on “son”, not “my”, but the implication was there, conscious or not. The drawing of a boundary, the definition of a relationship in which no one else could fully share, no matter how complete her sharing of a maturer love. And a further implication, without reproach to anyone, but clear as day to Renie. Grant might have said, “... my only son.”

  It was at moments like these that another picture was sometimes realized in Renie’s mind. She had never seen him except in the images derived from hearsay, but Anse Gordon’s lounging figure would sometimes cross the field of her inner vision with the furtive clarity of a character in fiction.

  “My son . . .”

  A paradox was stated here in terms of flesh and blood and fierce affection. A paradox that had created in Renie’s mind an immeasurable respect, a response like the response to courage. And yet she knew that this was something, despite Grant’s slow careful recital years ago, that she could never fully understand. Something that could be fully understood only through the intuitions of personal experience, the life Grant Marshall had begun on the day of Anna Gordon’s death and shared with Hazel McKee . . . She shook her head at Alan as he came, laughing, into the school-house.

  In the high woods at ground level the heavy white flooring was unbroken under the trees. Boughs supported crusty gobbets of snow, and the black water of Katen’s Creek, slow and small at this distance from its outlet in the Channel, was half-hidden under broken panes of ice.

  Grant Marshall and Dan Graham were wearing woollen socks and cowhide moccasins. Every once in a while Dan would glance back along their tracks for evidence that he was walking a straight line, but the growth was too dense in places to give him much of an idea. Running compass lines was new to him. At intervals he stopped, paced a circle, and put the callipers on the trunks

  of spruce and fir while Grant noted down the called figures. Finally a laugh slipped through.

  Grant put the notebook in his pocket and pulled on a mitt.

  He said, “Not bad . . . What’s funny?”

  Dan said, “Nothing much. I was thinkin’ve the way you always want to measure the woods before you knock it down. Anybody else’d go in and take a look and cut.”

  Grant laughed, a little self-consciously. He said, “I guess the old-timers can tell by the look of it, all right.”

  He had learned to map land and figure the cordage of standing trees during three seasons with a timber-cruising outfit in the west end of the county, in the early years when he was grabbing at every job that offered. He liked to apply the practical knowledge he had gained in that period, even when guess-work would do as well.

  At odd moments such as this he had flashes of insight in which he caught a glimmer of how such proceedings might cause him to be regarded as a kind of special character, give him a flavour of oddity, or add to the flavour of the unusual he had earned in youth. But long ago, he told himself, he had given up thinking of such matters.

  He said absently now to Dan, “A shame to cut this stuff for pulp ... all this stuff in here.” From the slope where they were standing, unbroken woods stretched north and east to the sky. “Look at it. As good a cut as you’ll find any place. If the market was right, and you had a mill . . .”

  Dan said, “Well, Rod Sinclair . . .”

  “No,” Grant said. “Rod’s not interested in anything but box- shooks. And he’s getting old. Anyway, in this kind of country a permanent site’s no good. I wasn’t thinking of water-power. What a fellow’d need would be a diesel outfit he could move around where the timber is.”

  Dan was non-committal. “Might be something in it.”

  Grant was turning it over in his mind. “Pulpwood at four or five dollars a cord . . . roughly seven hundred feet of lumber in a cord. And lumber’s—what?—maybe thirty dollars a thousand.” His mind went at it.

  He said, “Of course, one strip wouldn’t go far.” He spoke thoughtfully, as if talking to himself. “Not much more than eighty thousand on Felix. You’d have to tie in six or eight lots to make it worth while. Not worth fixing the roads up for less.”

  “S’pose not,” Dan said. “You could pick up the stumpage though. Next strip north belongs to your Uncle James, don’t it?”

  Grant frowned. He hadn’t really meant his speculative talk to be interpreted by Dan in terms of personal intention. He said, “I wouldn’t cut on Marshall land. Not till it’s Fred’s.”

  Dan said, with blunt curiosity, “Why not? You bought The Place-”

  Grant noticed Dan’s quick hesitation, halting the flow of speech.

  He regretted having spoken at all of what was in his mind, but he said evenly, “Oh, that was different. The Place belonged to me.”

  He didn’t want to go into it, any of it—his present ambition, which had led accidentally to talk of the past, or that past itself. He could think of that time matter-of-factly, but talking about it was different. He had got along well enough without explaining anything to anybody; except Renie, long ago. It wasn’t the kind of thing people questioned you about; Dan had let the question slip through and then caught himself.

  Apart from the long reluctance to discuss that personal thing, any attempt at explanation would only confuse Dan. But Dan was a friend. You could skirt the surface and give him some kind of an
swer.

  He said, off-hand, “I’d done so much work there I hated to give it up. So I just asked Uncle James if he’d sell it. He did. He’s fair-minded, you know.”

  Dan said, “Well, why don’t you go after his woods, if you want it?”

  “No,” Grant said. “That’s something else again.”

  Dan let the matter drop.

  As they tramped toward the single white birch Dan had picked as his next compass point, Grant’s mind roved involuntarily. Dan’s question had started him going back, thinking it over, the outlines of his life. The time at Gordons’, the time with Hazel, and Hazel’s death . . . the jobs he had worked at, anywhere and everywhere . . . Renie . . . the three-roomed house he had built first, for himself and Alan and Renie, and converted into a workshop and garage when the new one was complete.

  He grinned inwardly, considering how for years now he had scarcely thought at all of what his actions looked like to others. He supposed there must have been quite a bit of talk about useless gadgets—running water, a furnace, a bathroom. In a region where there was little essential change except birth and death and moving away, perhaps it was odd to contrive something new . . .

  He felt a ripple of well-being . . . Renie, Margaret, a kid like Alan. He called a halt. He and Dan pulled sandwiches from their pockets and stood there, knocking their moccasins occasionally against exposed roots, for warmth; lunching off cold pork between slices of home-made bread. Finally Grant threw away a last crust and said, “We’ve seen all we need to see on Felix. Le’s just take a look in some of this stuff east of here.”

  They began to climb the long slope into uncut timber.

  One of the informalities Renie had started when she had accepted the Currie Head school again, after years of preoccupation with her family, was an extra half hour at the noon break. Usually she walked home then to get away from the school atmosphere and eat the meal with Grant, if he happened to be at home. But as he had been working in the woods all day since early fall, she had fallen into the youngsters’ practice of bringing a lunch with her.

  As she put the kettle on the stove she was clearly conscious of happiness, of the goodness of her life. Right from the first, happy. She glanced at Margaret, precisely setting out sandwiches on her desk, using a page from The Herald for a table-cloth . . . And what she saw was another nine-year-old, in a green dress, running down the steep and crooked road to Bob Fraser’s wharf, her father’s wharf, in Princeport. To watch the mackerel boats come in . . . Big Bob himself, then, at a later time. Broad and tall, the red face stubbled with a week’s whisker . . . Good God, Renie! If you don’t like house-keeping, come into the business. But school-teaching!

  Whenever Renie thought of Big Bob she smiled gently and a little wryly, to herself. For Bess had gone into school-teaching too; and now the business itself was gone, swallowed up in a federation of fish companies; and Big Bob, an old man, lived in Halifax and ran a corner grocery for something to do . . .

  Her happiness was in the people who were hers . . . Big Bob and Grant, Margaret and Alan. In the host of others she knew, and had known, the work she did from day to day.

  But halting to think of these things was unusual in Renie. Pictures of the past faded with the meal. Dishes were washed, school resumed. The afternoon began to slip by, a small uneventful passage of the uncomplicated present. At four o’clock Renie said, “School’s out!” and smiled at the youngsters.

  While she put on her coat and pulled the old felt over rusty hair, she could hear them horsing around, squatted on the piles of wood in the hallway, putting on rubbers and overshoes. She paid little attention to it, the kid-talk, the boy-talk, but she gathered, absently, that Clyde Wilmot Was trying to persuade Alan and Bert Lisle to go home with him for a while, up the school-house road, to see the pair of young mink he was attempting to raise in a pen behind the barn.

  “Can’t do it today, Clyde,” Bert said regretfully. “Mr. Currie’ll want me. How’d it be if we come up Sunday afternoon? Christmas eve? I’d like to see them animals.”

  Alan said, “I can’t, today, either. I got to get home to chop wood. For Mrs. Josie.”

  “Aw ... You guys!”

  The taunt in Clyde’s voice caught Renie’s ear. Impatience at the small ordinary sense of duty in Alan and Bert. Impatience at interference with a desire to feel superiority, the chance their company would give him to show off something new and strange.

  “You guys! Always worryin’ about the boss . . . or your old man. Or—” an odd hesitant daring ran like an undertone in Clyde’s voice—”or your grandmother.”

  Renie’s hand stayed where it was, tugging the felt hat down. Jennie Wilmot cut in on her brother roughly: “Shut up, Clyde. Who cares about your darn stinking mink? . . . Anybody’d think you had a million-dollar fox ranch.”

  The chatter petered out.

  Renie felt herself possessed by unreality, cut off from the smooth unworried ways of life by careless words, a boy’s voice . . .

  “Or your grandmother” . . .

  Or was this reality? This sly hint of the past and its pattern, living in Channel Shore memory, traced again in half spoken allusion; something said perhaps more by inadvertence than malice; something said in gossip or anger, in the hearing of a boy whose heart was open and ignorant and therefore vulnerable?

  Or was she imagining it all?

  It came home to Renie suddenly, a drifting thought, secondary to the actual import of Clyde Wilmot’s slanted words, that the objective images in her mind, the things without special sharpness, were drawing in with the force of personal experience . . .

  The images of Grant had always been clear in her mind, personal to her, since a day in the winter of her first year at The Head. He had driven into the school yard with a sled-load of hardwood, a young man in mackinaw and high-laced moccasins. He had grinned with impersonal friendliness when she remarked on the size of the logs. “Yes; Joe and I’ll saw the stuff up and split it It is kind of big. The place hasn’t ever been cut over . . .”

  The story had been fresh then, a new thing. The successive sensations of Grant Marshall’s break from his uncle, his living with the parents of Anna Gordon, who was dead . . . his departure and return with Hazel McKee ... A sick girl, they said of Hazel. Taken to the cottage hospital at Copeland and on her back a month before the boy was born; and dying now at Gordons’ . . .

  The personal pictures as they related to herself and Grant began that day in the school yard. Something had puzzled her that afternoon. She had not been able to reconcile a previous conception of Grant Marshall—acquired she supposed by hearsay— as a boy shy and almost sullen, with this self-possessed man who was caught in tragedy, but whose eyes were direct and unshadowed and whose manner was sure.

  Pictures of life thereafter crowded her memory. A spring funeral, and late snow falling on the graveyard behind the church at Leeds. A summer wedding, more than a year later, with the sun checkered on the parsonage floor at Findlay’s Bridge. Uncounted pictures, until the screen, the fabric, was a tapestry; a Channel Shore tapestry in which Renie’s mind enlarged and picked out with special colour the scenes of which her own flesh were part.

  Hazel McKee had been merely a figure in the cloth, a figure vivid in the pattern seen by Richard McKee, by Eva, by Grant; but important to Renie only by association, through a weaving that was indirect and allusive; by the fact that Hazel had something to do with the qualities in Grant, the positive kindliness, the hard realistic independence, the calmness in the face of circumstance, that were to Renie a continual quiet delight and still could take her by surprise.

  But now . . . these things and people, the things and people she had seen as only indirectly related . . . these things that belonged to a time before . . . Drawn close, suddenly, in the raucous taunt of a schoolboy; made personal to her, merged with the living images of life.

  Or was it all ima
gination?

  She couldn’t tell.

  You couldn’t tie it down. You couldn’t count the sources of possible revelation. She had never thought of it in quite this way before; and she wondered now, walking down the short cut through the top of McKees’ pasture and then Marshalls’ whether this was something—this possibility of revelation—that all these years had lived in Grant’s remembering mind, a grey fear behind the affectionate possessive sense of fatherhood.

  Once, long ago, she had raised the point herself, in the one conversation in which they talked of that bitter time, of Alan and his origin.

  She had said: “You’ve thought of the risk?”

  And Grant: “Hell, Renie, we’ll take each day as if comes.”

  She didn’t know. All she was sure of was that she would have to tell him. The long easy silence would have to be broken. She would have to talk to Grant.

  2

  Renie washed the supper dishes by the sink at the east window. Margaret worked beside her, twirling the dishcloth over plates and saucers competently, like a small old woman. The kitchen was singing gently with the comfort of slowly-burning hardwood, a comfort visible in the narrow red rectangle between stove-door and damper and felt in the drowsy warmth of the indoor air.

  Margaret went up on tip-toes to pile dishes on the cupboard, and dropped back on her heels. She pressed a hand against the lower pane of a window to feel the cold of it in contrast to the warm and lighted room. The night had clouded up; it was already black outside. All she could see were the lights of Frank Graham’s house and Mrs. Josie’s, hanging like small yellow stars on the lower edge of the sky. The whole room, even its windows, turned inward now from darkness, inward to the fireside and the light. In the dark panes for a moment Margaret watched the reflection: her father sitting by the wood-box, back to the window, smoking; and beyond the stove, in the spot where he liked to sit, Alan; partly in the circle of light from the shaded reading-lamp, partly in shadow.