The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Renie emptied the dishwater down the drain and sighed. She said regretfully, “It’s prayer-meeting night. And choir practice for the Christmas service ... I promised Edith I’d go up with her. She’s taking the sleigh . . .”

  Grant said, “All right. We’re old enough to look after ourselves, I guess.”

  Renie twitched off her apron. She said, “Bed at nine, now,” to Margaret, and crossed to the downstairs bedroom, the one she shared with Grant, to dress for the evening out.

  Margaret said precisely, ‘Yes, Mother,” and opened her Fourth Grade English Reader on the red table-cloth.

  Grant, sitting in shadow, studied for a moment the small serene face between the tight brown pigtails. His own in miniature. The resemblance was ludicrous.

  There were times, times like these, when the simple fact of family, of possessing Alan and Margaret, thumped in his blood like the beat of a march-tune. Sometimes this feeling was accompanied by a trace of fear, as if his own boyhood stood up in memory to remind him. Remind him that of body and spirit there is no right of blood possession, only the gentler ties of affection and respect. . .

  Sometimes he would send Margaret home, when she followed himself and Alan around the hayfield and into the barn. Send her home or encourage her to go over to Grahams, where Edith Kinsman had two smaller girls for her to play with and take charge of. Sometimes, working with Alan at any of the man-and- boy jobs they did together, he would withhold both the praise and impatience of parenthood, seek to work and talk as person to person rather than father and son.

  He had followed this in his mind, sometimes, to the point of wondering whether this in itself, this attempt at a matter-of-fact personal as well as a family relationship might be weaving threads of feeling of another sort. But all he really knew was that no matter how much of a friend instead of a conventional father he tried to be, there were still times when he was all father, inordinately proud of Margarets mature and knowing ways, and Alan’s alert judgment in the woods and around the place. Inordinately cautious, inordinately annoyed when the boy showed a trace of forwardness, off-handedness with other people, or the girl an occasional abruptness with children of her own age. Inordinately proud, amused, impatient. Inordinately regretful, when he thought of it, that some time in the normal course of things on the Channel Shore, these two would have to choose a road and go. Inordinately swayed by tides of unreasoning protective love . . .

  Renie came into the kitchen again and tucked her hair into a woollen toque as she stood by the window, listening for the sound of sleighbells.

  She was not a possessive woman. She enjoyed getting out among people. But she could never close the door behind her on a common scene like this without a feeling of reluctance.

  In her earlier years, when teaching school had been a job instead of an incidental filling-out of life, she had been troubled at times by the violences of normal living. Rough talk had never bothered her when it was good-natured; she had listened to a lot of it, with childish appreciation, on the wharves at Princeport. But flaring violence between children in the school yard could set her shaking; or sharp words from parent to child, heard in the houses to which she had gone as a guest to tea or Sunday dinner. It all seemed so unnecessary.

  It was simply her reasonable nature, she thought, rather than any unusual sensitivity that caused this personal distaste. And gradually this reasonableness had created in her a sort of immunity to the harsh and the violent. She had come to see that in people along the Channel Shore there was much generosity and courage, and even kindness. She had ceased to dwell on the other qualities, the occasional meanness and cruelty, the gossip and intolerance and pride.

  But it was still true that there were some people you liked more than others. The Grahams, and old Richard McKee, and Josie Gordon . . . The Shore had no word for such people, but it had a word for the quality they did not have. They were not small.

  No place she could think of was as free of smallness in that sense as her own house. Renie never came back to it, to Grant’s casual glance and Alan’s energy and Margaret’s moods of chatter and silence, without a little upward sense of release.

  And so she always left it with a touch of reluctance and regret. As she left it now a curious feeling stole into her mind; there were personal radiations, changing in character and intensity as circumstances changed. Herself and Grant: alone together, going somewhere or at home, or even in a crowd—that was one thing. When all four were together, that was another; you governed what you said and did by its effect on all. When Grant and Alan worked around the barn or in the woods, the combination was changed again, the personal radiations concentrated between these two in a manner wholly masculine, a manner they themselves were not aware of. Regardless of how close and intimate four people were, intimacy changed and increased when-the circle was reduced.

  As she went out now into the raw night, hearing Edith Kinsman’s “Renie!” from the sleigh at the gate, she knew the radiations were changing, changing pattern with her own departure, drawing in from the atmosphere of the family complete to the special atmosphere of Alan, Grant and Margaret.

  A thought took hold. What if something should blunt the radiations, shake the faith that gave them their special quality, their confident warmth?

  The sense of ease in this house was such that while she went about the common business of getting supper, washing dishes, changing her dress, the afternoon’s apprehensions had seemed remote. Merely something she should mention to Grant without emphasis. Something he should know about.

  Now, outside, it was different. Now, as she left the house and Grant and the children, her family’s living flesh, the breathing evidence of tolerance and affection, fear gripped her imagination with a troubling strength.

  As she walked up the frozen path to the gate her instinctive reluctance to leave the house was sharpened to urgency by the need to get back and talk it over, the need to get it off her mind.

  Grant knocked the ashes from his pipe, went to the coat-closet for his notebook, and drew a chair to the end of the table farthest from the stove.

  Margaret looked up from her Reader. Her eyes moved from Alan to Grant and back to Alan, quizzical with the small ridiculous thought that stirred behind them.

  “Homework,” she said, gravely.

  Alan laughed. “Yeah. Even the boss has to do his homework. But he don’t have to show it to Renie, I guess.”

  Grant said, “You mean ‘doesn’t’,” and thought, That’s what being married to a teacher does for you. His pencil ran down the figures recording the diameters of trees sampled along the cruise-lines. “I s’pose you could call it homework, but you never know the answer till you work it out with an axe . . . We ran across an otter-slide today, Alan. You could see where he slid on his belly down a snow-bank into the brook.”

  Alan’s eyes came up in mid-sentence from A History of Canada for High Schools . . . Though not part of the loyalist movement, the Scottish emigration to Nova Scotia belongs roughly to this period. Economic conditions in the Highlands . . . His glance travelled across a brush-drawing of bearded kilted men, marching ashore from a beached longboat, a full-rigged ship far off against sea and sky. He shoved the history aside and sat with chin on folded arms, watching Grant’s pencil, while his mind roved the eighty- acre lot his father and Dan had cruised that morning. It noted the otter-slide as an incidental fact, part of the variety and interest of the woods, but of no importance. He said, “What’s out there, Dad? When d’you plan to chop it out?”

  “Haven’t figured that far yet,” Grant said. “Have to dicker for stumpage first. Why? Getting anxious?”

  Alan said, “I was just wondering.”

  “Well . . . there’s enough stuff up back of Kelley’s to keep the boys busy for the rest of the winter, I should think. Maybe we’ll figure on Katen’s and another couple of lots out there for the summer. Small crew, working when we
get a chance.

  Not worth while to build a bunk-house, I guess. We can walk in, mornings. A short day. Peel the stuff, maybe, and pick up a few extra dollars that way. Should be enough water in the creek by early fall to run it down to where we can pile it by the road for the trucks.” He paused, and added thoughtfully, “Unless we get into something else . . .”

  Alan made a pretence of going back to the settlement of Nova Scotia ... in the Highlands of Scotland were the principal cause. In 1773 the vanguard arrived . . . The printed lines meant nothing to him. He was thinking of other things. The Katen lot was not to be stripped this winter. Summer work. They’d be cutting this summer. Grant and Dan and himself and two or three others, perhaps. In the slack time between spring planting and haying time.

  Across the table, Margaret was studying the Reader. Something in her manner caught his interest. She was listening . . . intent on the skating race from Hans Brinker but listening to himself and Grant . . . Amusement tingled in Alan’s mind. He began to remember a little scene from the summer before last. The two of them loafing under the maples by the road on a Sunday afternoon. She had said: “Lan, how can we keep so much stuff in our heads?”

  He had answered her slowly, “How do you mean, Mag?”, careful to get to the root of what she was driving at, warning himself not to laugh no matter what it was.

  “Well,” Margaret said, “Katen’s car. It just went up the road. But I remember all the other times it’s gone past. Remembering —Why don’t it squeeze out something? That story Renie told us about how she got to know Dad—when he hauled wood to the school-house. That’s kind of a long story . . . You’d think a person’d have to forget something to make room for that. Why don’t we?”

  He had taken his time. His first impulse was to tease, to say, “How d’you know we don’t, Mag? If you forget it, it’s gone. You wouldn’t know you ever knew it, now would you?” He could have had some fun that way, could have made up a mythical tale and proved to Margaret that she had known and forgotten it, and that in the fact of learning it again she had been forced to forget something else to make room for it.

  But he couldn’t tease Margaret about anything she took seriously. He had an instinct about the family, especially Margaret. He thought: Maybe she’s worried about it; maybe she does think you have to make a hole by forgetting something old before you can put in something new. Furthermore, he suspected Margaret was smarter than himself. He had to do his best against the day when she would think of his answer in the light of her developing knowledge.

  He had said, “What happens, you start out with a blank brain. Putting in a thing like a car going by don’t take up the millionth part of a pinpoint. That story of Renie’s’d be less than a smitch. You want to remember something special, you pick a speck and put your old magnifier on it.” He couldn’t resist a little teasing at the end. “All the stuff you got in there so far, Mag, looks like a fly-speck on a barn door. You might fill up a quarter of the waste space by the time you’re a hundred and ten.”

  Alan thought of this now in the warm kitchen, perhaps reminded of it somehow by Margarets alert divided attention, carefully veiled; her mind, curious and quick and taking in all kinds of things at once ...

  Margaret glanced across at Grant’s bent head, conscious of Alan’s amused and affectionate glance. She had sped with Gretel Brinker along the ice of a Dutch canal, heard the hoarse cheers at the end of the shining mile, but she had not missed a word of talk about the otter-slide or the plans for Katen’s lot.

  It gave her a small secret pleasure to realize she had shared in this, been permitted to listen briefly to words about the world of men and boys and work. There was something else. In the fact of Alan’s casual and confident knowledge of that man’s world, the work-world, a richness and pride were added to her own personal experience, the intimate half-teasing relationship between herself and him. Listening to this talk, Margaret now was a small mistress taking joy in her lover’s devotion to battle and venture and discovery.

  She raised her eyes to the alarm clock on the shelf behind the stove. Two minutes to nine. Gravely she watched the long hand move in tiny jerks to the middle of XII, and dropped her glance to regard Grant and Alan.

  “It’s my bedtime now,” she said primly,

  Grant always went upstairs to say good night to Margaret when Renie was out. He returned to the kitchen now and found Alan hunkered in Renie’s rocker, his feet on the nickeled fender of the stove. As he settled in his own chair by the wood-box, Grant felt again the tingle of intimate affection that always touched him when he and the boy were alone together—something you couldn’t find the words to say, even if you wanted to; and of course you didn’t want to. His love for Renie was a continuing quiet passion, his love for Margaret a lyrical lightness of heart. The thing he felt for Alan was something else. Something farther back, rooted in the time of Anna Gordon and Hazel McKee. Rooted in winter, the time in which he had worked his way to calmness and deliverance, a personal integrity.

  For Alan, being in the house with Grant when no one else was there, when there was nothing to do but talk and listen, or even sit in silence, was a special feeling. Different from the man-and-boy relationship in the woods or the barn or the hayfield, which was a companionship of work, more a thing of action than communication. Different even from the spirit of lazy half-hours together on the back doorstep in the evening; then, the sense of the passing moment was always there. In this kitchen- feeling there was a kind of continuing permanence. This would happen again. You were in the house, among the long-known things: the table with its dark red cloth, the conversational stove.

  All the past times you had sat there melted into the present. Without the memory of separate facts or special detail, the spirit of a hundred evenings combined and flowed into one.

  Here he had heard stories of Uncle James, the old man crippled with rheumatism now, in Uncle Fred’s house up the road. Of Uncle Will, who had gone away and had his own lumber business in Halifax; of Uncle Joe McKee, and Dan Graham, and Dan’s brother, Colin, who hadn’t been home in years. And Dan’s cousin Bill who had spent a summer on the Shore a long time ago. Of Currie Headers who had been born there, and grown up there, and gone away. A good deal of the Channel Shore had become part of him while he sat across the kitchen stove from Grant.

  Sometimes an incidental revelation of personal feeling would enrich this mixture of usual things. The curious quiet tenderness with which Grant said “Hazel . . . your mother” on the rare occasions when her name was mentioned. The odd meditative way in which Grant had once recounted how James Marshall had travelled to the States to bring him home. Almost as if Grant knew he, Alan, couldn’t really like Uncle James, and told that story in a kind of wish to be fair . . . Alan carried in his mind a picture of that small boy on the plush of a day coach seat, dim lights, and rushing darkness. He always tried to remember this in the presence of the stern cold man he was taken to see, sometimes, in Uncle Fred’s house.

  All, a part of the texture of these evenings ...

  The things you’d felt, that were now part of the sum of feeling, came back, though the circumstances in which you’d felt them once were lost, were not important any more.

  Once in the fall of the year, more than two years ago, Grant and Alan had come back from Graham’s Lake after dark, with a string of trout, and found the house deserted. Renie and Margaret had crossed the fields to Grahams’. After Grant had pulled out the damper and shaken up the fire, Alan had inched the rocker up to the warmth and leaned back, sock feet on the fender, already drowsy with comfort and alert for the male companionship, the Grant-and-Alan feeling of warmth and kitchen talk.

  Suddenly Grant’s voice, rough and exasperated: “Get yourself out of there!”

  Alan had stiffened, pulled his feet to the floor, sat up erect and rigid.

  Grant had turned, still in a half-stoop, his hand reaching down toward the
seat of his chair, his face startled and incredulous, touched with alarm. “Alan—” The voice was a mixture of amazement and reassurance—”Good Lord! You didn’t think I was talking to youl”

  Alan had grinned and put his feet back on the fender. Grant smacked the cat lightly, driving her out of his chair, and laughed. “Cats are all right, but . . . you have to let them know who’s boss.” The laughter had in it a trace of disappointment, an edge of hurt that his son should even consider the possibility of being spoken to in a tone like that.

  This touched Alan’s mind lightly now, along with all the other odds and ends of personal intimacy; not the memory in detail, not even the fact of occurrence; merely the softly nagging sense of a thing half-forgotten, the rush of affectionate feeling, the strength of its essence.

  Something Grant had said earlier tonight stuck in his mind, anchored by a question mark.

  The answers always came. You could ask Grant anything and be sure of a reasonable answer. That was part of the person-to- person way in which he dealt with you. But Alan had been building up a private theory: it was better not to ask. It was more satisfying to hear the answers dropped casually or developed in action. Years ago on an evening like this Grant had said: “There’s a good bit of pulpwood-cutting going on. If a fellow could get a crew together and go into it in a bit bigger scale . . That fall and winter he had bought stumpage on a number of back lots northwest of Graham’s Lake, and with Dan Graham had begun the operations that made him a contractor. It almost seemed to Alan that in some Arabian Nights fashion the whole thing had grown out of that spoken thought, absently voiced while Grant smoothed an axe handle in the kitchen lamplight with a piece of broken glass.

  There were evenings when Grant would sit wordless, absorbed in his reading or merely thinking, but tonight Alan knew with the instinct he had for family atmosphere that his father wanted talk.