He said, without too much show of interest, “It’s a good piece of woods, is it?”
Grant said, “Better than you’d expect. Not been cut over, much, that far to the northeast. Oh, there’s places where they took out fire-wood . . . but most of it’s solid spruce. Some fir. A little hardwood. Not just Katen’s. Miles of it. We took a walk east. I’d been through some of it before, but just never realized how much there was.””Hard to get out, though, I s’pose,” Alan said.
Grant nodded. “Yes. A lot of it’s not close enough to any kind of a stream big enough to drive on. You’d have to cut roads and haul. And I don’t know . . . The profit’s not too big, even when you’re close to water.”
He hesitated, and went on thoughtfully. “I kind of hate to knock down stuff like that for pulp, anyway. If a fellow had a portable mill, a diesel outfit ... He could set up in there, a place like that, and turn the stuff into lumber. Right there. Payload to the railroad or boat’d be a lot bigger.”
If we don’t get into something else . . . That was the thing that was anchored in Alan’s mind. The scope of it seized his imagination; the images began to form. He said tentatively, “Lumber’s pretty low, though.”
Grant laughed. “Low enough. And hard to figure where you’d come out at. Something like the story Hugh Currie tells about old Walter Lisle, years ago. Walter couldn’t read or write, but he liked to keep things moving. One summer he had nine barrels of salt mackerel. He loaded them into his boat and crossed to Princeport. Sold the fish for eight dollars a barrel, seventy-two bucks, and bought a horse. Walked the horse into his boat and traded him in Morgan’s Harbour for a sow and a litter of pigs.
Took the pigs aboard and sailed down to Findlay’s Bridge and traded them for a yearling steer. Came back to The Head and traded the steer to Sam Freeman’s father for a wheelbarrow and a dozen Plymouth Rocks ... All in two days. Fritz McKee pointed out he’d kind of traded himself thin. Walt said, Yes, sir. Maybe I did. But I was doing business’ . . . Something like that, lumbering. Can’t figure everything, if you’re going to have the fun of doing business.” He laughed again. “Not that I think a fellow has to be as anxious to turn things over as Walt Lisle was. Should be able to have some fun and still come out even.”
The picture formed in Alan’s mind: a low slab-sided bunk- house somewhere out back with logs yarded shoulder-high and more being snaked in. The snarl of a forty-eight-inch circular, the mutter of the diesel and the drive-rig. Ten or a dozen men busy at the gliding carriage, the skidway, the edger and trimmer. A pile of edgings always burning, and sawdust growing in great pale heaps on the moss-floored yard. Trucks coming down to tide-water or going on out to the railway sidings at Copeland or Stoneville . . . thousands of board feet of yellow deal ...
There was in this for him more than a second-hand interest in something that was turning over in Grant’s mind. It had gone past the stage of being turned over or Grant wouldn’t have mentioned it. It was an enterprise in which he himself would have a share, however small. He felt that, from the way in which Grant had taken him into his confidence. He thought, maybe it’ll turn out I can run the trimmer.
He could feel the excitement of it, and the fading of a remote but certain worry, the thing that had crossed his mind on the way to school that morning, the thing he had shared with no one. This dated from the previous spring, when they had chopped from the shed floor, with sharpened hoes, the winter’s accumulated layer of sheep manure. He remembered Grant’s exact words: “This is absolutely the worst job we’ve got. Worse than picking stone.” He had looked up and laughed. “You’ll get a great kick out of this, thinking about it—when you’ve got your own business. In Halifax or somewhere.”
In Halifax or somewhere ... He hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but the words remained in his mind. Then, last summer holidays, he had mentioned to Grant that Rod Sinclair wanted a boy to cleat box ends for a week or two. Not asking, just mentioning. Grant had said, “You won’t be making a living around circular saws when you get older, so why take a chance on losing a hand?” He hadn’t pressed it. There was nothing to be gained by mentioning that cleating ends didn’t take you near the saws. And Grant had taken him into the woods for the holidays, anyway.
A number of outwardly unrelated things had begun to add themselves up: the little careful restraints, the insistence on school. The meaning was there when you thought about it. He had heard Frank Graham say more than once that Currie Head, the whole Channel Shore, was a place to be born in, to grow your teeth in, and to get to hell away from. That didn’t make sense, when you thought of Grant working hard and happily there, his whole life tied to the Shore. But it was something you would have to meet and deal with some time. Trips to places like Prince- port were fine. Seeing new things was fine. But the idea of going away for good . . .
Tonight, in some subtle way, had changed the picture. It might be that he would leave The Head eventually. But it might not. If Grant went into milling he would make a go of it, as he did of everything. If a man had a business like that, what should his son need or want beyond a chance to work at it?
He asked, audaciously and putting laughter into it so that Grant could laugh it off if he wanted to: “Have you ordered the rig yet, Grant?”
Grant started. Not at the use of his name instead of the usual “Dad”. Now and then Alan would call him “Grant”, humorously, as if mimicking someone else. Or, with dead-pan solemnity, “Mr. Marshall”. Just as Margaret, in the privacy of home, often called her mother “Renie”. It was a joke among themselves, without meaning except for the laughter in it. No, it was not the “Grant”, though that was unusual unless Renie or Margaret were there to hear. It was something else that startled him; you kept thinking of Alan as a boy who was all action, and then he shook you with a word or look that came straight out of the odd direct insight you didn’t know was there . . .
He said, “Well ... I haven’t said anything about it yet, even to your—even to Renie. I know where we can lay hands on a pretty good fifty-horse-power diesel, though.”
Light footsteps sounded on the porch. Renie came in then, a dust of melting snowflakes in her hair. Her face was flushed with the raw cold of the damp snowfall, and warm with the sense of coming home.
Faint sounds came from upstairs, the sound of a door closing and a window going up. Now the relationship was down to two again, Grant and Renie. She wondered how she could lead into what she had to say. Never in more than twelve years of married life had she found Grant hard to approach about anything, but this was something that went back to a time they had talked of only on his initiative, never on hers.
It was characteristic of Grant that once having talked of it without reserve he had never returned to it directly again. There was no barrier in the mind. No open avoidance of Hazel McKee’s name or Anna’s, or even of Anse’s if they happened to be men- tioned in the reminiscent conversation of the Channel Shore. But that was of the surface. Of these people and himself, the inner thing, he had not spoken, except rarely and by indirection, since an evening in May a little more than a year after Hazel’s death.
The scene was interwoven in Renie’s mind with the smell of sawn lumber and the sound of running water; lumber piled behind the roadside maples at Grant’s Place and the rush of Graham’s Brook.
She had walked down, that evening in the spring of her second year at The Head, to have supper with the Frank Grahams. Afterward, Frank had remarked a little slyly that she and Grant Marshall always seemed to find something to talk about when they happened to fall in with each other.
That was not strictly true. They had done little talking. But she had admitted to herself, thinking about it, that she found satisfaction in being near him, a satisfaction that left her still unsatisfied and yet was heightened by recognition of something in Grant that turned toward her, and matched her feeling, and waited.
As she walked home from Grah
ams’ in the early dusk she heard Grant piling lumber in The Place, noticed the glimmer of white planks through the trees, and turned in at the path down from the road.
He dusted off his hands and laughed.
“Well, Renie . . . come in and sit down.”
They had relaxed on a pile of planks, the stuff he was planning to put into his house.
His fingers were suddenly busy with cigarette papers and a small tobacco-bag. She was pleased that his voice and smile were light with humour. That was a quality of which she had seen little . . . Not much wonder, she supposed, considering the lifetime he had lived in twenty months. But tonight he laughed, and his mood was catching.
She said impulsively, “Roll me one.”
He said, “Ida Freeman 11 smell your breath. She’s not quite as full of conversation as Hat Wilmot, but you’ll hear about it . . . , or others will.”
He went on then to roll her a cigarette with careful fingers. “Not much good at this. Haven’t been at it long enough myself.”
Renie had never smoked. The impulse was one of curiosity mixed with an obscure urge toward closer companionship. She choked on the first drawn breath. Grant took the small ragged cylinder from her fingers, pinched it out against the edge of a plank, and tucked it into the tobacco-bag.
He said, “I’ll stand for a good deal, from clergymen and schoolteachers, but nobody can waste my makings.” The look in his eyes was a blend of amusement and something that startled Renie’s blood: frank, open affection. Still half-choking, she bent her head, coughed into the bib of his overalls, pungent with dried balsam, and clasped her hands round his neck.
A little later, as the mild spring evening darkened, he had talked of Anna and Hazel and Alan. As he told her of the conversation with Anna on the beach, of his awkward effort to explain the existence together of a sure love and an apprehensive uncertainty, she had had a curious understanding of the link between the uncertain boy of two years before and the man of that day. Something that didn’t change. Once again he was trying to make things clear, to put on record for a woman loved his heart’s findings. The difference was that now there was no uncertainty, no conflict of loyalties. And now he could find the words ...
He had talked simply, without obvious feeling, almost as if he were speaking of someone other than himself. “You’ve heard a lot of talk. I know how people talk—they can’t help it. About me, going to live with the Gordons; marrying Hazel. As a kind of—what would you say?—atonement, maybe. For Anna. But it wasn’t just that way. There’s not much you can do about things like that when they’re over. I didn’t feel entirely guilty . . . At least that wasn’t the whole of it. I was mad, sore. Hardly knew what at. But free. Uncle James—anything I owed Uncle James was paid up. I did what I felt like, without a doubt in the world.” He halted, and said reflectively. “It’s a queer feeling, not to have doubts. It didn’t come, finally, till I went to find Hazel McKee . . .”
He rolled a second cigarette and lit it. “Funny thing. You’re thinking Hazel and I were—well, hardly what you’d call in love . . . But we were closer together, maybe, in that little time she had, than lovers ever get. Don’t go round with any idea it was just—self-sacrifice; marrying Hazel. She was in a bad way, and nothing could make things any worse for me. When I said ‘free’ I didn’t mean ‘happy’. We’d have been all right, if she’d lived . . . All right. In the end we both learned something. Not a damn thing matters but what people can do for each other, when they’re up against it.”
In the pause, Renie said, “That’s your religion, is it, Grant?”
He said, “Yes,” and then, returning to an earlier thought, “Hazel did more for me than I was ever able to do for her. I’ve got Alan.”
His tone startled her, and what he said next was an answer to her thought.
“I s’pose most people, if you look at the outside of things— I s’pose most people would figure I wouldn’t care much for that kid. Well, I can’t go round denying that without calling attention to things that ought to be left alone. You know—before he was born, and when he was born, I felt queer about it. But it came over me that of all the people I knew . . . this baby was the one that had no way at all of helping himself. I didn’t have to make up my mind . . . It was made up for me by everything that happened before.”
He laughed, remembering. “I started out thinking of Alan as a person. You know, a kid entitled to a square show. And the next thing I knew—I was crazy about him.”
She had said, slowly: “You’ve thought about the risk.”
He said, “If you’re going to be a father, you’ve got to take a chance, I guess. One kind or another. Hell, Renie, we’ll take each day as it comes.”
He had paused then and spoken matter-of-factly. “You ought to go into McKees’ some time and see him. We’ve got him trapped in a play-pen.”
‘Yes, I should,” Renie said. “I will, too. But . . . I’ll see him every day pretty soon, won’t I? Or isn’t that the idea?”
He had turned to look at her and laughed, and found her hands.
She turned now from the coat-closet, from fiddling with spring clothes, aimlessly, to walk across the kitchen to the rocker beyond the range; and halted beside Grant’s chair as she caught the quizzical appraisal in his glance.
She turned to him. “What now?”
Grant laughed, “The Fraser bottom . . .”
He reached out, circled her skirted thighs with an arm, pulling her close to his chair, casually. “Bess has it too,” he said. “Dan’s caught in the same trap.”
She dropped her face in his neck, shivering with laughter and seized by a tenderness in which there was something almost sad.
“You’re an awful fool, Grant.”
“I’m not so bad . . . Get over where you belong, then.”
This kind of unpredictable foolishness, coming up rarely from depths of quietness, had a contagion in it. But it was going to be harder now to say what she had to say. She went round the stove, pulling the rocker in.
Grant said, “Now you can tell me what you’ve got on your mind.”
She was quiet for a minute, caught by this curious matter of insight in others.
She said deliberately, almost lightly, “Well—I was worried a little. About Alan. Oh . . . it’s not anything about him, himself . . . not anything definite. Just—Grant: did you ever think about how it would be if he heard? . . . If someone started talking?”
“Why?”
He asked the question quickly, with a sharp interest.
Renie said, “Don’t get worked up, now. It’s nothing, actually. I—something brought it to mind, and I had to mention it . . . You and I, we’re odd people. We don’t gossip. Maybe we forget, sometimes, that others do. But this may be—oh, it may just be imagination. It was something one of the kids said. Clyde- Clyde Wilmot. Talking to Alan. He said, ‘your grandmother’ and I thought he meant Josie. In a kind of a sly way. Jennie shut him up. But he could have been—”
Grant said, “Oh.” He added, “Thought of it? . . . Yes, of course. At times . . . You don’t entirely forget.”
Hat Wilmot’s youngsters . . . They would be the kind who were sure to know. Perhaps the only children on the Shore who had heard the old story. Everywhere, there were one or two who would keep a thing alive; for no reason except remembering gossip, unconscious malice; and go back to it, relishing it, carelessly, with children listening. And it wasn’t the kind of thing children would keep to themselves forever. Some children. Not if they remembered; not if they could enjoy a sly renown ...
Pictures formed in Grant’s mind. Himself and Hat Wilmot in the buggy behind the black horse Polo, young Dan and Bill hanging to the back of the seat...
Hat Wilmot and others like her hadn’t changed. All their conjectures had been confirmed. They’d been cheated out of public recognition of that fact by the marriage of Grant
Marshall and Hazel McKee. They had talked it out in their warm kitchens and stiff parlours, fourteen years ago. A lot of time had gone by, but it wasn’t likely they’d keep still forever . . .
And he hadn’t worried, greatly. Not with his conscious mind. Too many other things ...
He thought now of a winter night, in a hotel room on Front Street in Toronto. The last of the ten strange days of first re-acquaintance with Hazel McKee. Strange? No. The only strangeness was in the sense of—what?—the inevitable. The way they had recognized from the first that the road to peace was through each other.
Grant’s eyes now were fixed without seeing it on the nickeled handle of an iron lifter, standing in a stove-lid on the back of the stove . . . His mind was back in those bitter, exalted days—his own ambition somehow to solve it all: Josie’s shame and the sorrow behind the gently brooding face of Richard, and Hazel’s disgrace—
And Hazel. What, really, had been the impulse of her heart? Return. Return to the Shore. Return in a kind of bitter honour to the country she had fled from, the land she had escaped . . .
How their dreams had meshed! His own necessities and Hazel’s need—for the Shore, for the bitter presence of Eva and the look on Richard’s face.
That hotel room on Front Street. Grant could hear again the clanking of freight cars and see the gleam of stars faintly through city murk. They lay on its fringes still, but the city had been already behind them.
Behind Hazel, the months of dreary work in a dress-making shop on Spadina Avenue, the weeks of illness and worry and resignation; the public masquerade as Mrs. Gordon; and, under the eyes of Bertha Mason, the private shame . . . Perhaps, the secret knowledge; for she must have sensed—she must have sensed the end of it, and known—
Behind Grant, ten winter days in a strange unfriendly city; days lighted by an exaltation, the knowledge of deliverance . . . He could feel this again now; and he could feel again the need to go on record, to say it to someone, that had sent him northward through the city to Andrew Graham’s door. To tell Bill Graham, who had known Hazel and known Anna; who had been a witness to his shame and the beginning of redemption, and who had to know the end . . .
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