Behind them both, the grim ceremony in Bertha Mason’s parlour ... I, Grant, take thee, Hazel. . . And before them both the Shore.
They had huddled in bed there, on Front Street, in that odd intimacy, physical, emotional and affectionate. A relationship without passion, without even the memory of shared passion, but with, perhaps, passion expected on the other side of spring. In Hazel? The hope, perhaps. But expectation? He doubted it, now. She must have sensed ...
Hazel had said, “Grant . . . There’s something I’d like ... I’m always wanting something ...”
And he, coming up from the edge of sleep: “We’re square, Hazel. What is it?”
She had taken his hand and placed it on her swollen belly. “This. If anything happens ... I want him to be yours. Grow up as yours.”
He had told her to shut up. Nothing would happen. And the boy was Grant Marshall’s son. They’d make it so. Go to sleep and forget it.
One thing, he thought, they had been blind to. Or had kept far back in the closets of the mind. The thing that threatened now ... And yet, for years the fiction had been preserved. Almost unthought of. Until in his own mind and heart it wore the shape of truth.
Other pictures . . . Alan, helpless in the cradle; black-haired and mischievous in the play-pen. A stumbling four-year-old with a tiny hand-made rake, following the hay-cart . . . The easy promise, made in bed to a worrying girl, had become the truth of life. And not because of a word pledged. Because of love, affection, the way things were. His mind skipped to a day when the boy was eleven. They were stowing away green oats in the barn when Adam Fait came by and halted the second-hand Chev in which he now drove the mail. Adam squinted through the barn doors at Alan in the mow. “I see you’ve got some home-grown help . . .” Grant had said, “Oh, sure, they grow up,” matter-of-factly. He’d had to hide his amusement at the way Alan moved, with a stature heightened at the sense of identification with the place, the work, his father.
Grant got out of his chair now, back in the present, and stood for a little by the window, looking out into the blank dark. Josie Gordon’s light went out as he stood there, leaving a single spark at Frank Graham’s against the black.
He didn’t return to his chair by the wood-box, but began slowly pacing, back and forth, between the window and the door of the bedroom. Renie hadn’t seen him do that in nine years, not since the winter Alan lay in delirium with scarlet fever.
When he did sit down it was in one of the hard chairs by the table. He sat with elbows on the cloth and head up, a curious alert thoughtfulness replacing the calm of a thousand winter evenings.
He asked, “Anything you’d like to suggest?”
Renie shook her head. “I don’t know what . . . I’m thinking of Alan.” That was half the truth, anyway. “I was thinking, maybe . . . Perhaps he should be told. By someone ... I mean, not hear it from somebody outside, and carry it around inside, stewing about it. I’d be willing . . * If you wanted ...”
The fingers of Grant’s right hand tapped the table. He clenched and unclenched the hand.
“No, I don’t think so. That’s not it.” He looked down at the hand, curiously. “Something I should’ve been giving some thought to. You get kind of lulled . . .”
He stopped, leaving the thought unfinished. Later on, in the big maple bed, Renie lay and listened to his even breathing. It was not the breathing, softened with lost vigilance, of a man drifting down to sleep. Her body’s impulse was to turn to him, to press against him, to let him feel the warmth of her slow affectionate passion, quiet and constant. With an intuition deeper than instinct she controlled the urge.
3
North of the coastal slope, beyond the fringes of cultivation and the old second line of settlements, the woods swept unbroken over a second fold in the land. Here there are lonely lakes, swamps tucked between wavelike hills, aimless brooks and stillwaters in which are sourced the creeks that slip through hidden intervales and narrow valleys to emerge finally in bushy pastures and tumble to the Channel. Here there were miles of red spruce and fir, low wet land studded with black spruce, hills clothed with white maple and rock maple, stony plateaus of white and yellow birch.
This is the forest behind the Channel Shore, stretching east and west, rolling north until its brook-water begins to lie in secret ponds, to crawl and slip the other way, northward toward the railroad and the farms along the gulf.
Much of this wilderness had been granted long ago to early settlers, as back lands additional to their farms along the sea. A hundred years and more ago, in the time of early prosperity, the second and third generations of settlers bought up more, seeing, perhaps, a vision of villages and farms.
That dream was dead. Once in a while a man and his sons would cut a road and haul enough hardwood to rip up for a kitchen floor. Sometimes, in the mackerel-fishing days, a man would search these hills for pine and twitch it out to be sawn into planking for a two- master. Now and then when a wood-lot nearer home was chopped out, you had to go back for fire-wood. And lately there had been some pulpwood-cutting there. But much of it had never been touched by an axe.
On the southern fringe of this were the lots Grant had cruised with Dan Graham. This was where he went, with Alan, in the days following their talk across the stove about a saw-mill; the days following Renie’s reminder of the past.
Friday morning, he had glanced at Alan across the breakfast table and spoken lightly, smiling. “Well—d’you think school can get along without you, for one day? What d’you think, Renie?”
Renie’s answering smile, Alan thought, had been a little startled. He had been startled himself. Startled, surprised, and delighted. This was more than he had allowed himself to hope for. It was only one day . . . but for once work was being placed ahead of school. He felt a soaring sense of freedom.
That morning they had followed the road to Grahams Lake and turned east, walking along the lake beach and then up through scattered hardwood, chopped over long ago and now growing up again, to strike one of the old hauling-roads leading in from Katen’s Rocks. This they tramped back to its point of disappearance in the timber.
Now, Friday and Saturday and Sunday and Christmas were over. Sunday you had to put up with. But Christmas, Alan thought, had been a long day. Oh, there was the laughing excitement of presents, in the morning, but ... He felt a little guilty about this. Margaret took such delight in the young fir with its lights and green and red tissue bells and tinsel, filled stockings, wreaths in the windows, the blaze in the front room fireplace. He looked down at the slightly lop-sided blue mitts on his hands, the gift of her secrecy, and laughed . . . Must be getting older, when what Christmas meant to him personally was a day’s delay in getting back to this ... He comforted himself with the thought that it had been drizzly, anyway. No day for work.
Friday and Saturday they had spent, mainly, exploring; getting the lay of the land.
Now, on Tuesday forenoon, they were dropping small stuff in Katen’s lot, trimming and cutting it to length for corduroy to bridge the swamp-holes in the hauling-road, and at the same time extending and widening the road.
Alan had been out back once or twice in previous winters, but never so far as in these recent days. He thought of the land as a vast hilly checkerboard, each of the squares owned by different men; and then rejected this idea. You couldn’t see any lines. Only, here and there, the crooked traces of an overgrown hauling-road, and when you looked up, woods that sloped away to the sky; new snow, and the dark green of spruce and fir, with now and then a patch of birch or maple, and occasionally a grove of giant beech.
Somewhere far to the north the railway ran, paralleling the shore until the track curved south to join it far to the east at Copeland. Southward was the shore, the Channel’s edge flickering to its curved beach at Currie Head, curling on the reefs at Katen’s Rocks, stretching away east against the land—Mars Lake, Forester’s Pond, Millers
ville.
But here, out back, there was no hint of railway or shore, only woods. A thought tickled Alan’s mind with a mild sense of strangeness.
He said, “It’s like water.”
Grant spoke absently. “What?”
Alan laughed, a little self-conscious. “I was thinking of the woods. The cleared places out front, they’re like a strip of land with water both sides of it. Only on this side the water’s woods.” He laughed again, apologetically.
Grant glanced at him. “Kind of, at that.” After a minute he spoke again. “There’s a tide to it, too. They dammed it back a little, years ago. But it’s high again, now, with places like McNaughtons’ and Kilfyles’ under water. Under woods.”
Alan felt better. He had been touched by embarrassment at having voiced his fancy, but Grant had gone along with the mood.
He asked, “How’s it happen people own this woods in here, Dad? When nobody lives on it? . . . Why don’t they?”
“Live on it? Well—.” Grant drove his axe into the butt of a slender fir, fence-rail size, and straightened. “Times change. When the old people got here first I guess they figured the place would grow. Some of them took up this back land so they’d have places for their sons, I s’pose ... or as a kind of speculation. Didn’t turn out that way. The young ones didn’t stay. Nothing to stay for. Better chance other places. Too far from markets here for farm stuff.” He broke off and dropped the fir. “Couldn’t push the tide back.”
Alan said, “Well, it’ll be a little lower by next fall.” He waited, hoping Grant would pick the subject up and talk freely again about the woods and the mill and the summer, as he had last Thursday night. But Grant said nothing.
Alan was a little puzzled. He still felt the sense of freedom, but it was beginning to be clouded by an atmosphere he didn’t understand: Grant’s absent-mindedness, his disinclination to talk about his plans, even though you made openings. An oddness in other ways . . . His mind turned back to Sunday. Coming down the church hill from Christmas service, he had walked as usual with the boys, Bert and Clyde and the rest. Grant overtaking them in the sleigh, with Renie and Margaret; stopping to say, “Climb up behind, Alan.” A queerness, and unexplained . . . He glanced up now, with the feeling his father was about to speak. But Grant was merely cutting the fir pole into lengths.
Alan picked up the butt and carried it to the side of the hauling- road. He said, “Where are we, anyway? About three miles in?”
“About that, from the shore road,” Grant said.
“How much of the hauling-road’s in shape for trucks, d’you think?” Alan asked.
“None of it. Oh, for a mile or so in from the main road maybe, there’s nothing to do but a little fixing, rocks in the holes. From there in to where we are now, there’s a lot of swamping out to do. Some stumps I’ll have to blast. Build a bridge or two. We’ll go out that way tonight when we go home.”
This, to Alan, was part of the strangeness. Grant’s words on Thursday night had been confident and definite. They had carried a promise, almost; and in them he had touched the body of a dream. Two weeks of work, between school and school. Two weeks in which they would swamp roads, make plans, clear land for a mill site. Perhaps with Dan, or Lon Katen, along. So that in the spring, when the chopping back of Kelley’s was finished, they’d be set to make this further venture. Ready to go.
But now they were puttering. And there was no talk of plans. It wasn’t like him. It wasn’t like Grant to be casual about work in the woods.
Grant glanced up now at the sun. “Let’s knock off and eat a bite.”
They sat on a pile of trimmed wood in a little natural clearing, scarcely more than a wide place in the hauling-road, where the sun came through. The snow was crusty, here. Over Sunday and Christmas it had warmed up and drizzled and then hardened again. As he unbuckled his book bag and dug out thermos and sandwiches, the thought kept running through Alan’s head that they wouldn’t get much done, in the two weeks of holidays, at this rate.
As if he understood the unsaid things, Grant said: “No hurry about this, I guess. I’ve been thinking it over, and I don’t know. Might cut pulp again next summer. Wait awhile on the other business. Lumber’s low ...”
Alan felt in his veins the tide of disappointment, a sorrowful anger. What had Grant talked about it at all for, if this was the way it was? And he was talking in the singular.
He looked up, sideways. Grant’s expression was abstracted, his glance intent on something far from Felix Katen’s woods. This that he had said, perhaps was what he had been about to say for the last four days. But that wasn’t all of it.
He filled his pipe and lit it. His tone was tentative, his voice a little hoarse.
“Did you ever think what you’d like to do? After you go away to school, I mean. What you’d like to train for ...”
He couldn’t let the question lie. He had to go on, fumbling with words, trying to make too much of it before he halted for an answer.
“You could take a business course, like Will Marshall after the war. He’s done all right, I guess. But if you want to go through for— oh, law; or medicine, even—or just, well, general stuff; and see what you want to do after ...”
He let the words fade, looking down at trampled snow and skeletal brown ferns around his feet. He had done it awkwardly and bluntly; he recognized his own failure as an actor. You tried to work up to this. You tried to lead into it by talking of men who had left the Shore as boys: Will Marshall, going up through accounting to a contracting business; Dan Graham’s brother Colin, an engineer with an oil company in Venezuela; Dave Neill, growing fruit in California; Dan’s Uncle Andrew, a professor of mathematics in Toronto. His cousin Bill, who had come down and spent a summer on the Shore, years ago—something now in advertising. Stan Currie, whose name you saw sometimes over stories in the newspapers. But the boy hadn’t been interested. You never got a chance to turn the talk easily from what Stan Currie and Col Graham were doing in the world outside to what Alan Marshall would find to do there.
He hadn’t been able to put it off any longer. He’d had to get it settled. There was nothing he could do but ask a forthright question. When you dealt with things that lived in your marrow you couldn’t dress them up. An old fault, a double-edged failing: the inability to rest content while a thing remained unsaid and unsettled, and the inability to say it in anything but the bluntest words.
Something flickered in his mind. The sound of leisurely swell on the beach, sunlight on grey shingles, the smell of brine and tanbark and a girl, turning to him ... I’d feel the way I do now; I’d feel this way. The embrace he had turned away from. Queer how time lived. Well, when this scene, this memory of today came back to him, a dozen years from now, it would not remind him of a gutless indecision.
But the fact was bitter as gall. The fact that to keep your son, to preserve the heart of truth from creeping gossip on the stairs of time . . . you must send your son away.
Alan said, “No. Not much. Thought about it, I mean. I—”
Grant waited, and went on.
“I guess we have to. Think about it. Nobody stays here if they want—When I think of the people we know—there’s more Shore people in the States, Upper Canada, out west . . . The smart ones leave. Renie and me—we’ve been doing some thinking about it. You’re a kid yet, but in some ways you’re grown up. It’s better to get used to . . . better to rub up against people, before you’ve got to, well, leave for good.” He went into it abruptly. “Big Bob’s been after us again. He wants you to stay with him. This winter and spring.”
He paused again. Alan said nothing, and Grant went on.
“It’s a good time for it, the holidays. You can start right in with the after-Christmas term at school in Halifax. The one your Aunt Bess teaches at. Learn something about Big Bob’s business; help him out . . . It would be kind of a way of breaking in, getting u
sed to being away, before you go to the Academy in the fall.”
Grant stopped talking. No need to say now that it wouldn’t be the Academy at Copeland. By next fall the tendrils of habit would have begun to fray. The fascination of the world be at work. His mind ran on to picture the future: the Academy at Cardinal, across the border in New Brunswick. University. Summers at paying jobs, away from the Shore, and occasional visits home. Grant Marshall’s boy, back for a day or two between terms, and finally not back at all. It was a Shore tradition. There was nothing strange about it.
Alan asked, “When would I go? To Big Bob’s?”
“In a week or two. When the holidays are up. We’ve got some things to do . . .”
You couldn’t be in too much of a hurry about it. You couldn’t tell him one day and send him away the next. You couldn’t be conspicuous. But there was little danger in vacation-time, and until the day came, you could watch, guard, protect. . .
Throughout the afternoon Grant tried to convince himself it was all right. They talked naturally of common things as they chopped and trimmed in their stretch of timber lost between the Channel and the far-off railway. But not about Grant’s mill and not about Halifax and the future. Something about it was unnatural. Something was artificial and strained.
At the end of previous days they had walked home by the lake shore, but tonight, following Grant’s promise to look at the road, they took the hauling-road straight out to where it met the highway at Freeman’s mill. Neither said much. They did not stop to examine the road and discuss it. Grant turned in his mind Alan’s silent indifference. Under the surface of his regret, small annoyances crept along his nerves, a nagging anger. This went back through Alan’s silence to the non-committal look On Renie’s face when he had told her of the decision he had come to. The annoyance sharpened. Bad enough knowing this was necessary, knowing this was what you had to do. Bad enough knowing that, without the crawling sense of aloneness that grew from the boy’s quietness and Renie’s unspoken doubt.
The Channel Shore Page 26