The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Sinclair’s mill was shut down, a long low building squatting across Katen’s Creek with its race empty and dry. A little farther on, Katen’s store was lighted. You could see figures moving across the windows, inside. A stretch of woods, then, along the road. Vangie Murphy’s place. Vangie’s front field, once a hayfield and later a wilderness, was all stumps now. The tangle of bush had paid off, in the end, in pulpwood—a dozen cords between the house and the road.

  All the way through the woods and up the shore road Alan had been thinking about it all, beginning with the cold tingle that had coursed along his backbone at Grant’s words . . . Did you ever think what you’d like to do? After you go away ...

  He had let Grant down. He should have shown excitement, a looking ahead to venture . . . There should have been questions and talk to express that. There had been nothing. There was nothing, now. Only the slow cold flush, the numbness. The long aching disappointment.

  He didn’t give me a chance. He never asked me if I want to go. He just said I’m going.

  Vangie’s place. Gordon’s turn. It was early dark, the air cold and wet. They’d lighted the lamps. Clouds were piling up, black and melancholy, in the northwest, back of Mrs. Josie’s.

  Frank Graham’s. Dan was on the way in from the barn ... A little farther up the road a small figure slipped through the gate under the row of maples and turned down to meet them. Margaret must have caught sight of them when they rounded the turn. Home.. .

  Renie cleared away the dishes quickly and washed and dried them with Margaret’s help. Her mind never had to bother much with household tasks. Renie’s career, though she had never formed the thought in this way, was being a person. House-keeping and teaching school were incidental. Easily accomplished and not unpleasant, but incidental.

  Tonight her hands went through the motions with even less thought than usual about what she was doing. Supper had been a silent meal. She had talked a little herself, feeling that to let that kind of silence grow was to acknowledge and submit to the strangeness and the strain. When that sort of thing took hold, unresisted, it got to a point where it was pretty near unbearable.

  She had asked a question or two about the woods, and Grant’s answers had been easy enough. But none of these exchanges had developed into casual talk or the kind of conversational silence they were used to. She sensed that was not to be expected and neither she nor Grant had pressed it. To keep up a run of talk could be as bad as a tightened silence. The best you could do was say a word that took no trouble to think of but still broke up the strain.

  She stacked the last plate in the rack, moved to the table and leaned across Alan’s shoulder to turn up the lamp. His eyes came back from some unfathomable distance to the black print of his High School Reader.

  He closed the book and got to his feet. “Think I’ll run over to Curries’,” he said. “See Bert for a while.”

  Grant said, “All right.”

  Margaret followed Alan with her eyes, gravely, as he put on his wind-breaker and hurried through the door to the porch. Just as he stepped out he half-turned and winked at her, secretly; but he wasn’t grinning. Her insides had the feeling they got when there was something going on she didn’t understand. Something odd and frightening you didn’t want to ask about but had to know.

  Renie made herself comfortable in the rocker with her knitting. Her eyes placidly asked a question.

  Grant said, “Well, we talked it over...”

  Renie turned her head toward Margaret, an off-hand note of explanation in her voice.

  “Grandfather Fraser wants Alan to stay with him in Halifax for a while. This winter, and the spring.”Margaret looked at them both. Across the table at Renie, across the room to the shadows where the smoke from Grant’s pipe curled in a faintly drifting haze. Renie was conscious of a childish feeling in herself, as if she were under the scrutiny of someone old and wise. But there was nothing old in Margaret’s voice. Only something young and unbelieving.

  “Halifax? Does he want to go?”

  Renie started, her mind caught and held as her heart turned with a sense of tender pride and something close to rueful laughter. You skated all round a thing and a child went to the heart of it.

  The moment of private wonder died in the harshness of Grant’s voice. The long exasperation, the anger at circumstance, came through in unconsidered words, snapped out as he straightened in his chair.

  “Want to? Why wouldn’t he want to? You’d think-”

  He caught himself, stood up and reached for his wind-breaker. As he moved through the porch door he was humming softly the air of “Sleepy Time Gal”.

  You’ll learn—to cook—and to sew— What’s more—you’ll love it—I know ...

  The half-whispered tune was a kind of regretful apology.

  Renie said to Margaret, “Things’ll turn out all right, you know,” and reached into her knitting basket. She could feel the thoughts that would be moving in Grant’s mind while he walked, the endless reasoned argument. Why wouldn’t Alan want to go? It was something new and even venturesome, the sort of thing he used to ask to do. In his own hurt, in a mind hardened to something hard and necessary, Grant wouldn’t make distinctions. Wouldn’t see, just yet, the difference between joy in brief adventure, the passing urge to new experience, and the fact of exile. Not yet. Later it would come to him.

  How odd it must have seemed to Alan, to find the old cautions dropped, the sense of personal companionship gone; and no real explanation. The urgency must have been great in Grant, Renie thought, to have blunted his usual sensitiveness to such a degree that he could choose the woods out back, alive in Alan’s mind with the vision of work and companionship, as the place in which to tell him he must leave the Shore.

  Later on, Grant would see. But even then, unless you wanted to tell the truth, what could you do? What could you do except what Grant was doing?

  While her fingers moved, her mind went back to Thursday, the feeling of her new identity with the past that had possessed her, as she walked home from school, and of the past’s identity with the future; Grant’s quiet attention to what she had to say, and the sound of his breathing as he dealt with it in the dark.

  She had known next morning that he had reached a decision, when he had taken Alan with him to the woods; and what it was, that evening, as he sat at the desk in the room, writing to Big Bob Fraser.

  He had told her, but he hadn’t tried to explain or justify. He hadn’t asked her opinion. She understood that. The responsibility was Grant’s; it went back to a time she couldn’t really share. Under his personal code no one could share the decision or the risk.

  What he had in mind was clear. Protection through absence. Departure. As quickly as it could be arranged without seeming suspiciously sudden. Everything matter of course.

  But Renie couldn’t help wondering. She couldn’t erase the pictures that kept moving in her mind: the two of them, walking up through the lower pasture, driving the old ewes to the barn in a sleet-storm . . . building haycocks against threatening rain . . . Grant coming in from a day’s work in the woods, his eyes roving the yard for a sight of his son ...

  He would be on the road now, tramping it off. Dropping into Hugh Currie’s for a while, later, to walk home with Alan.

  You couldn’t argue about it. There was no way of telling what was right or what was wrong.

  She smiled across the table at Margaret. The small girl met the smile evenly, in acknowledgment. Behind the acknowledgment was a look of tolerance, an understanding of the fact that there were things neither Grant nor Renie could be expected to know.

  4

  When Josie sat by her kitchen windows she was likely to think of the past; not dwelling on special incidents but simply noting they were there. The kitchen, the southeast corner of the house, faced both daybreak and the noon sun. The windows in its walls belonged to the strange time
between the past and the present.

  The summer after Alan’s birth and Hazel’s death Grant had set extra windows into the kitchen walls, on each side of the ones already there. Now, the wide south windows caught the afternoon light. She and Margaret sat facing each other by the long sill, the small girl’s outstretched wrists moving a skein of yarn from side to side, slightly, as Josie’s fingers rolled the yarn swiftly into a ball.

  Her mind touched lightly on that older time: not the continuing torment, the soul’s knowledge of shame and death and absence. Those were things that had lost their sharpness, until you were able almost to forget. No, not to forget, but to think of the Josie Gordon to whom they had happened, not as this present flesh sitting in clear sunlight in silent communion with a little girl, but as another person, a neighbour across the fields of time.

  Whenever she looked far back, the slow recovery, the achievement of a tranquillity that was inward as well as outward, seemed interwoven with little things, with matters of no importance.

  There had been one definite turning-point; a look, and words said in a hospital room in Copeland. Without that, perhaps, she would have gone forever unhealed and hopeless. But beyond that, it was the little things that came to mind. Deliverance was merged with the small routines, the incidents of living...

  Grant, fixing the cellar steps and drawing Stewart out of his lethargy to mortise window-frames and whitewash pickets. Grant mending harness, filing and oiling tools. Grant rigging a scheme to heat Anna’s old room for the girl he had brought there, the odd girl Hazel McKee. Years later, Grant smiling in cautious sympathy, almost amused, it seemed, when Stewart in absent- mindedness, the mild aberration that had affected him just before his death, would look up and call him by name ... “Anse”.

  Josie said to Marg’ret now, softly teasing and in order to break a too-long silence, “Terrible quiet today, Margaret. Quieter even than usual.”

  “D’you think so, Mrs. Josie?”

  “Well, maybe it’s not a bad way . . . People waste a lot of time on talk, sometimes, it seems to me.”

  Margaret said, “I’m lonesome.”

  “Lonesome?”

  You never knew what to expect from this child. That was one of Josie’s small joys. But she was startled. She was still the austere silent woman of years ago; that was in her nature, apart from the shame and grief she had had to bear. But with Grant’s children, with Alan and in some degree with Margaret, she found herself sometimes lapsing into a curious ease of manner, almost a playfulness in speech. Now she was a little startled. It was hard to imagine loneliness in Grant and Renie Marshall’s house.

  Margaret nodded. “Yes. When I think of it. This spring . . . and Lan away. It’s awful.”

  She thought to herself: I used the name. But she didn’t care. She had said now what she felt about the thing closest to her heart, something that was part of herself. Something she couldn’t say to Dad or Renie because that would seem like exposing a weakness, like calling attention to yourself, trying to get round something by crying.

  You could say it to Mrs. Josie because she was a person who seemed like one of the family, and yet—was not. You knew she wasn’t, but her vague position in the flow of life didn’t worry you or make you curious. And when you talked to her you preserved the secrecy of talking to yourself while you got the relief of talking to a listener. You never felt yourself made smaller by laying bare your curiosity or misery or joy.

  It wasn’t quite the same thing as telling things to Alan. With Alan you didn’t care whether you made yourself small or not. But this was something she couldn’t say to Alan, because he was feeling bad enough himself.

  “Oh,” Josie said, hesitantly. “Lonesome that way.”

  Renie had told her of the plan to have Alan spend the rest of the winter with Bob Fraser. Josie had thought of it simply as a chance for the boy to see something beyond the Channel Shore. Grant’s willingness to let him go was strange, but it had not occurred to her that this had any particular meaning. It was, she supposed, merely his wish to see Alan started toward a life that could give him more than he would find at Currie Head.

  Her own affection . . . She was interested to find as she examined it now that this affection was rooted in Alan himself and in her feeling for Grant; that the fact her own blood ran in Alan’s veins had hardly occurred to her in years. Not, at least, as a thing to think about. There must be a kind of relationship, she thought, of place and touch and word as well as kinship. Her affection was deep and warm. But the prospect of his going hadn’t stirred her with regret. Going away was normal. She thought: queer how you can accept something, a little thing, and not realize it may be a bit of hell to someone else. But Margaret always seemed so self-possessed, so self-sufficient. ..

  She kept the pity out of her eyes and voice.

  “Lonesomeness’s not so bad, lots of times. It makes coming home all the better.”

  She knew this was poor comfort, nothing but the old trick of turning the mind to the dream world of faith and hope, beyond tomorrow. It was the best she could do.

  Something stirred in Margaret’s mind. Mrs. Josie. Lonesome- ness. Coming home. There was some old story, overlaid by newer and fresher stories and events that in themselves were growing small and dim, fly-specks on the barn door of memory. Anse. Anse Gordon. The one who had disappeared . . . She had a sudden pang of remorse for talking about lonesomeness. She turned in sensitive embarrassment to look through the window, while her hands kept adjusting the diminishing skein to Mrs. Josie’s winding. Across the Channel the Island hills were blue and grey and streaky white. She could see a few white specks lower down at the line of the water. The houses at Princeport. Her eyes came back to the Shore. Opposite the Grahams’, with a lumpy bag on her back, Vangie Murphy was coming down the road.

  Vangie walked the shore road, slow and almost stately, her strong body not unpleasantly tired by ten miles of plodding travel.

  Her habits of thought had developed in one direction until something of the sententious and the insinuating was implicit in everything she said and did. In her pace, the form and figure of a worn-out woman, badly used by life but facing up to it, deserted by her children and without friends, making her way alone.

  She had dropped in at McKees’ on the pretext of seeing whether anything had come in the morning mail but really to sit and nurse the illusion of social equality, and a continuing malice because this was something she could never really win. She had walked into Eva McKee’s kitchen without knocking, set down her bag of supplies, smiled at Eva and eased herself into a rocker. As Jane Marshall might have done or Hat Wilmot or Stella Graham. But it never quite worked.

  She had said, “Anything for me today, E—”, and lost courage and begun again: “Anything today, Mrs. McKee?”

  “Nothing, Mrs. Murphy.”

  As she walked the road now Vangie felt again the flick of anger. Never the intimacy of first names. Only the empty title they had given her, the cold camouflage of respectability.

  At McKees’ she had tried again: “Well, I can wait. I have to. You work and slave . . . and they leave you and forget They forget you.”

  Eva’s impersonal voice had cut her short. “Oh, I don’t know, Mrs. Murphy. It’s hardly a week since you had your cheque from Tarsh. Last Thursday night.”

  This was a problem Vangie had never quite solved. How to play both parts—the deserted mother, piecing out a poor existence, and the matriarch supported in comfort by her absent family. The latter role was closest to the truth. Tarsh in Halifax and Etta in Boston sent money. The Shore knew it. But there was a wide streak of human paradox in Vangie. There were times when she felt her best chance at social acceptance was in the wearing of her newest dress, appearances at church, praise of her children’s generosity. When that failed, she went back to the baggy sweaters and work-boots, and walked to The Bridge for flour and tea instead of having Adam
Fait bring them down in the mail-car.

  She would have admitted to herself, had the thought occurred to her, that she liked best the role of road-walking sloven. She had never taken satisfaction in keeping a neat house and sitting by the fire when the work was done. On the road there was a hint of the carelessness, the freedom, that had coloured her younger days with a harsh excitement. And you could drop in, at this house and that, on the sly look-out for the recognition that would serve as a substitute, now, for the earlier abandon.

  But recognition was something you didn’t get. You got a sort of withdrawn politeness from the women, and from the men a word, kindly enough, without malice, but touched with unconscious mockery.

  She had smiled as she left McKees’. The anger didn’t show in the smile. Vangie rarely risked the little she had by forthright protest about the things she couldn’t reach. It merely added up: one more resentment in the smouldering compost that would die with her. That broke out now in sly runnels of insinuation, feeling their way on doubtful ground. They smoked and crawled as she walked down the road past Marshalls’, Neills’, Curries’, Grahams’.

  Eva McKee. Knitting and not listening. And not so much to be proud about. Her own daughter, fourteen, fifteen, years ago ... her belly filled by Anse Gordon . . A little shock of personal pleasure could still travel in Vangie’s spine as she thought of Anse. But that pleasure had not been as full as her satisfaction in the knowledge that one of the good ones, one of the respectable ones, had been caught in the same net that life had set, years ago, for Vangie. Nor had the pain of Anse’s going been anything to compare with the unreasoned rage she had felt at Hazel McKee’s escape. Grant Marshall, stepping in to poison a pleasure that could have lived in Vangie’s soul for life ...

  It was all there as she walked down the shore road. On impulse, though she was nearly home and there was no excuse for such a visit on the plea of rest, she turned in at Josie’s Gordon’s gate.