The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  It didn’t, he found, do much to change the face of the immediate tomorrow, the personal tomorrow you didn’t like to think about . . .

  His attention was caught up from this uncharacteristic musing by a small noise on the ladder. Margaret scrambled into the loft.

  “It’s you, is it, Mag?” Now that his mind was back in the present he realized something was missing—the sound of Richard’s draw- knife. “Where’s Grandfather?”

  “In the house,” Margaret said, “looking for an oilstone.”

  Alan laughed to himself. It was typical of Margaret not to intrude in the man-world that fascinated her until the proper time, not to come here until he was alone.

  She picked her way across the littered loft floor, grave eyes on the battered green box.

  “A sea-chest,” Alan said. “Grandfather’s. Or his father’s. Old Fritz’s, most likely.”

  He clawed at the rubbish.

  “Look at this, will you, Mag?”

  Old, once-useful things like a ramrod or a candle-mould you might expect. But skates ...

  They were streaked with rust, screwed to girls’ boots with high tops turned down and tucked in, parcelled together with a strap of stiffened leather.

  Margaret said, “Your mother’s.”

  He looked up at her, a little startled. He hadn’t thought as quickly as that. He said, “I s’pose so,” and then, “Hazel’s.” His mind went back to the photo in folded tissue in his dresser drawer, the picture he had never tried really to merge with the idea of an actual person. Now, with the skates in his hands, a queerness began to crawl through him.

  He put the skates back, withdrew his hands, and half closed the chest; then tilted the lid back again and began to uncover whatever was left to see. From under the end till, weighted down by a package of boat-nails and an unopened can of enamel, he tugged a brown book, bound in boards. Songs for the Home. The fly-leaf bore the name and date in ink in a hand swift and angular: Hazel Evelyn McKee, Christmas, 1918.

  Alan fanned the pages. Snapshots lay together in the middle of the book. Originally black and white, they had faded to a vague sepia. He examined the face and figure of the girl, the face with high cheek-bones, wide mouth, luxuriantly piled hair. He knew them all from the photo in his dresser. A slender, angular figure in white middy blouse and long dark skirt, against the background of a bridge railing, the bridge over Katen’s Creek. He picked up the second print. The background was the same. But this was a man. A youngish man with dark hair falling over the left temple. The Brownie hadn’t missed much. The smile had something in it that was faintly superior, the outward cast of an inner knowledge, satisfying and unshared.

  There was something familiar about this picture.

  “I know,” Margaret said. “That’s Anse Gordon.”

  Alan glanced up at her again. “How d’you know that?”

  “I saw a snap in an album in Mrs. Josie’s parlour closet. In his uniform. About the time he came back from the war, about the time he went around with Dad’s first—with Hazel. When she was a girl.”

  Alan almost said, “Say: you know more stuff than I ever heard tell of,” but caught himself. The odd thing was, it would disappoint Mag rather than gratify her to know that he was ignorant of anything. He said, “Yes, so she did, I guess . . . Where’d you ever hear about stuff that happened that long ago?”

  “Just people talking,” Margaret said; and then, “Lan—”

  He sensed in her the same hesitancy, mixed with the need to ask, that he had felt when they were coming up the road. He began to tuck things back into the chest, carefully casual. “What’s on your mind now?”

  Margaret said slowly, “Mrs. Josie—the Gordons. What’s she got to do—Are they any relation? To us?”

  Alan considered. This was something new. He said, “Don’t think so, Mag. Never heard of it; the Gordons’ve always been Catholics. Only thing I ever heard, was, Grant kind of liked Mrs. Josie’s girl. When they were kids. The one was killed.” He looked at her curiously. “Where’d you get that idea?”

  For some reason she didn’t understand, Margaret was a little afraid. There were times when she wished she could get over wondering, get over the need to know, get over the feeling that scraps of guarded talk had to do with things that were important, get over the sense of something unfinished that drove her till she knew.

  She felt now an apprehension that was mixed with her revulsion for Vangie Murphy.

  It was the tone of Vangie’s words that had given this importance in the first place. But Margaret had a feeling now, a wish that she had left it all alone.

  Her speech stumbled. “Oh—nothing.” Suddenly she blurted, “Vangie Murphy. She was talking to Mrs. Josie about Anse. You and Anse. She said you’re the image of him.”

  Alan laughed. “Vangie’s crazy . . . You can’t listen to anything she says. Not to believe it.”

  He was speaking mechanically as he refilled the chest. The song book with its two snapshots went back under the till. He kept out the compass and the palm.

  Downstairs he heard his grandfather’s faint tuneless whistle and the crunch of boots in curled shavings. He said, “Come on; we’d best get down. You go in the house now. Soon be time to start for home.”

  Richard looked with faint absorbed interest at what Alan held in his hands. He took the palm and held it in his fingers. “Not been used for thirty years. Your great-grandfather was a good hand at cutting a suit of sails.” He added in an off-hand voice that attached no importance to the matter, “Keep it if you want to.”

  The compass he held longer, studying the card, setting it down finally on the work-bench and watching while the starred points slowed and stopped to the pull of the pole. He was smiling slightly when he handed it back to Alan. “When you get to Halifax, you can set this up. From Big Bob’s place. Let me see—The Head should be pretty close to nor’-east. . . maybe a bit more easterly . . .”

  He turned back to the shaving-horse and the staves.

  Margaret was chattering again. As they walked down the road Alan listened with a kind of attentive indulgence, not saying much, letting her talk slip through his mind. Mrs. McKee was hooking a rag mat-Margaret always said “Mrs. McKee” or “your grandmother,” careful not to make any personal claim on a relationship that belonged only to him. Mrs. McKee had set the frame up in the kitchen, Margaret said. The design wasn’t the usual roses and scrolls. She was hooking-in a schooner, black rags for the hull, white yarn for the sails, on a green sea. It was for the parlour; you couldn’t use a mat with white in it on a kitchen floor.

  This was talk you could reply to with simple attention; it was all right as long as Mag knew you were listening. The fact that she was talking again showed that her mind wasn’t puzzling itself to pieces over anything. Alan wondered about this. Nothing he had said in the shop loft had really been an answer to her question: Mrs. Josie . . . the Gordons . . . Are they any relation? To us? and yet as she walked beside him now, down the road from Grandfather McKee’s to Uncle James’s, there was none of the withdrawn brooding he had noticed earlier.

  The explanation came to him with a shock, the small shock of realized responsibility. She’s got it off her chest now; to me. And that would be good enough, to Margaret. Again he felt the weight of eldership in the bond between them, a bond that in itself was different from the rowdy half-antagonistic loyalty of brothers and sisters in the families they knew.

  It was not the difference that occurred to him as important. That was something that had always been, as long as he could remember. It was not possible for him to bark “Shut up!” or “Get out!” to Margaret, as Jackie Marshall sometimes did at Beulah, or one of the Wilmot girls at Clyde. And Margarets manner toward himself in the presence of others was almost ridiculously like respect. He had a sneaking suspicion that in this the two of them were regarded by their contemporaries as slightl
y soft. There were times when he had tried to snap at her, to put their relationship for public purposes on a basis of the usual. He could never quite do it.

  No, it was not the difference that touched him. It was the renewed sense of this secret phase of it, the eldership and the responsibility.

  Troubling and prideful, it merged and flowed and was part of something else. Margaret might resolve her doubts, ask her questions, and be satisfied with the words he gave her. But unless you were satisfied yourself, the need to know was merely transferred. Something in Margaret’s questions, something in an old sea-chest in Richard McKee’s loft, something that touched a sensitivity heightened by thoughts of departure, was stirring now in the depths of Alan’s memory.

  The old vague realization . . . Something odd sometimes, reflected in look or word, about himself and Grant . . . The thing he had thought was there because of the free and easy relationship between them. Less vague in his mind, now. Less vague, and linked with scraps of talk.

  Scraps of talk about Anse Gordon. Pictures in the mind. The Exhibition at Copeland, years ago, when you were seven or eight. Motor-boats thuttering on the harbour under whipping flags; you could see them from Exhibition Hill, beyond the red brick clock- tower on the post office. Crowds of people on the hill, moving in and out of the Farmer’s Building. More people than you’d ever seen: driving home that night, when you closed your eyes you’d been able to see them moving across your mind, like a dream; though you hadn’t been asleep.

  Something from that time that came back now. The smell of orange peel on grass, and bright red strawberry pop. The thud of hoofs, horses wheeling and scoring on a dirt track swept with dust. Someone looking up at the grandstand, under a peaked cap pulled back so the snap-fastener showed like an emblem. He couldn’t remember the face; only the cap with the fastener and the words, spoken with a kind of rakish reverence: “Renie Marshall; God, I’d like to ...” A hand had fallen on the speakers arm. Faceless he had glanced at Alan and glanced away. “Oh . . . the kid . . .” And, floating out of the sound of hoofs and wheels and scattered yelling, “Anse Gordon . . .”

  It had meant nothing then. It meant little now. But a strange excitement moved in Alan, a curiosity as to why this meaningless incident should have come back to him, why he should be seeing this crowd, the wheeling horses, hearing that casual voice, across time. And a feeling that this was not something isolated, but was related to other incidents, other brief incidents that moved with colour and life, other scraps of talk that lay in the mind, unremembered but not forgotten. They plagued him, these un- remembered incidents, with a sense of existence known but elusive and unproven. It annoyed him to have to turn in at Uncle James’s and put off until later the long and troubling pursuit.

  James Marshall sat by the north windows of his parlour, facing the road. Since arthritis had taken hold of his knee joints he kept to the house. There was something undignified about leaning on canes or hobbling between crutches as he had to do when the thing was at its worst, and something common about sitting around a kitchen. He had got Fred to cut a door through his bedroom wall to enable him to get directly into the front room without shuffling round the long way through kitchen and hall. There he could look out at the three ash trees in the front yard, arid up the slope to the road, forty yards away, and argue with God.

  He thought of it as prayer. A kind of communion. He was still the head of this house. But always now behind his consideration of when to order the ploughing and planting, when to mow the oats and let the ram loose among the ewes, a preoccupation absorbed his thought. He was speaking now silently and almost unconsciously while his hands gripped his useless knees . . .

  Why, oh Lord?...

  The pleading note in Mr. Marshall’s addresses to God was habitual and reflexive, the result of years of unconsciously memorizing the public prayers of a dozen ministers on the Channel Shore circuit. He did not, particularly, think of himself as a son. The relation was more of a partnership.

  For all his austere dignity, there were two qualities James had never quite known. Resignation and humility. He continued now to ask God for health. The request was phrased in established forms, as men use over and over the hackneyed forms of business correspondence. But behind the form was a demand.

  A demand . . . ungranted. He stirred restlessly. He had felt lately the beginning of an obscure frightening anger, and blended with this, a reservation. Out of this anger and this reservation, with no preamble of conscious reasoning, a thought so terrible that it left him cold and shaking would sometimes flicker through his mind.

  What if you’re talking to the wind?

  When this happened, he would pray again. For forgiveness. And the act of prayer would shut out the spectre of doubt until it returned again in another form ...

  A just God would answer. If not by granting prayer, by some recognition that prayer was heard. By some sign . . . He found himself asking God to prove existence, and arguing with himself that this was senseless, like the riddle of where space ended and time began. Proof was a thing of time. Belief belonged to eternity...

  There were times when he brushed it all away, the knowledge of God’s truth and the spectre of denial. Wipe it all away, everything you can depend on. Admit you don’t know. One thing is sure. There is still your own strength, your own mind. Still James Marshall.

  It was hard to find comfort in that, even though for sixty years or more you had found your mainstay in it, along with the thought of God. Hard to find comfort in it now when the mind lived in a body tottering between canes. It shocked him to learn how much of the physical was woven into the mind’s strength. Always he returned in the end to prayer.

  He didn’t look up as Jane entered the room, talking. She had in her hands a cup and saucer.

  “Soup . . . Supper’ll be late tonight. They’re not back from Town yet. Now, why don’t you pull the curtains back . . . how you can see . . .”

  She set the cup down on the wide arm of his chair and turned to fuss with stiff white lace curtains, to raise the blind a foot, and pull it down to its original level, and to stand for a moment, small and straight, gazing out at the fields and the road, singing under her breath.

  Seeing her there, James was embarrassed by a memory. He found himself living a memory so clear that it had the reality of present illusion. A memory of Jane, standing by the window this way, long years ago, watching the people leave after the wedding supper. She had turned to him from this same window and pressed against him, clasping her hands fiercely together against his back. Her body beginning to tremble, slim and soft, had shocked him. Such actions . . . they were not for women . . .

  Jane . . . Why should he feel regret? At the thought of that other woman, the younger one, the words of this present Jane fell half-heard on his ears.

  “. . . youngsters. Alan and Margaret. Turning in. They’re coming in. That’s nice. I must ask Renie ...”

  Alan. Margaret. Renie—Grant’s wife. Grant. He had hardly come back to the present before the past was ringing in his mind again. The same odd feeling of something lost, continuing from his memory of the young Jane to the thought of Grant, and through that back to Harvey. Impatiently he shook his head.

  Moments passed. He could hear them talking in the kitchen, though he couldn’t make out the words. Jane’s interminable chatter. Alan’s laugh. Margaret was the quiet one.

  He would have to see them both, he supposed, and his pleasure in Margaret, in noting the fineness of line, the blue-grey eyes, the calm pride of a Marshall face, would be cancelled out- erased by an unreasoning dislike for other eyes, dark and flecked with hints of laughter; for a face that was all surface charm. A Gordon face. A face that took him back to years of health and strength and the bitterest defeat he had ever known.

  Something struck him now with strange forces Something he hadn’t thought of. Prayer. He hadn’t prayed, that summer . . . Hadn’t prayed
about Grant and Anna Gordon. He had been too proud then, too sure that his own will was enough. Had it been a judgment? Was that why no one answered now?

  “How are you, Uncle James?” Alan said.

  “Poorly, in some ways.” There were times when he lapsed into the colloquial without thinking. He did not ask them to sit, but peered at their faces with eyes speculative and probing as they stood before him.

  “How are things at home?”

  “Pretty good, sir.”

  Never once, he thought, could he look at this boy without reliving that moment in Stewart Gordon’s house. No, Uncle James, I’m staying here...

  The ghost of a smile crossed his lips as he turned slightly to Margaret and looked beyond her to the old enlargement under its convex oval frame, above the mantel. Harvey . . . Grant . . . Margaret...

  Without explanation he said to her: “You have the face; you’re all Marshall,” and turned back to Alan:

  “I hear from Fred’s boy you’ve been in the woods.”

  “Yes, sir. Dad wanted me for some work out back, for awhile.”

  “Oh ... I suppose ... He won’t be keeping you out of school, though.. .”

  Alan hesitated. Uncle James hadn’t heard, then.

  He said, “No, sir. I’m going to finish out the year in Halifax. Mr. Fraser’s invited me to stay ... to stay with him a while. Him and Aunt Bess.”

  For a moment something more than polite interest flickered in James’s eyes. His mind turned this fact and examined it.

  Grant. Was Grant tired of raising as his own the boy he’d given his name to? Grant. James had always acknowledged to himself a grudging respect for Grant. For what he had done. For the vows he had taken to save a pregnant girl from shame. But the shame remained. Sin was something you paid for. To escape payment was to cheat life. He realized without remorse, merely noting it as a fact, that what he had felt at the wild idea of Grant’s disowning Alan was a hope, anticipation of a personal pleasure. Briefly, a sensation of power claimed him. He thought: I could do it myself. I could tell this boy, this Gordon boy, just how it is. I could tell him now what right he has to the name of Marshall...