The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  The sound of Grant’s voice ... the sense of something half- remembered. A dark kitchen, the smell of wet moss and the rank smell of trout; Grant grumbling at the cat, and the note in his voice: Good Lord, kid; you didn’t think I was talking to you!

  Something in the tone: Alan, kid—what is it?

  The strength of the essence. The new sense of maturity in Alan’s heart was merged with something else. With all the years of kinship.

  A question had been asked.

  Answer it, then.

  He said, “I don’t want to go to Halifax. Academy in the fall, either. I want to work here in the woods, with you; and take grade ten right here, from Renie.”

  He said it roughly, his voice hoarsened by the resolution that had come to him with Margaret in his arms; hoarsened by tears forced hack in the throat.

  Grant motioned him down to the door-sill and dropped to it himself, not touching Alan; not close enough to make it look like sympathy. He leaned back against the jamb, like a man considering something in a reasonable manner, not overly worked up about it. There was no sense wearing on your face the fact that reason had nothing to do with it.

  He found, in fact, that he wasn’t much worked up. What he felt was a kind of easy freedom and a gradual relaxed excitement. The odd thing was, he wasn’t thinking about Alan, or anyone in particular, but about the whole of life as it included himself and his people, his place and the Channel Shore.

  Somewhere he had read that dreams, even when they seemed to take all night and to cover days in time, were really over in a few seconds. The parts you remembered. Years ago at Uncle James’s he had dreamed an elaborate dream in which he left home, took the boat from Morgan’s Harbour to Copeland, boarded the train and went to Halifax. He could remember the coarse plush of the day coach in the dream, edited in, perhaps, from an earlier actual experience, and Uncle James standing stern and righteous on the wharf at The Harbour, to say good-bye. In Halifax he had got a job in a restaurant, dish-washing. The dream ended as he walked across the restaurant kitchen and the stacked plates he carried began slowly to topple, crashing with horrible deliberation to the floor. He wakened to the sound of the alarm clock, realizing it was his turn that morning to get up and light the kitchen fire.

  He had figured later that the dream had consumed only the time it took the clock to bring him awake. He had long known that his dreams seemed to grow from some thought or consideration not followed to a conclusion, picked up later in sleep. He had been day-dreaming about leaving home; thinking, turning over in his mind with no sense of conviction the idea of how it would be if he went away and made some kind of home and sent for Anna. Some small distracting thing had called his mind away from that, but it had come back to be carried on in a dream for which the clock had been the measure and perhaps the accidental light that flashed it on the screen of sleep.

  Now, the conscious considerations of his mind were like a dream in their rapidity and in the way they picked up and wove together the wisps of unfinished thought. He was feeling again his boyhood need to make a home at Currie Head, on the Channel Shore, at a time when everyone with ambition worked only to get away from it, to the opportunities of the cities and the west. Feeling again his refusal to run away. All he had ever known about that was, it was what he felt like doing.

  Sometimes he had looked at this feeling in the light of reason; but he had never arrived at an explanation of it. Now, without having to figure it out, he saw it clear.

  The next time Dave Neill came home from his fruit farm across the continent, and hinted that anyone with guts had left the Shore long ago, Grant knew what he would say. To himself, anyway.

  Away, sure. It’s easy enough to leave. Nothing new in that . . . But when you take the old stuff, the country that’s under your feet and all around you . . . when you take that, and build something they said you couldn’t, and grow something they said would die: that’s new, boy. That’s something really new.

  He picked up a winter-bleached oats straw and began to chew it, squinting at the slope of the upper field across the road. He felt a good deal as he had felt one day long ago, after a spring funeral, when he had come back to a house down the road and looked into a cradle and felt the turning of his heart.

  The odd thing was that this really had nothing to do, directly, with the fear that had risen in his mind as he listened to Renie across the kitchen stove . . . when was it? Less than two weeks ago. Nothing to do with it at all, when you looked at things reasonably. All the danger still remained. But reason had faded before the look in his son’s face and the response in his own blood. There were times when you did what you felt.

  Somehow now you knew that the thing you feared was less important, less dangerous, than the artificial thing you had thought up to defeat it. . . You knew that your way of living, the things you talked about and did and looked forward to, hardly knowing, came into this and were part of the pattern that made your feeling right.

  There were times when you did what you felt.

  Chances you had to take.

  ... we’ll take each day as it comes.

  He wanted to laugh. Then he remembered that he hadn’t said a word to Alan. It must have been half a minute since he’d turned and seen his son’s face in the door ...

  He said, “Big Bob won’t like it much . . . You’ll have to go stay a couple of weeks with him, anyway. That ought to be long enough . . . No idea you felt that way. That’s fine. That’s what we’ll do, then.”

  1946

  Forty miles or so northwest of Copeland as you travel east and south, the land begins to flatten. This is where they built the rail line close to the shallow salt invasion of the gulf, the county’s northern edge.

  On the right hand are sloping farmlands, checkered with square groves of spruce and hardwood; barns and houses in fenced fields, the barns stained a dusty red against the weather, and the houses white and orderly or shabby and grey with neglect. From the train window on that side you watch the country slide, sheep and cattle standing distantly in pastures speckled with maple clumps, far away a horse-drawn cultivator moving across a side hill, here and there an aproned woman, or a child in a dooryard, lifting a hand.

  But on the left, for miles, until the track swings southerly through woods and barrens to meet the southern beaches at Copeland, the traveller sees a low sweep of salt-mar$h and tall grass under the wind, the gleam of occasional water.

  This was where Bill began to be troubled.

  It had been all right, travelling down by the day train from Toronto and boarding the Ocean Limited at Montreal. He had been touched then with the same forward-looking excitement that had come to him a year ago in London, planning what he had to do. But these marshes, this shallow cloud-reflecting water from the gulf, were the first land and water he could recognize, the first fringes of the country he was coming to. These fringes he remembered from twenty-seven years ago, and with recognition came doubt. Doubt and the lurking fear that Andrew and Helen had been right.

  The two scenes were clear. They merged slowly with dark grass moving past the train window, the slow dragging creak as they pulled into station yards, the matter-of-fact mourning of the engine whistle, the dull white of banked clouds between sky and water.

  Andrew Graham, thin-faced and white-haired, leaning back in the worn black leather chair by his study window, fingering a paperweight, a tarnished silver stag; speaking with the old precision but with more gentleness than Bill remembered: “It seems odd. An odd thing. But I think I know what takes you back. Some sort of illusion. It might be kinder to memory—” he hesitated and went on: “Suppose the illusion lives. Harder, perhaps, to—” Andrew waved a hand. Bill finished the sentence in his mind: harder, perhaps, if you see a kind of rough well-being, to reconcile yourself to the nagging regret, the ice of surface living.

  Andrew Graham in his seventies was less absent-minded than he had be
en at forty-five. Now he noticed things, and tried to be encouraging; with a small reminiscent laugh: “Remind Frank . . . And remember me to Alec, and Rich McKee ... I hear Hugh Currie’s dead.”

  All his life, Bill thought now as he watched the marshes, Andrew had covered his shy gentleness with the other thing; the hard determination, the streak of granite that had carried him through the small college first, and then McGill; a master’s, a doctorate. Finding all of life in books and in ambition. Bill regretted for a little that in his shyness he had never really reached the heart of Andrew Graham, had merely caught a glimpse of him in odd moments when a softness crept into his voice unrealized, in some rare allusion to his boyhood. It shocked Bill now to realize that he regretted this more than anything he could think of. More, perhaps, than even the wall of difference that stood between himself and Helen.

  Helen ...

  What was it, really, when you tried to see . . . Merely that mud tracked into the front hall, in that first apartment on Castle- field, had been more important to Helen than the rush of feeling that hurried you in through the front door to reach for her. Merely that getting off a tram-car first, and raising an arm to hand her down, was more important to Helen than a word of endearment in the dark. The hand’s touch that was never there, nor the look in the eyes . . . When you tried to measure it, that was all it was. That was what it amounted to. Added up for eleven years.

  That was the apprehension he had been feeling, walking along the Mall, before he had seen Anse Gordon. Return, a sharp brief joy, and in the end, the wall . . .

  Helen . . . commenting on his resolve to spend the summer at a place she had hardly heard of: “It’ll look queer to a lot of people. How long have you been home? Seven weeks? Eight? ... It’s not only myself. Jock hardly knows you.”

  “I know.”

  There was nothing you could say just yet about the feeling it gave you to have an eight-year-old who called you, politely, “Sir.” That was the kind of thing that took time. You couldn’t hurry it. You won’t get anywhere running away from things, Bill. You’ve tried that.”

  That surprised him a little. He hadn’t thought of Europe in wartime as running away. He was ready to admit that his motives were no nobler than a wish to get into the show, and, far back, the thought of a boy growing up, coming to know, some time, where his father had spent the early and middle years of this decade. But he had not thought of it as running away.

  He said. “I suppose so. I’m going down to have a look, though, Nellie.” He had been pretty gay about it, with the free and easy feeling which a little stubbornness can give you; speaking lightly the old name he had used in mocking affection before the wall cut off the impulse to such fooling. He had caught the almost startled glance, and said, “I don’t suppose . . .” and let it drop when the glance vanished.

  The nervousness he felt now as the train emerged on the gulf shore was not directly the result of his father’s doubts and Helen’s. These had not really disturbed him; his consideration of them was a symptom of his own disquiet; they had expressed a possibility which was an apprehension in himself.

  Once as a small boy he had found in one of the city parks, near Andrew Graham’s house, an island of green moss under young hardwoods that met overhead to form a small leaf-walled house, a chapel. He thought of it as a den. He had spent most of an afternoon there, on his back, thinking of almost nothing. Next summer the place had come to his mind again, and he had found the path and gone down toward his den with expectation. Winter had made changes. One of his trees had splintered under the weight if snow; its dead top hung down, spreading brown boughs across the floor of moss.

  What Bill felt now was a nervous fear, a fear of the same kind of change, intensified a thousand times by the weight of his greater expectation and of time.

  Perhaps what he had felt in London was pure illusion.

  Perhaps Andrew and Helen had been right. Perhaps you couldn’t go back.

  The occupation of thinking of them, of the doubts they had voiced, brought quietness to his mind ...

  He had been thinking of all this for the best part of an hour. What was the last station they had passed? Stoneville. You could get a bus there, the trainman said, that would take you in to the west end of the Shore at Findlay’s Bridge. But he had chosen to do it the old way, the way he had come in nineteen- nineteen. Down to the other end of the Shore at Copeland and back up the road. Two more stations. Now the train ran parallel to the shore. Currie Head was over there, somewhere, twelve or fifteen miles away to the south. Unbroken woods, now. They were turning away from the northern water, beginning to cross the county’s eastern end. One more station and it would be time to start getting the bags down.

  He settled into a kind of fatalistic peace. The tree-house might be destroyed, the illusion gone. What of it? It would be something new, then. If the old thing wasn’t there, you could take a look at whatever there was in its place. Bill grinned at the way his mind was working, and told himself he felt all right.

  The train’s desolate hoot faded overhead. This was the last grade down into Copeland. He caught sight of water, not the green shallows of a while back, but the distant dark blue of the Atlantic, and nearer by as they pulled into the station, the murky slop around the coal wharves. He reached up for his suitcase, adjusted the dunnage bag under his other arm, and swung down the coach steps to the plank platform.

  Two coaches up, the mail-car’s sliding door rumbled open. A clerk in white shirt and black satin sleeve protectors began handing down bags to a moustached man in faded blue overalls, who stowed them in the back seat of a dusty Chev. Bill stacked his two bags together by the station door and watched the mail transferred. He let himself be absorbed briefly in a small interesting thought. This was, that a man of forty-odd, seen by a boy of thirteen, never gets any older. Adam Falt was just as he had been, on this platform, twenty-seven years ago. Just as he had been a year ago, in the timeless land of memory.

  PART THREE

  Summer 1946 ALAN MARGARET GRANT ANSE

  1

  At Marshall’s mill on the Mars Lake flats Dan Graham was switching the diesel over to gasoline for the evening shut-off. Alan brought the carriage up on its last run, pulled off his gloves, batted his cap to knock the sawdust out of it, and walked off the mill floor into late afternoon sunlight.

  He glanced up at the spruce piled back of the skidway, the stacked lumber, the open mill-rig under its sheltering roof, and began to feel the laughter.

  There were two periods in the day when the force of it was clear: just before seven in the morning, with the crew straggling into the yard; and again at shut-down time, when the flesh looked back in a kind of physical reverie, relaxed, feeling again the shuttling thrust of the carriage, the repeated droning snarl of the sawThis was something that was always somewhere in the shadowy depths of feeling. Now and then it would break the surface briefly while he worked. In an idle moment, perhaps, when Buff Katen was slow in rolling a log down the skidway to be clamped on the carriage. Sometimes at such moments he would be consciously aware of Dan feeding planks through the edger, Sam Freeman squaring them off at the trimmer, Lee Wilmot piling them in the yard. Consciously aware of the conveyor slanting up and out beyond the broad low roof, pitching slabs down to the smouldering fire. Con­sciously aware of sawdust heaps behind the mill, piled logs and stacked lumber in the clearing beside it.

  Sometimes it would come to him during the noon hour, a recess full of small concerns and eating and idle talk.

  But moments like that were brief and occasional, dropped by chance into a busy monotony; it was in the morning and after shut-down that he could really feel the tide of well-being, always remotely washing the shore of flesh and nerves, come in to flood the inlets of his mind.

  He glanced up now and laughed.

  Sam Freeman tucked his pipe under his moustache and said, “See you in the mornin’,” and walked o
ff with Lee Wilmot toward the Wilmots’ ancient car, parked at the side of the short stretch of hauling-road that led out past the western end of the lake to the highway. Lon Katen lounged after him and Buff followed them slowly, lingering.

  Dan pulled the tarpaulin over the diesel and sat down on the edge of the mill floor. He said, “Grant’s late.”

  Alan said, “He’ll he along. You go ahead with Lee if you want to, Dan. I’ll wait.”

  Dan got up slowly. “May as well, I guess.” He called to Lee to hang on a minute and crossed the yard, moving lazily in this time of leisure after the day’s work.

  A car come up the hauling-road then, pulled round Wilmots’ and crunched over sawdust and edgings in second gear. Grant got out and stopped to exchange a word with Lee and Sam and again for a moment to run a glance over the piled lumber. Then, erect and compact, he crossed the yard to the mill.

  Watching him, Alan felt again the private pulse of liking that always quickened in him when he saw Grant after even a brief absence; whenever he saw this figure in stained khaki and creased flannels, and the grave face still boyish under greying hair. He thought, a good-looking character. Some time he would have to tell Grant so. Since coming back from overseas he had found himself saying what he felt like saying. But this ... it would have to be kidding, said in fun.

  He said casually, “Hello, Pop. ‘d you get the cars?”

  Grant said, “After a little argument”

  Alan laughed. Grant usually got what he went after, even when things were scarce, like the freight cars he had gone to Cope­land to arrange for today.

  He saw then that Buff Katen had turned and was coming back with something on his mind.