The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  He grunted, feeling the ridiculousness of even! arguing about this in his own mind. All Grant had said was a quiet word about a dance, a small thing on which their judgments differed. He hadn’t even mentioned it after supper when he’d tossed over the car key.

  Making too much of it. But the irritation nagged. He was half sorry now they had thought of going to the damn dance. He had no particular interest in it, except to talk to a few down- shore people he had got to know before the war, when they had been lumbering there. People he liked. But there was Margaret; she wanted to go. And Buff. Buff wanted the pride of having them with him. Alan grinned, thinking of Buff.

  He went downstairs, still conscious of the drifting shadow, and found Margaret on the veranda steps, arms about her knees. Renie sat in a wicker chair on the grass out front, placidly knitting. She gestured with the needles as Alan and Margaret went up the path to the road.

  “Have a good time, now. And don’t be too late.”

  He said, “We won’t, Renie,” and glanced down at Margaret as she scrambled into the car. “Nice dress, Maggie.”

  She said, “Thanks, Alan,” and leaned back, stretching tanned stockingless legs straight in front of her.

  Alan laughed. For more than five years Margaret had lived in his mind as a girl of fifteen, shorter and scrawnier than average,

  trying to carry angularity with dignity. Then, when the Aquitania docked in Halifax two months ago, he had been embraced by a woman of twenty, no longer angular.

  Margaret said, “What’s funny?”

  “You are,” Alan said as he put the car in motion. “What do they call that thing you’ve got on?”

  “Oh, natural linen,” Margaret said. “Off white.”

  “Hard to make you match up with the girl you — with nineteen- forty. You’re more like the one that wore a red stocking-cap and mitts on a string round her neck.”

  Margaret made a small meditative sound and was silent. What he said was true, in more ways perhaps than one. In the years just before the war there had been an outward slackening in their curious intimacy. Her own awkward age and the period of Alan’s passionate preoccupation with Grant, and the mill, and growing up. No change in feeling. It was just that the expression of feeling had been more remote. A quick occasional smile instead of the long sessions of question and answer on the way to school. Now, in another sense, the first relationship was back. Back without the small-girl-and-big-boy chatter. Back in a sense that was clear to Margaret, but which, she thought, Alan had never stopped to consider or define . . .

  If it’s more life you’re looking for . . . There’s always Halifax.

  Her mind went back to Renie’s words and the dread there was in them. Halifax was all right. It had served its purpose. She remembered the sense of freedom that had come to her when Grant agreed to let her study stenography and get a war-time job. Escape from the Shore and from the emptiness of everything. In Halifax you could be alone with the aloneness. You didn’t have to act, to pretend interest in Red Cross meetings, the Young People’s League, the endless little running talk at the post office and Katen’s. There were times on the Shore with Alan gone when even Grant and Renie had seemed to her intolerable.

  Halifax was pot-hooks at the business school, streets crowded with uniforms, convoys gathering in Bedford Basin, ships moving in single file past George’s Island. Halifax was a job, hard work, and doing what you could, and freedom to be alone. Freedom to admit what you felt, uncomplicated by the implications of the old and the familiar.

  Sitting silent in the car, Margaret felt the moving images come up, the moving moments, flowing to the balanced, the precarious present.. .

  Lights. Lights, long ago, hanging at the lower edge of the sky, and a red table-cloth ... A small cold hand in a warm one . . . words . . . You’d forget your head if it wasn’t sewed on . . . It must remind you, Mrs. Gordon . . . Richard McKee’s shop loft, and an apprehensive curiosity . . . Whered you get that idea? . . . Vangie’s crazy . . . you can’t listen . . . not to believe it . . .

  School. Sunday school. Words, voices, in the dark. Walking home from church . . . No. Not even his half-sister. Didn’t y’know? Whispers. If her father hadn’t . . . he’d a been a bastard . . .

  That was how you knew. Anger, first. Anger and hurt. And then the shock. To find that the realization, when fully understood, didn’t strike you with a sense of loss or loneliness at all. Filled you instead with a throbbing excitement.

  The loneliness—that came later, when the excitement was a thing you hid, while the old relationship of sister and brother subtly changed. Changed for you alone, in the nerves and blood and mind; while on the surface, for Grant, for Renie, for Alan, for the Channel Shore, it must appear unaltered ...

  A subtle singing joy . . . until the war had taken him. Then, Halifax; escape from the reminders of his presence and of the accepted thing, the sense of family.

  But there was nothing now in Halifax. Everything was here. It was something, at least, to be here. Not enough, but something. She would have to be careful not to upset the balance; she would have to be friendly and interested; she would have to check the impulse that stirred behind the reserve and the control.

  Alan laughed to himself. Mag was having one of her quiet spells, but there didn’t seem to be any unasked questions in it, and a mile or two of silence in a car didn’t amount to much. Something about her had reminded him of that long strange time of war, the something you couldn’t explain. Her letters. In spite of all that you could do, there had been islanded hours in that careful separate existence when in spite of any precaution you found yourself across the border into the old-time world, felt the pull of loved people, saw the Channel marching under spring wind, heard the road’s gravel spurt under turning wheels, smelled the wet smell of sawdust. Something familiar in the slant of a field in Normandy could do it, or the sight of a farm-house with late sun on the windows. And the way you felt when mail overtook you, up the line. The feel of the thin blue crumpled airmail forms, the look of known handwriting.

  Grant’s, brief and matter-of-fact; little of the communication in his voice came through when Grant wrote a letter. Renie’s, easy and unlaboured, more like bits of spoken conversation. Margaret’s . . . Margaret’s were hardest to shut out when you were done with them, hardest not to take out and read again. More herself than the self you remembered. In her written words the old faint reserve was luminous, transparent. A veil that emphasized, that did not hide ...

  He slid the car to a stop beside Katen’s gas pump. There were few loiterers this evening. Only Dan Graham, with a stranger, sitting on the store’s low doorstep, and Stan Currie’s two boys, Hugh and Duncan, hunkered on the grass beside them, sucking cokes through straws. It was still light with the clear luminous light of late June, but as they got out of the car the store windows and its open door bloomed white. Old Felix had turned on the electricity.

  Dan and the stranger got up as Alan and Margaret walked toward them across gravel. Dan said, “I’d like y’t’meet Bill. Cousin of mine. This is Grant’s boy and girl, Bill.”

  Alan took Bill Graham’s hand. He said, “Pop’s talked about you,” and glanced up as a screen door slammed in the Katen house on the knoll. He waited attentively, the shadow of a grin on his face, while Lon Katen’s son came round the corner of the building.

  “Buff! Well, I’m damned. What is it? A secret weapon?”

  In Buff the sardonic Katen face was softened by an habitual cast of friendly curiosity and faint puzzled surprise. His carrot-red hair would not lie down under brushing. He had treated it. with oil. He was wearing blue serge with a green shirt, a figured red- and-yellow tie, and ox-blood shoes.

  Dan said, “Y’can’t blame Buff. There was a war on.”

  Margaret said, “Leave Buff alone. He’s teaching me to square- dance.”

  Alan laughed. “Blame him? I’m not b
laming him. I wish I had the nerve ...”

  Buff said. “This is my goin’-t’-Mass suit. Shut up!”

  A wave of good humour broke down whatever slight edge of constraint the presence of a stranger might have caused. Alan turned the car, stopped as if reminded of something, and turned back to Dan.

  “Listen . . . Why don’t you come on down? The dance, I mean. You and Mr. . . . You and Bill.”

  He waited expectantly, looking from one to the other.

  Dan shook his head, looked at Bill in a kind of hesitant questioning. “I never learnt . . . Were not dressed for it.” He glanced down at his unpressed pants. Neither he nor Bill had bothered to shave or put on a tie.

  Buff Katen looked up. As a regular attendant at down-shore dances, this was his business. He came out of his silence. “That don’t matter. Any kind of rig’s good enough.”

  Alan said, “Oh, come on, Dan. Do Bess good to miss you. We’ll be back early. If we can drag Buff away. He’s got work to do tomorrow, same as you and me.”

  Abruptly, Dan turned to young Hugh Currie. “Step in on the way home, will you, Hugh? Tell them we’re down-shore for a while, with Alan.”

  Alan laughed, thinking of Dan. From ‘forty-one on Dan had never got home. Georgetown . . . Dakar . . . Capetown . . . the Red Sea . . . Bristol Channel . . . and never a long enough turnaround at Halifax to get to The Head. Now he wouldn’t go down-shore without letting them know where he was.

  They climbed into the car, Alan and Bill in front.

  “How long’s it been?” Alan asked.

  “Twenty-seven years,” Bill said.

  Alan shook his head. “That’s quite a stretch.”

  Something in Bill Graham’s presence set him considering the small continual migrations, the people who left the Shore and those who came back. Rarely to stay, merely to be lazy for a month or so every second summer or fifth or tenth, or once in a quarter- century. Andrew Graham had been born here and was old Frank’s brother, and so this one, this Bill, was a Currie Header — one who had stayed away longer than most.

  They should have Stan Currie along, he thought, to give a kind of tourist lecture. Stan didn’t talk much, but sometimes the words came in a tide, and Stan was a kind of expert on the Shore. As far as you could be an expert, with mostly guesswork and hearsay to go by. A queer one, Stan. He claimed that along the Shore you found all the differences that make up nationality: different ways of doing things; differences of up-bringing and religion; differences between Findlay’s Bridge with its touch of village superiority, and Currie Head; differences between Currie Head, full of Protestant Scots and English, and the Irish Catholics of Katen’s Rocks and Mars Lake. Differences between all these and Forester’s Pond, which kept that name though the last Forester was gone, and where, although the Catholic Church was there, you began to get

  a sprinkling again of the up-shore kind of people. The Channel Shore — a little nation.

  All getting along in a kind of working tolerance but divided by difference . . . Differences that came down to people in the end. Differences between people. Grant didn’t like the Katens. He let them work for him, he’d work with them, but there was something about them he didn’t like.

  The road passed the outlet of the hauling-road in to the mill, curved around a hardwood hill, crossed a wooden bridge, straightened out until they could see the Channel curling to flat sand a quarter- mile away, beyond low pasture; and on the left a blue-flag swamp and scrub spruce with the glint of fresh water behind it.

  Alan nodded sideways to Bill.

  “Mars Lake. The Pond’s next.”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “I remember.”

  3

  The heart of Foresters Pond is almost a village. You come out of a gulch in the land to higher ground and find buildings clustered round the approaches of an iron bridge. Under the bridge a creek slips down to lose itself in the brackish water of the pond, a narrow salt lagoon lying inside the Channel beach. The tides find their way in and out at the pond’s eastern end and at high water reach up the creek bed to low meadows beyond the road.

  Just west of the bridge John M. Clancy has his grocery and feed store, south of the road. Across the bridge j the land rises abruptly. The Catholic church stands at the top of this short hill, on the pond side, with the square mansard-roofed glebe house behind it. Across the road is the parish hall, a hip-roofed building with dormer windows.

  A pick-up truck and two or three automobiles were already parked haphazard by this building when Alan pulled up there. Inside an orchestra was playing. A printed bill tacked to the grey shingles by the door identified it as the Copeland Rhythm Boys. Piano, drums, banjo and sax. The Rhythm Boys were playing “Blue Skies”. Through the open door and lighted windows Alan saw several couples, dancing earnestly.

  Dan said, “No fiddles? I thought they had fiddles.”

  There would be fiddles all right, Buff said. Not much square- dancing any more; but they always had a few sets, in between the other stuff. John M. and John B. would be there with the fiddles. That was the best of it. That was dancing.

  Three or four young men were hanging round the hall door, waiting for full darkness and a bigger crowd before going in.

  To the middle-aged woman at a small table inside the door Alan paid two dollars and fifty cents. He said, “Dough, Mrs. Clancy.” She looked up and smiled. Another car pulled up. Three men and a couple of girls got out, laughed, and took their time coming to the door. “Lot of visitors tonight,” Mrs. Clancy said.

  “Copeland people, these are . . . Nice to see you, Alan.” And to Dan, “Good evening, Mr. Graham.”

  Alan nodded, feeling a rush of friendliness for John B.’s wife. She was being matter-of-fact, not making any particular point of the oddity of Currie Head people at a Forester’s Pond dance. He drew Margaret and Bill forward and introduced them and edged Margaret out on the floor, grinning at Buff Katen.

  “You can have her in a minute, Buff. This is all I’m good for. You’re the square-dance man.”

  They were playing a moderately slow tune he didn’t recognize. He slipped easily into the rhythm. He wasn’t much of a dancer, he thought. He got around on a sense of timing, but had to keep his mind on it. He noted with surprise that Margaret was highly competent, and grinned down at her, a little mocking. She was lost in some rapt imagining; her eyes came back to regard him with gravity. She wrinkled her nose in a small swift wordless answer.

  Benches at the edge of the dance floor were well filled by the time the number ended. The two Clancys, old John M. and his son John B. tuned up their fiddles. Old Jay Katen stood up to call off the figures for the first square-dance. After the couples had swung into the stamping rhythm, Alan saw that Buff had persuaded Margaret into it...

  Buff, he guessed, was a little gone on Margaret. But it was under control. It would do Buff good to see a lot of someone like Margaret, and do Margaret good to learn that the qualities Buff had, the loyalty and soundness, could develop in someone who had grown up in rough surroundings, a rough home. Buff had lied about his age to enlist with Alan. He would hear no word of criticism about Buff Katen.

  He heard Margaret’s laugh. The girl continually surprised him. Along with her reserve, her quiet, she had a streak of casual hilarity, rarely roused. For a moment he stood bemused. Something in this scene, this atmosphere, had brought to his mind the image of another girl, an image made of pure fancy, a name scrawled in a song book, a fading snapshot, an old photograph, words heard by chance ...

  Why should he think now of Hazel McKee?

  Alan glanced at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. There hadn’t been much sense of time passing; only of laughter, and a hall full of people, the shuffle of fox-trot and waltz, an occasional change in tempo as the floor was cleared for a square- dance.

  Amused, he had seen Margaret dancing with Bill Graham, even inve
igling Dan into a few simple steps on one occasion. He had left her pretty much to the others while he danced with the daughters of down-shore people he had known before the war or run into since Grant had moved the mill to Mars Lake. He had one more duty dance to go, with John B.’s daughter Sadie, a plump dark girl just home from the States.

  It was while he danced with Sadie Clancy, while they were caught momentarily between couples near the side-lines, that he heard a snatch of conversation. Someone asking about himself or about Margaret.

  “... girl... with Alan Marshall?”

  att

  ... sister ...

  There were words lost under music and the slow shuffle of the dance, and a word faintly echoed.

  “... sister ...”

  Something in the way the word was said, a questioning. Was it merely a passing interest, or a mocking remembering knowledge? A recollection across the years of a story deep in time?

  He shook the thought off, told himself he was developing a crazy imagination, and led Sadie Clancy back to the benches as the music died in a spatter of clapped hands.

  A square-dance, next. He sat it out and as Buffi and Margaret came back toward the side-lines, got up to meet them. He said, “Well, one or two more—and I guess we ought to go.”

  Buff nodded. “All right.” The orchestra was getting into the slow beat of one Alan liked, an old one, one Grant used to hum . . . “Sleepy-time Gal.”

  He turned toward Margaret just as a young man in checked green tweed—Alan recognized him as having come in one of the Copeland cars—put out a hand to claim her for the dance. This was a little unusual; there had been no introduction that Alan had seen, nor any informal contact that might have brought Margaret and the Copeland man together. And there was a kind of rough conventionality about this dance. Not that Margaret would mind . ..