The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  He said, merely, “We’ve been doing a few odd chores for your mother. Milking and so on. I s’pose . . .”

  Anse said, drawling, “That’ll be all right. I’ll look after it . . .”

  In a little while Grant said, “Well . . .” and got up to go.

  6

  In the early dusk of Saturday evening Alan came downstairs and walked out on the veranda, irritated by a general restlessness, a wish to be doing something; a feeling heightened by the fact that it would not harden into a desire for any certain action. No one had suggested any of the activities that usually marked the week-end, a drive to The Harbour for the movie, or anywhere along the country roads, simply for the drive ...

  The morning after Anse Gordon’s return Alan had taken over the truck Lon Katen was driving on the haul from Millersville. There was no advantage any longer in being alone. The feeling between himself and Margaret was a remote crying ache at the back of his heart, displaced by a danger more immediate. The immediate thing was Anse; and to meet this he must be close to people. Must hear their spoken curiosity and share their speculation and live the part of Grant Marshall’s son as he had always lived it.

  This now he had done for four days. They had cleaned out the Millersville yard, but would not go back to sawing for a while. It was getting close to haying time.

  Margaret, in white blouse and dark slacks, was curled up in the swing, reading in the fading light. She looked up to exchange glances, her own non-committal and almost impersonal.

  He said, “Mag, what d’you say we go up and see if there’s any mail?”

  Indifferently, Margaret swung her feet to the floor. “All right; d’you want to walk it?”

  He said, “Sure. Let’s walk it.”

  They walked in silence. Past Stan Currie’s and Alec Neill’s and up the slight rise toward Fred Marshall’s. Thought moved in Alan’s mind. In that house, behind those windows reflecting dying daylight, Uncle James had lain for years helpless. Alan had seen the old man seldom in the years just before the war. He remembered the painful immobility of the figure in bed, the eyes in the caved-in bearded face, oddly alive for Margaret but with only a hint of impersonal recognition for himself.

  The thought of it clutched his heart for a moment with a strange sadness. James Marshall, forty, thirty, twenty years ago a power on the Shore . . . dwindling to the shape of an old man in bed, dwindling to a memory. And a memory of what? Even to him, Alan, Uncle James as a personality was no longer clear, except for the remembered hardness. He had passed from the Channel Shore story, except as the things he had felt, said, done, remained in the flesh of others.

  The figure who was clear to Alan was Jackie, small and full of hell. Nesting apples on the way to school, and in a grass-lined recess under the roots of a maple in Clem Wilmot’s pasture. Jackie, sweating green lumber out to the piles in the mill yard at Katen’s lot. Jackie, in ‘forty-one, coming down to Surrey on leave with the crown and stripes of a flight sergeant on his sleeve. Jackie, who had died in fire over Duisberg.

  Yet, behind that sharp sorrowful anger when he thought of Jackie, there was now this vague touch of sadness about old James. Or rather, about all those men and women whose power on the Shore had faded with age, dwindling into death. He found himself remembering a boy in Richard McKee’s shop loft, and useless things in a sea-chest that had for a moment, then, caught his heart with an aching pain.

  He shook his head and said to Margaret, “It’s queer when you think of it, isn’t it? Frank Graham still says ‘James Marshall’s place’. Even Dad says ‘Uncle James’s.’ But we say ‘Fred’s’ . . .”

  Margaret said, “Yes. I know.”

  Alan thought: she does know. For a moment he felt a strange relationship. Something he had caught a glimpse of years ago and saw now for a moment clear and sharp. Something of which the old big-boy-and-small-girl thing had been a surface manifestation. Something far back in the mind and memory, the instinct and the spirit. Farther back, he thought with a start, than this emotional and bodily magnetism that had found them out. Even if by some miracle this present craving should die, even though minds and hearts should come to the clash of anger, this inner thing was there: not a bond—it was more like a shared freedom.

  In this small moment of recognition he was lifted briefly into a climate of emotional peace. The recognition, or the memory of it, would remain. He was realist enough to know that the peace itself would come rarely.

  Behind the personal tenderness and the realized love, something almost impersonal, almost remote ... As he came to know this, and was left with the sense of always having known it, the immediate and the physical for the moment were almost unimportant.

  And yet, there was a strange new splendour in the tenderness and the love.

  Margaret, surely, had known it long ago.

  Anse Gordon tipped his chair against the wall of Richard McKee’s kitchen. Annoyance was beginning to edge his inner amusement. It had been exciting to walk into McKees’ for the mail and to sense the hard hostility in Eva, the cold “Well,” with which she had greeted him after twenty-seven years. She had not offered him her hand.

  First meetings with people whose lives had been changed by his departure were a series of small excitements. It was highly amusing to consider that not one of them dared to translate hostility into words or actions. In the interest of their own peace, and for Grant Marshall’s sake, they had to preserve the fiction. Hide their hate under friendliness, and stand it.

  He was beginning to be annoyed. Eva, simply by silence, was coming close to getting round that necessity. There had been an awkward moment, after she had handed him Josie’s copy of the Halifax paper and turned back to her chair by the table, leaving him standing. Richard’s indifferent, “Sit down, Anse,” had ended that. But he was getting nowhere with Eva. He had said, “You’ve been well, have you, Mrs. McKee?” and she had answered, “Well enough.” He had said, “Everybody looks pretty good,” and been answered by silence.

  He should have been foresighted enough, Anse thought, to visit the McKees when others were there. With no one else in the room, only Richard lounging in a rocker in the shadows, she could get away with it.

  He was about ready to let his chair fall forward and rise and leave when he noticed Eva’s hands halt in their aimless sorting of letters. Her eyes were on the window. A moment later Margaret Marshall came through the back door into the kitchen, followed by Alan.There was a moment of suspended time. Eva’s hands were motionless on the table top. Richard’s face, turned toward the door, was still.

  Alan said, “Hello. Hello, Mr. Gordon,” and to Richard and Eva, softly, “Hi. No mail, I s’pose?”

  Eva said, “Yes. A letter or two, I think, here somewhere. And the paper . .. I’ll light a light.”

  Alan said, “Oh, don’t bother doing that, not for us,” and found a chair. He stuffed the letters she handed him in a shirt pocket and glanced around. “Oh—Mr. Gordon, Margaret. My sister.”

  Margaret crossed the room to sit by Richard. She said, “We’ve met. I saw Mr. Gordon the other day at Mrs. Josie’s.”

  Anse grinned. For a moment the strain had been too sharp for comfort, but the kids had eased it. Covertly he examined Alan, lounging there with ankle over knee, searching his pockets for cigarettes. Anse got up and handed his package over.

  Something about the boy made people easy. Something of his own nonchalance, but with a difference. Easiness, Anse knew, was not the feeling his own presence usually called forth.

  He glanced at Margaret with appreciation. Momentarily, when he had first seen her at Josie’s, he had felt a slight regret that women no longer lighted in his blood the slow fires of earlier years. The cunning with which he had pursued the satisfaction of those early fires was still there. He had considered for a moment the havoc he could raise if by some wild achievement of personality he could fox Margaret Marshall into
an infatuation with himself. In Anse’s mind this was not beyond the possible. He could see in her a quality . . . and he doubted the likelihood of its response to the young men he had seen and heard of at Currie Head. A wanderer, with a touch of the world about him, and a reputation ... It might be done ... it might be done. But with physical desire no longer a driving force in him, the victory though spectacular would be chiefly of the mind. And it would be brief. Anse had no illusions that he, in this generation, could carry on an affair with anyone on the Channel Shore in secret. Or that the forced friendliness that fed his private amusement would continue in the face of that.

  For reasons which he did not directly examine he wanted to avoid a break, to go on enjoying his power over Currie Head, the Marshalls, the McKees, the Grahams, all these people who were . . . respectable. A drawn-out, continuing victory, climaxed perhaps—

  He glanced again at Alan, and was struck by a curious feeling. Alan Marshall was someone over whom he felt no urge for power. In whom he wished to see, toward himself—what? Certainly not dislike. Certainly not the revulsion the pursuit of Margaret would arouse. What, then? He felt a curiosity, personal and strong: did the boy know?

  That question Anse put away in the back of his mind, with the unformed dreams gestating there.

  Alan said, “How re you getting on with the boat, Mr. Gordon?”

  The boat, already, was beginning to excite interest at The Head. Lon Katen had attached himself to Anse. The two of them had hauled the hull out of the barn and propped her up in the yard. They would sit for hours on Josie’s steps, doing nothing, as if they took some peculiar secret satisfaction in conspicuous laziness while the industry of the Shore went on around them.

  Anse said, “All right. She’s sound. We’ve not done much to her, though. Not yet. Have to get her down to the water to soak before I start patching her up. Reminds me—you got a rig could handle that?’”

  Alan considered. “We’ve got a cat would get down Currie’s road as far as the inlet, I guess. It’s grown up, across the neck. We could rig some kind of trailer, maybe. Need a couple of men to steady her. Shouldn’t be much trouble.”

  Anse said, “Well, I can get Lon and Buff. What d’you say? Tomorrow night?”

  Alan shook his head. “Better make it Monday. After supper.”

  Anse chuckled. “That’s right. Tomorrow’s Sunday ... I forgot.” He said, “Richard, you’ve cut sails?”

  Richard stirred. He could feel no active hatred for Anse Gordon. Only a kind of indifferent distaste. He said, “I cut the odd suit of sails years ago. Cut the sails your father had on her, matter- of-fact.”

  Anse said, “I thought you did. I’ve got to get a new mains’l, anyway. Rain got in on the old one. I’m sending to Halifax for the cloth.”

  He let the moment lie, briefly, and then got up to go. “Good night, Richard . . . kids. Good night, Mrs. McKee.”

  Eva had risen to get down the lamp and light it. He gave her a slight friendly smile, only faintly touched with mockery, as he turned to go.

  Alan and Margaret stayed until it was fully dark outside. They talked a little, of small things, but not much. To them Richard’s house, even though there might be periods of a week or a fortnight when they never went there, was like home. A place where a person could be silent if he wanted to, where it wasn’t necessary to make conversation.

  Richard hadn’t put in electricity when the hydro line went through. Except for new oilcloth on the table, a change in the calendars on the walls and in the patterns of hooked mats, this kitchen was as it had been for forty years. Sitting in the dimmed edge of the lamp’s light, Alan felt something of this continuity. He was content to sit, almost empty of thought and almost happy.

  It was only after he and Margaret were back on the gravel of the road in overcast darkness that his mind began to turn again on the hard facts of the present, and people, and circumstance. The way in which he found himself acting naturally in Anse’s company was curious to him. He was keyed up to it, he supposed. At any rate, it was only in his imagination of situations, not the situations themselves, that he faltered. And it was only when he had time to think, time to consider, that despair and anger clutched him.

  Walking beside him, in the shallow opposite rut beaten by the wheels of trucks, Margaret stumbled slightly. He started to put out a hand and let it drop back. The shock of this instinctive caution struck him like a blow. He was suddenly angry, angry at no one. A fact that had faintly surprised him at Richard’s came to the surface of his mind.

  He said, “I didn’t know you’d run into Anse. Before tonight, I mean.”

  Margaret said, “Oh, yes. I kind of like him.”

  He said, non-committally, “You do, eh?”

  It came to him that he resented this off-hand reference of Margaret’s to Anse. And yet—he had no cause for resentment. The reticence between them that made of Anse in Margaret’s speech a person of merely ordinary importance, a person you could like or dislike casually, was of his own making. No reason why she should have gone out of her way to mention meeting Anse Gordon ... In every act and attitude he himself had made it clear that this was the way it must be.

  He told himself again that this was true. He could talk with Margaret—particularly when they were alone together—only within the circle of surface things. Any delving into the things that mattered, with its risk of an affectionate word, a touch of the hand, was what they had to avoid.

  In the dark Margaret half-prayed for accidental contact. She made a bargain with herself: If he veers from the rut, I’ll veer to meet him; if his arm brushes me, I’ll take his hand . . .

  But in a moment she shook her head, discarding stratagems and bargains, biting hard on the bullet of pride.

  She now looked straightly at the fact that to her Anse Gordon’s return meant not tragedy but something like hope, a strange half- sorrowful but exciting hope.

  Anse. Anse could break the shell of the past and re-set the pattern of the present. And yet—there was something dark, some shadow of meanness in the thought of it. She felt the slow anger of frustration surging through her flesh in waves.

  They found Renie sitting by the radio in The Room, listening to slow string music, turned low. Grant lay on the chesterfield, asleep. Alan grinned at Renie and stretched himself quietly in a chair. Margaret climbed the stairway to her room without a word.

  7

  Black spruce and juniper grew on the neck of low land connecting Curries lower pasture with the Head. The neck was patched here and there with swamp, but midway along the eastern edge of the inlet, between the old road and the water, the turf was firm in a flat half-acre, faintly ridged and treeless.

  In the early sixties Rob Currie had built the Star of Egypt here, a thirty-ton coaster, the only decked vessel ever launched at Currie Head. After that, during the years of the mackerel, men from The Head and The Rocks had brought their pine planks and steam-boxes, their juniper timbers and black spruce knees, their saws and planes and adzes to Rob’s Yard. Nine or ten sloops and two-masters had been built there, but nothing now in nearly thirty years. Nothing since Stewart Gordon and Frank Graham had wasted a spring in building the boat and that now lay moored at the edge of the tide-channel in the inlet.

  Anse in hip-length rubber boots sat for a little on the centreboard casing, watching salt water bead and seep along the joins and trickle down the inner surface of the old pine planking. He was humming to himself . . . “The Irish Washerwoman”. At length he eased overside and splashed ashore.

  He said, “Well, we’ll let her soak. Won’t hurt if she settles in the eel-grass. We’ll haul her out after a while, see where she needs patches. Cau’rk and paint. She’s stood up all right.”

  Grant asked, curiously, “What’re you going to do with her, Anse?”

  It was still an effort to be civil to Anse Gordon. But civility was necessary. He had welcome
d this chance, in fact, to help haul the boat to Rob’s Yard and to stand around with Anse and Lon Katen and Alan for a moment or two after they had got her into the water.

  Anse felt for tobacco and began to roll a cigarette.

  “Use her for? Don’t know as I’ll use her for much of anything.”

  He eyed the boat and said, lazily, “Lot of work on her yet. I think the spars are all right. We’ll have to bring ‘em down in a day or two, Lon. Shrouds are okay, too. Likely need some new rope.” He added, confidently, “We’ll have her under sail in a couple of weeks . . . She’ll be in shape for the Holiday.”

  Time and purpose were of no importance. It was enough for now to serve notice that this was so, to let Grant Marshall and Currie Head know, casually and without making a point of it, that no limit was set in days or weeks to his sojourn on the Channel Shore. Let them speculate and wonder.

  He let his glance drift deliberately over Grant Marshall, and on to the clam-beds, the spine of Curries’ beach, the sky and the Islands. Grant Marshall. He had never been able to see, long ago, what Anna found attractive . . . And now ... his eyes came back, to Alan.

  Alan was looping up the lengths of chain with which they had stayed the hull to the trailer-rig for the trip down Currie’s road. He was whistling, unaware that the tune he had picked up was “The Irish Washerwoman” and apparently oblivious of any undercurrent. He glanced up, broke off, and said lightly, “Well, Pop, we may as well get going.”

  Pop. Grant felt along his nerves the flush of an inexpressible annoyance. Pop. A word to go with the mock affection of Anse Gordon’s drawled Old Lady. Sometimes, a thing as small as that would break the lashings of a man’s control...

  He walked over to the cat and shook his head. “I’ll take her up. You go over to Frank’s. Find out when they want to start the hay.”

  He climbed aboard the cat, swung the rig round the yard and drove it lurching up the rutted road. A picture was in his mind: two faces, one middle-aged, the other young. One carved in downward lines of selfish and self-sufficient arrogance. The other mobile and laughing, but moulded in curves and lines you couldn’t mistake . . .