The first indication that she was not alone was a knocking on a fence rail. Bill Graham said across the fence: “Can I come in?”
She looked up, startled, and laughed.
“Hello, Bill. Come on over.”
She liked Bill Graham. A quick wordless friendship had grown between them in the short time he had been at Frank’s. It was as if they felt some sort of rueful half-humorous alliance, the alliance of aliens in a land friendly and familiar but to which they had not been born.
Bill climbed the fence, carrying a partly-filled preserving jar in a careful hand. “They won’t let me make hay. So I left them to stew in their own sweat.”
He sat on a cradle-hill, holding the jar between his knees. Renie brushed red-stained fingers through her rusty grey hair and gave him a look. She said, “They won’t let me make hay either. We’re outsiders, Bill.”
He laughed. “Maybe so. You know, Renie, seeing you here after strawberries ... It reminded me of something.”
She gave her little laugh. “Nice, I hope.”
“Well, odd, anyway . . . You remember . . .”
She said, “When you went to school to me’?”
“Yes. Well, not that, exactly. You were in Gordons’ kitchen, remember, the night after Anna was killed.”
Renie said, “So I was.” There was a little note of wonder in her voice as she went back to that time before she had known Grant, except by sight, or foreseen anything at all of the life she was to grow into in the time between.
Bill said, “It wasn’t that, though . . . Something else. Not directly. A Sunday afternoon and Dan and Stan Currie and Joe McKee and I, loafing in the woods along the Black Brook. Anse Gordon stopped for a while. And after that we wandered up to Lowries and he and Hazel were just leaving there. They’d been picking strawberries.”
“That was a long time ago,” Renie said. “And an odd thing to remember.” She spoke slowly. “You know it seems, well—a little queer. I’ve lived at The Head a long time—and yet—you were here first—”
Bill said thoughtfully, “Odd how things stay in your mind when you don’t even know it, isn’t it? I’d forgotten the Shore. Not forgotten, exactly, but it was something I didn’t think about. And then when I saw Anse Gordon in London—it began to come back. I could really feel it. It’d been, oh, a part of me, I suppose, all the time. Then the colours started coming up . . .”
Renie said, “You saw Anse in London . . . When?”
“A year or so ago.”
“And you didn’t write to anyone? Didn’t mention it?”
Bill shook his head. “No. I didn’t write. I didn’t mention it. He said he hadn’t been back, you see . . . And I didn’t know . . . I didn’t tell him anything. Not even that Anna was dead . .
Renie said, thoughtfully. ‘You know the whole story, don’t you, Bill? I thought you did.”
He shook his head. “Oh, no, Renie. How can anybody know the whole story? Of anything. You’d have to put together everything a lot of individual people know, and don’t talk about. Each one of them knows something no one else does . . . But I know enough. I was here, you know . . . and Grant came to see me, in Toronto ...”
Renie said, “So you know why . . . You know what Anse means to us. Coming back, I mean.”
Bill said, “I’ve got a pretty good idea, yes.” He went on, “Grant looks the way he did when he was worrying about the old man, old James, and Anna.” He hesitated. “Have you tried to talk to him about it?”
She shook her head. “Anything that goes back to that—he looks at it as a problem of his own.” She said, meditatively, “I meddled once. Years ago.” She had the gift of terse narrative. As she went back over that winter of twelve years ago she could feel again the tension in the house and the relief when it vanished. “And I never knew why. There was only—the sun out, and the cold. And Margaret glummer than usual. And then Grant and Alan coming in from the barn to dinner, and you could tell it was all right. I never knew why . . . But I said to myself then, I’d never meddle again ...”
She paused, thoughtfully. Far off across the bushy slope a figure climbed the fence into Stan Currie’s pasture-Margaret, going toward the beach.
Renie went on, slowly, “You’re right. You can’t ever know the whole story of anything. I know, for instance, that Alan’s known for years . . . Mrs. Josie told me that. She never told me how he knew, only that he did know, and that it was all right . . . It was something she had on her mind. She figured I ought to know, but not Grant . . . Margaret must’ve picked it up too, long ago; I don’t know. And I don’t know whether Grant’s ever found out that Alan . . . Oh, hell, Bill. It’s too involved-and yet, in terms of feeling ... I s’pose it’s simple. That strange thing, kind of beautiful, it’s been as much a part of Grant’s life and Alan’s as breathing . . .”
She hesitated. Bill was silent, and she went on.
“Odd, you know. Once his mind was made up to let Alan stay I s’pose Grant just stopped, well, trying to figure . . . The worry would be there, but he’d try to ignore it. What happened, it seems-as I look back-was that he lost a lot of his impulsiveness, got careful, not so free and easy. Instinct, I guess. Alan was the same. Each one kind of watchful for the other, till it got to be . . . But Alan’s grown up now, and he’s a little different. A man. That would have been all right, too. But Anse came back . . .”
She paused. “It’s nothing I can talk to Grant about. Neither can Alan. Can’t reassure him, I mean. The minute he does, it’s over.”
Bill said, thoughtfully, “Yes, I s’pose so. About all a person can do is stand by.”
That was it. Nothing had been solved by talking, but Renie’s heart was lighter for having talked with Bill. She felt none of the reaction, the sense of having exposed a personal weakness, that can depress a strong-minded person after speaking freely of inner things. There was no morbid inquisitiveness about Bill Graham. They had let each other know that they shared a recognition, a concern for certain people. That was all.
Renie stood up and brushed the seat of her slacks. She said, “Let’s get some berries picked. Come over to supper tonight, will you, Bill? I’m going to make a shortcake. Last one of the year.”
Margaret angled her way across Curries’ lower pasture toward the beach. In the years when Hugh’s place had lain unlived on, young spruce had over-run the whole slope, but Stan had cleared it again. To her right as she walked between small yellowing stumps toward the old road to the Head, his new-field potatoes were coming into blossom.
Margaret had found that in the last few weeks, the Currie place, the thought and sight of it, gave her a little lifting of the heart, a warmth. Something to do with the fact of Stan Currie’s return with his wife and children to the land he had been raised on. Stan had come back in ‘forty-one, put a new cellar under the house and installed running water, and left, the following winter, to follow Dan Graham into the Merchant Marine. This had made no notable impression on Margaret at the time, nor could she recall feeling anything in particular about the Currie house during its years of emptiness, an abandoned place. It was only now when Currie Head, home, had become vivid to her through Alan, that her heart stirred to events like Stan Currie’s return. This had little to do with Currie Head. She knew that. If Mexico or New South Wales had been Alan’s choice it would have been hers also. But his place was The Head. As Margaret turned south to cross the neck, the sight of Janet Currie’s washing on the line, the sound of Stan’s mowing-machine, helped to lighten a mood already excited with the purpose in her mind.
Her purpose was to find and talk to Richard McKee.
As she approached the swampy section of the road, an intermittent hollow tapping came to her through the fringe of black spruce to the right. Anse was working on the boat. Involuntarily she hurried a little, skirting to the left, anxious to avoid contact; she felt a flicker of surprise at her own reac
tion.
Anse could be the key to her problem. In Anse there was the possibility of release, the wakening of memory along the Channel Shore, open knowledge and acceptance at last of an old and hidden story ... It was clear to her that only open recognition and acceptance could make fulfilment possible.
But for Anse himself, she realized, she felt none of the warmth that could make a chance meeting and conversation a pleasant thing in itself. There had been truth in her statement to Alan that she rather liked Anse; but the fact was that most people were unimportant to her now, a waste of time . . . Anse Gordon could be an instrument, but he would be an instrument she couldn’t control, and one which in any event she couldn’t bring herself to use.
As she turned west to go up the inlet shore toward the huts on Curries’ beach she threw a swift sidelong glance over her shoulder. She could see the hull, propped up in the yard, and standing motionless by the stern, Anse. He was looking at her. Standing and looking.
Her glance had been a quick thing, a movement of the eyes, the head hardly turning. If Anse caught it, he did not wave. As Margaret turned to go up over the hump of the beach to Richard’s hut she had a moment of prescience in which it seemed to her that all those nearest to her, the members of her family, watched each other now through a screen of work and leisure, daylight and sleep. And were in turn watched.
On the narrow flat top of the beach she came out into the push of the southwesterly. It was low tide. On the inlet side the tiny tide-channel, dark with eel-grass, wound around clam-beds covered with less than a foot of water. The fawn shallows were minutely ruffled, now and then, as gusts of the long wind brushed and passed. On the seaward side of the beach the Channel marched to the packed sand and coarse gravel in a constant leisured lop, shore and sea merging in a continual splash and grumble of slow sound.
The day was bright but now and then the banked clouds, massive with summer, would move heavy-bosomed across the sun, trailing along the beach for long moments a windy shadowy chill.
Margaret approached Richard’s hut in a sunlit moment and saw that he was there.
Richard had hauled out for cleaning the single fleet of herring nets he still tended each July. The spread mesh lay cleaned of slime, drying on the slope of the beach. He was engaged today in mending a section of salmon net for Alec Neill; whiling away time by the sunny side of his hut.
The sight of Margaret coming up the beach gave him a sensation of pleasure he did not at first form in thought. It was merely a sense-perception of her small figure, buffeted slightly by the wind, merged with the knowledge that she was coming to see him.Somewhere during the years just before the war, Alan had grown out of the boyhood habit of closeness with his grandfather. The affection was still there, evident in a glance or the turn of a word, but for a long time he hadn’t seen a great deal of Alan. Richard understood that. In those years when he was growing up, the boy had grown away from an interest in old men and their archaic crafts; he had had no time for anything much but Grant; Grant and a lively activity. And then the war. For years now Richard had lacked the touch of youth around him. It was only lately that in an odd way he had felt it again, that protective sense of closeness, in his rare meetings with Margaret. Lately for some reason she had been calling him Uncle Rich.
He got up from the upended trawl tub on which he was sitting and looked around to find a seat for her.
“Never mind, Uncle Rich,” Margaret said. “This’ll do.” She tucked an ancient float-keg under her buttocks.
Richard resumed his seat, picked up the net-needle and grinned slightly at the mesh of Alec’s net.
“How are things up in civilization?”
Margaret laughed. Suddenly she knew, with relief, that she was not going to have to be gradual, groping for words, with Richard McKee. There was something in his voice, in the almost careless manner of his speech, that told her Richard was touched by little of the emotional prejudice she feared in others. She had a speculative thought that from the beginning of this story, nearly thirty years ago, he never had been.
She said, “Too civilized, sometimes.”
She slipped her feet out of her shoes, tugged off ankle-length socks, and curled her toes around smooth sun-warmed stone. Chin in hand and elbows on knees she watched while Richard’s knobbed and calloused hands moved with deliberate deft precision, drawing twine around the mesh-board, knotting his knot. For a moment it seemed to her that she could go on watching this indefinitely, as if there were no need to speak at all.
Richard talked intermittently, low-toned, neither to Margaret nor entirely to himself. Alec Neill wasn’t too well, he said. The old leg trouble was bothering Alec, enough to keep him in the house for a spell. Richard had hauled his salmon net for him. A few snags to mend. That was all.
His voice was an accompaniment of what he was doing, of his moving hands. The thought crossed Margaret’s mind that although Uncle Rich was well along in his seventies, there was no essential change. A little stooped and withered, but still the man who had been splitting hoop-holes, a dozen years ago, the day she and Alan pawed through the contents of a sea-chest in the
shop loft. More than half her own lifetime ago . . . But only a little time, perhaps, to Richard.
After an interval she said, “Uncle Rich. You’re the only person I could talk to. It’s Alan and me. We’re ...”
Her voice trailed off. Richard felt behind him on the trawl tub for his knife and snipped the twine off at a completed knot.
He said, “Is that a thing you just found out?”
She shook her head. “Something Alan just found out, I guess. I’ve felt that way for years.”
Richard nodded, put the knife away, and sat with his hands between his knees.
He said, “You both know the whole thing, then . . . The whole story. Otherwise . . . But I s’pose Grant wouldn’t think of that.”
Margaret said: “He doesn’t know—anything. That we know . . . Or the way we feel . . . And Alan won’t . . .”
Richard said, “No, I s’pose not. And you can’t, very well.”
She shook her head without speaking. She could not go to Grant. Not without betraying Alan, living with the knowledge of betrayal in her heart.
“Well,” Richard said. “It’s natural. Complicated, though.” After an interval, “Got any plans?”
Again she shook her head. “No. You know how he—how he and Grant feel. He was going away for a while. But then, he didn’t ... I don’t—we don’t know what to do.”
“Some things, you got to wait out,” Richard said.
“I know. But. . . Oh, we’d wait for years. But how’s that going to make it any better? To be any good for us, the whole thing’s got to come out, some time. How can it make any difference, waiting, I mean, when what’s got to happen is that Grant stops- stops being Alan’s father? No matter how long we wait”—Margaret moved her head abruptly, snaring in the gesture everything she could foresee of sensation, gossip, wonder—”no matter how long we wait, the shock’ll always be the same.”
Richard was dropping pebbles from one cupped palm to the other. He let them trickle through to the ground. His voice was matter-of-fact, neither sympathetic nor indifferent.
“I wouldn’t say that, Marg’ret. You’d be surprised . . . You’d be surprised what time does in the way of getting people used to an idea. Once it begins to sprout. You’ll have to do some waiting. It’ll likely work out.”
She said, impulsively, “Uncle Rich, I wonder . . . You don’t think—Do you think we ought to—” she made a short gesture— “try to forget it, smother it, stop thinking we can . . .?”
She was at once ashamed. Nothing could make her forget or change her purpose. She had come to the beach for the comfort of talk, of human contact and understanding. What she was doing now was appealing for justification.
Richard smiled slightly. He shook his head, not i
n negation but in rejection of the question. “People got to make their own minds up. You’ve done that already. Helps to talk about it, maybe. But you can’t go asking people whether it’s right or wrong.” His voice took on a note of remote amusement that included all humanity. “How can anybody know that, anyway?”
For the first time in months, perhaps for the first time since she had realized years ago the meaning of what she felt for Alan, Margaret had a sense of openness, of relief from secrecy. Even in the brief wild moment in the shadow of the house, there had been no relief from that. This, now, was a beginning.
A beginning. She said, “Suppose—”
Richard had resumed his work on the net. He looked up without breaking the rhythm of his hands, and down again, waiting.
“Suppose it comes out again. The old story. Uncle Rich, look. Even then. How could you prove it—that we’re no relation . . .?”
Richard sighed, faintly amused at Margaret’s switch to the practical. He finished the hole on which he was working. He snapped the twine, tucked the net-needle into an overall pocket, and turned to squint out over the Channel, forearms on knees. He felt, oddly, the thrust of irritation.
He said slowly, almost roughly, “Hell, girl—Grant wasn’t even in the country . . . Anybody can prove that.”
For a quarter-century he had kept his mind from brooding on Hazel . . . Hazel and Anse Gordon . . . Sometimes it hadn’t been possible to do that. The brain would return at intervals to pain. What he remembered now was a bitter walk down the frozen road, the pallor of Hazel’s face on the pillow, his own wonder at the thing in her mind that called him there . . . His mind turned again. There were other memories, other images from before the time of pain began. Himself, half-asleep in the room off the kitchen, and Hazel going after strawberries . . . the sound of voices, hers and Eva’s, remotely bickering . . . But always, the bleak appeal in her eyes when she had told him in the hut here . . . in the hut here . . . And the wordless thing he had felt, later, when Grant Marshall had brought her home ...
The Channel Shore Page 41