The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Grant’s voice was hard.

  “Who by?”

  Josie waited. A kind of anger was rising in her. She had gone as far as she could go.

  “Who by?”

  She said, stubbornly, “Not by anybody in your family. Not by Renie.”

  Grant said, meditatively, as if to himself, “Well, I asked for it. When I let him stay.” And then to Josie, “When was this?”

  She said, a little querulously, “Oh, years ago. When was it he went to Fraser’s?”

  Grant said, “In ‘thirty-three. No, just after New Year’s. In ‘thirty-four.”

  “Just before that, then,” Josie said.

  ‘Thirty-three. That bitter week came back to him. Katen’s lot, and evening talk by the fire, and Renie’s warmth as he pulled her close for an instant as she crossed the kitchen; her restlessness and her question.

  Did you ever think about how it would be if he heard? . . . If someone started talking?

  Days and nights of controlled anger. At life, at the Shore, at circumstance. And then decision. Decision, and a house with the life gone out of it. And then ... a boy in the stable door with resolution in his face.

  Just before that, then . ..

  He saw the significance of that but his mind passed quickly from it, teeming with confused memory. He could not quite grasp as a whole, continuing and certain, the fact of Alan’s private knowledge. He could not alter in a moment the long convention of unknowing sonship that was a part of his belief. Perhaps, he thought, he would never be able to alter it, really. Would never be able to think of Alan in that time, when he thought of it whole, except as a boy, a son, innocent and ignorant of the story of his birth.

  But now specific images began to come. Himself and Alan, stripping and plunging into Graham’s Lake, on the way home from the first mill yard out back, on a hot evening in ‘thirty-five . . .

  Himself and Alan, squatting by the pool they had dammed up in the lower pasture, watching for fingerlings . . .

  Himself and Alan.

  Behind the laughing yell of shock at the lake’s chill, behind the intent face peering down into the pool, there had been that knowledge. A shiver coursed Grant’s backbone, and turned the import of his thought.

  He had a moment of intense fear. That never in his life would a scene come up clear and sharp out of that vanished time without the shock of strange, fearful embarrassment.

  Alan . . . growing out of enthusiastic boyhood into young manhood, controlled and careful, knowing. Grant accepted it with a wondering humility. He said, “I should have been thinking . . . earlier . . .”

  Josie had never been clear about that long-ago visit to Halifax, supposed to last a winter and a spring, which had been cut at last to a fortnight. Now she caught a glimpse of the private conflict, a glimpse of something once seen and hardly noticed; understood or partly understood only when remembered now.

  I asked far it when I let him stay ... I should have been thinking, earlier . . .

  She caught a hint of the irony. Of Alan learning from hints, gossip, remembered scenes, and from her own lips, finally, the thing he had to know. Learning, almost on the eve of going. And somehow imposing on Grant his will to stay . ..

  It was not clear to her. She merely felt the truth. No good telling Grant that whatever it was these two had shared, it was finer than any tie of blood. No good telling him that this, also, was something Alan knew. No good trying to convince Grant that doubts were useless. There were things you couldn’t be told, that you had to see for yourself.

  She said only, “You did right to let him stay.”

  Grant said absently, “Perhaps.” He added, like an afterthought: “The other thing . . . Margaret . . . What made you think of it? I don’t—I can’t believe that, Josie.”

  She shook her head. She knew, but she had done all she could. He would see it, some time.

  She said, “P’raps I’m wrong. It was something that seemed likely.”

  After a little Grant got to his feet. He said, “Thanks, Josie,” and walked out through the gate and up the road.

  On the road as he walked slowly home his mind went back to deal with the full meaning of Josie’s words. He had known. Alan had known, that New Year’s Day of ‘thirty-four. He had realized this as Josie talked, but his mind had been too concerned

  with the remembered tensions of that time and with the remorseful embarrassment of images from the years that followed, to consider fully what it meant.

  He had known, and he had asked to stay. He had been a son, and more.

  I want to work here in the woods, with you; and take grade ten right here, from Renie ...

  That’s fine ... That’s what we’ll do, then.

  Queer how the emphasis could shift from the present . . . Now it was Alan, knowing, in those years before the war. Alan —content, cheerful, enthusiastic, sometimes almost exultant in their shared play and labour. Quiet, controlling his exuberance with a kind of deferential dignity, when they worked with others.

  Being a son.

  That was of larger importance than anything that faced them now. And he had taken it all for granted, taken for granted the lightness and the warmth, taken it for granted that he alone carried the shadow of that knowledge in his heart.

  It was still not clear to him. The thing he had seen as change, the nonchalance, the ease he had thought of as arrogance . . . Since the war, a difference ... A difference was there. There was still his anger with the present. The questions he had asked his mind about this present Alan, and Anse Gordon, were still unanswered. And this new thing of Margaret, to him incredible. They pressed his mind, still, with a long insistence.

  But —there was that time of comradeship and fatherhood, illumined now as something more than it had seemed. More than the thing he had sought to hold. Nothing could take it away.

  The past had subtly changed the present. The weight was lifted, the pressure lessened, as if others now walked beside him to share a burden he had considered his alone. He was almost calm.

  He turned in at the house. He had a sense of looking at life from the outside, from above, watching the people who were closest to him, and himself among them, going about their work in space and time. For a moment he caught a vision of it. No one person, watching life from his own point of view and his own level, could see the play of act, motive, accident; or hear the multitude of voices. Even when for a moment you were lifted up, became an observer unswayed by personal feeling, all you could see were the act and the sum of the acts. The motives were still obscure. You could only guess.

  12

  They towed the boat out through the inlet entrance on the second evening in August. Anse had painted and patched an old flat of Katens’ to serve as a tender, and that afternoon he and Lon had rowed off to drop the anchor and buoy the cable. Now he looped a length of tow rope round the sailboat’s pawl-post, put Lon at the oars in the small boat and took the tiller himself. Alan stood amidships, sweep in hand, in case they veered close to the steep rock beaches of the tide-channel.

  They took her out at slack tide, avoiding the millstream race of ebb or flow. She moved slowly, Lon holding close to the right bank where the mouth had its fullest depth.

  The entrance to Currie Head inlet changes and shifts with the years. In Rob Currie’s day they warped the Star of Egypt out at high tide in more than two fathoms. Now there is less than five feet of depth, and barely room for row-boats to meet and pass. Gales and tides have worked there. Twenty fathoms off the mouth a sand-bar has built up at a diagonal, so that a boat leaving the sheltered water for the Channel must veer to port, easterly. Lon lengthened his stroke as the tow slipped into this final reach. Just as they passed the end of the sand-spit, lipped by a lazy swell, Alan felt the slight roll of the Channel gently heaving the slowly gliding hull.

  The feel of it stirred him with memory and
with something new, a sheer physical pleasure, a kind of power. He had been on rolling water often, in small boats owned by Richard McKee. And again in troop-ships. Never in a craft of this size: small, a plaything compared with the smallest steamer you could think of, but belonging to a grander company than dory or flat. Built to move on marching water, under sail, beyond the range of oars . . .

  He pulled his sweep inboard and steadied himself with a hand on the main shrouds, glancing up at the bare masts, swaying gently with the sway of the Channel, as Lon rowed to the anchorage.

  Anse said “All right, Lon,” went forward and hauled the buoy in. There was almost no wind; the boat swung gently, head to the onshore swell, barely tightening the slack of the buoyed cable. Lon climbed over the washboards and made the flat’s painter fast to a thwart.

  Anse had not planned to give the boat a try-out until the following forenoon when they could expect the usual summer southwesterly. But as they sat there in a moment of silence before making a move to go ashore, the Channel began to stir and patch and darken under a land-breeze from the north. Anse grinned and began to take the lashings off the mainsail. He said, “Hell, let’s see . . . We can row her back if it dies ...”

  He watched while Lon and Alan ran up the old tanned jib and the bright new mainsail. Lon transferred the hitch of the mooring to the flat, and hoisted the foresail as Anse put the boat on a reach out toward the inner edge of the Rocks, more than two miles southeast.

  Anse laughed. The wind was the barest breeze, and fitful. He said, a little contemptuously, “Weather for yachts.” But excitement stirred in him. The excitement of having done it, of having resurrected this derelict hull and patched and rigged and painted it into a thing that sailed, as he had said he would. And there were other excitements . ..

  East of Frank Graham’s beach he gybed round, beckoned Alan aft, gave him the tiller, and sat beside him on the coping of the stern cuddy. The breeze had freshened slightly. It would die with darkness, but there was enough of it now to keep the boat footing steadily, even as she was headed, partly into the wind. Anse said, “Keep her off a little; we’ll take her up the Channel a bit.” He eased the sheets.

  But he said little. His instructions to Alan were in the hunch of a shoulder, the gesture of a hand. One of the elements in his excitement was that this was all Alan needed. This, and experience. The boy had the feel of it.

  There was something in this hour on the Channel that heightened momentarily in Anse his sense of power. This was a feeling he needed now. It was four weeks since his return. The sensation of that was dying out, was almost dead. If he stayed the fall, stayed the winter, Anse Gordon would be taken for granted, merely another person who lived on the Shore, like Dave Stiles, Alec Neill, Frank Graham, Lon Katen ... absorbed by the Shore itself.

  He grunted. He had been plagued lately, thinking of that . . . the dull . . . the commonplace . . . He had been plagued by impulse. To say his say, or have it said; to break the shell round the Marshalls, round the McKees, and look at the wreckage, and go . . .

  That was the temptation. But there was that other thing, that further ambition . . . Alan was still casual, still friendly, a neighbour’s son. Interested in what you were doing, for the sake of the friendliness and the fun he could have, sometimes, in doing it with you. But never the dropped word to tell you he would welcome, if not the public knowledge, the personal understanding ...

  Anse was cunning. Given that understanding, the rest would come. But he could not bring himself to take the risk of a personal approach. Not yet.

  The nearest he had come to it, to the necessary resolution, was after a drink or two in Katens’ kitchen. Lately he had been going to the bottle oftener than usual. But in the end he had always counselled himself to patience, the need to wait.

  Now, tonight, for reasons no more definite than the slight lurch of a boat on gently swaying water, a hand on a tiller, an eye on the luff of a mainsail . . . Well, if the time were to come at all . . . he could feel the time approach . . .

  Alan rowed the flat the hundred fathoms in from the anchorage with Anse and Lon squatted aft. They hauled the small boat up on the Channel side of the beach and turned to walk home by way of the neck and the pastures.

  He considered lightly a curious thing. Everything he had learned on the water with Richard, years ago, was still there. It wasn’t much, perhaps . . . And he knew that an hour or two in a light breeze in the company of knowledgeable men had little relation to the reflexive readiness you would have to develop, a second nature, if you wanted to handle yourself in different kinds of weather, in all kind of boats. But, despite the tiredness of his mind, despite his growing dislike for Anse, he felt something for the boat and the water; a liking, a kind of aptitude, akin to what he had felt the first time Grant had let him run the carriage up to the whirling saw.

  His thought drifted. Anse was talking. “Y’know, they still make a go of it, over on the Island side and through the channels, on the Atlantic shore. With a boat this size, put an engine in her — oh, eight, ten horse-power—a man could try the Channel again. Or go through and live in a hut, summers, on the Atlantic side . . .”

  Anse was talking gently, not directly to either, but the words wakened in Alan’s mind the old nagging sense of something at the back of memory, waiting for recall. It came to him, finally, with a sense of tingling shock: Grant’s words, in the kitchen on a winter evening years ago ... If a fellow had a portable mill, a diesel outfit, he could set up in there, a place like that . . .

  As he turned to go up through The Place, Anse halted.

  “Not coming down?”

  “Later, maybe,” Alan said. “I’ve got to call in home first.”

  As usual he had been going down to Katen’s a couple of nights a week, to keep up the pattern of the usual and to keep his contact with Buff. Buff’s nightly exposure to the atmosphere of Anse Gordon and Lon Katen together was something he did not like. Buff and he could create a climate of their own.

  But tonight he was not going to Felix Katen’s in company with Anse Gordon. There was something he wanted first. The sight of Renie, Grant, Margaret. The smell of the kitchen. The sound of the clock ticking in The Room. The feel of home.

  13

  High summer lay along the Channel Shore. Still early August, but a ripeness coloured the daylight, a thin invisible smoke; and at night the shadows of hills came earlier down, flowing into evening and. warm darkness, touched by the faint chill of the sea.

  Dust rose in the wake of cars and hung in wavering veils and settled, a fine tan film, dimming the yellow blaze of ragweed in the gutters and in pastures by the road.

  Haying was nearly done. The fields were a shaven yellowish grey, green-speckled, patched variously by the darker shades of oats and root crops. Back of the shore, in the cuttings, the brush and tops of last year’s cut were brownish red, and through the skeleton branches of earlier chopping, young raspberry canes wove their lush low canopy of leaves.

  Grant walked slowly out of the mill yard and down the hauling- road to the highway. Adam Falt should be along soon; he would get a ride home with Adam.

  He had gone to the yard simply to look around, checking on things, as he usually did two or three times a week when the mill was idle — to keep an eye on the place. He was walking today because Renie had taken the car to Morgan’s Harbour; he refused to put a truck on the road to save a three-and-a-half-mile walk.

  No hurry, anyway. He hunched on the bank of the road and rolled a smoke. It was curious, but in these last few days, since his talk with Josie Gordon, his mind had drifted in a kind of sorrowful serenity. This in itself was a puzzling thing. It would have been understandable, he thought, if Josie’s words had multiplied the torment. This was not so. Except for isolated moments when fear or anger caught him, or that strange tingling remorse, he had been more at ease in these last few days than at any time in monthsFar more a
t ease than during those years between Dieppe and Hitler’s fall ... A thought came to him unbidden as his mind moved to that time of waiting, when every phone call and every telegram had chilled his flesh with fear. If Alan had not come back . . . There would be no doubts now, no fear, no searching of the future. He shook the grim thought away with black contempt. No doubts and no fears, only an aching emptiness, a sharing of death.

  Adam Falt slowed and stopped. As Grant settled in the seat beside him, Adam said, “Hot . . . You’re not back t’work yet, eh?”

  Grant shook his head. “No; Sam and Wilmots’ve still got some hay to make. And Lon Katen, at Gordons’ . . . Not much use starting before the Holiday. We’ll get going next week, I guess.”

  Adam nodded. He said thoughtfully, “Gordons’,” and then, curiously, “What d’you think that fellow’s got in his mind? Stay here? ... I s’pose nobody knows.”

  Grant laughed, faint derision in his voice. “Did anybody, ever? Even Anse?”

  Adam said, “No, I guess not. All you could count on was some kind of devilment. Well...”

  He dropped it, his voice on the “Well . . .” drifting into a kind of resigned finality, recognition that there were things and people nothing could be done about.

  Adam had spoken naturally, Grant thought. Once he himself had mentioned the Gordons, it would have been obvious, an avoidance, if Adam hadn’t come up with a question, a speculation about Anse. And Adam’s way of dealing with that small situation was the way of the Shore. Concerned with his own apprehensions, Grant hadn’t thought much about that, the rough tact, the common consideration . . . The thought of this now blended with the humility he felt.

  The car rounded Gordons’ turn. Hay lay bundled in the house field, but the rack stood by the barn, its shafts down. Gone to the beach again, Grant supposed — Anse and Lon Katen and Alan.

  Thinking this, he felt again the flush of involuntary anger. Natural enough for Alan to help out with Josie’s hay. Grant had suggested it himself, on the pretext that it would hurry the job, get Lon and Buff free earlier and perhaps make it possible to get back to sawing a day or two sooner than otherwise. But why he should follow them round to the beach, the boat. . .