Adam stopped by Grant’s gate. He said, “Thanks, Adam; so long, now,” and turned in as the car pulled away.
Margaret lay on the veranda swing, reading. She rose and went into the house as Grant came up the steps. She said indifferently, “Renie’s not back yet; I’ll start getting supper.” Their glances crossed for a fraction of a second and slipped away in a curious conscious avoidance.
Some part of every day, it seemed, Anse must spend aboard the boat. Always there was a piece of gear to be replaced or some small repair job that served to justify a journey to the beach. He had shaped new rowlocks and nailed them to the washboards, shaved new thole-pins, fitted loops under the washboards to secure the old sweeps which would never be used except to work the boat through the inlet mouth.
This afternoon he and Lon were replacing with metal pulleys the wooden blocks Stewart Gordon had once used to take his running rigging. Alan was working aft, fitting into the cuddy a sliding panel of thin pine. Something close to childishness in some of the things they were doing, he thought. There had been a fascination in watching Anse take this abandoned hull and convert it into a thing of grace and life. Despite what the Shore might think and say of waste time and useless effort, that had been worth while, a novel, original thing. But now Anse was going a bit beyond that. Puttering. There was something—”forced” was the word Alan thought of — something forced in the trivial excuses Anse found to take him to the boat.
He had been drawn into this, himself, with increasing reluctance. But he was handy with his hands, a craftsman. If Anse asked you to do something, as any neighbour might, how could you refuse? How could you avoid it without making a point of avoidance?
He slid the panel back and forth, clicked into its staple the small brass hook that secured it, and turned on the thwart to glance ashore. No wind stirred; the floats of Alec Neill’s salmon net scarcely moved; the Channel was dark fluent glass, barely breathing in a slight long-drawn suggestion of a swell, moving in, unrippled, to lip the beach without breaking and almost without sound.
He saw that Alec was limping down the hump of the beach with Richard McKee. Richard had hauled his herring nets but had been lending Alec a hand with the salmon. He reflected that it must be past supper-time. Alec was about to make his evening trip to the net. Time, he thought with impatience, to be getting ashore. Anse was speaking.
“. . . don’t trim quite right. Need more rocks into her, for’ard. . . . Come on, Lon . ..”
Anse slid overboard into the flat. “Just hoist the mainsail, see how things run, Alan, will you? Be back in a minute or two.”
Part of the peculiar picture, Alan thought. Ballast-rocks for ballast, when the boat, on the Holiday, would be ballasted with people .. . and that off-hand assumption, like giving orders.
He pulled the sail up, heaving on the halyards with arms and body, made sure that everything ran freely through the blocks, and let the canvas down and brailed it and repeated this for foresail and jib. He could hear the sound of oars in the flat’s rowlocks, and then voices from the shore and the faint sound of stones being piled in the bottom of the flat. After a little he turned and saw that Anse was rowing back alone. Lon had squatted on his heels, talking to Richard and Alec.
Anse came alongside and tossed the smooth stones aboard. He climbed into the boat and stood on the ballast, an arm hooked round the foremast. For a moment, frowning, he watched the Islands. Idle on the main thwart, Alan was transfixed with a sharp discomfort, a sense of time in precarious balance. He had a feeling . . . Anse was on the point of speech, on the verge of words for which there could be no reply ... At length Anse made an indistinguishable sound as though touched by some obscure anger. He turned abruptly, and edged overside into the stern of the flat. He said shortly, “All right. We’ll go ashore. You row her in.”
As they slid in toward the beach on the almost imperceptible swell, Alan was touched by memory. A distant summer, and the row in from the nets with Richard. Richard had always let him do the rowing; he remembered now the feel of booted heels, slipping through slithering fish to find a brace against the timbers. And how when the southwesterly was up Richard would lean forward from his seat on the after thwart as they neared the beach, and put his hands on the oars and help him square away for a landing.
He had a feeling in which anger and fear and a sorrowful desperation met and blended, and which he told himself was simply a sick imagining. This was, that Anse Gordon was staging now, for Richard and Alec, a scene of casual relationship.
14
By two o’clock in the afternoon of the second Saturday in August the Holiday had begun. Most people from up and down the Shore left their cars and trucks at Grant Marshall’s or down Curries’ road at Rob’s Yard, and walked across the neck to the grounds. Others drove down Alec Neill’s road to the shore, following the practice of long ago when half a dozen boats had been berthed at landings in the inlet. For families from the school- house road and places other than The Head, the row across was part of the day, but now only Alec and Richard kept boats there. Bill Graham and Dan were rowing these back and forth, ferrying newcomers round the tide-covered clam-beds to the beach.
As Grant crossed his pasture with Renie they could hear shouts of laughter and see the colour of Sunday dresses through the fringe of spruce around the picnic grounds. One of the row-boats moved out from the near shore, loaded with Wilmots. Dan was at the oars.
Renie said, “It’s nice, you know. Isn’t it?”
She was walking slightly ahead. Her voice called Grant’s mind back from aimless speculation. There she was, moving ahead of him, in white shirt and black slacks, sure-footed on the path. He had a moment of insight: these last weeks of preoccupation and silence had been an injustice to Renie. His mind flashed to another time when he had barred her away from the things that filled his thought. That time had ended. Excitement stirred . . .
Excitement ... the word was too strong. It was more a sense of expectancy, tingling and provocative. Accept it and wait. In the meantime there was Renie. He stepped up beside her, closing his fingers briefly round her upper arm.
“Yes, it is nice,” he said reflectively. “This picnic’s been going on for eighty years or more.” “What?”
Grant’s brief laugh acknowledged the surprise in Renie’s voice. Surprise, not at the continuity of a common festival, but at Grant’s knowledge of this and interest in it.
“So Bill Graham says. He dug it out of Frank. Somebody—a man named Macnab—started holding a picnic here every year when school closed for the summer. A teacher, Macnab was. Frank would’ve gone to school to him, I s’pose. It started that way, then sort of grew to take in anybody that wanted to come, and finally got shoved over into August . . . Bill gets a kick out of things like that. When he was here years ago, a kid, he used to talk about this place, ours. It was in the Graham family once, you know. Fanny’s Farm. That kind of thing . . .”
Renie said, “Because his father moved away. That’s all. You don’t think of roots when they’re under your feet.”
“That’s right, I s’pose.” Renie’s easy-going mind was sharp. He had always known this, but it never ceased to please him. He walked on beside her, letting the casual intimacy have its way. His mind moved lightly on Bill Graham and Bill’s occasional interest in the past.
The past, beyond his own memory, was something he did not much consider. There had been a time when early memory . . . a voice, another voice, and green plush in gaslight . . . had woven round him a consciousness, tantalizing and contradictory; a web of possession, from which he had escaped, and a veil of doubt, of unsatisfied wonder ... The web he had smashed himself. The wonder had been satisfied, in a curious hour on the beach, by Richard McKee . . . alders back of the school-house, herring in William Freeman’s mushrat traps . . . and young Harve . . .
In continuity, when it didn’t trap you, there was something, a warmth, that peop
le like Bill Graham searched the past for, taking an obscure and private pride in their knowledge of it. Something akin to the thing Richard had given him, talking, years ago, beside a load of eel-grass ...
Thinking of Bill, his mind played with that evening when he had sat by Hugh Currie’s back steps, listening to old Hugh talk of Rob Currie and Fanny Graham ... He and young Bill, going on into the clearing, the beginnings of The Place, and Anna coming down to talk . . . and Uncle James . . . Far away in time, but clear now in memory when you thought of it. Action . . . action had kept these images far from the surface of his mind, except as something to be acknowledged and stored in a shadowy attic rarely entered. And yet now he could see the flushed pleasure in Anna’s face, feel again, though almost impersonally, as if for a moment he looked back through the mind of someone else, the thrill of her observed movement, the full-breasted supple body on the balsam stump . . . the rising fear at the sound of James Marshall’s footsteps on the twigs of the path.
It seemed to Grant, and the realization puzzled him, that somewhere in these images there was a message for him, a clarification. Woven into the sorrowful serenity . . . His mind found an ancient cliché: It’ll all be the same in a hundred years. But there was something more than that, something that eluded him.
Expectancy . . . This was in some way concerned with the way in which his mind had turned-consciously in these last few days, but how long had it been turning thus in the shadowy reaches of the unrealized?—to the long, the unknown past; and reawakened as something you could observe and feel, a part of the living scene rather than something dim and done with, personally hoarded and hidden, the nearer past of his own youth, the awakening and the pain.
There was something too that Bill Graham had said, recently, that nagged at his mind. Something he had only half listened to, his thoughts concerned with other things. This too was part of the expectancy. In time it would come to him.
He circled Renie’s arm with his fingers again, briefly, as they climbed the incline of the inner beach to the picnic grounds. The Head’s younger married women were already laying white oilcloth on plank tables. He heard Lola Marshall’s casual voice, “Let’s get it done; there’s a sail coming; we won’t get a chance when they start to eat.” The older women, Stella Graham, Christine Currie, Eva McKee, Jane Marshall, were relieved of work today. They rustled about, a matriarchal reception committee, to welcome people from up and down the Shore, uttering small cries as they embraced or shook hands with visitors home from the States, smiling down at children whose first names were confused in their minds.
Along the beach, squatting with their backs to the grounds, middle- aged and older men rested in the sun, a little uncomfortable in Sunday suits on a Saturday. Unmarried men, and boys and girls, had gathered in two groups, constantly changing, one at the eastern edge of the grounds where the boys were rigging a swing, the other up the beach a little, toward Hugh Currie’s disused fish hut. Bill Graham and Buff Katen had built a stone hearth there. Buff had hung his jacket on a small spruce, He was bending now to strap the tops of hip-length rubber boots round his thighs.
Grant stopped to speak to Frank Graham and Renie went on toward the tables. Bill came toward her from the direction of the swing, dusting off his hands.
More than eighty years, Grant had said. She was caught up for a moment by a sense of life and movement all around her, blending with things that happened long ago.
There had been a near-drowning once, in the time of the sailboat races. Renie remembered hearing about that even across the Channel at Princeport. The Currie Head Holiday was something known . . . For a moment she was lifted out of the present, seeing this day in the time of the Shore’s prosperity ... A hundred and fifty, two hundred people, gathered by boat and buggy, on horseback and on foot . . . The boats of the mackerel fleet, kept in gear after the spring run was over, for just this day . . . Joe Currie’s green whale-boat, Fritz McKee’s white craft with the knockabout bow, Anselm Gordon’s ancient sloop . . . The flagged keg five miles southwest, on a bearing opposite the Upper Islands . . . the beat out to the mark and the run home off the wind . . . The boats loaded with children, youngsters filled with a kind of dour pride in the leathery men who squatted aft, tiller under elbow . . . Other youngsters, from the back roads, shivering a little in the bluster of wind, ducking in fright under a gybing boom, feeling the living lift and surge of an element strange to their habit and their blood. Ashore, women with aprons over satin dresses . . . Bread and butter, leopard cake, chocolate cake, sponge cake, frosted cake studded with red, yellow and green sugar-pellets, Washington pie dusted with pulverized sugar, with a filling of strawberry preserves, fresh blueberries picked from the barrens north of Findlay’s Bridge . . . Boys on the clam-beds, their pant legs rolled to the crotch, plying manure-forks . . .
If a person could be given the eye to see . . . One day out of each year would be enough, back to the beginning . . . The Holiday or a Sunday service or a church supper around Christmas time. Given that sort of clairvoyance you could see the story of the Shore. And yet, what differed, across a hundred and fifty years? Horses and saddles, once; buggies later; and now flivvers, jalopies. Hand-made leather boots and homespun, then. Tweed now, from the mail-order houses. And always faces. Faces that didn’t change, really, though worn by different people in different generations . . .
Renie started, then realized that the whole of her small dream had taken no time at all. Bill hadn’t even noticed her preoccupation. He was looking over his shoulder at Grant, moving back to follow him. She heard Frank Graham’s voice expressing good- naturedly his opinion of picnics.
“Not an honest mouthful in the lot. It’s enough to turn you inside out. Cake and clams . . .”
Bill turned to grin back at her.
Frank was standing on turf matted with brown spruce needles under the fringe of trees that edged the grounds, looking across the slope of the Channel beach.
“He’s got her laying where the whale-boats used to anchor . . . in the open, but good ground. Bottom’s soft around east of the Head. Never gets rough from the sou’-west, though, and the Rocks breaks the easterlies. Stewart and me fished together, the two years he sailed that boat. Everybody else had the sense to quit. The last good run was in nineteen-eight. We kept after them, Alec and Richard, Hugh, some of the rest, till, oh, ‘sixteen, ‘seventeen. You’d get enough to salt down maybe a half-barrel. Couple’ve dozen a day, no more. Stewart wouldn’t believe they was through. Built her in the spring of ‘sixteen. Well, I couldn’t see him go it alone. We never landed a damn fish in two years. Not one. It finished even Stewart. He hauled her up to the barn . . .”
The wind by this time had settled into the steady pulsing blow of summer afternoons, a sailing breeze. The Channel marched deliberately against the beach, wave following wave in deceptively gentle rhythm, curling and crumbling on loose smooth stone and flat sand. There was a continual splash, a liquid ringing in the sound as it came to the ears of Grant and Frank and Bill, standing on the level selvage of the Head, under old and twisted spruce.
Grant noticed, as a flat pulled away from the anchored sailboat, that there was a good deal of authority in this marching water. It was taking oarsmanship to straighten the swaying flat away for the beach. He saw that the one at the oars was Alan.
This was no surprise. None the less it startled Grant to see him rowing ashore from Anse Gordon’s boat, with Anse squatted in the stern and Lon Katen hunched in the bow. For a moment the familiar controlled anger flushed through him, the alienation, the black tormenting doubt . . .
Lon Katen splashed into the wash at the shore’s edge as the flat touched. They came up the slope of the beach, heavy-footed in rubber boots over smooth stone.
Lon grunted “Frank, Grant,” as they went on into the grounds. Anse had a wordless half-sneer for them all. Alan said, “Hi, Bill,” and turned his head as he passed to grin at Grant and Frank. Gran
t’s moment of anger faded. He was feeling the quiet expectancy again, ruling his nerves. He thought, or fancied, he could see something secret in Alan’s look, something regretful, tense and private and almost amused.
In the grounds a dozen youngsters gathered round Anse and Lon and Alan, waiting, their chatter stilled.
Frank said, “Used to be quite a thing. The back road kids . . . half scared to put a foot in a sailboat, but crazy to try it. I remember ...”
Grant noted idly the youngsters waiting for the word of invitation or selection—Lol Kinsman’s boy and girl, Beryl and Jack; one of the Lisles from up Leeds way; Harry Neill’s young Alec, home visiting his grandfather; Hester Falt, Adam’s grand-daughter, from The Bridge; Stan Currie’s young Duncan ... As usual, holding himself aloof and alone, Skimp Wilmot.
Anse was talking, his manner and voice combining in a controlled careless swagger. “We’ll make a couple of trips, out to somewhere near where the old mark was, and back. Women and kids first trip . . .” He began naming them over. “It’ll take three trips in the flat, anyway, to get you all aboard. Alan, you start with the young ones, and I’ll go out with you and come back for the women. I don’t trust Lon with no one.”Anse grinned, and Grant marvelled at the ease with which that face, lined with half a century of self-will, could smooth itself into a laughing mask of innocence.
The boys and girls were gathering round Alan, all but Skimp Wilmot. Even in that moment, before Alan spoke, Grant began to feel the small heart’s-thunder of revelation. The swing . . . the trailing rope . . . the laughter in Anna’s face ... the half-impatient lilt of her voice . . .
The Channel Shore Page 45