The Channel Shore

by Charles Bruce

  Hey, Tarsh! Make yourself useful, kid. Give us a hand!

  Alan shooed the youngsters toward the landing with a gesture. He turned casually. He called, “Hurry up, Skimp. What you waiting for?” and batted Skimp Wilmot lightly on the back of the head as the kid limped past him toward the flat.

  Margaret had persuaded Renie out of the house with Grant and remained behind to pack a basket of pies and follow. She waited, sitting quietly in the kitchen, the packed basket on the table, until they had time to cross the pastures and turn down Currie’s road. She picked up the pies then and closed the kitchen door behind her.

  With the action of walking, thought began to flow. She was looking forward to this afternoon almost with dread. The laughter, the conviviality, the necessity of joining in, of thinking up banter, of sitting in an inverted oxbow, face to face with Syd Kinsman or Bun Laird . . . Letting yourself be swung between two swaying trees, with boys at the ropes putting in a jerk, now and then, and expected to squeal when they did it . . . Walking arm in arm on the beach with Beulah or Grace Freeman or some cousin or other from Leeds or The Bridge . . . Trying to find words, words that sounded natural . . . While all the while, all you wanted to do was work and wait.

  There was no real sense of uncertainty in Margarets mind. Ever since she had talked with Richard she had been able to imagine as something real and possible the shape of the future she lived for. But now and then, in spite of the patience she had begun to learn, in spite of the curious sense of peace she had experienced listening to Josie Gordon, in spite of the exultant reassurance she had felt in Alan’s violence on Gordon’s path . . . Now and then in spite of this it angered her that what she wanted must be brought about by the slow steps of time, of life unfolding in an unhurried slowly-changing pattern of days and nights and common acts and ordinary words. What she hoped for, perversely, then, was the swift stroke of drama—to tear away this web of wrongs half-forgotten and sacrifice cherished in illusion. What ought to be—she started at recognition of the wish that was in her: the thought that freedom would be whole, complete and fully satisfying, only if it came through one person, through Alan, through Alan’s act, voluntary, complete and final.

  She felt at this a flush of shame, remembering the truth that she herself had recognized. There was no reasoned course that he or she could take to sudden freedom without accepting the responsibility of betrayal.

  Well . . . When would the waiting end? Margaret damned herself for the coloured detail of imagination and desire her mind achieved.

  She walked on, across the bridge over the little branch of Graham’s Brook that Grant had dammed, and on across the neck and up the inlet beach, to turn in at the grounds.

  Lola Marshall, distributing knives and forks along white oilcloth, said cheerfully, “Hello, Marg’ret; time you got here.” Margaret smiled shyly. Her glance ran over the older women who, after the early fluster of welcome and reunion, had settled down to talk on benches in the shade, and the six or seven others who were setting tables or waiting to be taken out to the boat.

  The girls of her own age were grouped round the swing, waiting their turn, and laughing at the ones already aloft, or had paired off to sit in the sun or roam the beach.

  From the corner of her eye she saw Buff plod up from the inlet shore, his rubber boots glistening, a pail of clams in one hand. She heard the small rumble of clams as he dumped them into the pot over the fire. Already a group of loungers from down-shore, Mars Lake and The Pond, people she recognized only by sight, were hanging around the fire waiting to scoop opened clams from the steaming brew. If she strolled up that way Buff would detach himself; they would wander up the beach, away from this clamour of people who laughed at nothing, who had nothing on their minds but cake and clams and talk; who could enjoy these things, take pleasure in the feel of wind and sun, the sound of the sea.

  The idea of such an escape was pleasant. Escape from the necessity of attention, politeness, banter, when your mind needed freedom to deal with its own concerns. She was suddenly conscious that someone had been speaking to her. She looked up, flustered. “What?” Sam Freeman’s wife laughed. “Hand me the bread knife behind you, will you, Marg’ret? ... If it’s a nice dream, tell me.” Margaret flushed, angry with herself. She forced the lightness of a laugh, a shaken head: “Just half-asleep, for some reason.”

  Mrs. Freeman said, casually provocative: “He’s not worth losing your night’s sleep over, whoever he is.”

  Margaret thought, “God—I ought to get out of this.” But told herself at once she was being morbidly irritable. She continued, mechanically, slicing pie. Momentary escape, wandering the beach, was not enough.

  Through the fringe of spruce she could see a flat-load of kids, with Alan rowing, tossing rhythmically as it neared the sailboat. Snatches of talk were blown back across the water, and the faint small rattle of shipped oars . . .

  Despite the uneasiness he could not help, now, at the look and voice of Anse Gordon, Alan felt a swift excitement, the lift of a new thing, as the boat sliced to windward. Anse had picked a bearing, the far white speck of the Fisherman’s Church on Little Upper, and beckoned him aft to the tiller. There was in this, perhaps, something of the thing he feared and for which he had no defence. Identification. A subtle, public establishment of something that linked him through the boat to Anse. But this for the moment was almost lost in the feel of the thing itself, the lift and scend of the hull, the freshness of wet wind, the fluent curve of sailcloth, the march of rolling water. All alive, all becoming part of him in the pull of the tiller along his forearm, alive in his fingers. . .

  It was impossible not to feel this. Impossible not to find a sparkling pleasure in the wonderment of children, the foolish engaging chatter of women ... of all these who lived within sight of salt water but knew nothing of its ways. He caught a glimpse of Hat Wilmot’s puzzled face. Most of the older women had declined the offer of a sail, but Hat wouldn’t consider herself in the elderly class, he supposed. She was studying the boat’s rigging, the drawing sails. Through the screen of sound, the liquid thump and splash of water, the chatter of children, Hat’s questioning voice, to Anse: “You mean, that’s all there is to it? The wind pushes it along?” Alan grinned. It was a story he would never tell. No one would believe.

  Pleasant, in moments caught from studying the mark, studying the draw of jib and foresail and mainsail, to watch the faces of boys and girls. Boys and girls who had perhaps rowed around the inlet in Alec Neill’s flat, but who were feeling now for the first time the lift and sway of the Channel, hearing the faint creak of wood and wind-strained stays, sensing under sail the buoyancy of moving water that stretched under cloud and sun to the coast of Spain.

  They were growing up, these, in a generation in which swift travel was the usual thing. Travel by truck and car, up and down the road, to Copeland or The Harbour—journeys that thirty years ago, before the Model-T had altered living, would have been unusual—such travel was no longer novel now. What was new and strange was this return for a day to a vanished commonplace. Alan could see it in the faces of even the most insensitive, as white specks on the blue shapes of the Islands grew into small white blocks of houses, set in green and brown squares between the low white line of surf and the high shawl of woods. He could hear it in the excitement of voices, see it in the abrupt movement of young bodies, turning to watch the home shore recede . . .

  He had been holding the boat on her course, a close reach to mid-Channel, for the best part of an hour when Anse began to edge his way along the ballast. He would put her over for a hitch up the Channel and square away for the run home, Alan supposed. Alan gave up the tiller and crouched with a hand in readiness on the main-sheet.

  He was not sure of the intention until the thing was done. Anse let the boat fall off until her roll increased, then brought her sharply up. Spray drenched Hat Wilmot and Lola Marshall and Sarah Laird. Once more Anse smacked he
r into it before he put her over; once more spray fell in a splashing torrent on squealing women . . .

  Even if they had known it was deliberate, the women would have considered it nothing more than a rough joke, Alan supposed. But he had seen the look in Anse’s eyes, the faint sneering grin; and knew that behind the eyes was not simple laughter but a queer contemptuous malice, impulsive and yet deliberate.

  He knew, too, that Anse was aware of his observation. His own lips curved as though he shared a private dark amusement.

  Some of the hungrier picnickers had begun to settle at the tables. The boat, Margaret saw, was shaking out the wind as she came up to her mooring, completing the first trip.

  On the hump of the beach she noticed Richard McKee, in overalls and rubber boots. He turned from watching the boat, or the weather, or whatever it was Richard watched, and found himself a squatting-place on the stones. Margaret felt a flicker of warm amusement. It was like Richard to get here late, and not to bother with Sunday clothes, and to be alone. In a minute or two she would stroll out and sit on her feet for a while beside him. Of all this crowd here, he was the only one who knew; and her need today, she realized now, was simply that: companionship with someone you didn’t have to play a part for, someone who knew and who did not condemn.

  Grant had let the picnic go on around him, paying no heed at all, holding his mind free and still to accept the tide of light.

  Anna . . . Anna’s careless confidence, Anna’s casual good nature and light-heartedness . . . alive again in Alan.

  He remembered now what it was ... the words Bill Graham had said, the words that lurked in memory: Nobody’s a copy of his father ... All kinds of things get scribbled in, or edited out . . . You can’t figure inheritance on a slide rule . . .

  Absently, he saw Lon Katen row ashore with one load of passengers and go back with another. He straightened, realizing that to anyone who might have glanced his way in the last hour he must have seemed a curious figure, lounging alone and silent against a spruce or wandering on the beach. He noticed Richard then, sitting alone on the stones, and walked across to sprawl beside him.

  Richard said, “Well, Grant; nice day.” The old man had taken a jack-knife from his pocket and was whittling thin shavings from a piece of broken lath he had found among the stones.

  Grant watched the flat, doing its slow step-dance on rolling water, again inward-bound from the boat. Anse was at the oars.

  Incredible that only an hour or two ago he should have watched the moving flat in anger . . .

  An image of Alan, born of the memory of Anna, lighted by words unheeded and now remembered . . . This was reality. Strange that a memory so old and small, that words so common ... Or was it merely that these were the mind’s clues, the opening out of an inner atmosphere of light, the light he had glimpsed, listening to Josie Gordon-the light that must have risen eventually, under any circumstances, to end the darkness of his fear?

  There was something else . . .

  Alan and Margaret.

  It was something he had to think about.

  He leaned on an elbow, shielding a match from the wind, and glanced toward the grounds, his eyes seeking Margaret.

  Margaret turned to see what further chore she could do at the tables. Someone had persuaded Renie and Edith Kinsman to make a pair on the swing while they waited for Anse. The boys on the ropes were driving the oxbow a little higher than usual. She could hear Ediths laugh as it rose, and the faint creak of chain, and see the slow short arc of the spruce tops swaying to the weight of the swing.

  There was no hurry now. At any moment she could go to Richard. She looked back, then, and felt her heart thump with surprise. Grant was sprawled in the spot she had promised herself. He was half turned toward the grounds, talking to Richard and lighting his pipe while he leaned on an elbow. As she looked, he lifted his head and his glance caught hers.

  For a moment their glances brushed, the embarrassed self- conscious stares of strangers when eyes lock by chance. The look they had been avoiding for days and weeks . . .

  As Grant felt the beginning of that half-antagonistic, half-polite withdrawal, he knew what he would do. Before his mind had dealt with the matter he had sprawled beside Richard to think about, it had reached an answer. Communication. He would ask Margaret for the truth. Not now, but when chance offered. In token of faith, of unconscious promise, he smiled. He saw withdrawal crumble, in the slight forward thrust of her body, the parting of her lips.

  It was a strange thing, but now that knowledge filled his mind, now that doubt of Alan was like the memory of delirium, the other thing was almost academic. He did not yet believe Josie

  Gordon’s surmise. But if it were true ... if it were true ... He could look at this possibility with no trace of the dread the mere thought of it had wakened in him. If it were true then Alan could be his son no longer. The thing was ended, the long relationship cut—as surely as if the boy had turned in fealty to Anse Gordon.

  The long relationship and the long threat. This was something he had lived with throughout Alan’s lifetime and more than half his own—the most vital thing he had ever known. And yet now, considering this, he had a feeling of irrelevancy. In the face of his faith in Alan’s stature as a man, he could find in nothing else, not even fatherhood itself, a sense of urgency.

  On his way down to the landing, Anse halted and spoke to Richard and Grant.

  “Well, this trip we’re taking men.”

  Richard, meditatively chewing a shaving, said idly, “Think I’ll stay ashore, Anse.”

  Anse looked down at Grant, sardonic and questioning. Grant met the look. Now for the first time he could consider Anse Gordon with no thought of caution, no thought for the necessity of maintaining a careful friendliness. His stare was brief and cold and indifferent. He turned away and reached for one of Richard’s shavings.

  Anse wheeled and went down to the landing.

  Richard watched the loaded flat lurch out to the sailboat and realized that his only interest in all this was curiosity on a point of craftsmanship. He said, half to himself, “. . . stay ashore. But I want to see how those sails set.”

  That was all. He could remember the days when he and Frank Graham and Hugh Currie had haunted this beach as children, while their fathers—Fritz, Old Frank, Joe Currie-loaded their whale-boats and sailed off on the spring trip to L’Ardoise. And later days when he and Fritz had fished the Channel here, and after that, he and Hugh.

  Picnics . . . There was one day, the day old Fritz had said he was through running an excursion boat for the back road crowd. Richard had taken the whale-boat out, with Hugh . . . That was the day his eyes had first fallen on Eva Laidlaw. Eva, down from Morgan’s Harbour in tight-waisted black satin with close-set cloth- covered buttons down the front of her, serene and assured on the thwart, braced against the foremast, swaying slightly against him in the lurch of sea . . . The images were clear and clean; old, and as new as present experience. He had no wish, Richard found, to add to those images of days long gone an hour or two in Anse Gordon’s sailboat.

  As the boat headed up he could not tell whether what he heard was the actual snap of canvas, audible over the slow wash of sea at the shore’s edge, or sound remembered . . . Richard sighed. Until he had put shears into Anse Gordon’s sailcloth he hadn’t even seen the cutting of a suit of sails in nearly thirty years. He watched now as Anse held his boat on the wind, feeling for some mark on the Islands. Everything seemed to draw.

  Grant had risen and walked off toward the fire. Richard rose and sauntered after him.

  The gaiety had gone out of it, Alan thought, as Anse brought the boat around for the run home to the anchorage. Anse had handled her himself on this second trip, squatted aft on the coping of the cuddy, saying nothing.

  Something, in fact, had seemed to hold them all silent—Frank and Dan and Bill, Lol Kinsman and Stan Currie, Buf
f Katen and Sam Freeman, and Clem Wilmot and Dave Stiles; and Renie and Edith Kinsman, the only women. He had watched for Margaret to come aboard, feeling the anticipation, the thing he always felt at sight of her, and then been glad she hadn’t.

  Constraint . . . Even Frank Graham said little, half-crouched on the main thwart, drumming his fingers on the washboards.

  Anse, Alan thought. The presence of Anse. Perhaps men like Frank and Sam and Lol resented the fact they were here on Anse Gordon’s sufferance and invitation. Perhaps now they sensed that while a careful tolerance was proper and necessary in their normal commerce with Anse, there was something undignified and subservient in being aboard his boat. As if they found themselves by some misjudgment publicly recognizing and abetting personal qualities they privately condemned.

  He had a sense of relief when Anse once more brought the boat up to her mooring. He leaned overside, holding the flat while Lon transferred the hawser’s loop to the pawl-post.

  With late afternoon the wind had dropped. Now it was six, or past it, and a hint of evening coloured everything. The Channel’s blue-green had darkened, its roll was longer and more leisurely, the sound of sea on gravel deliberate and long-drawn.

  . A relief to have it over with. As Lon Katen headed for the beach with the loaded flat the thought came to Alan that he was not going to be able to do this sort of thing much longer. The sound of Anse’s voice, in the old jibe about Vangie Murphy . . . talking of his plans, outside the Islands . . . the look in his eyes ... the words that did not come ...

  The rebellion in himself was something he couldn’t quite control.

  So far, forethought and patience . . . But those were reasonable virtues. What he was beginning to feel now was the surge of something that would not wait for thought.

  This was what he was thinking while Lon rowed the flat ashore and he and Anse brailed up the canvas.

  When Lon returned with the empty flat after rowing two loads ashore, Anse herded Frank and Sam and Dave Stiles into it. He said over his shoulder, “We better wait, Alan, you and me; and let Lon come back for us.”