“Yes. And you’ll be leaving us soon, going home for Christmas yourself, no doubt.” He gets up and moves away from the stove, closing the door, and crosses the floor to stand by her desk. He is very tall, one of the few men Kit has stood beside who makes her feel small. Lamplight mingles with the first gray light of morning leaking through the windows, light enough to see the clean strong lines of Ben Porter’s cheekbones and jaw, his large nose, his full, warm mouth. He lifts his cap. “Pleased to make your acquaintance while you’re still here, Miss Saunders.”
“I – thank you. Yes, I’ll be here for another fortnight, till we finish up lessons and have the Christmas pageant, and then I’ll go back to Missing Point for Christmas and New Year’s.”
“That’s a shame,” he says, then smiles. “I mean, it’s a shame for me. You’ll be glad to get back to your people for the holidays.”
Kit can think of nothing witty or charming to say, although he has charm enough for the both of them. “I think that fire will do fine,” Ben says. “I ’low some of the boys will be up here soon with more wood – that’s what we used to do in my day.”
“In your day!?” she echoes. “You sound like your schooldays were fifty years ago.” It’s a relief to laugh, though she’s sure it comes out as a nervous titter.
What does Kit Saunders know of men like Ben Porter, outside of books? He might as well be Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley for all the experience she has of a flesh-and-blood man, tall and handsome, a fisherman’s son gone away to university. All Kit knows of men is – well, there’s Joe Bishop. Infatuation, she calls that now – infatuation on her part; something else on his. Something she has no name for. Then there was Jacob John Russell: her word for that is dalliance. A brief dalliance, quickly ended. Now she needs a new word: romance, perhaps?
Even her words come from novels; that’s all she knows. She went from an outport schoolroom to an all-girls college and now to another outport schoolroom where she plays a different role: different, but equally chaste.
The next three mornings he’s there before she is, each time with a load of wood, waiting for her to open the door. His parents’ house is on the opposite end of the road from her boarding house, so there’s no passing each other on the way. He gets to the school, builds up the fire, and leaves before the first children arrive. She doesn’t even see him in full daylight till church on Sunday.
After church, he lingers to ask if he can walk her home. She asks about university, about the things he studies – he is getting a degree in History with the intention of going on to law school – and the people in his classes. She asks where the other young men come from, what kind of people they are.
“It’s not all men, you know. There’s a good few girls there, getting their B.A. degrees. A couple of years ago there was even a woman from Newfoundland.”
“From St. John’s, no doubt,” she says. Who but a wealthy St. John’s merchant would send a daughter to university?
“You should go,” he says. “I know what you’re like, you’ve got a good mind. You’d fit right in up there.”
“You know what I’m like? And how do you know that? You’ve only met me three times, and every time to build up the fire in my woodstove.” The words, spoken in as light and flirtatious a tone as she possesses, suddenly sound suggestive, as if she were hinting at something improper. Or perhaps it’s just his answering smile, the dimple in his right cheek, that makes her think so.
“I hear things,” he says. “I hear talk about the new schoolteacher, how smart she is, the grand fine books she reads to the youngsters.” Kit imagines the younger children, Sam, Tillie and Rachel prattling about school, telling tales about Teacher. She imagines Ben drawing the children out with questions, glancing away as he does so, trying not to seem too interested. Kit feels a blush creeping from her collar up to the brim of her hat, which she dips to hide her face.
Apart from filling the woodstove and walking home from church, the social life of Elliston offers few opportunities for courting. Young couples walk back and forth on the road on warmer evenings, but with winter closed in there’s little of that, and Kit wonders if it’s considered proper for the schoolteacher to engage in such mating rituals, anyway. In lieu of more romantic activities, Ben volunteers to help with the Christmas concert. He comes to the school in the afternoon as Kit rehearses with the students and helps keep them in line while they wait to go on with their songs and recitations. He hangs a piece of canvas and paints a backdrop, and builds a passable manger.
After the triumph of the concert, Kit packs her bags for home. Two weeks ago she could not have imagined being reluctant to leave Elliston for the holidays. Whatever mixed feelings she has about people back in Missing Point – her parents, Jacob John, Joe Bishop, even Triffie in a way – it is her home, the place her roots are planted. She will never live there again, but she’ll always go back there – and Triffie, whatever strange new religion she’s embraced, is still her second self, her other half. What could Elliston offer to compete with that?
Ben takes her bag down to the wharf and sees her off on the Ethie. “I’ll be gone to Nova Scotia when you get back.”
“Yes, and if you come home for the summer, I’ll be getting ready to go home again,” she says.
“Ships passing in the night. I’ll be sure to have my flags out when you pass by, though.”
“You could write me,” she suggests.
“I’m no great letter-writer,” he admits. “But I may send the odd postal.”
“You do that, then,” says Kit. “The odd postal. The odder the better. I’ll look for it.”
Triffie
Missing Point
January, 1908
My Dear Peony,
Just a postal to send on the Ethie when she sails tomorrow – long letter to follow. How short a time you were here, yet how great a gap your Absence leaves. New friends may come and go but none fills the Void left by an Old, True Friend who is Far Away. I sit at my little table tonight and wish I could cross the water and be with you. And if I caught a glimpse of a certain Mr. Darcy, that would at least satisfy my curiosity!
“He’s really nothing like Mr. Darcy,” Kit had insisted when she was home at Christmas. “A bit in looks perhaps. But not in character. Can you imagine Mr. Darcy building a manger for the school Christmas pageant?”
Of course Triffie couldn’t. This Ben Porter sounds like a perfectly nice, charming, helpful young man. Handsome, of course. Tall and dark, Kit has assured her. Her quick pen sketched a series of caricatures that left Triffie laughing, but Triffie can’t entirely erase the idea of Mr. Darcy from her mind. The thought that Kit has an admirer whom Trif has never seen, who is entirely outside their circle of acquaintance on the Point, fills Trif with the blackest envy. She offers this sin up to God in her prayers but never manages to dispel it completely.
Before Christmas, blond and smiling Brother Anderson said his goodbyes to Trif and the rest of the small flock of faithful Adventists left behind in Bay Roberts and the nearby harbours. He has gone back to America, to Battle Creek, that town humming with devout industry. It’s a mythical place in Trif’s mind, filled with golden corn-fed young men like Brother Anderson, and apple-cheeked blonde maidens like his fiancée Louisa, coupled off two by two like animals going into the ark: missionary preacher and teacher; missionary doctor and nurse.
But his departure does not spell the end of Trif’s newfound faith. Rather, with the American missionaries gone, she is stirred into action, keeping the little band of believers faithful by gathering them on Sabbath mornings, doing everything short of preaching sermons. A dozen times Uncle Albert has threatened to put her out of the house if she won’t give up her new religion and do some housework on Saturday. But Triffie has figured out by now he’s all talk; he’ll never be known as the man who turned his own niece out of doors to starve. Aunt Hepsy Snow, the only other soul on the Point who continues going to the Adventist meetings now that the missionaries have gone, is a valuab
le ally. She is Aunt Rachel’s first cousin by marriage, and is quick to defend her own and Triffie’s religion when others in the family criticize. Moreover, Aunt Hepsy has a horse and sleigh that she drives to meetings, picking Triffie up along the way.
Trif’s work week is reduced from six days to five, since Aunt Rachel won’t hear of her doing any housework on Sunday. On Fridays Triffie bakes a double batch of bread and cooks a big pot of something – pea soup or beans, usually – that will do for Saturday’s dinner. If it’s pea soup, she puts her own aside in a separate pot before adding salt pork for the rest of the family, though she can’t work out a way to get around frying things in lard. She turns over the Saturday jobs of blacking everyone’s Sunday boots and polishing the silver to Betty and Ruth, who are old enough now to take over those tasks, and moves her scrubbing day back to Friday. Trif won’t lift a finger from sundown Friday till sundown Saturday, but nobody in the house can fault her, for she works like a slave the rest of the week. Given that the blessed martyrs suffered and burned at the stake and the faithful remnant will suffer the same in the last days, Trif is hardly about to complain of a bit of extra housework.
Unlike the rest of the new Seventh-day Adventists, she hasn’t heeded the call to Come out of her, my people entirely. She tells her fellow believers it makes things easier on her at home if she continues to accompany her aunt and uncle and the children to Sunday services at the Church of England. She can still keep an eye on the youngsters during church, though she resigned her post as Sunday School teacher before the minister could relieve her of it. She tells herself she is like Namaan bowing in the house of Rimmon.
The truth is, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she weren’t in church Sunday morning. Church is where everyone goes. It’s one thing to stand bravely alone as part of God’s last-day remnant, but quite another to miss out on the one major social event of the week.
By the same token, she still sometimes goes to the Sunday night Salvation Meeting at the Army, now that Adventist preaching services on Sunday night have ended for the winter. She misses the singing and clapping and tambourines at the Citadel. She’s absolutely convinced of the end-time prophecies Brother Anderson showed her, and still reads Daniel and Revelation faithfully, trying to understand those beasts better – though she can never think of them now without hearing Jacob John’s voice in her head saying “Buckhorned goats and flying angels.” But she finds it hard to accept this one article of faith: that someone or something as vast as God can be confined in one particular room, can be the property of one group of people, and be absent everywhere else. Well, that and the business of not drinking tea. She has abandoned pork and bacon because the pig is plainly listed in Leviticus 11 as an unclean animal, but she can’t embrace the Adventist idea that a cup of tea is bad for the nerves.
If it weren’t for God, Triffie feels she’d have precious little to look forward to. Kit is off in Bonavista Bay, running her own school and falling in love. Joe Bishop has another teacher helping him out at the school, a young girl named Sylvia Morris from Notre Dame Bay who, despite her romantic name, is a very dull, small-minded girl with whom Triffie has been unable to strike up a friendship.
The schoolroom is closed to her now, the possibility of teaching children as remote as the chance of getting any more book-learning herself. From here on, Triffie determines, she will be self-educated. She continues on through Shakespeare, having reached minor works like Timon of Athens and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Joe Bishop still brings her novels from St. John’s to read before putting them in the hands of the schoolchildren, and she returns often to her favourite poets: Tennyson, Wordsworth, Blake. She’s also working her way slowly through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and with the help of the Adventist minister from St. John’s, who comes periodically to preach to the faithful few in Bay Roberts, she is reading the collected works of Mrs. Ellen White, the Adventist prophetess. Given how few hours of lamplight she has these winter evenings after the supper dishes are done and the dark draws in, it’s a busy reading schedule.
“How come you reads all them books?” Will asks one night. He is perched on a stool at the other end of Trif’s little writing desk, sharing her lamplight as he makes his painful way through a story in the Third Royal Reader.
“Because I like it. You can learn a lot from books,” Trif says. Of her three young cousins, Will is by far her favourite, but she has had no luck inspiring him with a love for books and learning. He is ten years old now, eager to put the schoolroom behind him. “Books can take you to foreign lands,” she adds, looking up from Idylls of the King.
“No they can’t,” Will says. “Ships can; books can’t.”
“In your imagination,” Trif says.
“I knows what you meant Trif, I’m not stunned. I just don’t say it works. Or it don’t work for me, anyway. I’m readin’ this story now about the feller on a ship going to China, but I ain’t going to China, I’m right here on the Point, sitting on my backside in your room, reading a book when I’d sooner be down on the beach or out in the woods.”
Trif laughs. “Anybody as clever with words as you are, Will Bradbury, ought to like books. It’s a sin you don’t, and I don’t know why, for you couldn’t ask for a better teacher than Mr. Bishop. Maybe when you’re older you’ll find out what you’ve missed, and take up reading when you’re an old man, too old to go fishing.”
“We’ll have to see about that.” Will’s tone clearly indicates he thinks it unlikely. After a moment more of squinting at the page he adds, without looking up, “You know what Jacob John says about you and your books?”
“Jacob John? As if I minds what he says!”
“He says if you took your head out of a book now and again, you might see what’s in front of your eyes.”’
“Does he now.” Trif draws a breath, and decides there is nothing to be gained by venting her opinion of Jacob John Russell to a ten-year-old boy who repeats everything he hears.
She lays aside her own book to pull Will’s Royal Reader toward her. “Go on then, I’ll read it out loud to you,” she says, and the boy puts his chin happily on his folded arms. He likes listening to stories, even if not reading them. The story of Brave Bobby holds his attention once Trif reads it with the proper emphasis, since it’s all to do with a ship and a sea voyage and a big Newfoundland dog like Old Jock, the dog Uncle Nate French has for hauling his wood.
In April, Uncle Albert returns from the seal hunt with both his feet frostbitten. Aunt Rachel declares he needs time to recover before going down on the Labrador in June, and Jacob John, also back from the ice but none the worse for wear, offers to take Will into the woods along with his own two younger brothers to cut wood.
The day the boys return from their overnight trip, Triffie runs into Jacob John driving over from the south side to the north side of the Point with his pony cart and a load of wood. Triffie is walking back from bringing a jar of pea soup up to poor Sadie Parsons, who has been laid up all winter. Sadie had the ’flu back in the fall but she was never able to shake it, and plans for her wedding to Jabez Badcock have been postponed until she’s better. Trif wonders when that will be, if ever. Nobody says it aloud, but the cough and the rattle in Sadie’s lungs have gone on too long for ’flu or even pneumonia. Her family can afford to call a doctor, but Dr. Fradsham hasn’t done her a bit of good. It’s not that Sadie needs Trif’s soup – her poor mother could float a dory on the soup she’s made, and no doubt would do so if she thought it would help her daughter. Coming over with soup or buns to tempt Sadie’s appetite is only an excuse for a visit, a chance to sit down awhile and tell Sadie that her cough will clear up when the warm weather comes.
On the road back from Sadie’s house, Jacob John and Will pull up alongside her with Uncle Albert’s load of wood.
“You’re some helpful to my uncle,” Trif says, taking Jacob John’s offered hand to climb up on the seat beside him as Will clambers back to sit on the wood.
Jacob John reins in the horse in front of Uncle Albert’s gate, and Triffie hops down. “Oh, and what business is that?”
“My business,” he says with another wink. He jumps down too, and begins unloading the wood with Will. When Triffie takes an armload, Jacob John says, “You go on in the house now and boil the kettle, I’ll want a cup of tea when I’m finished.”
“The nerve of you, placing orders like you were in a St. John’s hotel.”
Half an hour later, sitting at the kitchen table, Jacob John reaches for the sugar bowl. “Your tea is like yourself, Trif – too strong and not near sweet enough.”
Trif shoves the sugar bowl across the table at him. She’d like to get up and leave him, go find some work to do, but it’s Sabbath afternoon, her usual time for visiting the sick, so she’s uncharacteristically idle. As if noticing her stillness, Jacob John says, “Off to your church this morning, were you? Jesus not come down and taken that crowd away yet?”
“If He had, I doubt you would have noticed. You’d be too busy making fun and scoffing.”
“Sitting in the seat of the scornful, that’s me.” He grins. “You didn’t think I could quote Scripture, did you?”
“The Devil can quote scripture when it suits his purposes, so I don’t see why you couldn’t.”
Aunt Rachel comes to Trif’s room that night to talk. Trif is reading the 109th Psalm and thinking of people she would like to curse.
“Triffie, I need to talk to you about A Serious Matter,” Aunt Rachel says.
Already Triffie is one step ahead of this moment, past the part where she has the unpleasant conversation and onto the part where she writes about it to Kit. As she spoke I could hear the capitals in her words, A Serious Matter, and what do you think the Matter was? Nothing less than a proposal of marriage from Jacob John Russell, who appears to have given up all hope of charming me and is trying his charms on my guardians instead.
That Forgetful Shore Page 8