That Forgetful Shore

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  The party on the beach broke up when Jabez started a fight with Fred Mercer, then passed out and had to be carried home. Jacob John came back to his house, his steps steady, and took his bride up the narrow staircase to the marriage bed.

  The sky is dark, with an hour to go before dawn. Jacob John is still asleep upstairs. Trif thinks of waking beside him tomorrow and the next day and every morning till one of them dies.

  She holds the letter beside the candle and thinks, Why give Kit the trouble? The trouble of reading, the trouble of burning, the trouble of knowing.

  She sets the letter to the candle’s flame and drops it in her wash basin, watching it flare briefly and then crumble to ash.

  Triffie

  Missing Point

  November, 1909

  My dearest Peony – Just a note to say that the Deed is Done. Mr. R. and I are settled in the house of our own – ourselves and no other, as promised. How I wish you could have been with me on the day, dear one – it was all that I wished of happiness in that fateful hour.

  Ever your own,

  Posy

  Triffie brings the postcard, along with a letter she is sending to Millicent Butler in Harbour Grace, to the Bay Roberts post office in time to catch the mid-week mail. It’s a pleasantly crisp day for so late in the fall, the sky a shade of blue more often seen in October than the gray end of November, and Trif walks around the long way, not taking the causeway but going around the Coish, past Country Path and down by Long Beach Pond, till she comes in sight of the Russell house. Her house.

  She stops to look at it, taking pleasure in its trim appearance, the white paint, the green shutters. Two pine trees in the front yard, still green now that the birch and maples are bare, frame the neat saltbox house. She opens the gate – her front gate – and goes up the path and around the house to her own back door.

  “You looks right like you belongs here,” Jacob John says to her that evening as she cooks salt fish and potatoes for his supper. He leans in the kitchen doorway, arms folded across his chest. He looks pleased with himself, to have a wife here in his kitchen.

  “I s’pose I do belong here now,” Trif says, though she won’t give him the pleasure of turning around to look at him, to see his self-satisfied grin. He’s got what he wants, and though he knows full well it’s the house and the promise of a married woman’s status that won her, he’s as smug as if he had truly won her heart. He’s not one to talk of love himself, so why should the fact that she’s not in love with him give him any trouble? It’s a practical arrangement, Triffie tells herself, and it should suit them both just fine.

  It certainly seems to suit Jacob John fine. He glows with self-importance, enjoying his status as a man with a wife and a house of his own, though he’s not yet twenty-one. He sits beside her in the pew on Sunday morning and gloats about the fact that he no longer has to seek permission to walk her home. Somewhat to her surprise, he doesn’t object when she and Aunt Hepsy go over to Mabel Dawe’s house in Bay Roberts on Sabbath morning for the Adventist service. He makes the odd crack about the beasts of Revelation or the prophetess Mrs. White, but he never tells her not to go to Sabbath service, nor does he mind that his dinner on Saturday is warmed over from the night before, nor that his wife does no housework on the seventh day. And when Reverend White corners Triffie after church one Sunday to lecture her about her wayward beliefs Jacob John interrupts, drawing her away with a hand on her arm. “I’ll look to my own missus, thank you, Reverend,” he says. “Don’t the Good Book say the women should listen in silence, and ask their husbands to teach them at home?”

  Reverend White, unaccustomed to hearing Scripture on the lips of young Jacob John Russell, is speechless long enough for Jacob John to bid him good-day. Triffie is speechless too, till she busts out laughing.

  “So you’re going to take to instructing me in Scripture at home, are you?” she says finally.

  “Some chance I’d have of that,” he replies. “About as much chance as there’d be of you ever learning in silence.”

  But he says no more about it than that. In the evenings when work is done, he doesn’t seem to mind that Triffie reads instead of knitting or sewing. He often goes out in the evenings when she would rather stay home; he visits Fred Mercer, now married to Minnie Dawe, or he goes to sit with the men in Joe French’s shed, mending nets and telling stories. But he doesn’t drink and he’s always home by the time Trif is ready to put out the lamp and go to bed.

  Bed. It’s the hard part of the day for Triffie. She has always described Jacob John, to others and to herself, as “not bad looking,” though “handsome” would be a stretch. He’s a little man, not quite as tall as she is herself, with sandy hair and a beard he keeps neatly trimmed. His ready smile and the quick gleam in his eye draw people to him; he’s by no means unappealing or ugly. Triffie simply has no interest in what goes on in the bedroom. Never has had much interest in it, to tell the truth. She and Kit puzzled out many of the basic facts by applying animal physiology to human when they were still in school, but the reality of the act remained a mystery to Trif until her wedding night and she wouldn’t mind at all if it had remained a mystery forever.

  Jacob John clearly has some sort of experience, though she has no desire to know where he’s obtained it. He isn’t rough or brutal, but neither is there anything in the whole process to make Trif see what the fuss is all about. If this is the business that drives lovers mad – if it’s for these few minutes’ awkward fumbling in a dark chilly bedroom that people leave their marriages and children, ruin their reputations, imperil their souls – well, Triffie simply can’t see the point. Why bother?

  There are moments – sitting by the fire at night, perhaps, her reading a book and him fixing the rungs on an old chair or putting a new handle on a hammer – that she feels almost fond of Jacob John. But she feels nothing close to passion, and nothing that happens in the bedroom seems likely to stir her in that direction.

  At Christmas time, she misses Kit, who has always come home for the holiday before but can’t afford the steamer fare from Nova Scotia this year. She and Jacob John go over to Uncle Albert and Aunt Rachel’s for dinner on Christmas Day, and Triffie revels in the feeling she has every time she steps over their threshold now, the independence that allows her to come as a visitor and leave to go back to her own house. It’s a wonderful thing not to be beholden to them.

  She asks Will how school is going; she misses the daily company of her young cousins, though not the responsibility of caring for them. “I nearly got that hove over,” he says. “I’m still trying to get through that old Fourth Reader, and Mother says I got to stay in school till we goes to the Labrador in the spring, but after that I’m not going back no more.”

  “He’s not going down on the Labrador this year, is he?” Trif asks.

  “I can’t keep him back no more.” Aunt Rachel sighs.

  “Time for him to go,” Jacob John says, chiming in to support Uncle Albert and Will. “Lots of boys goes before they’re twelve and it does nobody no harm.”

  “And it’s not like he likes school, not like you,” Uncle Albert points out. Ruth, at fourteen, is also finished with school now. Trif wishes there were one other person in the family who cares about learning, who sees the wonder to be found in books.

  “The only thing I’ll miss about school is Trif helping me with my lessons,” Will says. “And you don’t do that no more anyway, Trif, now that you’re married, so why should I care? I always liked hearing you read stories and poems, but I never liked reading them for myself.”

  “I can still read to you,” Trif says. The boy often drops over to their house on the south side to hang about the kitchen or go out in the shed with Jacob John to do some small task. To her surprise, his eyes brighten a little at the mention of reading, so she repeats the invitation. “Next time you comes over our way, maybe on a Sunday afternoon or sometime I’m not too busy, I’ll read something to you.”

  She looks at her o
ne shelf of carefully hoarded books later, trying to pick one that might appeal to Will. He takes her at her word and shows up the first Sunday afternoon in January, a blowy, blustery day with swirls of snow streeling across the road. Isaac French is with him, and they both sit to listen as Triffie begins Gulliver’s Travels. The next Sunday, they bring Char Mercer with them, and it becomes a routine – Trif reads to the three boys, and to Jacob John too if he’ll sit still long enough to listen, through the long monotonous hours of Sunday afternoon. They all stay for their suppers, filling the house with their lively energy, and Jacob John doesn’t say a word about how much they eat or begrudge them space at the table.

  As winter draws in, there is more visiting in the long evenings, and Trif more often leaves her fireside after supper and joins Jacob John at the home of a neighbour or relative. One night he coaxes her up to old Uncle Jedidiah Mercer’s place, just a few doors up from them on the South Side Road. She knows that evenings at Uncle Jed’s always turn toward recitations, songs and stories as people huddle around the woodstove. When she and Jacob John blow in, Trif counts fifteen people crowded into Aunt Sal’s kitchen. All the women have knitting to keep their hands busy though the men mostly sit still, listening while Uncle Jed tells the story of the Greenland disaster and sings a long song, verse after verse, to go along with it.

  Over on the floor by the stove she sees young Charlie, Isaac and Will. There are two other young married couples, and several older men on their own, their wives no doubt home with the children. Jabez Badcock stands in a corner looking gloomy, as he always does now except when he’s drunk. And Joe Bishop sits in a chair pulled up to the table, nodding and drumming his fingers on the tabletop along with the rhythm of Uncle Jed’s song. When the song ends and a babble of chatter breaks out again in the room, Joe turns around to talk her. “You’re looking well, Mrs. Russell.”

  She smiles at the name, still unfamiliar to her. “I am well, Mr. Bishop. Did you have any more books come in lately?”

  “In fact I’ve got one here tonight; I brought it up thinking I might see you, or else I might have dropped it in at your door as I passed.”

  Triffie takes the book and turns it over in her hands. Ivanhoe. “A friend of mine in town sent out a box of the novels of Sir Walter Scott,” Mr. Bishop said. “I wonder what you think of them for the children.”

  “I’ve only read Waverly – there used to be an old copy in the schoolroom, wasn’t there? I think the boys would like this one, though,” Trif says, leafing through it.

  “Perhaps Rob Roy as well?” Joe suggests.

  “I’ll read this one first and tell you what I think. But if I like it, some of them might hear it from me before they hear it from you in school.” She holds it up across the room for Will to see, a promise for future Sunday afternoons.

  Joe Bishop laughs. “I don’t mind,” he says. “You’re better at reading to them than I am, and the boys are lucky to have you. Young Char has already given up on school, you know, and I don’t see Will or Isaac staying at it much longer, once they’ve gone fishing. But having you read to them is an education in itself. I wish we could still have you back in the classroom – but married life agrees with you, for all that.”

  “It might agree with you too, if you found yourself a woman,” Trif says, surprised at her own brazenness. Being a married woman has made it possible for her to talk to a man like Joe Bishop as an equal, to tease him about his still-unmarried state. The man is well into his thirties, starting to go bald on top of his high-domed forehead, and still no woman in sight. His neck and cheeks colour a little as he laughs off her comment. “Sure, who’d have me?” he asks, as Uncle Jed starts another song.

  Some lucky woman, Trif thinks, and that thought surprises her as much as her earlier bold words. She never had the schoolgirl crush on Mr. Bishop that Kit did, maybe because she never dared imagine herself growing up into a girl that a schoolteacher might court and love. And indeed, she didn’t; she is a fisherman’s wife, as she was always fated to be. But now that she is a wife, she allows herself a daydream of sharing a house with Joe Bishop, the both of them reading by lamplight at night, stopping to read aloud a line or two to each other, to discuss the meaning of a poem or talk about what he was teaching in his classroom.

  Then she firmly lays such thoughts aside. This is not the sin of lust, exactly, but something very like it. Coveting, perhaps – not thy neighbour’s husband, but a man other than her own husband.

  The thoughts flit through her mind as she watches Joe Bishop’s face while Jabez Badcock picks up the fiddle and plays a mournful “Barb’ry Allen.” Occasionally he interrupts his own playing to sing a verse, in his fine tenor voice that was once heard leading the hymns at the Methodist Chapel.

  Young Willie died for me today,

  And I’ll die for him tomorrow.

  The fiddle plays out its last sad notes and the singer echoes the final lines:

  And the rose…grew ‘round…the briar.

  In the silence following the song, Joe turns back to her. “Mrs. Russell should give us a recitation,” he suggests. When Trif shakes her head no, he says, “The best student I ever had for recitations and poems? How can you say no?” and a chorus of her neighbours’ voices joins in.

  It’s Will’s plea that finally convinces her: “Give us that Highwayman, Trif. That’s some good poem, that is.”

  So Trif sits up a little straighter on her chair, clears her throat and begins. The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor…

  There are eyes on her: Joe Bishop’s eyes, warm with pride; the eyes of Will and his friends, wide with interest. Her husband’s eyes, but she cannot read his expression, and she turns away from his gaze, back to the boys.

  The highwayman came riding, riding, riding,

  The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

  Kit

  Halifax, Nova Scotia

  February, 1910

  My dearest Posy,

  I am sure that when you think of my life here in Halifax, you imagine it to be one of Great Glamour, but I can assure it is Not At All as you might picture. I say this because of my own Phantasies, before I came here, of what University life must be like, and how little that accords with Reality.

  It is true, we do have the opportunity to study with some very Learned Professors, almost all of them Male, and it can be heady stuff to hear a college lecturer holding forth upon, let us say, Hamlet or Othello. But the reality is that it is, after all, schoolwork and more schoolwork, with higher expectations than ever I had placed on me at Spencer. This week alone I have two long Themes due, and three books to read. I find myself burning the lamp till the midnight hour trying to keep up with everything, and I hope this excuses my lack of correspondence of late!

  Some of these same learned men are most Condescending towards the women students, as I have discovered. The same professor who holds forth with such knowledge on the subject of Hamlet and his Fatal Indecision, has in his lecture hall some thirty-five young men, and six women. He addresses himself entirely to the men, to the extent of calling the whole class “Sirs” as he lectures – till he remembers himself, and adds with a chuckle, “oh, and ladies, of course.” He was most dismissive of Ophelia, and said that she was a person of no true Weight or Substance, nor had any real impact upon the action of the play, but that her only goal was to fall in love and seek a husband – “not unlike a modern young lady attending a University!” he added, to a chorus of great laughter all around.

  Yet, much as it shames me to say it, there is some truth to his condescension. Along with some of my classmates who are, like me, quite dedicated to the Serious Business of getting an education, there is certainly a class of young women, I have discovered, whose parents can afford to send them to University simply to capture a University man as a husband. I cannot think but that there must be simpler and less expensive ways for a girl of good family to meet a man of similar background. Do these sort of people not have par
ties and teas and dances? Do they not go to church, or visit in one another’s homes?

  But no, nothing must do but that Priscilla or Annabelle must be packed off to Dalhousie with a dozen fancy gowns, and aim herself for a target among the pre-medicine or pre-law students, for nothing but a doctor or a lawyer will do – one already wealthy enough that he need not work for a living, but will take up a profession, it seems, merely to further the cause of Medicine or the Law, by his own brilliance.

  Oh dear, will you read this letter and think that your darling Peony has become most Sarcastic and Cynical? Remember if you do, that these seeds were planted in me at the earliest possible age, only that there is something in the climate of Canada that brings them to Germination!!

  Ever your dearest,

  Peony

  The time it takes to write a letter severely cuts into Kit’s study time. She has cut back correspondence to only the most essential people, relegating old friends from Missing Point, newer friends in Elliston, and classmates from Spencer, to the occasional postcard. Only her mother and Triffie get proper letters anymore, and never as often as they would like. But at least the letters to Trif, unlike the carefully worded ones to her mother, are something of a release.

  The only two people she feels she can be honest with are Triffie and Ben, though even there she has to be cautious. With Triffie, she doesn’t want to make her life sound too interesting, lest Triffie be sunk in despair and jealousy, for even college life on its worst and most crushing days has to be better than being stuck back on the Point with Jacob John Russell. With Ben her trouble is the opposite: she cannot truly tell him how tired, how overwhelmed, how insignificant she often feels in the whirl of college life, for she never wants him to regret making it possible for her to be here.