The fourteenth of July is a hot, muggy day, the sky threatening rain that does not fall. Kit has been helping Trif in the garden; Trif is tired; she is almost certain that she is expecting again. She sits on a rock for a few minutes, watching Katie pull at blades of grass, catching her breath.
”Don’t wear yourself out,” Kit says. “I can do the rest of this, you don’t want to take any chances. How far along do you think you are?”
“Well, I missed my monthlies in June, and now I’ve missed them again, so it could be as much as two months,” Trif says. “Jacob John’ll be some pleased when he comes home from the Labrador, I don’t mind saying. I hope this one’s a boy, for much as he loves Katie I know he wants a son – every man does.”
“Have you told Aunt Rachel yet?”
“I’ve told nobody but you, and I won’t, not till I’m sure. With the price of fish so high, it’s a grand year to be having a baby, and if I’m right about the times it’ll be February when it comes, and I can –”
“Trif! Trif!” They look up to see Betty running down the path that crests the hill, hatless and out of breath. “Mom says come over to the house quick! Liza Dawe was down at the Mercantile and heard tell there was a telegram over at the cable station for Pop.” Betty looks like she’s run all the way from the north side.
“Catch your breath, Betty, what are you saying? A telegram?” Trif repeats the words as if by saying them she can slow time, fix this moment before they get the telegram, before they know.
“They must have it by now – but Mom told me to come over and get you, she knew you’d want to be there if it was – if it…”
Trif is already on her feet; she has taken off the dirty apron she wears in the garden and wiped the earth off her hands. She is the opposite of harried, frantic Betty in every way at this moment; her movements are slow, deliberate, almost majestic as she picks Katie up in her arms.
“I’ll come too,” Kit says, needlessly, falling into step behind them.
On the way back across to the north side, Betty keeps up her hurried pace, her frantic torrent of talk. “We’re not the only ones – Liza said there’s a telegram for the Frenches too – it could be Will and Isaac both. Of course Mom says not to think the worst, they might just be wounded, it might not be anything…too bad.”
To this torrent of words, Trif says nothing at all, which is strange for her. Her face is cold and deadly calm, and Kit thinks of how she favoured young Will. Kit puts out a hand as they walk, to touch Trif’s arm.
The walk from south side to north side of the Point takes about a quarter of an hour. All the way Betty talks, and Trif says nothing, and Kit thinks of the descriptions she has heard of the Front, of men staggering across No-Man’s Land under the barrage of artillery fire, of the clouds of poison gas that carry death on the air.
Cannon to the left of them
Cannon to the right of them
Into the jaws of death…
“Look! There he is now!” Betty says as they turn onto the North Side Road near her parents’ house. Young Robbie Snow, one of the cable company’s messenger boys, is riding his bicycle out of the French’s front gate. “He must have already brought the telegrams.” As the three women draw nearer Robbie pedals faster, racing past them back down the road towards the causeway, not meeting their eyes.
Kit follows Betty and Triffie up through the yard and around the house to the back door. Inside, Rachel, Ruth and Albert – who is home this summer because Rachel said she couldn’t bear to have him down on the Labrador with Will overseas – all sit around the table staring at the unopened envelope. Trif and Betty sit down in the two empty chairs; Kit is left standing, the outsider in the family circle.
“I can’t – you open it, Trif,” Aunt Rachel says, picking up the envelope by a corner. Trif takes it, but doesn’t open it. She looks up at Kit.
“It might not be – well, they send telegrams for everything, don’t they?” Kit says. “Even if a soldier’s only wounded, even if it’s not serious. It doesn’t have to be ….”
“You read it out,” Trif says, handing it to her.
Kit takes it, her hands shaking. It feels wrong for her to be the one reading this private message, yet they are all looking up at her as if this is a role she has the right to play. On the kitchen wall behind Uncle Albert’s head is the framed picture of Will in uniform: his eyes, too, seem to meet Kit’s as if he waits with the rest of his family to learn his fate. Even as Kit opens the envelope she thinks that telegrams must be coming to houses in St. John’s, too. Is there one for her, for Mrs. Benjamin Porter?
“Regret to inform you – ” she reads aloud, “Number 1446, Private William Bradbury has been reported killed in action July first.”
Betty and Ruth both cry out: Ruth moves quickly from her chair to kneel next to her sister and put her arms around Betty’s waist. Aunt Rachel says, “Oh, dear Lord,” and Uncle Albert lays a hand over hers on the tabletop. Trif doesn’t make a sound, just presses the heel of her hand against her mouth. Of all the faces in the room, only the serious face of Will in his Regiment photograph remains unchanged, as if he alone is untouched by the news.
Triffie
France
June, 1916
Dear Trif,
Tis some hard to think what to wright.
I love to get your letters tho, and it don’t seem fair for you to send them and never get any back. Some of the fellows loves wrighting letters and some cant wright at all. I am someware in the middle I spose.
If you promise not to read this to Mother and Father I can tell you more. About how dirty and wet we are and about the lice and the rats and how men are getting sick all the time around me. Not like when we was traning in England. That was a good laff but this is different all together. I hate to say it sence I was so flick to sign up but the truth is I would give anything to be back home right now. Isaac and Char feels the same way but they would not tell there folks either. Isaac writes to Jennie Snow from Spaniard’s Bay and he always puts on the brave face for her. Remember that girl I told you about that I met over in England, Gertie? She wrights me and I tries to wright her the odd postal but its hard to know what to say. Its easyer with you Trif but you was always my easyest person to talk to.
Some of the bys are spoiling for a real fight after all the time we spent in traning. I thoht I wanted a fight too but since we been over here I got a better idea what its all about and the truth is its pretty scarey stuff. I don’t know what it will be like in a big battel but no douts we’ll find out soon. The bys all say we’ll get orders to go over the top soon, maybe in a day or two.
I hope I don’t make a fool of myself, Trif. I was brave enough in traning but a real battelfeild with real German shells coming at you is another thing all together. You keep saying those prayers for me and I’ll do my best I spose. If God is listening to you at all I lows I’ll be home out of this soon, back on the Point safe and sound.
I wish I was there now.
Your loving cousin,
Will
The letter arrives, as such letters so often do, a few weeks after the telegram. A ghost letter. Aunt Rachel and Uncle Albert get one too, which they read out loud to everyone, and as promised it is calmer and braver than Triffie’s. Trif does not share hers with anyone but Kit. Rachel and Albert and Ruth all think they would love to have one more piece of Will, one more thing to remember him by, but Triffie honours his wishes and doesn’t show them the letter. What good would it do, to know that he faced his first and last battle like the scared young boy he was?
Triffie herself reads the letter over and over. It is neither eloquent nor well-written. Will’s letters have never been the kind that would be published in the Guardian. But its raw honesty tears at her heart as she rereads it and pictures Will, small and lost when he sleepwalked as a child, or frustrated over his schoolbooks, or a young man laughing and carrying on with his friends.
His friends. Isaac and Charlie were both wounded at Beaumon
t-Hamel. Isaac’s injuries were minor; he is recovering in a field hospital and will be back at the front soon. Charlie has lost a leg, and will be sent home as soon as he is able to travel.
Gertie Mercer is beside herself, not knowing whether to be devastated at Charlie’s loss or relieved that he is out of the war for good. With Alf drowned and Harry still at sea, she has had a hard war already. But at least she will have no more fears for Charlie – the worst has been done to him. Nellie French goes about like a ghost, horrified to think Isaac has come through the hell that was Beaumont-Hamel – for now the stories are coming out, of what it was like, of how vast the losses were – but that he will be patched up and sent back into that madness.
As for Triffie’s own family, Aunt Rachel and Ruth are drawn together by grief. Betty has gone to St. John’s with Kit, and the two women remaining in the house have turned to each other. When Triffie goes over to visit them she feels excluded, as if her loss is different and one she must bear alone. She sympathizes with Uncle Albert more than anyone. He goes about his work, fishing from Abel Morgan’s boat, in grim silence. Trif does not talk to him about Will – nothing about her uncle encourages confidences – but she imagines that he looks at his nets and traps and wonders what it’s all for. A man builds his home, his work, his life around the hope of handing it on to his son, the hope that his children will have a better life than he has had, will go a little farther and live a little easier.
Trif’s own emptiness consumes her. Jacob John is still away on the Labrador and Kit has gone back to St. John’s. Kit’s own news was similar to what the Frenches got about Isaac. Ben Porter was wounded, but his injuries were minor and he would be back on the front line soon. More Newfoundlanders were coming, fresh from their training in England, to the Somme to replace some of the hundreds of men killed and wounded. The dance of death will go on; the offensive has failed, but the war is far from over.
Kit was Triffie’s mainstay in the terrible days after the news about Will arrived. She hired a girl to help her mother so that she could be free to stay with Trif and Katie. She helped with every household chore, cared for Katie, and sat up long at night with Trif. Sometimes they sat and knitted in silence. They did not talk a great deal, for the first time in their long friendship, for what was there to say? When the silence was too hard to bear, they went back to their old practice of reading aloud. Kit read all of Tennyson’s In Memoriam aloud. Trif has always loved Idylls of the King and other poems by Tennyson, but this is her first time reading the poet’s lament for his dead friend. Whether it’s Tennyson’s words or Kit’s steady voice, she draws a little comfort from these readings.
With Kit gone back to town, the world is colder and grief is harder to bear. It will be October before Jacob John returns. News comes and goes from the boys so far away in France, yet the men fishing on the Labrador are as cut off as if they are in another world. Letters rarely come and go except in case of emergency. Triffie thinks of sending a cable to Battle Harbour but decides against it. When Jacob John comes home, he will learn of Will’s death, and he will learn that Trif is pregnant again. Good news and bad news. The good will weigh more heavily with him than the bad, for though he thinks a lot of Will, a son of his own will mean more than the loss of the boy who was like a son to Triffie.
Yet when the day finally comes, when she and Katie watch Skipper Wilf’s schooner dock at the wharf, she does not tell Jacob John, first, about the new baby. She lets Katie put her arms out to Papa and be swept up into his embrace. “Ah, there’s my girl, there’s my girl,” Jacob John says.
He puts an arm around Triffie and gives her a casual squeeze. “How’s yourself, missus? Keeping the home fires burning and all? What kind of summer was it? Fishing good around here?”
“Not a lot of fish, but the price is good, so people are doing all right out of it,” Trif says, putting Katie back in her pram and falling into step beside Jacob John as he picks up the small chest with his few belongings and says goodbye to his shipmates.
“Lots of fish down on the Labrador,” Jacob John says. “Hard old news from the Front though, eh? No bad news from any of our boys after the July Drive, was there?”
He tosses the words off so casually, as if he knows there can’t possibly be bad news. The men on the Labrador must have heard how bad things were over in France, but perhaps they haven’t got the scope of it. Jacob John may not realize, yet, how every corner of the island has been touched by the disaster of July 1. Surely if he knew, he wouldn’t ask so lightly.
“It was a terrible day,” she says. “We had – there was a telegram. For Uncle Albert.”
“What?” He stops walking. “Not Will? He wasn’t…was he wounded?”
Triffie shakes her head, not trusting her voice.
“Ah girl, I’m sorry.” He turns and gives her the embrace he wouldn’t give her on the wharf, taking her into his arms. “What a grand young fellow he was – and his whole life ahead of him. He never shoulda gone over there – none of ’em should. What a waste.”
Triffie shuts out the words and lets herself relax for half a minute in her husband’s arms. His chin, scratchy with a summer’s worth of beard, nestles against the top of her head – not that he’s so tall, but she’s buried her face in his shoulder, in the smelly rough wool of his jersey. Fish and sweat and tobacco – oh, it will be good to have a man around again, someone to fill up the empty spaces in her days and in her house.
Enough weakness, now. She pushes back, away from him, and smudges tears out of her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“All summer, now, you had to bear this, and I didn’t even know of it,” Jacob John says. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when we got the news.”
Katie, perhaps confused by the rare sight of her parents embracing, reaches up her arms from the pram. “Papa, take me up, take me up!”
Jacob John, who spoils the child something shocking, Trif thinks, lays down his sea chest and gets Katie out of the pram. Putting the chest in the pram instead, he says to Trif, “You don’t mind pushing that for a while, do you?” and swings Katie up high on his shoulders, grunting a little as he does. “Ooh, you’ve grown since I went away, my love. Come on now, let’s go home.” And on the walk home Trif tells him about the baby, and he is as glad as she has imagined he would be.
Home is, indeed, easier to bear with Jacob John there. Not that his presence makes up in any way for Will’s absence, or even that he is as much comfort to her as Kit was. In fact, after first hearing the news, he doesn’t mention Will, except when they go to visit Aunt Rachel and Uncle Albert, and he says how sorry he was to hear it.
Still, there he is, and her nights don’t seem so long. She sleeps poorly, lies awake trying not to dwell on the images that crowd her brain, tries not to see Will’s mangled young body, lying in a blood-soaked uniform in the mud.
But you can get used to anything, even loss, Triffie finds. The news from France continues bad, but there are no more casualty reports of local men, until the day in October when Triffie walks over to her aunt’s house on the north side and finds no-one at home. She knocks, goes inside, calls out, lays on the table the batch of date squares she carried over, and turns to go, when she sees Ruth coming into the yard.
“Oh, Mother said she thought that was you, Trif. You better come over. We’re all over next door to the Frenches – well, all but Father, he’s still gone cutting wood. Mrs. French got a telegram.” Ruth’s eyes are red.
“A telegram? About … Isaac?”
Ruth nods, and Triffie takes Katie by the hand and goes over the lane to the French house, where she finds her aunt and cousins sitting awkwardly in the parlour around Mrs. French. The telegram is on the table, telling them that Private Isaac French was killed in action on October 11 at Gueudecourt.
Triffie liked Isaac, though he wasn’t family, wasn’t part of her the way Will was. Yet in a way this second loss doubles the heartbreak. She thinks of the two boys, such good friends all those years growing up, bo
th dead and buried in foreign soil across the sea. She remembers again the morning Nell French found Will asleep in the bed with Isaac. Trif thinks at least if they both had to die, they might have died in the same battle so they could lie close together again in the same graveyard. Two childhood friends; two boys from the Point.
And then there’s Charlie Mercer, the third of their trio. Fall chills into winter and after the second shock of Isaac’s death, the war again slips into the background for most of the folks on the Point. The Bradbury and the French families are scarred forever. Everyone else goes on about their business, reading and talking about the headlines from Europe, shaking their heads over one Allied loss after another, but getting on with the business of daily life. Then, one day in March, the same train that takes the men off to St. John’s for the seal hunt brings one-legged Charlie Mercer home from the war.
He has sent word he is coming, and he is the first of their boys home from the war, so half the Point gathers at the Bay Roberts station. Nine months have passed since Beaumont-Hamel, months that Charlie has spent recuperating in an English hospital, being fitted for his artificial leg and acquiring a wife – an English nurse, the first rumours are. Upon closer reading of the letter she wrote home on Char’s behalf, it turns out she’s an Irish girl who worked in the hospital laundry.
At first, when he appears in the window of the carriage, there is silence, then a ragged cheer. “Charlie!” a few voices cry out, and then Joe Bishop’s strong voice rises above the rest. Joe has brought the children down from the school to see the war hero return home. “Hip, hip, hurrah!” Everyone joins in on the hurrahs and then Joe and the schoolchildren sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” When the chorus is done Joe Bishop shifts to “God Save the King.” Everyone joins in; the men readying their bags to go on the train stop and take off their caps, and in the middle of “Happy and glorious,” Charlie Mercer sets his one good foot on the soil of home, and his mother breaks from the crowd and throws herself in his arms, nearly knocking him off balance. His war bride, a petite girl with eyes as round as buttons, stares around the wharf as if trying to fathom where on God’s earth Charlie has brought her.
That Forgetful Shore Page 17