“It’s not a matter of cleverness,” she replies, “as you’d know if you sat down and studied it out with me. It all makes sense, all the prophecies and times and laws. When Elder Hubley used to preach back when the war started about how the Turkish Empire would fall and it would lead to war in the Middle East and Armageddon, it all seemed so clear to me.”
Kit sighs. “Now that it’s all said and done, I can’t see how Armageddon could have been much worse.”
“That’s just it, Peony. It was Armageddon – the war to end all wars. How could any war ever be any worse than the last four years have been? This – this has to change everything, one way or another, don’t it? The worst war ever fought, and then a deadly epidemic on top of it – if that’s not Armageddon, what is? If the Lord really were ever going to come, wouldn’t He have come and put a stop to all this?”
“Unless there’s something even more terrible ahead – unless Armageddon is worse than we can imagine.”
They sit in heavy silence for a minute, drinking their tea. “No, I can’t believe it,” Trif says. “I can’t believe God would abandon us here like this.”
“Well, you’ve always had a lot more faith in how much God cares about us than I have,” Kit says.
This is the sort of moment Trif is supposed to be looking for, an opportunity to win Kit to Christ. If she really believed in the truth of the message, and if she really loved Kit enough to want her to be saved, she would use this moment, use Kit’s grief and her desperate need for purpose in her life, to ensnare her with the gospel. In fact, she leans forward in her chair, as if to begin witnessing, then sighs and sits back.
“It’s harder to believe than it used to be,” she confesses.
“Why not give it up? Do you really need to haul all that baggage, God and faith and everything, around with you?”
Kit’s attack, after Trif has just resisted the temptation to preach to her, feels unfair – a low blow. “It’s not something I haul around. It’s more like – something that holds me up. The boat I ride in. Lately I think it’s sprung a leak, but kicking a hole in the bottom won’t help.”
Kit shrugs. “What do you patch it up with, then? What do you use to plug a hole in your faith?”
“It’s not about patches and plugs – it’s about finding the truth. I thought I had it, but now it’s – I don’t know. But I picked up something today – a flyer I saw on a lamp-post, on my way back from church.” She holds it out to Kit, crumpled from being tucked in her pocket for hours. A series of revival meetings begins tomorrow night at the George Street Methodist Church; the speaker is Mrs. Victoria Booth-Clibborn Demarest, granddaughter of General William Booth himself.
Kit looks it over. “I thought you weren’t in the Army anymore.”
“I’m not – well, I go to their meetings sometimes of a Sunday night, because I miss the singing and the band. But this isn’t a Salvationist meeting, it’s just a revival meeting.”
Kit rolls her eyes. “What do you need a revival meeting for, Trif? I go to the Cathedral on Sunday mornings because everyone expects it of me, and then I put it away and try to think as little about God as possible for the rest of the week. But you’re always chasing after Him, and to tell the truth the whole thing makes no more sense to me than a kitten chasing its tail.”
It’s rare for Trif Russell to bite back words, not to say what comes to mind. But she makes the effort now. Her friend is, after all, grieving. Kit is perhaps saying more than she means, and someone has to exercise some discretion here.
“I think I’ll take myself off to bed,” says Triffie.
The next morning she goes to the Cathedral with Kit, for the socially necessary exercise of being seen at morning prayers. Kit flatly refuses to return the favour by coming to George Street that evening to hear Mrs. Demarest speak, so Trif goes alone.
The Methodist Church is packed with bodies, and there is enough singing, clapping, even dancing in the aisles, to satisfy Triffie’s need for a livelier form of worship than she can find with either Adventists or Anglicans. It is, in fact, much like a Salvationist meeting, except for the lack of uniforms, and everyone has worked up a fine sweat by the time Mrs. Demarest gets up to speak.
A lady revival preacher! Triffie has heard a couple of women officers in the Salvation Army, and she loves hearing the gospel coming out of a woman’s mouth – it’s a reminder that the world is larger than the one she knows. But Victoria Booth-Clibborn Demarest is something entirely different – a performer, a show-woman, almost an actress. The Holy Spirit fills her, there’s no doubt about that, but she’s hardly a transparent vessel. She’s more like a stained-glass window: the Spirit within only makes her colour and design shine more vividly. Her small figure at the pulpit makes the whole room glow and shudder with the presence of God.
There is nothing restrained in this preaching, nor in the response of the audience. There could be no sharper contrast to the solemn Anglican liturgy of this morning, or the lengthy, Scripture-laced Adventist study she sat through yesterday. This is pure emotion, pure Spirit – music and prayer and shouting all twined together. “Glory! Glory, Hallelujah!” people shout all around her, as Mrs. Demarest’s voice rises to a crescendo. She lifts her hands above her head, shaking her fists. “Come down, oh Lord! Fill us with your Spirit! Come down, NOW, Jesus!!”
This is heady stuff, commanding God to come down and fill the room. The Adventists wait and work and pray for Jesus to return, but they know it’s ultimately His decision when He’ll show up. Mrs. Demarest seems to believe one can compel God to be present, and He’ll obey. It may not be the Second Coming, but the Spirit is here, right now, in this room, and it’s as real as any return she can imagine with angels and trumpets.
People pour down the aisles to kneel and be saved, tears streaming down their faces, praying aloud, bursting into song. Trif kneels at the altar and feels, as John Wesley once did, that her heart is strangely warmed. God is not, after all, sitting far away on a cloud, checking off prophecies on a calendar while He waits for the moment to return, safely removed from the hell of Armageddon and Beaumont-Hamel and Monchy-le-Preux. He is here, among His people, present and alive.
Last night she felt the little dory of her faith was swamped, ready to capsize. Now she feels buoyed up, sped across the water with a fair wind at her back. Though she knows Kit will mock and be cynical, she can scarcely wait to get home to tell her about it.
Kit
St. John’s
January, 1919
Dear Triffie,
I can scarce explain…
I am at a loss for words when I think…
It was most kind of you to come visit me in my Hour of Need, and I feel I must apologize for …
I regret so many of the things I said…
It’s no use. Kit has tried eight times since Triffie went home to start a letter of apology. Every time she tries, she gets angry all over again. What good is it to apologize when she’s still angry?
The first part of the visit went so well. Until Triffie got tangled up in those revival meetings, and couldn’t talk about anything else. One night she came home an hour later than usual and told Kit she had been to a prayer meeting after the main revival meeting where she received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues.
Kit has no words to match this folly. She is still struggling to figure out what her life will be like without Ben and fighting mind-numbing despair every day. She hasn’t the energy to deal with Trif in the grip of yet another bout of religious enthusiasm, babbling happily about the Holy Spirit.
Before this, she’s always been able to set her doubts against Trif’s faith, both of them equally sturdy, and have a lively discussion that ends with both of them still friends, still respecting each other’s views. But respect is not, perhaps, most evident in Kit’s tone on the night she says, “If there really is a God – something I have a harder and harder time believing – surely He could put His time and His omnipotence to better use
than making a bunch of fools dance around George Street Church speaking gibberish. Perhaps He might have spared some of that power to save a few million people from dying of influenza, or perhaps stopped the war before millions of men died in the trenches? Or if that’s too much for Him, I hear there are still people starving to death in the world. Maybe He could have a look over there and see what needs doing instead of making all the Holy Rollers in Newfoundland drunk, when a bottle of bootleg gin could do the same!”
There is chilly silence in the room when she finishes her diatribe, and Trif says stiffly, “I puts up with a lot from you, Kit, for the sake of friendship. But you know what the Scripture says about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”
“Blasphemy – is that it? You really want to accuse me of blasphemy?”
“I don’t want to accuse you of anything – I want to warn you.”
“Warn me! Don’t you think my soul is a bit past saving now?”
“Why should it be? I know you’ve been through a hard time, Kit, but those whom the Lord loves, He rebukes and chastens, and as gold passes through the refiner’s fire –”
“I don’t want to be refined!” Kit shouts. She grabs at her own hair with both hands, pulling it loose from its pins so that it falls around her face, tugging as if she would tear it out in handfuls.
“Well, you’re certainly not acting very refined just now.” A grin quirks the corners of Trif’s mouth. It almost melts Kit – it always has before, how the same woman can speak so seriously and self-righteously about sin and blasphemy, prophecy and punishment, yet burst into irreverent laughter a breath later.
But Kit hardens her heart against Trif. She is tired of being preached to, tired of Trif’s belief that there are easy, God-given solutions to every problem. She lowers her voice, not wanting to attract attention from Betty, who has gone on to bed hours ago.
“You don’t know the half of what I’ve been through.” Kit turns away from Trif to look out the window. “You think just because you lost your cousin, you’ve got some clue about what it’s like to lose someone you love.”
“I know ’tis not the same,” Trif says, her voice so much calmer and kinder than Kit’s own. “I’ve said all along that what you’re going through is worse than anything I’ve had to bear. I know that.”
“But maybe it evens the score.”
Trif says nothing. In the silence Kit wants to prod further, to pick at the sores underneath old scabs. “You always envied me, didn’t you, always thought I had it better? Always felt I had the easy life?”
“Perhaps. But I never wished you any ill,” Trif says, still with that gentle calm in her voice. An after-effect of the Holy Spirit, perhaps, which makes Kit angrier.
“Wished or not, it’s come to me now, hasn’t it? I’ve paid for any good luck I’ve ever had – and paid for my sins too. For doubting God, for not loving Ben enough –”
“What do you mean, not loving him enough?”
“I never did. I was in love with him, but I can see now, looking back, that I never loved him the way he loved me. I was always torn two ways, wanting to be with him but wanting to be on my own too. I wanted to go on teaching and having a life, work of my own. I was afraid of being a married woman, afraid I’d lose myself. And it wasn’t till I lost him that I saw how selfish I’d been, what a fool I was.”
Again, the silence, and Kit does not turn around to meet Triffie’s eyes. “You were right, though,” Trif says after a moment. “Being married does change things for a woman. At least, it did for me, and every other woman I’ve known. It might have been different for you, married to a man like Ben.”
I’ll never know now, will I? Kit rages silently. We had forty-six days of married life together: two days of honeymoon under the shadow of war, thirty-nine days when he was mad with shell shock and despair, and five days when he was dying with the ’flu. I’ve had a hell of a married life, haven’t I?
She is going to say this to Trif, to speak out loud the bitterness that lies beneath her pain, to explain why her grief cannot be clean and pure. Trif will, perhaps, understand, and some of that burden will have been shifted onto friendly shoulders.
Kit opens her mouth, and instead she says something different, because that need to hurt, to wound is still there, like a serpent coiled under her tongue. “A man like Ben?” she echoes. “You envied that too – that I got a good man, someone good-looking and smart and ambitious. Jacob John Russell was never good enough for you, was he?”
Now she turns, wanting to see Trif react to the words, wanting to see the crack in her saintly calm. Sure enough, Trif’s jaw clenches and her eyes narrow. “Jacob John is a good enough man,” she says. “But I’ve never lied to you, Peony. You know I was never in love with him. You know if I wanted to be married it wouldn’t have been to a man like him.”
“Why – because he’s a fisherman? Because you’re too good for him?”
Trif takes a step back, her face like the face of a beaten child, not understanding what she has done to deserve the harsh words. But what is Kit doing that’s so terrible? Only telling the truth, telling truths that have been left untold for years. Trif has always been comfortable in her illusion that their friendship is completely honest, that they tell each other everything. How many buried secrets can lie beneath the surface before they poison everything?
“I was raised in a fisherman’s house. Why would I think I was too good to marry a fisherman?” Trif’s voice is calm again, but not that quiet, saintly calm – it’s cold now, and hard-edged, flat as a blade.
“You did, though. You always wanted something different, something more.”
“What are you saying? That I had ideas – ‘above my station’?” The sarcasm in those last three words can’t be missed. The social gulf between them never mattered when they were girls and has been resolutely ignored in womanhood. They have chosen to be sisters, twins, so there can be no difference. But the difference has been there all along.
They always have been equal: in intelligence, in ambition, in dreams. Everything Trif has lacked, everything she’s envied, has been denied her because she is the orphaned niece of a fisherman, while Kit is the only daughter of a merchant’s clerk. Thus it has always been and ever shall be, no matter how many men bleed and die on battlefields for high-minded ideals like liberty and equality and brotherhood.
“I never said anything about rising above your station,” Kit says. “Only that you always wanted more.”
“Which is exactly the same thing, in different words,” Trif says. “But if Jacob John wasn’t the man I wanted, it’s not because he’s a fisherman. You know that. It’s not the man’s place in life, it’s the man himself. I s’pose I had the same foolish romantic dreams most girls do, of a man I could fall head over heels for, a man who was romantic and – well, passionate.” Her tone shifts to sound something like it did earlier in the evening when she talked about the Holy Spirit making her speak in tongues; it’s the same longing, Kit is sure, that drives Trif to seek out odd sects and revival meetings. “Yes, a man with some passion to him. You knows what I means, don’t deny it. Jacob John wasn’t good enough for you; why should he be good enough for me? Did you think you could pass him on like a hand-me-down dress?”
“If Jacob John wasn’t the right man for me,” Kit says, “it certainly wasn’t for any lack of passion. I know all about what kind of passion Jacob John Russell is capable of – probably more than you know, after eight years sharing his bed and bearing him two children.”
“What do you mean?”
“I knows what kind of a man Jacob John is,” Kit says, her carefully educated voice slipping back into lost rhythms and cadences, “because I had him long before you ever did. Did you think I was a virgin when I married Ben? Don’t be so foolish, Trif. Me and Ben was together as man and wife for nearly a year before any preacher ever said vows over us, and before that I was with Jacob John, time and again that winter I taught out home. On a bed of nets in Abel Morgan’s
fish store, that’s where I gave it up to Jacob John.”
She never meant to say all this. It’s as if one sentence drags the next behind it, like they’re roped together, and she can’t stop adding fact after fact, confession upon confession, as she sees the shock and disgust on Triffie’s face.
“You – you and Jacob John?” A small few words in response to Kit’s torrent of information, words twisted out of a mouth gone suddenly small and tight.
“Yes, me and Jacob John. Don’t look so shocked, girl, it’s not the end of the world. Only don’t go trying to tell me that man’s got no passion in him. He had it right enough when he was seventeen, and if he’s lost it since then, I know whose fault that is.”
“You…common…whore.” Trif gives each word the weight it deserves, and Kit does not defend herself. The fight has gone out of her; she doesn’t understand her own need to hurt Trif with this long-buried secret.
Trif turns to go for the stairs, and Kit thinks she will go off to bed in the guest room, turn the key in the door, and somehow, after a long and sleepless night, they will both sit over breakfast in the morning and find a way to piece this back together. Kit will apologize – only she can’t do it right now.
In the morning, this demon will have left her, and she will be a better person. Not a saint, never a saint like Triffie. But a decent woman. Refined. Someone who chooses her words with care and would never dredge up a dark old secret just to hurt a friend. She knows she may have done untold damage to Trif and Jacob John’s marriage. But if the older, stronger bond of their friendship can be repaired in the warm light of morning, then everything else will begin to knit back up as it should.
But Triffie stops on the third step, turns back. “Why have I been such a fool all these years?”
“You’ve never been a fool,” Kit says. “Maybe you’ve been foolish about some things …”
About God, she means, about believing there’s someone out there watching the fall of the sparrow, with some mighty purpose that will make sense of all our squalid sparrow lives. But Trif is thinking of a different kind of foolishness; she has her words back now, and is in full flight with them.
That Forgetful Shore Page 20