She tells one of Nellie’s daughters that someone should stay over here with Rachel tonight, though that’s really Trif’s job. Instead she picks up the sleeping David, shakes him awake and stumbles with him up over the lane, across the Point to her own place, the only placed Trif can bear the thought of being right now.
The front bridge of Trif’s house is cool but not yet cold in the early-October evening. She puts David down in his bed and then goes and sits outside. Across the road the Long Beach stretches out, the rocks worn smooth from the waves that beat against them year after year. Like us, Trif thinks, like the women all along the shore. We sit here year after year and wait for word from the men, wait for the worst the sea can give, and whatever happens, we take it. We just take it.
The sea looks calm enough tonight here in the bay but it’s no difficulty to imagine the high waves, the screaming wind, the rocks that could tear apart a wooden schooner in minutes. Such things have been part of Triffie’s dreams her whole life. They became sharper and clearer when she married a fisherman, and they have become oppressive this summer, since her eldest son went off to sea.
The sky darkens so she can hear the waves better than she can see them: there’s no moon tonight, but that rushing sound of water on rocks is ever present. Triffie is angry – angry at Jacob John for encouraging the boy to go, for going himself year after year, angry at God, angry at the sea itself.
It’s easiest to be angry at the sea, at this huge impersonal force that rules all their lives, that gives so grudgingly and takes with such abandon. She says aloud, “God, if you bring our Billy and Jacob John home alive out of this, no man of mine is ever setting foot in a boat again. No more fishermen in this family.”
The next day word comes that the Sea Rose sank on the night of the fourth of October, in the waters off St. Anthony. Trif, Katie, Aunt Rachel and half the women on the Point, it seems, crowd into Parsons’ Mercantile to hear the telegram from St. Anthony.
Skipper Wilf stands up on a box and raises his hand. His son Ted is captain of the Sea Rose’s sister ship, the Lily.
“The first telegram is from the telegraph office in St. Anthony,” Skipper Wilf says, raising his voice. “Ladies – ladies, quiet down now, it’s not all bad news. Sea Rose lost, stop. Nine survivors safe with us, stop. Further news to follow.”
“Nine?” The number is repeated over and over throughout the crowded shop. “Only nine! Nine saved? How many lost then?”
Skipper Wilf raises his voice. “The Sea Rose carried a crew of sixteen men. If nine men are saved, then seven are – lost.” His voice breaks a little on the word. “We got no way to tell yet, who the survivors are. Not till another telegram comes from St. Anthony.”
Over the panicked voices of women that break like waves in the room, Skipper Wilf raises his voice again. “I have a second telegram from my son, Skipper Ted, who made harbour in Twillingate. The Lily is going back to St. Anthony to get the survivors from the Sea Rose.”
The second telegram arrives the next day, listing the survivors who made it to shore and are on their way home. Captain Hezekiah Barbour. Robert French. Arthur French. Nathaniel French. Jabez Badcock. Harry Mercer. Fred Mercer. Jacob John Russell. William Russell. The other seven men are not accounted for, presumed to be lost. The name of Albert Bradbury is not among the survivors.
Aunt Rachel stayed home this time, keeping David with her, rather than go to the shop to hear the telegrams read out. She can’t bear it, she tells Triffie, so it’s left to Trif to come home and break the news.
Trif, growing up in that house, in and out of it almost every day for years since she married, cannot recall many moments of tenderness or soft words between her aunt and uncle. In fact she can remember almost no conversation between them at all – Aunt Rachel spoke to the children, and Uncle Albert barely spoke at all. She can’t remember ever seeing them touch, or kiss, or embrace. But Rachel cries with huge sobs that shake her shoulders and raw gasps of air, and when all her tears are gone she sits at the table staring down at the oilcloth with hollow, empty eyes.
What is she crying for? Trif wonders. For the loss of the man she loved? For the loss of the only life she knew? For the years of widowhood lying ahead, with husband and son gone and her daughters far away? If Jacob John were lost, what would I be crying for?
People come in and out of the kitchen all evening. Triffie feeds them and gives them tea; Rachel sits quietly, accepting their condolences. She is not the only one with a man whose name did not appear on the survivors list. Nellie French has lost another son: John, too young to go off to the war that claimed Isaac, is among the missing, leaving a wife and four children. The women of the Point go from the house to house, sharing what comfort they can, until long after dark. Lamps are lit, lights burning in windows for fishermen who will never come home from the sea.
When Rachel talks, finally, it’s only to Triffie, when the well-meaning neighbours and relatives have gone and Katie, summoned home from Spaniard’s Bay to hear the news, has gone to bed next to her little brother in one of the upstairs rooms. Tonight Triffie can’t leave Rachel, can’t go home to her own place no matter how much she longs for it. She has to stay.
“I hated for him to go,” Rachel says, looking not at Triffie but out the window, though it’s dark and there’s nothing to see out there. One oil lamp illuminates a small circle of tablecloth.
“I know, I know,” Trif says. “I hated for Jacob John to go too.” That’s not quite true: there was a time she used to be glad he was gone, though she always worried about might happen to him. “And I never wanted Billy to go.”
“No, I was the same with our Will, remember?” Rachel says. “Much good all my worrying did – better he should have died on a fishing boat than go the way he did. Nothing good ever comes to those who go away from home, Trif. I worries that much about Ruth and Betty and their crowd, you’ll never know. They goes off, they all goes off – only you had sense, Trif, you never went away.”
I wanted to, Trif thinks. If she’d had the chance to go, her aunt’s worries wouldn’t have counted for anything. She doesn’t say that; she says, “I went away three summers to Labrador.”
“Labrador!” The name sounds like something Rachel would spit out, not fit to have in her mouth. “Everyone gone down on the Labrador. Albert went to Labrador and now he’ll never come home. Grace went to Labrador, and look what happened to her! Will went to France, Ruth and Betty are gone to Nova Scotia … nothing good ever comes from going away, maid. Nothing good at all.”
“Grace … my mother went on the Labrador?” Triffie has never heard this, not from Rachel or anyone.
“She went as cook on Josiah Badcock’s schooner one summer – the summer she was seventeen. Came back home a disgrace to her family. And no, before you gets on with it, I don’t know no more than that. It could have been any one of the men on that schooner or the old captain himself, bad as he was. I told her no good would come from going away and I was right…I was right about all of them.”
With no warning, her sobs start again. She weeps with such abandon that Trif longs to comfort her, wishes she could put her arms around her and hold her aunt’s weeping body against hers. They have never been close, yet now she is all Rachel has, the only one who stands by her. She takes one of Rachel’s bony, weathered hands across the table and holds it between her own.
All over the Point that week, women weep and hold each other. Everyone is crying when the Lily comes into port and the survivors of the Sea Rose come down the gangplank. Ki Barbour comes off first, leading the half of his men who survived. He looks broken, this man who survived France and came back a hero, who took such pride in rising to be captain of a fishing schooner.
Trif watches Skipper Ki’s face only for a moment before she sees, among the men behind him, the smallest of the survivors, and she breaks from the crowd to run forward and take her son in her arms.
Billy squirms and fidgets as she covers his dark head with kisses. Katie
and David go to Jacob John and welcome him home, then it’s all five of them together, the children in their parents’ arms, Jacob John smiling at Triffie as if he’s just come back from a great adventure and had a grand time. Even with the loss of Uncle Albert and the other men, Triffie cannot help but rejoice, cannot help thanking God that her husband and son are home, that her small family is intact.
Over supper in her own house that night, Trif lays down the law. What she promised God that night on the front bridge, she will fulfill. “No more fishing in this house,” she says. “Not a man here will go out in boat, ever again. ’Tis tempting fate, and we’ve lost too much. I won’t risk my boys in the boat.”
They all stare at her, dumbfounded. What can they be, if not fishermen?
“I don’t care, ye’ll all have to learn some other trade,” Trif says. “Billy, you stay in school, you got a good head on your shoulders and there’ll be no more leaving school to go to the Labrador. You’ll be back in that classroom tomorrow morning.”
“Can I be a preacher?” Billy says, and now it’s him that everyone looks at in surprise. He shrugs. “When we was out there in the dory trying to make her to shore I told God if he got me through it I’d be a preacher, and I means to do it.”
Trif wipes away a tear with the back of her hand. “That you can, my boy. We’ll find a way.”
“Good enough,” Jacob John says. “Katie’s going to be a Seventh Day teacher, Billy’s going to be a Holy Roller preacher – sure we’ll make young David a Church of England minister and then we’ll have the full set.” They all laugh, even Triffie, and while they’re still laughing Jacob John says, “But what are you going to do with me, Trif girl? What would I do, if I didn’t go fishing?”
For that she has no answer. But she’s made a promise to God, and God will have to help them figure something out.
Kit
St. John’s
March, 1931
…You will be most interested, I hope, in this position. Outside of a women’s college, I recognize there are few opportunities for women to teach at the college or university level, but that will change; it must. What better place than here, where we are making all things new?
If that is not enough, then I will appeal to you bluntly: These are dark days in the Colony, darker perhaps even than they are in other places. We began this College in a mood of hope and optimism; we carry it on under a government on the point of bankruptcy, in a land where thousands of the people are destitute, and the rabble is ready to riot in the streets.
In such a time, what do we need more than an educated populace? Surely nothing but learning can banish the spectre of another Dark Ages?
It’s an oddly passionate letter for someone to write inviting a person to apply for a teaching post. Kit certainly does not have a passionate relationship with this Dr. Paton – she has never met the man, though he has heard of her not only from contacts in St. John’s but also from people in his home city of Manchester. But his passion for Memorial College burns on the page. And strangely, in reading it, Kit feels something not unlike the thrill of reading a love letter.
She has accumulated some love notes in her life – hasty scrawls from Ben in their courting days, tender and troubling letters from him while he was at the Front, and, in these last couple of years, a handful of notes from Leo – short, intense, and quite often, frankly indecent. All of them have stirred her in their different ways. Each, she thinks, was fitting for the woman she was when she received them, though of course if anyone among her London acquaintances ever read Leo’s notes, “fitting” would hardly be the word that would spring to mind. But this letter from Dr. Paton, asking if she would be interested in a position at Memorial University College, touches another part of her entirely.
She thinks about it; at first she consults no-one. She wishes she could talk to Leo, but he is far away in Manchester, growing more and more frustrated with the impotence of the Party there and the unlikelihood of revolution ever springing up in English soil. How ironic if, after years together of Leo constantly threatening to return to Poland, Kit were the one to go home.
She hasn’t been back to Manchester since leaving it, and Leo has visited London only twice. They meet during her school holidays, if Leo happens to be free from his lecturing duties then. To colleagues at her school, Kit describes her holidays as walking tours and brings back vivid word-pictures of remote Welsh or Cornish vistas where she hiked. In reality, though she and Leo take the occasional walk, those vistas are glimpsed mostly through the windows of hotels. They spend most of their rare time together in bed, having never tired of each other’s bodies, which amazes Kit now that she approaches her fortieth birthday. After making love, they sit up late in bed at night, talking and arguing and laughing, then sometimes fall asleep in the early morning hours and wake to make love again at noon.
During those times together, Leo is the centre of Kit’s world, but for the rest of the time, he is peripheral. He lives on the margins of her world, and she on the margins of his. At the centre of Leo’s world is the Party, the hope of building a better society, the articles he churns out for radical newspapers. At the centre of Kit’s world is her teaching, which she thoroughly enjoys now that she is in an excellent school and no longer burdened with the duties of headmistress. Edith Stone is a good Head, and Kit is free to do what she does best – work with bright girls who actually care about learning, who have a hope of making something of their lives. Oh, there are dull and careless girls too, and she is stern with them while at the same time hoping to inspire them to care just a little about literature. But most of her energy is focused on the clever girls, the ambitious ones.
She sees herself in them – of course she does. But these are girls from well-off London families, and their ambition lacks that edge of desperate hunger that drove her and Triffie when they were the top students in the one-room school at Missing Point. Still, she is often reminded of her own girlhood. The endless pashes and raves of schoolgirls falling in and out of love with one another remind her of the notes she and Trif used to exchange, their teary farewells in each other’s arms and promises of eternal loyalty whenever Kit left the Point to go to school in St. John’s. They didn’t know the language of English schoolgirls, never talked of having a pash or a crush. But being plunged once again into the intense emotional world of adolescent girls can’t help but make Kit think of her own adolescence.
She has had two good years in London, likes her students, likes her fellow teachers. She would be happy to stay for several more years, yet that letter from Dr. Paton sits on her desk and draws her like a magnet every time she walks into the room. Finally she talks to Edith Stone, weighs the pleasures of her life in London with the possibilities inherent in a college position back home.
In the end, she makes her decision, and the letter telling Leo of it is the second one she writes. It, and her letter to Dr. Paton, go into the same post.
A week after the letters are posted – far too soon to have heard anything back from Newfoundland – Kit wakes at one in the morning to someone hammering at the door of her flat.
She goes to the door, wrapping her robe around herself as she walks, knowing who it must be. “What are you doing here?”
“A nice welcome for your lover,” Leo says, stumbling across the threshold and into her room. He’s drunk, and Leo is not a hard-drinking man.
“Lower your voice,” she hisses, closing the door behind him. “Bad enough you come here in the middle of the night, do you want to announce at the top of your lungs that I have a lover?”
“Oh, of course, sorry. I forget that love is a shame that must be hidden.”
“If you’re a schoolmistress, yes, it certainly is. I can teach Romeo and Juliet, but I can’t have men crawling up my balcony at two in the morning. What’s the matter, Leo?” Although even as she says the words, as he moves awkwardly around the room and finally collapses into the wingback chair, she knows it’s a stupid question. She sits down acro
ss from him on the settee. He looks exhausted, red-eyed, disheveled. He’s not as drunk as she first thought – he’s been drinking, but he’s also genuinely distressed and that adds to the impression of mania. He sits now with his elbows resting on thighs, running both hands through his tangled hair.
“I got your letter,” he says finally.
“Yes, I gathered,” Kit says. “Was it really such a shock that you had to come tearing down here on the first train?”
“I never thought you would go.”
“Yet you talk all the time of leaving me. Am I not allowed to be the one to move first?”
“You did move. Down here, away from me. That was bad enough. If you go back to Newfoundland we will never see each other again.”
“If you go to Poland we won’t either,” Kit points out.
“I have told you I want you to come with me.”
“And I’ve told you I can’t. Anymore than you would want to come to Newfoundland with me – though that would be far saner than going to the Continent. It might even work, if we were married.” She has her doubts about the position at Memorial being as freely offered to a married woman as to a widow, but a widow with an unemployed Polish Jewish Communist lover would be beyond the pale entirely. It’s a safe proposal to make as he’ll never say yes. Still, the idea of being with Leo in St. John’s, making a new start in the new world, is not without appeal.
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