How easily it rolls off Kit’s tongue, to say things are hard out home. Little she knows about it. “Hard” is not the word for it. Jacob John kept his promise about not sending the boys out fishing anymore, and for awhile he even stayed onshore himself, working in the new sawmill on the Point alongside one-legged Char Mercer. Young Bill went as far as he could in the school on the Point, then finished up his Grade Eleven in Bay Roberts last year. He wanted more schooling, too, but there’s no money for it. He’s gone off to Sydney now to live with Betty and Frank and work in the mines. “You think the mine is any safer than a fishing boat?” Jacob John asks her, and Trif feels her heart like a stone inside her. But what can you do when people are lining up to take the dole to feed their families? It’s a miracle to have one child in college, and Katie has put in years of hard work to get here.
Last year Jacob John got laid off at the mill and in the spring he told her he was going fishing again, no matter what she’d promised God. As a matter of compromise he was going to fish inshore, as a shareman in Fred Mercer’s dory; Fred’s wife Minnie is no longer well enough to join him in the fishery, and neither Fred nor Jacob John wants to go back on the Labrador any more. This past summer, for the first time since before Katie was born, Trif worked on the flakes, hating it as much as she did when she was a young wife those summers in Battle Harbour. But if that’s what it takes to stay off the dole and keep food on her children’s plates, then she will do it.
She thinks now of those hours splitting and gutting cod, a pitiful few cod, too, for the sad price the merchants were offering. Thinking of the smooth feel of Kit’s hand when she took it a moment ago, the old envy rushes back, like a salt taste in her mouth. Trif prays for charity. Actually, what she prays is: God, you got me into this, get me out of it. She felt the Holy Spirit like a kick in her arse, telling her she had to go see Kit, put things right. At least, put her part of it right. Thank her for the money she sent for Katie, and apologize for her part in the rift.
“Well then. Will you come over and see me while you’re in town? My address is here –” Kit pulls out a card and passes it to Trif.
Trif sizes up the card. “Very high class,” she can’t resist saying, and sees Kit’s shoulders stiffen.
“Well then,” Kit says. “The invitation’s open. I would like to – catch up.”
“What do you want to hear about? Who’s dead, who’s moved away, the price of fish, who’s on the dole? There’s no good news out home.” Trif realizes she’s crossed her arms in front of her and forces herself to uncross them. She tries to keep resentment out of her voice.
“Katie has done a good job of keeping me up to date on what’s happening on the Point. It’s – good to feel like I’m back in touch again.”
Trif nods. She’s going to make an excuse and get out of there, end this awkward encounter. “Anyway. I don’t know if I’ll have time to drop by while I’m in town, but I just…wanted to say thank you. I should go find Katie.”
“Yes, of course.” Kit holds out her hand again; their fingers brush briefly.
Trif turns away.
“Triffie…wait. P-Posy …”
The old nickname sounds odd, false, in Kit’s new voice. But it’s enough to make Trif turn around.
“I’m sorry,” Kit says. “No, really. I am. For – everything. I was a fool – to say all those things, and then never write or anything. I’m sorry.”
The silence that follows is not silent: girls pass through the corridor talking and laughing, but it feels to Trif as if she and Kit are standing on the Long Beach hearing nothing but waves. “I was as foolish as you,” she says at last. “I went off half-cocked, took off and never wrote or nothing. And you were right – about himself. Dear Pedagogue.” Another old name that sounds strange, saying it now.
“You’ll have to tell me all about it,” Kit says, and for the first time she sounds like herself, like Kit, like Peony.
The odd thing is, Trif doesn’t tell her all about it. About Joe Bishop, and how she threatened him and made him toe the line, how for years Trif would have him tutor youngsters in her kitchen in the evenings, even after Katie was gone on to Spencer. She determined, before and after she got on the School Board, that no child, boy or girl, would be done out of the extra help they needed if they were clever enough. But she also made sure there would be no more of Mr. Bishop having them alone in the schoolroom after hours, either.
It’s a good story, but Trif doesn’t tell it, and Kit doesn’t ask. Trif does go to Kit’s house for tea the next day, while Katie Grace is going around with a few of her friends, Christmas shopping. The two women talk for hours, catching each other up on the past ten years, regaining something of the old intimacy but never straying too close to the subjects that divided them.
What’s to be said, anyway? Trif could tell Kit the whole story of her victory over Joe Bishop, has written it all out in a letter that was never sent. But if they started talking about that, there’d be the other thing too, that old business with Jacob John, and the truth is Triffie’s ashamed to talk about that. Ashamed of how angry it made her, ashamed that she ever threw it in Jacob John’s face the way she did.
She can remember the hurt she felt when she first heard it, the way you look at a tree cracked off the stump and remember the big windstorm that took it down. But you don’t feel the wind in your face when you’re standing there, years later, staring at the tree stump. There’s only a memory, and that’s all Trif feels when she thinks of young Kit and young Jacob John, little more than children really, in each other’s arms. She remembers her own rage at hearing it, but can’t remember why she was so angry, why it mattered so.
Once Trif believed that you couldn’t mend a broken relationship without thoroughly picking through the rubble, examining each of the shattered pieces, gluing them back together with painful care. She would have thought the whole thing had to be hashed over, discussed, repented, forgiven. Like a Catholic going to confession, she thinks now, rhyming off everything you did wrong, asking for your penance. But it’s not like that at all.
Instead, she and Kit between them pick up the damaged thing, their friendship, and although there are pieces missing – ten years apart, things they don’t speak about – they just pick it up and lay it between them and start using it, pour something new into it and hope it holds. They begin talking about their lives now, and about Katie Grace, the thing they have in common. They go on from there, without any great reconciliation or explanation. And it feels right.
Kit
HAS ANYONE, KIT wonders, ever gone home after many years without pondering the phrase “You can’t go home again?” Or to attempt a more classical allusion, can anyone bathe in the same river twice?
All the experts agree that one can’t. Go home again, or re-bathe in the river. Neither is possible, so Kit schools herself to expect neither. She approaches this visit to Missing Point with no preconceptions, no expectation that anything will be the same, least of all herself. She tries to think of it, in fact, as visiting an entirely new place, a place with perhaps some historical interest, like Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. Not exactly Kit’s birthplace – she was born in Trinity – but certainly the place that shaped her more than any other. There is always one place that one longs and fears to return to, and for Kit it is the Point.
Four years after her return to Newfoundland, she still hasn’t gone back.
She’s come, finally, at Trif’s insistence. Triffie, Jacob John and the boys all came into town for Katie’s graduation from Memorial. The two-year course has taken her three years, because she took a teaching job in between her first and second year, to save a little more. This last year she boarded with Kit, and the whole family comes to stay for Convocation weekend.
Like other families from around the bay celebrating the convocation of their hardworking sons and daughters, Triffie and Jacob John looked dowdy, frightened, a little dazed, but beneath their lowered eyelids was a pride they fo
ught to keep under control. One of their children has managed to escape a life of incessant toil; one child has the chance for an easier life and may raise the rest of the family from grinding poverty.
Looking around at the graduates, Kit wonders how realistic these hopes are. Many of the young men and women convocating come from well-off families and will no doubt have the chance to follow in their parents’ footsteps. But the fishermen’s sons and daughters like Katie Russell, those who scrabbled their way to a college diploma by sheer toil and bloody-minded determination – what are their chances? In the Newfoundland of 1935, with more and more people on the dole, fish prices still dropping and fewer jobs available all the time, Kit fears that for many of them all their struggle will only earn them what so many already have – a ticket on a boat going to the Boston States. The Depression is bad everywhere of course, but Newfoundlanders are driven by the eternal hope that things will be better somewhere else.
Young Bill is home from Nova Scotia for the occasion, and both Kit and Katie show him around the college, taking special care to introduce him to Dr. Carew and show him the room where the engineering students study. Kit sees Bill’s narrow face brighten: the boy had no interest in being a teacher like his sister, Trif told her, but he had a great head for facts and figures. Despite the fact that his childhood ambition was to be a Pentecostal preacher – and, indeed, apparently he is a fine lay preacher – it’s the engineering classes that attract him. Kit has already made the offer that if Bill wants to put his savings from working down in the mine towards college, she will help in any way she can, including the free room and board she gave Katie.
Trif has urged Kit for a long time to come back to the Point. Now she says Kit must come back with them after Convocation. Jacob John adds his voice to Trif’s. “Sure you knows you wants to come back, see how it’s all changed, how modern we are now,” he laughs. “They got electric lights on the street in Bay Roberts, you wouldn’t know the place.”
Kit dreads seeing the people who watched her grow up, who will never look at her without seeing the ghost image of the awkward young girl she once was. For some people, like Triffie, the presence of those people is a constant, and Kit supposes because Trif has watched those same people change and grow old, too, her life is part of a closely woven whole. Whereas Kit’s life is patchwork, pieces disconnected, and she will land on the Point as a woman out of joint. People will spend a fortnight exclaiming over how she has changed, or else how she hasn’t changed a bit.
There’s also the more practical consideration of putting herself under the feet of Triffie and Jacob John for two weeks at a busy time of year. Jacob John fishes inshore in summer, and young David, whose mother will not permit him to go out in a fishing boat, helps his parents make fish onshore. “Don’t mind that,” Triffie said when Kit said she’d be afraid to be underfoot. “Sure with our Bill home, he’s going to give Jacob John a hand out on the flake too, and they won’t need me. I’ll have a vacation myself, right in my own home.”
Kit wonders, too, what it will be like to spend day in and day out with Triffie and Jacob John, living under their roof. She and Trif have corresponded regularly for the past two and a half years, but there are still many things left unsaid between them. She wonders if the fabric of their friendship is strong enough, after everything that’s passed, to survive a fortnight of each other’s company.
She sizes up Jacob John over Convocation weekend: she can see in this weathered, work-toughened middle-aged man the shadow of the boy she knew, but it’s a shadow only. His green eyes still squint at her in that measuring way he had, of taking somebody in before making a saucy remark. Kit thinks of her own image as she sees it in the mirror each morning: thin, graying, prim, reserved. There is no hint in that picture of the girl who pushed Jacob John up against the wall in Abel Morgan’s store and made him laugh with surprise and delight; no hint, either, of the schoolteacher who made love to Ben Porter on the desk in her classroom, or of Leo Lanski’s secret lover. All of that longing is tamped down and tucked away, and she is confident Jacob John sees nothing in her to remind him of the past.
Stepping off the train in Bay Roberts, Kit is hit with a wave of memory: the smell, the sight, the sounds of an outport town. She is stepping into a different world, and she realizes that Jacob John was joking when he talked about her coming back to see all the changes on the Point. Fred Mercer meets them with a horse and cart to drive them across the causeway, and as they drive onto the North Side Road, Kit thinks that Missing Point has changed far less than she herself has in sixteen years.
The boats tied up at the wharf might be the same boats that were tied there in 1920, and the houses along the North Side Road are the same too. The sawmill and the coal and salt works are new, ugly buildings offering a brazen promise of prosperity that so far has not been fulfilled. Houses and boats look weathered, as if they haven’t seen a lick of new paint since the war.
Even the people look the same, just older and more worn, like their boats and houses. Gray hair where once there was black or brown or blond; more lines on faces. Children she barely remembers have grown into men and women while she was away. Missing faces, too: Trif’s Uncle Albert and Aunt Rachel, both dead now; Trif’s cousins, moved away to Canada. Many people have moved away, looking for the prosperity that has always eluded the Point.
Beneath all these surface changes, the Point still feels like a place untouched by time. In St. John’s, there is a change in the air. During the war years and even for a year or so after the war, people spoke as if the future held great things, as if Newfoundland were about to become a player on a world stage. As if the staggering sacrifice of the troops in the Great War had bought the country a place among nations.
Now, after years of depression, after the country squandering its independence and the Commission of Government rushing in to save the day, the mood in St. John’s has soured. Every new enterprise, even the College itself, feels these days like a lick of paint over peeling despair. Underneath it all is a sense that Newfoundlanders are a people perhaps forever unfit to govern themselves.
The mood on the Point is different. There never was, as Kit recalls, any of that heady optimism here, and so there is none of that headlong rush to despair to follow it. Fish is low and times are hard; people are out of work and on the dole, but the cycle of good times and hard times is familiar. Rather than highs of optimism and lows of despair there is only a constant patient endurance, a sense that the weather and the price of fish and even wars and governments are in the hands of the Almighty. Ordinary people must just get up every morning and get on with the work.
At night, in her bed in Trif’s house, Kit wonders if there is any accuracy at all to her observations. Is she making sweeping generalizations about a place she hasn’t lived in twenty years on the strength of a single afternoon and evening back home? What does she know, really?
Kit determines not to analyze the Point while she’s here: she wants to talk less and listen more, perhaps even to learn something.
Mostly, she keeps that resolution. Jacob John and his sons are busy at the fish, Jacob John in the boat and the boys onshore. Triffie would rather her sons never touch a codfish, but she knows in the present climate that’s impossible and tries to be content with their promise not to go out in a boat. While they work down by the water, Kit spends much of the day up on the hill with Triffie and Katie. The small vegetable garden Kit remembers up here above the house has become much larger: with times getting harder Triffie has broken new ground, growing more crops so they owe less to the merchant. Weeding the potatoes, carrots, cabbage and turnip takes a good bit of time, and on nice days it’s a grand place to work, with the warm breeze blowing in their faces and the whole south side of the Point spread out below them.
If Katie is not with them, Kit and Trif talk more freely. Kit tells Trif all about Leo, including the fact that she hasn’t heard from him in over a year. Trif, still rock-solid in her own convictions of sin and righte
ousness, listens without judgement to Kit’s tale of her Communist lover and her fears about why his letters have stopped coming.
She wonders if Trif even knows anything about Communism beyond a distant Red Menace she might hear of on the news, but she finds that although Trif has not yet read The Communist Manifesto – “I keeps meaning to get my hands on a copy,” she says – she has read a number of articles about socialism and communism. “It’s lovely, of course, just like Jesus and the apostles – or Tolstoy for that matter, no wonder the Russians like it so much. But how far are you ever going to get with a philosophy that expects people to be better than they are?”
“The Church expects that,” Kit points out.
“But the Church allows room for sin and repentance, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit too, though you may not make much of those,” Trif says. “I don’t gather there’s any Holy Spirit of Communism.”
“You still put a lot of stock in God and the Holy Spirit,” Kit observes.
“More than in guns, which is what Stalin seems to put the most stock in,” says Triffie.
Triffie’s faith, which has meandered through several different churches and come out in a way that allows her to attend them all without any apparent discord, is still beyond Kit’s grasp. But it no longer irritates her as it once did. After Leo, maybe she’s gotten used to the fervour of a true believer. Perhaps that made her more tolerant of all kinds of faith, and the strange places it might lead. Or perhaps middle age just makes everything easier, less intense and more bearable.
This seems a likely thought, except for the nights when she lies awake imagining where Leo might be now. On those nights, as she now tells Triffie, she knows that the pains of middle age are just as sharp as those of youth. “I loved Leo, but there was no way for us to make a life together,” Kit says. “Now he’s gone, and I’m afraid – scared I’ll never hear from him again, scared of what’s happened to him.”
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