That Forgetful Shore (12 page)

“Don't you ever intend to marry?” Aunt Rachel says, her forehead crinkling. An unpaid housekeeper is all very well now while the children are young, but with Ruth almost finished school and Will and Betty growing up fast, it will take only a few years to move Trif from being an asset to being a burden.

“P'raps, when I meets the right one,” Trif said. “But I can tell you for sure, Jacob John's not him.”

“I hope you're not holding out for meeting some young man who shares your religion,” Aunt Rachel says, “for you won't find many of them along this shore. And meanwhile, you'll have let a good man slip through your fingers. Jacob John won't wait for long – I think he got his eye on your cousin Lizzie if you don't give him any more encouragement than you're doing.”

“Tell him there's no point in waiting, and Lizzie Snow is welcome to him,” says Triffie. She is pleased with herself; this unpleasant conversation has turned out almost as well in real life as it's doing in her head. She can hardly wait for Aunt Rachel to leave, so she can write it all down.

Kit

Elliston
June, 1909

Dearest Posy,

This postal comes by
Prospero
to say that I will arrive on the very next boat. The last weeks have been such a Whirlwind, with finishing the School year and making preparations for next, that I hardly know where I am. How good it will be to get home to you, my Darling Friend, and talk of all our plans and dreams!

Kit feels guilty. It will really be
her
plans and dreams they talk about, her great, impossible dream that has somehow come true, and surely that will be hard on Triffie.

Yet Trif has cheered her on all the way, telling her to apply to Dalhousie, telling her she will get in even when it seems impossible. Kit still has this final campaign to wage, going home to convince her parents that they should let her go. Her scholarship covers tuition, and she has enough savings from teaching all winter and working at the Mercantile in the summer to pay for room and board. She has enough, anyway, for the first year. After that – well, she can't think of it yet. She has the opportunity for one year of university, and if that's all she ever gets, she intends to enjoy it to the fullest.

Ben has been the other angel on her shoulder, as encouraging as Trif but with far more knowledge about how such things work. While Kit spent her second school year in Elliston, Ben was back at Dalhousie. Their paths cross only briefly, when he comes home for Christmas or for the summer, before Kit goes back to the Point. Ben brings her copies of the Dalhousie catalogue, helps her with the applications, tells her over and over that this is possible.

Kit's mother always told her that men didn't like girls who were too clever or too educated. Although, like most things her mother said, Kit disdained the advice, she has always secretly believed there is something to it. Certainly the cleverest women she knows, the mistresses at Spencer College, including her beloved Miss Shaw – who was more than happy to write Kit a glowing letter of recommendation for university – are all unmarried.

Ben Porter, having charted his own course away from a fisherman's life in an outport town, seems eager for Kit to follow suit. Yet his interests are clearly more than platonic. Their time together has been so brief over these past two years, and he spoke the truth when he said he was no letter-writer. But when he comes home, nobody in Elliston doubts that he's courting Miss Saunders the teacher.

On the night before Kit leaves Elliston for the last time, having resigned her teaching post, Ben sits beside her on the back fence of her landlady's house. The air has become warm and spring-like just in these last few days, the hard ground softening and tree buds opening into full leaf. Kit leans back against the fence, Ben perched beside her. The air between them feels like June – full of possibility.

“What if it doesn't work out?” she says, putting her fears into words. “What if my father puts his foot down and says I can't go? What if I go up there and fail the matriculation exam? Then I've given up a good job for nothing.”

His fingers play with the hair swept high on her head, teasing little strands loose. His fingertips brush her neck. Shivers run through Kit's body.

“It won't happen, Katherine.” He's the only person who calls her Katherine; it feels like as much a pet name as when Trif calls her Posy. “This is meant to be. It's your destiny.”

Since he's already made bold to touch her, Kit dares to be a bit brazen herself. “My mother won't want me to get a university education. She thinks if I'm too educated, no-one will ever marry me.”

“Oh. Well. We can put her mind to rest on that score, can't we?”

“Can we?”

Ben chuckles. “You know my intentions are honourable, Katherine. I'll write your mother and father a letter, if you like.”

“They might like that. I wouldn't.” She wants to keep Ben's courtship to herself, not to drag it into the harsh light of parental scrutiny. They have stolen kisses and caresses in their rare moments alone together, and Ben talks of the future as if their lives will be entwined, though he hasn't formally proposed. But Ben's greatest gift has been to show her the way to another life. Even if he never ends up proposing marriage, if he gets her out of Newfoundland and into university in Canada, he will always be the prince in her fairy tale.

On board the
Ethie
, steaming away from the wharf, she leans over the rail and waves to him, thinks of the funny postcard he sent her last winter. The picture showed a girl dressed in the height of fashion, her hat perched atop a huge Gibson Girl hairstyle, looking flirtatiously over her shoulder as she climbed the gangplank of a ship. The caption read “All eyes were on me when I boarded the steamer.” On the back, Ben had written: “She reminds me of you – seems I'm always watching you sail away.”

During the summer, Ben fishes on his father's boat. Unlike most fishermen, he earns cash rather than credit for his share, due to an arrangement his father has with the merchant. Kit goes back to work behind the counter at Parsons' Mercantile. The shop girl's job belongs by rights to her cousin Sadie, but Sadie is dying of tuberculosis.

A week after Kit gets home, Trif comes to the shop to meet her at the end of the day. Trif has put in a hard workday herself in the house and garden, but she has an hour to spare and now, as Kit lays aside her shop apron, they both take the lane up towards the Neck Road and then the path down to the south side.

Kit has arrived home at the tail end of the caplin scull, and it's caplin weather, misty and cool. “I'm that sick of caplin, I don't care if I never sees another,” says Trif, who has been hauling buckets of the small fish up from the beach to her garden for fertilizer. This evening no-one is out catching caplin; the small fish are gone and already on a few stages around the beach codfish are laid out to dry. A few men still fish the waters off the Point, though fishing hasn't been good here for years.

“Mother says she remembers when she was a girl, the Long Beach all lined off with fish drying, all summer long, and every man, woman and child would be working at the fish,” Kit says.

“Uncle Albert says the same thing,” Trif says. Now almost all the fishermen go down on the Labrador for the summer, either alone or with their families. Except for the short weeks of the caplin fishery, the beach is quiet during summer.

“Father finally gave me his permission today,” Kit says after a moment's silence. They sit side by side on the smooth beach rocks, looking out at the waves. “I'm sailing on the
Bruce
at the end of August. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm not sorry, but –”

“You're sorry for me.”

“Not – not
sorry
for you.” She knows Trif will never want to be pitied. “Sorry you're not coming with me. I wish it was something we could do together.”

“So do I. But we can't. And anyway, you won't be alone. You'll be with Ben.”

Kit is sorry about that too – sorry that Trif doesn't have a Ben in her life, doesn't have anyone but the alarmingly faithful Jacob John. “I honestly thought he'd have give up by now,” Trif says, when Kit steers the conversation in that direction.

“Perhaps he thought
you
would have given up by now,” Kit counters. “Given up saying no.”

“Well, I haven't and I'm not,” Trif says. But she sounds less sure than when they've had this conversation in the past. She won't meet Kit's eyes. “Everyone keeps telling me he has his own house.”

“Well, he does.” They both look up at the solid bulk of the Russell house, standing sentinel across the road like the guardian of the beach.

“His mother is still in it, though. The boys are both gone – Ned to the lumber woods and Josiah to North Sydney. Mrs. Russell says she'll move over to Bay Roberts with Liza when Jacob John gets married, but what if she don't? Not much good having a house of your own if it got your mother-in-law in it.”

“No, that'd be worse than keeping house for Aunt Rachel. Better the devil you know.”

“I don't mind, really.”

“Don't mind what? Marrying Jacob John?”

“No! Don't mind – you know. Going on as I'm doing. Keeping house for Aunt Rachel and Uncle Albert, looking out for the young ones. I'm not saying I don't wish I was in your shoes, but I'm at peace with it. 'Tis God's will for my life, and I trust Him.”

“Do you think God's got a plan for after?”

“After what?”

“After the youngsters grow up and leave home. When they don't need you so much anymore. What are you going to do then?”

“The Lord could have come by then. He's coming soon, and it's more important for me to be ready for that than to look for someone to marry with a house of his own.”

“You really believe that, do you?”

Trif doesn't answer. Kit knows her friend has a kind of faith she can never approach or imagine. Trif has always had faith, but since taking up with the Seventh-day Adventists she has augmented her belief in a personal God who watches out for her every move, with a belief that Judgement Day is coming in a year or two, thus making all future plans moot. Fortunately she has not been fervent in trying to convert Kit to her beliefs. The possibility that the world might end before Kit gets to go to university, sit in classes, graduate, teach in a bigger school, marry Ben, see the world – the thought of being cut short from doing all those things is as much hell as Kit will ever need to contemplate. Kit has her heaven here on earth, all spread out like the beach rocks at her feet, every stone a possibility.

Still, Kit realizes that for all Trif's trust in the Lord, she doesn't laugh off the idea of Jacob John as she used to. Time is passing. Trif, like Kit, is eighteen. Hardly an old maid, but unlike Kit, Triffie does not have new opportunities and new possibilities beckoning. Apart from the hope of the Lord coming to pluck her out of this narrow life, her possibilities are becoming fewer. What will she be, once her cousins are raised and out of the house? A dependent relation, a burden to her aunt and uncle? No wonder Trif turns her eyes from the stones at her feet to the sky above, waiting for the Lord to whisk her away.

Jacob John Russell is no Mr. Darcy, nor even the equal of Ben Porter. And he certainly is not the Lord Jesus come riding down on a white cloud. But he is not without his appeal. As Kit has cause to know.

Kit watches and waits. There's no courting in summer. Men who fish off the Point are out in boat from before dawn till mid-afternoon; their women and children spend hours on the flakes, gutting and splitting fish, laying it out to dry. Other families are gone entirely, off to the Labrador. In many families, like Triffie's, the men are gone and the women and children stay behind, caring for chickens and pigs, tilling the gardens to grow the vegetables that will make the difference between hunger and plenty when winter comes. Uncle Albert is gone on Skipper Wilf Parsons' schooner; so is Jacob John Russell. But Jacob John's name comes up in conversation more often than it has in previous summers, and each time Kit takes note of the look in Trif's eye and the tone in her voice.

“You're going to come round, you know,” Kit tells Triffie one evening. And instead of the usual denial, she hears Trif say, “I s'pose I am, after all.”

“To Jacob John? Do you really think you will?”

“At least before he left in the spring he asked me for my hand instead of asking Uncle Albert for it.” Trif shrugs. “I could do worse. I s'pose that's the furthest thing you could say from true love, isn't it? ‘Why did you marry him?' ‘I thought I could do worse.' But life's not a novel, Peony. I got to take what God gives me, and what if He's give me Jacob John?”

Kit has no words. She moves closer to Triffie – they are sitting on the bridge of Kit's house, enjoying the warm evening breeze – and puts her arms around her. “I wish it were different. I wish you were head-over-heels in love with him.”