That Forgetful Shore (13 page)

Triffie laughed. “With Jacob John? No chance. But I don't mind. I don't need love. I do need a place of my own.”

Again the weight of secrets, stories untold, tugs at Kit like a tide. But what can she say? It's not a matter of spoiling her Posy's happiness, for Trif is not happy. But she is – what? Content, perhaps, or resigned at least. It's not much on which to build the hope of happiness, but she could have even less than this.

Their last outing together before Kit leaves is a melancholy one. Sadie Parsons is buried in the little graveyard behind the Methodist Church. Her father and her brother Ted are still down on the Labrador; her mother cries bitterly in the arms of Jabez Badcock, who has stayed home from the fishery to be at Sadie's side and entreat God to spare her. Jabez looks more devastated even than Sadie's mother does; his handsome young face is hollowed and grim. Kit remembers Sadie, not as the frail invalid of the past two summers but as a laughing schoolgirl. Her best chum, Millie Butler, comes to stand by Kit and Trif. Triffie reaches out an arm to put around Millie's shoulders and draw her in, and the three girls stand together looking into the grave. Jabez throws a clod of dirt on Sadie's coffin, and her mother throws another. The solid thud of earth against wood echoes with grim finality. Except for the minister, nobody has a word to say.

Three days later, Kit is on board the
Bruce
, sailing for Nova Scotia.

Triffie

Missing Point
November, 1909

My dearest Peony,

Please, I beg of you, tear up this letter and throw it away once you have read it. I sit here at the kitchen table in Jacob John's house – my house, I suppose – on my first morning as a Wife, and ask myself what have I done? I have married a man who does not share my Faith, nor my Interests, nor any of my Ambitions, a man who has courted me in his own sorry fashion for two years, yet knows me no better now than if we had just met in passing on the road.

He never said he loved me, only that I wouldn't do better than him and he couldn't do better than me. And the sad truth is, he was right. So I made my vows, without even you, my dearest Friend, to stand by my side – not that I can fault you for not being here, for you are far away, and Fall is the only season in which a fisherman will even consider a wedding.

I cannot shake the misgiving, that I have made a terrible mistake.

I said you ought to tear up this letter. Do not tear it; burn it. Burn it, and blow the ashes on the wind. And think of your own dear Posy, uprooted and planted in a strange Garden, yet still growing all Alone.

Triffie signs the letter. She folds it, seals it in an envelope, writes Kit's new address on it. Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Her mind runs through the scenes of the day before – the crowded, jumbled hours. They were married with a handful of witnesses in the parlour of this house, her new home. Jacob John's mother looked cross, having agreed to move out but clearly not happy with it. Aunt Rachel and Uncle Albert looked relieved – that was the only possible word for it. Jacob John looked pleased with himself. God alone knows what Trif looked like.

The rest of the afternoon and evening half the people on the Point crowded into the kitchen and parlour, eating the cake and biscuits Aunt Rachel had baked, drinking her blueberry wine or, for the more abstemious, tea. The boys had something stronger, down on the beach. Jabez Badcock, who since Sadie's death has thrown over his teetotalling Methodist principles, brought a few bottles of rum, she heard, and the fellows lit a bonfire down there. Some of the girls went down and danced on the beach with them in the cold night air, but Triffie stayed up in the kitchen receiving everyone's good wishes, wishing it were all over. Hoping Jacob John had a good few drinks of that rum, that he might get too drunk to want anything from her later on.

The party on the beach broke up when Jabez started a fight with Fred Mercer, then passed out and had to be carried home. Jacob John came back to his house, his steps steady, and took his bride up the narrow staircase to the marriage bed.

The sky is dark, with an hour to go before dawn. Jacob John is still asleep upstairs. Trif thinks of waking beside him tomorrow and the next day and every morning till one of them dies.

She holds the letter beside the candle and thinks,
Why give Kit the trouble?
The trouble of reading, the trouble of burning, the trouble of knowing.

She sets the letter to the candle's flame and drops it in her wash basin, watching it flare briefly and then crumble to ash.

Triffie

Missing Point
November, 1909

My dearest Peony – Just a note to say that the Deed is Done. Mr. R. and I are settled in the house of our own – ourselves and no other, as promised. How I wish you could have been with me on the day, dear one – it was all that I wished of happiness in that fateful hour.

Ever your own,
Posy

Triffie brings the postcard, along with a letter she is sending to Millicent Butler in Harbour Grace, to the Bay Roberts post office in time to catch the mid-week mail. It's a pleasantly crisp day for so late in the fall, the sky a shade of blue more often seen in October than the gray end of November, and Trif walks around the long way, not taking the causeway but going around the Coish, past Country Path and down by Long Beach Pond, till she comes in sight of the Russell house. Her house.

She stops to look at it, taking pleasure in its trim appearance, the white paint, the green shutters. Two pine trees in the front yard, still green now that the birch and maples are bare, frame the neat saltbox house. She opens the gate – her front gate – and goes up the path and around the house to her own back door.

“You looks right like you belongs here,” Jacob John says to her that evening as she cooks salt fish and potatoes for his supper. He leans in the kitchen doorway, arms folded across his chest. He looks pleased with himself, to have a wife here in his kitchen.

“I s'pose I do belong here now,” Trif says, though she won't give him the pleasure of turning around to look at him, to see his self-satisfied grin. He's got what he wants, and though he knows full well it's the house and the promise of a married woman's status that won her, he's as smug as if he had truly won her heart. He's not one to talk of love himself, so why should the fact that she's not in love with him give him any trouble? It's a practical arrangement, Triffie tells herself, and it should suit them both just fine.

It certainly seems to suit Jacob John fine. He glows with self-importance, enjoying his status as a man with a wife and a house of his own, though he's not yet twenty-one. He sits beside her in the pew on Sunday morning and gloats about the fact that he no longer has to seek permission to walk her home. Somewhat to her surprise, he doesn't object when she and Aunt Hepsy go over to Mabel Dawe's house in Bay Roberts on Sabbath morning for the Adventist service. He makes the odd crack about the beasts of Revelation or the prophetess Mrs. White, but he never tells her not to go to Sabbath service, nor does he mind that his dinner on Saturday is warmed over from the night before, nor that his wife does no housework on the seventh day. And when Reverend White corners Triffie after church one Sunday to lecture her about her wayward beliefs Jacob John interrupts, drawing her away with a hand on her arm. “I'll look to my own missus, thank you, Reverend,” he says. “Don't the Good Book say the women should listen in silence, and ask their husbands to teach them at home?”

Reverend White, unaccustomed to hearing Scripture on the lips of young Jacob John Russell, is speechless long enough for Jacob John to bid him good-day. Triffie is speechless too, till she busts out laughing.

“So you're going to take to instructing me in Scripture at home, are you?” she says finally.

“Some chance I'd have of that,” he replies. “About as much chance as there'd be of you ever learning in silence.”

But he says no more about it than that. In the evenings when work is done, he doesn't seem to mind that Triffie reads instead of knitting or sewing. He often goes out in the evenings when she would rather stay home; he visits Fred Mercer, now married to Minnie Dawe, or he goes to sit with the men in Joe French's shed, mending nets and telling stories. But he doesn't drink and he's always home by the time Trif is ready to put out the lamp and go to bed.

Bed. It's the hard part of the day for Triffie. She has always described Jacob John, to others and to herself, as “not bad looking,” though “handsome” would be a stretch. He's a little man, not quite as tall as she is herself, with sandy hair and a beard he keeps neatly trimmed. His ready smile and the quick gleam in his eye draw people to him; he's by no means unappealing or ugly. Triffie simply has no interest in what goes on in the bedroom. Never has had much interest in it, to tell the truth. She and Kit puzzled out many of the basic facts by applying animal physiology to human when they were still in school, but the reality of the act remained a mystery to Trif until her wedding night and she wouldn't mind at all if it had remained a mystery forever.

Jacob John clearly has some sort of experience, though she has no desire to know where he's obtained it. He isn't rough or brutal, but neither is there anything in the whole process to make Trif see what the fuss is all about. If this is the business that drives lovers mad – if it's for these few minutes' awkward fumbling in a dark chilly bedroom that people leave their marriages and children, ruin their reputations, imperil their souls – well, Triffie simply can't see the point. Why bother?

There are moments – sitting by the fire at night, perhaps, her reading a book and him fixing the rungs on an old chair or putting a new handle on a hammer – that she feels almost fond of Jacob John. But she feels nothing close to passion, and nothing that happens in the bedroom seems likely to stir her in that direction.

At Christmas time, she misses Kit, who has always come home for the holiday before but can't afford the steamer fare from Nova Scotia this year. She and Jacob John go over to Uncle Albert and Aunt Rachel's for dinner on Christmas Day, and Triffie revels in the feeling she has every time she steps over their threshold now, the independence that allows her to come as a visitor and leave to go back to her own house. It's a wonderful thing not to be beholden to them.

She asks Will how school is going; she misses the daily company of her young cousins, though not the responsibility of caring for them. “I nearly got that hove over,” he says. “I'm still trying to get through that old Fourth Reader, and Mother says I got to stay in school till we goes to the Labrador in the spring, but after that I'm not going back no more.”

“He's not going down on the Labrador this year, is he?” Trif asks.

“I can't keep him back no more.” Aunt Rachel sighs.

“Time for him to go,” Jacob John says, chiming in to support Uncle Albert and Will. “Lots of boys goes before they're twelve and it does nobody no harm.”

“And it's not like he likes school, not like you,” Uncle Albert points out. Ruth, at fourteen, is also finished with school now. Trif wishes there were one other person in the family who cares about learning, who sees the wonder to be found in books.

“The only thing I'll miss about school is Trif helping me with my lessons,” Will says. “And you don't do that no more anyway, Trif, now that you're married, so why should I care? I always liked hearing you read stories and poems, but I never liked reading them for myself.”

“I can still read to you,” Trif says. The boy often drops over to their house on the south side to hang about the kitchen or go out in the shed with Jacob John to do some small task. To her surprise, his eyes brighten a little at the mention of reading, so she repeats the invitation. “Next time you comes over our way, maybe on a Sunday afternoon or sometime I'm not too busy, I'll read something to you.”

She looks at her one shelf of carefully hoarded books later, trying to pick one that might appeal to Will. He takes her at her word and shows up the first Sunday afternoon in January, a blowy, blustery day with swirls of snow streeling across the road. Isaac French is with him, and they both sit to listen as Triffie begins
Gulliver's Travels
. The next Sunday, they bring Char Mercer with them, and it becomes a routine – Trif reads to the three boys, and to Jacob John too if he'll sit still long enough to listen, through the long monotonous hours of Sunday afternoon. They all stay for their suppers, filling the house with their lively energy, and Jacob John doesn't say a word about how much they eat or begrudge them space at the table.

As winter draws in, there is more visiting in the long evenings, and Trif more often leaves her fireside after supper and joins Jacob John at the home of a neighbour or relative. One night he coaxes her up to old Uncle Jedidiah Mercer's place, just a few doors up from them on the South Side Road. She knows that evenings at Uncle Jed's always turn toward recitations, songs and stories as people huddle around the woodstove. When she and Jacob John blow in, Trif counts fifteen people crowded into Aunt Sal's kitchen. All the women have knitting to keep their hands busy though the men mostly sit still, listening while Uncle Jed tells the story of the
Greenland
disaster and sings a long song, verse after verse, to go along with it.

Over on the floor by the stove she sees young Charlie, Isaac and Will. There are two other young married couples, and several older men on their own, their wives no doubt home with the children. Jabez Badcock stands in a corner looking gloomy, as he always does now except when he's drunk. And Joe Bishop sits in a chair pulled up to the table, nodding and drumming his fingers on the tabletop along with the rhythm of Uncle Jed's song. When the song ends and a babble of chatter breaks out again in the room, Joe turns around to talk her. “You're looking well, Mrs. Russell.”