That Forgetful Shore (29 page)

“Of course I'm awake, Trif. What the hell was Kit thinking, digging up that old foolishness after all these years? Is she cracked, or what?”

“Maybe she is,” Trif says, pulling her hand away from his. “She's lost her husband; she's been through a hard time. I'm sure she said a lot of things she didn't mean.” Is this true? she wonders now. Did Kit say things she didn't mean to say, or things she had been longing to say for years? “But at least she finally told me the truth, even if it was years too late.”

“And what good did that do, eh? Are you better off, now that you know?”

“It's always best to know the truth.”

“Right. The truth will make you free.” It makes her madder than almost anything else, when he quotes scripture, like Satan rhyming off verses to Jesus in the wilderness. “Are you free now, then?”

“I wish I was.” She gets up and walks to the window, pulls over the curtain. It's a moonlit night and the moon makes its path across the water. She loves this view, loves to look out at the calm cove and the moonpath that seems to lead to somewhere much farther and stranger than Bareneed.

“Ah, yes. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Is that why you wish Kit had told you the truth years ago – if she had, you'd never have married me?”

“Of course I wouldn't!” She turns back to him, though in the dark she can't make out his face, can't see the look in his eyes. “Don't you think it's been bad enough all these years, knowing you went around with her first and only came after me once she showed you the door? I already knew I was your second choice – now I come to find out there was more to it than I ever guessed. That you and her was –” She searches for the right word. “That you and Kit had relations, long before you and me was ever married. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“I'm sure it don't make you feel too good,” Jacob John says after another long silence. “That's why I never wanted you to find out.”

“It was her you wanted, all along,” Trif says. “I know I was second best, but I never thought you'd be comparing me to her, all these years, in the bedroom as well as everywhere else. I'm sick to death of not bein' Kit Saunders, never bein' as good as her.”

Again the silence. How did she ever wind up with a man so stuck for words?

“If that's what you think, Trif, you're crazier than I ever thought you was. And that's saying something.” She hears the bedsprings creak again; he turns over, so that if she does get in the bed – how can she ever get in that bed? – his back will be to her.

“Well, that's a great comfort, I'm sure.”

“I don't know what you want me to say, girl. If you haven't figured out after ten years that you're second best to nobody, I doubt I can give you much comfort now. I s'pose nearly every man got something in his past, some foolishness he got up to when he were a boy. I never thought you'd drag that out to hold it against me after all this time.”

Well, I only just found out, didn't I? If I'd known sooner, I'd have brought it up sooner
, Trif thinks. But she doesn't say it; it's too much like one of her usual saucy comebacks, the kind that might lead to Jacob John laughing, turning over, pulling her into his arms.

“I'm going to lie down with Katie,” she says.

“Please yourself,” says Jacob John.

Triffie lies in Katie Grace's narrow bed, warmed by her daughter's small body, listening to the sniffling sound of Billy's breathing in the nearby cot.
This is my life
, she tells herself.
These children, this house
. A path of moonlight on the water might beckon her away, she might dream of Heaven's chariots and some golden daybreak, but the truth is she's here. Stuck here you might say, but also here where she belongs.

She listens for sounds from the other room, wondering if Jacob John will get up, will come in here or go downstairs. Finally she hears a sound: his deep, steady snore that used to keep her awake when they were first married, that now lulls her to sleep. Tonight it makes her angry. After all that's been said, he can go right off to sleep.

She, too, falls asleep at last. Images chase themselves through her tired mind and weave their way into her dreams – the two children, the house, the moon on the water. Joe Bishop leaning over a young girl with a schoolbook, a kindly image that has now been tainted forever. The girl is naked; she is Kit; she kisses the man who is first Joe Bishop and now is Jacob John, who lays her down on a bed of fishnets and brin bags and touches her body. The girl looks up into Triffie's face, her eyes laughing, mocking, triumphant.
I've won it all; I have everything
, she says, and her face changes again. Kit stands at the bottom of the stairs, angry and hurt. The room grows darker and darker so that Trif, at the top of the stairs, can barely see Kit's face.
The last time I saw her
, Trif thinks,
the last time ever
, though she doesn't know later if that's a waking thought or part of a dream.

She goes on sleeping in Katie's bed for the next few weeks, a treat the children accept without question. She returns to her own bed on the March night after Jacob John goes to St. John's to join the ship that will take him to the seal hunt. Back in her own wide, empty bed, she is unable to sleep. As one sleepless night follows another Trif reverts to her usual cures: prayer and books. Alone on her knees she tries to recapture that bright fire of the Holy Spirit that enflamed her during the revival at George Street Church. She feels something – a sense of comfort, of not being entirely alone – but it's a far cry from the intense infilling of God's presence that she experienced there, and her inability to get back to that feeling hurts almost as much as the loss of Kit. She goes on attending services as always, Saturdays and Sundays, but no hymn or sermon or prayer can recapture what she felt then.

So she plunges back into books, and finds herself engrossed in Tennyson's
In Memoriam
, the poem Kit read to her in the bleak days after Will's death. Though the poem is about losing someone to death, she finds some parts of it more poignant, more fitting now than they were in that bleak summer after the July Drive. Tennyson's friend Arthur was to him what Kit was to her: the friend of youth, the one who understood and shared his dreams and aspirations. Lines drift from the page to haunt her dreams. One night she lies awake thinking,
For all is dark where thou art not
, and in the morning, over and over in her brain drum the words
And unto me no second friend
.

Kit is lost to her, lost as surely as if death had taken her. No letter comes, and Trif does not attempt to write one. Reading
In Memoriam
, Trif thinks that Tennyson had it easier. Surely death is the cleanest way to lose someone you love? Then the memories are forever pure and intact, not sullied by petty meanness. There is no book Trif can open, no spot on the Point she can walk, where there is not a memory of Kit. Everything is tainted – not just Jacob John and Joe Bishop, not just the schoolhouse and Abel Morgan's store, but the causeway and the church and even the Long Beach.

She goes down to the beach on those cold, blustery March days – takes the children down there sometimes to throw rocks in the water, chilly as it is, just to get out of the house and let fresh air blow on her face. One night when Katie and Billy are both tucked up in bed, Trif crosses the road in front of the house and goes down to the beach alone, her coat wrapped tightly around her, and sits on a rock in the dark, gazing out at the waves as they foam on the rocks.

And Love would answer with a sigh,
“The sound of that forgetful shore
Will change my sweetness more and more,
Half-dead to know that I shall die.”

She thinks of the poet's forgetful shore, the River Lethe, and wishes she were sitting on that gentler shore instead of this wild one. Would she reach forward, take a drink of that sweet water? She has never realized how much memory can hurt.

Staring out at the water, lost in thought, she doesn't hear footsteps on the pebbled shore until they are close enough to startle her. She looks up to see a man's tall form silhouetted against the moonlit sky.

“Well, well. Trif Russell. Look at you, stuck out here on the rocks like a mermaid.”

“I'm no mermaid,” she says, recognizing the voice before she sees the face. Jabez Badcock has been gone from the Point for five years. When the war broke out he was up in Nova Scotia working, and then he joined the Canadian Army and went overseas. He's been back for several weeks now. The servicemen are slowly returning home in ones and twos: Ted Parsons and Ki Barbour have come back with medals; Cyrus Snow has written to Ruth to say he will be back by April and asking her to marry him before the summer fishery starts. Harry Mercer is back, the one Mercer boy to return unscathed. Every time a soldier or sailor returns, the people of the Point turn out to welcome him home.

Nobody remembers what train or steamer brought Jabez Badcock home: he was simply back one day, without ceremony. He lives in a house out on the furthest eastern tip of the Point, which used to belong to his uncle. It was once a nice, snug little house, but it hasn't been lived in for ten years and from all Trif's heard, Jabez isn't doing much to improve it. Even before the war he was well on his way to being an eccentric.

He sits on the cold rocks beside Triffie and pulls out a flask. He takes a long drink and passes it to her.

“What are you, foolish? I don't want that.”

“You don't? What, you got nothing you wants to forget?” His voice takes on the sonorous tones it used to have in prayer meetings in the days when Jabez aspired to become a Methodist minister. “
It is not for kings to drink wine, nor for princes strong drink, lest they drink and forget the law. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink and forget his poverty and remember his misery no more
. I'm neither a king nor a prince, and my heart is heavy, so according to the Scriptures this is for me,” he says, taking another drink.

“
And they sung a new song, saying, Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood, and hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth
,” Trif counter-quotes.

Jabez throws back his head and laughs. “The one person on the Point I should have known better than to get into a battle of Scripture with!” he says. “Trif Russell, you've always been the only person I knew who was as haunted by God as I am. That Hound of Heaven, He've got our scent, haven't He?”

“I suppose so.” To her own surprise, Trif tells Jabez about the revival meetings at George Street and the prayer meetings afterward, when the Spirit descended and she was slain and spoke in tongues.

Jabez nods. “I seen that too, up in Montreal one time – people laid out cold on the floor, shaking like they had fevers, babbling like maniacs – all in the name of the Holy Spirit.”

“You never had it yourself, though? The baptism of the Spirit?”

Jabez shifts his eyes away from her, takes another pull from his flask. “I might have, I might not. I don't remember. There's lots I don't remember, lots I don't want to remember.”

In the moonlight his profile is stark but handsome. He's always been a good-looking man, and in the years before he left the Point, Triffie knew there were many girls who wouldn't have minded trying to mend his broken heart. He looks older now, and harder, but he's still a fine figure of a man.

“That's why you took up drinking – so you wouldn't remember?” Trif suggests. She glances up at the lamp lit in the window of her house, calculates how long she's been down here on the shore. She should go up soon, check on Billy and Katie Grace. She remembers Jabez's stormy grief after Sadie Parsons died, and thinks it strange that he should still grieve after all these years. Sadie, as Trif recalls her, was a nice enough girl, pretty and good for a laugh. But even throwing an untimely death by consumption into the story she never seemed the type to inspire lifelong devotion on the scale of a Shakespeare tragedy.

Jabez laughs, as if he's heard her thoughts as well as her words. “Tell you the truth, Trif maid, I think I took up drinking to forget Sadie … then I went overseas to forget things I did when I was drinking…now I'm back and I got to go on drinking to forget what I saw over there.”

“Were you wounded?”

“Bit of shrapnel in my shoulder is the worst I got. I knows there's plenty never got off so easy – I was sorry to hear about your uncle's young fellow, and the rest of 'em. There's no justice to it, maid – them as wanted to live are buried over there in France, and some of us who didn't give a damn whether we lived or died came off without a scratch.” Another pause, another drink. “I 'low you got your own things you'd rather forget.”

“I s'pose I do. Don't we all?”

“Sure you won't have a drink?” He offers the flask again, and when Triffie shakes her head he puts the cap on, puts it in the inside pocket of his coat, and stands up. He offers Trif his hand and helps her to her feet, and for a moment they both stand looking at each other till Trif shifts her gaze out to sea.

“We got a lot in common, you and me, Trif.”

There's such intimacy in his tone that she can believe there are women drawn to him, and she thinks for a moment he may be making a proposition. But when she looks back at him she can see that whatever he's got in his mind, it's not that.

Do they have a lot in common? On the surface, not much, she thinks. Trif Russell, pillar of more than one church, and Jabez Badcock, drunk and reprobate. But perhaps he's right. “You already said that,” she points out. “The Hound of Heaven, and all that.”

“Oh right, there's that. But there's more than that, far more.… Who's your father, Trif?”