That Forgetful Shore (43 page)

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 righteousness, 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.”

“It's a hard thing, loving anyone,” Trif says. “It nearly always ends up hurting, but I don't say you'd want to miss out on it.
Better to have loved and lost
, like your man Tennyson said.”

When Trif is not in the garden she works in the house, baking and scrubbing and sewing. She dresses from top to toe in clothes she makes herself and sews as much as she can for the rest of the family, again to save on money and credit. While Kit stays there they eat fish at least once every day, but Trif varies the meals when she can, once making a stew out of moose she bottled the previous fall.

Kit has forgotten – or never really known, perhaps – just how hard this life is, how close to the bone, how dependent on the earth and the sea and human toil. By cutting the Point out of her life for so many years she managed to forget how harsh it was, but also how beautiful. She was homesick for the place when she first left; a part of her still belongs here as it does nowhere else.

Among the visits Kit makes to old friends, she spends an evening at the home of her cousin Ted Parsons, visiting his wife Eliza in what is doubtless the most comfortable house in the community. Ted, who is down on the Labrador, owns not only the shop and schooners the Parsons family always owned, but also the new sawmill. “We got to try other things,” Eliza tells Kit, “make money off of something besides fish. There's no future in fish alone.”

Looking around at Eliza's simple furniture Kit sees that while this is luxury compared to Trif's house or the homes of most fishermen, it is still spartan compared to homes she visits in St. John's. She remembers the old resentment the fishermen feel for the local merchant, making his fortune off their bent backs. But she also knows that the plummeting prices of fish hurt the merchants too, that men like her cousin face hard times.

“Have you been up to visit the school?” Eliza asks. “It's come a long ways since we were in it. Mr. Bishop did a lot for that place in his time.”

“Triffie took me up to see it,” Kit says. She doesn't attempt to convey to Eliza, whom she barely knows, the heart-clutch of mingled fear and nostalgia she felt when Trif unlocked the door and let her in to the empty classroom. Nor does she say anything about what Joe Bishop, who retired last year after nearly forty years of service, has or hasn't done for the young people of the Point.

But Eliza won't let the subject go. “I saw him in church this Sunday – it's a shame you weren't there,” she says. “Plenty of people would have liked to see you. Perhaps you'll get out next week? Anyway, when Mr. Bishop heard you were visiting Triffie, he said you should come by to see him. He's very crippled up with his arthritis and I think his heart is weak. He's not old – not sixty yet – but he's worked himself into the ground for that school, he has. And he'd love to see you.”

Kit mentions the invitation to Triffie that night. “Yes, he said the same to me in church Sunday,” Trif says. She doesn't turn around from peeling potatoes.

“You never told me.”

“Truth be told, I didn't think you'd want to see him. After everything.”

“Do you think I should?”

Trif pauses in her work, but still doesn't look at Kit. “Hard to say, girl. There's something to be said for making things right, but there's a good bit to be said for leaving sleeping dogs lie, too.”

“Some help you are,” Kit says, but she knows Triffie is right. There are times no-one else can tell you what's right or wrong.

She goes up the next day to see him. There are only four days left to her visit, and she doesn't want Joe Bishop hanging over them. A stout middle-aged housekeeper – a Dawe, by the look of her, though Kit can't say offhand which one – lets her in and announces, “Mr. Bishop, that's Mrs. Porter to see you.” Apparently she has no trouble placing Kit.

Eliza is right – he looks old. A few wisps of gray hair cling to a bald pink scalp; the hands gripping the arms of his chair are gnarled with arthritis. He looks nothing like the commanding figure at the front of the classroom; she can hardly even imagine his presence next to her, both sinister and attractive, one arm sliding around her while her head bent over the book close to his.

“Mr. Bishop,” she says.

“Mrs. Porter – Kit Saunders, I feel inclined to say.” Even his voice is thinner, though there's something there of his old timbre. “Of all my old students, none has had as impressive a career as you have.”

“Well – it's kind of you to say so, I'm sure.”

“Not kind – true. An Oxford degree? A professor at Memorial College? Hardly accomplishments to be sniffed at.”

“No – no, they aren't. I have worked very hard for everything I've achieved.”

He waves a hand towards a chair, high and straightbacked. He's received her in the parlour, the same rarely used room that most families on the Point would have ushered him into when he came to visit. The parlour was for the minister and the schoolteacher; the kitchen was good enough for everyone else. “I shouldn't keep you – standing.” His breath catches a little. “Do, please, sit down.”

“That's all right, Mr. Bishop. I won't be staying long – I'd rather stand.”

For the first time he looks at her with something other than a beatific smile, as if taking her measure. Whatever he was hoping for out of this visit, it's not meeting his expectations.

“I wish you would. Sit down,” he says, his thin voice high and querulous.

Kit stays on her feet, her hands clasped behind her. It strikes her that her pose is not unlike the one she would take for giving a recitation in the schoolroom, in days of old.

The conversation staggers and almost falls, but the old man makes an effort to pick it up, asking Kit about the college and her work there. Reflecting that the man did give her the best possible teaching for his place and time, despite the harm he did, Kit tries to be gracious.

But before much time has passed he brings the conversation back to the little schoolroom in Missing Point. “You've gone on to do great things, Mrs. Porter,” he says. “Studying at Oxford, teaching at college. I've never done anything very great in my life – just been a simple outport teacher. But I like to think my greatest accomplishment was planting seeds – yes, making it possible for young people like yourself to go farther and do more.”

“Yes, sir,” Kit says dutifully. “As Newton said, sir, we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

He likes that, smiles and straightens his own shoulders. He likes thinking of himself as a giant. “Yes, I look at a woman like you and think, there is my greatest accomplishment, there is my legacy – to know that I made all this possible, and that the leaders of today are grateful to the teachers of yesterday, to those of us who placed their feet on the path of success.”

The man sounds like he's writing a book – or making a commencement address. Slowly it dawns on Kit what he wants. He's waiting for her to thank him.

The disparity between what he wants and what she wants hits her like a fist below the ribs, and without thinking she lets out a short, sharp laugh.

“You find it funny? That you would thank an old teacher for helping you along the way?”

“No, sir … that is –” Kit collects her thoughts. This man is old, possibly dying; should she be kind? Perhaps Kit should say the words he needs to hear and go away. Let him rest in peace.

“Of course, sir, like any student I'm grateful for having had good teachers. But you might perhaps appreciate why it's difficult for me to thank you.”

His eyes are mild and blank. Perhaps his memory is gone – perhaps he really doesn't know what she means. Certainly he sounds innocent as he says, “Why would that be, Mrs. Porter? Do you think you could have gotten so far in life on your own, without my help?”

The insolence of his frail voice snaps the fire inside her. “I could have done quite well, sir, without your inappropriate advances. As, I'm sure, could a number of other young ladies.”