That Forgetful Shore (9 page)

“There's two men going around – they've been working their way up the shore, from Holyrood to Brigus and now here. They say they're selling religious books that will help people understand the Bible better. But beware of them, Triffie – they're wolves in sheep's clothing, teaching error and heresy. You watch out, now – a clever girl like yourself don't want to be led astray. Pray to the Lord to guide you, and if you should run across one of these Seventh Day crowd, you run the other way.
Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin.
”

“Yes, sir,” Triffie says. On Monday afternoon, two men who call themselves Brother Anderson and Brother Pierce tap at Aunt Rachel's front door, and Trif does not run the other way. She asks them into the parlour and offers them each a cup of tea, though they decline, explaining that tea is a dangerous stimulant.

Trif is at a loss without teacups; she has nothing to give the men except her attention, though she does scrounge up a few tea buns, hoping the name won't put them off. “Now don't be in there all afternoon jawing with the likes of them,” warns Aunt Rachel, who is busy with the Monday wash.

“I'll only talk to them for a few minutes, to be polite,” Triffie says.

“Well, sing out to Ruth to come help me if you're going to waste time talking to preachers.”

The two young men – Americans, polite and scrubbed, with strange hurried accents unlike the long, slow tones she is accustomed to hearing along the shore – open their books and begin to talk. They are delighted to discover how well Trif knows her Bible, that when they begin to quote a verse, she can finish it.

“Have you ever wondered, Miss Bradbury, about the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation?” Brother Anderson asks.

“I ponders over them for hours,” Trif says honestly, “but to tell truth I can't make head nor tail of them.”

Brother Anderson takes one of the heavy, clothbound books from his satchel and reveals the title:
Daniel and the Revelation
. “This book will make a great many things plain to you, that are now murky and hard to understand.”

Triffie turns the pages, skims the dense paragraphs of type, examines the diagrams. The frontispiece shows a lurid horned beast with many heads. She traces the picture with her fingers. “The man who wrote this – this Uriah Smith – he can open the books that are sealed till the end of time?”

Brother Pierce smiles. “These books are being unsealed now because this is the end of time, Miss Bradbury! These are the last days, the days to which prophecy points. Only read this book, with your Bible open beside you, and you will see how clear it all is!”

Triffie buys the book from her own small store of money. She reads it exactly as the missionaries suggested, her Bible open beside her, checking each verse and reference, making notes in the margin. For a time even Shakespeare, along with Dickens and Austen and Mrs. Gaskell, are laid to one side.

Not only the Salvation Army officers but even the Anglican minister – and, she hears by report, the Methodist preacher too – warn their congregations about these Seventh Day missionaries, who believe that Jesus is coming soon and in the meantime we should all go to church on Saturday and avoid the flesh of pigs. “If I did all you said I'd plant myself crosswise to every soul on the Point,” she tells Brother Anderson, the smiling and handsome missionary, the younger of the two.

“But that is what the Lord says we are to be,” he tells her. “Planted crosswise to the world, as you put it, at odds with family and friends and all the world around us, for His sake.”

The idea pleases her. Trif Bradbury, a warrior for truth, at odds to all the world. One of the faithful ones who keeps the commandments and has the testimony of Jesus, who will not be shaken even in the time of trial.

Missing Point
August, 1907

Dearest Peony,

I know how you disdain what you call my “religious enthusiasms” and that yours is a Quieter Faith, yet I long to sit down with you and show you what I have learned, what I am learning, about the prophecies of the End Times.

I have envied you your opportunities for learning in the Wider World, but now I feel I am learning as much or more here on the Point, and that while you take your courses in town and prepare to venture off to your new task as the Teacher in Elliston, I too am Embarking on a new Venture, no less fraught with Danger and Possibility than yours. You know how I hold you in my heart and in prayers – oh that you would do the same for me, even though you do not share my Beliefs!

At the end of September, a Seventh-day Adventist preacher from St. John's comes out to Bay Roberts once a week to hold meetings, to reap what Brother Anderson and Brother Pierce have sown over the summer months. Aunt Rachel says she won't have Triffie going to the meetings, but Triffie simply says she must obey God rather than men, finishes her day's work, puts on her hat and gloves, and walks across the causeway to Bay Roberts.

The meetings are held on Sunday nights, and the first two Sundays Trif talks Sadie Parsons into coming with her. Of the girls her age, Sadie is her closest friend now that Kit is gone. Sadie is by no means a soulmate; she is a pleasant, silly girl, not overly bright but with a thin veneer of sophistication due to the fact that her uncle runs the Mercantile and her father is captain of a schooner. There was talk when Sadie finished school that she might go on to college in St. John's, as her brother Ted did, but once she wrote her examinations no more was said about that. She is Kit's cousin, and used to be best pals with Millicent Butler, but with Millie in service in Harbour Grace, Sadie is, like Trif, at a bit of a loose end. They are thrown together, friends more by chance than by choice.

Sadie showed no interest in the prophecy books Trif was reading, but the week before the meetings started, word came to the Point that Skipper Wilf Parsons' schooner, the
Eliza May
, lost two of her boats in a storm on the Labrador. The
Eliza May
is full of men from the Point – Trif's Uncle Albert is on her, and most of the young fellows including Jacob John Russell and Sadie's beau Jabez Badcock. The possibility that their men may have been lost paralyzes the women of the Point as they wait for news, and Sadie is driven to her knees to beg the Lord to spare Jabez's life. When Triffie suggests the Adventist meetings as a possible way to seek God's will, she comes along readily enough.

The visiting preacher lectures in a dry tone untouched by any hint of revival fervour. He talks about the end of the world the way a merchant might talk about the price of fish. Many curious people press in on the first night, but after hearing discourses on the year-day principle and the twenty-three-hundred day prophecy, many of them stop coming. They say it's because they've been convinced the Seventh-day Adventists are in error, but Triffie thinks it's because they had hoped for something more impressive – fire and brimstone preaching, perhaps. The coloured posters of the beasts of Daniel and Revelation are bizarre enough to lure a few people in, but sometime during the discussion of the Roman emperor Constantine and his nefarious plot to change Sabbath to Sunday, they drift away.

What little fire and brimstone is to be found at the Seventh-day meetings comes from the lips of young Brother Anderson, who does not preach but often gives the closing prayer.
Now that one will be a powerful preacher someday
, Triffie thinks; he has told her he is studying at college to become a minister back in the States. He and Brother Pierce go around to the homes of the few people still faithfully attending the meetings, holding Bible studies on the evenings there are no services. His prayers are condensed altar calls, urging God to act upon the listening hearts, drawing them out of Babylon and into His remnant people now –
now
, while there is yet time and hope, before probation ends and He comes to judge the earth.

In the middle of October comes the welcome news that all the men from the
Eliza May
made it safely to shore and are bound home. Soon after, the survivors themselves arrive. Some, the storytellers and braggarts, are eager to tell the tale. More taciturn men, like Uncle Albert, only say, “'Tis good to be home.” Jacob John Russell comes up to Triffie on the dock where everyone has gathered to welcome the crew and stands in front of her with his hands in his pockets, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet with a foolish grin on his face.

“What do you want?” she says.

“I might've died, Trif. Is it too much to ask you'd be glad to see me alive?”

“I'm glad you're not drowned. Now go on, and don't make a nuisance of yourself.”

That Sunday afternoon, Sadie tells Trif she can't come to the Adventist preaching service with her anymore. “Jabez don't want me to,” she says. Jabez is a strikingly handsome young man a few years older than Sadie and Trif, a staunch Methodist, who since his return from the Labrador, has been heard saying he means to become a minister now. “He says God saved his life for a purpose and he's going to dedicate himself to the Lord, and he don't want me being led astray by no false doctrines before we gets married,” Sadie explains.

Triffie goes alone that night, walking over the causeway with the other young people who are heading, as she once did, to the Salvation Army, then going her own way to the rented hall where the Adventists hold their meetings.

When the service is over she steps outside to find Jacob John Russell, of all people, stood up leaning against the wall. “What are you doing here?” she asks, when he falls into step beside her.

“Walking you home.”

“I'm after telling you a dozen times I don't need you walking me home.”

“You told me that back in the spring when we were walking home from the Army,” he points out. “Fair enough – there's plenty of other people coming back along the road when Salvation Meeting lets out. But there's not another soul on the Point coming across to these fool meetings, and I won't have you walking back over the causeway on your own in the dark.”

“What business is it of yours?”

“It's my business if I make it mine. I knows now you'd rather have that fellow Anderson walking you home, but I don't see him trudging over the causeway to bring you back to the Point.”

“You think I got my eye on him, is that it? I suppose you'd be glad to know he's got a fiancée waiting for him back in the States.”

“Is that so, now? And when did you find that out?”

“A nice while back.” In fact, it was only last week that Brother Anderson mentioned the saintly Louisa, the lovely young girl who is studying to be a nurse back at the Seventh-day Adventist College in Battle Creek. When he returns from his missionary work in Newfoundland they plan to be married. Triffie will not confess – not to Kit, not to God, and certainly not to Jacob John Russell – that her heart fell a little at this news. Perhaps she had dreams – but no. Those were only fantasies. And with the end times approaching, she has more serious matters on her mind than catching the eye of a handsome young American missionary, and going back with him to Battle Creek.

“And you're still going to those meetings, even though the young missionary's spoken for?” Jacob John taunts.

“I wouldn't expect the likes of you to understand. There are some people in this world got more serious matters on their mind than courting and marrying.”

“Tell me then, Triffie. What's more important than courting and marrying? Queer old pictures of buckhorned goats and flying angels? Is that worth traipsing over the causeway twice a week and turning everyone on the Point against you?”

“I don't mind being persecuted for the truth,” Trif says. But she thinks of those words – turning everyone against her, or her own words about planting herself crosswise to the whole town. Is she willing to stand out, to be one of the handful of people baptized when the evangelistic meetings are finished? To worship on Saturday, forswear eating salt pork and cooking with lard, dig a chasm of difference between herself and all those she knows and loves? If she is one of the remnant, she and Kit will be forever on opposite sides of a great gulf, unless Triffie can somehow win her to the truth. Trif knows in her heart that's a long shot.

“Time for you to give up this foolishness, think about settling down, getting married, now, ain't it?”

She stops short in mid-stride, turns to face him. Jacob John is as brazen as brass, but even so she didn't expect him to be as forward as this. “What did you say?”

“Only that it was high time you thought of getting married, that's all.”

“I'm not even seventeen. I'll think of it when I'm good and ready,” Trif says. “You got some gall.” He's always had gall, of course, but where Jabez Badcock, Sadie's young man, came back from the near-disaster on the
Eliza May
with a sober conviction that God had a holy purpose for his life, Jacob John Russell has come strutting back like the cock of the walk, sure he was leading a charmed life and that fate would hand him whatever he wanted – even Triffie Bradbury.

“You watch yourself, Jacob John,” she warns. “I'll tell my uncle you're taking liberties.”

“I'll tell him myself I'm ready to take any liberties offered,” says Jacob John. He walks on beside her, not chastened at all, over the causeway and up the North Side Road as far as the front gate of Uncle Albert and Aunt Rachel's house. When her hand is on the gate to swing it open, he says, “I got me own house.”

“You do not – you lives with your mother.”

“Yes, but before Father died he put the house in my name. It's mine when I gets married or turns twenty-one. Mother says when I marries, she's going over to Bay Roberts with Liza and Joe. So I got me own house.” Liza is his older sister; there are also two younger brothers, not fortunate enough to inherit a house.