That Forgetful Shore
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Authors: Trudy Morgan-Cole
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary, #book, #ebook
That
Forgetful
Shore
TRUDY J.
MORGANâCOLE
Bestselling author of
By the Rivers of Brooklyn
That
Forgetful
Shore
A NOVEL
Copyright © 2011 Trudy J. Morgan-Cole
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada.
ISBN 978-1-55081-362-3
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Breakwater Books is committed to choosing papers and materials for our books that help to protect our environment. To this end, this book is printed on a recycled paper that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council of Canada.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We acknowledge the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA.
For Jamie ⦠In Memoriam
I can't believe I've written a book
you'll never be able to read.
For this alone on Death I wreak
The wrath that garners in my heart:
He put our lives so far apart
We cannot hear each other speak.
âTennyson,
In Memoriam
Contents
My Heart is Thine: 1904 â 1908
All Eyes Were on Me: 1909 â 1913
A Quick and Safe Return: 1914 â 1918
And Leaves the Wretch to Weep: 1919 â 1927
Absence that Afflicts my Heart: 1928 â 1935
“The thing you don't know about me,” Trif Russell says, “is, I was one of a twin.”
She has said this to many people, over the years. She has said it in the garden above Aunt Rachel's house, picking rocks from the stony ground. She has said it in the dark, turning to a face half-seen beside her in the bed. She has said it so often that it is, in fact, a thing almost everyone knows about her. Yet she creates the illusion that she is letting you into a confidence. She says it with lowered voice, with a glance to make sure there are no eavesdroppers.
She says it today over a cup of tea at her kitchen table, to the young Church of England minister, Reverend Bliss. A grand name, that, Reverend Bliss. Reverend Bliss himself shows a certain formality about the nicknames the people of Missing Point have come up with to manage their odd Biblical appellations. Ki Barbour is Skipper Hezekiah to him; old Aunt Hepsy Snow is Miss Hephzibah. He has called Trif “Mrs. Russell” since he came to town six months ago, but now, in the comfort of her kitchen, trying to get better acquainted before leading the service tomorrow, he says, “You would be named Tryphena, I suppose?”
“No,” says Trif as she gets up to refill his cup. “No, you'd think that, wouldn't you? I was christened Tryphosa. You see the thing you don't know about me, Reverend, is I was one of a twin. Mother had the two of us, two girls, and I don't know if it was her or my Aunt Rachel picked out the names, but Aunt Rachel said we was to be called after the two sisters in the Bible, Tryphena and Tryphosa.
Who labour in the Lord
, as the apostle says.”
“How very unusual,” says Reverend Bliss.
“Isn't it?” She puts the teapot back on the stove, the big Waterloo that takes up half the kitchen. Katie Grace has been after her for years to get an oil stove. Trif has put it off long enough that now it doesn't matter any more; soon she'll cook her last meal on that woodstove.
Tryphena and Tryphosa; Peony and Posy. It explains everything, she thinks. Half of a whole, a piece torn away.
“You're a legend in these parts, Mrs. Russell,” the Reverend says. He sips the last of his tea and looks into the bottom of the cup. “Like your namesake, you have laboured in the Lord. A wonderful life of service.”
She is sixty-four. Does this young minister think it's her life that's over? Will he make a mistake and bury her tomorrow, thinking that sixty-four is as good as dead?
Their two teacups, hers and the Reverend's, sit side by side on the small table, framed by the kitchen window. Trif has spent more than forty years looking out this window, the two pine trees in the yard and beyond them, the Long Beach, the whole scene framed by the kitchen curtains she sews from old flour sacks. Year by year the pines grow a little taller; every few years Trif hauls down the curtains, sews and embroiders and hangs a new pair. Those are the only changes. The same grey waves roll onto the same grey rocks, as they've done for two hundred years â as they did long before that, when there was no window and there was no house, when not a soul lived on the Point to watch the waves break on the shore.
“What will you do now?” the young minister asks. The same question they're all asking. Where will Trif go now, what will she do?
She knows, but she isn't about to explain her decision to Reverend Bliss. To understand where the story ends, he'd have to know it all the way back to the beginning, and that's more of a story than she has time to tell today.
“What you don't know about me is, I was one of a twin.”
It's forty years earlier â no, forty-five. She lies in bed beside Jacob John Russell, in the front bedroom where the roof slopes down above the bed. Jacob John blows out the lamp and shifts himself to face her.
They said their vows earlier that day, down in the parlour, the Church of England minister reading off from the book. Uncle Albert and Aunt Rachel stood beside Trif, and Jacob John's mother, sister and brother-in-law on the other side of him. Trif's cousins, Ruth, Will and Betty, squeezed onto the settee. That was all the people they could fit in the parlour, though half the folks on the Point came later to the kitchen to have a piece of dark fruitcake and a drop of tea.
Trif had no-one to stand for her. Aunt Rachel had tried to get her to have Ruth for a bridesmaid, or her cousin Lizzie Snow, or one of her other girlfriends â Minnie Dawe or Millicent Butler, perhaps.
“No,” Trif said. “If Kit can't be here, I'll have nobody. I wants Kit standing up beside me on my wedding day, or no-one.”
“It's Jacob John you'll have standing up beside you,” Aunt Rachel reminded her, her eyelids lowered like blinds pulled half-way down in a house of mourning. “You'd do well to remember that.”
She got through it anyway, Kit or no Kit. Put her hand on Jacob John's arm and felt the rough weave of his good suit coat, the muscle underneath. Said the vows, and silently asked God to be her witness. Now, in the dark, she turns to him and tells him her secret. She brings few enough hopes into this bedroom with her, but she tries telling him anyway.
“I knows that,” he says. “I knows your mother died having twins and she lost the one twin. Another girl, wasn't it?”
The dark tale of her birth sounds blunt in his unvarnished words. “Another girl,” she agrees. She does not tell him Tryphena's name, says nothing about Pheenie and Phosie.
“What else do you know about me?”
She feels the movement of his shoulders against the mattress, feels him shrug. “Only what everyone knows, I s'pose.”
Then that's all you'll ever know
, she promises silently.
Only what everyone knows, less if I can manage it
. Never asks herself what she knows of him, what secrets a man like Jacob John might have.
His hand on the fabric of her nightdress. “Come on now, maid,” he says. “Let's get on with it.”
“What you don't know about me,” Triffie says, heaving a rock onto the rock pile, “is that I was one of a twin.”