That Forgetful Shore (11 page)

“He's really nothing like Mr. Darcy,” Kit had insisted when she was home at Christmas. “A bit in looks perhaps. But not in character. Can you imagine Mr. Darcy building a manger for the school Christmas pageant?”

Of course Triffie couldn't. This Ben Porter sounds like a perfectly nice, charming, helpful young man. Handsome, of course. Tall and dark, Kit has assured her. Her quick pen sketched a series of caricatures that left Triffie laughing, but Triffie can't entirely erase the idea of Mr. Darcy from her mind. The thought that Kit has an admirer whom Trif has never seen, who is entirely outside their circle of acquaintance on the Point, fills Trif with the blackest envy. She offers this sin up to God in her prayers but never manages to dispel it completely.

Before Christmas, blond and smiling Brother Anderson said his goodbyes to Trif and the rest of the small flock of faithful Adventists left behind in Bay Roberts and the nearby harbours. He has gone back to America, to Battle Creek, that town humming with devout industry. It's a mythical place in Trif's mind, filled with golden corn-fed young men like Brother Anderson, and apple-cheeked blonde maidens like his fiancée Louisa, coupled off two by two like animals going into the ark: missionary preacher and teacher; missionary doctor and nurse.

But his departure does not spell the end of Trif's newfound faith. Rather, with the American missionaries gone, she is stirred into action, keeping the little band of believers faithful by gathering them on Sabbath mornings, doing everything short of preaching sermons. A dozen times Uncle Albert has threatened to put her out of the house if she won't give up her new religion and do some housework on Saturday. But Triffie has figured out by now he's all talk; he'll never be known as the man who turned his own niece out of doors to starve. Aunt Hepsy Snow, the only other soul on the Point who continues going to the Adventist meetings now that the missionaries have gone, is a valuable ally. She is Aunt Rachel's first cousin by marriage, and is quick to defend her own and Triffie's religion when others in the family criticize. Moreover, Aunt Hepsy has a horse and sleigh that she drives to meetings, picking Triffie up along the way.

Trif's work week is reduced from six days to five, since Aunt Rachel won't hear of her doing any housework on Sunday. On Fridays Triffie bakes a double batch of bread and cooks a big pot of something – pea soup or beans, usually – that will do for Saturday's dinner. If it's pea soup, she puts her own aside in a separate pot before adding salt pork for the rest of the family, though she can't work out a way to get around frying things in lard. She turns over the Saturday jobs of blacking everyone's Sunday boots and polishing the silver to Betty and Ruth, who are old enough now to take over those tasks, and moves her scrubbing day back to Friday. Trif won't lift a finger from sundown Friday till sundown Saturday, but nobody in the house can fault her, for she works like a slave the rest of the week. Given that the blessed martyrs suffered and burned at the stake and the faithful remnant will suffer the same in the last days, Trif is hardly about to complain of a bit of extra housework.

Unlike the rest of the new Seventh-day Adventists, she hasn't heeded the call to
Come out of her, my people entirely
. She tells her fellow believers it makes things easier on her at home if she continues to accompany her aunt and uncle and the children to Sunday services at the Church of England. She can still keep an eye on the youngsters during church, though she resigned her post as Sunday School teacher before the minister could relieve her of it. She tells herself she is like Namaan bowing in the house of Rimmon.

The truth is, she wouldn't know what to do with herself if she weren't in church Sunday morning. Church is where everyone goes. It's one thing to stand bravely alone as part of God's last-day remnant, but quite another to miss out on the one major social event of the week.

By the same token, she still sometimes goes to the Sunday night Salvation Meeting at the Army, now that Adventist preaching services on Sunday night have ended for the winter. She misses the singing and clapping and tambourines at the Citadel. She's absolutely convinced of the end-time prophecies Brother Anderson showed her, and still reads Daniel and Revelation faithfully, trying to understand those beasts better – though she can never think of them now without hearing Jacob John's voice in her head saying “Buckhorned goats and flying angels.” But she finds it hard to accept this one article of faith: that someone or something as vast as God can be confined in one particular room, can be the property of one group of people, and be absent everywhere else. Well, that and the business of not drinking tea. She has abandoned pork and bacon because the pig is plainly listed in Leviticus 11 as an unclean animal, but she can't embrace the Adventist idea that a cup of tea is bad for the nerves.

If it weren't for God, Triffie feels she'd have precious little to look forward to. Kit is off in Bonavista Bay, running her own school and falling in love. Joe Bishop has another teacher helping him out at the school, a young girl named Sylvia Morris from Notre Dame Bay who, despite her romantic name, is a very dull, small-minded girl with whom Triffie has been unable to strike up a friendship.

The schoolroom is closed to her now, the possibility of teaching children as remote as the chance of getting any more book-learning herself. From here on, Triffie determines, she will be self-educated. She continues on through Shakespeare, having reached minor works like
Timon of Athens
and
Pericles
,
Prince of Tyre
. Joe Bishop still brings her novels from St. John's to read before putting them in the hands of the schoolchildren, and she returns often to her favourite poets: Tennyson, Wordsworth, Blake. She's also working her way slowly through Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and with the help of the Adventist minister from St. John's, who comes periodically to preach to the faithful few in Bay Roberts, she is reading the collected works of Mrs. Ellen White, the Adventist prophetess. Given how few hours of lamplight she has these winter evenings after the supper dishes are done and the dark draws in, it's a busy reading schedule.

“How come you reads all them books?” Will asks one night. He is perched on a stool at the other end of Trif's little writing desk, sharing her lamplight as he makes his painful way through a story in the Third Royal Reader.

“Because I like it. You can learn a lot from books,” Trif says. Of her three young cousins, Will is by far her favourite, but she has had no luck inspiring him with a love for books and learning. He is ten years old now, eager to put the schoolroom behind him. “Books can take you to foreign lands,” she adds, looking up from
Idylls of the King
.

“No they can't,” Will says. “Ships can; books can't.”

“In your imagination,” Trif says.

“I knows what you meant Trif, I'm not stunned. I just don't say it works. Or it don't work for me, anyway. I'm readin' this story now about the feller on a ship going to China, but I ain't going to China, I'm right here on the Point, sitting on my backside in your room, reading a book when I'd sooner be down on the beach or out in the woods.”

Trif laughs. “Anybody as clever with words as you are, Will Bradbury, ought to like books. It's a sin you don't, and I don't know why, for you couldn't ask for a better teacher than Mr. Bishop. Maybe when you're older you'll find out what you've missed, and take up reading when you're an old man, too old to go fishing.”

“We'll have to see about that.” Will's tone clearly indicates he thinks it unlikely. After a moment more of squinting at the page he adds, without looking up, “You know what Jacob John says about you and your books?”

“Jacob John? As if I minds what he says!”

“He says if you took your head out of a book now and again, you might see what's in front of your eyes.”'

“Does he now.” Trif draws a breath, and decides there is nothing to be gained by venting her opinion of Jacob John Russell to a ten-year-old boy who repeats everything he hears.

She lays aside her own book to pull Will's Royal Reader toward her. “Go on then, I'll read it out loud to you,” she says, and the boy puts his chin happily on his folded arms. He likes listening to stories, even if not reading them. The story of Brave Bobby holds his attention once Trif reads it with the proper emphasis, since it's all to do with a ship and a sea voyage and a big Newfoundland dog like Old Jock, the dog Uncle Nate French has for hauling his wood.

In April, Uncle Albert returns from the seal hunt with both his feet frostbitten. Aunt Rachel declares he needs time to recover before going down on the Labrador in June, and Jacob John, also back from the ice but none the worse for wear, offers to take Will into the woods along with his own two younger brothers to cut wood.

The day the boys return from their overnight trip, Triffie runs into Jacob John driving over from the south side to the north side of the Point with his pony cart and a load of wood. Triffie is walking back from bringing a jar of pea soup up to poor Sadie Parsons, who has been laid up all winter. Sadie had the 'flu back in the fall but she was never able to shake it, and plans for her wedding to Jabez Badcock have been postponed until she's better. Trif wonders when that will be, if ever. Nobody says it aloud, but the cough and the rattle in Sadie's lungs have gone on too long for 'flu or even pneumonia. Her family can afford to call a doctor, but Dr. Fradsham hasn't done her a bit of good. It's not that Sadie needs Trif's soup – her poor mother could float a dory on the soup she's made, and no doubt would do so if she thought it would help her daughter. Coming over with soup or buns to tempt Sadie's appetite is only an excuse for a visit, a chance to sit down awhile and tell Sadie that her cough will clear up when the warm weather comes.

On the road back from Sadie's house, Jacob John and Will pull up alongside her with Uncle Albert's load of wood.

“You're some helpful to my uncle,” Trif says, taking Jacob John's offered hand to climb up on the seat beside him as Will clambers back to sit on the wood.

“Ah, I'm the helpful kind,” Jacob John says with a wink. “Anyway young Will did more than his share, he's a grand little worker. I'm glad to help out where I can – and besides, I got business to discuss with Uncle Albert.”

Jacob John reins in the horse in front of Uncle Albert's gate, and Triffie hops down. “Oh, and what business is that?”

“My business,” he says with another wink. He jumps down too, and begins unloading the wood with Will. When Triffie takes an armload, Jacob John says, “You go on in the house now and boil the kettle, I'll want a cup of tea when I'm finished.”

“The nerve of you, placing orders like you were in a St. John's hotel.”

Half an hour later, sitting at the kitchen table, Jacob John reaches for the sugar bowl. “Your tea is like yourself, Trif – too strong and not near sweet enough.”

Trif shoves the sugar bowl across the table at him. She'd like to get up and leave him, go find some work to do, but it's Sabbath afternoon, her usual time for visiting the sick, so she's uncharacteristically idle. As if noticing her stillness, Jacob John says, “Off to your church this morning, were you? Jesus not come down and taken that crowd away yet?”

“If He had, I doubt you would have noticed. You'd be too busy making fun and scoffing.”

“Sitting in the seat of the scornful, that's me.” He grins. “You didn't think I could quote Scripture, did you?”

“The Devil can quote scripture when it suits his purposes, so I don't see why you couldn't.”

Aunt Rachel comes to Trif's room that night to talk. Trif is reading the 109th Psalm and thinking of people she would like to curse.

“Triffie, I need to talk to you about A Serious Matter,” Aunt Rachel says.

Already Triffie is one step ahead of this moment, past the part where she has the unpleasant conversation and onto the part where she writes about it to Kit.
As she spoke I could hear the capitals in her words, A Serious Matter, and what do you think the Matter was? Nothing less than a proposal of marriage from Jacob John Russell, who appears to have given up all hope of charming me and is trying his charms on my guardians instead.

“It's a good match, Triffie,” Aunt Rachel says. “You know we're glad to have you here, but you'll want to move on and start a home of your own someday. Jacob John is a nice young fellow, a hard worker. And he has a house of his own.”

Ah, that house again – how often it seems to come up as a point in his favour!
Trif writes in her mind, as she will later write on paper.
Was Pemberly such an inducement to Elizabeth Bennett, that it needed to be urged above the claims of Mr. Darcy's own personality? Surely if a man must hang all his hopes of marriage on the fact that he has a house, there must be something vital lacking in the man himself?

The letter in her head is cooler and more flippant than Triffie herself is able to be. To Aunt Rachel she only says, “I don't fancy marrying Jacob John.”

“Why not? He's always been very nice to you.”

“He's saucy,” Trif says, although this is in fact the only thing she likes about him.

“Well, you got a sharp tongue in your own head, my girl. With that on top of your queer religious ideas and all the reading you do, you should count yourself lucky that such a fine young man is willing to make an offer for your hand in marriage.”

“He's made me no offers,” Trif said. “He might think of talking to me about it himself.”

“He told the Mister you never gave him much encouragement,” Aunt Rachel says. “He hoped we could help you see the advantages.”

“Unless you're going to put me out of the house, I don't see no advantages,” Trif says. “I got a roof over my head here as good as I would there. If I'm married, I'll be doing housework and raising youngsters for the rest of my life, and if I stay here I'll be doing the same. I'm used to doing what you and Uncle Albert say; why should I get used to doing what Jacob John Russell says?”