That Forgetful Shore (2 page)

“You were?” Kit Saunders is supposed to be helping Trif pick over the ground before planting the garden. She was eager enough to be bazzing rocks around for the first little while, but now she's perched up on the fence railing, sucking on a toffee while Trif bends over and scrabbles one rock after another from the thin soil of early spring. “What happened to the other one, the other twin?”

“It was a storm, the night I was born. A terrible January storm,” Trif has been rehearsing this story in her head for all of her ten years, piecing it together from bits of gossip, tales overheard, Aunt Rachel's pinched replies to her questions. She has never had the chance to tell it aloud before. Now this Saunders girl, newly come all the way from Trinity, is avid to hear it. Trif strings her words together carefully.

“A terrible storm, and my mother was sick. It was early – two months before we were supposed to be born. Me and my sister, my twin sister. We were only seven-month babies, and my mother went into labour.”

“What's labour?”

“You know – the birth pains. Like when a woman, or a cow or anything, is going to have a baby.”

“We never kept no cows,” Kit says. Her father is not a fisherman; he was clerk for a merchant up in Trinity and has now moved to Missing Point to do the same job for his wife's people, the Parsons family who own the Mercantile and two schooners. Kit has no brothers or sisters; she knows nothing. “So what happened to your mother?”

“It was a terrible storm, a terrible winter storm. Aunt Rachel sent her brother out for to get Granny Morgan, the midwife, but it was too stormy. And the babies were coming, and there was only Aunt Rachel here with my mother. She borned us both, first my sister, then me. Aunt Rachel had in mind to call the first Tryphena and the second one Tryphosa. But it was too early; we were too little to live. Aunt Rachel thought we were both dead. She told my mother we were both dead, and my mother died of a broken heart. And when Aunt Rachel looked away from tending to my mother to the two of us wrapped up in the basket, sure enough, Tryphena was all blue and pale, but I let out a little cry, like a baby kitten. And I was no bigger than a kitten, either. And she took me up, wrapped me all up and put me in the warmer on top of the stove. Where you put bread in rise.”

Kit's mouth is as wide now as her eyes. “And you lived?”

“Of course I lived, maid, here I am.” After a moment both girls bust out laughing. Then Trif bends to her work again. She picks up two good-sized stones. Every winter the snow and ice sweep over the land and leave behind this debris of rock that has to be picked over before the potatoes and carrots and cabbage can be planted. Picking over the ground before the hard work of planting is a job for young maids like herself. She hands one stone to Kit, who hurls it at the rock pile.

“Where was your father?” Kit asks.

Trif shrugs. The missing father, a topic on which Aunt Rachel volunteers no information, has always been the least interesting part of the story to her. What is an absent father, or even a tragic dead mother, next to a ghost twin, a shadow-self that almost was?

“What would she have called you, if you'd both lived? You couldn't have two Triffies in the one family,” Kit points out.

“I asked Aunt Rachel, but she wouldn't say. They couldn't have called out Tryphena and Tryphosa all the time. Not every day.”

“Pheenie and Phosie,” Kit suggests.

They laugh again, but Trif nods. “I thought of that,” she said. “I could be Phosie. I'm almost glad she didn't live, so I wouldn't be called that. But I'd like to have a twin. It's almost like I misses her.”

“Pheenie and Phosie,” Kit repeats. “They could be like two flower names, almost. Peony and Posy.”

“That's pretty.” Trif has a hard time thinking of herself, hard, tall and angular, as Posy.

“I wish I had a sister too,” Kit says. “Mom says the doctor warned her not to have no more after me. She's delicate. Come over to the Long Beach with me after you finishes picking over the ground?”

Triffie's jobs done, they walk down the North Side Road, past the new causeway linking the north side of the Point to Bay Roberts, then across the neck of the Point to the south side where Kit's family lives. On the vast pebbled shores of the beach they throw stones again, this time for fun, skipping them on the water.

“Are you staying here?” Trif asks, unable to bear the hope building inside her.

“For now. Pop talks about going away, to the Boston States, but Mom won't hear tell of it.”

“Why did you leave Trinity?”

“Mom was homesick for the Point. She grew up here.”

“If you stay here, we could be like sisters.”

“My birthday's in February,” Kit says. “One month after yours. We're almost twins. I could be Peony.”

Trif nods but doesn't dare speak, afraid she might cry or say something stupid.

Kit picks up a piece of rock different from the smooth beach rocks all around. This one has a hard, jagged edge, not yet worn down by the endless pounding of the sea. She draws the edge quickly over her palm, raising a bright red line. “I heard tell of people mixing their blood,” she says, holding out her hand. “So they can be blood brothers. Or sisters. It was in a book.”

Trif takes her hand, though not the rock. “We don't have to do that. Aunt Rachel says your grandmother Snow was her father's first cousin.” Then, seeing that Kit doesn't understand, she explains, “We got the same blood in us anyway.”

And that is where the story begins.

Triffie

TRIFFIE IS SCRUBBING clothes in the big wooden washtub in the kitchen – she'd rather do it outside but it's raining – when Kit raps on the window. Trif straightens up, goes to the window. She presses her hand against the watery green glass, meeting Kit's hand on the other side. Looking at Kit through a window is like looking in a strange, distorted mirror. Their dark eyes are level with each other; Kit's long dark hair is loose while Trif's is tightly braided to keep out of her face while she works. They look alike in some ways, yet though they are always together people seldom comment on the resemblance. Trif understands that this is because Kit is beautiful, while she herself is not, though studying the lines and angles of their two faces, she cannot quite grasp what makes the difference.

“Can you come out?” Kit says, through the glass.

Trif goes out the back door and circles the house to the front bridge. “I got to do the wash,” she says. It's Monday, and the fact that Mr. Bishop has said the final examination results will be handed out at the school today makes no difference to washday. A light, spitting rain drizzles the girls as they stand talking.

“Won't she let you come up to school to get your report?”

“Not likely,” Trif says. “She says school is done now, what odds what marks I got. Will you bring mine back for me?”

She watches Kit step off the bridge and go on down the North Side Road. Yesterday Trif took a worn bedsheet and ripped it clean down the middle so she could sew it up again with the sides in the middle. The cotton tore neatly, dividing into two in her hands. She hears again now that clean ripping sound, tearing her from her schoolgirl life, from books and words. From Kit, who will go on while Trif stays behind.

They are two of three scholars to write Standard Six examinations in the school at Missing Point. The other is Ted Parsons, son of Skipper Wilf, who is destined for college in St. John's. Ted is still in school at thirteen, two years after all the other boys have gone fishing; his father even kept him back from going down on the Labrador this June so he could finish the school year and write his exams. Ted finished school because he was expected to, Triffie and Kit because, as Mr. Bishop says, they are true scholars. They have read half of Shakespeare's plays out loud to each other in Triffie's bedroom, huddled beneath blankets on winter nights. Ted Parsons is going on to school because his father can afford it, but Mr. Bishop had to haul Ted through his Geometry proofs one unwilling step at a time, both their faces red with frustration. Meanwhile Trif and Kit helped each other through the proofs, then passed a piece of paper back and forth. They were writing a series of sonnets illustrated with Kit's funny drawings, sonnets that Mr. Bishop would later confiscate, then smile as he read them, applauding the girls' cleverness. His clever girls.

Trif thinks about it all morning while she finishes scrubbing out stains and hangs out the wash, glad the rain shower has ended. It's as if thinking about Mr. Bishop has conjured him when she sees him walking down the road beside Kit, drawing in at the gate to stop, holding out her report to her.

Kit, beside him, stands still but looks like she's dancing, her eyes and face alight. Her hand flutters as she takes Trif's report from Mr. Bishop so that she can be the one to hand it to Trif, thrusting her own next to it.

“You took top marks in Reading, Geography, Geometry and Algebra,” Kit says, “and I took top marks in British History, Newfoundland History and Composition. Between the two of us we got all the top grades.”

It's no surprise. No one expected Ted Parsons to take the top scores, least of all Ted himself; the only thing to be determined was which subjects Kit would lead in, and which Triffie.

“You both should be teachers,” Mr. Bishop tells them. “A year or two of college in St. John's to get your Preliminary CHEs, and you could be teaching in a school of your own the September after next.”

Trif catches her breath. A sudden vista opens up before her: stepping aboard the train at Bay Roberts station, the tracks carrying her away from the Point. Sitting in a classroom in St. John's with an open book on the desk in front of her, clean sheets of paper to write on. Her own little boardinghouse room with her skirts and blouses hanging on hooks behind the door. Standing in front of her own classroom, children's heads bent over their Royal Readers. Everyone in town calling her Miss Bradbury.

Kit pouts. “I'm not sure I want to be a teacher.” Kit sees other vistas, other possibilities. For her, teaching dozens of children in a one-room school is a narrowing of possibilities. For Trif, there has always only been this one path, the dark tunnel that leads through Aunt Rachel's house. She will rear her younger cousins, cook dinners and scrub clothes, till the tunnel leads her straight to some man's house where she will bear her own children and do the same chores till she dies. Now, a door opens: a brief glimpse of another corridor, a different room. The door closes as quickly as it opened. “Aunt Rachel and Uncle Albert would never let me go to St. John's.”

“That's why I walked up here with Kit, so I could speak to your aunt,” Mr. Bishop says. Uncle Albert is away on the Labrador for the summer; any major decisions will be made by Aunt Rachel. “There's such a need for teachers, so many little coves and bays where children don't learn because there's no-one to teach them. It would be a shame if girls with gifts like yours didn't have the opportunity to further them.”

His excitement is contagious and Trif finds it hard to tamp down that little flame of hope that kindles again with his words. Joe Bishop is a tall man with dark hair sprouting high up above a smooth-domed forehead that makes him look clever and distinguished. He has been the teacher at the Missing Point school for six years, which makes him the only teacher Triffie has ever known: when she reads the word “teacher” in a book it's Mr. Bishop's face that comes to her mind's eye. She and Kit secretly call him Dear Pedagogue behind his back.

Aunt Rachel appears then, coming around from the back of the house. She invites the schoolmaster to come in through the front door, used only for important guests, to sit in the parlour and have a cup of tea. Trif and Kit, excluded from the parlour, go to the kitchen where Trif hangs out the last of the wash and quickly makes soda bread to go with the fresh meat soup Aunt Rachel has put on for supper. Uncle Albert got credit for supplies from Abe Parsons before he shipped out for the Labrador with Skipper Wilf, so the pantry is full and they're able to enjoy a change from salt fish every day.

Half an hour later, Aunt Rachel lets Mr. Bishop out of the parlour. “Kit, I'm going up to talk to your parents now,” he says, and Kit joins him, going out the front door. He turns back to Triffie. “Congratulations on your examination marks, Triffie.” His voice sounds sad despite the congratulations. He turns to leave with Kit, his silhouette beside hers in the doorway.

It occurs to Trif suddenly, with the early evening light slanting down off the water behind Kit and Mr. Bishop, that she has always thought of Mr. Bishop as a middle-aged man, as old as Uncle Albert or the other fishermen of that generation. Now, with the suddenly older eyes of a young woman who is no longer a schoolgirl, she sees he is not old at all, perhaps not twenty-five yet. Just a few years ago he was one of those boys finishing Standard Six, with a teacher saying, “You're a clever boy, Joe, you could go on to school in St. John's, you could be a teacher.” He is ten or twelve years older than Kit and herself, a young man with no wife or children. He comes from here in Conception Bay, from some place farther up the shore, past Carbonear. He and Kit suddenly look right together, as if they are part of the same world. He lays a hand easily on Kit's shoulder as they turn to go on together into that world from which Trif is barred.