That Forgetful Shore (22 page)

The applause is not quite as warm as the room when Ada sweeps off the stage and Kit steps on. In fact, Kit gets a larger round of applause just for walking on stage than Ada does for singing: somewhat to her own embarrassment, Kit is something of a romantic figure to her neighbours. Local girl who made good, went away to college and became a teacher in a big school in St. John's, and a war bride to boot!

Kit takes the stage and looks out at the hot, uncomfortable people crowded into their chairs, some glad for the evening's diversion and others no doubt hoping it will soon be over. She straightens her spine, puts on her recitation voice, pitched to carry to the back of the room, and begins.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward…

Everyone knows the poem, of course, some of them probably memorized it in school, and all have sat through at least half a dozen recitations of it at various concerts and events. She sees lips moving, people forming the words along with her. But as she begins the second verse, the familiarity of the memorized words with their echoes of school days falls away, and she sees the trenches of Flanders, those blood-soaked, mud-soaked fields she has never seen except in newspaper reports and in Ben's letters.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd.

Someone had blundered. There is a tone in Ben's letters, things he will not put into words for fear of the censor. She senses he has doubts – about the wisdom of the men above him, about the orders he gives to the men below him. What if someone has blundered? Every time she says “the six hundred” she thinks of the five hundred, the First Five Hundred. There are nearly twice that many over there now, huddled in the trenches on the Somme, waiting for the Big Push, the great advance that will shatter the German lines and secure the Allied victory they are all praying for. The Newfoundland Regiment is earning a reputation, everyone in St. John's says, for bravery, for devotion to duty. For going ahead fearlessly in the face of incredible odds.
Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do… or die.

This was the wrong poem to have chosen for tonight, Kit thinks. The images tumble through her brain; she thinks of talk she has heard back in St. John's. The Regiment has suffered no great losses yet, only a handful at Gallipoli, but Ben believes – all the men believe – that their day is coming soon.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made,
Honour the Light Brigade
Noble six hundred.

Apparently no-one shares her misgivings about the choice of recitation. The hall is silent for a moment, then the wave of applause breaks over her. Kit takes her bow and leaves the stage, not even seeing the two people coming on as she walks off, blundering into them and apologizing before she realizes it's Joe Bishop and young Rebecca Parsons, going up on behalf of the NPA and the WPA to make a presentation to the two young men who are soon to go overseas. Joe makes a little speech and Rebecca, giggling, hands over a pair of hand-knitted socks to each of the boys, and gets two kisses on the cheek in thanks.

The choir ladies push past, eager to assemble under the two Union Jacks draping the stage.

Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set,
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!

The audience joins in, everyone singing, pleading with God to make England mightier yet, and then it's the anthem and everyone goes out into the blessed cool of the last night of June. Triffie, of course, stays behind to clean up, and Kit stays with her, sweeping up garbage from the floor of the hall, taking down decorations and putting them away. Triffie hums the chorus of “Land of Hope and Glory” as she folds bunting.

“How much did we make?” Kit wonders.

“Fifty-three dollars,” says Trif with pleasure. “I sent the money box off with Mrs. Parsons already.”

The lamps are out now and the hall is dark; Kit follows Trif out onto the step and Trif locks the door behind her. Trif may worship with a suspect offshoot sect, but she is still trusted with the keys to the Anglican Church hall, because she is Trif Russell, and who would deny her? Kit slips her arm through Trif's.

“It was the strangest thing tonight – when I was reciting,” Kit says. “I shouldn't have picked that poem – I couldn't help thinking of Ben and all our boys – wondering where they are, what they might be facing. And what it's all for, in the end.”

“It's for the best,” Triffie says, with such confidence Kit wonders can she really feel it. “It's all part of God's great plan,” Trif adds, as if convincing herself. Arm in arm, they walk down the road.

Kit sleeps in Trif's house that night, sharing her bed as she often does during these weeks while Jacob John is away fishing. Both women are sound asleep, dreaming their own dreams, in the long hours after midnight while the sun rises over the battlefields of the Somme. They are asleep when it is nine in the morning in France, when Captain Ben Porter and Private William Bradbury and all the rest – eight hundred of them – hear the order to go over the top, onto the fields of Beaumont-Hamel.

Back home in Missing Point, the first weeks of July alternate between warm sunshine and a cold, damp drizzle. The news from the Labrador fishery is the first thing on everyone's mind, the war a distant second now that the patriotic fervour of the WPA concert has ended. As long as no new casualty reports appear in the papers, as long as no telegrams arrive at houses on the Point, the war remains something for old men to discuss in the evenings, smoking pipes as they mend their nets, or for women to shake their heads over while they knit socks.

The news reports are slow in coming. At first they report that the great Somme offensive is a success. It is July 8 before they first see the name of Beaumont-Hamel in a newspaper story brought in from St. John's.

The fourteenth of July is a hot, muggy day, the sky threatening rain that does not fall. Kit has been helping Trif in the garden; Trif is tired; she is almost certain that she is expecting again. She sits on a rock for a few minutes, watching Katie pull at blades of grass, catching her breath.

”Don't wear yourself out,” Kit says. “I can do the rest of this, you don't want to take any chances. How far along do you think you are?”

“Well, I missed my monthlies in June, and now I've missed them again, so it could be as much as two months,” Trif says. “Jacob John'll be some pleased when he comes home from the Labrador, I don't mind saying. I hope this one's a boy, for much as he loves Katie I know he wants a son – every man does.”

“Have you told Aunt Rachel yet?”

“I've told nobody but you, and I won't, not till I'm sure. With the price of fish so high, it's a grand year to be having a baby, and if I'm right about the times it'll be February when it comes, and I can –”

“Trif! Trif!” They look up to see Betty running down the path that crests the hill, hatless and out of breath. “Mom says come over to the house quick! Liza Dawe was down at the Mercantile and heard tell there was a telegram over at the cable station for Pop.” Betty looks like she's run all the way from the north side.

“Catch your breath, Betty, what are you saying? A telegram?” Trif repeats the words as if by saying them she can slow time, fix this moment before they get the telegram, before they know.

“They must have it by now – but Mom told me to come over and get you, she knew you'd want to be there if it was – if it…”

Trif is already on her feet; she has taken off the dirty apron she wears in the garden and wiped the earth off her hands. She is the opposite of harried, frantic Betty in every way at this moment; her movements are slow, deliberate, almost majestic as she picks Katie up in her arms.

“I'll come too,” Kit says, needlessly, falling into step behind them.

On the way back across to the north side, Betty keeps up her hurried pace, her frantic torrent of talk. “We're not the only ones – Liza said there's a telegram for the Frenches too – it could be Will and Isaac both. Of course Mom says not to think the worst, they might just be wounded, it might not be anything…too bad.”

To this torrent of words, Trif says nothing at all, which is strange for her. Her face is cold and deadly calm, and Kit thinks of how she favoured young Will. Kit puts out a hand as they walk, to touch Trif's arm.

The walk from south side to north side of the Point takes about a quarter of an hour. All the way Betty talks, and Trif says nothing, and Kit thinks of the descriptions she has heard of the Front, of men staggering across No-Man's Land under the barrage of artillery fire, of the clouds of poison gas that carry death on the air.

Cannon to the left of them
Cannon to the right of them
Into the jaws of death…

“Look! There he is now!” Betty says as they turn onto the North Side Road near her parents' house. Young Robbie Snow, one of the cable company's messenger boys, is riding his bicycle out of the French's front gate. “He must have already brought the telegrams.” As the three women draw nearer Robbie pedals faster, racing past them back down the road towards the causeway, not meeting their eyes.

Kit follows Betty and Triffie up through the yard and around the house to the back door. Inside, Rachel, Ruth and Albert – who is home this summer because Rachel said she couldn't bear to have him down on the Labrador with Will overseas – all sit around the table staring at the unopened envelope. Trif and Betty sit down in the two empty chairs; Kit is left standing, the outsider in the family circle.

“I can't – you open it, Trif,” Aunt Rachel says, picking up the envelope by a corner. Trif takes it, but doesn't open it. She looks up at Kit.

“It might not be – well, they send telegrams for everything, don't they?” Kit says. “Even if a soldier's only wounded, even if it's not serious. It doesn't have to be ….”

“You read it out,” Trif says, handing it to her.

Kit takes it, her hands shaking. It feels wrong for her to be the one reading this private message, yet they are all looking up at her as if this is a role she has the right to play. On the kitchen wall behind Uncle Albert's head is the framed picture of Will in uniform: his eyes, too, seem to meet Kit's as if he waits with the rest of his family to learn his fate. Even as Kit opens the envelope she thinks that telegrams must be coming to houses in St. John's, too. Is there one for her, for Mrs. Benjamin Porter?

“Regret to inform you – ” she reads aloud, “Number 1446, Private William Bradbury has been reported killed in action July first.”

Betty and Ruth both cry out: Ruth moves quickly from her chair to kneel next to her sister and put her arms around Betty's waist. Aunt Rachel says, “Oh, dear Lord,” and Uncle Albert lays a hand over hers on the tabletop. Trif doesn't make a sound, just presses the heel of her hand against her mouth. Of all the faces in the room, only the serious face of Will in his Regiment photograph remains unchanged, as if he alone is untouched by the news.

Triffie

France
June, 1916

Dear Trif,

Tis some hard to think what to wright.

I love to get your letters tho, and it don't seem fair for you to send them and never get any back. Some of the fellows loves wrighting letters and some cant wright at all. I am someware in the middle I spose.

If you promise not to read this to Mother and Father I can tell you more. About how dirty and wet we are and about the lice and the rats and how men are getting sick all the time around me. Not like when we was traning in England. That was a good laff but this is different all together. I hate to say it sence I was so flick to sign up but the truth is I would give anything to be back home right now. Isaac and Char feels the same way but they would not tell there folks either. Isaac writes to Jennie Snow from Spaniard's Bay and he always puts on the brave face for her. Remember that girl I told you about that I met over in England, Gertie? She wrights me and I tries to wright her the odd postal but its hard to know what to say. Its easyer with you Trif but you was always my easyest person to talk to.

Some of the bys are spoiling for a real fight after all the time we spent in traning. I thoht I wanted a fight too but since we been over here I got a better idea what its all about and the truth is its pretty scarey stuff. I don't know what it will be like in a big battel but no douts we'll find out soon. The bys all say we'll get orders to go over the top soon, maybe in a day or two.

I hope I don't make a fool of myself, Trif. I was brave enough in traning but a real battelfeild with real German shells coming at you is another thing all together. You keep saying those prayers for me and I'll do my best I spose. If God is listening to you at all I lows I'll be home out of this soon, back on the Point safe and sound.

I wish I was there now.

Your loving cousin,
Will

The letter arrives, as such letters so often do, a few weeks after the telegram. A ghost letter. Aunt Rachel and Uncle Albert get one too, which they read out loud to everyone, and as promised it is calmer and braver than Triffie's. Trif does not share hers with anyone but Kit. Rachel and Albert and Ruth all think they would love to have one more piece of Will, one more thing to remember him by, but Triffie honours his wishes and doesn't show them the letter. What good would it do, to know that he faced his first and last battle like the scared young boy he was?

Triffie herself reads the letter over and over. It is neither eloquent nor well-written. Will's letters have never been the kind that would be published in the
Guardian
. But its raw honesty tears at her heart as she rereads it and pictures Will, small and lost when he sleepwalked as a child, or frustrated over his schoolbooks, or a young man laughing and carrying on with his friends.