That Forgetful Shore (26 page)

He doesn't say anything for awhile, cooling his porridge, eating another spoonful. “You could leave them here,” he says. “I won't be at much in January, sure. I might go in the woods again for a few days if need be, but I could leave Katie and Billy with Aunt Rachel if I do. If you brings two youngsters in to Kit's house the two of you won't have much peace and quiet. Kit's not used to young ones in the house like we are – it might wear her out more than give her any comfort.”

“You're right, I s'pose, but I didn't like to leave them with you.” It's good of him to offer. She won't stay in town as long if the children are at home, but what time she does have in town she'll be freer of responsibilities, more able to concentrate on Kit. Kit will be teaching, of course – now that she is a widow she's been told that her position at Spencer will be open as long as she wants it. They will have evenings and weekends together to talk, to read, to re-knit the bonds between them.

She will miss the children. Katie, who is five now, looks up at Trif with wide blue eyes on the morning she leaves and says, “But Mama, what will we do without you? Papa can't make supper.”

“Papa will have to try his best,” Trif laughs, although she knows Rachel and Ruth will keep them well fed and cared for while she's away. A fortnight, or three weeks perhaps – she can't be away from the children longer than that. She takes Billy in her arms for a last kiss, gives him back to Jacob John and kneels to embrace Katie before turning to board the train.

“What about me? Don't I get a kiss?” Jacob John says.

“What, in front of everyone?” Trif takes pity and brushes her lips on the side of his beard.

Kit is at work when Triffie's train pulls into the station, but Betty comes to meet her and they hire a cab to take them to Kit's house. Betty seems so grown-up, moving through the busy St. John's streets with the confidence of a city girl. Her young man, Frank Dalton, will be home from overseas soon. The soldiers are beginning to return, the survivors of war.

They reach Kit's house, which looks both large and crowded since it's three storeys tall but attached to the houses on either side of it. Trif and Betty sit down for a good chat in the kitchen. When Betty begins to get tea ready, Trif gets up to help, but Betty slaps her hand away. “You're company now, Trif, and I'm the hired girl. You got to get used to being a lady of leisure while you're here.”

The first week is everything Triffie has dreamed of for years – forever, it seems. Every time she and Kit have had a little time together in these last years, Trif has always had the pressure of family and housework and responsibility in the background. Now Kit is the one who has her work to go to each day, while Trif takes the first holiday of her life. She is free to spend her mornings sleeping late, reading, even walking about the neighbourhood as she gets braver.

When Kit is off work, in their evening and weekend hours, they are truly together, with nothing to do but talk. Betty walks the line between family friend and hired girl neatly; she lingers in the dining room to chat with them for awhile after tea, then excuses herself to do the washing up and makes herself scarce for the rest of the evening, leaving Kit and Triffie to talk alone.

Nothing is held back in those conversations: Kit pours out all her hurt and pain, the unfairness of losing Ben just when she'd got him back, her feeling of being lost and adrift. “I always thought I loved being independent, working, being my own mistress,” Kit admits. “I loved it all through the war years, even while I missed Ben. I worried how I'd get used to being just a wife, giving up all that freedom, once he came home. Now I've got nothing but freedom ahead of me – years and years of it – and I wake up in the morning and think, ‘What am I going to do? What's it all for?'”

Trif nods. “Of course,” she said. “Before, you had a purpose. You knew what it was all going towards. But now –”

“Exactly. But now.” Sometimes they don't even need words, things are so well understood between them.

Ten days into Trif's visit she suggests the possibility of taking the Thursday train to Bay Roberts. It has been a good visit – not long enough, of course, but how much time could ever be enough to spend with her dearest friend, her other self? She wants to stay longer, but is afraid it will be too hard on Jacob John and the children.

“You've never been away from them before, and you probably won't again for years,” Kit says. “I won't keep you here if you really feel you ought to go, but …”

“I don't want to outstay my welcome …” Trif offers the one objection she knows for certain will be overridden.

As, indeed, it is. Kit throws her arms around Triffie. “Outstay your welcome! As if you could!! Do you know how huge, how empty, this house will seem when you're gone? I have a lifetime of empty rooms and empty halls ahead of me, Posy – don't make it start any sooner than it has to. I mustn't be selfish, but …”

So they both, selfishly, decide that Trif will stay another fortnight. So often in later years Trif will look back at that decision, will wonder how things might have been different if she had gone home ten days after she came to St. John's. So much would have been different: so much lost; so much saved. At the time it seems the only people who could be hurt are Jacob John and the children, and her family will make sure none of them starve. Instead of bringing Triffie to Missing Point, the train brings a letter saying she has decided to stay a little longer.

On Saturday, Trif seeks out the Seventh-day Adventist Church and worships there. It's lovely to worship with fellow believers; good to have a few more voices to join in the Advent hymns, too, though here, in this unfamiliar setting, Triffie can't help but reflect that the stirring lyrics about the Lord's coming sound a little flat now, inspire her less than they used to.

“The truth is,” she admits to Kit that evening, “when I came into the Adventist faith, it never crossed my mind I'd still be sitting here ten years later. They talked about it like Jesus was coming the day after tomorrow.”

“Well, you know I never put any stock in all your prophecies,” Kit says. “No offense meant, of course, but I always felt you were too clever to believe all that, Posy.” She pours out tea for them both, and Triffie wonders why, when people say “No offense meant,” they invariably go on to offend.

“It's not a matter of cleverness,” she replies, “as you'd know if you sat down and studied it out with me. It all makes sense, all the prophecies and times and laws. When Elder Hubley used to preach back when the war started about how the Turkish Empire would fall and it would lead to war in the Middle East and Armageddon, it all seemed so clear to me.”

Kit sighs. “Now that it's all said and done, I can't see how Armageddon could have been much worse.”

“That's just it, Peony. It
was
Armageddon – the war to end all wars. How could any war ever be any worse than the last four years have been? This – this has to change everything, one way or another, don't it? The worst war ever fought, and then a deadly epidemic on top of it – if that's not Armageddon, what is? If the Lord really were ever going to come, wouldn't He have come and put a stop to all this?”

“Unless there's something even more terrible ahead – unless Armageddon is worse than we can imagine.”

They sit in heavy silence for a minute, drinking their tea. “No, I can't believe it,” Trif says. “I can't believe God would abandon us here like this.”

“Well, you've always had a lot more faith in how much God cares about us than I have,” Kit says.

This is the sort of moment Trif is supposed to be looking for, an opportunity to win Kit to Christ. If she really believed in the truth of the message, and if she really loved Kit enough to want her to be saved, she would use this moment, use Kit's grief and her desperate need for purpose in her life, to ensnare her with the gospel. In fact, she leans forward in her chair, as if to begin witnessing, then sighs and sits back.

“It's harder to believe than it used to be,” she confesses.

“Why not give it up? Do you really need to haul all that baggage, God and faith and everything, around with you?”

Kit's attack, after Trif has just resisted the temptation to preach to her, feels unfair – a low blow. “It's not something I haul around. It's more like – something that holds me up. The boat I ride in. Lately I think it's sprung a leak, but kicking a hole in the bottom won't help.”

Kit shrugs. “What do you patch it up with, then? What do you use to plug a hole in your faith?”

“It's not about patches and plugs – it's about finding the truth. I thought I had it, but now it's – I don't know. But I picked up something today – a flyer I saw on a lamp-post, on my way back from church.” She holds it out to Kit, crumpled from being tucked in her pocket for hours. A series of revival meetings begins tomorrow night at the George Street Methodist Church; the speaker is Mrs. Victoria Booth-Clibborn Demarest, granddaughter of General William Booth himself.

Kit looks it over. “I thought you weren't in the Army anymore.”

“I'm not – well, I go to their meetings sometimes of a Sunday night, because I miss the singing and the band. But this isn't a Salvationist meeting, it's just a revival meeting.”

Kit rolls her eyes. “What do you need a revival meeting for, Trif? I go to the Cathedral on Sunday mornings because everyone expects it of me, and then I put it away and try to think as little about God as possible for the rest of the week. But you're always chasing after Him, and to tell the truth the whole thing makes no more sense to me than a kitten chasing its tail.”

It's rare for Trif Russell to bite back words, not to say what comes to mind. But she makes the effort now. Her friend is, after all, grieving. Kit is perhaps saying more than she means, and someone has to exercise some discretion here.

“I think I'll take myself off to bed,” says Triffie.

The next morning she goes to the Cathedral with Kit, for the socially necessary exercise of being seen at morning prayers. Kit flatly refuses to return the favour by coming to George Street that evening to hear Mrs. Demarest speak, so Trif goes alone.

The Methodist Church is packed with bodies, and there is enough singing, clapping, even dancing in the aisles, to satisfy Triffie's need for a livelier form of worship than she can find with either Adventists or Anglicans. It is, in fact, much like a Salvationist meeting, except for the lack of uniforms, and everyone has worked up a fine sweat by the time Mrs. Demarest gets up to speak.

A lady revival preacher! Triffie has heard a couple of women officers in the Salvation Army, and she loves hearing the gospel coming out of a woman's mouth – it's a reminder that the world is larger than the one she knows. But Victoria Booth-Clibborn Demarest is something entirely different – a performer, a show-woman, almost an actress. The Holy Spirit fills her, there's no doubt about that, but she's hardly a transparent vessel. She's more like a stained-glass window: the Spirit within only makes her colour and design shine more vividly. Her small figure at the pulpit makes the whole room glow and shudder with the presence of God.

There is nothing restrained in this preaching, nor in the response of the audience. There could be no sharper contrast to the solemn Anglican liturgy of this morning, or the lengthy, Scripture-laced Adventist study she sat through yesterday. This is pure emotion, pure Spirit – music and prayer and shouting all twined together. “Glory! Glory, Hallelujah!” people shout all around her, as Mrs. Demarest's voice rises to a crescendo. She lifts her hands above her head, shaking her fists. “Come down, oh Lord! Fill us with your Spirit! Come down, NOW, Jesus!!”

This is heady stuff, commanding God to come down and fill the room. The Adventists wait and work and pray for Jesus to return, but they know it's ultimately His decision when He'll show up. Mrs. Demarest seems to believe one can compel God to be present, and He'll obey. It may not be the Second Coming, but the Spirit is here, right now, in this room, and it's as real as any return she can imagine with angels and trumpets.

People pour down the aisles to kneel and be saved, tears streaming down their faces, praying aloud, bursting into song. Trif kneels at the altar and feels, as John Wesley once did, that her heart is strangely warmed. God is not, after all, sitting far away on a cloud, checking off prophecies on a calendar while He waits for the moment to return, safely removed from the hell of Armageddon and Beaumont-Hamel and Monchy-le-Preux. He is here, among His people, present and alive.

Last night she felt the little dory of her faith was swamped, ready to capsize. Now she feels buoyed up, sped across the water with a fair wind at her back. Though she knows Kit will mock and be cynical, she can scarcely wait to get home to tell her about it.

Kit

St. John's
January, 1919

Dear Triffie,

I can scarce explain…

I am at a loss for words when I think…

It was most kind of you to come visit me in my Hour of Need, and I feel I must apologize for …

I regret so many of the things I said…

It's no use. Kit has tried eight times since Triffie went home to start a letter of apology. Every time she tries, she gets angry all over again. What good is it to apologize when she's still angry?

The first part of the visit went so well. Until Triffie got tangled up in those revival meetings, and couldn't talk about anything else. One night she came home an hour later than usual and told Kit she had been to a prayer meeting after the main revival meeting where she received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues.

Kit has no words to match this folly. She is still struggling to figure out what her life will be like without Ben and fighting mind-numbing despair every day. She hasn't the energy to deal with Trif in the grip of yet another bout of religious enthusiasm, babbling happily about the Holy Spirit.