That Forgetful Shore (45 page)

It's quiet and restful here, and she's content to sit beside him. It's not so different from the evenings they used to sit together in the kitchen, her always with a book and Jacob John always at some little thing he could be making or mending, something to keep his hands busy. His hands are folded now. He's finished his work and done, and Triffie needs just a little while to get used to the idea. Not to get over the ache, but to learn to live with it.

She sits there until the light in the room changes. Sunset will come early this November evening. Soon Katie and her husband and youngsters will be here, and the boys with them. The Adventist minister, a Salvation Army officer, and a matched pair of Pentcostal pastors came this morning to offer their condolences, though it's the Anglican minister who will have the job of burying him, as Jacob John would have wanted. Tonight the neighbours will come with food and comfort and memories of funny things Jacob John said and what a hard worker he was. She will feel, as she always does at such times, alone in the crowd, unable to be touched by the comfort that others share so easily.

When she hears the back door open she doesn't get up to answer; everyone will know where to find her. Slow heavy footsteps move through the kitchen and a tall frame fills the parlour door. Jabez Badcock stands there, his gray hair windblown and his fiddle tucked under his arm. He's a strange sight, not usually the first person to show up at a wake, but it seems fitting he should be here. He might, after all, be family. In a way Trif feels like the old drunkard has always understood her, though they've exchanged no more than a few dozen words in twenty-five years.

Jabez crosses to the coffin. He takes off his shabby cap and lays it over his chest as he looks down at Jacob John, then intones, “
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, when the evil days come not, nor the years draw by when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them
.”

“Well, Jacob John was spared that,” Trif says. “He always had pleasure in his days, right up to the end. And how much mind he paid to his Creator I was never sure, but he was good to his fellow man.” Being born again as many times as she's been herself, Triffie used to be contemptuous of those who said they needed only to live a decent life to get to heaven. She could lead a Bible study to show you that you needed to repent and believe on the Lord Jesus to be saved. But now she hopes there's something to that humbler creed, which Jacob John surely subscribed to. He used to like that poem about Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase, the fellow who couldn't say he loved God but loved his fellow man. Jacob John would get Triffie to read that out sometimes, when she was in a poetry-reading mood. God couldn't ask for a better citizen in heaven, and the thought of eternity without Jacob John somewhere nearby seems bleak.

Jabez goes to sit in the corner of the room, lifts his violin, and begins playing a mournful tune that, after a moment, Trif recognizes as “She's Like the Swallow.” She hums along with the haunting notes:
I love my love, and love is no more
.

More voices and footsteps at the back door, and suddenly the house is full of people, neighbours and friends and church people coming in twos and threes as if they've been bottled up outside, just waiting for Triffie's dictum of “everyone out until suppertime” is lifted. “You may want to be alone but 'tis good to have people around you,” Minnie Mercer says, kissing her on the cheek and putting a cherry cake on the table. Other women bring food and lay it out, even Clara Snow who brings a plate of cold sliced ham, presumably because she knows Trif won't eat it.

Over and over, people ask Trif what she's going to do now. Go live with Katie in St. John's, or move away with one of the boys, or stay on in the house alone? The answer is none of those, but people will find out her plans in her own good time. “I'm not staying on here another winter,” she does tell Millicent Batten. “This place is not fit for living in year-round anymore, and I'm not putting the money in to get it done up with electricity and indoor plumbing at my time of life. We'll keep it on for a summer place, that's all 'tis fit for now.” More and more older homes on the Point are like that, boarded up in winter and left to rot or, if families can afford it, visited in summer by men and women who have moved away to the mainland or the States.

“I 'low you're right, girl,” Millicent says. “You gets to a point in life when 'tis not fit to be going out to the outhouse or hauling buckets of water from the well.”

Under all the talk Jabez Badcock continues to play the violin, sweet and eerie tunes drifting out from the parlour where everyone goes in briefly to pay their respects to Jacob John before drifting back into the overcrowded kitchen. It's strange to have people in the house without Jacob John to tell them a few stories, get them all laughing. After awhile Char Mercer comes in with the accordion and joins in with Jabez. Trif hears Charlie singing “The Prisoner's Song”; the bleak words wind their way in and out through the mourners' conversation.
Oh, I wish I had someone to live with, for I'm tired of living alone
.

Katie and her husband Wayne and their children arrive with Bill and Dave. Neither of the boys have brought their families; Trif's lucky they are both able to fly down themselves on such short notice.

They all take Trif in their arms, one by one, and she holds her sons, drawing strength from their broad shoulders and strong bodies. Neither of them is a fisherman, as she decreed, but both are strong men, men their father was proud of. For the past few years they have brought their growing families home for summer visits, and offered to bring Triffie and Jacob John to see them. Jacob John never wanted to go; he was content to stay on the Point and let them come to him.

Triffie had no such reluctance to travel. In the past ten years she has gone into St. John's to visit Katie, and to stay with Kit while she was still teaching at Memorial. She's gone to Boston and Toronto to visit the family, to Montreal and New York with Kit. Last year Kit sent her tickets for their greatest adventure together, a trip to England and France. For that, they flew in a plane, an experience Triffie didn't particularly enjoy but is glad to have had.

To her surprise, Jacob John didn't object to these jaunts of hers. “You'd never get me up in a plane,” he told her before the trip to Europe, “but it tickles me to think of you and Kit flying across the ocean – you always was one to enjoy a bit of gallivanting. Enjoy your travels, missus, and don't worry about me. A man don't die from eating bread and butter for a few weeks.” Lately Kit has talked about a trip to Italy where she can paint watercolours. Trif has no interest in painting, but now that Jacob John's bread and butter is no longer a concern she can imagine herself sitting in the Italian sun, reading a book with her feet up while Kit paints.

She follows her daughter and sons into the room where Jacob John lies, where the mournful music fills the air. They gather around the coffin and Trif stands back to give them room, leaning her hand on the wooden doorframe, like she sometimes used to lay a hand on Jacob John's shoulder, an apology she couldn't or wouldn't put into words. She loves this old house, this place where she came as a reluctant bride, where she bore her children and cried over losses and was angry and stubborn and loved. This place where she prayed and cursed and worked like a dog for forty-five years. The house and Jacob John are tied together in her mind, almost as if they were one and the same. She will come back here as a visitor – summers on the Point are always grand when you're not working your fingers to the bone – but it will never be her home again, not after tonight.

People come and go. Trif minds the company less than she thought she would. They don't know it yet, but it's her farewell party as well as Jacob John's, and these people, like the house and the Long Beach and the sea, are part of her. She will leave them behind, but she'll never fully let them go.

She steps outside the stuffy kitchen to get a breath of fresh air and goes around to the lane just in time to see a car pull up in front of the house. The passenger who gets out is a tall, straight-backed, gray-haired woman. An old woman, like herself.

“You foolish thing,” Trif says. “Didn't I tell you on the phone last night not to bother coming up for the funeral?”

“You didn't think I paid any attention to that, did you?” Kit snorts, lifting her overnight bag out of her cousin Ted's car. “I bought your ticket to come down just like I told you – I just decided to bring it to you rather than send it. Flew in this afternoon, took the outport taxi to Bay Roberts, then called Ted to drive me over.” She looks at the lighted windows, music drifting out into the night air. “What are you having here, an Irish wake?”

“Close enough. He would have enjoyed it – he always liked a good time,” Trif says.

They stand together for a moment, looking not at the house but out at the sea as Ted Parsons drives away with a wave. Trif puts her hand on the old fencepost and Kit lays her own hand on top of Trif's. The steady rush of waves on the shore is a counterpoint to the music coming from the house and Trif wonders for a moment what it will be like to live away from that sound. Kit tells her that in North Carolina, where she's lived since retiring, they won't be all that far from the ocean. But the beaches there are sandy and Trif imagines it will sound different.

She recites softly:

The sound of that forgetful shore
Will change my sweetness more and more,
Half-dead to know that I shall die.

“You will,” Kit says, her hand squeezing Trif's more tightly for a moment, “and so will I. But not just yet. We've got a bit more living to do.”

“I'm glad you came,” Trif says, and they turn to go into the house together.

AFTERWORD

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the geography of Conception Bay will recognize that the fictional community of Missing Point, located across the causeway from Bay Roberts and at the other end of Long Beach from Bareneed, sits on exactly the same point of land as the real town of Coley's Point. My reasons for putting a fictional place in such an obviously real location are that the flimsy disguise of a false name allows me to take a little license with geography, with history, and most of all with people. Missing Point is very like Coley's Point, but different in a few significant ways, and by giving it another name I felt absolved for making those changes.

On the south side of the real Coley's Point, at the same spot at the head of the beach where Triffie and Jacob John's house stands in fiction, stands a 150-year-old house built by my great-great-grandfather, Abraham Morgan. In this house many years ago, my cousins found, and showed to me, a collection of postcards from the early 1900s. All of them were addressed to the same woman, Abraham's daughter Emma Morgan, a teacher who worked in various Newfoundland outports between her graduation from Spencer College in 1907 and her marriage in 1917. The postcards came from family, friends, and former students all over the island, but a small subset of them – just over a dozen – came from a woman named L. Martin.

In the postcards, Miss Martin and Miss Morgan addressed each other by pet names – “Puggie” and “Muddles,” and L. Martin made such flowery protestations of her love for E. Morgan that my cousins and I at first assumed the postcards were written by a man to a woman he loved. But they were, in fact, written by one woman to another, and made use of the conventions of romantic friendships of young women in that era.

I know only a little about the life of Emma Morgan, and nothing at all about her correspondent L. Martin, not even her first name. I have far less than half of their correspondence – only the postcards from Puggie to Muddles survive, not the replies, nor the longer and more private letters that the postcards allude to. It's hard for a writer's imagination not to be stirred by that kind of circumstance, and as a result I ended up exploring not the real lives of two real women, but the fictional lives of two women who lived at the same time and in a similar place, whose friendship was as intense and as important for them both.

Visit
www.thatforgetfulshore.com
for more about the background of this story.

One final note about the parallels between real life and fiction. A few real people appear very briefly in this fictional story: R.A. Hubley, Victoria Booth-Clibborn Demarest, Alice Garrigus, Sophie Guy, Eugene Vaters, Ethel Dickinson and Dr. John Paton. But all the major characters are fictional. Just as Missing Point is a sort of Platonic shadow of Coley's Point, so the career of Joe Bishop in the Coley's Point school parallels, at least in time, the incredible career of a real man, James Norman, the beloved and respected schoolteacher in Coley's Point for over 40 years. (One of Coley's Point's most famous sons, Ted Russell, credited Mr. Norman with awakening his lifelong love of learning). But while the two men lived and taught under similar circumstances for many of the same years, I want to emphasize that there is not a hint of a suggestion that James Norman ever shared any of Joe Bishop's more unsavoury qualities. In fact, the desire to make a distinction between the two men was one of the reasons I felt the need to change the name of the town.

While as a novelist I'm interested in characters like Joe Bishop who manage to do a great deal of good and a great deal of harm simultaneously, as a Newfoundland writer and educator I'm keenly aware of the debt we all owe to real life heroes and heroines like James Norman, Emma Morgan, and thousands of other teachers in one-room outport schools. These men and women kept a love for learning alive against overwhelming odds. The tremendous flowering of Newfoundland literary and cultural life we benefit from today would never have happened without the dedicated efforts of the teachers of our grandparents' era.

Trudy J. Morgan-Cole
St. John's, 2011