That Forgetful Shore (8 page)

“So, you likes it, being a teacher?” Jacob John asks, his question sawing into her thoughts like a blunt knife cutting into rope, unable to sever them cleanly. “You must have some patience with them young ones, is all I can say.”

“They're not so bad,” Triffie says quickly. Triffie is finding Fred Mercer as poor at conversation as Jacob John is finding Kit, though Kit thinks it's unlikely Fred's thoughts are taken up with deeper things. Likely he just can't think of anything to say.

Triffie, though, can talk to anyone.
She'd talk cod out of the water, that one
, Kit thinks.

Triffie says, “I had a grand time with them last year – there's some right smart youngsters in that primary class, isn't there, Kit? Young Mattie White – now he's a bright one, but there's Amelia Snow, too, hasn't got any of his advantages and yet look how quick she is.”

“Smart as paint,” Kit agrees. “She's already going through the Fourth Royal Reader even though she's supposed to be in the second. She can't help it – she got the first, second and third ones all read, and half the other books in the classroom too. I wish I could get a few more books in here, for young ones like her that can't read 'em fast enough. There's never been enough books in that classroom for anyone who liked to read – was there, Trif? Sure it was even worse when we were coming up.”

“There was always plenty of books for me,” Jacob John says. “Ain't that so, Fred? More than enough books for the likes of you and me – sure I thought that old Fourth Reader would've been the death of me, thought we'd never get through that.”

“I never did get through it,” Fred says. Like many of the boys, Fred stopped school when he was ten: Jacob John lasted a year longer. Girls are more likely than boys to finish schooling in a place like Missing Point. And there are families, like Kit's, who see the value of a daughter with an education who can earn her own keep as a teacher for a few years before she settles down to get married.

“I like teaching,” Kit says now. A sudden burst of gaiety lightens her mood, lightens the air around all four of them – for though they rely on Triffie to keep the conversation going, it's from Kit that they all catch their mood, somber or merry depending on her whim. Even Fred laughs when she says, “Some of the young fellows think a lady teacher won't whip 'em, or that they needn't listen to me because they remember I was in the schoolroom with them only two years ago. I suppose a few of 'em gave you the same trouble, Trif? But Peter French won't make that mistake again, not since I called him up to the front for carrying on when he was supposed to be working on his arithmetic. Well he said right back to me, brazen as you please, ‘What are you going to do, call in Mr. Bishop?' And I told him, I don't need Mr. Bishop to give you what you've earned, and I made him stick out his hand. He put it out with a smirk, like nothing I could do could ever hurt him, and I let fly with the ruler. My word! I think they heard him screech all the way back home. His mother came up to me in church this morning, told me whatever I done to him it must have worked, for he's practising his sums at home and says he don't want to get in trouble at school ever again!”

That gets the boys laughing, comparing their own tales of being whipped and strapped and beaten in school. Neither of them holds the slightest resentment against Joe Bishop for the frequent corporal punishments they were given: it is, in their view, a boy's job to misbehave and a schoolteacher's job to punish. That, too, is ordained by Providence.

Providence does nothing more towards bringing Kit and Joe Bishop together as fall chills to winter, though she's one room away from him every working day, on the other side of the partition hastily erected by Joe and some of the older boys over the summer. Some days after school he takes the time to help her plan her lessons or answer the questions that pile up like snowdrifts by the end of each day. Other days, he's busy helping the upper students, and Kit puts on her coat and walks home alone, through cold afternoons that deepen to twilight as she walks.

One Friday afternoon she is nearly home, turning onto the South Side Road, when she realizes she's left behind her history book; she planned to read ahead to be sure she knew the lesson before teaching it to the children on Monday. The schoolroom will be locked tomorrow and Sunday, and it's a waste of a weekend if she doesn't catch up on her work. Tonight Triffie will come over, as she does almost every night, knitting while Kit does her schoolwork, waiting till the work is done so they can read aloud together. They are halfway through
Othello
.

She turns around and goes back to the schoolhouse.

She pauses at the door, hears voices inside. Joe must be tutoring someone after school – maybe Effie Dawe, who has nearly finished the Fifth Reader. Kit glances through the window; beyond the frost that coats the glass, she sees the shape of the girl in her desk and Joe Bishop leaning over her.

Memory slams into Kit so hard she imagines it might knock her off the schoolhouse step. She cannot see any detail through the frosty glass, cannot see how close his head is to the girl's nor where his hand rests. But she is herself, twelve years old again. Dear Pedagogue's hand on her shoulder, creeping down to the tiny curve of her little-girl breast. His hand slipped inside the neckline, beneath the petticoat, touching bare skin. Then he sat beside her, patiently working through a Geometry proof, his other hand on her thigh. Under her skirt, fingers working up the nubbed wool of her stocking, exploring the warm bare flesh between stocking and bloomers.

Kit opens the door, slips into the room. The scene is, perhaps, innocent enough. She would think it innocent if she had never sat where Effie Dawe sits now, feeling the pressure of Joe Bishop's hand on her shoulder, his breath on her cheek. He has an arm around Effie's shoulders now as he reads from a textbook, but Effie's eyes are on him, not on the book.

Then they hear the door, and Kit's footstep, and both look up. She reads it all in Joe's face: guilt, shame, apology – though she has seen nothing but a teacher reading with a student, his arm around her shoulder.

“The extra time he takes with the youngsters – like he used to do with me and you, sure – the man's a saint,” Triffie says, when Kit mentions Joe Bishop is keeping Effie Dawe behind for extra lessons.

“Yes, he used to have both of us in after school the odd time, to work on our compositions. And he kept me in for all that extra help with Geometry,” Kit says. “He never used to keep you in on your own, did he?”

Trif shakes her head. “No, Aunt Rachel hardly ever let me stay, she always wanted me home working as soon as school was out. What I can't fathom is them who do have the opportunity and won't use it. Last year he tried to give Millicent Butler a bit of extra help, and I know her father would have paid for her to go to St. John's for teacher-training. But she wouldn't stay after school – just couldn't be bothered to put in the extra time or the extra work.”

“Funny how it's always girls he keeps back for extra work, isn't it? You and me, Millicent, Effie….”

“Well, 'tis good of him to see the potential in young girls, when so many folks don't,” Triffie says.

Kit gives up. There is no way she can phrase even the most delicate question, no way she can ask, “Did he ever …?” Trif's admiration for Dear Pedagogue is a wall that cannot be breached, and whether it's built of genuine ignorance or an inability to speak the ugly truth aloud, Kit cannot tell.

She cannot tell Triffie. Kit imagines a dozen conversations, but every one would mean explaining why she had never told before, years ago. How could you tell someone a thing you didn't even tell yourself? Things that didn't make sense didn't happen. She would grow up, and Joe Bishop would come courting. Everything would make sense then.

Now everything makes a different kind of sense. She finds it hard to look at him day after day in the classroom. He says nothing – what can he say? – but the atmosphere between them has changed, the comradely chatter of colleagues at day's end is gone now.

One night Jacob John Russell makes bold to call at Kit's house, a thing he has been threatening to do for weeks, though she has always discouraged him. The night is clear, without either fog or snow, the stars shining brilliant in a cold black sky. Kit allows Jacob John to squirm awkwardly in the parlour for half an hour while she finishes marking homework, then, with her father's permission, she puts on her gaiters and bundles up in her coat, hat and mitts to join Jacob John for a walk across the Long Beach.

She feels the young man's relief as soon as they're outside, away from the stuffy propriety of her mother's parlour. They walk down the road, empty of travellers this cold night, listening to the rush and hiss of the waves on the rocks. A light burns in Abel Morgan's storeroom where men are mending nets and telling stories. As Jacob John leads her onto the beach, Kit slips a hand into the crook of his arm, for warmth and for protection against the icy rocks. Jacob John Russell smiles, like he cannot believe his sudden good fortune.

Triffie

KIT, IN HER new suit and hat, already looks like she belongs in St. John's instead of on the Point. Standing next to her on the train platform, Trif feels dowdy, dressed in a hand-me-down of Aunt Rachel's that she has altered to fit. The dress and her boots are not the only things Trif has that are hand-me-downs; before he went down on the Labrador Jacob John Russell, who had abruptly lost all interest in courting Kit, started offering his unwanted attentions to Triffie.

Kit's father embraces his daughter; her mother dabs away tears. Mrs. Saunders can accept Kit going to St. John's to take summer classes. What she cannot accept is that Kit would throw away the advantage of living at home and teaching in the Missing Point school, for a one-room school in Trinity Bay. Kit grimaces as she meets Trif's eyes over her mother's head. She hates emotional scenes like this, farewells and tears. She and Trif have said their private goodbyes, and Triffie will not weep or beg her to stay.

To Triffie, Kit has said only that she never intended to live out all her life in Missing Point, that she wants to be mistress of her own classroom, live away from home, see the world.

“The world, starting in Elliston?” Triffie probed gently.

“The world has to start somewhere,” Kit declared. She was lighthearted after the decision was made, and Triffie suspected there was more to it than just Kit's desire to strike out on her own. Sometime during the winter, the pleasure of being home palled for Kit. Trif cannot quite believe that Kit is keeping a secret from her, but when she pressed Kit to explain why she wanted to leave, she found herself facing a stone wall. The same thing happened about what Kit had done to scare off Jacob John. There might be no secrets between them, as such, but there are subjects Kit is not eager to talk about.

Trif has her suspicions, of course. She's long thought that Kit cherished a schoolgirl crush on Joe Bishop. It must have become clear to her, over the course of her winter at home, that Dear Pedagogue was not going to come courting. It would be hurtful to press her about her reason for leaving, when the topic must surely be as painful as a sore tooth.

When the moment to say good-bye comes, Triffie grips both Kit's hands in hers. “You'll write, of course,” she says.

“Of course I will, my dearest. Every day.”

A kiss on the cheek, a squeeze of their clasped hands – that is more than enough display. Any passionate feelings will be saved for paper, or for prayer.

She has little time to commit anything to paper, though plenty of time for prayer, as the weeks of summer dwindle away. She puts in hours working in the garden, supervising Ruth and Will, which is sometimes more work than pulling the weeds herself. She hates gardening, but knows the hours scrabbling weeds out of the rocky soil will make all the difference in the long winter months when the root cellar is stocked with potatoes and turnips.

In the evening hours, garden work and housework done, she ruins her eyesight, according to Aunt Rachel, reading by lamplight. Joe Bishop gets novels from St. John's for the schoolroom, but lets Triffie read them first. “To see if they'd be suitable for the children,” he says, by way of explaining his kindness. She writes postcards and letters to Kit, saying as much about the books she reads as about her daily routine.

After books, and letters to Kit, there remains God. Trif still goes to the Church of England every Sunday morning and to the Army every Sunday night, but she needs more; her desire for something beyond her daily existence drives her to her knees in long, passionate nightly prayers. She imagines that if her family were Papists she could become a nun. No-one would deny Trif's desire for a different kind of life if she were called by God. But she's not inclined towards the teachings of Rome, only to the idea of a convent, a life of holy dedication.

She swallows long passages of the Bible, praying her way through the nightly Psalms in the prayer book and dipping at random into the darker and stranger corners of Scripture: Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, Revelation. Their wild poetry is harder, in some ways, than Shakespeare's, but while the Bard points inward, to the depths of the human heart, the Bible points upward and outward, to something so far beyond, so other, that she can never fully grasp it. When she reads in Revelation,
Come out of her, my people
, she pictures herself stepping out, moving out of the stultifying round of her existence into something larger and freer. Ezekiel's cries of a people in exile speak to her too: Trif feels like an exile on the Point where she was born, an unheeded wanderer in a valley of dry bones.

One Sunday night Captain Fifield at the Citadel gives a thundering sermon against deceivers and false shepherds leading people astray with strange new doctrines. The diatribe is far too heated to be general; after the meeting, Trif lingers to ask the Captain if he knows of any false prophets in particular.