That Forgetful Shore (23 page)

His friends. Isaac and Charlie were both wounded at Beaumont-Hamel. Isaac's injuries were minor; he is recovering in a field hospital and will be back at the front soon. Charlie has lost a leg, and will be sent home as soon as he is able to travel.

Gertie Mercer is beside herself, not knowing whether to be devastated at Charlie's loss or relieved that he is out of the war for good. With Alf drowned and Harry still at sea, she has had a hard war already. But at least she will have no more fears for Charlie – the worst has been done to him. Nellie French goes about like a ghost, horrified to think Isaac has come through the hell that was Beaumont-Hamel – for now the stories are coming out, of what it was like, of how vast the losses were – but that he will be patched up and sent back into that madness.

As for Triffie's own family, Aunt Rachel and Ruth are drawn together by grief. Betty has gone to St. John's with Kit, and the two women remaining in the house have turned to each other. When Triffie goes over to visit them she feels excluded, as if her loss is different and one she must bear alone. She sympathizes with Uncle Albert more than anyone. He goes about his work, fishing from Abel Morgan's boat, in grim silence. Trif does not talk to him about Will – nothing about her uncle encourages confidences – but she imagines that he looks at his nets and traps and wonders what it's all for. A man builds his home, his work, his life around the hope of handing it on to his son, the hope that his children will have a better life than he has had, will go a little farther and live a little easier.

Trif's own emptiness consumes her. Jacob John is still away on the Labrador and Kit has gone back to St. John's. Kit's own news was similar to what the Frenches got about Isaac. Ben Porter was wounded, but his injuries were minor and he would be back on the front line soon. More Newfoundlanders were coming, fresh from their training in England, to the Somme to replace some of the hundreds of men killed and wounded. The dance of death will go on; the offensive has failed, but the war is far from over.

Kit was Triffie's mainstay in the terrible days after the news about Will arrived. She hired a girl to help her mother so that she could be free to stay with Trif and Katie. She helped with every household chore, cared for Katie, and sat up long at night with Trif. Sometimes they sat and knitted in silence. They did not talk a great deal, for the first time in their long friendship, for what was there to say? When the silence was too hard to bear, they went back to their old practice of reading aloud. Kit read all of Tennyson's
In Memoriam
aloud. Trif has always loved
Idylls of the King
and other poems by Tennyson, but this is her first time reading the poet's lament for his dead friend. Whether it's Tennyson's words or Kit's steady voice, she draws a little comfort from these readings.

With Kit gone back to town, the world is colder and grief is harder to bear. It will be October before Jacob John returns. News comes and goes from the boys so far away in France, yet the men fishing on the Labrador are as cut off as if they are in another world. Letters rarely come and go except in case of emergency. Triffie thinks of sending a cable to Battle Harbour but decides against it. When Jacob John comes home, he will learn of Will's death, and he will learn that Trif is pregnant again. Good news and bad news. The good will weigh more heavily with him than the bad, for though he thinks a lot of Will, a son of his own will mean more than the loss of the boy who was like a son to Triffie.

Yet when the day finally comes, when she and Katie watch Skipper Wilf's schooner dock at the wharf, she does not tell Jacob John, first, about the new baby. She lets Katie put her arms out to Papa and be swept up into his embrace. “Ah, there's my girl, there's my girl,” Jacob John says.

He puts an arm around Triffie and gives her a casual squeeze. “How's yourself, missus? Keeping the home fires burning and all? What kind of summer was it? Fishing good around here?”

“Not a lot of fish, but the price is good, so people are doing all right out of it,” Trif says, putting Katie back in her pram and falling into step beside Jacob John as he picks up the small chest with his few belongings and says goodbye to his shipmates.

“Lots of fish down on the Labrador,” Jacob John says. “Hard old news from the Front though, eh? No bad news from any of our boys after the July Drive, was there?”

He tosses the words off so casually, as if he knows there can't possibly be bad news. The men on the Labrador must have heard how bad things were over in France, but perhaps they haven't got the scope of it. Jacob John may not realize, yet, how every corner of the island has been touched by the disaster of July 1. Surely if he knew, he wouldn't ask so lightly.

“It was a terrible day,” she says. “We had – there was a telegram. For Uncle Albert.”

“What?” He stops walking. “Not Will? He wasn't…was he wounded?”

Triffie shakes her head, not trusting her voice.

“Ah girl, I'm sorry.” He turns and gives her the embrace he wouldn't give her on the wharf, taking her into his arms. “What a grand young fellow he was – and his whole life ahead of him. He never shoulda gone over there – none of 'em should. What a waste.”

Triffie shuts out the words and lets herself relax for half a minute in her husband's arms. His chin, scratchy with a summer's worth of beard, nestles against the top of her head – not that he's so tall, but she's buried her face in his shoulder, in the smelly rough wool of his jersey. Fish and sweat and tobacco – oh, it will be good to have a man around again, someone to fill up the empty spaces in her days and in her house.

Enough weakness, now. She pushes back, away from him, and smudges tears out of her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“All summer, now, you had to bear this, and I didn't even know of it,” Jacob John says. “I'm sorry I wasn't here when we got the news.”

Katie, perhaps confused by the rare sight of her parents embracing, reaches up her arms from the pram. “Papa, take me up, take me up!”

Jacob John, who spoils the child something shocking, Trif thinks, lays down his sea chest and gets Katie out of the pram. Putting the chest in the pram instead, he says to Trif, “You don't mind pushing that for a while, do you?” and swings Katie up high on his shoulders, grunting a little as he does. “Ooh, you've grown since I went away, my love. Come on now, let's go home.” And on the walk home Trif tells him about the baby, and he is as glad as she has imagined he would be.

Home is, indeed, easier to bear with Jacob John there. Not that his presence makes up in any way for Will's absence, or even that he is as much comfort to her as Kit was. In fact, after first hearing the news, he doesn't mention Will, except when they go to visit Aunt Rachel and Uncle Albert, and he says how sorry he was to hear it.

Still, there he is, and her nights don't seem so long. She sleeps poorly, lies awake trying not to dwell on the images that crowd her brain, tries not to see Will's mangled young body, lying in a blood-soaked uniform in the mud.

But you can get used to anything, even loss, Triffie finds. The news from France continues bad, but there are no more casualty reports of local men, until the day in October when Triffie walks over to her aunt's house on the north side and finds no-one at home. She knocks, goes inside, calls out, lays on the table the batch of date squares she carried over, and turns to go, when she sees Ruth coming into the yard.

“Oh, Mother said she thought that was you, Trif. You better come over. We're all over next door to the Frenches – well, all but Father, he's still gone cutting wood. Mrs. French got a telegram.” Ruth's eyes are red.

“A telegram? About … Isaac?”

Ruth nods, and Triffie takes Katie by the hand and goes over the lane to the French house, where she finds her aunt and cousins sitting awkwardly in the parlour around Mrs. French. The telegram is on the table, telling them that Private Isaac French was killed in action on October 11 at Gueudecourt.

Triffie liked Isaac, though he wasn't family, wasn't part of her the way Will was. Yet in a way this second loss doubles the heartbreak. She thinks of the two boys, such good friends all those years growing up, both dead and buried in foreign soil across the sea. She remembers again the morning Nell French found Will asleep in the bed with Isaac. Trif thinks at least if they both had to die, they might have died in the same battle so they could lie close together again in the same graveyard. Two childhood friends; two boys from the Point.

And then there's Charlie Mercer, the third of their trio. Fall chills into winter and after the second shock of Isaac's death, the war again slips into the background for most of the folks on the Point. The Bradbury and the French families are scarred forever. Everyone else goes on about their business, reading and talking about the headlines from Europe, shaking their heads over one Allied loss after another, but getting on with the business of daily life. Then, one day in March, the same train that takes the men off to St. John's for the seal hunt brings one-legged Charlie Mercer home from the war.

He has sent word he is coming, and he is the first of their boys home from the war, so half the Point gathers at the Bay Roberts station. Nine months have passed since Beaumont-Hamel, months that Charlie has spent recuperating in an English hospital, being fitted for his artificial leg and acquiring a wife – an English nurse, the first rumours are. Upon closer reading of the letter she wrote home on Char's behalf, it turns out she's an Irish girl who worked in the hospital laundry.

At first, when he appears in the window of the carriage, there is silence, then a ragged cheer. “Charlie!” a few voices cry out, and then Joe Bishop's strong voice rises above the rest. Joe has brought the children down from the school to see the war hero return home. “Hip, hip, hurrah!” Everyone joins in on the hurrahs and then Joe and the schoolchildren sing “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.” When the chorus is done Joe Bishop shifts to “God Save the King.” Everyone joins in; the men readying their bags to go on the train stop and take off their caps, and in the middle of “Happy and glorious,” Charlie Mercer sets his one good foot on the soil of home, and his mother breaks from the crowd and throws herself in his arms, nearly knocking him off balance. His war bride, a petite girl with eyes as round as buttons, stares around the wharf as if trying to fathom where on God's earth Charlie has brought her.

He looks years older than when he went away in the fall of 1915, though he's still not twenty. He's so thin now, and his hair is cropped, and there are lines in his forehead that don't belong on a boy of nineteen. But he steadies himself, then steps forward to embrace the rest of his family and introduce his wife while the schoolchildren finish singing the anthem.

“Remember when you had him sing ‘The Old Polina' for recitation day, back when he was a little fellow?” Triffie says to Joe Bishop. “I thought it was the smartest thing I ever heard of – you thinking of that, I mean, when he had such a hard time in school.”

“Well, Charlie never did get the knack of schoolwork,” Joe said. “But he was brave enough over there, where it mattered. He's done his bit – now the only question is, what will he do with the rest of his life?”

It is a sobering question, for a one-legged fisherman is no asset in a boat. Trif wonders if the thought troubles young Charlie, or if he is simply glad to have survived. Over the din of voices surrounding him she hears Charlie's laughter, hears him say to Jacob John and the other sealers, “Yes, b'ys, I went over there to fight for king and country – didn't realize till I got over there that the King was a bloody Englishman!”

It's hard to look at him, to hear his joking voice and the laughter which, despite everything, is still easy and boyish. Hard not to think,
Lord, if three of them went away and only one could come back, why couldn't it have been our Will?
Then she asks forgiveness for that unkind thought, and tries not to envy the blazing joy on the face of that stupid woman Gert Mercer, who was once so proud of having three sons in uniform.

Kit

St. John's
September, 1918

My Own Posy,

How strange it seems to have
Good
 
News
 
at
 
last
from overseas. We have become so accustomed to the papers being one parade of Tragedy after another, that to hear that our boys, bolstered by the Americans, are winning Victories seems almost beyond belief.

Yet it is true. I hear sober, sensible people – those whose advice can be trusted, not those who are prone to too much optimism – wondering not if, but when, Germany will sue for peace, and what the peace terms might be, and, Most Important for
all
 
of
 
us
, how soon the boys will be home.

When I think of my good fortune, that after four years of War, Ben is going to return home safely, I can scarce believe it. He has been in hospital in England ever since being wounded at Cambrai, and now that the Regiment, so decreased in numbers, has been withdrawn from active Duty, he is being sent home. Yet I cannot speak of our Good Fortune without thinking of you, of all the women who are not so fortunate, whose Loved Ones will never be coming home. Ben has been through such terrible things – fought at Beaumont-Hamel, at Gueudecourt, at Monchy and Cambrai. I wonder at the Horrors he has seen, how they will have changed him, how one lives after seeing so many men die all around one. He writes that only a handful of the boys he signed up with in 1914 are still in the Regiment – the rest dead, or so badly wounded they were sent home. And not all the Wounds are Bodily Wounds – Ben writes that the
strain
of what they have experienced in the trenches causes some men to
lose
 
their
 
minds
. And he says, most troubling of all, that he knows what such men go through.