That Forgetful Shore (27 page)

Before this, she's always been able to set her doubts against Trif's faith, both of them equally sturdy, and have a lively discussion that ends with both of them still friends, still respecting each other's views. But respect is not, perhaps, most evident in Kit's tone on the night she says, “If there really is a God – something I have a harder and harder time believing – surely He could put His time and His omnipotence to better use than making a bunch of fools dance around George Street Church speaking gibberish. Perhaps He might have spared some of that power to save a few million people from dying of influenza, or perhaps stopped the war before millions of men died in the trenches? Or if that's too much for Him, I hear there are still people starving to death in the world. Maybe He could have a look over there and see what needs doing instead of making all the Holy Rollers in Newfoundland drunk, when a bottle of bootleg gin could do the same!”

There is chilly silence in the room when she finishes her diatribe, and Trif says stiffly, “I puts up with a lot from you, Kit, for the sake of friendship. But you know what the Scripture says about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”

“Blasphemy – is that it? You really want to accuse me of blasphemy?”

“I don't want to accuse you of anything – I want to warn you.”

“Warn me! Don't you think my soul is a bit past saving now?”

“Why should it be? I know you've been through a hard time, Kit, but those whom the Lord loves, He rebukes and chastens, and as gold passes through the refiner's fire –”

“I don't want to be refined!” Kit shouts. She grabs at her own hair with both hands, pulling it loose from its pins so that it falls around her face, tugging as if she would tear it out in handfuls.

“Well, you're certainly not acting very refined just now.” A grin quirks the corners of Trif's mouth. It almost melts Kit – it always has before, how the same woman can speak so seriously and self-righteously about sin and blasphemy, prophecy and punishment, yet burst into irreverent laughter a breath later.

But Kit hardens her heart against Trif. She is tired of being preached to, tired of Trif's belief that there are easy, God-given solutions to every problem. She lowers her voice, not wanting to attract attention from Betty, who has gone on to bed hours ago.

“You don't know the half of what I've been through.” Kit turns away from Trif to look out the window. “You think just because you lost your cousin, you've got some clue about what it's like to lose someone you love.”

“I know 'tis not the same,” Trif says, her voice so much calmer and kinder than Kit's own. “I've said all along that what you're going through is worse than anything I've had to bear. I know that.”

“But maybe it evens the score.”

Trif says nothing. In the silence Kit wants to prod further, to pick at the sores underneath old scabs. “You always envied me, didn't you, always thought I had it better? Always felt I had the easy life?”

“Perhaps. But I never wished you any ill,” Trif says, still with that gentle calm in her voice. An after-effect of the Holy Spirit, perhaps, which makes Kit angrier.

“Wished or not, it's come to me now, hasn't it? I've paid for any good luck I've ever had – and paid for my sins too. For doubting God, for not loving Ben enough –”

“What do you mean, not loving him enough?”

“I never did. I was in love with him, but I can see now, looking back, that I never loved him the way he loved me. I was always torn two ways, wanting to be with him but wanting to be on my own too. I wanted to go on teaching and having a life, work of my own. I was afraid of being a married woman, afraid I'd lose myself. And it wasn't till I lost him that I saw how selfish I'd been, what a fool I was.”

Again, the silence, and Kit does not turn around to meet Triffie's eyes. “You were right, though,” Trif says after a moment. “Being married does change things for a woman. At least, it did for me, and every other woman I've known. It might have been different for you, married to a man like Ben.”

I'll never know now, will I?
Kit rages silently.
We had forty-six days of married life together: two days of honeymoon under the shadow of war, thirty-nine days when he was mad with shell shock and despair, and five days when he was dying with the 'flu. I've had a hell of a married life, haven't I?

She is going to say this to Trif, to speak out loud the bitterness that lies beneath her pain, to explain why her grief cannot be clean and pure. Trif will, perhaps, understand, and some of that burden will have been shifted onto friendly shoulders.

Kit opens her mouth, and instead she says something different, because that need to hurt, to wound is still there, like a serpent coiled under her tongue. “A man like Ben?” she echoes. “You envied that too – that I got a good man, someone good-looking and smart and ambitious. Jacob John Russell was never good enough for you, was he?”

Now she turns, wanting to see Trif react to the words, wanting to see the crack in her saintly calm. Sure enough, Trif's jaw clenches and her eyes narrow. “Jacob John is a good enough man,” she says. “But I've never lied to you, Peony. You know I was never in love with him. You know if I wanted to be married it wouldn't have been to a man like him.”

“Why – because he's a fisherman? Because you're too good for him?”

Trif takes a step back, her face like the face of a beaten child, not understanding what she has done to deserve the harsh words. But what is Kit doing that's so terrible? Only telling the truth, telling truths that have been left untold for years. Trif has always been comfortable in her illusion that their friendship is completely honest, that they tell each other everything. How many buried secrets can lie beneath the surface before they poison everything?

“I was raised in a fisherman's house. Why would I think I was too good to marry a fisherman?” Trif's voice is calm again, but not that quiet, saintly calm – it's cold now, and hard-edged, flat as a blade.

“You did, though. You always wanted something different, something more.”

“What are you saying? That I had ideas – ‘above my station'?” The sarcasm in those last three words can't be missed. The social gulf between them never mattered when they were girls and has been resolutely ignored in womanhood. They have chosen to be sisters, twins, so there can be no difference. But the difference has been there all along.

They always have been equal: in intelligence, in ambition, in dreams. Everything Trif has lacked, everything she's envied, has been denied her because she is the orphaned niece of a fisherman, while Kit is the only daughter of a merchant's clerk. Thus it has always been and ever shall be, no matter how many men bleed and die on battlefields for high-minded ideals like liberty and equality and brotherhood.

“I never said anything about rising above your station,” Kit says. “Only that you always wanted more.”

“Which is exactly the same thing, in different words,” Trif says. “But if Jacob John wasn't the man I wanted, it's not because he's a fisherman. You know that. It's not the man's place in life, it's the man himself. I s'pose I had the same foolish romantic dreams most girls do, of a man I could fall head over heels for, a man who was romantic and – well, passionate.” Her tone shifts to sound something like it did earlier in the evening when she talked about the Holy Spirit making her speak in tongues; it's the same longing, Kit is sure, that drives Trif to seek out odd sects and revival meetings. “Yes, a man with some passion to him. You knows what I means, don't deny it. Jacob John wasn't good enough for you; why should he be good enough for me? Did you think you could pass him on like a hand-me-down dress?”

“If Jacob John wasn't the right man for me,” Kit says, “it certainly wasn't for any lack of passion. I know all about what kind of passion Jacob John Russell is capable of – probably more than you know, after eight years sharing his bed and bearing him two children.”

“What do you mean?”

“I knows what kind of a man Jacob John is,” Kit says, her carefully educated voice slipping back into lost rhythms and cadences, “because I had him long before you ever did. Did you think I was a virgin when I married Ben? Don't be so foolish, Trif. Me and Ben was together as man and wife for nearly a year before any preacher ever said vows over us, and before that I was with Jacob John, time and again that winter I taught out home. On a bed of nets in Abel Morgan's fish store, that's where I gave it up to Jacob John.”

She never meant to say all this. It's as if one sentence drags the next behind it, like they're roped together, and she can't stop adding fact after fact, confession upon confession, as she sees the shock and disgust on Triffie's face.

“You – you and Jacob John?” A small few words in response to Kit's torrent of information, words twisted out of a mouth gone suddenly small and tight.

“Yes, me and Jacob John. Don't look so shocked, girl, it's not the end of the world. Only don't go trying to tell me that man's got no passion in him. He had it right enough when he was seventeen, and if he's lost it since then, I know whose fault that is.”

“You…common…whore.” Trif gives each word the weight it deserves, and Kit does not defend herself. The fight has gone out of her; she doesn't understand her own need to hurt Trif with this long-buried secret.

Trif turns to go for the stairs, and Kit thinks she will go off to bed in the guest room, turn the key in the door, and somehow, after a long and sleepless night, they will both sit over breakfast in the morning and find a way to piece this back together. Kit will apologize – only she can't do it right now.

In the morning, this demon will have left her, and she will be a better person. Not a saint, never a saint like Triffie. But a decent woman. Refined. Someone who chooses her words with care and would never dredge up a dark old secret just to hurt a friend. She knows she may have done untold damage to Trif and Jacob John's marriage. But if the older, stronger bond of their friendship can be repaired in the warm light of morning, then everything else will begin to knit back up as it should.

But Triffie stops on the third step, turns back. “Why have I been such a fool all these years?”

“You've never been a fool,” Kit says. “Maybe you've been foolish about some things …”

About God, she means, about believing there's someone out there watching the fall of the sparrow, with some mighty purpose that will make sense of all our squalid sparrow lives. But Trif is thinking of a different kind of foolishness; she has her words back now, and is in full flight with them.

“…trusting you, looking up to you, and yes, you were right, I envied you. More fool me – to want anything you had, to want to be anything like you. Tying my whole life up to someone who don't know what friendship or loyalty means –”

“That's not fair,” Kit says. “It's not as if I slept with Jacob John after you were engaged to him – it was long before, it was all over.”

“Yes, so I could take your leavings and never know it! Some friend you are! Did you really think I'd be satisfied with Jacob John, even if I didn't know you'd had him already? You knew what I wanted out of life, knew the kind of man I would have been happy with. If you'd told me the truth, I never would have married him, and I'd have been better off!”

“I knew what kind of man would please you?” Kit repeats. “And what kind of man would that be? Someone too good for this world – the voice of Billy Sunday and the face of Mr. Darcy?”

“Don't you mock me,” Trif says. “Don't you try to make a joke of this like you does of everything. My ideas weren't so high as you think. I'd have been satisfied with a good man who cared for the same things I cared for, who thought about more than what was on the table for supper at the end of the day, who enjoyed a good book. I wasn't as foolish as you seem to think – I wasn't looking for something out of this world. There are men like that. You found one, and I might have, if I'd waited.”

Kit smiles slowly, cruelly. Though she already regrets what she's said, the desire to unburden the past hasn't left her. “A good man, one who likes to think and read books? You mean, a man like Joe Bishop.”

Trif nods, not surprised. “Sure, a man like him. I don't mean Mr. Bishop himself – you was the one who was sweet on him in school, I recall, and I thought even after there were times you might have made fast to him. To me he was always the schoolteacher, but it's no shame to say I admired him. Yes, I would have been happy with a man like that.”

“You wouldn't have been happy with him – or anyone – because you can't see past your fancies to see what's really there, what a man is really made of.” Kit's angry, suddenly, on behalf of Jacob John Russell, even though she herself rejected and discounted him years ago. What is he, but a good, steady man, good looking and quick with a laugh? He was gentle and eager, for a boy of seventeen with a girl in his arms for the first time. She feels bad that he's ended up with this woman, this harridan, who will never think he's good enough just because he left school before he finished the Fourth Reader and doesn't like to quote poetry or wrangle about Bible verses. Jacob John Russell deserves better than to be compared to the likes of Joe Bishop. It's time Triffie knew that.

“Joe Bishop,” Kit says, the name dipped in vinegar. “Is that your ideal man, then? And you think I was sweet on him in school – is that your version of it? Was it really just me, Triffie? Did he never lay his hand on your thigh when he was explaining Mathematics to you, or slip a hand down the front of your dress on the sly while he helped you write your themes?”

“What are you talking about?”

“If it had happened to you you'd have known what I was talking about, or even if you'd kept your eyes open. It was me when we were in school – me that I know for sure, though there could have been others. Later on, there was Millicent Butler – did you never wonder why she wouldn't come back for extra tutoring? Of course, you thought she was a silly girl who wouldn't take a good opportunity to better herself. When really she was just an innocent young girl who didn't want a dirty old man taking advantage of her!”