That Forgetful Shore (33 page)

Children are not as resilient as grown women; they set off in the morning swinging their pails, laughing and carrying on, but it's nearly noon now. Billy, Ruth's two older boys and Betty's daughter Evelyn are all starting to complain. Ruth's littlest one, Lizzie, has given up picking and fallen asleep in the shade of a larger bush. She's barely four, and really should have stayed at home with the little ones. But you can't put too much of a burden on Aunt Rachel these days.

Betty and her husband Frank have been living in St. John's since they got married. This summer, Betty and the children are staying with Aunt Rachel while Frank goes fishing on the Labrador. When the fishing season is over, Betty and Frank and the children are moving to Nova Scotia, where Frank is going to work in the Sydney mines. Ruth and Cy talk about moving up there too, if the fishing doesn't get better. This sunny afternoon amid the berry bushes might be the last time she and Betty and Ruth go berrypicking together like they used to as girls, Trif thinks.

You can't say a word against Katie Grace when it comes to berrypicking. She's working as hard as the three grown women, barely lifting her head or saying a word. Betty nods toward her. “That one's some little worker,” she says. “What is she, twelve now?”

“Just turned twelve in July,” Trif says. “She's a grand hand for work.”

“Mom says she's just like you were,” Ruth adds. “Always with her head in a book so you'd think she wasn't good for a thing, but then you sees her put her hand to a job and you sees another side to her. Mom always said you was a dog for work.”

Trif knows her aunt can offer no higher accolade. The words of motherly affection she was starved for as a girl never came to her, but for Aunt Rachel to call her “a dog for work” is equal to anyone else taking her in her arms and saying, “I love you, Triffie.” You take what you can get in this life, Trif thinks, and you don't cast your mind back to what you missed.

If you think of anything beyond the day's work, you look to the future, to your children. She's proud to hear Katie praised as a good worker, but she doesn't want to hear that Katie is just like her. Katie will do better, go farther.

School starts up again next week, and Joe Bishop dropped by the house last night to talk to Trif and Jacob John about Katie Grace. “She's a smart girl,” he said, “though I don't need to tell you that. I imagine you've taught her as much as I have, Triffie.”

“No, no – she's gone far beyond what I was able to teach her,” Trif protests. “Though I do still read Shakespeare out loud with her in the evenings, along with the Bible.”

“Shakespeare and the Bible –Trif's right and left hands,” Jacob John puts in. “I can't read more than a half dozen words in either one, but she reels off jeezly grand strings of 'em both, chapter and verse. 'Tis not half bad to listen to, in the winter when the evenings closes in early and there's not so much work to do.”

“You won't get a much better education than you'll get from hearing Triffie read Shakespeare and the Bible,” Joe Bishop assented. “But if Katie wants to go further in school and train for a teacher – then she'll need some extra tutoring, especially in Mathematics.” The little school on the Point goes further now than when Trif went there; Mr. Bishop offers classes for the Prelimary Certificate to the older students, while two women teachers handle the younger grades. “I know she can do well in her exams, but I'd like to start working a bit more with her, maybe after school some evenings. You won't mind that, will you?”

Trif has expected this talk for years. When Katie was just toddling around, Trif imagined her heart swelling with pride; imagined, too, that she'd have to make her case to Jacob John, convincing him that somehow there had to be a way for a fisherman's daughter to afford an education.

She knows Jacob John well enough by now to know she will not have to persuade him on this point. “She's a clever one, for sure,” he tells Joe Bishop. “If she could get on a bit in school, we'd be proud of her. I don't know where we'd find the money for her to go to St. John's, but I 'lows we'd find a way, wouldn't we, missus?”

“Of course we would, supposing I have to take up scrubbing other people's houses,” Trif says. Why, then, this sick feeling in her stomach as she closes the front door behind Joe Bishop? Why feel dread on a night she should be celebrating?

Of course she knows why. The knowledge has lain there like a stone ever since Kit threw it at her, more than five years ago. She has never repeated it to anyone, never said a word to a soul. She's tried to pretend there's nothing to it, and most of the time she's able to believe that. But now, with Katie Grace before her, her little red-gold head bent over the berry bushes, Kit's words are as clear in her mind as if they were spoken yesterday. “
Do you really want to risk not believing me, when Katie's the clever one, and Joe Bishop asks you can she stay behind for extra lessons?
”

She can't keep silent anymore. To test it, she says to Ruth and Betty, who are both nearby, “Mr. Bishop says he's thinking of keeping Katie after school for extra lessons this year. He thinks she'll have a good chance of finishing high school and training for a teacher if we can afford to send her to town.”

“Well, that's no surprise,” Ruth says.

“She's just like you, Trif, smart at her books,” Betty agrees.

Nothing more, from either of them. Not that they were ever the ones to get extra lessons after school – dutiful but uninspired students, both her cousins. Still, they were young girls in Joe Bishop's schoolroom.

“Yes, she's a grand girl,” Trif says. “I wonders about them extra lessons after school, though. I'm not sure I'm easy in my mind about it, if it's the right thing to have her staying after like that.”

“Sure what harm could come to her?” Ruth says. “You got extra lessons back when you was in school, Trif – as much as Mom would allow, anyway. It's a sin you weren't allowed to go on farther.”

Betty nods, but says, “All the same, you can't be too careful.” Her face is turned towards the blueberries, her fingers picking swiftly and efficiently. Her eyes slide towards Trif's and then away.

Later, after the children have had their break for lunch and been set back to work filling their pails, Trif moves nearer to Betty. “You think I'm right,” she says, “to have some doubts about Mr. Bishop keeping Katie after school?”

Betty is quiet so long Trif doesn't think she's going to answer. “I s'pose you'd know more about it than I would,” she says at last. “Like Ruth said, you stayed after yourself the odd time. But … well, I don't like to say anything against anyone. It's not right to gossip.”

“It's not always gossip,” Trif says. She prays for victory over the sin of gossip, but not as hard as she does about her other sins, because you can pick up a lot of useful information from gossip. How would a small town ever function if people didn't know things they weren't supposed to know about one another? If you didn't know what people were up to, you'd make a right fool of yourself with the things you said, not knowing when to be careful. If you didn't listen to gossip, you might pass comment on how Clara Snow's youngest boy looks nothing like either of his parents but is the spit of Jabez Badcock. You might ask Isaiah Butler how his young one Elsie likes being in service in Carbonear and watch him stammer, if you didn't know the poor child was gone off to her aunt's house to have a baby. Trif considers gossip a useful tool, which may be why the Spirit hasn't given her deliverance over this particular sin yet.

Now she just says, “There's times things have got to be said…otherwise more harm might be done.” Hopes that will be enough to unlock Betty's tongue.

Again, the shifting sideways glance. “Did he ever try anything with you?” Betty asks.

Trif shakes her head.

“But you knows something. You must have heard.” After a silence, Betty says, “Was it Kit?”

“Could be. Me and Kit don't keep in touch nowadays, but she said a few things in her time. I don't know what to pay heed to, tell the truth.” Now that they're near the core of it, Trif feels sick to her stomach. She can't stand to hear this, but she can't afford not to. She gives up all pretense of picking berries and eases back onto her heels, then sits. Above, seagulls wheel and screech. She doesn't look at Betty, who is still picking.

“Well, I don't know much. He touched me a few times, nothing to talk about, you know, but it didn't seem quite right. But I'd never have said a word, only –” Betty pauses again. “You should talk to Amelia Snow.”

“Amelia?” Trif remembers Amelia as a clever girl, very quiet. She certainly didn't go on to high school or to anything grand – she lives across the bay in Bareneed, married to a fisherman. Trif hasn't seen her in five years or more.

But Amelia's sister Helen goes to the Pentecostal meetings in Clarke's Beach, as does Trif whenever she can get over there. A while back a Pastor Vaters came through and had some revival meetings on the Point and some more in Bay Roberts, but the Spirit hasn't touched those places like Clarke's Beach, which still has the only Pentecostal congregation along this stretch of Conception Bay. The next Sunday night Trif makes an excuse, after the singing and praying and preaching and tongues, to go up to Helen Morgan, who used to be Helen Snow. She asks about how the family is doing, steers the conversation around to Amelia.

“Oh, you know, she's had a hard time since her little one's been sick – did you hear about that?”

Triffie remembers hearing that Amelia's daughter, a year or two younger than Katie, nearly died of scarlet fever last winter. The child lived, but she is very weak, an invalid, and Helen tells her that Amelia spends most of her time caring for her daughter. It's an easy enough thing to find an errand that will bring her over to Bareneed, to stop by Amelia's house with a couple of jars of jam – not just the blueberry, which anyone can get, but the bakeapple jam which is so much rarer, the berries being harder to find and more work to pick. Trif's bakeapple jam has won some fame on the Point.

“I was talking to Helen the other Sunday, when we were at the meeting,” Trif says, when Amelia invites her in for a cup of tea. It's hard to get the conversation from their common acquaintance, Amelia's sister, to what she wants to talk about. Trif plots her course through Amelia's sick daughter and a promise to pray for her, to her own children, to the suggestion that Katie might have some extra lessons with Mr. Bishop. Finally she is able to lean towards Amelia, lower her voice, and say, “I hates to ask it, but it's on my mind, you know. I heard rumours, years ago, not long after I left school, about Mr. Bishop. I know he was a good teacher and all, but all the girls he used to keep after school for extra lessons – did he ever – you know? I mean, was there ever anything …?”

Amelia fixes Trif with a cool gaze, so much less awkward around this subject than Trif is. Her life has been hard, Trif knows, and perhaps it has stripped her conversation down to the bare essentials.

“Did he fool around with me, you mean? Of course he did. He done it with plenty of girls, you should know that.”

Trif shakes her head, but Amelia clearly doesn't believe her. She shrugs and looks away. “I got more to be worried about than old stuff that happened years ago, Trif. All I know is, if my young one was well enough to still be in school, I wouldn't leave her alone in a room with Joe Bishop, no matter if he promised her a dozen scholarships.”

That's all she will say; Trif knows better than to push her. She can't stop now; there are other women she has to talk to. Millicent Butler, now married to a Batten from Bay Roberts, will only say that she doesn't want to talk about it, but that if Triffie is going to spend as much time as she does down on her knees, she should say a few prayers for Joe Bishop. Effie Dawe is more forthcoming than all the rest, perhaps because she received a carefully worded letter rather than an awkward conversation over tea.

The letter took ages to write and Triffie thought Effie might just toss it in the fire. Instead she gets back three pages of perfect copperplate penmanship from Miss Dawe, now teaching in Grand Bank.

There is nothing I regret about my schooling, humble though it was in that little schoolhouse with poor Mr. Bishop. Indeed, I have endeavoured over the years to give my own scholars some taste of the fine education he gave me during those precious years of girlhood.

With all that said, I will confess that your letter awakened memories I have long kept buried. When I speak of our old teacher now I often think of him, as I just wrote, as “poor Mr. Bishop,” for I firmly believe that that unfortunate man – who is, in essence, I believe a truly Good Man, and a fine teacher – has some manner of disorder or trouble in his mind, or perhaps in his soul, that causes him to do things that have the potential to tear down all the fine work he has laboured to build. In short, I may say that in my own experience, the damage done to my young spirit was balanced by the great good he did my mind by expanding it so. But I will not pretend there were no tear-filled nights as I struggled to come to grips with those so inappropriate advances.

I trust you will have the discretion to burn this letter. But as to the matter on which you requested advice – what you ought to do about your own daughter – I hardly know what to say. I believe with absolute fervour that any young woman who is capable of a higher education should avail herself of one if it is at all possible, and I doubt that could come to pass at all without the extra tutelage our old teacher has always provided so kindly. But if you ask whether I would leave an innocent young girl alone with the man of whom we speak – I must confess that unless God has wrought some great miracle upon him, to make him a better man…then I would have Grave Misgivings.