That Forgetful Shore (39 page)

“I don't know what would trouble you about that, Reverend,” she says now, looking him square in the face. “Sure I was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England, and I've got my backside on the pew every Sunday morning – when have you ever seen me miss a Sunday service?” She says nothing about the other baptisms, her baptism by immersion in a chilly lake with an Adventist pastor, or her baptism in the Holy Spirit at the Pentecostal Assembly. She gambles that in the face of her brazenness Reverend Spencer won't push it any farther, and sure enough he doesn't. He only says, “Well, there's no doubt you have the interest and ability, Mrs. Russell, but it is most unusual. And I did hear a suggestion that Mr. French might be willing to take the seat as well, though he is getting up in years.”

The conversation trickles away with nothing definite being said. Trif talks of it to no-one but Katie, yet somehow word gets around the Point that there's talk of Trif Russell getting herself put on the School Board. Plenty of people are shocked at the idea of a woman – especially this particular woman – as a Board member, but all that talk is reported second-hand, few people wanting to confront Trif to her face about it.

“I told them, I said, why shouldn't a woman be on the Board?” Trif is surprised to hear this sentiment from Aunt Rachel, who has certainly never made any bold statements about women's rights and had not much to say one way or another when she was given the vote. But now she says, “It's always the mothers who send the boys to school when their fathers are trying to get them out in boat as young as eight or nine. Why shouldn't a mother have some say in her children's education?”

“Well, I've heard no more about it from Skipper Wilf, nor from the minister since he brought it up to me, but I expects any day now to hear Uncle Joe French got the place,” Trif says. “Where is David, over next door? I should take him back over to our place now.” Katie Grace is back home working in the garden while Triffie weeds Aunt Rachel's garden and lets her keep an eye on David.

“Oh, you know it's never no trouble to look after David,” Aunt Rachel says as the boy comes up the steps onto the front bridge. She reaches out to embrace him. “Leave him here all week – leave him here all summer, sure. He's the last little chick in my nest, aren't you sweetheart?”

David is big enough now to squirm away with a little embarrassment from her kisses. Aunt Rachel is far more sentimental and tender with her grandchildren and Trif's children than she ever was to her own when they were young, certainly more than she ever was to Triffie. But Ruth and Betty have both gone off to Nova Scotia now with their husbands and children, and Rachel has no-one but David left to spoil.

Aunt Rachel is over sixty now, and she's all right as long as Uncle Albert is around, but she seems lost when he's away. Albert stopped going to the ice this spring, but he reckons he has a few good years left in him fishing on the Labrador, and Trif determines to do everything she can for Aunt Rachel during the long months she's alone. She's offered, of course, to bring Rachel over to the south side with her, but Rachel won't leave her own house, and Trif can hardly blame her for that.

She's back at the Mercantile one day in late August, bringing in some blueberries she and Katie and David picked to sell, when she's again beckoned into the back room. Skipper Wilf looks up from lighting his pipe and gestures again for her to sit down. “Not everyone was happy with it, I'll tell you the truth,” he says. “But Reverend Spence agreed with me and in the end most of the other Board members did too, though it's really only the minister's opinion that counts for much. You'll be joining us Tuesday evening in the schoolroom, Trif, for your first Board meeting.”

Trif's steps are light on the road home that evening. She's gotten extra credit on her account for the blueberries – one more little safeguard against hunger and want – and she's won something no woman on the Point, perhaps no woman in Newfoundland, has had before. She has no idea how much power, how much say the School Board really has, but to sit there among those men, to raise a woman's voice to whatever questions they may discuss, is something to hold her head up about. And Jacob John will be proud of her – and doubtless relieved, too, since she knows he never would have wanted the job.

After the thrill of being appointed to the Board, the actual Board meetings are something of a letdown. Four old men – the two younger men on the Board are still down on the Labrador – sit about in the schoolroom and smoke; Skipper Wilf reads off lists of resolutions about teachers' salaries and plans to repair the leaking roof; and the Board members all say Aye. But still, Trif thinks,
it's a step
. At her first meeting she makes an effort to restrain herself, to say little and learn much with the thought that she may have more to say at the next meeting.

She's disappointed to learn that the Board meets rarely and leaves the running of the school almost entirely to Joe Bishop and the two young women who teach the lower grades. There's a second meeting in early October when one of the teachers falls sick and has to be replaced, but even then it's only a matter of lending their approval to a decision already made by the Church.

The few decisions have all been made and the meeting has been derailed by Uncle Ike Barbour reminiscing about how hard the old schoolmaster used to beat the boys back in his day, when someone knocks at the door. It's Abigail Parsons with a message for her grandfather. Skipper Wilf goes outside the door for a few moments. When he comes back in, he looks ten years older.

“We've just had a telegram,” he says. “The
Sea Rose
never made port in Twillingate where she was supposed to, and there was a big storm up there last night.”

The
Sea Rose
is one of two schooners owned by the Parsons family at the Labrador fishery this year; Ki Barbour is the captain, and Jacob John, Billy and Uncle Albert are all on board her. Triffie stands up suddenly as the men burst into questions, far more animated than they've been throughout the meeting. Skipper Wilf looks at her and says, “You go down and tell your aunt and the Frenches, Trif. We'll let you all know when we've got any more news.”

At Aunt Rachel's house, Nellie French from next door is sitting at the kitchen table having a cup of tea, and David is asleep on the settee. Trif wishes for Katie's calming presence; somehow she thinks having her daughter here would make it easier to tell this terrible news, that the ship carrying all their menfolk may have been lost at sea.

As soon as Trif gets the words out, Nellie cries, “Oh, no! Oh, God!” and Aunt Rachel moves quickly from her chair. She goes, not to Trif but to her old friend, and the two older women grip each other's hands. Rachel and Nellie have been next-door neighbours for forty years. They have borne the worst together, losing their two boys in the war, sending their men off to the Labrador every summer and to the ice every winter. There is no news, only wild speculation and women's grief. As the news spreads, women come to the door. The wives, mothers and daughters of the men on the
Sea Rose
gather to comfort and encourage one another. A knot of women forms around Rachel's kitchen table, voices and hands twining as they share stories of old shipwrecks, offer hopeful stories of survival against all odds. There is an empty chair but Trif stands by the door, unable to join the circle. There's something strengthening in the sharing of sorrow and worry, but Trif has never been able to do it – not with a group like this, rocking back and forth and keening, waiting for news to come in.

She tells one of Nellie's daughters that someone should stay over here with Rachel tonight, though that's really Trif's job. Instead she picks up the sleeping David, shakes him awake and stumbles with him up over the lane, across the Point to her own place, the only placed Trif can bear the thought of being right now.

The front bridge of Trif's house is cool but not yet cold in the early-October evening. She puts David down in his bed and then goes and sits outside. Across the road the Long Beach stretches out, the rocks worn smooth from the waves that beat against them year after year.
Like us
, Trif thinks,
like the women all along the shore. We sit here year after year and wait for word from the men, wait for the worst the sea can give, and whatever happens, we take it. We just take it.

The sea looks calm enough tonight here in the bay but it's no difficulty to imagine the high waves, the screaming wind, the rocks that could tear apart a wooden schooner in minutes. Such things have been part of Triffie's dreams her whole life. They became sharper and clearer when she married a fisherman, and they have become oppressive this summer, since her eldest son went off to sea.

The sky darkens so she can hear the waves better than she can see them: there's no moon tonight, but that rushing sound of water on rocks is ever present. Triffie is angry – angry at Jacob John for encouraging the boy to go, for going himself year after year, angry at God, angry at the sea itself.

It's easiest to be angry at the sea, at this huge impersonal force that rules all their lives, that gives so grudgingly and takes with such abandon. She says aloud, “God, if you bring our Billy and Jacob John home alive out of this, no man of mine is ever setting foot in a boat again. No more fishermen in this family.”

The next day word comes that the
Sea Rose
sank on the night of the fourth of October, in the waters off St. Anthony. Trif, Katie, Aunt Rachel and half the women on the Point, it seems, crowd into Parsons' Mercantile to hear the telegram from St. Anthony.

Skipper Wilf stands up on a box and raises his hand. His son Ted is captain of the
Sea Rose
's sister ship, the
Lily
.

“The first telegram is from the telegraph office in St. Anthony,” Skipper Wilf says, raising his voice. “Ladies – ladies, quiet down now, it's not all bad news.
Sea Rose
lost, stop. Nine survivors safe with us, stop. Further news to follow.”

“Nine?” The number is repeated over and over throughout the crowded shop. “Only nine! Nine saved? How many lost then?”

Skipper Wilf raises his voice. “The
Sea Rose
carried a crew of sixteen men. If nine men are saved, then seven are – lost.” His voice breaks a little on the word. “We got no way to tell yet, who the survivors are. Not till another telegram comes from St. Anthony.”

Over the panicked voices of women that break like waves in the room, Skipper Wilf raises his voice again. “I have a second telegram from my son, Skipper Ted, who made harbour in Twillingate. The
Lily
is going back to St. Anthony to get the survivors from the
Sea Rose
.”

The second telegram arrives the next day, listing the survivors who made it to shore and are on their way home. Captain Hezekiah Barbour. Robert French. Arthur French. Nathaniel French. Jabez Badcock. Harry Mercer. Fred Mercer. Jacob John Russell. William Russell. The other seven men are not accounted for, presumed to be lost. The name of Albert Bradbury is not among the survivors.

Aunt Rachel stayed home this time, keeping David with her, rather than go to the shop to hear the telegrams read out. She can't bear it, she tells Triffie, so it's left to Trif to come home and break the news.

Trif, growing up in that house, in and out of it almost every day for years since she married, cannot recall many moments of tenderness or soft words between her aunt and uncle. In fact she can remember almost no conversation between them at all – Aunt Rachel spoke to the children, and Uncle Albert barely spoke at all. She can't remember ever seeing them touch, or kiss, or embrace. But Rachel cries with huge sobs that shake her shoulders and raw gasps of air, and when all her tears are gone she sits at the table staring down at the oilcloth with hollow, empty eyes.

What is she crying for?
Trif wonders.
For the loss of the man she loved? For the loss of the only life she knew? For the years of widowhood lying ahead, with husband and son gone and her daughters far away? If Jacob John were lost, what would I be crying for?

People come in and out of the kitchen all evening. Triffie feeds them and gives them tea; Rachel sits quietly, accepting their condolences. She is not the only one with a man whose name did not appear on the survivors list. Nellie French has lost another son: John, too young to go off to the war that claimed Isaac, is among the missing, leaving a wife and four children. The women of the Point go from the house to house, sharing what comfort they can, until long after dark. Lamps are lit, lights burning in windows for fishermen who will never come home from the sea.

When Rachel talks, finally, it's only to Triffie, when the well-meaning neighbours and relatives have gone and Katie, summoned home from Spaniard's Bay to hear the news, has gone to bed next to her little brother in one of the upstairs rooms. Tonight Triffie can't leave Rachel, can't go home to her own place no matter how much she longs for it. She has to stay.

“I hated for him to go,” Rachel says, looking not at Triffie but out the window, though it's dark and there's nothing to see out there. One oil lamp illuminates a small circle of tablecloth.

“I know, I know,” Trif says. “I hated for Jacob John to go too.” That's not quite true: there was a time she used to be glad he was gone, though she always worried about might happen to him. “And I never wanted Billy to go.”

“No, I was the same with our Will, remember?” Rachel says. “Much good all my worrying did – better he should have died on a fishing boat than go the way he did. Nothing good ever comes to those who go away from home, Trif. I worries that much about Ruth and Betty and their crowd, you'll never know. They goes off, they all goes off – only you had sense, Trif, you never went away.”

I wanted to
, Trif thinks. If she'd had the chance to go, her aunt's worries wouldn't have counted for anything. She doesn't say that; she says, “I went away three summers to Labrador.”