That Forgetful Shore (5 page)

“So you think it's trouble with his lessons got him so nervous?” Aunt Rachel asks Trif one Saturday as they scrub the floor together. “Do Mr. Bishop whip the youngsters if they don't get their lessons right?”

“No, I only ever saw him use the whip on the bigger fellows if they're saucy or won't listen. The little ones gets a tap on the hand with the ruler if they can't say their lessons, but no worse than that. I 'low all Will needs is a bit of extra help like I've been giving him at home. Mr. Bishop don't have the time he needs, with all them youngsters in that one room.”

Trif is feeling her way cautiously towards the question of being hired as Mr. Bishop's assistant; she doesn't want to waste too much time and goodwill on it in case it never comes to anything, but if he were to come to her tomorrow and say he had the money to hire someone, she would like at least to have the ground prepared.

She writes to Kit before bed that night, making mention of Mr. Bishop's offer. She sleeps fitfully, dreaming of Kit far away in St. John's, her dreams flavoured with the usual mixture of envy and concern.

A noise wakes her before dawn, and she thinks,
I must have fell asleep after all
. She lies there awhile, drifting through dreams, something tugging at the edge of her mind. Finally she remembers:
Will.
The sound she heard – how long ago now? She turns toward the window: the sky is just graying towards dawn.

She gets up, wraps her housecoat around her and puts on slippers against the bitter chill of the room. Now that she's up she may as well start the fire, save Uncle Albert the trouble of doing it when he rises at five. She crosses the hall to the children's room and sees Will's side of the bed, the covers tumbled, empty. On the other side Ruth snores lightly.

Downstairs, everything is still and bare. Shapes of table, chairs, crockery on the table, emerge gradually from the gloom. No sign of a little boy with bed-messed hair and bare feet.

She goes through the hall, the parlour, back upstairs to check his parents' room. Sometimes he gets in bed with Aunt Rachel and Uncle Albert, though Albert always brings him back to his own room. This morning, Will is not there. His parents are both asleep and Trif hesitates a moment, wondering whether to wake them now or later.

She puts on her boots and coat and goes out into the frost-edged yard, but there is no sign of him out there. She follows the path, unwilling, down to the beach. No signs that anyone has passed this way, but what sign would his little bare feet leave on rocks? Her heart races in her throat.
Time to wake Aunt Rachel
, she tells herself. But cannot bear to, because the moment she wakes her and says, “I can't find Will,” is the moment it will be real.

She goes back up to the house, looks everywhere again, still can't bring herself to go into her aunt and uncle's room. Outside once more. The sun is about to rise, a vivid line of light tracing the horizon to the east, out beyond the eastern tip of the Point. Triffie stands on the front bridge, frozen both inside and out, watching the orange disk of the sun slip up out of the sea, even though she knows in a search like the one that will begin as soon as she wakes her aunt and uncle, every minute will count.
Please, God,
she prays.
Let him not be in the water, I'll do anything. Any vow you want me to make…
. She would promise to be a missionary in India or China if she could only figure out how…but then, that would be no sacrifice; she would love to go somewhere far and be a hero. The greatest sacrifice, perhaps, would be to stay exactly where she is, do what she's doing, and never complain again, even silently, or in letters to Kit. Even that would be worth it, if Will is not floating face-down in the ocean.

She shivers, shakes herself. How much time has she wasted standing here, watching the sun? A minute or two. But even that is too much. She turns back to the house, to alert the sleepers, to begin the hue and cry.

“Triffie! Are you up?”

Of course I'm up, I'm standing on my front bridge, you ignorant cow,
Trif thinks, but does not say, as she turns to see fat Nellie French from the house next door, out in the laneway. She is clad, like Triffie herself, in a winter coat over her nightdress, boots on her feet.

“Well! You will not believe, not in all your days, what I found in my house this morning,” Nellie French says, obviously pleased with herself. And though Triffie wants to burst out the answer, joy and relief make her magnanimous enough to listen through the woman's whole story.

“…and I went in, before I lit the fire, like I always do, to check on the young ones, and there in Isaac's bed there was two little heads instead of one, and the other one was fair-haired. You knows none of my crowd is fair, so I peeled back the covers and there was young Will, sound asleep. Now I knows he wanders so I wonder could it be, he just wandered right out of your house and into ours, up into Isaac's bed? Could he do that, I wonder?”

Trif is ahead of Nellie French, racing into Nellie's house, up the stairs. He could do such a thing, apparently, and did. Today Uncle Albert will have to put on that new lock, up high on top of the door where even standing on a chair – for he's capable of that – Will won't be able to reach it. He's capable of anything, if his night-wanderings can take him into a neighbour's house, a friend's bed, without ever waking.

He wakes when she picks him up. “Triffie,” his sleepy voice says.

“Will! Do you know where you are?”

“In bed.”

“Yes, but not in your own bed.” She carries him downstairs and sits down in Nellie's kitchen, by the newly lit woodstove, while Nellie chatters away about the strangeness of it all and Trif, in the rocking chair, rocks her small cousin. His golden head fits just under her chin.

“I'm in Isaac's house?” he says, confused.

“Yes, you got right out of your bed in your sleep, went out of the house and over to Isaac's house. Do you see now why your mother got to tie you on? You could come to harm, wandering like that.”

“But I didn't come to no harm. You came and found me.”

“Yes. Yes,” she says, soothing him. “What did you dream, Will? Do you remember your dreams?” She has never asked him this before.

“Same dream as always,” he says sleepily.

“What dream is that?”

“I'm far from home, and I got to find my way back. Out on the barrens, and I got to walk back before the fairies takes me.”

Though the boy is safe in her arms, another shiver runs down Trif's spine at the mention of the fairies. She knows the tales as well as anyone on the Point, stories of children who vanished on the barrens and never returned, or worse, returned forever changed, fairy-touched. Old wives' tales, Trif would have said if anyone asked her, though she carries a crust of bread in her pocket when she goes berrypicking all the same. Now she holds Will closer in her arms, till he falls back to sleep and she can carry him across the lane and put him down in his own bed.

Kit

St. John's
September, 1905

My dearest Posy,

Oh to think of you now, in our old Schoolroom, standing by the side of our Dear Pedagogue and the little ones before you in their breeches and pinafores. How strange that you should be teaching the children while I am yet Learning, still a Schoolgirl though in a Schoolroom far bigger and grander than we ever imagined back home!

I spend my days in study and books, but I yearn for the day when I shall have my own classroom to manage, my own Pupils to
Inspire
. All the
hard
 
work
I put in last year towards my Preliminary examinations has paid off, and I am finding this year much easier. Though I would like to carry on, and learn
all
 
there
 
is
 
to
 
learn
, Father says that will be enough schooling for the present, that I should take a school of my own next year.

I send you
kisses
 
and
 
dear
 
thoughts
, all the way from gray and cold St. John's to the beautiful shores of Missing Point. I imagine the sun sparkling on the waters off the Point, though I know that if the Sun is shrouded here, it is likely foggy there too. In my memory the sun is always shining.

It is indeed a gray, windy day in St. John's. Kit finishes off the letter to Triffie by drawing a few quick pencil sketches in the margin – caricatures of Miss Shaw, Miss Babbage, rude little Nancy Ellis and a few other girls from school. She puts in a handful of pressed flower petals picked from Cousin Ethel's rosebush two weeks ago. It is late September, and the summer months at home are already receding, slipping away from her memory. Home is real when she is there, but once she steps on the train it becomes a place in a book, covers closed. She likes to imagine it as a place where nothing will ever change, where her parents will never age and the children will not grow up. Only Triffie is allowed to change, growing year by year older to keep pace with Kit herself.

This latest change – Trif assisting Mr. Bishop in the school – is, of course, wonderful news for everyone. Wonderful for Mr. Bishop, who needs the help. Wonderful for the children, who could not ask for a better tutor. Wonderful most of all for Triffie, who has so longed to get out of the drudgery of Aunt Rachel's house. Kit has behaved exactly as she should, congratulated her friend on this wonderful opportunity. She won't admit even to herself that she envies Trif, who since last spring has been standing where she, Kit, ought to be – not just in front of the classroom, but at Joe Bishop's side.

Kit has seen little of Mr. Bishop since he came to call on her here in St. John's nearly a year ago. When they meet in passing during her school holidays, he asks about her studies but betrays no personal interest, nor has he written to her. His last hard, urgent kiss is seared into her memory, but it seems to have been an end rather than a beginning.

Very well then, she will make her own beginning. Kit Saunders is not a girl to wait on anyone else for a fresh start. She makes her way in the world, creates her own opportunities. So she tells herself, every day.

Miss Shaw, the English mistress, is her new role model, her new Dear Pedagogue. Sturdy, brisk, her red hair turning gray – she must be about forty – Miss Shaw strides into the lecture room, a model of sober spinster scholarship. But when she opens a textbook a new woman emerges, a Sarah Bernhardt hidden beneath the sensible gray tweed of her skirts and jackets. As she reads Shakespeare aloud, she becomes each character in turn, creating an entire Globe Theatre with her voice and hands.

Some of the girls laugh at Miss Shaw, imitate her accents and gestures behind their hands in the common room. They invite Kit to join them with smiles and glances, but she holds herself aloof.

What the magic of her own voice and Shakespeare's words do in the classroom, Miss Shaw attempts also to do with the Spencer College stage and a handful of awkward adolescent girls. Kit joins the Dramatic Society and wins the role of Petruchio in
The Taming of the Shrew
. She felt she had the temperament and spirit to play Kate, but tall girls who can act well tend to get the male roles. Which would be good news if they were doing
Macbeth
or
Hamlet
, but Miss Shaw says tragedies are too ambitious for schoolgirls; one needs to have suffered to play Hamlet. The older students are doing
Much Ado About Nothing
. Miss Shaw likes plays with strong female roles, even though her girls end up playing men as well, in a reversal of Shakespeare's original staging.

Having fallen in love with the part of Kate, Kit now tries to throw herself into the opposite role, to learn the lines of the proud man who wants to crush that independent spirit, bring Kate to heel like a trained lapdog. “It's impossible!” she complains to Miss Shaw in the gymnasium, flinging the book across the room.

“A very Kate-like display of spleen.” Miss Shaw draws down the sides of her mouth as if she's trying not to laugh. “But this is acting, Katherine. It's not finding an excuse to play out your own little dramas under someone else's name. It's about crawling into another person's skin, seeing the world through his eyes,
becoming
Petruchio.”

“But can I do it? I'm not sure I can.”

“I certainly hope you can; if not, I shall have to recast the part,” says Miss Shaw, and strides away to where the girls playing Kate and Bianca are practising their quarrel.

Something rises like a tide in Kit's chest. She thought she wanted Miss Shaw to do what Mr. Bishop would have done when she was a child, to say, “Of course you can do it, Kit. You're clever, you're brilliant, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to!” But this is better – this brisk dismissal with no honeyed words of praise.
Do the job, or I'll find someone else who can
. This, Kit decides, is a challenge to which she can rise.

“Very well then, let's take Act One, Scene Three, from Kate's entrance,” Miss Shaw bellows a few moments later, and Kit walks onto the stage, trying to imagine how a sixteenth-century Italian man might swagger into the courtyard, confident in his right to possess and rule. She thinks what she is doing is actually a poor imitation of Miss Shaw striding into the classroom, but perhaps it will do for now. “Good morrow, Kate, for that's your name, I hear!” she announces.

The pert little thing playing Kate – Nancy Ellis from Bonavista – looks up at Kit through fluttering eyelashes. “Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing. They call me Katherine that do talk of me.”

“What the – what do you think you're playing at, Nan!” Miss Shaw's voice cuts across the lines. “Kate's not
flirting
with Petruchio, she can't abide the man! She's a wild horse who won't be broken! Show some spirit, Nancy!!”