That Forgetful Shore Read online

  That Forgetful Shore

  TRUDY J.

  MORGAN–COLE

  Bestselling author of By the Rivers of Brooklyn

  That Forgetful Shore

  A NOVEL

  Copyright © 2011 Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada.

  ISBN 978-1-55081-362-3

  WWW.BREAKWATERBOOKS.COM

  Breakwater Books is committed to choosing papers and materials for our books that help to protect our environment. To this end, this book is printed on a recycled paper that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council of Canada.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We acknowledge the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA.

  For Jamie … In Memoriam

  I can’t believe I’ve written a book

  you’ll never be able to read.

  For this alone on Death I wreak

  The wrath that garners in my heart:

  He put our lives so far apart

  We cannot hear each other speak.

  –Tennyson, In Memoriam

  Contents

  Prologue: Missing Point, 1955

  My Heart is Thine: 1904 – 1908

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  All Eyes Were on Me: 1909 – 1913

  Kit

  Triffie

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Triffie

  Kit

  A Quick and Safe Return: 1914 – 1918

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  And Leaves the Wretch to Weep: 1919 – 1927

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Absence that Afflicts my Heart: 1928 – 1935

  Triffie

  Kit

  Triffie

  Kit

  Epilogue: Missing Point, 1955

  Afterword

  Questions For Discussion

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  MISSING POINT, 1955

  “The thing you don’t know about me,” Trif Russell says, “is, I was one of a twin.”

  She has said this to many people, over the years. She has said it in the garden above Aunt Rachel’s house, picking rocks from the stony ground. She has said it in the dark, turning to a face half-seen beside her in the bed. She has said it so often that it is, in fact, a thing almost everyone knows about her. Yet she creates the illusion that she is letting you into a confidence. She says it with lowered voice, with a glance to make sure there are no eavesdroppers.

  She says it today over a cup of tea at her kitchen table, to the young Church of England minister, Reverend Bliss. A grand name, that, Reverend Bliss. Reverend Bliss himself shows a certain formality about the nicknames the people of Missing Point have come up with to manage their odd Biblical appellations. Ki Barbour is Skipper Hezekiah to him; old Aunt Hepsy Snow is Miss Hephzibah. He has called Trif “Mrs. Russell” since he came to town six months ago, but now, in the comfort of her kitchen, trying to get better acquainted before leading the service tomorrow, he says, “You would be named Tryphena, I suppose?”

  “No,” says Trif as she gets up to refill his cup. “No, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? I was christened Tryphosa. You see the thing you don’t know about me, Reverend, is I was one of a twin. Mother had the two of us, two girls, and I don’t know if it was her or my Aunt Rachel picked out the names, but Aunt Rachel said we was to be called after the two sisters in the Bible, Tryphena and Tryphosa. Who labour in the Lord, as the apostle says.”

  “How very unusual,” says Reverend Bliss.

  “Isn’t it?” She puts the teapot back on the stove, the big Waterloo that takes up half the kitchen. Katie Grace has been after her for years to get an oil stove. Trif has put it off long enough that now it doesn’t matter any more; soon she’ll cook her last meal on that woodstove.

  Tryphena and Tryphosa; Peony and Posy. It explains everything, she thinks. Half of a whole, a piece torn away.

  “You’re a legend in these parts, Mrs. Russell,” the Reverend says. He sips the last of his tea and looks into the bottom of the cup. “Like your namesake, you have laboured in the Lord. A wonderful life of service.”

  She is sixty-four. Does this young minister think it’s her life that’s over? Will he make a mistake and bury her tomorrow, thinking that sixty-four is as good as dead?

  Their two teacups, hers and the Reverend’s, sit side by side on the small table, framed by the kitchen window. Trif has spent more than forty years looking out this window, the two pine trees in the yard and beyond them, the Long Beach, the whole scene framed by the kitchen curtains she sews from old flour sacks. Year by year the pines grow a little taller; every few years Trif hauls down the curtains, sews and embroiders and hangs a new pair. Those are the only changes. The same grey waves roll onto the same grey rocks, as they’ve done for two hundred years – as they did long before that, when there was no window and there was no house, when not a soul lived on the Point to watch the waves break on the shore.

  “What will you do now?” the young minister asks. The same question they’re all asking. Where will Trif go now, what will she do?

  She knows, but she isn’t about to explain her decision to Reverend Bliss. To understand where the story ends, he’d have to know it all the way back to the beginning, and that’s more of a story than she has time to tell today.

  “What you don’t know about me is, I was one of a twin.”

  It’s forty years earlier – no, forty-five. She lies in bed beside Jacob John Russell, in the front bedroom where the roof slopes down above the bed. Jacob John blows out the lamp and shifts himself to face her.

  They said their vows earlier that day, down in the parlour, the Church of England minister reading off from the book. Uncle Albert and Aunt Rachel stood beside Trif, and Jacob John’s mother, sister and brother-in-law on the other side of him. Trif’s cousins, Ruth, Will and Betty, squeezed onto the settee. That was all the people they could fit in the parlour, though half the folks on the Point came later to the kitchen to have a piece of dark fruitcake and a drop of tea.

  Trif had no-one to stand for her. Aunt Rachel had tried to get her to have Ruth for a bridesmaid, or her cousin Lizzie Snow, or one of her other girlfriends – Minnie Dawe or Millicent Butler, perhaps.

  “No,” Trif said. “If Kit can’t be here, I’ll have nobody. I wants Kit standing up beside me on my wedding day, or no-one.”

  “It’s Jacob John you’ll have standing up beside you,” Aunt Rachel reminded her, her eyelids lowered like blinds pulled half-way down in a house of mourning. “You’d do well to remember that.”

  She got thr
ough it anyway, Kit or no Kit. Put her hand on Jacob John’s arm and felt the rough weave of his good suit coat, the muscle underneath. Said the vows, and silently asked God to be her witness. Now, in the dark, she turns to him and tells him her secret. She brings few enough hopes into this bedroom with her, but she tries telling him anyway.

  “I knows that,” he says. “I knows your mother died having twins and she lost the one twin. Another girl, wasn’t it?”

  The dark tale of her birth sounds blunt in his unvarnished words. “Another girl,” she agrees. She does not tell him Tryphena’s name, says nothing about Pheenie and Phosie.

  “What else do you know about me?”

  She feels the movement of his shoulders against the mattress, feels him shrug. “Only what everyone knows, I s’pose.”

  Then that’s all you’ll ever know, she promises silently. Only what everyone knows, less if I can manage it. Never asks herself what she knows of him, what secrets a man like Jacob John might have.

  His hand on the fabric of her nightdress. “Come on now, maid,” he says. “Let’s get on with it.”

  “What you don’t know about me,” Triffie says, heaving a rock onto the rock pile, “is that I was one of a twin.”

  “You were?” Kit Saunders is supposed to be helping Trif pick over the ground before planting the garden. She was eager enough to be bazzing rocks around for the first little while, but now she’s perched up on the fence railing, sucking on a toffee while Trif bends over and scrabbles one rock after another from the thin soil of early spring. “What happened to the other one, the other twin?”

  “It was a storm, the night I was born. A terrible January storm,” Trif has been rehearsing this story in her head for all of her ten years, piecing it together from bits of gossip, tales overheard, Aunt Rachel’s pinched replies to her questions. She has never had the chance to tell it aloud before. Now this Saunders girl, newly come all the way from Trinity, is avid to hear it. Trif strings her words together carefully.

  “A terrible storm, and my mother was sick. It was early – two months before we were supposed to be born. Me and my sister, my twin sister. We were only seven-month babies, and my mother went into labour.”

  “What’s labour?”

  “You know – the birth pains. Like when a woman, or a cow or anything, is going to have a baby.”

  “We never kept no cows,” Kit says. Her father is not a fisherman; he was clerk for a merchant up in Trinity and has now moved to Missing Point to do the same job for his wife’s people, the Parsons family who own the Mercantile and two schooners. Kit has no brothers or sisters; she knows nothing. “So what happened to your mother?”

  “It was a terrible storm, a terrible winter storm. Aunt Rachel sent her brother out for to get Granny Morgan, the midwife, but it was too stormy. And the babies were coming, and there was only Aunt Rachel here with my mother. She borned us both, first my sister, then me. Aunt Rachel had in mind to call the first Tryphena and the second one Tryphosa. But it was too early; we were too little to live. Aunt Rachel thought we were both dead. She told my mother we were both dead, and my mother died of a broken heart. And when Aunt Rachel looked away from tending to my mother to the two of us wrapped up in the basket, sure enough, Tryphena was all blue and pale, but I let out a little cry, like a baby kitten. And I was no bigger than a kitten, either. And she took me up, wrapped me all up and put me in the warmer on top of the stove. Where you put bread in rise.”

  Kit’s mouth is as wide now as her eyes. “And you lived?”

  “Of course I lived, maid, here I am.” After a moment both girls bust out laughing. Then Trif bends to her work again. She picks up two good-sized stones. Every winter the snow and ice sweep over the land and leave behind this debris of rock that has to be picked over before the potatoes and carrots and cabbage can be planted. Picking over the ground before the hard work of planting is a job for young maids like herself. She hands one stone to Kit, who hurls it at the rock pile.

  “Where was your father?” Kit asks.

  Trif shrugs. The missing father, a topic on which Aunt Rachel volunteers no information, has always been the least interesting part of the story to her. What is an absent father, or even a tragic dead mother, next to a ghost twin, a shadow-self that almost was?

  “What would she have called you, if you’d both lived? You couldn’t have two Triffies in the one family,” Kit points out.

  “I asked Aunt Rachel, but she wouldn’t say. They couldn’t have called out Tryphena and Tryphosa all the time. Not every day.”

  “Pheenie and Phosie,” Kit suggests.

  They laugh again, but Trif nods. “I thought of that,” she said. “I could be Phosie. I’m almost glad she didn’t live, so I wouldn’t be called that. But I’d like to have a twin. It’s almost like I misses her.”

  “Pheenie and Phosie,” Kit repeats. “They could be like two flower names, almost. Peony and Posy.”

  “That’s pretty.” Trif has a hard time thinking of herself, hard, tall and angular, as Posy.

  “I wish I had a sister too,” Kit says. “Mom says the doctor warned her not to have no more after me. She’s delicate. Come over to the Long Beach with me after you finishes picking over the ground?”

  Triffie’s jobs done, they walk down the North Side Road, past the new causeway linking the north side of the Point to Bay Roberts, then across the neck of the Point to the south side where Kit’s family lives. On the vast pebbled shores of the beach they throw stones again, this time for fun, skipping them on the water.

  “Are you staying here?” Trif asks, unable to bear the hope building inside her.

  “For now. Pop talks about going away, to the Boston States, but Mom won’t hear tell of it.”

  “Why did you leave Trinity?”

  “Mom was homesick for the Point. She grew up here.”

  “If you stay here, we could be like sisters.”

  “My birthday’s in February,” Kit says. “One month after yours. We’re almost twins. I could be Peony.”

  Trif nods but doesn’t dare speak, afraid she might cry or say something stupid.

  Kit picks up a piece of rock different from the smooth beach rocks all around. This one has a hard, jagged edge, not yet worn down by the endless pounding of the sea. She draws the edge quickly over her palm, raising a bright red line. “I heard tell of people mixing their blood,” she says, holding out her hand. “So they can be blood brothers. Or sisters. It was in a book.”

  Trif takes her hand, though not the rock. “We don’t have to do that. Aunt Rachel says your grandmother Snow was her father’s first cousin.” Then, seeing that Kit doesn’t understand, she explains, “We got the same blood in us anyway.”

  And that is where the story begins.

  Triffie

  TRIFFIE IS SCRUBBING clothes in the big wooden washtub in the kitchen – she’d rather do it outside but it’s raining – when Kit raps on the window. Trif straightens up, goes to the window. She presses her hand against the watery green glass, meeting Kit’s hand on the other side. Looking at Kit through a window is like looking in a strange, distorted mirror. Their dark eyes are level with each other; Kit’s long dark hair is loose while Trif’s is tightly braided to keep out of her face while she works. They look alike in some ways, yet though they are always together people seldom comment on the resemblance. Trif understands that this is because Kit is beautiful, while she herself is not, though studying the lines and angles of their two faces, she cannot quite grasp what makes the difference.

  “Can you come out?” Kit says, through the glass.

  Trif goes out the back door and circles the house to the front bridge. “I got to do the wash,” she says. It’s Monday, and the fact that Mr. Bishop has said the final examination results will be handed out at the school today makes no difference to washday. A light, spitting rain drizzles the girls as they stand talking.

  “Won’t she let you come up to school to get your report?”

  “Not
likely,” Trif says. “She says school is done now, what odds what marks I got. Will you bring mine back for me?”

  She watches Kit step off the bridge and go on down the North Side Road. Yesterday Trif took a worn bedsheet and ripped it clean down the middle so she could sew it up again with the sides in the middle. The cotton tore neatly, dividing into two in her hands. She hears again now that clean ripping sound, tearing her from her schoolgirl life, from books and words. From Kit, who will go on while Trif stays behind.

  They are two of three scholars to write Standard Six examinations in the school at Missing Point. The other is Ted Parsons, son of Skipper Wilf, who is destined for college in St. John’s. Ted is still in school at thirteen, two years after all the other boys have gone fishing; his father even kept him back from going down on the Labrador this June so he could finish the school year and write his exams. Ted finished school because he was expected to, Triffie and Kit because, as Mr. Bishop says, they are true scholars. They have read half of Shakespeare’s plays out loud to each other in Triffie’s bedroom, huddled beneath blankets on winter nights. Ted Parsons is going on to school because his father can afford it, but Mr. Bishop had to haul Ted through his Geometry proofs one unwilling step at a time, both their faces red with frustration. Meanwhile Trif and Kit helped each other through the proofs, then passed a piece of paper back and forth. They were writing a series of sonnets illustrated with Kit’s funny drawings, sonnets that Mr. Bishop would later confiscate, then smile as he read them, applauding the girls’ cleverness. His clever girls.

  Trif thinks about it all morning while she finishes scrubbing out stains and hangs out the wash, glad the rain shower has ended. It’s as if thinking about Mr. Bishop has conjured him when she sees him walking down the road beside Kit, drawing in at the gate to stop, holding out her report to her.

  Kit, beside him, stands still but looks like she’s dancing, her eyes and face alight. Her hand flutters as she takes Trif’s report from Mr. Bishop so that she can be the one to hand it to Trif, thrusting her own next to it.