That Forgetful Shore by Trudy Morgan-Cole Page B

frying things in lard. She turns over the Saturday jobs of blacking everyone’s Sunday boots and polishing the silver to Betty and Ruth, who are old enough now to take over those tasks, and moves her scrubbing day back to Friday. Trif won’t lift a finger from sundown Friday till sundown Saturday, but nobody in the house can fault her, for she works like a slave the rest of the week. Given that the blessed martyrs suffered and burned at the stake and the faithful remnant will suffer the same in the last days, Trif is hardly about to complain of a bit of extra housework.
    Unlike the rest of the new Seventh-day Adventists, she hasn’t heeded the call to Come out of her, my people entirely . She tells her fellow believers it makes things easier on her at home if she continues to accompany her aunt and uncle and the children to Sunday services at the Church of England. She can still keep an eye on the youngsters during church, though she resigned her post as Sunday School teacher before the minister could relieve her of it. She tells herself she is like Namaan bowing in the house of Rimmon.
    The truth is, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she weren’t in church Sunday morning. Church is where everyone goes. It’s one thing to stand bravely alone as part of God’s last-day remnant, but quite another to miss out on the one major social event of the week.
    By the same token, she still sometimes goes to the Sunday night Salvation Meeting at the Army, now that Adventist preaching services on Sunday night have ended for the winter. She misses the singing and clapping and tambourines at the Citadel. She’s absolutely convinced of the end-time prophecies Brother Anderson showed her, and still reads Daniel and Revelation faithfully, trying to understand those beasts better – though she can never think of them now without hearing Jacob John’s voice in her head saying “Buckhorned goats and flying angels.” But she finds it hard to accept this one article of faith: that someone or something as vast as God can be confined in one particular room, can be the property of one group of people, and be absent everywhere else. Well, that and the business of not drinking tea. She has abandoned pork and bacon because the pig is plainly listed in Leviticus 11 as an unclean animal, but she can’t embrace the Adventist idea that a cup of tea is bad for the nerves.
    If it weren’t for God, Triffie feels she’d have precious little to look forward to. Kit is off in Bonavista Bay, running her own school and falling in love. Joe Bishop has another teacher helping him out at the school, a young girl named Sylvia Morris from Notre Dame Bay who, despite her romantic name, is a very dull, small-minded girl with whom Triffie has been unable to strike up a friendship.
    The schoolroom is closed to her now, the possibility of teaching children as remote as the chance of getting any more book-learning herself. From here on, Triffie determines, she will be self-educated. She continues on through Shakespeare, having reached minor works like Timon of Athens and Pericles , Prince of Tyre . Joe Bishop still brings her novels from St. John’s to read before putting them in the hands of the schoolchildren, and she returns often to her favourite poets: Tennyson, Wordsworth, Blake. She’s also working her way slowly through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , and with the help of the Adventist minister from St. John’s, who comes periodically to preach to the faithful few in Bay Roberts, she is reading the collected works of Mrs. Ellen White, the Adventist prophetess. Given how few hours of lamplight she has these winter evenings after the supper dishes are done and the dark draws in, it’s a busy reading schedule.
    â€œHow come you reads all them books?” Will asks one night. He is perched on a stool at the other end of Trif’s little writing desk, sharing her