A Sudden Sun (24 page)

T
HANK YOU, MISS.” The little girl’s lips were so badly chapped “ they looked like thin slices of raw meat in her narrow face. “Yer some good to us, Miss.”

Grace started to reply, then lifted her shoulders in a shrug and let them fall helpless. Being “some good” today consisted of bringing a barrel of cast-off clothes to the two-room flat where Effie Butler lived with six younger siblings. Grace had sorted through the mounds of castoffs donated by church ladies, thinking of each of the children in those squalid rooms and what would fit them before making her visit on Sunday afternoon—the only day Effie would be off work and home to receive the bounty.

Effie and her siblings should properly have been in the Methodist orphanage: their mother had died of pneumonia last winter and their father was away for months at a time fishing on Grand Banks schooners or, this time of year, gone to the ice. When he was home he spent little time in the rooms where his children lived. He preferred the company of a woman the children called Aunt Loll who lived on the bottom floor of the house, entertained a lot of gentleman callers,
and was supposedly “looking after” them. But the father insisted no children of his were going to no orphanage.

Effie was about fourteen. She told Grace she used to work in the Ropewalk factory before it closed down, so she must have been working since she was at least twelve. After the Ropewalk closed she had found a job in another factory; her brother Frank, a year younger, worked on the docks. Between them they sometimes earned enough to feed the five younger ones, though not enough to keep them clothed or heat the rooms on a regular basis. Grace had encountered the little Butlers when they tumbled into her Sunday School class months ago. Now they were part of the ever-growing network of families to which she, as the deaconess of Gower Street Church, attempted to extend enough charity to keep them alive.

Grace had graduated with her diploma in social work last June. She could have had a job in New York, but Jack was back in Newfoundland and so was all her family, and she still found New York a lonely place much of the time. So she moved back into her grandfather’s house and began volunteering everywhere she could, hoping to find paid work. Finally the deaconess at Gower Street Church was forced to resign due to ill health and another trained deaconess could not be found. The church offered Grace a position. Because she lacked formal deaconess training her title was “lady assistant” but her duties were the same as those the old deaconess had done, primarily serving the poor of the parish. And it was a saving for the church: they paid her the deaconess’s stipend of a dollar and fifty cents a day, but they did not have to provide her with room and board as they would normally do.

Grace knew that her stipend, much like Effie’s earnings at the factory, was not nearly enough to address her actual needs. If she had wanted to live anywhere other than her grandfather’s house, or to wear fashionable clothes, or purchase anything more for herself than books or the occasional train ticket home, she would have had
to ask her parents for money. Every time she left a house like Effie’s, Grace was keenly aware of the luxury of her own position. She could afford to do work she enjoyed for little pay because her family was well-off enough to allow her such an indulgence. She could, she supposed, have lived in a boarding-house room, taken on extra work—tutoring in the evenings, perhaps—but it would have been a much more difficult life.

The Butlers were her last family to visit this afternoon. Sunday was the day of rest, but it was often Grace’s busiest day of the week; she taught a girls’ Sunday School class and made calls to families who would not be home any other time of the week, as well as going to morning service at Cochrane Street with Grandfather and Daisy, and evening service at Gower Street, usually with Jack. She wasn’t sure of Jack this evening, though.

As she climbed back up into Grandfather’s buggy, which she often borrowed to carry around the boxes and barrels of clothing she had to deliver, Grace made a note of calls she had to pay and letters to write tomorrow. Apart from the direct acts of charity, much of Grace’s workload consisted of speaking up on behalf of her charity cases to employers, landlords, and merchants. Effie’s brother Frank had been unable to work for a fortnight because his shoulder had been injured when a crate he was unloading fell on him. While Frank was off work the rent went unpaid and if Grace had not spoken to the landlord, all seven Butlers would have been homeless.

It was hard, as she hefted the empty clothing barrels onto the cart, not to think of the settlement house on Eldredge Street where she had spent her second-year placement. How wonderful to be part of a team of people, all working together to improve the lot of the poor, sharing the same goals and ideas. She was, of course, part of a team on the ministerial staff of Gower Street Church but their concerns were not necessarily hers, and she often felt very much alone, going about from house to house trying to be all things to all people. Nobody in
St. John’s had the kind of vision that the settlement workers in New York did, of everything that could possibly be done for, and even by, the poor in the cities if all worked together. Indeed, as she had learned in her classes, even many social workers didn’t share the vision of the settlement house ideal, condemning it as sentimental and unscientific.

Thoughts about work occupied Grace’s mind during the drive home, but underneath that was a niggling worry about whether Jack would come to walk her to evening service tonight. If he was not coming, he would send a note round to the house; Jack was far too much a gentleman, even at the worst times, to leave her waiting without sending word. But she was beginning to fear this was one of the worst times.

Nearly two years, now, had gone by since Jack had left McGill in the middle of exams. He had moved into St. John’s and found work in the office of Mr. Coaker’s
Advocate
newspaper, drawing on his experience in Grandfather Hunt’s printshop and his father’s Port Union connections. Jack admired Mr. Coaker’s work and was glad to have a small part in it, but “God never meant me for a printer,” he told Grace. “I’d appreciate it if He’d give me some inkling of what He did mean me for.” The comment was tinged, as were many of Jack’s comments now, with faint bitterness.

All through the year that Grace had been finishing her course in New York and Jack working here in St. John’s, they had kept writing to each other, though there was a constraint in their letters that had not been there before, when Jack was in Montreal. Grace had hoped that when she, too, came home, their situation would be clearer. But she had been back eight months now and though they were still, in some sense, keeping company, Jack said nothing about marriage or about the future. He took her to church on Sunday evenings and sometimes, if there was a lecture or a debate she might enjoy, he took her out on a Saturday night as well. Aunt Daisy badgered Grace to invite Jack to dinner, but he accepted less than one invitation a
month. He was like a man holding himself at a careful distance, not wanting to sever the connection but not wanting to commit himself either.

One Sunday night in October, Jack had sent a note saying he could not escort her to church that evening. Grace had thought little of it, but the next evening she dropped by his brother’s house, where he was boarding, to see if he was feeling under the weather. Jack’s sister-in-law, Evelyn, met her at the door and looked relieved. “Oh, Grace—I was hoping you’d come. He’s having another bad spell, and I never know what to do. Can you talk to him?”

Grace could not, because Jack would not see her. And she had no idea what a “bad spell” meant, though according to Evelyn this had happened three or four times during the last year. Two days later he sent a brief note of apology; the following Sunday night he came to take her to evening service as usual.

“Were you sick?” Grace asked.

He took his time answering. “The manager at the
Advocate
seemed to find it easy to believe I was sick. Maybe that’s the best way of putting it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s not much I can tell you, Grace. I just couldn’t—face things. Anything. It happens sometimes, is all.”

“But you’re all right now?”

He was all right—until the next time. Bad spells came every couple of months, never for more than two or three days at a time. When they came, Jack refused to see or talk to anyone, sent a note to work saying he was sick, would not come out of his room or even eat. The last one had been in the middle of February, over a month ago, but there was no pattern, no rhyme or reason to it that Grace could see. Every Sunday afternoon, before Jack was scheduled to come and get her for church, Grace felt a sick knot of fear in the pit of her stomach. Was this going to be another of his bad Sundays?

But he was there on the doorstep at six, smiling when Daisy said that next week he must come earlier and have supper with them. Smiling, but making no promises. As they walked down Gower Street, Grace told Jack about her afternoon visits. “What did you do this afternoon?” she asked finally, feeling that her words were falling into a well of silence.

“Went to sleep for a few hours. Blessed Sabbath, day of rest, you know.”

The speaker at Gower Street this evening was not the regular minister, not a preacher at all in fact. It was a young English doctor who had spent the last year working in Dr. Grenfell’s mission hospital in Labrador. Despite the fact that his training was medical rather than homiletic, he was a good speaker: he lacked any rhetorical flourish but spoke earnestly, with a furrowed brow that hinted at how strongly he felt about his subject, though his voice was pitched low and there was no shouting.

“Do you remember,” Jack said as they left the service to walk home, “my mother wanted me to be a missionary overseas? I still think about that.”

“I remember.”

Grace remembered, as if it were something from another lifetime, how easily she and Jack used to be able to talk in those months before he went to Montreal. She missed his ready laughter and the way his eyes lit when they made plans for the future. Now the time they spent together was nearly always at public events that allowed little time for conversation, and when they did talk—as on the walk to and from church on a Sunday evening—Jack kept the conversation light, steering her away if she tried to probe too close to his thoughts and feelings.

But tonight he was pensive. “I always thought the mission field meant, you know, Africa or India. Like everyone thinks, I suppose. What that fellow said tonight—it opened my eyes. I mean, think of the things we saw, growing up around the bay, how hard the
fishermen have it. Then you imagine, on the northern coast or down on the Labrador, how it must be—so far from any civilization, the fishermen and trappers and the natives. That’s a mission field, right there—a place where there’s real need.”

“You’re thinking of going up there?”

Jack shrugged. “Better than spending my life doing something I don’t care about, I suppose.”

“I know you’re not happy working with the
Advocate
.”

“It’s a job, and I’m lucky to have one with times as hard as they are now.” The brief postwar boom in Newfoundland business had ended. Last winter several factories had closed and businesses had gone bankrupt. Hundreds of people in St. John’s were out of work. “But when I try to look ahead it’s like looking down a dark tunnel. Mr. Coaker wants to move the
Advocate
out to Port Union and he’d like me to go with it. Your grandfather thinks I should come back to his shop. I believe he wants me in place of Charley, to pass the business on to. My own dad wants me to go into the family business, and Mother still hopes I’ll finish medical school someday. And I don’t—I just can’t make any plans. Just when I think I’m going to be all right, and I can start thinking about the future, it’s as if—oh, I don’t know.” Looking at him as he spoke, Grace thought, was like watching a fire struggle to catch. One bright spark began to glow, then flickered out, turning dark and cold again.

Grace wanted so much to see that flame, to see the old Jack instead of this defeated man. It would be worth losing him to the Labrador if he came back someday, whole and himself again. If whatever he’d lost during those long months in Montreal—or earlier in France—could be won back.

“I think you should talk to Dr. Shelby,” Grace said. “He’ll be in town for a week, and I can find out his address from the church tomorrow. Go see him, if you think you might be interested in working for Dr. Grenfell’s mission.”

“No, don’t you go finding out his address for me,” Jack said. “I’ll take care of it, if I decide I want to talk to him. I’ve got to turn it over in my mind a bit.”

“Well, don’t turn it over too long. He is just here for a week, and—”

“For heaven’s sake, Grace, let me do this myself, will you?” There was a bite in his tone she’d never heard before.

“I’m sorry. I only thought—”

“I know what you thought.”

They walked along in silence. Distant and untalkative as he had been these last months, Grace had never seen him angry.

“You make it sound like I’m always pushing you to do this or do that, like I should just leave you be,” she said, knowing silence was better but driven to speak nonetheless. “That’s not fair. When have I ever pushed you to do anything?”

She had, she thought, been a model of patience. Accepted his leaving medical school, accepted his coolness and his strange behaviour, accepted that the subject of their marriage was suspended. She had gone about her own work, kept company with him when he asked her to, not pushed and prodded him with questions or advice.