A Sudden Sun (26 page)

At the crowded flat they found four of the five younger Butler children. Frank was away fishing on the Labrador, and Jennie, who was ten, was the next oldest. It was Jennie who answered the door.

“No, Miss, Effie’s gone, they took her to hospital. I tried to find Aunt Loll to tell her but she’s been gone this two days. And I don’t know where Jimmy went to neither, he took off with them Morris boys and Effie always says they’re a hard crowd and he shouldn’t go around with them. And all the little ones are bein’ bad and I don’t know what to do!”

“Did you have anything to give them for their tea?” Mrs. Earle asked, wading into what seemed like a sea of small children.

“There was only half a loaf of bread, and no butter, Ma’am, and
they’re still squallin’ at me like they wants more.”

“I’m going to the shop,” Mrs. Earle said to Grace, “to get something for these children to eat. You try to find out what hospital they’ve put poor Effie in and how badly off she is.”

Grace remembered May Kennedy’s comment that Julia Salter Earle was an indifferent housekeeper. She had an untidy look to her—her clothes were serviceable but unstylish and her greying hair was pinned up any which way, with no impression that she had taken time over it. But she was able to perform housewifely duties when the situation required. By the time Grace had spoken to the neighbours and determined that Effie was at the General Hospital, Mrs. Earle had bread with butter and jam, and slices of bologna and hard cheese ready for the Butler children along with a fresh pot of tea—a better meal than those children had had in months, Grace guessed.

It was the next morning before Grace was able to visit Effie. She found the girl feverish, her hand swathed in bandages, in a bed with the word “
PAUPER
” hung on a sign over it. Effie drifted in and out of consciousness. She told Grace the story of her injury and insisted she was well enough to go home, but didn’t seem to know who Grace was. “Infection,” a nurse told Grace. “We can’t put her out on the street in that condition.”

Grace went back to the house to shepherd the younger Butlers off to school. The baby, Rachel, was only three and not yet going to school, and Jennie wanted to stay home to look after her, but Grace insisted everyone go to school. She took Rachel downstairs to Aunt Loll, who had reappeared but seemed to have little interest in the Butler children’s plight. Grace left the child with her anyway, not knowing what else she could do.

When she stopped back by the hospital in the evening to see Effie again, she found a very different scene from the morning. Effie was asleep and the “
PAUPER
” sign had been removed. A
bouquet of flowers sat on the table beside her bed, and Julia Salter Earle, looking pleased with herself, sat in a chair nearby. Where another woman would have occupied her idle hands with knitting, Mrs. Salter Earle was scribbling notes on a large pad of lined paper.

“Did you bring the flowers?” Grace asked as she pulled up a chair.

“No, they were sent by Murrays—the factory owners,” Mrs. Salter Earle said. “I stopped by and had a little chat, and pointed out a few provisions in their policy book that bound them to pay the medical expenses of an employee injured on the job. After putting up a little protest they agreed to abide by the policy, and I suggested it might be a nice touch to send flowers as well. We’ve won all these concessions in the past, you see. It’s all down in writing. But as soon as times get tough and workers are desperate for jobs, the owners think they can go back on what they’ve agreed to. Someone has to hold their feet to the flame.”

“And that’s your job.”

“It is one of my jobs.”

In the dimmed light of the hospital ward, Grace looked at the older woman. She was a bit scared of Mrs. Salter Earle, though she felt as if they had something in common now, having gone together to the Butler home last night. “May Kennedy told me I ought to meet you,” she dared to say now. “Though she said you only drop by the Franchise League meetings once every blue moon.”

Mrs. Earle snorted. “That’s about right.”

A nurse moved through the ward, checking on patients. She paused beside Effie’s bed and felt her forehead. “She’s sleeping a bit more peaceful now. I think the fever has broken,” she said to Mrs. Earle. “You ladies will have to go soon, it’s nearly the end of visiting hours.”

“I was just hoping she’d wake so I could tell her that the children are being looked after,” Grace said. “I’m sure when she does wake up she’ll be worried.” Effie stirred and shifted a little in the bed but did not open her eyes.

“The Franchise League ladies are well-meaning,” Mrs. Earle said to Grace when the nurse had moved on, “but they’re wealthy women with all the advantages of their class. They’re glad to have poor women mark their names—or their Xs—on a petition, but they don’t really see those women as equals, as sisters.”

“Do you? Really? I mean, do you really believe—” Grace gestured towards Effie, who murmured a little in her sleep, “she is your equal?”

“In education, in opportunities, in breeding, of course not. But those are external things. Raise a girl like that in a different family, give her a good education at the Methodist College, put the right clothes on her and she’d be indistinguishable from me or you. That’s what equality means—recognizing we’re all the same underneath, and working to strip away those external differences.”

Effie’s eyes fluttered open. She looked around the hospital ward and then at Grace and Mrs. Earle, who had been sitting there nearly an hour, waiting to give her the good news that her bills were paid and her brothers and sisters fed.

“Glory be, is that the two of ye there chattering?” she said, meeting Grace’s eyes with her own fever-bright gaze. “I kept havin’ a dream there was seagulls perched all around the bed. Can ye quiet down or go home so I can have a few minutes’ peace?”

^“
Y
ES MAID, AND ’tis about time too.” Sarah Gullage wiped her hands on her apron and took the paper from Grace. “I know they says ’tis only the young ones wants it and the old folks are standing in the way of change, but you mark my words, we’re not all old-fashioned just because we’re on the wrong side of fifty. I say ’tis high time, when you looks around and sees what the men has done, that we gives the women a chance. I hope I lives to see a woman prime minister—be better than that one Squires, I ’low.” She took the paper to her kitchen table, where two mixing bowls full of dough sat ready—she was just about to put bread in the warmer to rise. Grace handed over the pen as well, and Sarah took it, frowning in concentration as she carefully etched out the letters of her name.

“You wouldn’t believe it, I had a lovely hand when I was a girl—went to school up to the third Royal Reader, I did, and I could write all kinds o’ things. But for nearly forty year now I never had to write nothing except births and deaths in the family Bible, and my hand is getting shaky these days.” Sarah was nearer sixty than fifty: she had borne twelve children and raised ten—the nine of her
own that survived plus one that was either a nephew or cousin. One of her nine was Harry, who had long ago asked Grace to marry him; Grace didn’t know if Mrs. Gullage ever knew about that.

They were all grown up and married now, and old Bill Gullage was still fishing with his sons Harry and Bert. Now at the end of October, with the cod landed and made and sold, Mr. Gullage and his boys were repairing and repainting the dory and mending their nets before winter closed in. Sarah, freed like the other fishermen’s wives from labour on the flake, was still busy around the house but glad for a few moments to stop and chat as she signed Grace’s petition. “You got a nice few names there,” she said, handing the paper back to Grace. “Do you find most of the women round here are sensible enough to want the vote?”

“Oh, I’d say it’s about half and half so far,” Grace said. She had knocked on doors of houses like this one where she and her petition had been welcomed warmly, and she had gone to others where the door had been slammed in her face. At Heber Bursey’s place she had never even gotten to talk to the woman of the house; the mister told her to get out. “Minister’s daughter or no minister’s daughter, I’ll kick you off the gallery if you comes waving that piece of trash in my missus’s face again.” After a reception like that it was nice to sit in Mrs. Gullage’s warm kitchen and hear how it was high time for women to have the vote.

Heber Bursey’s missus, Betty, cornered Grace outside the church on Sunday. “Have you got that petition of yours? I means to put my name to it while himself got his back turned.” Heber was not a churchgoer so Betty did not have to look out for him as she made a careful X and Grace wrote “Elizabeth Violet Bursey” next to it. “I hope ’tis not a sin to sign it on a Sunday. I suppose it is a sin to go against my lord and master but what he don’t know will never hurt him, so I ’lows he’ll live forever since he don’t know nothin’.”

Grace took the petition back from Betty and saw her own mother beckoning. “Hurry up, dinner will be stone-cold,” Lily said. The Reverend had finished his after-church handshakes and conversations with parishioners and only a few people were left in the churchyard.

On the road that sloped down from the church to the parsonage, Lily said to Grace, “I suppose I can’t stop you from passing around that petition altogether, but could you at least refrain from doing it on Sunday right after service? It’s unsuitable.”

“I wasn’t passing it around—Mrs. Bursey came looking for me,” Grace said. “Anyway, I happen to think it
is
suitable. I believe women’s suffrage is God’s will.”

“And you’re qualified, all of a sudden, to tell the rest of us what God’s will is? That’s presumption, is what that is.”

“Oh, Mother. How is anyone qualified to say it’s not God’s will? And don’t quote me a proof-text about women keeping silent in church or being submissive to their husbands. In Bible times nobody had the vote, men or women, so it’s not relevant.”

“Now you’re just being saucy,” Lily said, and hurried a few steps ahead to walk next to her husband, though as usual, she did not take his arm.

“What do you think about women’s franchise, Papa?” Grace asked over dinner.

Lily sighed heavily. “Haven’t you already said enough about it, Grace? Let the subject drop.”

“But I think it’s right to get Papa’s view on the question, both as my father and as my pastor,” Grace said. “Shouldn’t we be guided by him?”

Lily made a sniff that was almost a snort and rolled her eyes but said nothing. The Reverend, apparently unaware that he was being used as a playing piece in a game his wife and daughter were playing, waved his fork in the air like a conductor’s baton as he
spoke. “It’s a most interesting question. I know that when I was younger I was quite convinced, as were most of the clergymen I knew, that women had no place in political life. Why, your mother and I had some quite lively discussions about it when we were courting—she was well acquainted with some of the women in the suffrage movement.”

“So I’ve heard,” Grace said, and caught a sharp glance from Lily.

“I don’t remember that they were particularly lively discussions, myself,” Lily said to her husband. “I knew your views on the subject, and in time I came to agree with you.”

“But my own views have changed over time, as society has changed.”

“Truth doesn’t change. If a view is correct it should be held to regardless of what the world is doing,” said Lily.

This was the liveliest conversation Grace could remember at the family dinner table since Charley had died. Besides genuinely wanting to know her father’s views on the question of women’s votes, she wanted to keep it going. “Mr. Coaker has told the Franchise League he supports the cause,” she said.

“Yes, he’s one of the people with whom I’ve discussed it,” her father said, returning his fork to its usual task of conducting roast beef to his mouth. “He thinks, as I do, that making a truly fair and equal society means extending voting rights to women as to men. As I study my Bible I’ve come to believe that God made man head of the home, but he didn’t intend to keep women from having a voice altogether. It’s all a question of balance,” he went on, warming to his subject so that he sounded as if he were in the pulpit again. “Of course there are extremes; of course there are people who want to break down the barriers between the sexes entirely and see women in the House of Assembly, women on the magistrate’s bench, women out of the home circle entirely. Now, I
couldn’t countenance that. But the vote? There’s no harm in that, and plenty of good.”

“I agree, Papa—although I’d go farther, and say that the House or the magistrate’s bench might not be bad places for women. Someday.”

“And there’s the danger, you see?” Lily turned not to Grace but to her husband. “The downhill slope. You let down the standards in one area, and people think they can upset the apple cart entirely.”

“Now, I don’t think that’s completely true—”

“Haven’t you just heard your own daughter?” said Lily, who never interrupted her husband in conversation. “You said you supported the vote, with reservations, and she charged ahead and said the reservations don’t matter. You mark my words, the men who support women’s franchise will live to regret it one day.” She turned to Grace. “And women will come to regret it too. Girls your age will long for the day when their fathers and husbands protected them!”

“Perhaps we don’t need protecting,” Grace said. “Perhaps the apple cart
should
be upset.”

Lily laid down her fork: somehow that one statement from Grace seemed to have drained all the animation from her face and voice. “Until you become a mother yourself, you have no idea.” She sat for a moment longer, staring at her plate as Grace and her father continued to talk about the franchise vote and whether Mr. Coaker would give it the support of the Fishermen’s Party when it came up in the legislature. Suddenly Lily said, “Excuse me, I’m not hungry, and I have a meeting with the Sunday School teachers to prepare for.” She pushed back her chair with a scrape and stood up, her roast barely touched.

“You should try not to upset your mother,” the Reverend said mildly, when they heard the door to her room close upstairs.

“I didn’t
try
to upset her,” Grace said. “She was the one who
brought it up.”

“I think perhaps it troubles her that you’re soliciting signatures. Quite apart from her view of the cause, which I’ll admit is old-fashioned, she may think it’s not appropriate for you to be knocking on doors for a political cause.”

“Do you think it’s not appropriate, Papa?”

He looked down at his plate. “I think it’s better for a girl’s mother to judge what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour for a young lady,” he said. “Talk about women’s rights and the franchise upsets your mother. It brings back memories she would rather forget.”

Why, was she bitten by a suffragette in her cradle?
Grace wanted to ask, but knew her father, tolerant as he sometimes was of her brand of humour, would not appreciate levity on the subject of her mother. He treated Lily the way a man who was no gardener might treat an exotic orchid someone had given him—with a kind of wary, nervous pride.

“Why should it stir up bad memories?” Grace said. Her father seemed like the least likely person on earth to give her any insight into Lily’s past, and yet, presumably, he had been there for it.

“Oh, she had many friends who were involved in that cause when she was young. She had some experiences that were—hurtful. She had to put certain people, certain associations behind her. It’s no wonder if those ideas are painful to her now.”

“I won’t bring it up again around her,” Grace promised, not at all sure whether or not she would keep that promise. But she was anxious to end the conversation on a conciliatory note, before her father actually ordered her to stop bringing around the petition.

At the end of a week she had gotten sixty signatures in Catalina and was starting on the ladies of Port Union. This time of year, late fall, was the best time to catch women at home, with the fish in and the gardens harvested. She got a few signatures as well from the tiny class of well-off ladies in Catalina: her own mother did not, of
course, sign, but the Anglican minister’s wife did and so did Mrs. Perry, who was still teary-eyed after Jack’s departure in September.

“What good work you’re doing, I admire it so much,” she said, signing the petition in her lovely script. “You out campaigning for women’s rights, and Jack off to the Labrador to look after Esquimos and trappers—what a pair you are. I don’t mind saying, Grace darling, I thought the two of you would have been married long before this, but I tell myself all the time that God moves in mysterious ways.”

Grace could think of nothing to say to this. After all, hadn’t she, too, thought she and Jack would be married by now? The Lord’s ways were mysterious indeed and she did not think she wanted to discuss them with the woman who was supposed to have been her mother-in-law. Instead she asked, “Have you heard from Jack since he left?”

“One letter on the last boat. He sounds like he likes it up there, doesn’t he?”

Grace had had two letters and Jack did indeed sound happier. She wasn’t sure how much to trust letters. The year he was in Montreal, his letters to her in New York hadn’t hinted at his growing panic and despair. Even in person, he had become good at hiding his true feelings. She thought of all those times last year that Jack would retreat into his room for days and then reappear as if nothing had gone wrong.

Mrs. Perry, too, was thinking of those times. “Earl and Evelyn were so worried about him, you know, last year? I’m sure you were too—I mean he had a good job with the
Advocate
but they told me how he used to send word he was sick sometimes when he didn’t seem to be. They were afraid he had taken up
drinking
?” She lowered her voice on the last word. “But I said I couldn’t see that, not Jack….”

Grace couldn’t see it either. She thought Earl and Evelyn had latched onto that explanation because the idea of a stalwart young
Methodist secretly taking to drink was more believable than the idea that a brave war veteran would lie on his bed staring at the wall for hours on end, unable to face another day. And she couldn’t say that, exactly, to Jack’s mother. Instead she said, “I’m praying Labrador will do him good.”

“I am too, my darling. You’ll understand when you have children of your own, how you just have to leave them in the Lord’s hands. Anyway I think it’s wonderful work you’re doing, with the petition and all—you just keep it up.”

Grace intended to keep it up. She walked over the bridge from Catalina to Port Union one morning when the ground was hard with the season’s first frost. The sound of hammers and saws still filled the air: not until snow covered the town would the men of Port Union stop erecting new buildings. Here there were more ladies of leisure to contact than in Catalina. Coaker’s new industries all required managers, and managers had wives. Grace went door to door knocking at each of the row houses—just like a miniature St. John’s street—first the little ones up on the hill where the labourers lived, then the nicer ones down by the harbour where most of the managers’ wives were happy to sign the petition.

Then she thought of the shopgirls in the Union Store, and continued down the road by the harbour to the tall white building with its lofty towers. Inside, the shop sold the same things available in most outport merchants’ shops, but in greater quantity and variety, and in a much more impressive setting. It boasted two storeys connected by an elevator—probably the only elevator outside St. John’s, Grace thought—and nearly a dozen employees, all young and female. When she stopped by the fabric counter to show the petition to the girl there, several others gathered around, curious.