A Sudden Sun (3 page)

Lily took her father’s arm and they made their way through the crowds, out of the park. Military Road was full of people doing the
same thing they were doing: venturing out to see the devastation, to see what remained of homes and businesses.

The dull grey light of the smoky morning showed a road that had become impassable, strewn with the rubble of fallen houses. Across from the park where hundreds of people had sheltered during the night, the fire had ripped through the wooden row houses, leaving only the brick chimneys standing so the street looked like a graveyard with gigantic brick tombstones. Between each lay the debris of what had been a home, a life.

“No matter what condition the house is in, you and Mother are not to worry, now, Lily,” Father said, the tremble in his voice betraying him. He and Lily picked their way through the huddled knots of people and the debris in the road, up Military Road, down Prescott Street, down to Queen’s Road. “We will be able to rebuild. You may have to go stay with your mother’s people out in Harbour Grace until we have a roof over our heads again. It may be only a matter of minor repairs….”

His voice trailed off as they reached the spot that, until last night, had been their home. It had been an imposing three-storey house, not grand but solid, attached to the house next to it. All that remained now were the blackened chimneys, towering above a heap of fallen interior walls, shattered windows, burned possessions that had been their furniture, clothes, china dishes, and shelves and shelves of books.

“Don’t, Lily,” her father said as she let go his arm and began to walk into the rubble. “Your skirt—your shoes—”

It was a feeble protest and even he recognized it, for he was doing the same, moving into the debris of their home, their lives, as if looking for one miraculously unburnt thing that would be a talisman, a sign of hope. Lily looked in the ashes for a gleam of silver or gold, a face still peering from the frame of a painting, a book whose pages, inside charred covers, might still be intact. The sharp
smell of ash almost choked her. And wherever she looked on the ground at her feet, she saw nothing but trash and soot.

Despite the devastation, despite the way her father was rubbing his face with a handkerchief as if he could erase the devastation he saw all around him, Lily couldn’t suppress a quiver of excitement, a small winged thing inside her. With everything destroyed, there was always the possibility of beginning again.

She knew better than to mention the phoenix to her father—that was overly dramatic even for her. Papa would be concerned, man-like, with the practical details of insurance and rebuilding. She kept hope folded inside herself, a phoenix in a cage, as she and her father wandered, arm in arm, around the edges of the ash-heap that had been their home.

A
SEALED ENVELOPE addressed to Reverend Obadiah Collins, Catalina, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, lay on the kitchen table. When Grace came home she found her mother sitting at the table, her hands folded, about eighteen inches from the envelope. Her gaze was fixed on it.

Grace didn’t know, as she crossed the kitchen, that it was a telegram. She came through the door telling her mother that Mrs. Snelgrove had stopped by the school to pick up the little ones and told Grace to tell her mother she couldn’t be at the WPA executive meeting this evening. “She said to say she was sorry, hoped it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience—” Grace stopped short of trying to convey the undercurrent of nervousness in Mrs. Snelgrove’s tone: the women of Catalina did not lightly tell Mrs. Reverend Collins that they could not attend a meeting. Then she realized her mother wasn’t listening, saw what she was staring at.

“When did it come?”

“An hour ago.”

Grace drew her fingers over the unopened white envelope as if she could break a spell by touching it. She wondered how long her mother had sat here looking at the envelope. She would never have admitted to needing her daughter or her husband with her when she opened and read the telegram. But she had not opened it herself.

“Should we wait for the Reverend?” Grace asked. She and Charley, when very young, had picked up their mother’s habit of referring to their father by his title: Mother never called him Obadiah, only the Reverend, and his children said Papa or Father only when speaking directly to him. In the third person he was always the Reverend.

Her mother said nothing. She had not even looked up to meet Grace’s eyes; it was as if by looking at the envelope she could will the news inside to be something other than what it must be. Good news never came by telegram, not in the spring of 1917. Not to a family with a boy overseas. The best you could hope for was wounded but recovering in an army hospital in England. Out of harm’s way. Some perfect injury, severe enough to send him home for the duration of the war, yet light enough not to blight his future.

If Grace had the power to bend fate, she would sacrifice Charley’s arm or Charley’s leg or even one of his eyes to buy his life. Would her mother make the same exchange? Grace thought so, but it was, like so many other questions, something she could not ask.

She took the envelope, turned it in her hands. She would go to get a letter opener. No, she would go to get her father. He was either at the church or over at Port Union. The church was right across the road from the manse; he might be preparing Sunday’s sermon. Perhaps if he was in the middle of opening the Word of God, he could call on divine power to change the words on the inside of the envelope.

“We should read it first. Then I’ll go find Father.”

Her mother made no move. Grace opened the envelope, read the
words first silently, then aloud, as if they were lines in a play. As if they had no connection to her, to her mother, to her laughing older brother who had gone away just a year ago, looking oddly mature and serious in his uniform. She reached across the table but her mother pulled her hands away. “Excuse me, I—I need to be alone,” she said. “Find the Reverend and tell him.” Her voice broke on
Reverend
and she hurried out of the room. Why today, of all days, would she not say “your father” or even “Obadiah”? Why was it essential that she leave the room before Grace could see her cry? Shouldn’t they be crying in each other’s arms?

Grace searched her memory for a time when she was in her mother’s arms, cuddled and petted, crying after a fall or a disappointment. She remembered words instead: “Don’t make a big fuss over such a little thing.” “You must be brave; don’t complain.” But this was not a little thing, not a skinned knee or an unkind taunt. Grace thought of following her mother upstairs. What would she say?

Instead, she left the telegram on the table, went out of the house. A mild April day with sun trying to break through the overcast sky. She practiced as she walked over the road to the church, tried to imagine what to say to her father. Could she say, with a steady voice and dry eyes, “Father, there’s been a telegram. Charley has been killed in action”? Or would she say, “There’s bad news—you’d better come home and read it for yourself”?

The church was empty. These days, if her father was not at home or in the church, he was often over at the Fisherman’s Union site on the south side of the harbour, visiting Mr. Coaker. She left the church and climbed the path to the little graveyard, perched on the hill looking down towards the water. It was a sunny day, the clear blue sky making the air crisp and cold even for April: she shivered and wrapped her coat closer around her. There was a stone here in memory of one Catalina boy already: George Snelgrove died last year in the terrible July Drive. Charley was one of scores of boys from all
around Trinity Bay who had enlisted after hearing about those losses: as if every time a boy was cut down in the bloody soil of France, another had to be uprooted from a Newfoundland bay and planted over there in his place.

She could see late-afternoon sunlight dancing on the water, and boats in the harbour—no fishing boats out yet, far too early in the year for that. She could see, distantly across the harbour, the skeletons of new buildings going up in Mr. Coaker’s town. She couldn’t hear the ringing hammers from here, but she knew from experience that if she took the path that led to the bridge over to the south side, within fifteen minutes of walking she’d be close enough to hear that sound.

A boy, a young man, ran down the road below her, towards her house, and for a moment Grace thought it was Charley. It was Jack Perry, Charley’s best pal. Charley and Jack had talked about joining up together last summer, but Jack’s mother had convinced him to go back to college in Canada instead. He was the youngest of four sons and the other Perry boys all worked in the family business: Jack was studying to be a doctor up in Montreal. He had just come home for his holidays.

“Jack!” Her voice steered him away from the manse; he bounded up the hill to the graveyard.

“Is everything all right? Mother saw the boy from the telegraph office going up your lane.”

Grace shook her head. “I think…I think my father must be over visiting with Mr. Coaker. Can you go find him? Tell him to come home.”

“Was it…?” Jack left the two words hanging: adding more would, Grace thought, make it more real. She shook her head again, then nodded, and tears came, finally. And there was, after all, someone who would take her in his arms and stroke her hair while she cried—not her mother but Jack Perry, her brother’s friend, a boy
she barely knew. She pressed her face into the rough cotton of his work shirt and felt his body rock a little from side to side.

When she drew away they both stumbled back a step. Jack handed her a big white handkerchief and she dabbed at her eyes and then blew her nose hard. He said, “I’m sorry,” at the same moment she said, “Thank you,” so the words got jumbled and it was impossible to tell for a moment who was sorry and who was grateful, and for what.

“I’ll go find your father,” he said. “You go on home, I’m sure your mother needs you.”

Does she?
Grace thought. If she did, Grace had no idea what kind of help to offer.

“Should I tell him?” Jack said. “Or just say there’s been a telegram and he should go home?”

“No, tell him.”
Then I won’t have to say the words.
Maybe she would never have to say, “My brother is dead,” and it would never be quite real. Especially if, like so many, he was buried over there in France somewhere. It would be as if he had simply gone away. Even after the war ended—if it ever did—it would be as if Charley had survived all the battles, married a Frenchwoman, and stayed there, and somehow forgot ever to write a letter home.

Jack went over the road toward the south side of the harbour, and Grace walked back to the manse. It was the maid’s half-day off and the house was like a mausoleum. Somewhere upstairs, Lily Hunt Collins lay, or sat, behind a closed door, mourning her son. Her daughter walked half-way up the stairs, looked at Lily’s bedroom door, then went back down to the kitchen and picked up the telegram on the table. She waited for her father to come home.

Y
OU’VE WRITTEN THEM already? Given up your position?” Lily “ stood across the parlour from Grace; she wore a brown wool skirt and a beige linen blouse but in her mind’s eye Grace saw a breastplate over her mother’s bosom and imagined donning her own armour for this fight.

“I did. I told you I would.”

“And I told you not to! Not without your father’s permission, without mine. Now you’ve given up an excellent teaching position, and for what?”

Grace had taught school here in Catalina for two years now, ever since getting her second-class certificate from the Methodist College in St. John’s. The best she could say about teaching was that she didn’t hate it. In fact there were parts of it she liked very much: she liked the children themselves, especially the ones who had trouble in school, who came barefoot from the poorest homes and huddled close to the stove for warmth. She wanted to follow those children home, put shoes on their little cold feet and cook a good dinner for their sick, overworked mothers, instead of staying in the
schoolroom and dragging the rest of the class through one Royal Reader after another.

“I’ve told you what I want to do,” she said.

“And we’ve told you it’s not possible.” Lily was a formidable sight when laying down the law, which as far as Grace could see was all she ever did. She ordered the Sunday School teachers to stop letting the children run wild; she told the WPA their quota of socks for soldiers was unsatisfactory; she scolded the maid for burning the roast and explained how to cook it properly; she told Grace there was no possibility of her going overseas as an army nurse.

Two months had passed since the news of Charley’s death. For the first fortnight Grace had thought her mother was broken. Lily spent hours, even whole days, barred in her room and Grace found the house empty and cold without that fierce energy she had spent her whole life battling against. Now, at the end of June, the WPA and the Sunday School still sailed on without Lily’s firm hand on the tiller, but here in the house the iron had returned to her spine with the news that Grace intended to leave off teaching, go to St. John’s, and train to be a VAD nurse.

“I want to do my part!” Grace said—shouted, really. Lily never raised her voice, which made Grace sound hysterical when she wanted to sound firm and brave. Jack Perry had gone off to St. John’s to enlist: it was his turn, he said, to take Charley’s place. Before Charley died, Lily used to rally the WPA women whenever there was word of a deadly battle in France or a ship lost at sea.
Send out the word: more men are needed to carry on the fight!
Grace would enlist if she were a boy, but girls were going overseas too. She pictured herself on a battlefield, wiping the feverish brow of a wounded boy with a clean white cloth. The soldier in her dream had Jack Perry’s blue eyes.

“You will do your part here at home. That
is
a woman’s part—to keep the home, to preserve the values the men are fighting for.”
Lily sat down and picked up her embroidery, as if to illustrate how to preserve those womanly values, though she used her needle to point at Grace for emphasis rather than to stab the cloth. “Nursing is no job for a lady. You have romantic ideas about it—in real life it’s dirty and dangerous too, if you go overseas. It’s not a profession for a well-brought-up girl. Nursing is not what you imagine. Nothing is. If you don’t want to go on teaching you can help me here at home, but I don’t want to hear anymore foolish talk about nursing.”

Lily’s needle pierced the thin cotton stretched over her embroidery hoop: the red thread of the roses she was embroidering looked like drops of blood on the white cloth. Her attention to her work was meant to signal the argument was done. Grace turned for the door, ignoring her own bag of work, which contained yet another pair of sturdy military socks.

“Where are you going?”

“Up to the church to see the Reverend.”

“It’ll do you no good. We’ve discussed this. He and I are in agreement. Don’t think you can go behind my back and get a soft answer out of him.”

Grace knew this was true. She had talked with her father last night but the Reverend was no good if Lily got to him first. He toed the party line and said that nursing was too difficult and dangerous. Anyway it was a lie. She wasn’t going to the church. Outside, in the clear summer air, she felt better as soon as she started walking over the road to Catalina South.

A year ago, the south side of Catalina Harbour had been a quiet, grass-grown spot, empty of houses, stores, or stages. But then William Coaker, head of the Fisherman’s Union, had bought up most of the land on that side of the harbour. Fishing and the war occupied the minds of most Newfoundlanders this summer of 1917, but here in Catalina there was another obsession and another
source of paid work: Mr. Coaker was building a model town. He had built himself a new home and a headquarters for his Fisherman’s Protective Union; now, a Union store, a fish plant, row houses for the workers were under construction. Every time Grace walked down by the harbour she could hear the ringing of hammer and axe.

Her father was a great admirer of Coaker’s work and since the man himself had landed almost on their doorstep, Reverend Collins was found over at Coaker’s premises nearly as often as he was in his own church. Port Union, as Mr. Coaker was trying to get people into the habit of calling it, would have electric lights and every modern convenience. It would be the finest town in Newfoundland because, as Reverend Collins explained to Grace, instead of being built like every other town in the world—for the rich to become richer—Port Union was being built from the ground up by the workers themselves, for fishermen and their families to have all the blessings a new century could bestow.

Even the war was supposed to be only a temporary interruption in the grand plan—young men like Charley were meant to go away, fight for King and country, then come home to build the new world that would rise from the ashes of the old. And even with Charley gone, buried somewhere in France, Grace felt a little of that old excitement pushing through her loss, like the buds that were just beginning to open on the trees. This was where she belonged—in a new world, a new century, of action and serious work. Even if her mother was determined to try to keep her in the last century, dutifully sitting at home knitting socks or embroidering pillowcases.

Jack Perry was going overseas: Grace had promised him she would write. But she was determined to be more than the girl at home writing letters to a soldier. Perhaps she could get Grandfather and Aunt Daisy to invite her on an extended visit to St. John’s. Grace and Charley had both lived with their grandfather and his second
wife while they were at school in St. John’s; Grace liked her cheerful step-grandmother, who preferred to be called “Aunt Daisy” and who softened the edges of Grandfather’s austere house. Perhaps, if Grace came to visit with her own hard-earned savings in her hand, Grandfather and Daisy would overrule her parents, let her train for the VAD after all. If she could get to St. John’s anything was possible. Port Union was a stepping stone.

Her father was not at the FPU headquarters but Mr. Coaker was. Her father had introduced her to the great man months ago. Now she walked up to him boldly, like a brave girl who would defy her parents’ wishes and make her own way in the world.
If I play the role well enough
, Grace thought,
someday it just might be truth
.

“So you’re not going back to teaching, Miss Collins?” Mr. Coaker said when Grace had explained what she wanted.

“No, sir, I want to do something for the war effort. But I need to earn money this summer. I can take dictation, I have my second-class certificate, and my penmanship is excellent.”

William Coaker sat behind his desk and looked out over the FPU office, at the busy hum of people coming and going with messages, articles being written for his newspaper, the
Fisherman’s Advocate
, work orders going out for the new construction, shipping records for all the things coming in to Port Union, and the salt fish that would go out from there into the markets of the world. From the muffled ladylike stillness of her mother’s parlour to this humming place, this masculine busy world—this was exactly the journey Grace wanted to make.

“I may have something for you here in the office,” he said. “Just temporarily—during the fishing season. Let me see what I can do for you.”