A Sudden Sun (4 page)

F
ROM HER GRANDFATHER’S house on Queen’s Road to the Empire Hospital was a short stroll on a cool spring day. Grace enjoyed the walk through downtown St. John’s: down over Prescott Street, across Duckworth, then on to Water Street. She liked being greeted by the giant advertisement for Minard’s Liniment, King of Pain, on the side of O’Driscoll’s. She loved the busy swarm of women going into stores and coming out with brown-paper parcels, men in their suits and hats entering office buildings, workmen in overalls going to the stonecutters’ yard. The returned servicemen were recognizable by their military stride even when their regimental uniforms had been exchanged for civilian clothes. They looked strong and handsome and whole, these men who had come back unscathed.

At the corner of Hill o’ Chips on the eastern end of Water Street stood the hospital, recently opened to deal with the growing numbers of wounded men returning from overseas. The building had once been a woodworking factory and a small section at the back was still used as a bakery, so the warm yeasty smell of bread and
cakes mingled with the stench of antiseptics and illness. The men at the hospital were not the ones whose military stride identified them on the street. These men were not paraded out at dinner parties or honoured at Government House.

The armistice had been signed six months ago; soldiers and sailors returned on every ship that sailed from England these days. Grace had long since given up wishing her brother Charley had been wounded instead of killed two years ago at Monchy-le-Preux. Death was cleaner. She saw the broken men every day, brought them their soup and sometimes helped them drink it, looked into their bottomless eyes. The perfect wound she dreamed of for Charley—one that would get him out of the war alive but leave him whole and unblighted—did not exist. There were only two ways to end a war well. Either miraculously survive unharmed or die cleanly, leaving your family with a framed picture of a hero on the wall.

Grace went home at Christmas, to spend the holiday with her parents in the manse where Charley’s picture hung in the parlour. Whatever celebration of the war’s end that took place in Catalina happened in church and in the homes of her friends. No celebration in Reverend Collins’s home, where the declaration of peace was a reminder of all they had lost.

It was a relief to return to St. John’s, despite her love for home and the excitement that seemed to hum through the air of Port Union along with the new electric power lines. Her grandfather’s house was less gloomy than her parents’. Grandfather Hunt, at sixty-eight, still went to work in his printshop every day. Aunt Daisy was a vigorous, chatty woman ten years younger than her husband. She was as much involved in the church women’s guild and the WPA here in St. John’s as Grace’s mother was back in Catalina, but Daisy’s involvement had a different quality than Lily’s. Daisy was a follower rather than a leader, one who welcomed circles of women into her home to knit and sew because she enjoyed their company and liked
feeding them home-baked treats, without needing to lay down the law to them.

Grace had lived with her grandfather and Daisy for a year and a half now, since the fall of 1917, when she finished work in the Fishermen’s Protective Union office and moved to St. John’s. Grandfather Hunt would not agree to her taking the VAD course without her parents’ permission, but Aunt Daisy convinced him to allow Grace to stay with them in town as long as she was doing “something suitable,” which Grace took to mean something other than a paying job that her family might see as beneath her. She volunteered three days a week at Empire Hospital and two days at the Poor Asylum, and taught a girls’ Sunday School class at Cochrane Street Methodist church.

“Good day, Miss Collins,” the matron, Miss Fitzpatrick, said as Grace came onto the ward, took off her coat and hung it up, and went to wash her hands. The hospital was understaffed and while Matron had little use for young lady volunteers who were too good to train as nurses yet wanted to be seen as do-gooders, she needed them. With the returning soldiers and the flu epidemic, volunteers who were actually willing to roll up their sleeves and work eventually earned her grudging respect. “Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Barry need their sheets changed and nobody’s got time to do it. Then you might read to Mr. Barry. He’s very unsettled.”

Mr. Barry liked to hear selections from the
Book of Common Prayer
when the nightmares of shell shock kept him from sleep. He had a loving mother and sisters out in Humbermouth who could presumably be reading the Morning Service to him, but they had come on the train to visit him and could not bear to be in his presence for more than a few moments. He lost his nose, one eye, an ear, and a piece of his jaw on the Somme; his face was a cratered map of the Western Front and its horrors. He needed help to eat, though he could walk about fine on his own. Except for the ruin of his face
and the rattle in his lungs he was otherwise hale. Even some of the nurses had trouble looking at him, but Grace found, to her surprise, that the sight of maimed faces did not revolt or horrify her. A face was still a face, after all. Mr. Barry’s eyes were the colour of deep-woods ponds, brackish and still. She looked mostly into his eyes, but she did not shrink from the rest of his face, and she knew that he appreciated that more than her readings from the prayer book.

He told her once that he liked to hear the prayer book because he had planned to be a minister. At least, that was what she pieced together out of the tortured sounds he was able to get out. Speech was difficult for him, but Grace imagined that in another life Mr. Barry might have been a good minister. A better preacher, perhaps, than her father. Reverend Obadiah Collins was a great Bible student but he lacked the gift to convey what he had dug out of his Greek lexicon in a form that would excite the fishermen and their families in the pews. When she was young, Grace used to think her father was awkward in the pastoral role, as well, trying to comfort the afflicted, but that had changed since Charley’s death. Parishioners seemed drawn to him now.

People were naturally suspicious, Grace thought—they didn’t really believe that a preacher could understand their pain unless he had suffered pain himself. It was a shame Mr. Barry couldn’t be a minister. Surely a man who had survived the trenches and come back with half a face, but with his faith somehow intact, would be able to talk to people about God’s love. He could place a hand on top of theirs, and they would know he had suffered, like Jesus, in all points like as they had. Even Jesus, though crucified, got to keep His nose and His jaw intact.

By mid-afternoon when Grace left the hospital, a cold sleety rain had begun, making the walk home far less pleasant than the walk down in the morning. Aunt Daisy met her in the doorway. “I have a
surrrpriiise
for you!” she trilled. Grace used to think “trilling” was
just something writers said in books and not something a person could actually do with her voice, but Daisy disproved this theory. The trill, the glow on her round face, the word “surprise,” all effectively removed any possibility of Grace actually being surprised. She knew before she stepped into the parlour that she would see Jack Perry there, in uniform. Whatever made her gasp for breath at the sight of him, it could not possibly have been surprise.

She wanted to go to him, for him to fold her in his arms the way he did that day she told him about Charley. But two years had passed. She had shaken Jack’s hand in farewell the day he left Catalina to go to St. John’s to enlist. Jack was her brother’s friend, nothing more. They had written often while he was away, the kind of friendly letters a girl wrote to her dead brother’s best friend while he was overseas. The sorts of letters hundreds of girls all over Newfoundland wrote, were enjoined to write, to keep up the spirits of the men at the front.

In the past two years two young men had asked Grace to marry them; she did not think of Jack Perry as being in any way similar to those boys. He did not sign his letters with love or say that he was thinking only of her. He wrote about the things that happened around him, the men in his unit, funny incidents that punctuated otherwise boring days in the trenches. Daisy brought his letters to Grace saying, “Here’s another from your young man!” and confidently expected that Jack’s return would be a lover’s reunion.

Jack put out his hand and she took it. “You’re looking grand,” she said. “It’s good to have you home.” They all sat down, Aunt Daisy perched on the edge of her chair like at any moment she might take flight and leave the lovers alone, if it weren’t for the rules of propriety.

Jack was in uniform and he really did look grand. His slender form had filled out, shoulders broader, chest and arms more muscular. His face, though, was leaner, less boyish. Grace thought
of Jack as having blond hair but it had darkened to a light brown. His eyes were light blue, very bright as he talked, smiled, laughed, turning from Grace to Daisy and back again. It was impossible not to compare him with Ivan Barry and the other men in the hospital.

“You haven’t been home yet, then?” she said.

“No, our ship only docked here in town yesterday. I thought I’d take the train out tomorrow, see Mother and Father and all the family. I wondered if—that is, would you like to come out with me? Have you been home lately?”

“Oooh yes, Grace, you must, your mother would be so happy—” Aunt Daisy said, but was spared from explaining why exactly Lily would be happy by the arrival of the maid with a tray full of teacups and raisin buns, with rhubarb jam in a little silver pot. If she arrived back in Catalina with Jack Perry, would her parents jump to the same conclusion that Daisy seemed so happy to leap to? And would it please them?

Lily had said no to the idea of Grace training as a nurse; she had turned up her nose last year when one of Grace’s old teachers at the Methodist College had suggested Grace could win a scholarship to go to college up in Canada. “A college education is no good to a young lady,” Lily had said. The obvious assumption was that she wanted Grace to settle down, be a wife and a mother. But when Abram Russell had asked her father for Grace’s hand in marriage—without so much as a preliminary discussion or even a hint to Grace herself—Lily had not been enthused about that prospect either. “They say he comes from a good family,” Lily said, “and he’s very ambitious, but there’s something common about him.”

Abe Russell was one of Mr. Coaker’s protégées. He had come from Bonavista North to manage the newly built factory that would manufacture and bottle temperance beverages in Port Union. He had political ambitions too. People said he meant to run for a seat in the House one day. While Mr. Coaker hadn’t moved Abe into his
Bungalow the way he had with the Bailey boys—like the sons he never had—he was known to warmly approve of Abe Russell. Grace had spoken to him only a handful of times, and certainly had no interest in his marriage proposal: she was relieved that neither of her parents thought she ought to take it seriously.

She had not even told them of Harry Gullage’s proposal, which he made directly to her on her visit home last summer. Harry was a nice-looking boy, good for a laugh; she had known him for years. He was a fisherman, son of a fisherman, and no matter how her father supported Mr. Coaker’s desire to dignify the lot of the fishermen, Grace knew her parents would be shocked at the idea of her marrying one. She tried to be gentle in refusing Harry, and he was philosophical: it was as if he’d known he was aiming too high even by asking. He had married Lyddie Carter a few months after Grace turned him down.

Grandfather drove Grace to the Water Street train station to meet Jack two days later. Grace couldn’t leave town right away; she told Jack she needed time to inform the hospital and the poorhouse that she would be away for a couple of days, and Jack had delayed his return home. Together they sat in an almost empty carriage. The only other passengers in their car sat at the far end so it was almost like having a private car.

The train began to roll—late getting out of the station, as usual. The route was familiar to Grace by now, but travelling with Jack, their knees almost touching as they sat across from each other, made it seem different, like a journey to someplace foreign. Grace imagined boarding a train at night in a foreign country, surrounded by people who spoke another language. The picture came accompanied by a stab of longing so intense it was almost like hunger.

“It’s different from riding troop trains in France, I imagine,” she said.

“It’s a fair bit more comfortable.”

“I’d like to see it, though. France, that is. I always imagined I’d go there someday. That was before the war, of course. Is it all ruins now?”

“Not all. There are still beautiful places. Cathedrals, a few churches that didn’t get shelled. The villages where the fighting was are in shambles. I spent a few weeks in Paris after the Armistice. It’s still lovely.” He was looking out the window at the Waterford River valley rolling by. “Maybe I’ll take you there someday.”

Grace looked out the window and hoped he wouldn’t apologize for being presumptuous. For two years now she had been building a picture of Jack Perry, piecing together fragments from his letters to imagine what kind of man he was becoming. Laying those fragments on top of the boy she remembered, her brother’s friend.

At Donovan’s Station the train stopped to take on passengers, then again at Kelligrews. At Avondale there was a longer stop; Grace and Jack walked to the end of the platform and looked down the tracks, watching the line ’til it curved and disappeared in the woods.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be able to do a Grand Tour of Europe for a few years yet,” Jack said, picking up the thread of the earlier conversation. “It’ll be a long time before it’s business as usual over there. Although already there’s talks of them making the battlefields into parks, so people can go visit the soldiers’ graves.”