A Sudden Sun (34 page)

Early in the new year, the Reverend could no longer get out of bed. That meant he had to be lifted to a chamber pot. There were chores of cleaning and washing and taking away full pots and soiled sheets—things Lily had never imagined herself doing. There was Grace and Jack and Hannah, still, but so much of it fell to Lily; so much of it she felt shouldn’t have to be done by anyone but a wife. She had, after all, vowed for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, no matter how unwillingly.

One day she washed him in bed and helped him into clean underwear and a fresh nightshirt, averting her eyes from the most intimate parts of the task as she generally did. When she settled his now-thin body back onto the pillows he reached out and grabbed her
wrist with a hand that had become claw-like. “Thank you, Lily. You’re a good woman. A good wife.”

Though she hated looking at his loose-hanging private parts or the skin that was yellowish and soiled, she hated meeting his eyes most of all. But she met them now, and forced herself to see that this was the face of a dying man.

“I haven’t been, not really,” she said. It was no more than the truth.

Obadiah—she could not think of him as the Reverend anymore, it was like an identity he had shed along with day clothes and excess flesh—sighed. “Neither of us has done all we could have done. But you’re here now when I need you, doing for me—doing more than you should, really.”

“I guess this puts us even, then.”

He shook his head. “No. I never thought of it that way. Never thought you owed me anything.”

He closed his eyes; that much conversation had tired him. She knew with certainty that what he said was not true. There was a time when he did keep score, when he did think of Lily as being in his debt. It couldn’t all have been in her mind, could it?

Lily sat in the chair by his bed, going over the years like she would go over a piece of knitting, counting back to the dropped stitch. In life you could never unravel, go back and knit up what had gone wrong. For thirty years she had felt she was paying back a debt and she was pleased with idea that these last few months’ work, caring for her dying husband, had settled the score. The idea that there had never been a score to settle was more difficult to wrap her mind around.

“You were good to me long ago, when I needed it,” she said finally, her voice quiet among the dust-motes that danced in the light from the window. “I don’t mind doing for you, now.”

She looked down to see if that satisfied him, but his eyes were closed. He had drifted off to sleep.

In March, Grace announced that she was going to St. John’s to stay with her grandfather and Daisy for three weeks. “I’ll be here to help you with the Reverend,” Jack assured Lily.

“I can manage—you go on with Grace.”

“No, I want to stay. And Grace ought to go alone. This trip means a lot to her.”

“Why?”

Jack excused himself to go see to Obadiah while Grace and Lily stayed at the table finishing their tea. “The bill for the women’s franchise is going to come before the house on the tenth of March,” Grace said. “This time, it’s going to pass. Prime Minster Monroe is bringing it in as a government bill, and Mrs. McNeil writes that the Women’s Franchise League has no doubt of it this time. I want to be there. It’s history in the making.”

Lily smiled. “If you know it’s going to pass it’s hardly history in the making. What’s the point of going to see it if you know how it will turn out?”

“To be there. To bear witness.” Grace looked up from her cup. “Like you and the others did back in ’93 when you sat in the gallery and watched the motion defeated.”

“That busybody Abby Hayward told you that story, did she? We were ignorant young girls and we didn’t know what we were doing.”

“You were fighting for a cause that’s finally going to win. Are you so sure you were wrong?”

Lily sighed. “I’m so worn out, Grace, I’m not sure of anything anymore. I used to worry—I still do—about what will happen when nobody knows their proper place. Men and women, husbands and wives. Everything will fall apart.”

“Perhaps it won’t, though. Perhaps it will just change. You said yourself things are different now than they were thirty years ago. In another thirty years they’ll be different again. Today women are getting the vote; maybe in thirty years a woman will be prime minister.”

“I doubt it. Though I suppose a woman would be no worse than the crowd they’ve got in there now.”

Grace got up and began to clear away the table. They all did so many things now that had once been clearly the maid’s job. All of them in the manse were like people living near a battlefront or through some natural disaster, Lily thought—all roles were renegotiated and everyone worked together in such amity that she and Grace could even sit down and have a half-ways civil discussion about the franchise.

“That petition of yours,” Lily said. “All those years ago.”

“It’s all right, Mother. It doesn’t matter.” Grace was at the sink, stacking dishes, her back to Lily.

Lily remembered as vividly as yesterday that night nearly three years ago when she’d stood by the stove holding those papers, those signatures Grace had traipsed over Catalina and Port Union getting the women to write out. That night she had thought for the first time in years of her own petition, the one only Abby had signed. She thought, too, of everything else she’d burned, all David’s letters. How easy it was to let the flames eat a mistake, to leave nothing but ash. On that memory Lily had lifted the burner of the stove and dropped Grace’s pages onto the smoldering embers. There was a moment, before they caught, when she could still have snatched them back. She stuck her hand into the stove to grab the paper out, thinking how Grace would feel. Then she drew her hand back, stinging from the heat. If her own mother had burned that foolish suffrage petition back in 1893—if Eleanor had ever paid enough attention, or been brave enough—what pain, what heartbreak she might have spared Lily! And now Lily might spare Grace.

So Lily had thought, that night standing over the stove, watching the paper burn away to ash, women’s names winking out at her through the flames before they vanished. It was hard to believe, now, that she had done that to her daughter. Lily knew she couldn’t have coped these last months without Grace and Jack. The little
matter of Grace gallivanting off to St. John’s to see the bill for women’s votes pass the house was a small thing by comparison.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter now,” Lily said. “But it was—a harsh thing to do.” She picked up the knives and forks, took them over to the sink where Grace was stacking dishes for Hannah to wash in the morning. “Too harsh. I knew it even then.”

“About the things Mrs. Parker told me,” Grace said. She sounded like she was saying words she’d been struggling with for a long time but finally had to say out loud—just as Lily had felt a moment ago. “About you being a suffragette.”

“That’s not what they—we. Not what we called ourselves.”

“I know, I’m sorry. But what I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time is—I didn’t hear all that just from Mrs. Parker. I—I met David Reid in New York.”

Lily could not have been more shocked if Grace had hauled off and slapped her. Here she had just been thinking how nice it was to work side by side with her daughter, the two of them getting along so well, and then Grace said that name. The platter Lily was holding, her big china one with the rose border, slipped from her fingers and crashed to the floor.

Grace knelt at once to get it. “I’m sorry, that’s my fault—I know that was a shock. Look, it’s all right, it’s not broken.”

Lily took the plate from her. “Yes it is,” she said, tracing with her fingertip the long line of a crack that had appeared in the plate’s surface. Well. It wasn’t an heirloom or anything. “I suppose that’s Abby’s doing too, is it, telling you about...him? About Mr. Reid.”

Grace carried the platter to the sink and began rinsing off the plates. “Mrs. Parker told me his name, but only after I badgered her. I’d already figured out a good deal for myself. Mr. Reid told me the rest of the story. He’s alive and well, by the way, and he remembers you kindly. I’m—I’m sorry, Mother.”

“Sorry—for what? For digging up my private business, for
poking into matters that were dead and buried before you were ever born?”

“I’m sorry about ... about the baby you lost.”

“You should never have brought any of this up. The past should stay buried.”
Buried, like that tiny grave in the Greenspond cemetery. Buried, like Charley’s bones on a battlefield in France.

“He writes to me sometimes—Mr. Reid does. And I write to Mrs. Ohman too, since that time I stayed with her in Montreal. And Mrs. Parker, of course.” Grace did keep up a voluminous flow of correspondence; Lily had not realized that so many people from her own past wrote to her daughter. “They are all concerned for you, with Papa’s illness.”

“Those people—they’re all ghosts to me,” Lily said. She picked up the cracked rose platter, traced the broken line with her fingertip.

Upstairs in her room Lily tried not to imagine this meeting in New York between her daughter and David Reid—what they talked about, how they met, what he looked like now. Was he married? Did he have children? Had he become the successful reporter he’d dreamed of being?

Instead of playing out that scene, she tried to remember the girl she had been, the Lily who had fallen in love with David Reid and sinned with him. Years ago, the Reverend’s mother had kept in her house a set of those wooden Russian dolls that nested inside one another. Was a person like that, Lily wondered, all her past selves nested neatly inside, each new layer of life built over the next, protecting as well as concealing what had gone before? That was what Grace wanted, to break her mother apart, to find inside a Lily that had lived and died long ago, tiny and preserved and perfect. But Lily thought the only way she resembled the Russian dolls was that she, too, was hollow inside.

T
HE GALLERY WAS crowded with women. All the Women’s Franchise League were there, along with women Grace knew from Gower Street Church. There were even a few working women—factory girls in cotton dresses, sitting among the ladies in silks and feathered hats. Mrs. Salter Earle had brought a contingent from the NIWA.

There was, as Grace had told her mother, no real suspense about the outcome. Still there was something thrilling about seeing the men rise one after another to say, “Aye,” “Aye,” “Aye.” When the last vote was registered a burst of applause filled the room. Grace jumped to her feet with the rest, waving her hat in the air.

On the way out of the Colonial Building, Grace found herself walking alongside Julia Salter Earle. The woman had always intimidated her, but she had greeted Grace like an old friend tonight in the House, and now took her arm as they walked down Military Road. “The real test,” the older woman said, “is how long will it be before we’re out of the gallery and down there on the floor along with them?”

“Perhaps you’ll have to run in the next election,” Grace said, thinking that if any woman could do such an unlikely thing, it would be this tough old warrior.

“Oh, there won’t be another general election for years. Monroe’s got a solid grip on power. But we won’t have to wait that long. I intend to run in the city election this fall. If you’re living in town by then you can vote for me—maybe even work for the campaign!”

“I will, if I’m here.” Grace felt light-hearted, almost light-headed with the excitement of the evening. Groups of women pushed past each other, arms linked, talking and laughing. But thinking of where she might be in the fall made her grow serious. “I don’t know what will happen with Papa—or, for that matter, what will happen to Mother after he dies.” Jack had a job at the
Advocate
office—it wasn’t work he loved, but he was willing to do it so that Grace could help her parents. The nurse at the clinic in Port Union called on Jack when she needed to set a broken leg or do some other job where she needed a second set of hands. “We’ll get back to St. John’s sometime, I’m sure,” Grace told Mrs. Salter Earle, “but when that will be I can’t say.”

“Well, you should arrange to come in for a while before the election if you possibly can,” Mrs. Earle said. “Fannie McNeil and May Kennedy are talking about running too—imagine that, three women in an election!”

“What if you all ran and won? The council would be half women!”

“It’ll be a miracle if even one woman gets elected, but if only one does, it will be I. I’m not running merely for the novelty of having a Mrs. on the ballot—I’m running for the causes I’ve always fought for, for the good of the working man and woman.”

“And all those working women can vote for you now!”

“Only if they own property,” Mrs. Earle reminded her. While the new Franchise Act for Newfoundland had no property
requirements for either men or women, the city of St. John’s still required voters to own property in the city. “Don’t you remember last city election, some of the Franchise League women had their husbands put outbuildings and sheds in the wives’ names so they’d will be listed as property owners? If you move back to town you’ll have to get yourself a little henhouse so you can vote for me. You are twenty-five, aren’t you?”

“Just this year,” Grace said. The law still was not truly equal between men and women, for men could vote at twenty-one and women not until they were twenty-five, which, she thought, was entirely ridiculous, for anyone who had ever met a man and a woman of twenty-one would have no difficulty saying which was the more sober, mature, and sensible.

She thought she would stay in town for a fortnight after the vote in the House: she could do some shopping on Water Street, pick up things the FPU store in Port Union couldn’t supply. She could visit with friends as well as with Daisy and Grandfather, go see Ivan Barry and a few other people she wanted to look up. She could attend the first meeting of the Women’s Franchise League under its new name, the League of Women Voters. To be back in town and free of the manse, dominated as it was by her father’s illness, was as heady as an intoxicant.

But the next morning a cable came from Jack: REVEREND FAILING STOP COME AT ONCE STOP.

As the train wheels unrolled the miles below her, Grace wondered if she ought to have left Catalina at all. She had not thought her father was close to death, but Jack would not have called her home for any lesser reason. She did not want to be away when he died.

She felt closer to her father in these last months than she ever had. It would not change his feeling towards her or hers toward him, if she were gone when he died. The person she really thought of was Lily. In the months Grace had been back home, everything she had
done—every book she had read to her father, every tray of custard she had carried to the sickroom, every time she had helped Jack turn him in bed and change the sheets—some part of it had always been a performance for which Lily was the audience. At long last, Grace thought, Lily was grateful to her. Their shared effort created a bond, however fragile, between them. What would Lily think if Grace was in St. John’s celebrating the passage of the women’s suffrage bill when the Reverend died?

The wait to change trains in Shoal Harbour seemed impossibly long, with no way to find out what was happening at home.
He could be dead already
, Grace thought. She wondered what her mother would do in the Reverend’s absence. The manse belonged to the Methodist church—or rather, she corrected herself, to the United Church, as it was now called, though church union made no practical difference in a place like Catalina where there were no Congregationalists to unite with. The circuit would likely want either to install Reverend Kenny, the supply preacher, as a permanent minister, or bring in someone more experienced. Either way, they were letting the Collins family stay in the manse now only as an act of kindness: they would require it again from Lily when the Reverend was dead. And what then?

Jack met her at the station. “The doctor was in town just after you left,” he said. “He took a look at your father and felt he couldn’t last out the week. He’s not eating at all now, and we’re trying to give him water, but he can’t even keep that down.”

She was too late, in all but the strictest sense, for her father was beyond recognizing her. Lily sat in a straight-backed chair by the window. “Grace is here now, Mother Collins. Why don’t you go get some rest,” Jack said.

“I don’t need to rest,” Lily said. She had the unbending air of a sentry at her post, afraid she would be charged with desertion if she wavered.

So they all kept vigil, Grace and Lily in the sickroom, Jack doing what needed to be done around the house and keeping visitors appraised of the Reverend’s condition. Grace read from the Psalms from time to time; she couldn’t tell if her father heard her.

In the middle of the night, after Grace had dozed in her chair and startled awake, Lily said, as if continuing a conversation, “Your father owns a piece of land over in Port Union.”

“He—I beg your pardon?” Grace had to rearrange the words in her tired brain before they made sense.

“He bought a parcel of land over there, out past the FPU property, about five years ago. I think he might have thought of building on it for his retirement, or maybe as an investment. I had a look at his will the other day—he’s left two thirds of the land to me, and one-third to you.”

Grace was surprised: she had not really expected any legacy except perhaps her father’s collection of theology books, which he had said she could have her pick from before donating the rest to the church. “What will you do with the land?” she asked her mother.

“Sell my bit of it, I suppose. I don’t see anything to hold me to Port Union now your father’s—that is, when your father’s gone.”

But she was almost right: he was nearly gone. His breathing grew more and more shallow; there was a rattle in his throat, and by morning he had stopped breathing altogether. Grace was holding his hand when the tiny wisps of breath disappeared from between his lips. She was amazed that his hand felt no sudden difference. He was a dying man; then he was a dead one. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

He had been doubtful, she knew, about the soul flying off to heaven after death, and when he preached funeral sermons he liked to emphasize instead the resurrection on the Judgement Day. He had told Grace once he would trust the Lord to take care of what might happen to him until then. Grace, who had her own questions about the sweet by and by, found it easier to believe that he was sleeping
peacefully than that he was hovering somewhere above, looking down as she and Jack made funeral arrangements and Lily moved between the kitchen and the parlour, accepting the condolences of a steady stream of visitors and advising the maid on what to do with the cakes and pies and cooked dishes they brought.

Grace surprised herself by bursting into wild sobs as her father’s coffin was lowered into the grave on the hillside looking down over Catalina Harbour. It was a sunny day, though the March wind was biting, and sunlight danced like diamonds on the water. Grace clung to Jack, but Lily stood a little apart, her arms wrapped around her own body as if holding herself together.

The minister said the words of committal and Jack moved forward with the other pallbearers to lower the coffin into the ground. Grace moved closer to Lily. She could not remember a time when she and her mother had shared the easy affection of so many mothers and daughters, arms around each other, hands entwined. Lily seemed to forever want to pick at Grace’s thoughts and behaviour but she kept her body apart, guarded like a citadel. For a moment it felt like a strange thing for Grace to do, to lift her arm and put it around her mother’s shoulders. She felt her mother’s slender body stiffen, then melt towards her, ’til Lily’s head was resting against Grace’s shoulder. Only then, for the first time since the Reverend had stopped breathing, did Grace see tears on her mother’s face.

The next day, Reverend Kenny told Lily the church would give her a month to pack her things before he moved into the manse. It would have been time anyway. Catalina had had the same minister for over ten years, which was nearly unheard of. Reverend Kenny himself had gotten the word that the pulpit would be his: he disappeared on the train to St. John’s for a week and came back with a new bride, as fresh and pretty and unexpected as if he had gone to Ayre’s and bought her for the occasion. Grace and Jack moved their things into Jack’s parents’ house, and Mrs. Perry told them they could stay
as long as they liked. “But maybe you’ll be wanting to build a house on your piece of land over in Port Union?” she suggested. It was almost palpable, her desire to have them stay—she, who had once wanted to send Jack off to India to doctor the heathen.

But Grace and Jack were not going to stay. They would keep the land—not just Grace’s third but Lily’s two-thirds, which Jack bought from her with money his father had given them for a wedding gift. They would build a house there eventually, they agreed: this would be the home they came back to. Someday.

Grace walked home from Port Union to Catalina one day after visiting her plot of land. It was raised up on a little height of land above the water, to the west of Mr. Coaker’s Bungalow, and she pictured the modest house she and Jack would build there someday. She stopped at the Union store to buy a few things and walked on past the bustle of the town: women going in and out of the store, men at work in the wood shop and the print shop and the bottling factory, boats at the wharves getting ready for the fishing season. Spring was coming to the harbour.
When we have children
, Grace thought,
then we’ll come back. This will be the place to raise our family.

She imagined how the town would grow in the coming years. Mr. Coaker was in poor health and spent his winters in Jamaica now; a few cynics said he had made his money in Newfoundland and gone off to retire in the sun. But Grace remained loyal, if not to the man himself, at least to his dream.
None of this
, she thought,
would exist without him
. People had grand dreams, and a few actually tried to put their dreams in practice, and invariably they fell short. Trying to change all Newfoundland, Mr. Coaker had changed only a tiny piece of it. But surely it was better to try?

She and Jack were going to St. John’s. Jack had a job as a hospital orderly; Grace was going to be assistant matron of a new home for unwed mothers. She would be there when the city election was held;
she could vote for Mrs. Salter Earle and Mrs. McNeil and Miss Kennedy. She and Jack might go back down on the Labrador sometime, and they would travel, and they had their piece of land and someday their house in Port Union. And they, too, might find little pieces of the world they could change. Life was open and broad as a spring day, full of plans and possibilities.

Those thoughts carried Grace all the way over the path that joined Port Union to Catalina, over the bridge that spanned the droke and down to the manse. At the door of the manse Grace paused. She thought of her mother inside, packing up or giving away the remnants of her married life. Lily was ruthless about getting rid of things, paring down her belongings. Just as Grace’s own future opened up before her, Lily’s life was narrowing, like a long hallway with doors being shut all around. Wife, minister’s wife, even mother, really, with Charley gone and Grace grown and married—all those roles were over for Lily now, Grace thought. Lily had said nothing about where she planned to live, what she would do with the remaining years of widowhood.