Upstairs in her room, she undressed in the dark, keeping the bedside lamp off so as not to wake her sisters. Marilyn stirred and mumbled in her sleep; June just kept snoring. Audrey had had some thought of taking Harry’s letter out of the drawer to re-read, but she remembered most of it anyway. Tomorrow would be Sunday, with church in the morning, Sunday dinner and then the long afternoon stretching out before them. Elderly relatives would visit; Dad would play hymns on the accordion, the one time in the week he sat down to rest instead of working. The shop would be shuttered and quiet. Plenty of time, tomorrow, to write back.
ELLEN
Ellen came downstairs to the shop at five o’clock, leaving a pot of fresh meat soup on the stove for supper for Wes and the youngsters. Marilyn, who had been working at the counter all afternoon, was talking to a couple of her friends. Ellen stopped for a moment in the door, arrested by the sight of the three of them, full skirts swinging almost to their ankles, hair crisp in permanent waves. They were sixteen: when did they all get to look like young women instead of little girls? Ellen had seen this transformation twice already in her two older children but it still took her by surprise.
“All right, Marilyn, you go on upstairs and set the table. Dad will be home in a few minutes and then ye crowd can all have supper.”
“Mom, I got something to tell you first, wait a minute. The mail came while you were upstairs.”
Ellen took the handful of envelopes, skimming quickly—a letter from her mother, another from her cousin Louise in New York, a bill from the electric company. Marilyn held one envelope back, already opened, holding it in front of her chest like something she was showing off, though it was only a plain envelope. “What’s in that one?”
“My grades! I got my CHE results—well, we all did today.”
“Oh, let me see. Did you pass?” It was the routine question Ellen asked Audrey when she finished Grade Eleven, the question parents always asked, though she knew it was foolish to even wonder in Marilyn’s case. She was near the top of her class. Ellen looked down the list of 80s and 90s. English, Mathematics, Civics, Science—excellent marks in everything. “This is wonderful, Marilyn.”
“A lot better than mine!” Sharon Hiscock said. “Marilyn’s like our Ella, always a great one for the books.”
“But you passed everything, did you?” Ellen asked Sharon and the other girl, the Taylor girl she always got mixed up with her sister. Such a slew of girls in that family. Shirley, was it? No, Carolann.
Both girls nodded. “I’m going to do the commercial course in September,” said Carolann.
“S’pose I’ll just keep working at the Royal Stores,” said Sharon. “Till I finds some rich man to sweep me off me feet.”
“Don’t be talking like that, now. Kind and hard-working is more important than rich any day,” Ellen chided, and looked back at her own daughter. Marilyn hadn’t said a word all summer about what her plans were now that school was over. She had been working in the shop, hadn’t looked around for a more permanent job, but she could certainly do a commercial course and get a job in a good downtown office like Audrey had done.
“So…I’ve been thinking, Mom…what I really wants to do is take the nursing course at the Grace Hospital. Do you think…is that something we’d ever be able to afford?” Marilyn said now, still holding on to her exam results as if it were a ticket she needed to board the train.
“Nursing! Well, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
“I didn’t want to say anything before my marks came back. I was afraid I’d get my hopes up and then my grades wouldn’t be good enough.”
Ellen had never thought of her girls doing anything more advanced than a typing course, or going straight to work. But nursing was a wonderful profession for a girl if she was ambitious and willing to work hard, and the Lord knew Marilyn was both those things.
“It’s suppertime now, go on and get upstairs. I’m sure the rest of ye got your own suppers to go to. I’ll talk to your father about the nursing school business, Marilyn, and we’ll see what he has to say.”
The other girls scattered, out the door and back to their own homes for supper, and Ellen took her place at the counter. She was tired after a morning in the shop and an afternoon of housework upstairs. If Marilyn went to nursing school, Ellen would most likely have to hire someone to help in the shop. Frank was only twelve; the girls had started working behind the counter at that age but Frank was still only a youngster, Ellen thought. Give him another year or two. Ten years they had managed to keep the shop going with only family working there, but as the youngsters grew up, Ellen knew she’d have to hire someone.
Audrey wouldn’t be home till nearly six, by the time she got off work and walked up from Water Street. Alf had most likely gone straight from the job he was working on over to the lot where he was building his own new house; Wes would go help him after supper. The two of them were working full days down on the base and then working on Alf and Treese’s house as long as it was light. Alf’s piece of land was over on Little Street, just up from Empire Avenue—the Old Track, as Ellen still called it, though the railway hadn’t run through there since before she moved to town.
There was a thing to be proud of, now—her son, twenty years old, working since he left school at fourteen, having enough money saved to buy a piece of land and build a house for his bride. The only help Alf would accept was his father’s labour. And Wes was more than willing to help with building, though he said he wouldn’t go to the wedding. “I just don’t know if I can go along with it, Nell,” he had told her that very morning. “I mean, I can see they’re going to get married no matter what we haves to say about it, and if they had of done it in the judge’s office I s’pose I could have been reconciled. But a Catholic church, up in front of a priest? I can’t see myself sitting there watching it. I just can’t.”
Ellen had sighed, glad Alf was already gone out so he didn’t have to hear this. Wes was a good man and a good father but he was a stubborn one too, when he dug in his heels. She’d heard enough back and forth about this wedding, now, to last her a lifetime, and whatever feelings of her own she had about Alf marrying a Catholic were long buried under her wish that everyone could just make peace and get along. Treese’s father and brothers wouldn’t even help with the house; Alf and Wes were doing it all.
The house would be closed in by winter, and the men would continue working inside till spring. When the house was done, there would be time to talk about the wedding, although it was clear enough already there was no solution that would make everyone in both families happy. Unless the youngsters broke off the engagement, and then they’d both be unhappy, for anyone with eyes could see they were crazy about each other.
Ping! She looked up, expecting Audrey, but it was Peter Walsh from a few doors down. Poor man: his wife had died in childbirth in the spring, having their twelfth child. The baby died too, but that still left poor Mr. Walsh with eleven youngsters. The youngest ones were parcelled out among his family: two boys nobody had room for went to Mount Cashel orphanage, but the older three were still with their father, and the eldest couldn’t have been more than fifteen. It was easy to trace the hard time the poor man was having by his visits to the shop: he was in to pick something nearly every day, usually baloney or tinned beans. Sometimes it was tomato soup, and there was always a loaf of baker’s bread.
“How are you doing today, Mr. Walsh?”
He stood in front of the counter, holding his hat in one hand and scratching his head with the other, looking at the shelves as if looking for inspiration. “Well I’ll tell you now, Mrs. Holloway, it’s not easy and that’s the truth. I’m lookin’ for something to give the youngsters for their tea and I haven’t got a thing in the house. I s’pose it’ll have to be beans again, will it?”
Ellen took two cans of beans from the shelf. “They could do a lot worse than beans and toast. Do you need bread?”<
br />
“Oh, you knows I do, I had a loaf last night but when I gets home from work they got that all gone, same as always.”
Of course they did, poor little mortals—nothing to eat all day but tea and toast for three growing children. They played out in the street with the rest of the crowd, and when the other youngsters got called in for dinner, the little Walshes went in and ate whatever they could find, which was usually little enough. “Your young one Maureen must be big enough to be some help now, isn’t she?”
“Ah, well, she makes sure the boys has something to eat for their dinner and she tries to keep the place clean. She talks about getting some kind of a job to help out, but it’s hard enough for a grown man to keep a job now, with men coming back from overseas and so many of the Americans leaving the base. What chance do a young girl her age have to find anything? I s’pose she’ll end up going cleaning house for someone, but then I got nobody to watch the boys. I don’t want to send them to Mount Cashel as well, bad enough having Paul and Anthony in there. I hate to think what my poor missus would say if she were alive to see it, Mrs. Holloway, I do.”
Ellen handed the poor man his beans and bread, another box of tea, and a tin of tobacco, and wrote it all down under his tab. What to do about the tab for her poorer neighbours had been a vexing issue as long as they had had the shop, a faint echo of her father’s headaches in the merchant’s store in Candle Cove where all the fishermen lived on credit. Some people here in town paid cash; most of the neighbourhood regulars ran a tab but settled it every payday. But there were always the few—the Cadwells, the Walshes, the Ryans, the Hiscocks—who had a running tab that would run till Doomsday. They put a little down on it every payday, but it would never be settled. Still, you couldn’t let your neighbours starve.
“You could be a bit stricter with them, though, Mom,” Audrey said, coming in from work a few minutes later and lingering long enough to hear her mother’s thoughts on the poor Walshes. “You need to at least demand the money off people, let them know it’s a business and not a charity. You’re too soft. And don’t tell me you’re thinking about hiring Maureen Walsh to work behind the counter just because you feel sorry for her father.”
“I’m going to need someone, and if it can’t be family it might as well be one of the neighbours. The Walshes are poor but they’re not crooked. Well, Maureen isn’t anyway. The boys are little Tartars, but who can blame them?”
“I don’t think she’s right in the head, Maureen, though. I think she’s simple.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You don’t know she’d be any good to work in a shop. Why not hire Treese? She’ve only got part-time work and she’d be glad to make some extra money before the wedding, I’m sure. Maybe even after—there’s no reason she couldn’t go on working till they start having babies.”
“Glory be, Audrey, don’t be talking about babies already. It’s enough of a shock, all of you growing up so fast. If anyone comes at me with the thought of grandchildren I don’t know if I’ll be able to carry on.”
Audrey’s face changed for a moment, became serious—she had been half fooling so far, giving her mother a hard time about not being tough enough on customers. Ellen saw that serious look, and her breath caught. Her first thought was, Please Lord, no, don’t let her tell me she’s expecting a baby, and her second was, Who’s the frigger that done this to her? I’ll tear him apart with my bare hands.
“Harry’s getting discharged from the Army,” Audrey said. Ellen’s brain scrambled for a moment: Harry? Thoughts of some feckless boy getting her girl pregnant scattered in an attempt to remember who Harry was.
Seeing her mother’s face, Audrey repeated, “Harry Pickens? The fellow I was seeing before he went overseas, the one I’ve been writing to?”
“Oh, Harry, of course.” Ellen wished she could go back, erase her first response, make her eyes light up with interest at Harry’s name. “So he’s going back to…where was it he was from?”
“Louisiana. But he’s coming here first. Mom, he asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”
“What?” This was too much, too quickly. First Alf and now Audrey? “Your father would never say yes to that, you’re only eighteen.”
“Nineteen, by the time Harry gets back here. And you know that if my mind’s made up we’ll get married anyway, no matter what Dad has to say about it. But we’d rather have your blessing.”
“Oh. Oh my goodness, Audrey, I don’t know what to say.”
But in the end, what was there to say? She talked to Wes in bed that night when their children—not children any longer—were in their rooms asleep. “Bad enough Alf and Treese getting married, but at least they’ll be only a few streets away. But if Audrey marries this Harry? He’ll take her to the States, and we might never see her again! We could have grandchildren we’d never see!”
“Now, Nell girl, that’s the way of the world,” Wes said, his sleepy voice settling over her like a quilt. “Youngsters grow up and they go away. Sure it’s worse than it used to be, with the war and all these girls going off marrying the Yanks, but when you think about it, how often have your parents or mine seen our young ones? Once every year or two, maybe. And all our crowd down in the States, sure when have the folks ever seen them? Not for years. Young folks got to go away, make their own start.”
“But so far away! And what are we going to do with this business of Marilyn and nursing school? I don’t want to hold her back, she’s a bright girl, but how can we afford that?”
“Now, girl, you’re gettin’ ahead of yourself there. Borrowing trouble, is what it is. Let the good Lord worry about tomorrow, like the Good Book says. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”
Ellen suspected Wes of quoting Bible verses or hymns when they talked late at night because he knew it was something she couldn’t argue back with, and then he could roll over and go to sleep. He was good at leaving things in God’s hands, while Ellen, for all her faith, struggled to hold onto things with her own hands. She couldn’t help remembering that God’s hands were supposed to have kept Johnny safe.
Sufficient unto the day…It wasn’t as if this day had brought any real evil. One daughter had good marks in school and wanted to be a nurse. The other was marrying a decent man who had served his country in war. And Alf was marrying Treese, who was a sweet girl. This time, Ellen managed not to add even if she is R.C.
“Wes?” He had just started to make the humming noise in the back of his throat that came before the real snoring started.
“What? What is it, maid?”
“Please don’t make trouble about the wedding. If they do get married by a Catholic priest, I mean.”
Wes’s almost-snore turned to a heavy sigh. “I’m not meaning to make trouble, Nell, but I can’t change what I think is right and wrong, can I? If he gets married in her church, he got to stand up before a priest and swear they’re going to have the youngsters—our grandchildren—baptized Catholic, going to a papist church, muttering confession to some priest. That’s not how either of us was brought up, and you know it’s not right. Superstition, is all it is. Praying to statues and the like.”
That was a long speech for Wes, especially this late in the evening. “I know all that,” Ellen replied. “But I had Treese’s mother and her aunt down in the shop only a few weeks ago, both of them crying their eyes out, swearing they couldn’t go to the wedding if it was in front of a judge. And now you saying you won’t go if it’s in their church. Sooner or later, somebody got to give an inch, or we could lose Alf altogether. And the children—bad enough if we had grandchildren down in the States we never saw, but what if Alf had children here in town and we weren’t allowed to see them?”
There was more she could say, but she stilled her tongue. Alf had been like Wes’s little shadow ever since he was old enough to trot around behind his father and hold a hammer, and she knew the t
hought of their son turning against him would hit Wes harder than anything the Bible or any minister might have to say against Catholics. She’d said her piece and now she would have to leave it at that. Wes could be led, if you know how to lead him, but he was as hard to push as a piece of string.
He said nothing, and after a moment she heard his breathing grow steady and the first snores begin. Pictures of the future chased themselves around in Ellen’s mind, but she tried to lay them aside. Her children were growing up. Sufficient unto the day.
musical interlude
WES HOLLOWAY
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun
The last notes of “Amazing Grace” finished, I settles the accordion on my lap a bit more comfortable.
— Now this is a song I learned from my grandfather, old Zeb Holloway out in Candle Cove.
I doubt any of them are even listening to me, half-asleep as they are from a big dinner of salt pork, cabbage, pease pudding and all the rest. Church in the morning, family to dinner, youngsters off to Sunday School while the women cleans up the dinner dishes. Now, with the shop closed and the young ones back home, it’s the one time in the week we gets a bit of a rest. The one time I gets to take down the accordion and play a few tunes.
— Like we never had enough hymns in church.
It’s only a mutter, Audrey to Alf, the two of them thinkin they’re too big and too smart for this now. But I gives them the look and they says no more, even if Audrey rolls her eyes a bit.
— Anyway this one is not a hymn. It’s an old song from out in Bonavista Bay.
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