A Sudden Sun

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  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.

  “I’ll put me name to it,” said Sandra Courage, and two or three others did the same.

  “Don’t be so hasty,” warned another girl Grace didn’t recognize—an Anglican, she thought, whose father fished with Skipper Bob Howley. “I don’t know if Father would be all right with me signing this, and your Pop might not either, Sandra.”

  “Ain’t that the whole point of it, though?” Sandra said. “Why should a girl have to ask her father’s say-so to sign a piece of paper? Or her husband’s either, for that matter.”

  “Now, you goes talking like that, you won’t have to worry about getting your husband’s say-so on anything because you won’t get a husband!” said Elva Hallett.

  “Go way with you, maid! Just cause you can’t hook a man don’t mean I can’t—signing this paper or having the vote got nothing to do with it one way or the other.”

  It was hard to steer the conversation back to the franchise but in the end Grace got eight signatures and was just ready to leave the store when the front door pinged and an older man walked in and lifted his hat to the girls gathered around the fabric counter. They scurried to their different stations like insects scurrying after a log had been turned over.

  Only then did Grace recognize William Coaker. She had met the man only a handful of times in the years since she had defied her mother’s wishes and gone to ask him for a job. He was not always home when she came to visit her parents; he travelled not just back and forth to St. John’s but also to America and Europe on union business. She remembered her father saying that Mr. Coaker had just returned from a trip.

  If she had taken a moment to recognize him, he had no such difficulty knowing who she was and what she was doing. “Ahh, Miss Collins. I hear you’ve been bringing the Women’s Franchise League petition around town. Is that what you’re doing here today?”

  “Yes…Sir?” Grace didn’t mean to turn it into a question. Mr. Coaker, or at least his union, owned most of the town, but it wasn’t as if she needed his permission to get the signatures of the town’s women.

  “May I see?” he asked, and she handed him the paper, somewhat reluctant to let it slip from her fingers.

  He nodded as he looked up and down the list of names, and some Xs, for the women who couldn’t write their own names. “Very good, very good, Miss Collins. I’m impressed with the work you’re doing.”

  “Mrs. McNeil tells us you’ve promised your support in the House, Mr. Coaker.”

  “Of course, of course. The women’s vote is an issue whose time has come. I’ve always stood up—the Fisherman’s Party, that is, and the Union, have always stood up for the rights of the oppressed and that includes our women as well. The time has come,” he said again.

  “Then no doubt you’d be willing to be the one to introduce the motion into the House? It would stand a far better chance of success if it’s brought in by a member who’s so widely respected.”

  “Well, he got out of there so fast I thought he was going to start walking backwards,” one of the girls said after Mr. Coaker had left the store. “I never saw a man go back on what he said so fast since Uncle Wilf Gullage as
ked Phoebe Chaulk did she like his new house and she said yes and she’d love to marry him.”

  All the girls laughed. It was certainly true that Mr. Coaker had checked himself very quickly once Grace asked if he intended to bring the bill in himself. “Still I don’t know why,” she said. “If he supports the bill, why wouldn’t he introduce it in the House?”

  “Miss Collins,” Sandra said, “I know you got a lot of book-smarts and you knows all about what goes on in the House of Assembly, and I don’t know none of that, but I knows this much: ’tis one thing for a man to say he agrees with an idea, and another thing altogether to put his own name to it. Especially if the idea comes from a woman, right?”

  The girls nodded. “Anyway, Mr. Coaker can’t go taking no chances these days,” said Elva.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My pa says Mr. Coaker’s taking hits from all sides—not just the merchants and the bigwigs, but even some of the union men don’t support him anymore.”

  “Don’t be talkin’—they don’t know what’s good for them,” said the girl whose name Grace couldn’t remember. “Fishermen would be nowhere without Mr. Coaker.”

  “Sure, he does lots of good for us, but he does all right for himself too,” Sandra said, nodding in the direction of the Bungalow, Coaker’s spacious house that crested the hill like a little castle.

  “And lots of people never forgave him for voting for conscription,” Elva added. “My pa says that’s the real trouble.”

  “The war’s been over for four years,” Grace pointed out. “And we never had conscription anyway.” She didn’t add that the conscription law had been, in her view, necessary, and would have had to be put in place if the war had lasted. She knew that people who had lost a family member in the war, like herself and Mr. Coaker, believed conscription was needed. Those who hadn’t lost anyone thought the very idea of military conscription was terrible, and there was no getting past that divide.

  “It don’t matter,” Elva said. “Once they lost faith in him, he’ll never win it back. People remember. They hold grudges.”

  Grace left the store with a bolt of gingham cloth, a packet of needles and eight signatures—and more insight than she had expected from a group of shopgirls. When, she wondered, will I learn to stop underestimating people? She found the same thing in her work in town. She was always leaping ahead, thinking she knew better than others just because she had a college education and they were poor.

  Effie Butler had taught her a valuable lesson. Back in the summer Grace and Mrs. Earle had worked hard to get Effie compensated for her accident so she could provide for her younger brothers and sisters. Effie had been grateful, but as soon as she was back on her feet she had marched the four youngest ones up to the Methodist orphanage and signed them in.

  “I thought you wanted to keep the family together!” Grace had protested.

  “Now Miss Collins, you been awful good to us and yes, I woulda liked to keep us all together if I could. But having food on the table means more than all being under one roof. I learned something from all this, and that’s that I can’t provide for the youngsters on just what Frank and I makes. They could have starved. Them little ones will be better fed and better off in the orphanage. Anyway it was our da who never wanted them in there, and what do I care what he thinks?”

  I thought I knew what was best for Effie’s family, Grace thought now. And I thought a bunch of shop girls would know nothing and care less about politics. But the girls in the shop, all fishermen’s daughters, knew more than she did about how Mr. Coaker was viewed by the union members. While the minister’s daughter might believe that the great reformer was a hero, the fishermen’s daughters heard what their fathers and brothers said about him around the dinner table, and that was a more complicated picture.

  The next day was Grace’s last at home before returning to St. John’s. Her train was to leave at noon and she packed her bag after breakfast. The suffrage petition was on the downstairs hall table, ready to go in her handbag—except that when she looked for it, it wasn’t there. Grace asked the maid if she’d seen it, but the girl had no idea.

  The Reverend was out visiting; he would be home later to drive Grace to the station. Lily was in the parlour. Grace tapped lightly on the door and opened it a crack to Lily’s faint “Hello?”

  “Mother, have you seen my petition? I left it on the hall table.” Grace hated to bring it up again—her father had asked her, after all, not to upset Lily—but she couldn’t leave without it.

  For a moment Lily didn’t say anything. She sat in a chair by the window, her knitting needles clicking furiously at what looked like a mitten. She looked neither at the knitting nor at Grace but out at the rain slapping the glass.

  “Mother? Did you hear me?”

  “I told you I didn’t want you at that petition business. Nothing good will come of getting yourself mixed up with those kind of women, Grace.”

  “I just need to know if you saw the petition.”

  Lily shrugged. All her attention was on her knitting as she finished off a row of stitches. “There was a jumble of papers on that hall table. I assumed if no one had put them away they must be all garbage.”

  Grace felt ice-cold. “What did you do with them?”

  “I put them in the fire.” Lily rolled up the ball of blue wool with neat, efficient movements and began working with the red wool.

  “You did what? Was my suffrage petition in there? Did you look at them at all?”

  “I don’t know. If your papers are so important to you, you should take better care of them.”

  “That’s a lie!” Grace burst out. “You wouldn’t have burned them without looking! You knew what it was! You burned my petition on purpose, because you don’t approve! How could you do that?”

  Still Lily didn’t take her eyes from her knitting, though Grace knew from years of watching she was well able to knit without looking down at the work. “If that petition did get thrown on the fire it’s all for the best.”

  “You—you—” Grace shook with anger, tears springing to her eyes.

  “You stop and think before you say words you’ll regret. Anything I’ve ever done was for your own good.”

  “How can I go back to those ladies, to Mrs. McNeil and Mrs. Gosling and the rest, and tell them I don’t have my signatures because my mother burned the papers? Those women remember you—some of them anyway. They remember you marching with the WCTU and fighting for the franchise. How can I tell them you did this?”

  “I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you tell them,” said Lily who, to Grace’s knowledge, had never uttered a curse word in her life. “And I certainly don’t care what they think of me. Do you think I’m proud of those days, of what I did?” Now she did look up, her needles still moving, and Grace saw tears in her mother’s eyes, tears that matched her own. Though Lily’s hands were steady her voice shook a little as she said, “Grace, my dear, if throwing one handful of paper on the fire could save you from making mistakes you’ll regret all your life, I’d do it again. I’d do it right in front of you.”

  “You selfish, opinionated old hag, you always say you’re only thinking of me when all that matters is your opinion, your views. Nobody can be right but you!” Hot tears spilled down Grace’s cheeks. “I’ll never forgive you for this, never!”

  She slammed the door behind her, ran out into the hall and through the front door. She was halfway up the road to the church before she remembered her father was not there, but visiting with a parishioner.

  She would tell him. She would. He understood; he thought her cause was just. But what could he do? He couldn’t unburn paper.

  In the end, Grace said nothing. She sat on the front porch of the house in the drizzle with her bag ’til the Reverend came with the horse and buggy to drive her to the station. Lily did not come out to say goodbye and Grace did not go back in the house. She took the train back to town, and told Mrs. McNeil at the next Franchise League meeting that
her petition papers had got mixed up with some others and accidentally been put in the fire, and she was so very sorry for the terrible mistake. She told no one what had happened, did not even put it in her letter to Jack.

  She could have gone back to Catalina at Christmastime, told the same story and tried to get the women to sign all over again. Getting those signatures again would have been the best thing for the cause. But Grace wrote to her parents and said Christmas was a busy season in church work, as the Reverend knew so well, and she could not spare the time to come home.

  Grace

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “NOW, WHAT ABOUT the Port Union area? Oh, I’m sorry, those were yours, weren’t they, Miss Collins?” said Mrs. McNeil, sorting through stacks of petitions. “Of course, such an unfortunate mistake. But these things happen.” Over the fall and winter the Franchise League leaders had heard more than one story of petitions that had mysteriously gone missing or been destroyed outright. Despite returning empty-handed Grace had been invited to join a committee that would draft a covering letter to accompany all these petitions when they were presented to the prime minister. She sat around a table with the most powerful women in the League—Fannie McNeil, Edna Bulley, May Kennedy, Armine Gosling, none of whom knew what had actually happened to the hundred signatures she had collected back in October.

  “I’ve tried to see if there’s someone else in the area who can circulate a petition for us, but we’ve had no luck so far,” said Mrs. Gosling. “And Mr. Coaker told me just what he told you—he and the other Fishermen’s Party members will vote for the bill when it comes up in the House but that he won’t be the one to introduce it.”

  “That might be just as well,” said Mrs. Bulley. “I’m not sure Mr. Coaker’s support is the support we want, with the Telegram and the Daily News both calling him a Bolshevik.” Grace thought of the shopgirls in Port Union. Mr. Coaker seemed to be in trouble with the fishermen for supporting the established parties too much, and in trouble in St. John’s for being too radical.