A Sudden Sun (27 page)

“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 asked 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.

^“
N
OW, 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.

“Sir Richard says he will bring it in as a government bill,” Mrs. Gosling said, “and that will be much better than having Mr. Coaker sponsor it. If it’s a government measure it’s sure to pass.” Armine Gosling certainly knew the value of having the ear of the man in power: her husband had been mayor of St. John’s, and while he was in power, council had made it legal for women to vote in city elections—as long as they were property-owners. It was a step toward the franchise, but only a small one. The government of Newfoundland still needed to be roused to the suffrage cause.

“I don’t know what to make of Sir Richard,” sighed Edna Bulley. “He claims to support the cause when we talk to him in private, but then you read things like this article in the
Gazette
—and we all know that paper has Squires’s money behind it.”

The women around the table rolled their eyes—they had all read the article—but May Kennedy put her hand over her heart and recited a line from it all the same: “‘It would be interesting to know whether any of these true-hearted, honest Newfoundland women from Fortune Bay or Bonavista support the franchise cause.’”

“It just makes my blood boil, how the papers—the
Gazette
, anyway—try to make us out to be nothing but a bunch of rich townie socialites instead of ‘honest Newfoundland women,’” Mrs. McNeil said.

“Well, anyway, these petitions should answer that accusation,” Grace said—it was the first time she’d spoken up without being asked a direct question. As the other ladies passed her the petitions she had been copying down a list of the communities they came
from. She began reading off the list of communities—“Bonavista, Baie de Verde, Cormack, English Harbour, Heart’s Content…. How can anyone say now that the outport women aren’t in favour of the vote?”

The next day, after making a call to the Methodist orphanage, Grace was off to another meeting—this time to the Ladies’ Branch of the NIWA. At tea-time afterward the imposing Mrs. Salter Earle pulled her aside. “What went on at yesterday’s Franchise League meeting, Miss Collins? I do rely on you to keep me up to date on their gatherings.” She snorted at the news that Sir Richard was going to bring in the franchise bill.

“Government measure, my foot! When are those fools going to stop believing everything that sleveen Squires tells them?” Unlike Mrs. Bulley, Mrs. Earle had no difficulty deciding what to make of Sir Richard. Since she worked at the House of Assembly she knew the ins and outs of what went on there. “Squires makes promises to put people off, then makes excuses about why he can’t keep his promises. That’s just the way the man works. The way his government works. I don’t know why anyone trusts him further than they can throw him.”

“I suppose he’s the man in power, people have to work with him if they want to get anything done.”

“Nothing
will
get done as long as he’s the prime minister. Including women getting the franchise—you mark my words. Those women are barking up the wrong tree if they think anything is going to change as long as Squires and his crowd are in power.”

Grace admired Mrs. Earle but found her exhausting. She was a tireless worker but also a tireless agitator: you couldn’t fault her for saying the world, or Newfoundland, was an unjust place because she certainly was doing all she could to make it better, but her energy was fuelled by a kind of anger that Grace found hard to take. It was an anger harsh and powerful as lye soap, useful for getting things
done. Still, Grace wanted to believe the world was essentially a good place and could be made still better with prayer, dedication, and a little kindness.

But Julia Salter Earle was rarely wrong. Weeks slipped by and the franchise bill had still not been introduced. “I’m afraid the session will go by and nothing will get done ’til the fall—if then,” May Kennedy said one evening in February, as their small committee sat down around the table to talk after the next Franchise League meeting was done. “I had so hoped that when I went to the congress I could report that the women of Newfoundland have finally joined the rest of the English-speaking world. Now that even the Americans have the vote, any country that hasn’t given women the franchise looks more and more backward.”

After working with these women throughout the fall and winter, Grace was becoming a little bolder about speaking up. “You’ll have to tell them instead that our government is dragging its heels,” she said now. “Maybe you can get the ladies in other countries to write letters to the government of Newfoundland, shame them publicly in the papers for being so slow to give us the vote.”

“That is exactly what we ought to do!” Mrs. McNeil said. “Do you know, we asked the government, and the international alliance petitioned them too, to send a delegation of Newfoundland women to the Rome congress. But Sir Richard said there wouldn’t be a penny to send suffragists off to Europe for any such thing.”

“Thank goodness I’ve the means to go at my own expense,” May Kennedy said. She was a well-off spinster who lived with her aging mother; their needs were provided for by a generous inheritance that allowed for plenty of household help and left May free to devote herself to good works. “Are we done here for tonight? Mother will be in bed by now, but my cats will think I’ve abandoned them. Miss Collins, do you have a ride home? It’s far too cold to walk.”

Grace rode to her grandfather’s house in the comfort of Miss Kennedy’s side-sleigh; it was every bit as cold as walking in the knife-sharp winter air, but the journey was much faster. Miss Kennedy leaned her fur-hatted head close to Grace’s ear and said, “There are a few months to go ’til the congress. It may be possible to collect enough donations from our wealthier members so that we can send a second delegate to Rome. If we can do that, I think it ought to be you.”

“Me? By rights it should be Mrs. McNeil or Mrs. Gosling, or someone else with more experience.”

“Not all the older ladies enjoy travel as I do. And we all agree we need a younger woman, someone who can represent the voice of the next generation. You’re articulate, Miss Collins, and it’s quite stirring to think that your mother marched with our first woman suffragists way back in ’93. You can talk about that, and say that here we are, her daughter’s generation, and we still don’t have the vote.”

They were turning onto Queen’s Road, almost at Grandfather’s house. The bells on the horse’s bridle jingled merrily. Grace was used to the fact that Lily’s suffragist past was an open secret to a certain generation of women in St. John’s. But what a lie it would be, to go all the way to Rome carrying the banner of a second-generation suffragist.

After leaving the house that day back in October, Grace had written no letters home until she wrote her father to say she was not coming for Christmas. She got a Christmas card from both her parents with a five-dollar banknote inside and, in her mother’s handwriting, the note, “May the Lord bless you in 1923. Your loving mother and father.”

Grace had wondered for a while if her mother would write again—and if she even wanted to hear from Lily. Perhaps the business of the burned petitions had severed things between them forever. She felt oddly relieved, now, to see a letter in her mother’s
handwriting on the hall table. It was full of the usual: Catalina news, church doings, and advice for Grace. She made no mention of the petition nor of the months of silence between them.

That night, Grace sat down to compose a short but newsy response. She rewrote it several times before she was able to match her mother’s neutral tone, devoid of the anger and regret she felt. She could not forgive what Lily had done, but she could not leave the letter unanswered. Cutting off all ties to home was unthinkable.

After that, Lily’s letters once again arrived weekly, as they had always done, and Grace replied to each one. But among all the letters she received that winter, from her mother and other relatives and her college friends, she missed Jack’s familiar handwriting. His last letter had come before Christmas, when ships were still leaving Battle Harbour. They had agreed to keep writing to each other in instalments over the winter, keeping their letters in a journal they would send each other in spring. It was April before the Labrador steamer arrived and the next day Grace found a parcel on the hall table with a black leather-bound notebook inside.

“Oh, a package from your friend, you must be so pleased,” said Daisy. But the usual bubbly trill was missing from Daisy’s voice, along with the phrase “your young man” that she used to use as if it were Jack’s name. His months-long absence had clearly demoted him in Daisy’s eyes. She had hoped Grace would begin courting someone else; several times she asked if Grace would be willing to meet the nephew or grandson of some friend of hers. Grace declined all such offers. Once during the winter an earnest gentleman who attended Gower Street Church and was articling at a law firm had invited Grace to a concert with him. The evening had been pleasant enough but she had felt no more desire to spend more time with the young lawyer than she would with any other casual acquaintance of any age or gender. She busied herself with work, with reading, and with the activities of the Women’s Franchise
League, and thought it possible that her interests, taken together, did not add up to a whole that made young men particularly anxious to court her.

Grace waited ’til she was alone in her room in front of a small fire with a cup of hot cocoa, before she opened the notebook to read what Jack had written through the long months of winter. Even when she was settled in her chair, she found herself strangely reluctant to open the cover. She hadn’t heard from Jack since the last steamer sailed in the fall. Busy as she had been, she had never stopped wondering how he was faring.

Just his tidy, close-written script on the first page—“My dear Grace”—made her heart race. So many months had passed since his last letter and she had spent more nights than she would ever admit to anyone lying awake, trying to imagine what Jack’s life was like in Labrador. She had imagined terrible things—that the work, the loneliness, those long cold winter nights had driven him to despair. That he really had taken to drink, or worse. She knew of men who had been overseas who were so tormented in their minds that they had been driven to take their own lives. What if work on the Labrador coast, which Jack had hoped would be his salvation, had been his undoing instead?

She had tried to comfort herself with the thought that if anything truly terrible had happened, some news would have come back—a cable to his family, perhaps. And then in the winter silence she imagined other things—that he was well, and happy in his work, and had forgotten about her. Perhaps he was contented because he had fallen in love with some fresh-faced English nurse or even an Esquimo woman. The jealous thoughts were petty and Grace tried not to dwell on them, but stranger things had happened, and he had said, after all, that no promises should bind them. One promise he had kept—the promise to write. He had written a great deal. She supposed he had little else to do except for
work. As she read the first page she found, as always with Jack’s letters, that it was as if he were in the room with her, his voice filling the empty spaces both outside and within.

Grace read the first entry in the journal over twice before she turned the page. Just to see on paper Jack’s admission that he relied on her letters made her feel like a key had turned in her heart, unlocking something she hadn’t known was locked. He had still felt that way in November. Would he have sent the journal, after all, if he hadn’t still felt that way when spring came?