A Sudden Sun (33 page)

When they boarded the train for Catalina, Grace again offered to come with them but Lily refused. “Your father is on the mend and it’s not as if I’m alone in the house—I have help. There’d be hardly anything for you to do.” Lily couldn’t help thinking that another sort of daughter—a girl like Camilla Coaker, perhaps—would not have accepted the refusal so easily.

Later she thought they had returned home too soon. The Reverend could walk, and he no longer needed dressings changed, but
he was weak and found it hard to get around the house: once he was upstairs in the bedroom he didn’t like to come downstairs only to climb up again. So his meals had to be brought up on trays. The girl, Hannah, had to clean the house and cook light meals for Lily, while making custards and cream of wheat and porridge for the Reverend, toting them upstairs on trays and then bringing the crockery back down to be washed. It was more than one girl could cope with, so Lily took over making and delivering her husband’s food herself.

Parishioners and neighbours dropped by the house every day. The Reverend did not always feel well enough to see them so Lily was required to sit and visit with each one, and carry up their good wishes. It wasn’t only good wishes they brought: the church, after all, kept meeting every Sunday and business had to be taken care of. The Reverend made an effort to get up to meet with the deacons when they came, but he was exhausted afterwards.

If Lily insisted he rest and not be disturbed then she found herself dealing with not only the church business that had always been hers—the Women’s Guild and the Sunday School and the Missionary Society—but also chasing down the workmen who had not, after all, put the new roof on properly, for it leaked in the spring rains. Betty Bursey came, shamefaced and hardly speaking above a whisper, to ask could the church help her out, for with Heber not able to work since his accident she couldn’t feed the children. Olivia Edwards died in childbirth and Lily had to send a message to the Methodist minister in Elliston to come and conduct the funeral service, and gravediggers had to be arranged, and all the little Edwards children packed up and sent on the train to a great-aunt in Bonavista who would look after them, for their father was nearly helpless in his grief.

One cold night Lily came down to answer a knock at the door after tending to her husband who had been throwing up ’til he had nothing left in his stomach and was reduced to the dry heaves. She
found Solomon Sweetapple there to say that old Sarah Gullage was dying. Sarah wanted the minister at her deathbed and if the minister couldn’t be there, Solomon could go because he was a deacon, but he couldn’t bear to go alone. Surely the minister’s wife would be some comfort? Lily ended up asking Hannah, the maid, to come back for a few hours to keep an eye on the Reverend while she herself hiked up over the road in the dark with Sol Sweetapple, and sat for two hours with a dying woman who was more certain to see the face of Jesus when she closed her eyes, Lily thought, than either Lily herself or poor Sol, who could barely stammer out a prayer. It was nearly dawn when Lily got home. She paid the maid extra for staying there all night and never mentioning a word to the Reverend, so that he wouldn’t worry.

It was astonishing, to think of all the work he did, all the troubles people brought to his door. All these years Lily had thought of herself as a model minister’s wife, a perfect helpmeet, but her work had been committee meetings and sales of work and fundraising concerts. People did not pour out their hearts or ask her for help: she was surprised they did so to her husband. She had never thought of him as a particularly tender soul—not like Grace, always looking for hard-luck cases—but perhaps once the clerical collar was on, the hard cases sought him out naturally.

The only blessing Lily could count that spring was that she was sleeping better now; she was so exhausted when she fell into bed every night—the hard narrow bed off the study where her husband had slept most of his married life—she slept for four or five hours before she woke to look at the dark sky outside the window and wonder how she would get through another day.

One afternoon she came downstairs balancing a tray with a teacup, a bowl of custard, and a plate of bread crusts. She was trying him with a little toast now, hoping to tempt him towards solid food, though he could only nibble it if he soaked it well in tea
first. He had gotten through half a slice of toast and Lily wanted to believe that meant he was getting better, that things would soon be back to normal. How little she had appreciated normal, when she had it.

“Mother. Can I take that?”

Grace stood in the hall, with her trunk at her feet. Lily stopped on the stairs, holding the tray before her.

“Mrs. Perry wrote me,” Grace said. “She wrote to say you looked completely worn out, that Papa was still bedridden most of the time, and that she thought you wouldn’t ask for help but needed it. So here I am.”

“How long for?”

“As long as you need me. I resigned my position at Gower Street. Now, let me take that tray.” She took it out of Lily’s hands, and went to the kitchen, and Lily followed her.

T
HEY FOUND A rhythm of working together that summer: Lily, Grace, and Hannah. Hannah cooked dinner for Lily and Grace, and cleaned the house, which included cleaning the sick room. Lily made the Reverend’s meals, bland dishes he could tolerate, and brought them up to him. She also did a little cooking for herself and Grace on Hannah’s day off. Grace did little in the kitchen, except to pitch in when asked, but she met with the deacons and told them when questions were too petty to disturb her father, then referred church members back to those same deacons when they had problems. Visitors who came with kindly intent had to visit with Grace first before she decided whether the Reverend felt up to seeing them that day. She also sat with her father for hours, reading to him when he was too tired to read for himself.

This was, Lily thought, the greatest advantage to having Grace at home, both for herself and for the Reverend. Before Grace came, he had complained that Lily was so busy, she had no time to keep him company. As if she ever had! Keeping each other company had not been a feature of their marriage, but now that he suffered enforced
idleness he was desperate for a companion. Grace was the perfect person to fill that role.

When they first came back from St. John’s after the operation, Lily had imagined her husband back to his usual routine within a few weeks. The reality was different. By midsummer, in the warm muggy days of July, he was able to get up during the day for longer periods, to sit in a chair on the front porch and watch the busy activity of an outport at the height of the fishing season. Grace often sat with him and they watched the small boats, which had put out to sea in the predawn hours, coming back to shore at midday. The Reverend recognized the different boats and could name the men in them even from a distance. From the porch of the manse they could see the men at the wharves unloading the fish, then joining the women at the flakes, gutting and splitting and laying the fish out to dry, acres of white cod open to the sun. These were the fishing families who stayed and fished Trinity Bay over the summer; many more went off to the Labrador and the Reverend was always accustomed to his smaller congregation during the summer months.

He said he was writing a sermon, that he would preach again soon, but in July the deacons were still taking turns at preaching. One hot afternoon Lily stood in the kitchen making raspberry jam, listening as her husband and daughter talked on the porch. Grace had been reading him one of John Wesley’s sermons and they ended up talking about heaven.

“You can’t say it in the pulpit at a funeral of course, but I’ve always had my doubts that our ideas about heaven are very Biblical,” the Reverend said. “You know, floating about on clouds, becoming guardian angels…”

“Playing golden harps?” Grace suggested.

“Yes, all that—it comes from bad hymns and worse religious literature, not from the Scriptures. Jesus called death a sleep, and the Bible talks about a resurrection at the end of time, not about floating
off to heaven—I do wonder about it sometimes—read an interesting sermon on the topic years ago...I wish I remembered who it was by.”

“But I suppose people would be very shocked if the minister suggested poor Nan wasn’t in heaven right at the moment,” Grace said.

“Oh, shocked indeed—keeping your more troublesome questions to yourself is part of being a clergyman. So good to have someone as intelligent as yourself to discuss it all with,” he said. “You know, you’d be a better preacher than either Abel Courage or Solomon Sweetapple. I ought to get you up in the pulpit on Sunday morning!” He laughed a faint, wheezy laugh.

Lily poured her jam into jars, hearing in that laughter a faint echo down the years. Young Obadiah Collins, chuckling at the thought that if women were allowed at the ballot-box, they might someday dream of standing in the pulpit. And young Lily Hunt disdaining him for his backward views, though never brave enough to say it to his face.

She laid the jam jars aside, each one a dark red jewel in the sun that slanted through the window. She wiped down the counter, then dried her hands on her apron and took it off. Outside, Grace’s voice and the Reverend’s rose and fell out on the porch, as steady a background as the surf on the beach. Lily had heard tell that the round beach rocks down by the shore had not always looked like that: it was the effect of thousands of years of the ocean wearing away at them that had smoothed their edges and made them what they were. So decades of life seemed to have done to the Reverend: smoothed the edges of his opinions to the point where he could chuckle about his daughter preaching sermons.

She went to the front door and hesitated before pushing it open, not wanting to interrupt them. The Reverend seemed well and happy when he was talking theology with Grace. The two of them were a small world unto themselves, and Lily had nothing to say about theology, about the Biblical concept of heaven. For many years now
her concerns had been entirely earthly. But she went out onto the porch and sat on a chair a few feet away from them, listening to their talk, thinking about waves wearing away at beach rocks.

She wondered if it was possible that her husband had actually forgotten, after all these years, how he and Lily had first come together? He had never known David Reid’s name; only that Lily had kept the company of suffragists and been friends with frivolous Abby Hayward. He knew that Lily had been unchaste with some nameless man who left her with child and did not marry her. Surely he had not forgotten! Surely he knew how the wrong associations could lead a girl down the wrong path. And not every girl would have an Obadiah Collins to rescue her. Grace had only shiftless Jack Perry, no use to any woman.

But his little jest about Grace preaching a sermon had been ten minutes ago and Lily could not drag it up again only to point out that it was a mistake to put such thoughts in a girl’s head. They were talking about heaven again, and Lily willed herself to sit and listen, and not interfere.

“Still, I do want to preach about heaven if I can do it without treading on too many toes,” the Reverend said. “At least, I want to preach about the hope of the resurrection. I tried to preach something of the sort after our Charley was killed but—I don’t think my heart was in it, then. I couldn’t persuade even myself. Now that I’ve had my own brush with mortality—well, perhaps I have a new perspective. But I don’t find I have the strength to write for more than half an hour or so at a time.”

“You could dictate to me,” Grace offered. “That would save your strength.”

“Well now my dear, that’s a fine offer, I may just do that. I may just.” And something else in his words gave Lily a little heartfall then, to hear how easily he accepted his status as an invalid.

Yet he did climb into the pulpit and preach on the last Sunday in
August, and again for the next two Sundays, each sermon dictated by him and written out by Grace. His voice lacked the volume of his old pulpit delivery. But the congregation were so glad to have him back preaching again they would have forgiven him anything, and as these post-illness sermons were shorter than his standard forty-five minutes, perhaps they were glad for other reasons too.

On the third Sunday that the Reverend preached, Jack Perry sat with Grace and Lily in the Collins family pew. He had arrived two days earlier on the Labrador steamer, and that evening Grace sat down with her mother at the kitchen table over a cup of tea.

“Mother, Jack and I are going to get married. We’d like Papa to perform the ceremony, if he feels up to it.”

“Is that how it’s done now? ‘Jack and I are getting married’? When your father proposed to me he went to speak to my father about it; we didn’t sit my parents down and announce it was happening. Times have changed.” Lily wished there were a way to take back words once spoken: she hadn’t meant to sound bitter. She ought to be wishing Grace happiness, however slim she thought the chances were. And she ought not to lie about her own marriage. She and the Reverend had, after all, discussed the plan before he ever went to her father with a proposal.

“Yes, times have changed.” Grace’s tone, too, was sharp. Then she drew a deep breath and added, “Of course Jack will still speak to Papa. Only I wanted to talk to you first, not about the wedding, but about what happens afterwards.”

For a terrifying moment Lily thought Grace meant to ask her about the marital act. To deflect that possibility she said, “I suppose you’re going off to the wilds of Labrador after him, are you? Going to live life in a tilt like a trapper?”

“Right now we both feel—well, we want to stay here. I don’t want to leave you to care for Papa alone.”

“Your father is getting better. He won’t need much care, soon.”

Grace looked down into her teacup. “I know you want to believe that, Mother, and so do I, but I really don’t think it’s true. Cancer is a difficult thing. With winter coming on, I’d feel better if Jack and I were here to help you. Jack can find work with his father or with Mr. Coaker in Port Union. He agrees I need to be close to you and Papa until—well, while Papa’s so ill.”

She had been going to say,
Until Papa dies
. Those words, even left unspoken, hanging in the air of the room, took the heart from Lily. She wanted to be strong, to need no one, but she nodded. “Of course you and Jack are welcome to stay,” she said. “I would be—I’d be glad to have you.”

Grace and Jack’s wedding was as simple as Lily’s own had been. The Reverend, his voice a bit thready and his hands trembling, pronounced them man and wife in the parlour of the manse with only the two sets of parents present. It was the Reverend who suggested that Jack move into their house with Grace rather than the both of them moving over to the Perry house. They moved the big double bed into Grace’s room. Lily kept her old bedroom, but with the narrow single bed from Grace’s room. They moved the Reverend’s bed down to what used to be the good parlour on the main floor, nearer the lavatory. Lily watched him walk down over the stairs to his new room and thought,
He’ll never go up those stairs again.

That week after the wedding was a great upheaval, everyone moving things about and trying to let the Reverend rest as much as possible. Late one night Lily went up to the attic with a box of old clothes too worn out even to give to the poor. After Christmas, perhaps, she’d start on some rag rugs. Grace and Jack were unpacking boxes in Grace’s old room.

“Are you ready to pack your dolls away now that you’re a married woman?” Lily heard Jack say. There was teasing laughter in his tone; Lily thought of how long it had been since she had heard that note in a man’s voice.

“Not that one!” Grace protested. “That’s Henrietta, she was my favourite toy. Mother bought her for me in Toronto and I thought she was the most beautiful thing ever. I was afraid to play with her because I thought she’d get broken, but I’d lie here in bed looking at her up on her shelf and make up the most fantastic stories about her adventures—I had her travelling the world, climbing the Himalayas—I even wrote a little book about her,
The Adventures of Henrietta
, in one of my old scribblers. It’s probably still around here somewhere.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised—everything else seems to be here somewhere,” Jack said, and there was the laughing, scuttling sound of two young people in love mock-fighting, a sound Lily knew would end with a kiss. Ashamed to be eavesdropping she hurried off to the attic stair as Jack said, “All right, Henrietta can stay!” And up in the attic, above the muffled sound of the newlyweds making love under Henrietta’s glassy eyes, Lily sat on the lid of a trunk and put her face in her hands and cried ’til sobs shook her whole body.

At the end of October the last Labrador steamer left port. Jack had given his notice at the Battle Harbour hospital and they had someone else to replace him. So he and Grace would stay, for the winter anyway. That was the morning Lily went to the Reverend’s room to bring in his cream of wheat and found that he had soiled his sheets, not being able to get up to get to the lavatory or even the chamber pot. He lay there like a child, without shame, only wanting to be helped and cleaned up.

Lily set to the work, lifting him to his feet and putting him in a chair while she called Grace down to help her clean up the bed. As she helped him over to the chair she felt how light his once stout body had gotten. It was Jack who, when the bed and the Reverend had both been cleaned up, picked him up like a child and carried him back to bed.

Throughout the fall, the deacons continued to take the sermons; once or twice Jack preached, and he was better than the deacons but not as good, Lily thought, as Grace would have been. Then the circuit
wrote to say they were sending a supply minister to fill in as long as needed. The new supply minister and the deacons managed things: there was no longer a need for anyone to ask the Reverend to make decisions or give advice. Mr. Coaker—Sir William Coaker, now, the King had given him a knighthood—came by to visit two or three times before he went to his winter home in Jamaica. The visits were short ones; Obadiah Collins had no more strength for long conversations.

On Christmas morning Jack and Grace got the Reverend up in his chair after breakfast. Lily had ordered gifts from the Eaton’s catalogue earlier in the fall: a handsome new watch for Jack; a gold locket for Grace. Grace’s wedding band was the plainest gold circlet and she had no other jewellery. Lily wanted to see her in something lovely, for her to have at least one nice piece to wear.

“Oh, Mother, how pretty,” Grace said, and Lily felt at once that the word
pretty
was a reproach, that the gift was frivolous. Grace was such a serious girl, but what should she have gotten her? Jack had given Grace a book, a big heavy thing of essays or something, which seemed to please her more than the locket, though later in the day, when the young couple went out to have dinner with Jack’s parents, Grace wore the locket.