A Sudden Sun Page 32

  In the spring that followed that endless winter she did escape. Then she cabled the Reverend from Halifax and he sent the money for her to return. He even came to Port aux Basques to meet her steamer, though whether that was to help her or to make sure she really came back, Lily never knew. He said that he knew her mind must still be unbalanced over the loss of the baby. He said, “I forgive you. Only you mustn’t try to run away again; you must learn to be content.”

  She did not run away again but she did not learn to be content either. She learned other things. She learned to be the minister’s wife, to rule the manse and the Sunday School and the Ladies’ Aid with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. She learned to take pleasure in a well-run household, in a well-organized parish. She learned to admire newly hooked rugs and rows of jelly preserves on her pantry shelf.

  She learned to share a bed with her husband and to banish all thoughts of David Reid. She learned how very much her husband enjoyed playing the role of Hosea, the godly man who took back the wayward wife. She learned there was a kind of power in being Gomer, too, in being the wife of a man who knew she wanted to leave. She learned that he had changed the key to his strongbox, and hidden the new key where she could not find it.

  Never once, in all that time, did Lily feel content. Resigned, perhaps. Not content. Then Charley was born. Lily held him in her arms and thought, This is my reward. And again, three years and two miscarriages later, Grace. She had her son and her daughter, and she loved them with a love more fierce than she had ever felt for David Reid. From the moment each of them left her body, her only fear was that she would lose them.

  Her children were her consolation, but she didn’t want to raise them in godforsaken fishing villages. They deserved better than that. Lily waited out those first years in Greenspond and thought that if her husband were more ambitious they might get back to St. John’s someday. Instead they moved from one outport to another, each as barren and poverty-stricken as the last.

  Since William Coaker had moved to Port Union people said it was as good as being in town, that Port Union had everything St. John’s had. Lily laughed at them—to herself, of course. Port Union was a freak, an American town built on top of a Newfoundland outport, with the skeleton showing through. It was nothing like St. John’s, the city she loved and almost never returned to. Once every year or two, with the Reverend, who did not let her travel alone now. She saw her parents, returned for her mother’s funeral but not for her father’s remarriage to the entirely inappropriate Daisy Gill, her old Sunday School teacher. She wrote Abby Hayward Parker one letter a year at Christmas. She knew every woman in every town they lived in; she drank tea in the kitchens of fisherwomen just come in from making fish on the flakes and she sat on committees with the wives of merchants who sent their children to school in England. She never made another close woman friend, not after Abby Hayward and Jessie Ohman had both led her astray. She would never again love anyone but her children, Lily promised herself.

  Now the children were gone—Charley dead and Grace gone away. She had fought with all the strength she had to protect them, to spare them suffering, and to keep Grace, at least, safe by her side. You couldn’t do that to a son, but a daughter, surely, you could shelter from the world. But not Grace. She was as headstrong and eager for the world as young Lily had been years ago. Lily had lost her children after all; she had not been able to keep them safe, any more than Lily’s own parents had kept her safe.

  Lily had seen it when Grace came home for a few days in the fall—her first visit home in ages, and she had barely pitched long enough to look around. She was off out the door with young Jack Perry, that useless know-nothing, as soon as she had her bags laid down. He had been down on the Labrador for, what, a year or more? Lily thought the whole business of Jack going off to work for that Grenfell man was foolishness, but all the same at least while he was in Battle Harbour he wasn’t in St. John’s getting Grace into trouble. The few days they’d spent together here in Catalina—well, Lily was nervous about that. The two of them roamed all over Catalina and Port Union those warm summer days and evenings. Grace was all full of high ideals and as righteous as a preacher, but then Lily herself had been that way once, and her high ideals had not stopped her from getting up to what she shouldn’t. What would become of Grace if she were in the family way and young Perry was off on the Labrador coast with the Esquimos?

  Now Grace was back in St. John’s and Lily was alone again with the Reverend. He was busy with parish meetings and visiting the sick, reading books and writing sermons, and jawing with William Coaker whenever the old man was in Port Union. Lily had her own kind of busy-ness, organizing the fall sale of work and making sure the new schoolteacher didn’t fool up the Christmas pageant, but what pleasure she took in such things had paled in these last few years. More and more she found herself laying aside work to sit alone with her thoughts, which seemed to grow darker along with the skies of late November.

  She sat in the parlour one chilly morning, crocheting lace edging on a pillowcase for the sale, when the front door opened. Her husband never came home at midmorning; he came for his dinner at twelve o’clock sharp. He stayed in the office at church and wrote his sermons there, and made himself available for parishioners if they needed to drop by with a question or a problem, which they generally did.

  But he was here, at ten-thirty in the morning. He explained he hadn’t been feeling well, was overcome with weakness and—he was going to go on, something about his stomach, but Lily didn’t want to hear indelicate details and told him he should go lie down. He went up to his study, reappeared at lunchtime but ate only a little. Then he had to go again, because he was meeting with someone at the church—some workmen coming to do something to the church, something that needed to be done before winter. The roof? Windows? She wasn’t sure. Apparently it couldn’t be done in summer because the workmen were also fishermen; nothing could be done ’til the fishing was done. At any rate the Reverend went to his meeting and by suppertime seemed quite himself again.

  Lily might have forgotten the odd incident but for what happened later. At the time it was only an interruption between trimming pillowcases and going to play piano for the Christmas concert rehearsal. But later it was from that day, the day of coming home early, that she dated the beginning of what people referred to as All the Reverend’s Trouble.

  The Reverend’s Trouble was a private matter for the first little while—a collection of complaints and ailments that he kept mostly to himself. But there were further interruptions to the routine: a day’s work he could no longer complete, meals he could not eat. “Dyspepsia,” he said. “Indigestion.” It happened often enough that for the first time since she had known him the portly Reverend began to lose weight: his suits hung loose off a diminished frame. When Elizabeth Perry pulled Lily aside after church and said they were all praying for the poor Reverend, Lily adjusted her vision and looked closely at her husband. The man was ill; something would have to be done.

  There was a doctor in Bonavista, but the Reverend would not go to see him, even after the Sunday when he was so ill he could not give the sermon. One of the deacons—a kind and sincere man chosen for his piety and not for his ability to speak in public—had to get up into the pulpit and read out the sermon the Reverend had penned, stumbling over words like “justification” and “sanctification.” Lily sat through the hesitant reading and the concerned questions of the congregation afterwards. She went home to find that her husband had spent the morning vomiting into a chamber pot, and the maid was in tears.

  They were locked hard into winter then. It was January, and hard to go anywhere, much less all the way to Bonavista for the doctor. The Reverend rallied and felt a little better. He preached the next Sunday and thanked everyone for their prayers. But he continued to lose weight. Lily had to take in all his trousers. As she did so she thought, If he really is ill, seriously ill, I will have to care for him, I will have to wipe drops of sweat from his brow and
likely far worse. Even adjusting his pants seemed too intimate.

  For five years, early in her married life—from the time she returned from Halifax to the day she knew she was carrying Grace—Lily had submitted to her husband in the marriage bed, endured his touch frequently enough to conceive four times. After Grace, her second surviving child, was born, she told the Reverend there would be no more. She had the two children, a boy and a girl, and henceforth she would sleep alone.

  He had not been happy about this, had told her it was part of her duty as a wife. He said a man had needs and that as a man of God he was not free to satisfy them elsewhere, so she must save him from sin and allow him back into their bed. She had gambled on the fact that he wasn’t the kind of man to force her, and she was right.

  Now Lily found herself having to go into his bedroom, then switching rooms to give him the more comfortable bed because he so rarely got a good night’s sleep. In February she finally wrote to the Bonavista doctor and asked him to come.

  Lily thought afterwards—she should have realized it beforehand, really—that all her husband’s hesitation, his refusal to call a doctor, had been because he already knew something was far more wrong than dyspepsia. He had wanted to put off the evil day, to avoid having the truth confirmed.

  But it was confirmed, and there was to be a journey to St. John’s for an operation. Much as she hated Catalina, Lily did not enjoy travelling to town. She loved walking through St. John’s shops, fingering lovely bolts of fabric and picking up bone-thin teacups and leafing through brightly coloured magazines, but in the end it only reminded her that such luxuries were not to be had in her everyday life. She came away from a stroll down Water Street more discontented than before. Lily believed, and told others, that everyone should accept her lot in life and make the best of it, but it was harder when she was in St. John’s.

  What she didn’t want was to come to town this way—as the poor relative, the outport minister’s wife, in need of help and pity. She always hoped that when she came her father would feel pleased, would think that this match he had brokered so long ago with had worked out very well. She liked to imagine that Daisy would look at her and think, “Now there’s a real lady,” and that Grace would think, “I wish I could be like my mother—so graceful and composed.” She wanted people to greet her in church and afterwards say to each other, “Ah, Lily Hunt—Lily Collins she is now—she’s done well for herself, hasn’t she?”

  Lily had never admitted these thoughts to herself before but the first night that she spent in the guest-room in her father’s house they all came out and paraded themselves before her. This visit was everything she dreaded: she came to town as a woman in need. Everyone was kind and helpful; Grace and Daisy took turns going to the hospital to sit with the Reverend so that Lily could rest. On the day of the operation Grace sat with Lily all morning in the hospital waiting room.

  “Will you both stay in town while Papa’s convalescing?” Grace asked. “Grandfather and Daisy would be glad to have you.”

  “We’ll stay until your father is well enough to travel. After that, I’m sure he would be more comfortable in his own house.”

  “Then let me come back with you. You’ll need help—more help than a housemaid can give.”

  “What about this precious job of yours? I thought it was so important, you couldn’t leave it to come home for a holiday.”

  “This would be…different. It’s not a holiday. I’m sure the church would understand.”

  “Either your job is important or it’s not; you can’t have it both ways.”

  “Let’s not quarrel, Mama, not while Papa’s in the operating theatre.”

  “It’s good of you to offer, but I’ll manage just fine at home with your father. No need to change any of your…plans.”

  It was a very long operation but the doctor came out afterwards to tell them that he thought it was a success, that he believed they had “got it all.” Then there were days of recovering in hospital and another fortnight at the house on Queen’s Road while the Reverend got back on his feet.

  “On his feet” meant shuffling around the house leaning heavily on a cane, but at least he was getting dressed in suits again instead of wearing a bed-jacket. And his spirits were good: he told everyone that he felt much better, although he still could not eat properly—only thin porridge and custard, and not much of that.

  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 hi
m 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.