A Sudden Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

but Mr. Coaker was. Her father had introduced her to the great man months ago. Now she walked up to him boldly, like a brave girl who would defy her parents’ wishes and make her own way in the world. If I play the role well enough , Grace thought, someday it just might be truth .
    “So you’re not going back to teaching, Miss Collins?” Mr. Coaker said when Grace had explained what she wanted.
    “No, sir, I want to do something for the war effort. But I need to earn money this summer. I can take dictation, I have my second-class certificate, and my penmanship is excellent.”
    William Coaker sat behind his desk and looked out over the FPU office, at the busy hum of people coming and going with messages, articles being written for his newspaper, the Fisherman’s Advocate , work orders going out for the new construction, shipping records for all the things coming in to Port Union, and the salt fish that would go out from there into the markets of the world. From the muffled ladylike stillness of her mother’s parlour to this humming place, this masculine busy world—this was exactly the journey Grace wanted to make.
    “I may have something for you here in the office,” he said. “Just temporarily—during the fishing season. Let me see what I can do for you.”

Grace
CHAPTER THREE
    F ROM HER GRANDFATHER’S house on Queen’s Road to the Empire Hospital was a short stroll on a cool spring day. Grace enjoyed the walk through downtown St. John’s: down over Prescott Street, across Duckworth, then on to Water Street. She liked being greeted by the giant advertisement for Minard’s Liniment, King of Pain, on the side of O’Driscoll’s. She loved the busy swarm of women going into stores and coming out with brown-paper parcels, men in their suits and hats entering office buildings, workmen in overalls going to the stonecutters’ yard. The returned servicemen were recognizable by their military stride even when their regimental uniforms had been exchanged for civilian clothes. They looked strong and handsome and whole, these men who had come back unscathed.
    At the corner of Hill o’ Chips on the eastern end of Water Street stood the hospital, recently opened to deal with the growing numbers of wounded men returning from overseas. The building had once been a woodworking factory and a small section at the back was still used as a bakery, so the warm yeasty smell of bread andcakes mingled with the stench of antiseptics and illness. The men at the hospital were not the ones whose military stride identified them on the street. These men were not paraded out at dinner parties or honoured at Government House.
    The armistice had been signed six months ago; soldiers and sailors returned on every ship that sailed from England these days. Grace had long since given up wishing her brother Charley had been wounded instead of killed two years ago at Monchy-le-Preux. Death was cleaner. She saw the broken men every day, brought them their soup and sometimes helped them drink it, looked into their bottomless eyes. The perfect wound she dreamed of for Charley—one that would get him out of the war alive but leave him whole and unblighted—did not exist. There were only two ways to end a war well. Either miraculously survive unharmed or die cleanly, leaving your family with a framed picture of a hero on the wall.
    Grace went home at Christmas, to spend the holiday with her parents in the manse where Charley’s picture hung in the parlour. Whatever celebration of the war’s end that took place in Catalina happened in church and in the homes of her friends. No celebration in Reverend Collins’s home, where the declaration of peace was a reminder of all they had lost.
    It was a relief to return to St. John’s, despite her love for home and the excitement that seemed to hum through the air of Port Union along with the new electric power lines. Her grandfather’s house was less gloomy than her parents’. Grandfather Hunt, at