Free A Sudden Sun by Trudy Morgan-Cole Page B

ever did.
    In Grace’s room, she thought, there would be old clothing she could tear up for polishing rags. Grace had never cleared out the room because she had not really moved out. Not like a girl did when she got married. This gadding off to St. John’s, volunteering at thehospital, trying to be a career girl—none of that ever lasted, did it? Fishermen’s daughters went off into service and ministers’ daughters taught school or did good works. No girl truly left home until she got married.
    Lily had moved out of her old room in her parents’ house when she married the Reverend, but even she had left things behind, old clothes, scraps of paper, and bits of writing and letters. Things she could not imagine taking with her into married life. Nothing that could reveal any secrets to a curious eye, should anyone ever search there—she had burned all the dangerous papers.
    Grace’s room had the untidy look of a place the owner intended to return to, which both irritated and comforted Lily. She never went into Charley’s room. After word had come of his loss she had locked the door and never entered it. She wasn’t keeping the room like a shrine, as some foolish women did. It was as if the room had ceased to exist at all, like a piece torn off the house.
    In Grace’s top drawer Lily found something she could tear up to make rags: an old blouse, far too small—something Grace had worn when she was eight or ten years old. Beneath it was a hand-made rag doll; a gift from Daisy when Grace was about six. They had been living—where, then? Before Elliston…oh, those were the years over on Cape Freels, the most godforsaken spot on earth. So Grace had dragged some of this stuff in her little trunk from Cape Freels to Elliston and then from Elliston to Catalina. They would have been packed up and gone to another place by now—the Methodist circuit liked to shuffle their ministers around—except that they were having a hard time finding a minister for Catalina so they were leaving Reverend Collins there for now. Another postwar shortage, Lily supposed.
    She stood holding the cloth doll in her hands. It was a faded little thing, stuffed, she thought, with cotton batting, buttons sewn on for eyes. Grace used to streel it about with her everywhere andsleep with it at night. One arm hung half-off. Lily had a vivid memory of coming into Grace’s room one day to find Grace cradling the doll and crooning to it, “My babby…My babby…My babby.” It had startled Lily because that was what she had called both Charley and Grace when they were little, “My babby.” But only for such a short time, when they were babies and it felt safe to be sentimental. She had stopped it, she was sure, by the time they were both weaned, if not before. She had always been careful to call them by their names and address them in proper English, no foolish baby-talk.
    The year Grace was ten and Charley thirteen, Lily had accompanied the Reverend to some church meetings in Toronto—the one and only trip she and her husband had taken off the island together. In a store on Yonge Street, Lily had seen a doll: eighteen inches tall, dressed in a gown of real green velvet trimmed with lace, face and hands of exquisite china, real hair with a lovely auburn sheen, and emerald eyes that opened and closed. She bought it for Grace, had it packed in its own special box with layers of protective fabric and straw to preserve it for its long journey home on the train and steamer. She had bought a gift for Charley too of course—a toy fire-engine, she thought—but it was the doll for Grace that absorbed all her thoughts.
    Grace’s reaction had been gratifying. Her eyes had been wide and her mouth an O of delight. She had said it was the most beautiful doll in the world. She put it on its own shelf in her room and there it stayed; that doll, too, had moved from one parsonage to another, though by the time they got to Catalina, Grace had been too old for dolls.