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sixty-eight, still went to work in his printshop every day. Aunt Daisy was a vigorous, chatty woman ten years younger than her husband. She was as much involved in the church women’s guild and the WPA here in St. John’s as Grace’s mother was back in Catalina, but Daisy’s involvement had a different quality than Lily’s. Daisy was a follower rather than a leader, one who welcomed circles of women into her home to knit and sew because she enjoyed their company and likedfeeding them home-baked treats, without needing to lay down the law to them.
    Grace had lived with her grandfather and Daisy for a year and a half now, since the fall of 1917, when she finished work in the Fishermen’s Protective Union office and moved to St. John’s. Grandfather Hunt would not agree to her taking the VAD course without her parents’ permission, but Aunt Daisy convinced him to allow Grace to stay with them in town as long as she was doing “something suitable,” which Grace took to mean something other than a paying job that her family might see as beneath her. She volunteered three days a week at Empire Hospital and two days at the Poor Asylum, and taught a girls’ Sunday School class at Cochrane Street Methodist church.
    “Good day, Miss Collins,” the matron, Miss Fitzpatrick, said as Grace came onto the ward, took off her coat and hung it up, and went to wash her hands. The hospital was understaffed and while Matron had little use for young lady volunteers who were too good to train as nurses yet wanted to be seen as do-gooders, she needed them. With the returning soldiers and the flu epidemic, volunteers who were actually willing to roll up their sleeves and work eventually earned her grudging respect. “Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Barry need their sheets changed and nobody’s got time to do it. Then you might read to Mr. Barry. He’s very unsettled.”
    Mr. Barry liked to hear selections from the Book of Common Prayer when the nightmares of shell shock kept him from sleep. He had a loving mother and sisters out in Humbermouth who could presumably be reading the Morning Service to him, but they had come on the train to visit him and could not bear to be in his presence for more than a few moments. He lost his nose, one eye, an ear, and a piece of his jaw on the Somme; his face was a cratered map of the Western Front and its horrors. He needed help to eat, though he could walk about fine on his own. Except for the ruin of his faceand the rattle in his lungs he was otherwise hale. Even some of the nurses had trouble looking at him, but Grace found, to her surprise, that the sight of maimed faces did not revolt or horrify her. A face was still a face, after all. Mr. Barry’s eyes were the colour of deep-woods ponds, brackish and still. She looked mostly into his eyes, but she did not shrink from the rest of his face, and she knew that he appreciated that more than her readings from the prayer book.
    He told her once that he liked to hear the prayer book because he had planned to be a minister. At least, that was what she pieced together out of the tortured sounds he was able to get out. Speech was difficult for him, but Grace imagined that in another life Mr. Barry might have been a good minister. A better preacher, perhaps, than her father. Reverend Obadiah Collins was a great Bible student but he lacked the gift to convey what he had dug out of his Greek lexicon in a form that would excite the fishermen and their families in the pews. When she was young, Grace used to think her father was awkward in the pastoral role, as well, trying to comfort the afflicted, but that had changed since Charley’s death. Parishioners seemed drawn to him now.
    People were naturally suspicious, Grace thought—they didn’t really believe that a preacher could understand their pain unless he had suffered pain himself. It was a shame Mr. Barry couldn’t be a minister. Surely a man who had survived the trenches and come back with half a face, but with