Lily's Story (105 page)

The rap on the door jolted her upright and
awake in one motion. Hap never knocked. The rapping came again,
magnified by the dark, twisted by the wind-blown rain. Loud but not
regular enough to be official. As she started for the door, candle
in hand, it came again, rattling the hinges in its urgency. One of
Hap’s boys, was her only thought as she lifted the latch and let
the door swing inward.

A man stood there blinking at the flame and
the wash of interior heat over him. He was a hobo, no doubt just
off the express. The rain had smeared soot into grotesque shapes
over his face. He wore a battered fedora and a wool overcoat three
sizes too large and soaked right through. He was holding a rumpled
package in his hands as if it were fragile and some kind of
offering. He stared at her as if he ought to know her and were
waiting for her to confirm his assumption. For a second she was
blinded by the whites of his eyes refracting the bent
candle-flame.

As she started instinctively back, he
stepped forward, and pulling up the canvas flap shielding the gift
in his arms, Bradley said in a consumptive whisper, “It’s me, Mama.
I’ve come home.”

She fell back as if struck.

“
And this is Eddie,” he
said, lifting the baby’s face into view.

Eddie

50

1

G
ranny Coote sat by
the window looking over at the altered landscape to the west,
wondering vaguely when Mr. Stadler would arrive to begin the
transformation, and finally drifting into a doze. “After wars,
pestilence,” Cap had told her many times. You were right, for once,
she thought. She let the events of that extraordinary month in 1918
pass before her for Cap’s skeptical appraisal.

S
ometime in the middle
of the night of October 1, Oliver Fletcher sneezed. Just a cold but
worrisome nonetheless because Ollie had been gassed at Ypres and
returned home with half-a-lung. Young boys stopped him on the
street and asked to hear him breathe. By mid-day he was running a
fever. Five-year-old Barbie Savage, who’d survived scarlet fever
and whooping cough, stopped playing with her china-head doll and
asked to be put down for her nap an hour early. Chuck Simmers,
delivering bread, felt a stab of pain in his lower back: lumbago.
He headed for the Richmond House and some afternoon
solace.

There was considerable
unease along Charles Street at the sight of dear young Dr. Simon,
black bag in hand, hurrying up to the Fletcher house and entering
without a knock or by-your-leave. By suppertime everyone knew that
Ollie had died: poison gas. A hero.

Still, no one was seen
going in or out of the stricken house. It was morning before the
undertaker arrived from Sarnia. Mrs. Carpenter, a lifelong friend,
was observed about noon on her way to Mrs. Fletcher’s with a soup
tureen, still steaming. Barbie Savage refused to get up from her
nap. A fever took hold of her in the early hours. Dr. Simon rushed
in. Neither of the Savage twins was seen on the streets that
evening. Chuck Simmers had to be carried home from the hotel in his
wagon. He swore he’d only had two drafts. By morning his wife had
covered him with three blankets and he was calling for more. By the
time Dr. Simon arrived, his lips were beginning to turn blue, a
deep lassitude had taken possession, and he mistook the doctor for
his horse. Mrs. Simmers locked the children in their
rooms.

Some sort of
collective distemper seemed to have struck the village. Sailors
just off the boats were ordered to stay on the docks. Two who
slipped undetected into the Mens at the Richmond House found
themselves in a scuffle, then a punch-up in the alley, and finally
were dragged to the wharf and dumped. Any stranger on the street
was eyed with suspicion, rudely dealt with by junior clerks,
welcomed out of tow
n. Among
friends, customers and neighbours tempers were short: a lifelong
word misunderstood, taken wrongly, newly resented. “The war’s been
goin’ on too long,” grocer Redmond said to his wife before bed,
“people are gettin’ squirrely.” “Too many false stories about an
armistice,” Maxie Wise opined to his wife already in bed, “You
can’t keep raisin’ people’s hopes like that.”

Next day while
the hearse carrying Ollie Fletcher’s body to the cemetery passed by
a weeping crowd of mourners along Michigan Ave., news arrived of
the deaths of little Barbie and Chuck Simmers. Turned blue an’
died, both of
’em, the rumour
rippled west to east following the black cassion of the fallen
soldier.
Flu
.

G
ranny heard the
church bells tolling their dark news. She saw the hearses from
Sarnia passing her house en route to one of the three churches on
the main street. She saw the toy coffin being carried from the
Savage’s house. She saw the white wreath on the door. She tried to
make room in her heart for the grief of a child’s death. It was
hard.

F
or days no one seemed
to pass by her window, at least not while she was looking. The
recess bell from the school stopped ringing in mid-morning. Twice
more that week she was roused by a carillon of death – all three
belfries lamenting in unison. Dr. Simon went into the Savage house
again. He was wearing a surgical mask. That Sunday no bells
proclaimed heaven to the faithful. Two figures in white – masked –
hurried past and into Mrs. Carpenter’s next door. A mother’s cry
scattered the eerie Sunday silence. For two years now Granny had
not ventured beyond the front gate or the back hedge. Her tongue
had paralyzed itself. She had nothing to say. She had nothing to
give.

On Monday morning she went out
to look at the village.

T
he sun was bright,
the air dry and warm. She was alone on St. Clair Street. Not a soul
stirred on verandah or waved from hedge or fence. Not a single door
or window stood open to the breeze, to the rare sweetness of
autumn. As she passed familiar doorways, she felt curtains part and
fall behind her. Leila Savage, eyes red-rimmed above her gauze
mask, kept her glassy stare aimed straight ahead as she went by.
She was carrying a crockery pot wrapped in a towel. On Michigan
Ave. several figures, head down, walked briskly towards some
overweening imperative, as if any contact with the streets
themselves were irrelevant, hazardous even. Several women came out
of the back entrance of the Anglican Church – not saying a word –
reached the sidewalk and parted company silently, pretending their
momentary meeting was accidental. The town gossips, she thought,
amazed. She turned into the churchyard. Alien ground. A chill, all
over. She was walking on the moon, the back side.

In the
vestibule she heard the minister’s wife say that they had more food
than they could use, wasn’t it wonderful how generous people were
in a crisis, and so on, but they needed volunteers to take it into
the worst houses, some of which, like the McLeod clan farther down
the Lane, had not been checked at all – perhaps they were all dead.
She felt the astonishment of the Anglican ladies upon her as she
reached out for a tureen of soup. Mrs. Stokes handed her a mask.
She shook her head no. It had begun. Without a
word
.

O
n this part of the
Lane noise was usually continuous and varied: babies crying in
several keys of displeasure, the shouts of unincarcerated children,
the bawl of a calf or pig or battered wife. At this moment not even
the chickens flicked an eyelid. Here silence had become something
positive, not an absence but an embodiment of something foul oozing
out of the cracks in the house, under the doors, through a
fist-size hole in a window-pane, and settling over the styes and
coops and hutches where animals squeezed in the darkest corners and
watched, without hope.

She walked
briskly. There was need. She stepped over the debris in the yard of
Jessie McLeod’s shack, wishing she could call out some warning,
some comforting salutation. She banged the tureen, still steaming,
against the door. No sound from within. She turned the knob and
leaned inward. Then she glanced down and saw the jamb that had been
wedged against the world.
She
waited. She heard breathing on the other side of the door, shallow
but quick. A child’s. ” She fought the urge to speak, knowing what
chaos that would bring. Instead she began to hum, searching for a
tune and keeping her voice soft and lullaby-low. Something ticked –
tentatively, weakly – at the shim. It popped loose. Seconds later,
still humming, she felt the door drawn backwards into whatever fear
had seized the interior and its inhabitants. She saw a black-haired
McLeod child. No mistake. A girl about five-years-old.

Granny smiled or at least she
thought she did because the child did too. Granny edged into the
gloomy ‘front room’ of the shack.

“
Mommy won’t
wake up,” the child said. “We’re hungry but Pa says he’ll whip us
if we go out.” She began to weep, not in the sobbing, physical
manner of children but in the quiet, foreknowing way of stricken
adults.

Granny put her
hand on the little girl’s shoulder: the touch was electric. She
strode to a table, put the food down, and went through some
curtains into a bedroom. Jessie – barely thirty, one of Eddie’s
playmates – lay propped up on two filthy pillows, her eyes closed,
feigning sleep, feigning peace – for the children’s sake. Beside
the bed was a home-made cradle. Granny reached down to grasp the
baby’s hand. It was as stiff as a doll’s. Clo
sing the curtains, she went into the next room.
Three mattresses, salvaged from the dump, had been laid out on the
floor. Sam McLeod – Jessie’s second cousin, sweetheart, then
husband – lay naked on one of them, shivering and moving his lips
in soundless, misshapen moans. His three boys were huddled under
covers nearby, alive but unable to acknowledge her presence, their
eyes glazed, all their weeklong aching passed into painless
languor. She felt for fever, there was none. One of the boys, the
youngest, let his eyes loll over to try to take her in. Through his
puffed lips she heard him whisper: “Are you an angel?”

Granny set
about her work, little ‘Claire’ at her heels. Pillows were
improvised so the boys could be propped up, washed and fed a drop
or two of soup. Sam was made warm and as comfortable as possible.
He couldn’t take any food. Claire ate ravenously, and turned
chatty. Granny sent her in to cheer up her brothers while she
washed and wrapped the bodies in the other room. Then she went next
door to Katie McLeod’s. Katie’s face appeared in the window. “We’re
all right,” she mouthed. “Go away, please.” Granny gestured
and pointed towards her
sister-in-law’s place, trying to convey with her eyes the dread
news. The curtain was whipped shut. Moments later a male voice
said: “Get out of here, old woman, an’ leave us alone!”

She walked all the way back to
young Dr. Simon’s house on Alfred Street. She sat on the stoop and
waited for him to return. Out of the surgery window his nurse
glanced from time to time, not unkindly. Young Dr. Simon, the first
physician ever to have his residence in the village, pale and
solemn, followed her to the Lane. When he had finished inside, he
said to her, “We need you very much, Mrs. Coote. You come to my
office in the mornings if you can, and I’ll tell you where to go
and how to help.” He touched her hand, the way Eddie used to when
he needed her approval.

P
eople entered the
shops singly – no more than one or two or three at any one time in
the baker’s or grocer’s or post office. No one deemed a haircut
necessary. The clerks stayed behind their barricades, pointing and
giving directions. When Granny entered Redmond’s, unmasked and
brisk, the few customers trapped there dissolved into shadow behind
the pickle barrel or a stack of canned goods, giving out tiny
warning coughs every few seconds. Any movement quicker than the
cautious, underwater strokes of the fear-struck was enough to send
panic rippling through a store or along the fringes of a street.
When people did talk, as those in charge had to, they spoke in
slow-motion, in tune with their hushed gestures. Still, rumours
managed to slide freely along an edge of communal fear, snuffling
at doorways, abbreviating gossip, waylaying the weak and
faint-of-heart.

It’s the Gerries, that’s what!
It’s them new-fangled electrical lights, interferin’ with Nature.
It’s the foreigners, we never should’ve let them in. It comes in on
the trains, like all our trouble – goddamn the railways! It floats
in on the wind: close your windows, close your mouths, close your
hearts.

On Sundays the bells held
their peace. During the week the whole village waited in dread for
their sombre pealing. In Sarnia they had run out of coffins before
the ides of the month.

M
rs. Stokes had
everything ready for her at the Church each morning, afternoon and
evening: food, aspirin, quinine, clean bedding. Dr. Simon was too
busy now: he left instructions and disappeared. He looked
sixty-years-old, and haunted. One by one the volunteers themselves
went down. More were needed; few could be found. Neighbours lived
in fear not only of the pestilence – now spread to every street and
lane – but of the cry from the door or a child with a name on the
verandah begging help, the dreadful decision to be made in an
instant and unretractable. Mrs. Carpenter walked down to her
sister’s with a bundle of food, and stood for ten minutes on the
front porch before entering the diseased rooms within. The next day
her whole body went numb. She lay helpless while six-year-old David
and the three-year-old peered at her with puzzled faces. Eventually
David started to cry; Flora wandered into the shed and began to
play with her doll. It was still light when Granny came by – her
day spent in ceaseless walking, washing the living and the dead,
holding the children stiffly in her arms, and bearing the useless
medicines of the day – unable to utter a single word of comfort or
goodbye. Flora’s face was pressed against the front window. Granny
turned and went in.