Lily's Story (110 page)

“
I ain’t heard
no one proposin’ it.”

“
Well then, if
you don’t approve of Tory policies, then you must be a Grit, deep
down.”

“
Worse than
the Tories by half, they are.”

“
But in Canada
you have to be one or the other. If you’re not a Liberal then
you’ve got to be a Conservative. Red or blue, it’s an
axiom.”

“
I’d put the
axe to both of ’em.”

“
Don’t be
impertinent, Granny Coote.”

T
hough he personally
admired Laurier and his optimism about the Dominion’s place in the
twentieth century, Arthur was a worshipper of the late Sir John A.
Macdonald and his ‘national policy’.

“
The greatest
man North America has ever produced, and that includes Lincoln. The
epitome of the nineteenth century. Out in British Columbia where he
was hated and loved, we called him the Old War Horse. He brought us
the railroad and saved us from the Visigoths of California. He had
a dream bigger than all of us.”

“
Never cared
much for the man,” Granny said as gently as she could.

Arthur peered out of his
reveries long enough to say, “Oh, why is that?”

“
He was a
Scotchman through and through.” And I know, she wanted to say
aloud, I met the gentleman once with his promises down.

Arthur seemed more puzzled than
hurt by this odd remark. Finally he winked omnivorously and said,
“With a Frenchman’s liver, eh?”

“
Don’t be
impertinent.”

G
ranny told Arthur
only those few facts of her own life which she felt he could
withstand. How much he guessed or she gave away, she never knew.
The great advantage, she thought, of
not
having shared the
same past at our advanced age is that we can choose to reinvent
those parts that please us most or offer the best chance for hope
or are necessary to our mutual living, here and now. What we dream
in private must remain mostly our own; there is not time nor words
enough to begin the whole retelling, and that is a blessing in
itself. On his side, Arthur tried many devices to get her talking,
particularly about the ‘pioneer days’ as he called them. One day he
left
The Observer
open at the local page where she
would be sure to see the lead story; it was a feature interview
with one Bessie Sycamore: Pioneer of Warwick Township. Through a
series of adroit questions, the cub reporter was able to elicit
from ninety-year-old Bessie the fact that she had borne fifteen
children in a log cabin snug in the back-bush, eight of whom, she
was proud to say, lived to adulthood. Moreover, she seemed to have
spent six happy, unscathed decades cooking for the survivors and
caring for two husbands, thirty-one grandchildren and uncounted
great-grandchildren. Apparently she was now distressed because just
this year for the first time she had been unable to bake her two
dozen blueberry pies for the church bazaar. Arthritis, you know.
And the secret of her long life? Hard work and prayer twice a
day.

When Arthur
came in from the shed, Granny gave him such a look of malevolence
he thought he must have inadvertently poisoned her tea. But later,
alone, she realized that the article had dismayed her as much as it
had angered her.
Did
such people exist? Were there
ever
lives
like that? Was it possible to watch
seven children perish – who had ripped their way out of your flesh
and seized the air you offered them in hope and trust – could
anyone suffer that and still go on baking blueberry pies as if God
and not the world mattered? Someone, she thought bitterly, has a
lot to answer for.

“Y
ou might say I
squandered my youth leading a double life,” Arthur said, recovering
from his nap and trusting that she was awake in the chair next to
him. “I couldn’t stay away from the minstrels or the ‘Free and
Easies’ as we called them back then. When Charles and Ellen Kean
came to Victoria, I was in the front row of the Theatre Royal, I
could hear the echo of the illustrious Edmund Kean himself, I vowed
ever after to hold my appetites in check and feed only on a steady
diet of
Hamlet
and
Richelieu
. I offered
my services to one of the Anglican churches and rediscovered the
organ. Still, I’m ashamed to admit I was not only present in 1875
when Charles McDonald’s ‘Occidentals’ performed
Black-Eyed Susan
and pranced about the stage like trained bears, I was in
the wings supplying some of the traitorous music. Nevertheless,
that night marked a turning point in my life, for I saw a side of
the theatre, and of theatrics, I had refused to acknowledge before.
This American impresario had gathered together from each of the
tribes of British Columbia nine native people whom he billed as
‘the Occidentals’ and described on his posters as ‘four squaws and
five men…the best specimens of the children of the forest’. Besides
a repertoire of hideous farces in which he’d trained them to mime a
grotesque self-parody, these wretches performed nightly an Indian
War Dance, contorted their bodies into ‘sixteen different pyramids’
and concluded the evening’s spectacle with the Indian Feast of
Fire. You won’t believe this but this so-called aboriginal ceremony
consisted, as the playbill proclaimed in bold type, of ‘eating
fire, drinking burning naptha, devouring burning torches, breathing
smoke and fire, and pulling long poles from their mouths’. And this
travesty was put on at the Theatre Royal before a cheering Governor
Douglas and all the local, highborn pooh-bahs.”

Arthur sighed deeply. Granny
shifted in her chair, audibly.

“
Later on I
heard that this monstrous troupe was feted in Philadelphia and
Washington during the 1876 celebrations, and then went abroad to
the Crystal Palace in England to be gawked at by thousands of
foreigners. In Paris they were booed off the stage because they
failed to closely resemble the inhabitants of the Punjab. Shortly
after that night, a new customer came into our bank, and a few
months later I was engaged.”

As Arthur was fond of
saying in jest, it was the longest engagement in recorded
matrimonial history – eleven years and twenty-nine days. Helen
Driscoll had come out to Victoria with her father, a Methodist
preacher, and although the old man liked Arthur a great deal, he
forbade his daughter to marry an Anglican, even a lapsed one. In
desperation Arthur embraced the Methodist faith but apparently
after too much doubt and reflection. When the old bigot finally
died in 1887, they married. By this time Arthur was a full-fledged
communicant and part-time organist of his bride’s church. When a
position as full-time organist back in Helen’s hometown became
available, the newlyweds returned east to London, Ontario. A year
later internal politics and factional rivalries in the London
parish prompted Arthur and Helen to accept the offer of the Point
Edward Methodists, who were more than happy to have in their midst
a musician of Arthur Coote’s standing.

“
But you still
love the old ditties and the drumrolls,” Granny said. “How did you
hide them all those years?”

“
I only
disguised them a little,” he laughed. “I don’t think there was a
soul who didn’t notice.”

She waited a while until some
tone in the shuttered room had imperceptibly shifted, then she
said, “Why did you really give it up?”

He let the
question get comfortable before responding. “I wanted
something…
authentic
in my life.”

Granny murmured
reassurance.

“
I wanted,
after a lot of wandering about, to come home.”

They listened to the tic toc of
the rocker through the room.

“
I’m still
here,” Granny said.

53

1

W
hen Eddie went off to
Victoria College in Toronto to study philosophy and literature in
the mellow autumn of 1910, the house was a lot quieter. And they
were getting old, of course – Arthur and Granny – overtaken now by
sudden naps, drifting into snoozes in the sunlight through the
window, into dozes later denied, into lapses of thought or purpose,
bickering pleasantly over the imperfections of memory. Whatever the
season, Granny went out every day to check the mail for letters
from Eddie, to buy the few groceries they pretended to need each
day, to nod hello to the few souls she still knew who also could
get up and about, and to listen from shy corners to the buzz of
gossip among the young who barely remembered her – touched by their
enthusiasm and by their sense of having inherited this time and
place whole and without obligation. In the winter she pulled
Eddie’s sled to Redmond’s – where Sandy now presided – or even up
to the coal dock for a bushel of coke. Sometimes she would stand on
the wharf and look north at the Great Lake and just wonder, till
the chill took her and a brisk walk home warmed her up again.
Arthur’s gout kept him indoors much of the time, though he always
came out once a day in the growing seasons to offer editorial
comment on the flowers or vegetables or the trimming of the hedges
Before he would be allowed to go back inside, they would promenade
arm-in-arm around the perimeter of their land, admiring the view
over the marsh clear to the River before turning homeward. Once,
Granny overheard young Ethel Carpenter, who assumed all old people
were deaf, whisper loudly to her husband: “Now ain’t they a cute
pair!” Granny winced, then smiled inwardly all the way to the
stoop.

E
ddie wrote them every
week while he was in college. In the summers he worked for the
Sarnia newspaper,
The
Observer
, and lived at home.
He had many friends, in Toronto and here in Lambton. Eddie assumed
there was good in the world and spent much of his time searching it
out, though Granny could see that the books he studied and the
sights he’d seen in the big city had left him with little doubt of
the magnitude of his quest. But he was not one to flinch from its
pain, she could see that plainly. He had courage, and a winning
heart. Friends flocked to him, and many of them, she thought, would
remain steadfast in the causes he had persuaded them foolishly to
undertake with him. Already he was talking about graduate studies,
of being a professor or lawyer or someone who could move the earth
an inch or two just by being in it. Arthur and Granny would sit at
the kitchen table in the lamplight and jointly compose letters to
him, Arthur’s English-schoolboy ‘hand’ flowing across the white
page carrying thought and feeling and happening into elegance and
some kind of permanence he only vaguely comprehended. She was the
one – always – to read back what they had written in a sober
cadence that made Arthur laugh till she swatted him with the letter
and started over, daring him to intercede. When the return letter
arrived faithfully within the week, they sat on the chesterfield
taking turns presenting it, re-enacting the best moments many
times, constructing lovingly in their minds the unfolding biography
and pageant of their grandson’s life. You won’t believe me, Cap
Dowling, Granny said to him one day, but I am happy.

A
rthur died at 1 a.m.
in the morning of April 3, 1912, a month shy of his seventy-seventh
birthday. Granny was beside him on the chesterfield where he’d been
resting, close to the stove. His recurrent pleurisy had turned to
pneumonia. He died peacefully in an interval between dreams. Just
before he closed his eyes for the last time around midnight, he
smiled wanly at the companion of his latter years and asked her to
hold his hand. When she did she found his grip resolute. He was too
weak to say anything more but as the lids came down, she saw
something in the eyes she interpreted as ‘forgive me’ before it was
extinguished by a twinkle. About one o’clock his breathing stopped.
She permitted his hand to grow cold in hers.

O
f all the deaths and
departures she had endured in her seven decades of living, Arthur’s
was the most simple and most touching. For the first time in her
life Granny found she could mourn with a pure and biding sadness, a
sadness uncomplicated by guilt, remorse, rage, helplessness. Arthur
lived a long and eventful time on earth, taking little and giving
much. Near the end he could talk of heaven as if he believed it was
waiting for him. He was one of the lucky ones.

E
ddie felt terrible
about having to go straight back to college to write his exams, but
he was reassured by the steady look Granny gave him that said,
‘You
have
to; I’ll be all right’. Though not unexpected,
Arthur’s death had dealt Eddie a sideways blow. He was bearing up
well, but when he came home again for the summer, she would have to
keep a close watch on him.

Arthur’s
funeral was attended by most of the village and the outpouring of
sorrow was largely genuine. Granny noted that many of the young
people, students and choir members under Arthur, who came over to
offer their condolences did not seem at all sure exactly who she
was, other than Granny Coote. It was an odd sensation and one that
disquieted her more than the tedious eulogy by the recently
arrived
Methodist minister.
Arthur’s tombstone stood in a perpetually sunny spot on the
south-west side of the little cemetery. Granny noted how much it
had filled with graves since the lonely day when Cap was put under
the horse-chestnut in the north-east corner. She recognized too
many of the names cut in stone. After the interment, she stood
apart with Eddie and gazed at the ground that now possessed her
husband – body and spirit – thinking that this was a fitting spot
for him and most of all for her. I’ll be laid right here, Arthur,
she whispered to him, not a yard away. In the meantime, you behave
yourself.