Lily's Story (111 page)

As they turned
to leave, Granny took a step towards Cap’s grave, acknowledged it,
then
swept her eyes across the
plain tablet a few feet to the south of it. The strange syllables
of Bradley’s name hovered on her lips. She moved into the silence
and dropped the flowers she had been holding. She felt Eddie’s
stare, and for a moment dared not turn to face him. In the carriage
all the way back to the reception hall, she waited for his
question. If he asks, she thought, I’ll have to tell him. I have no
choice.

Eddie said goodbye at the
station, clinging to her as he used to with the blind trust of the
child he no longer was.

2

“I
t was good to hear
Arthur’s piano played again. Though it had little of Arthur’s
sprightly thunder in it, Eddie’s performance was vigorous and
high-spirited. Quite often his journalist friends would come down
to take him out for the evening – usually dancing at Lake Chipican
– and linger for an hour or so to sing along with him, and flirt
with Granny in what they took to be an outrageous manner. “Isn’t a
gal at Chipican could hold a candle to you, Gran,” one of them
invariably proclaimed as he whirled her about carefully to a
musical flourish from Eddie. “You must’ve been a ballerina,” they’d
tease, “A dance-hall girl in Dawson City!”, “Come on with us, Gran,
we won’t tell them how young you are.”

One
of them, Ralph Sifton, had an
automobile which he lent to Eddie on occasion so that he could take
her for drives in the country on Sunday afternoons. She was amazed
not only by the mechanical noise-maker they were miraculously
seated upon but by the way in which the countryside it roared
through had changed since she had grown up in it. She realized,
too, how long it had been since she had driven out here on a cutter
with Lucien Burgher. The bush was gone. A few strands of timber had
been overlooked and left to brood over the wide spaces between
them, rolling with wheat and oats and neatly fenced pastureland.
Here and there secondary scrub growth nudged upward through swail
or lowland; the primary forest, born in the slow surge of
millennial time, would not come again. On the way home she had a
hard time swallowing.

In the spring
of 1914
Eddie graduated with
honours from the University of Toronto. He desperately wanted her
to come to the convocation and even arranged for Ralph Sifton to
accompany her on the train. But she took ill a few days before the
event – the doctor diagnosed it as severe grippe – and she had to
send Ralph off alone. She was furious with herself. Even now
nearing seventy-four, she was rarely sick except for her
rheumatism, and that was never disabling. When Eddie came home,
though, there was no hint of disappointment in his face. He
modelled his cap and gown for her, he hung his framed baccalaureate
next to the tintype of Arthur at the piano of the Theatre Royal,
and then brought out the photographs Ralph had taken of the
ceremony with
The
Observer’s
best camera. He
escorted her to supper at the Colonial Hotel in Sarnia – still
bustling with its own celebrations as the nation’s newest city –
and told her of his plans.

Using the money Arthur had set
aside for him in his will, Eddie said he was going to return to
Toronto in July to begin studying for his master’s degree in
comparative literature. That would take him about eighteen months,
after which he would look for a job teaching in one of the small
Maritime colleges or right here in Ontario where there was talk of
expanding the university in London. He hoped to continue his
studies, but for the near future he wanted to find a place where he
could be useful and self-supporting, a small town preferably where
he could put down roots and where he could bring his granny to live
out her days with him.

“
You can’t say
no, Gran. Arthur would have wanted it to be that way.”

What could she say?

E
ddie began to write
to her as soon as he had returned to school, every two weeks as he
had done since Arthur’s death. But Arthur was no longer here to
write out the words for her or tease and cajole in his special way
so that what she ended up saying to Eddie was always lively, witty
and charged with good humour. But seated alone at their table with
her own thoughts and the elusive words to pin them on, with a shaky
pen unaccustomed to writing of any kind let alone the free-fall of
her inner speech, she found she could not in any way recapture the
verve of those joint letters. Moreover, she had little to narrate
in the way of current events; indeed, as she told him in one letter
that first winter, “the word ‘current’ and your granny aren’t to be
seen in the same dictionary.” She had lots of thoughts – she’d
never been short on that score – but discovered that it took so
long to scratch and blot them on paper they soon tumbled over one
another and came up nonsense. “Try to picture yourself talking to
someone,” Eddie wrote back, “Arthur or me or a friend on the street
corner.” She occasionally had some success when Cap was in the room
visiting, until he started to chip in too many of his own silly
ideas. Gradually the task got easier, and though her replies were
stilted and not newsy enough, she did manage her four pages a
month.

In fact,
during the unusual quiet of the summer of 1914, she came to the
realization that what remained of her life was in Eddie’s hands.
Less and less did she attend to the daily traffic of human affairs
she had spent a lifetime observing and recording. The great events
of the world beyond her own township – elections and reciprocity
fights and skirmishes in Africa and the Sea of Japan, which had
never been able to hold her attention for long – now receded almost
completely from the foreground of her existence. She lived for
Eddie’s letters and for the essence of him they conveyed minute by
minute for her appraisal and concern. We have lived past our
three-score-and-ten, old man, she said to Arthur who had been
called in at the last second to help with the wording of a
sentence.
And we haven’t got a
lot to show for it. We tried. I know I did. I bore four children. I
stayed put for seventy years, hoping to have planted here in this
barren place something permanent, some memorial to my much-vaunted
suffering. Nothing took hold. Nothing but Eddie out of all that.
Eddie was a gift of the near-sighted gods, an oversight perhaps in
the frenzy of their careless blundering – but we took him and
fostered him, and let him be. Already I am learning to live through
his eyes. May he prosper, may he love and marry and father a dozen
children, each of them obsessed with living; may the roots of that
tree be numerous and strong and deep as the underground rivers that
feed them.

There, Arthur.
Now, if only y
ou could write
that down for me.

I
n October Eddie wrote
to say that he had decided to ‘join up’, that he hoped to complete
his course work before he was sent overseas, that he would start in
on his dissertation as soon as he got back, and that in any case he
would come home for a few days before leaving. She wrote and begged
him not to come home. But this time he could not bring himself to
do what she wished.

54

1

G
ranny Coote sat at
the window of her new house and kept a faithful watch on the
workmen across the street. Mr. Stadler had brought along two
helpers to assist him in unloading the rough slabs of limestone he
would smooth and shape into a memorial pillar over the weeks to
come. Sunny Denfield had shown her the drawings – deft pencil
sketches on brown paper – and so she was able to speculate not
unpleasantly about how these raw-cut stones might be teased into
the elegant promise she’d seen on paper. The stones were very
heavy. They had to be eased down ramps from the back of the truck –
as dented and dusty as the old man’s face – and then skidded over
to a spot near the site itself. The young men appeared to be sons
or nephews of the builder; they were as lithe and wiry as he, and
moved with animal ease. Their skin was tanned and roughened, the
mark of men who spend much of their life outdoors. The old man, who
came almost every day, was a delight to watch: he hopped about like
a rabbit on a griddle, firing off instructions (in a strange,
jabbering tongue) that were respectfully ignored, lending a hand
when it was least required, then unexpectedly lapsing into a state
of deep repose from which he observed and blessed the intricate
actions of his son (surely he must be Stadler’s father) as if from
a dream. When they sat down on one of the stone for a brief rest,
the old fellow seemed to dominate the conversation, speaking in a
low voice and gesturing as if he were telling long,
thoroughly-weathered stories. There is something very familiar
about the Stadler family, Granny thought, but then I’ve lived so
long and seen so much around these parts, everything looks familiar
to me.

2

E
ddie began writing to
her as soon as the troops reached Valcartier camp for the second
phase of their training. Eddie had joined up in the new year when
recruiting for the Second Canadian Division began in earnest. Five
of his college friends joined with him as part of one of the
university companies who would form replacements for Princess
Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry already overseas and in combat.
Such students were given permission to carry on with their studies
during the local training period, which ended in March, after which
they entrained for Valcartier. Granny knew Ralph Sifton well and
though she had not met them, she felt she knew the other four
because they had been part of Eddie’s conversation for two or three
summers. As she read over each name of ‘the Vic platoon’ in Eddie’s
letter, a picture of past exploits – college-boy derring do and
hijinks and irresistible good humour – instantly formed in her
mind. Besides young Ralph from Sarnia (studying law as his father
had), the platoon included Cliff Strangways from British Columbia
(graduate history); Sandy Lecker from Waterloo County (biological
science), the first of his family ever to attend university; Bart
Ramsay (graduate philosophy) whose Toronto family had enough money
to protect him from the temptations of academia, but couldn’t; and
Henry Potter, raw-boned prairie lad who was studying French in
hopes of joining the foreign service and seeing parts of the world
that weren’t flat. Although they didn’t all get into the same
platoon, they were part of a single company, an inseparable
fraternity.

In April Eddie started writing
once a week, his letter arriving on Tuesday morning where she was
waiting in the Post Office on Michigan Ave. to pick it up. She
never opened one before she got back home, nodding obscurely to
friendly or anxious faces on the street and once there making
herself a cup of tea to sip on as she read the words aloud at
first, then silently – many times.

“
Valcartier is
a pleasant surprise considering the rumours we were foolish enough
to believe in advance. It’s a hug complex of barracks, drilling
grounds, rifle ranges and mock battlefields – all cut right out of
primeval bush. I get the strangest sensation firing my Ross
.303 at a painted target two hundred
yards across a scraped pasture and looking up at the evergreens
behind them which roll unbroken and impassive for a thousand miles
north of us, north of anywhere. Do you know what I mean?

Yes, Eddie, I do, though I
haven’t got the words you have to describe it.

“
Bart, our
city-boy, went for a stroll in the woods last night, as if he were
off to High Park in pursuit of pretty girls – of which there are
none, pretty or girlish, within twenty miles – and promptly got
himself lost. The Vic-platoon volunteered for the search party, and
it was Cliff, who grew up in the Kootenays, who found him on the
second tallest branch o
f a
spruce tree, where he claimed a black bear had driven him out of
spite. Cliff is of the opinion that it was a sasquatch, abetted by
the shadows and on overheated imagination.”

Granny found
it a daunting task to respond to these weekly outpourings – four or
five pages of elegant script capturing a side of Eddie she knew she
would not see if he were at home – closer, safer. But there was
nothing else to do but sit at the kitchen table in the afternoon
sun or the evening lamplight and try to make the pen say the
thousand things racing through her. By the time the Second Division
was ready to embark for England in May of 1915, she was able to
write several pages of stilted prose, sweating laboriously over it
for two days. In part Eddie made it a bit easier by asking
questions about his chums in the village or about local events she
herself had long
ago excluded
from her sphere of concern: “Who’s joined up lately? Did they
finally get Hitch? Or Sandy Redmond? Who’s to replace MacPherson on
the council? Will you be sure to clip the theatre items from
The Observer
?” And so on. Though replying to these and making an
occasional comment herself helped to fill up some of the weekly
quota of two pages, she was not pleased with the results. Her first
letters were choppy, disconnected pieces; she felt she was not
conveying anything of herself in them, and every instinct she
possessed told her that Eddie was waiting out there, and listening
with his heart for some force behind her words more tender and more
compelling than the voices he was hearing daily inside him and all
around. I can’t do it, Eddie, she thought sadly. I never learned.
I’m too old, too stubborn, too stupid.