Lily's Story (24 page)

She looked up from her
card to see just who “Mr. Marshall” might be when he said, not a
foot from her, “I believe I have the honour of this dance. My name
is Tom Marshall. I’m from London.”

T
he penultimate dance
was the fast-paced
lancers
with eight
couples pacing through the military complexity of its steps and
manoeuvres and musical stratagems. There was little opportunity to
converse – even if Lily had been able to think of anything to say,
though she ruefully noted that one couple – obviously lovers –
managed a series of looks and touching that were more eloquent than
any
tête-à-tête
.
Nonetheless, she felt Tom’s arms momentarily about her waist, her
hand clasped in his, and confirmed her premonition of his
vulnerable strength, his erratic energy, his need for
collaboration. She placed her face naked before his gaze, released
to him for scrutiny and care a locked part of herself through the
dance as far as it might flow. He smiled at her when they were
apart and possessed her with his grasp when they sashayed or
twirled in linked curves. He wafted words to her and she nodded as
if they were real.

When the lancers ended, he
ferried her towards the table where the punch was wilting in the
heat. Now they would talk and it would begin. He placed a crystal
goblet in her hands. She drank thirstily.

“
Lily, you’re
the best dancer of the lot. Surely you can’t be from Port Sarnia,”
he said with a twinkle.

She was about to reply
when his eye was caught by some movement to their left. “Damn,” he
muttered to himself. “Would you please excuse me, Miss Ramsbottom;
I’m wanted by my party. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. I hope
we’ll meet again.”

We will, Lily thought.
She thanked him and watched him walk over to the Dowling group.
Lady Marigold and her husband had joined them. When the music
started for the last dance, a Strauss waltz, she saw His Nibs take
the withered fingertips of the judge’s wife; then Dowling put his
arm about the waist of the dark lady and they strolled with utmost
ease to wait for the music to stir and legitimate their illicit
lusts. So engrossed was Lily in this minor melodrama that she
almost missed seeing Corporal Marshall provide a military escort
for Miss Platinum to stage-centre where, the second the music
began, he clasped her pliant bodice and pulled the bullets of her
breast against the blue shield of his own.

You will come back, Tom
Marshall. I know.

I hope.

L
ily was in a deep,
daylight sleep – following a night of restless dreams and
near-dreams – when she was awakened by Mrs. Templeton gently
shaking her hand. She blinked at the invading light. “What’s
wrong?” she said.

“
It’s your
Auntie,” Mrs. Templeton said.

Lily saw Aunt Bridie hovering
behind Mrs. Templeton, her face ashen.

“
Are you all
right, Auntie?”

“
Yes, love.
It’s your Uncle Chester.” Her voice was close to breaking. “His
heart give out,” she said.

8

1

T
he year was born in
hope. For the County’s farmers, after the ‘black frost’ of 1859,
there was not much else left. In the days before welfare and
government subsidies, those who tilled the soil were left with
charred blossom, shrivelled root and wizened leafage to mock them
through the hot summer of ’fifty-nine with little chance that they
could afford even to buy seed for next year’s planting and some
chance in the back townships that they might starve or chew their
way through a winter of turnip, chicory and hazelnut. But then it
must be remembered that death was more common, more random and
variegated in those days. Typhus, cholera and diphtheria trimmed
the infant population with regular and reliable horror, and struck
down among the adults those who were weakening, unwary or
conspicuously wanton. Moreover, the high cost of progress – of
living up to the County’s adopted motto,
ongoing
–
appeared to be routinely accepted by the populace. Certainly the
440 shipping disasters listed for 1859, at a cost of $668,565.00
and 105 lives, offered no deterrent to the expansion of water
commerce – the taming of the Great Lakes – nor did it in any wise
discourage excursionists and pleasure-seekers from boarding
hundreds of cruiser-craft and heading out ‘into the blue’. In
September 1860 the excursion boat
Lady Elgin
went down
with a loss of 287 lives. The disasters on the new, often
jerry-built, railroads, though not as calamitous, were as frequent
and as cavalier. Notwithstanding, the Great Western moved more than
800,000 passengers per annum in Upper Canada in these years. And
the Grand Trunk had designs of its own on the landscape. Elsewhere,
bridges were being dreamed and flung across the St. Lawrence at
Quebec and at Lewiston, swing ferries wobbled and broke in the St.
Clair rapids, canals deepened and widened – each leap forward
taking its routine toll in killed and maimed, the latter being cast
upon the public charity, to be pitied as freaks or shunned as
exiles in their own land.

One of the more curious
cataclysms occurred in the backwater township of Enniskillen, where
a recently arrived homesteader, in desperate search for water to
keep his stock and kin alive through the drought, dug straight into
the earth and struck, not a spring, but a suppurating ooze of
molasses-like ‘goo’ which no amount of packing could staunch.
Naturally he abandoned the place for more healthful terrain. Though
the significance of the latter event would not be appreciated for
several more years, and only then by the prescient and the daring,
few politically aware citizens of the County missed the import of
John Brown’s aborted uprising at Harper’s Ferry in the fall of
1859: to the Tories it signified the folly of all rebellious acts
however noble their cause; to the Reformers it was a painful
reminder that the passion to be free, though universal and
irrepressible, was – like love itself – rarely a direct, simple,
unadulterated affair.

B
ut the following
spring of 1860 seemed blessed by that same Providence whose hand
was ever on the tiller and the throttle. Sun and rain collaborated
so that the wheat throve and the fruit trees blossomed on cue. Even
Aunt Bridie began once again to entertain the notion of a future.
She had become resigned to the fact that all of their efforts had
now to be put into maintaining a few cash crops to be sold, at
outrageously low prices, at the farm gate. Nonetheless, she
persevered through two long winters with her quilting despite the
onset of arthritis, which she mocked as “a little twinge or two to
remind me I’m gettin’ old an’ to keep me honest.” Much of their
precious cash had to be used for them merely to survive the ravages
of the black frost, but as Auntie often said, “We’re holdin’ our
own with our heads up, lass, don’t ever forget that.” But Lily
sensed a new hollowness to Auntie’s aphorisms, a whisper of
world-weariness in them. Many times before the glorious spring of
’sixty, in the daylight dark of the cottage as they sat sewing with
Uncle Chester snoring anonymously in his wicker, Lily glimpsed the
panic in her Aunt’s smile, and found it so painful, so terrifying
that she had to look away, ashamed and aching. She knew that Auntie
Bridie could not live long without hope: her resignation – so
deeply a part of her Celtic heritage and uncontaminated by
Christianity – was in her only a temporary manifestation designed
to help her endure momentary, even prolonged, setbacks. But it was
not constitutional: she would die rather than succumb to the
orthodox debilitations of her pioneering sisters.

With Uncle
Chester now an invalid, there was no talk of Lil
y’s going back into service even though that
expedient would have helped them a great deal. Someone had to nurse
poor Uncle Chester, night and day, summer and winter. His heart
attack had been real, and he was fortunate enough to have the
doctor arrive from town too late to be of immediate assistance, and
thus managed to survive. For several months he lay on Lily’s bed
(she now slept on a cot in the kitchen) barely able to flick his
eyes at her in appreciation as she fed him with a spoon, emptied
his festering bedpan, bathed his bleached flesh, or ‘read’ to him
the few stories from Mrs. Templeton’s
Arabian Nights
she had been able to memorize. By the spring of 1859 he was
able to whisper “Thank you” in a hoarse guttural, like a wraith
calling from some shallow part of purgatory.

“
I don’t pray
much, Lily, as you know,” Bridie said. “But if I did, I’d ask my
maker to take Chester back. Nobody oughta suffer like
that.”

Lily knew which of those
two was suffering the most. Uncle’s eyes welled with tears of
constant gratitude; they opened up at her with the unaffected love
of a puppy; they had regained a kind of innocence. However, early
in the summer of ’fifty-nine, even as the black frost’s legacy
deepened, Chester murmured, moved, sat up, smiled, and became
impossible. Aunt Bridie stared at him as if he had, for a second
and more unforgivable time, betrayed her. But she did her duty.
They bought him a wicker chair with feather pillows and wheels so
that he could sit by the stove or on the flagstones in the sun or
be ferried about on short excursions through the garden and
woodlot. His gratitude alas was not continuous nor his appreciation
perfect. He whined and wheedled, threw tantrums and dinner plates,
cried like a baby and grumbled like an octogenarian, and generally
wallowed in self-pity.

“
I should’ve
gone, like
that
,” he’d say,
failing to make his fingers snap, “the world’d be a better place
without old Chester in it.” Auntie would sever him with a stare,
then relent and say without conviction, “But you’ll be up an’
walkin’ soon. Is there anythin’ special Lily can fix you for
supper?”

“
Well, rhubarb
tart’d be nice, but I expect it’s too late for that.” It invariably
was, and he then had to be mollified with whatever second-best
offer could be effected.

If it hadn’t been for
Bachelor Bill, the farm itself would have collapsed. When his wheat
crop was wiped out by the black frost, he came to Aunt Bridie and
asked her to buy his fields, leaving him only his shanty and
garden, and to let him work as her hired hand for his food and a
dribble of cash. Sniffing the scent of a future on the wind, Bridie
went into town that very day and removed most of her life’s savings
from the Bank of Upper Canada and doubled her land holdings when
everyone else was retrenching or going under. Of course, a second
killer frost and they would have lost everything.

The hope that
Aunt Bridie nurtured through the brutal winter of ice storms and
blizzards and murderous thaws – auguries of disaster all of them –
bordered on the hysterical. Lily took to spiking Uncle
Chester’s
Ayer’s Cherry
Pectoral
with some of his own
hooch (discovered when they dismantled the north coop) just so he
would sleep through the grating January afternoons. Several times
at night Lily heard her Aunt crying alone in her room: not the sort
of weeping women use to release or publish their sundry griefs, but
the half-repressed anguish that is one part rage and two parts
despair. The next morning she would be bright with forced
cheerfulness as she pulled on her macintosh and headed back to the
woodlot to help Bill with the cutting. “That’s pine’s cash in the
bank!”

More and more, also, Auntie
seemed to be placing her hopes on the sounds not only of their own
axes but those now ringing through the pinery that lay between
their fields and the waters to the north and west. The
long-rumoured arrival of the second and most ambitious of the great
railway octopuses, was happening. And less than half-a-mile from
them.

“
I told you,
didn’t I, Chester, they’d build somethin’ big on that property.
That’s why we moved way out here in the first place, Lily. Mayn’t
be soldiers over there, but there’s gonna be trains,” she said
wistfully, “an’ people, too. We’re gonna have neighbours, lass, a
real town of our own to belong to. Didn’t I say so,
Chester?”

Chester was asleep, dreaming
perhaps of an unscorched carpenter’s shop and a boy name Bertie –
his Cherry Pectoral clutched in his hands like a rosary.

2

J
uly was sweltering.
Aunt Bridie, Bachelor Bill and Lily sweated and slaved in the
fields. Lily burned, freckled, peeled and then burned anew. Uncle
Chester took his first baby steps, tottered and sprained his wrist,
after which he too sweated and whined. About the middle of the
month, Violet ran off. Work was halted so that a search could
begin. Lily went to the pond first because Violet had been peering
into its coppery mirror on several recent occasions, near daybreak.
Only Booster and his harem were there, looking on in bemusement.
Throughout the afternoon they combed the pinery, and Auntie even
walked as far as the oak ridge and Little Lake to the north-east,
pausing as she crossed the freshly-laid imprint of the Grand Trunk
to contemplate the future. But it was Lily who found her sitting in
a daze in a field near the railway worker’s shanties down by the
construction site for the new wharf and station. It was dusk, and
Violet must have become alarmed enough to start crying. When Lily
arrived, Violet was sobbing incoherently; even Lily could make out
no word. She put her arm about the wretched girl and half-carried
her home. Auntie intercepted them near the house and together they
took Violet into the tallow-lit gloom of the log hut. Bachelor
Bill, sitting with his head buried in his hands, looked up with
mixed rage and relief, but said nothing. He glared at Lily as she
stroked Violet’s hair and rubbed her neck and shoulders till the
sobbing stopped. Auntie left to answer Uncle Chester’s piteous
calls for aid, but Lily stayed, murmuring softly into the girl’s
ear and watching Bachelor Bill. Finally she rose and with
reluctance left the house. Outside she paused, waiting for the
explosion within and deciding that somehow she would intervene.
Aunt Bridie was suddenly beside her. Together, they listened in the
dark.