Lily's Story (47 page)

As last something clicked
and turned over in Sophie’s brain. She got herself up, roused no
doubt by one of Lily’s shrieks-dissolving-to-a-wail. Shrieks she
was accustomed to, she read their special code as easily as
braille, and suddenly she did not like what she was hearing and
what her brain had finally cleared enough to register. She put both
hands over Lily’s flinching abdomen and kept them there while the
spasms continued.

“
Holy shit,”
she murmured. “
Marlene!
”

Marlene was ready, with
the cloths and steaming kettles. Right behind her came
Tom.

“
What’s
happening?” he said. He was gray from exhaustion and worry. He had
run into the village and then all the way to Sarnia and then all
the way into the township.

“
We got
trouble,” Sophie said without turning to greet him. She waved
Marlene to the other side of the bed.

“
Sons-a-bitches are all gone somewhere,” Tom cried to no one
in particular. “Dollard’s on a call to Corunna. Benchley’s on
holiday. Nobody bothered answering at McElroy’s on the London
Road.
Nobody
.”

“
Marlene, you
get her to drink some of this if you have to choke it down her.
Then keep the sweat outta her eyes, an’ this towel between her
teeth when she needs it. An’ you, ya’ dumb untrustin’ bastard, get
your butt over here an’ hold a leg. I can’t do this without
you.”

“
You’re
drunk!
” Tom shouted. “You’re pissed! You think I’m gonna let you
kill my wife?

“
Hold her
gently just behind the knee,” Sophie said. She had to force his
hand there and close it.

“
Cry later”,
she said. “Right now, I’m all you got.”

“
Tom,” Lily
said. “I can’t see you.”

“
I’m right
here, love. Everything’s goin’ to be fine now,” he said, biting
into his tears.

“
Just pray to
Heaven she’s a strong one,” Sophie said.

M
arlene managed to get
Lily to drink the potion.

“
It’s a
narcotic,” Sophie said towards Tom. “Old Indian recipe,” she
winked. “Christ, I can’t work up here. Come on, we’ll lift this
mattress onto the floor.”

They lifted the mattress and
its tender cargo as gently as they could onto the floor, where
Sophie then heaved her own beluga bulk between Lily’s spread legs
and set to work. “A breech birth,” she said, “little bugger’s
tryin’ to come out feet first.”

Tom
kept his eyes averted, occasionally
peeking up from his station to read the agony on his wife’s face,
and worse: that glint of first-terror when the mind begins to doubt
the body’s daunted vigour. He could not, however, close off any of
the sounds that filled the room: Lily’s coughing gasps as she
fought for each breath and then repulsed it as if it were a poison
gas; Sophie’s grunts and coarse whinnying as she pushed and
wheedled, grappled and comforted; the sucking noise between Lily’s
thighs as Sophie’s fingers began to probe, stretch, demand; the
drip of blood – one bubble at a time – onto the oil-cloth; Lily’s
voice: a continuous whimper containing no ghost of a word, fading
down down until interrupted by a stiletto cry that confirmed the
depth of pain and the resistance of a life somewhere
within.

Tom
heard a vile curse from Sophie, felt
a great shifting of her amphibious flesh, and could not help
looking up. He saw a gush of purplish blood splatter over Sophie,
followed shortly by a guttural, clenching moan from Lily in a voice
he had never heard or imagined. Sophie’s hands were buried in his
wife’s body, in regions that resembled none he had been witness to
– grotesque, stretched, blood-pummelled flaps of flesh.

“
Come outta
there, you little fucker!” Sophie commanded. “Marlene, get that
towel between her teeth before she bites her tongue off! Tom
Marshall, bring in hot water an’ fresh towels. We’re gonna need
‘em.”

When Tom came back in,
Lily was arched fully and breathing like an asthmatic near the end.
Sophie was hunched over with her flippers stiffened and jerking
back. Tom saw the child’s legs in Sophie’s grasp, blood pouring
over them like pus.

“
Gotta hurry,
gotta hurry,” she panted. She gave a wrench that would have
stripped a calf of its intestines, Lily coughed and moaned sweetly,
and a rump popped into view, followed immediately by a curved back
and the rim of a skull.

“
My God, it’s
coming !” Tom said glancing up to check on Lily. Her scarlet saliva
had stained the towel between her teeth.

“
Holy Jesus,”
Sophie whispered.

“
What’s
wrong?”

“
The fuckin’
cord,” she wheezed, panic in her swollen face. “It’s wrapped around
his neck. Help me!”

Tom
’s hand shook, his
teeth chattered, and the sweat poured into his eyes, but somehow he
managed to take hold of the eel-slippery, half-born foetus and,
forgetting it was alive and humanoid, squeeze its body mercilessly
while Sophie reached one finger through the flensed crevice and
with a series of deft manoeuvres somehow coordinated with Lily’s
last spasms, managed to slip the cord over the baby’s head as it
propelled itself – at last, reluctantly, perversely – into the air
above the ocean.

Dangling it upside down as the
afterbirth gushed in a fetid pool at her feet, Sophie tapped on its
heels and it howled triumphantly, as if it had made this journey,
thank you, on its own merit. Bradley Marshall had uttered the first
of his million syllables.

“I
’m gonna leave
Marlene here,” Sophie said. “Lily’s very weak an’ ripped open a
bit. Marlene knows how to put on the special plasters I’m gonna
leave you. She’ll need the narcotic, too, and the tonic later on.
I’ll come by if you need me. Just send Marlene.”

Tom
poured himself another mug of coffee.
He had no emotions left to exercise, but if he could have, he would
have felt puzzled and sad at what he saw across the table from him.
This woman, who had just saved the life of his wife and his son,
looked utterly wasted, drained of all vitality. She must have put
on a hundred pounds since her visit here last year. Everywhere she
wasn’t bloated, she sagged. It was more, he knew, than mere fatigue
from the ordeal of the birthing room. When he had arrived at her
house, hours before, she had barely recognized him. She had fallen
on her rump and cursed him out of her house. Even now, she bore the
same badge of abuse he had recoiled at earlier in the day. The left
side of her face was swollen to twice its size, leaving only a
puffed slit for the dark, gypsy’s eye to manoeuvre through. The
flesh there, previously a sort of scorched red, was now souring
thickly: a purpling, yellowish, aborted tumour. When she slumped on
her elbows, it dripped – like a smashed pepper-squash.

“
Who did that
to you?” Tom asked.

Sophie glared balefully at him,
then smiled as best she could and said, “My hubbie, of course. With
his stokin’ fist.”

The shock must
have registered on Tom’s face for Sophie said: “You don’t think I’d
let anybody
else
do this to me, do you?” She
straightened up. “Now where in hell do you keep the pain-killer
around here?”

T
he minute I’m feelin’
up to it, I’m gonna walk over there an’ thank that woman myself,”
Lily said.

Tom
tossed Robbie into Uncle Chester’s
chair, then nuzzled into him till the boy screamed in
delight.

“
I may just
bake her the biggest pie I ever baked,” Lily said. Then,
“
Ow
, I swear this little jigger’s tryin’ to bite
me.”

Tom
came over. “She lives on squatter’s
row,” he said.

“
Does that
matter?” Lily said.

3

L
ily felt guilty at
waiting so long but finally she did find time to bake an apple pie
with the first crop of green cookers from Clara Fitchett’s orchard.
It was almost September. She was in no particular hurry to pass
through the meadows still half-a-mile wide between their property
and the outskirts of the village: the goldenrod was new, the
bobolinks and killdeer sang in the distance, the sun was warm on
her bare arms. As she neared the houses on Charles Street, several
with partly finished rooves, she tried to think of all the things
she had seen and heard about the squatters.

“
Bunch of
hoo-ers an’ pimps,” she’d heard Gimpy say to a pal at one of the
Saturday dances, and Tom had a difficult time explaining the terms
to her afterward. “Railway oughta clean them gypsies right outta
there,” was one variation of a recommendation offered by numerous
storekeepers and rate-payers along the main street. “They squat on
Grand Trunk land, an’ just ’cause it ain’t good for nothin’ else
don’t mean they shouldn’t kick their butts clean to London an’
back.” “Marg’s hubby slips over to Car-teer’s come Saturday night,”
Maudie whispered, assuming she would know what a bootlegger was and
was for. “Could be worse,” Clara countered. “Hazel’s ain’t far
away.” Hazel’s Heaven it was called – where the pimps and hooers
went to commit their anti-social acts. “When we get our own church
here next year,” Maudie said, “that’ll be the end of all that
filth. Then maybe honest folk won’t have to lock their doors at
night or keep an eye out on the boardwalk for the riff-raff that
comes floatin’ up from that sewer.”

Lily herself had seen children
– freckled, orange-headed, streaked with dirt – bounding over the
tracks from that direction to be shooed and badgered by the
neighbouring townsfolk as if they were chickens out of their run –
laughing and cursing merrily as they dodged all blows and melted
into the scrub-bush. “Them’s the McCourt brood,” Redmond sighed
over his scales, “leastways the redheads is, the others are most
likely bastards of dubious origin, if you know what I mean. Old
Jess McCourt died under a hopper-wheel up in Camlachie two winters
ago – cut him right in two, clean as a firelog. His old lady scrubs
out toilets for the Grand Trunk; they don’t care if she squats in
that shack, long as she don’t mind swabbin’ up other people’s
you-know-what.”

Lily turned
off Michigan Ave. o
nto Prince
Street. Several sailors lounged on the patio outside the Queen’s
Hotel; she let their whistle sail amiably by. A number of large
boats were in port. Prince Street, named in honour of His Royal
Highness, was less than a hundred yards long, ending its brief
north-easterly path a few feet before the Grand Trunk main-line
which entered the village farther to the east, looped around its
northern limit till it came close to the lakeshore, and then swung
south along the riverfront to the docks and station. Beyond the
track where it almost intersected Prince Street lay a screen of
runt hawthorn, soft poplar and red-willow and beyond it a patchy
piece of open ground covered with sawgrass and sandburs that rolled
northward till overtaken by the dunes and the beach below them. As
Lily reached the end of Prince Street, she spotted a walking path
through the grass, followed it over the tracks, picked it up on the
other side and went through the curtain of bush into what had
already become known, inside and outside the community, as Mushroom
Alley.

And
there
was
a kind of lane or alley, about as broad as a
dog-cart’s track, that might have been labelled a street if it had
not so flagrantly meandered and ox-bowed its way among the
residences on either side. The first two dwellings Lily saw, partly
hidden away among some poplars, were not luxurious enough even to
be called shanties. They were confected out of the jetsam of the
Grand Trunk: rusted corrugated iron, chipped packing cases and
chewed-up graindoors. Barred rocks skittered in the dirt where
grass had been, then fluttered aloft in the wake of the children
who came hurtling from behind one of the shacks. Copper-topped and
black-haired, mostly naked, of every size and sex – they roared
past Lily without a nod, intent on some ritual game more compelling
than the arrival of a stranger. McCourts and McLeods, she thought.
From the edge of a hog-wallow, Lily felt the cold eyes of a woman,
who did not wave when she did but watched her until she had veered
out of sight. Suddenly she began to wonder how she would ever
discover where Sophie Potts lived. She would have to speak
to
some
one.

Next she came
across a genuine shanty, a barn-like structure with vertical boards
and proper crossbeams and a slanted roof bearing an iron-plate
cover, rusted with moss. The siding had been undisturbed by paint,
and while not yet rotten, it had decided to rest a little by
leaning fifteen degrees to the left. The single window was covered
with greased paper. Like the cabins used to be, she thought. Behind
this house, and to a lesser extent beside and in front of it, had
been dumped all manner of junk, refuse and castaway valuables:
broken tables, backless chairs, two iron stoves irrevocably cracked
in different places, piles of gunnysack, burlap, wretched bits of
clothing, and utensils of every kind, many of them taking root in
the inhospitable soil. A thin figure in an outsize flannel shirt
stood over one of the racked stoves holding a piece of sandpaper
poised above one of its incurable blemishes. Lily waved and took a
step off the path. The figure, male and possibly advanced in years,
started to raise its right hand, then stopped
and turned back to its labour. Lily could see the
left sleeve of the man’s shirt flapping in the breeze.