Lily's Story (52 page)

Point Edward
by day was also unique among the insular Christian communities of
those days.
In most Ontario
towns everyone on a main street would be instantly identifiable –
along with his pedigrees, the direction and purpose of his
movements, the said-value of these latter and the likely
consequences thereof. A stranger’s presence would be noticed as
quick as a bur between the toes and be almost as popular. But here,
Michigan Ave. and Prince Street – even a back street if it led to
the beach – were daily invaded by exotic creatures from every
class, the identification of whom could often form an amusing but
inconclusive pastime. Tramps, sailors, stockbrokers, escaped
felons, failed poets, even Sir John A. Himself might pass by
Redmond’s store without a second glance being taken.
Notwithstanding such an incongruous cosmopolitanism, there existed
alongside it – or within it – a typical ingrown, self-generating
community of the Ontario variety. Amazingly, the two societies
rarely blended, even at the edges, though they were materially
responsible for each other’s welfare. The ‘village’ of Point Edward
provided the Grand Trunk with a sober supply of respectable workers
with families to ballast their commitment and a church to teach
them their manners. The Company – despite the noise, moral squalor,
and crass commercialism – ensured the permanent citizens a life of
modest affluence and certain progress in divine concert with the
Dominion itself.

5

L
ily Marshall stood at
her kitchen window and surveyed the wonders of her small world. The
tulips she had planted along the garden path bloomed gaily in
primary reds and yellows. Clara and Gimpy – returned to their
circle of friends once more – had made a special trip out in their
new Burlington buggy just to admire them, Clara’s frail teeter and
pastel stare reminding them of her recent ordeal, Gimpy joking
bravely and poking his leg in jest at the boys. Along the lane the
lilacs that Bachelor Bill helped Uncle Chester plant so long ago
exploded a dozenfold in mauve and evening indigo, their underground
runners popping up everywhere around, stitching earth to air. Along
the edge of the spaded vegetable patch, Robbie, dreaming of his
seventh birthday and instant manhood, roamed like a scout for King
Arthur – nose to the ground, wooden sabre cocked and ready (made
for the young paladin by his aging father), and muttering
abracadabra
oaths to keep his courage charged. With no visible
mercy he cut down every milkweed corpse who had dared to survive
the winter with a fearsome blow, then scampered into the woods in
the direction of Big Creek or Camelot. Ever since Gimpy had read
him those King Arthur stories during his stay with them (while Lily
nursed Clara alone), Robbie had been wild with them. Tom borrowed
the book and read him more, indeed read to them all around the
winter fire. Robbie could hardly sit still long enough to hear the
end of an adventure; he would be itching to act it out, to get
outdoors and stretch his legs and his intrepid arms. He never
wanted the same story repeated, and would threaten a tantrum
whenever Brad, as he usually did, asked for the one about Gawain or
young Lancelot again and again. Lily watched Brad’s eyes, the flame
dancing in them, as he lay on the sheepskin and formed the words in
his mouth a second before Tom pronounced them, as if he were
tasting them, until all at once they struck his imagination with
the impact of tattoos. Lily sat beside Tom on the arm of the big
chair, matching the letters to her husband’s lips, herself no
longer amazed at the magic congruence of letter and sound, the
marvelling transformations of the heart it allowed. She could read.
Not all by herself yet. But almost, soon. When Robbie went off to
school, in the village in September, she would have him bring the
gray-covered primer home, and they would learn together. And Brad
too. Lily and her boys.

That’s what
people whispered behind her along Michigan Ave.
when she pulled them into town on the toboggan
Tom had made them. She wanted them to say it out loud, to sing it
to the congregation. “An’ how are the tow-heads this
morning?”grocer Redmond would say, ruffling their hair under the
tuques and slipping them an appeasing sweet. “Like two beans on a
platter.” But of course they were as different as two humans could
be. For Robbie the objects of the variegated world around him were
put there by some benign gamesmaster especially for him to explore,
expose to delight or plunder with desire. When he rested, they did
too. He could watch with dispassion as his father skinned a
freshly-killed rabbit, not connecting the clouded eyes in the
death-clench of that animal’s face with the bright kinship of those
that peered out at him from a brush pile or turned their tender
curiosity upon him when he disturbed them over lunch at the lettuce
patch. Brad, too, as his health improved, loved to be outdoors in
the summer. When the family went walking together, Brad would lag
or meander, sometimes even stop in mid-stride as something in the
air struck him still: a thrush’s sigh from the shadows, beads of
dew along a leaf trapped by light, a crow raking the silence with
his caw, a bullfrog’s eyes bobbing in the slime, the flick of a
trout in a pool with no bottom. From this window she could, if she
were careful, watch him out there – listening, touching, reaching
for the roots of awe. At such moments she wished she could bring
him – and Robbie as well – to Old Samuels and hear them talk
together or not talk in those silences-between-souls she knew were
gone now from her own life. Robbie would have bounced into the
woods on Sounder’s heels, chattering all the while and then going
perfectly quiet for hours, like foxes in the deep grass waiting for
prey. Brad and Acorn would have been fast friends, nothing could
have stopped them.

Naturally
Tom found it
easier to relate to Robbie, taking him off to fish in the creek,
sometimes letting him come along while he hunted, the boy carrying
the lumpy burlap with two dead cottontails on his sore back, blood
tickling his bare leg. The boy worshipped Tom’s presence and filled
his absence with reverent re-enactments of their pleasures. Brad,
horrified by the barn, the stench of carcasses and the accusing
eyes of slain creatures, took to Tom slowly and obliquely. At last
Tom seemed to understand this and accept it as what would always be
between them. Tom had that disarming smile – quick and unprepared
for, flashing news of its warmth, its fear of being hurt, the sense
of its own helplessness in the mess of emotion and desire that made
up his larger being. Gradually and very reluctantly, Brad caught
sight of those parts of Tom she herself had loved outright from the
moment of contact across a faraway dance-floor. By the time Tom
began reading to him, Brad was not surprised. Months later he eased
himself up onto Tom’s knee, and Tom kept right on
reading.

They are each
an extension of one part of
Tom, she thought. Does he know that? Is that why he can
love them in such different ways? How much of me lies enfolded in
them, I don’t really know. I can’t see such things because I think
of my love for them as complete and whole – as an unending ache
when I fear for their safety, panic when their bodies shiver on the
brink of fever, as joy that swells out of my heart and leaves me
without breath when I see them laughing together with Tom with
nature with the world around that loves them this moment. What the
women who will love them later might see, I can never say. The
affections that bind us here and now are a web of wondrous
intricacy, of inseparable elements: Tom and me, me and Tom, Tom and
each of his boys, me and the boys. We are. I never hoped for
more.

Tom
was more than happy when he was
offered the foreman’s job starting in September. He felt
vindicated. He wrote to Bags Starkey’s cousin in London to offer
Bags a job, but word came back that he had ‘gone off’ without
telling anyone where. On the first sunny Sunday in April, Tom had
borrowed Gimpy’s old buggy and taken the whole family for a drive
in the country. On the way back home they detoured into the
village, and Tom, going strangely quiet, pulled the horses up at
the corner of Albert and Ernest. Tom pointed his whip towards a
newly-built frame cottage covered with cedar-shakes, whose aroma
sweetened the air for blocks around.

“
It comes up
for sale,” Tom said, “at the end of the summer.”

Lily took hold of his other
hand. “The school’s just down the street a ways,” she said to the
boys.

“
I don’t wanna
go to no school,” Robbie said.

“
He’s just mad
’cause we took so long,” Lily said quickly to Tom. He just laughed
and embarrassed the boys by hugging her in public. To the north
Lily could hear the waves repeating their chant on
Canatara.

What more could I want,
Lily thought, watching Brad from her kitchen window as he sat on
the oak-stump in the May sunshine staring past his brother’s antics
into the woods beyond. The move into the village would be the last
link in the chain of connection Lily felt all around her these
days. They would at last become part of some larger community, one
in which, though she herself might never feel fully a citizen, the
boys could grow up inside so naturally they would think later on
they had invented it. For Tom, it meant committing himself more
certainly to a life he had taken up in large measure because of his
love for her; company and family and town would be his domain. But
there was a part of him – as with her – that would always remain
irreconciled to domesticity, to the predictable rhythms of
civility, to a God who hurled brimstone one moment and puffed on a
pipe the next. I loved that in him too, she thought, I must have –
that perverse will to hazard, to ride the flux, to play
truth-or-dare with the random deities of the universe.

Old Samuels was right: the gods
don’t disassemble when the hedgerows and the houses and walled
gardens go up. When the white man cleared the forest of the great
trees that were left in the wake of the fleeing ice, the demons who
lived in them did not perish in their ash, they were released into
the volatility of air where they still whirl and collide and howl
like schizophrenes. Even now they ride the winds of pestilence over
the corrupt earth, mocking and vengeful.

Lily had heard
their mocking laughter many times. When Clara’s boy was stillborn
and she had come down with childbed fever, Lily had wrapped the
foetus in a blanket and covered its drowned eyes and begged Clara
not to look. She had sat beside her friend for weeks, watching her
twist and grimace with dreadful pain and with the dream of the dead
child’s face. Most of the time they were alone in the dark, where
Lily’s hand on a brow, a cheek, over the eyelids was Clara’s only
link with life and its manifest horrors. When the fever broke and
Clara was surprised to find herself alive, she gave Lily a look
that said: so it was
you
who brought me
back to all this? Later on, when Gimpy arrived and Lily had bathed
the stink off her and washed her hair and put a bit of rouge on her
ghastly face, Clara smiled and was able to offer something that was
almost gratitude. Lily was not in the least offended.

During the winter there
had been a diphtheria scare. Quarantine signs dotted the village
doors. Lily didn’t go into town for weeks. The boys complained but
were not taken to Little Lake to skate. Word came via Tom that
Maudie Bacon’s youngest was stricken. “She’s got Mary there to
help,” was all Tom said. A week later Maudie’s little girl was dead
but not before suffering the bewilderment of pain that no mother’s
arms could diminish or explain. She was the first human creature to
be buried in the cemetery grounds just donated by the Grand Trunk
to the three churches. She’s near the woods and the shy trilliums,
Lily thought, blotting out the nasal sentiments of the Reverend
Hardman. Old Samuels would approve. But what would he say about
Aunt Bridie encased in knickerbocker granite lintelled with a
family name that would have shrivelled a leprechaun’s laugh. Or
Uncle Chester buttoned up in the chaste Methodist grave of a
sometime oil town, the name on the headstone a perpetual puzzlement
to the locals ever after. Where were their spirits now?

A few weeks after the
funeral Lily caught Robbie in her room with a leather pouch wide
open on the floor and one of its objects in his hand. “Uch!” he
snorted, “a dead rabbit’s foot.” Lily scolded him more severely
than he thought necessary, and then gently replaced the cross,
pendant, stone and Testament. The rabbit’s foot she kept in her
hand till it warmed. “Did Da shoot that?” Robbie said through his
dried tears.

Lily put the
token in her apron pocket, and when
Tom took the boys off to watch the ice break up on the
creek, she put on her coat and scarf and headed into town. She went
around the northern perimeter, avoiding the streets, walked along
the tracks a ways till she could see the smoke from the shacks in
Mushroom Alley, then veered north through the brush, coming out
after a while into the windswept clearing she knew so well. She sat
down and caught her breath. Soon the voices began, one by one, to
detach themselves from the wind. She heard Acorn say something to
Sounder and caught Sounder’s shrill laughter. Southener repeated
words to her she had almost forgotten. She saw the outlines of his
grave, now sunken below ground level with the weight of a dozen
years. Where is he? She asked soundlessly, afraid that even a
jarring step might be catastrophic. Slowly she felt her head turn
to the north-east, and perhaps ten minutes later – how could she
tell? – she was able to discern a slight rectangular hump in the
sand, well disguised by grass and young aldershoots. She approached
the grave, knelt down, said something reverential in a strange
tongue, then scooped up a little sand, placed the rabbit’s foot in
the hollow, and covered it.
Goodbye, Old Samuels
.