Lily's Story (58 page)

Lily tried to take this in.
Robbie suddenly peeked around the curtained doorway, half wrestling
with two black-haired male replicas of Sophie Potts, and grinning.
“We could set up in the barn for now,” she said. “Then…”

“
You could
stay here, too,” Sophie said.

And they did.

A
s soon as Lily was
able to walk, Sophie led her across the cart-path that served as a
road towards a barnboard shack squatting forlornly among the scrub
alders. For a big woman Sophie moved adroitly in a sort of ambling
trot. When they came up to the shack, she eyed it with the zeal of
a horse-trader, kicked the door open and seemed delighted that it
stayed upright on its rusty hinges. “Solid wood,” she said,
entering and motioning Lily in after her. “Christ knows where them
Icelanders hooked it from.” To emphasize her point she slapped both
palms down upon a thick table that dominated the large main room.
Dust skittered into the thin sunlight offered by two narrow windows
with glass. Sophie pointed to a misshapen stone hearth unadorned by
andiron or grate. “Only place in the Alley, except the hoorhouse,
that’s got one of these. I don’t think the poor buggars knew what a
stove was. Most of ’em live in igloos back home, I’m told.” She
tested the resistance of a doorless cupboard over the washstand,
loosening one shelf but otherwise seeming to approve. “For your
best china,” she winked. Then she flung back a curtain that once
might have been a velveteen skirt, and when the dust cleared she
said, “
Voilà
, they left the
beds! See, you could put a screen down the middle an’ have yourself
two bedrooms, one for the boys.” Lily’s eyes were casting slowly
about the room. “Back there?” she asked. “Ah, that’s what I really
brung you over for,” Sophie said, and she pushed open the back door
and squeezed herself through. “Them Icelanders, there was two of
them, brothers we reckoned, sneaked off the train headin’ for
Manitoba an’ set up house in the shanty that used to sit right
here. Then they built this place, real sturdy. Didn’t talk to a
soul, but I liked them. We could hear them jabberin’ away in their
crazy lingo – either laughin’ to bust a gut or arguin’ fit to
murder – and as the Alleyfolk usually do, we left them some food
an’ essentials when they wasn’t lookin’. We figured they was
plannin’ on becomin’ fishermen ‘cause they went down to the shore
every day an’ stood watchin’ the pickerel netters real close. One
day they started buildin’ a boat, just back of here, an’ then they
added on this big shed.” She waved at the luxurious, spendthrift
space all around them. “An icehouse, we thought. Who knows? One day
soon after, some ‘official-lookin’’ gentleman come up the Alley an’
before anybody could figure out a way of warnin’ them, the two
brothers was hauled away in irons, lookin’ awful sad. We never did
find out what crime they committed.” The shed had no floor but it
was spacious, had windows on the east side, and boasted several
homemade tables and benches and two enormous cast-iron
pots.

“
You can
s
et up in here,” Sophie said.
“It’s perfect.”

What Lily set
up, with a lot of help from Sophie and others, was a laundering
room. After the Icelanders had been taken off to the wilds of the
Manitoba Interlake, a woman named Mabel Trout had moved in with her
two daughters and established herself as a washerwoman. She had
five customers from the ‘big houses’ up on Victoria Street, and
sometimes handled the overflow from the Queen’s after a ship or two
had debouched its crews upon the lower town. “A hard-workin’ woman,
I’ll give her her due,” Sophie said. “She deserved better than
those sluts of hers – lazy as sows in the sun, they’d sit an’ watch
her scrubbin’ her hands raw an’ never lift a finger. Had fancy
ideas, they did, till one got the clap workin’ part-time up at
Hazel’s an’ the other got herself knocked up an’ dumped by her
so-called respectable gentleman-friend from Charles Street. Went
bonkers, dear old Mabel did – scrubbin’ shit off too many nappies,
I reckon. Anyways they had to cart her off to London, screamin’ all
the way. And I’m tellin’ you, you gotta be far gone to be taken for
crazy in
this
part of town!”

Mabel’s place had
subsequently been taken up by a number of transients and hopefuls
over the course of the winter. “None of ’em lasted much longer than
a pig’s fart,” Sophie said. “People see these empty shacks an’ they
think all they got to do is move in an’ settle down free-of-charge.
Ain’t that easy. I seen a hundred come an’ go. It takes a special
breed to live here for very long.” She paused, then grinned: “We
got rules, you know.”

Although it seemed
obvious to Lily that Sophie felt some special affection for her,
the latter made no effort to explain the intricate code of
behaviour that governed the lives of the permanent residents of
Mushroom Alley. “You gotta learn them on your own, so you’ll know
for sure whether you can stay,” Sophie told her. Lily learned some
of them every day during those first few weeks in which, though no
overt decision was made, Lily began to clean up and repair the
Icelanders’ shack for habitation. Sophie was able to supply Lily
and her boys with clothing to keep warm, drawing upon her vast,
motley stock of wretched hand-me-downs. “When you got eight kids,
nothin’ gets wasted.” Lily wore a moth-eaten sweater of Marlene’s,
wondering where Marlene herself was and why Sophie, who gabbed on
relentlessly about her children, never mentioned her. Robbie and
Brad were well supplied with assorted tuques, mittens and piebald
macintoshes. Spring was only weeks away.

There was no
furniture, however, and not a single utensil. But the day after
Lily began sweeping the filth out of the main room, she found
several pots and pans and a kettle, well-weathered but intact,
sitting on the table. Next day there was a chipped chamber pot and
accessories. Then four shell-shocked wicker chairs. Finally a sofa
desperately in need of a good home. When queried, Sophie just shook
her head and jammed a spoonful of porridge into Bricky’s clenched
jaws (Bricky was short for Baby Ricky,
Sophie’s five-year-old, loudly proclaimed
‘love-child’). “Maybe it was the good fairy,” said nine-year-old
Wee Sue, who still persisted in believing in such things. However,
the moment the gifts stopped arriving, Sophie said, “Spartacus
brung them over. If you don’t like them you can go over to his
junkyard an’ pick out better ones. He likes to choose things
himself for the first time. He won’t be hurt if you take them back
for tradin’. He likes to trade. Got little use for
money.”

“
I got money,”
Lily said. “How much do I pay him?”

“
He likes
coins best,” was all Sophie would say.

When Sophie suggested
that Lily take over Mabel’s defunct business, Lily agreed mainly
because she could think of no other course of action to pursue. She
could not bring herself to return to her own property, to gaze on
the ruins of the house she had spent nineteen of her thirty years
living and growing in. Nor could she consider trying to stay, even
temporarily, in the barn where Uncle Chester had gone to escape
from himself, where Benjamin had waited so loyally all those years,
where the jersey had died giving birth, where Ti-Jean had lain
awake nights dreaming of her hurt eyes. It would be a long time
before she went back there.

Right now they
needed a stove to heat water, they needed firewood, they needed
mangles and scrub-boards and irons (Mabel’s had been looted –
“Here, we call it re-usin’,
”
Sophie explained). Lily had some money left in the bank but she was
afraid to spend it. As soon as she could, she and Robbie walked
down to McHale’s General Store and loaded up a sled with groceries.
When Sophie was out, she stocked her shelves and pantry. Nothing
was said.

“
Don’t buy a
stove,” Sophie said. “Stewie says there’s a good one in your barn.
We’ll haveta get it here before all the snow melts.”

As far as Lily could see, no
plans were made for moving the stove. She continued to fix up the
Icelanders’ shack. The boys helped, still somewhat dazed by the
sudden changes, but like most children unable to cope with being
inactive. Without any advance warning the stove arrived on top of a
large sled. “You Lily?” said the grizzled driver from his bench. In
the keen air his odour preceded him by several rods. “Yes.” He put
two fingers in between his toothless gums and sent an icy whistle
up the Alley. Then he dropped his chin on his chest and appeared to
doze off. The boys ogled the horses, easing up to them and
venturing a pat or two. A quarter of an hour later several bulky
young men – McLeods, McCourts and Shawyers from their genetic
trademarks – trudged in from sundry directions and Bachelor Bill’s
stove was carried into the workroom and its pipes set up and
adjusted to fit the hole already in the roof. When Lily come out to
thank the driver, he was gone. “Belcher, the honeyman,” Sophie said
later. “An off sod, that one.” “How can I thank him?” “Leave him
alone.”

By the time
spring came and the earth around her heaved with tendril, bulb and
root, Lily was ready to leave the rambling comforts of Sophie’s
house. At first she thought there should be some ceremony to mark
the occasion, but it so
on
became clear that none was called for. Sophie went off with Peg and
Stewie in search of morels, and when she came home hours later,
Lily and her boys were gone.

Lily got a
rousing fire started and baked some extra biscuits in Bachelor
Bill’s stove, whose whims she knew intimately. She sat on the boys’
bed singing softly to them and keeping one ear tuned to the
outdoors. When Brad fell asleep at last, she sat at the table
looking into the dark towards the River. No one came, that day or
the next. Finally she walked over to Sophie’s house, knocked, and
getting no response, eased the door open and sat down to wait. The
kitchen felt queer. The objects in it began to sway. She grabbed
the table-top to steady herself. A great emptiness was swelling up
inside her, she was a little girl afloat on her own body, a wafer
of ice on a steaming, featureless se
a – she was marooned unalterably estranged. The tears,
copious and scalding, assuaged nothing, purged nothing, not even
the rage she aimed at her own heart.

When she looked up again,
Sophie was standing off to one side; she had been there for some
time, it seemed, from the stillness of her pose and the resolute
composure of her face. “Cryin’ won’t help,” she said gently. “But
not cryin’s worse. I done my share.” She went over to the stove,
thrashed the grates and put a kettle on for tea. “When you’re
ready, love, we’ll sit down an’ talk about the launderin’ business.
An’ anything else you care to tell.”

2

P
eg used to collect
and deliver the laundry from the ‘fancy houses’ on Victoria Street,
taking John or Stewie along to help pull the wagon over the tracks
or through the mud of the Alley itself. Crazy Mabel gave them a
nickel apiece. But according to Sophie, Peg was now too old for
such a menial task, she was seventeen and ready to go out ‘into
service’ if she wanted to. Although Sophie nattered and swore at
all her kids indiscriminately and cuffed them whenever they were
unwitting enough to loiter within range, she seemed to have almost
no impact on the direction of their behaviour or their lives. “My
Peg’s got the kinda boobies gentleman wanta use for door-knobs,”
she’d sigh, but when Peg announced she intended to go to work as a
maid for a bigwig at the refinery in Sarnia (“a notorious rake” who
had “sprinkled the county with his bastards”), Sophie ranted and
huffed like a storm-warning, threatened to “set your Pa on you”,
sighed, and let her go. She even helped her pack her bags, and said
to Lily, “Jesus, I envy her.” Thus it was that Fred – or Blubber as
he was affectionately called – with Robbie dragged along ‘for
training’, became the delivery boy for the Alley’s newest
washerwoman. Lily didn’t ask how Sophie managed to regain the
interrupted business, but all five customers returned to the fold.
“I know more about them ladies than their priests,” was all Sophie
had to say on the matter. It was more than enough. Spring arrived
in full force. I may not be alive yet, Lily thought, but I’m
living. That’s something. On April first they celebrated Brad’s
seventh birthday.

W
henever Stoker came
home Sophie was a different person. The changes in her, which Lily
came to know intimately in the months ahead, began a week or so
before he actually made his appearance. Blubber or Wee Sue would
detect more sting in her glancing blows and glare back with lips
aquiver. Sophie – who was rarely quiet for more than twenty seconds
at any stretch, carrying on a marathon gossipy tale while giving
Lily a cooking lesson, boxing the ears of the nearest ‘brat’, and
breaking up a skirmish in the yard outside with a lash of her
trumpet tongue – now fell into pockets of silence from which she
had to be periodically roused. Her good humour, that often seemed
as indigenous to her as the jowls that telegraphed it, began to
fail her, and she would sting the handiest victim – child,
neighbour, kettle – with a fearsome, Bible-shaking curse. “I lost
forty pounds since I brought your Brad into the world,” Sophie said
one day when Lily came into the kitchen and found her settled and
steaming in a tin vat, formerly used to nurture beer and now being
filled with an endless supply of hot water by Pet and Wee Sue.
Sophie plopped a sponged into Lily’s hand and she automatically
began to scrub the great dame’s back. Sophie released an
elephantine sigh and then lay back among the cleansing suds; her
voluptuous breasts, liberated from their natural function, floated
before her like plump, spiced offering. Sophie was very vain about
her skin; at the beach she had John and Stewie erect a portable
sunshade over her, and when she bathed in the Lake, she donned a
bonnet bigger than most parasols. “Stoker’s comin’ down from the
bush,” she said languidly, probably not even aware that her fingers
had reached up to emprison her engorged nipples. “Gonna be here
five days before the boat leaves. Five whole – goddamn you, girl,
that’s
hot
, you wanna
scald
my skin, you
want your daddy to warm your ass so’s you won’t be able to sit down
from here to next week!” Wee Sue ignored the comment on her work –
being already well out of range and on her way for more
healing-water. “Stoker’s real fussy about my skin,” Sophie said.
“After all, the man’s had nothin’ to rub his hands over but the
bark of a tamarack for almost three months.” At this point several
mammoth towels – once white – were brought in by the servant-girls
and held theatrically along one side of the tub. Lily offered her
hand and Sophie rose out of the petal-scented waters – all pink
curves and voluminous coombs and licorice curlicues and mahogany
thatch and acres of scrubbed skin inviting touch.