Lily's Story (73 page)

Dowling gave them all his best smile but
there was no mirth in it. He promised a response within a week.

3

I’m thirty-eight years old, Lily thought.
It’s time I put down some roots of my own. I’ll take some of Brad’s
schooling money and turn the place into a cottage. I’ll paint it
blue. It’ll be a place he’ll want to come back to, the kind of
place everybody needs once in a while – a sanctuary. For me, it
will be home.

It was hard for Lily to
believe that Brad was now in grade ten at the Sarnia High School,
having completed grade nine with honours in every subject. He was
studying literature and grammar and mathematics, even French. But
when she attempted a brief conversation in the tongue she had known
from childhood, Brad grimaced, then announced that she wasn’t
speaking any version of French that
he
knew of. She started to explain
her position but for some reason stopped part-way through and
mumbled, “Well, I guess your teachers would know best.” They had
more luck in their discussions of history and geography, certainly
in the flush of mutual excitement during those first few months
when Lily packed him a lunch and walked with him to the trolley and
waited by the window in the gathering dusk till she spied his slim
figure among the crowd of returning workers and put their kettle
on. Lily listened to his tales of the English kings – the wicked
and the sublime – and of the odysseys of the mad, foolish,
wonderful seafarers who sailed straight off any horizon. Cautiously
she would interrupt him, trying anxiously to keep the countries and
oceans in their place, not a little baffled by the flat maps in
Brad’s textbook and by his abrupt expositions. He himself
worshipped England, her sanguinary pageant and her heroic verse,
and was quickly irked by Lily’s persistent questions about Ireland
and where this or that minor country might be, as if it really
mattered to anyone. When Lily reminded him that his grandfather and
grandmother came from there, he simply looked puzzled, then hurt;
finally he would sputter, “This is history, Ma, not family.” Then
that soft and engaging side of his nature, the side that needed to
be loved utterly, re-emerged and he would curl up beside her on the
chesterfield and read aloud to her from
The Idylls of the King
.

By the winter term, however, these happier
sessions were fewer and further apart. He seemed more and more to
prefer studying alone, drawing the curtain around his bed or when
Robbie clumped through, wrapping himself in a shawl and
disappearing into the drafty shed. Several times in January he came
home late for supper without explanation, and picked at his food.
Finally he confessed that he was going out with school chums to
have a coffee at a restaurant where they read the newspapers and
talked, and occasionally bought some supper. He said how sorry he
was for worrying her and that it would not happen again, he was
sure, because the fellows had all treated him so many times he just
couldn’t throw himself on their hospitality any more. Next morning
Lily gave him a silver dollar: “You ain’t a beggar,” she said. “You
need money to treat your friends. Just tell me when you plan to
stay late down there.” Brad made a solemn promise, and most of the
time remembered to honour it.

In June Lily received a letter from Mr.
Axelrod, the principal, and read it with wonder and trepidation. In
a formal style and script, it informed her that her son was at the
head of the class and reported to be one of the most brilliant
students his teachers had ever seen. She was exhorted not to reveal
such appraisal to her son for fear of unpredictable consequences in
regard to the orderly development of his moral character.
Nevertheless, it was important for his mother to realize the depth
of his talent that still lay untapped by enlightened instruction,
and to make preparations for her son’s potentially long and
certainly fruitful academic career. In short, it was never too soon
to start saving money, as even with the scholarships Brad was sure
to obtain, a university education in a capital city was expensive.
That much Lily already knew, and her intuition about her son’s
precocity was now fully confirmed. She went immediately to the jar
under her bed, next to Sounder’s pouch, and counted out sixty-nine
dollars – two year’s savings. She would have to find more, but
there were three years still to worry about that. Robbie was paying
her a little board money whenever he got work at the sheds. Violet
often refused to take the salary Lily gave her, but Lily merely put
it aside in a separate cache – it wasn’t her money. We’ll make out,
she said to Tom, like we always do.

In March she had wondered
if that sentiment were true when Brad, studying in the shed to
punish his boorish brother, caught a chest cold which rapidly
turned into pneumonia. “It ain’t my fault, Ma,” Robbie pleaded and
Lily absolved him with a touch and together they once again nursed
Brad through his fever and delirium, but in so doing Robbie
expended some small part of affection and faith that was afterwards
irrecoverable. Robbie pitched in and helped Violet with the
laundering – swearing the household to secrecy – while Lily sat by
Brad’s bed reading aloud to him (in a cadence almost as good as
Miss Kingman’s) his current favourite, ‘The Lady of Shallot’. When
at last he was strong enough to speak, the first words he said
were: “I love you, Ma. I’ll never leave you. Never.” He began to
shake, not from the fever but its devastating aftermath. Tears
slipped unannounced down his livid cheeks, and though Lily brushed
them aside with a soft cloth, they continued to fall. He
knows
already, she
thought. One way or another, I will lose him.

As soon as she had finished counting out the
precious savings, Lily went fishing for Brad’s Easter report card;
she didn’t know why but she wanted just to look at it and admire
the scarlet A’s printed there and shimmering like heraldic gules –
to hold them up to the light for Tom to see. It wasn’t in the
apple-box beside the bookcase so Lily pulled out the drawer under
Brad’s bed where he often kept his papers and notes from school. It
was there, but she didn’t pick it up. A notebook, half-open caught
her eye and held it. She leafed through it, scanning the crabbed
printing that was unmistakably her son’s. Each page contained a
poem, scribbled over and copied out and altered and finally printed
in immalleable block capitals. They were Brad’s own poems. From the
fading of the ink, she concluded that some of them had been written
many, many months ago. She could not read them. She closed up the
secret book and carefully put it back in its rightful place. She
sat down at the kitchen table, shaken, unable to think a single
mitigating thought. “Hey, Ma, I’m cleanin’ two cottontails out
here, you want ’em for supper?” Robbie called, and then came in
from the shed to see if she was all right. “I’ll get the fire
goin’,” he said.

With the depression showing
no sign of being able to discriminate between
bleu
and
rouge
, Robbie had been able to find
only occasional work at the freight-sheds, lugging barrels and
crates much as Tom had done in the full heat of the summer. Redmond
continued to give him three half-days delivering grocers in the
township, plodding along at the mercy of Rocket whose swayback and
irregular trot amused children and roused the derisive instincts of
the young toughs-about-town. Robbie never complained, and although
he was naturally taciturn, he often sank into a black silence that
Lily noticed immediately and gave a wide berth to. When Brad
blundered into one of them, a brief flare-up ensued with Brad
snapping out something elegant and barbed and Robbie stammering an
unoriginal curse before stomping off to the woods.

The woods he loved still – to walk in, hunt
in, do whatever private ruminating he needed to do when the world
flummoxed him as it so often did. He was like a gentle bull with
its horns growing inward. One day on his return from hunting in
Second Bush, he said to Lily, “I stopped over at the old place.”
“You did?” “I looked in the barn. Nothin’s been touched. There’s a
bed in there an’ Ti-Jeans rocker. I almost forgot about that old
place, you know.” “It’s still ours,” Lily said, looking for some
defense. A week or so later Robbie did not come home all night;
Lily didn’t notice until she called out to the pup-tent where he
often slept in the spring and discovered it was empty. He arrived
shortly after breakfast and said, with a hint of badgering pride,
“I slept over at the old place. It’s real cozy. You get a fresh
breeze out there, all night.” During the month of June he seemed to
spend more and more of his spare time ‘out there’. When she
casually questioned him about this, he grew silent, then morose.
She stopped asking. But one day when she and Violet were out for
their Sunday walk, they found themselves by chance coming out of
First Bush by a new path and crossing Michigan Ave. towards the
town-line not a stone’s throw from Bridie’s place. Sensing where
they were destined, Violet drew Lily into a direct route and they
came upon their ruined homesteads through the rotting stumps of the
windbreak. What they saw surprised and then astonished them. A
fully developed vegetable garden had arisen like a materialized
dream-image exactly where the old one had always been – leaf and
vine and tuber and wrinkled blossom. Robbie came out of the barn,
blinking. “It’s real good ground,” he said.

Nothing was said about it but when Lily felt
up to it she slipped over to ‘Rob’s place’ (as it was now called)
in the early June evenings of 1878 and stepped into stride beside
her son, hoe in hand, as of old. She offered no advice and none was
asked for. He can’t make a living out of this patch, fertile as it
is, but he loves it: it allows him to give something of himself
completely without the fear of hurting or being hurt, she thought.
When the August blights spoiled half of his crop, he was undaunted.
He gathered his harvest, sold it at the Sarnia Market every
Saturday during the season (she was told), and gave his mother ten
dollars of his earnings. She put it in the schooling fund. And when
Brad whined and pleaded and threatened over the question of his
boarding in Sarnia during his grade-ten year, Lily was able to hold
fast and say no. The trust fund had taken on an aura of something
sacred between them. Someday Brad would understand it all. For the
time being, though, he retaliated by staying away more and more to
squander his money and time with school friends she was never to
meet.

Just before the elections and the fuss over
property title, Robbie received a letter with an exotic stamp on
it. He had never before received a letter of any kind. Somewhat
guiltily he slunk away to his tent and read it. Lily heard him jerk
his shotgun off the shed wall and tramp towards the bush. The
letter was floating in the breeze near the tent, abandoned. Lily
rescued it, then read it as she knew she was meant to. It was from
Fred Potts – Blub – and contained a thrilling account of his
adventures with the circus, including lurid descriptions of the
southern American towns and backwaters they visited each year, and
a narrative of his own rise from stableboy to midway helper to
full-scale barker for the girly-show. Fred hinted darkly that the
circus would be coming next spring at least as far as London, and
that a world of unimaginable, footloose wonder awaited the ruthless
and the brave.

When Lily and Rob had finally finished
piling the last of the pumpkins onto the barrow, they sat on the
bench outside the barn and sipped tea made over the open fieldstone
fireplace Rob had built nearby. Lil was thinking of past pleasures
and sadnesses so she was startled when Rob said to her in his
blunt, unprefaced manner, “I’ll never leave you, Ma.”

4

It was close to Halloween
with a frail bloom of Indian summer on the village-to-be when news
reached the Alleyfolk that the council-elect had voted –
unofficially of course – three to two in favour of accepting their
suit. Nor was their unreserved joy dampened one whit by the various
provisos attached to the original request: that the lots be
resurveyed as far as possible to conform with the accepted
geometric principles, that the winding lane in consequence be
‘straightened’ into two tolerable curves, that the latter be
attached to Prince Street at the tracks and adopt
that
nomination for all
time-to-come, and finally that a settlement stipend of fifty
dollars per property – regardless of size or length of tenure – be
paid within three years to cover back taxes, the cost of the survey
and the necessary legal fees, and to convince the legitimate
citizens once and for all that the Alleyfolk intended to be
ratepaying members of this community. The celebration, fueled by
John the Baptist’s new still, went on for days.

Lily took no part in it. She was not ready
yet to celebrate. She had more than the necessary fifty dollars,
and could certainly raise that much again in three years if need
be. In the back of her mind she had thought all along that she
would sell Bridie’s legacy and with it invest at last in something
of her own making and choosing: thus the appropriateness of taking
possession of this property seemed foreordained. She owed ten or
twelve dollars in back taxes on the old place, which the township,
noting the rekindled interest in the land, had decided to press
for, but even in the currently depressed market, almost two acres
of cultivated land with a barn would sell for forty dollars or
more. But Bridie’s place was now Rob’s place. No thought of selling
it could enter her mind. It’s his, she thought; he’s made it his.
I’ll pay the taxes and sign the deed over to him. What else have I
to give my firstborn son? Even so, enough cash remained to buy back
her birthright, as she now thought of it. Of course she would have
no reserve money of any kind. Brad needed a new suit; the two she’d
bought him last year had shrunk around his sprouting frame – he was
going to be tall and slim and handsome. But more importantly, the
warning in the principal’s letter and the burden of her own
responsibility weighted heavily upon her. More immediately she was
worried about Brad’s increasing truancy, and though his grades
remained high, he was drifting away from her control and into
habits that could be ruinous. She knew she must let him board in
Sarnia under the supervision of a respectable family whose
influence, though not her own, would be essential to his progress.
Painful as it might be, she would have to make the move after
Christmas. For that, she needed cash, all she could possibly earn
slaving six days a week.