Lily's Story (77 page)

What would
become of them, fatherless as they were? And now growing more out
of their own stock than out of hers. And out of this place,
too.
That was something, there
was something here that could not be got round. And we’ve made it
better, Sophie, she whispered into the pure dark ahead of her. We
made it more real, anyways.
You
did. But how can
we believe in it now that you’ve left us? It seems like just as
soon as I get to know something, it goes and dies on me.

Strange, but just before
she had decided – for Sophie’s sake – that she ought to come here,
Lily had surprised herself by digging out Sounder’s pouch where it
had lain, dust-covered, for the longest time. Had she given up
entirely on the aboriginal promise of magic in this world?
Trembling, she’d drawn open the leather sachet and one by one
fingered the contents: Mama’s crucifix with its forlorn sheen under
the muted winter-light; Papa’s Testament still unread and the Lady
Fairchild of its inscription having long ago relinquished her
titles; the cameo pendant with the ivory profile someone said might
have been a grandmother undiminished by seas or eons; and
Southener’s jasper amulet – magic’s own heart-chamber once – where
no echo now embered anywhere. For a second she had wanted to weep,
girlishly, not at her irreconcilable loss but at the absence of
feeling itself. Just then Rob had called from the lane, “C’mon Ma,
everybody’s leavin’!” She put the pouch aside, and flung her scarf
resolutely about her throat. The Alleyfolk cheered as the
nightchill struck the warmth of her greeting.

Lily laughed,
then glanced around to make sure none of the buskers had seen her
smiling through the tears congealed on her cheeks. She was
remembering something Sophie had said only a few months ago. Hazel
had asked her if she was interested in having her picture taken by
one of those daguerreotype men who came around to the Heaven every
once in a while. “Christ, no,” Sophie snapped. “I don’t need no
picture of myself to be remembered by. Who’d ever forget
this
shape once they laid their unsuspectin’ eyeballs on it?
Stoke calls me the pink poppy with the purple dropsy, an’ he ain’t
far afield on that one!”

The skaters
had started a
bonfire near the
rink. Its avid orange flame tongued the black penumbras above it.
It twisted and grew fabulous as she watched, unleafing its fragile
intensities in scrolls ever widening, brightening, taunting the
very edges of expiry. Lily shuddered, blood-deep in her being. I am
still here, she thought. I don’t know why and I never have. I am
carried along by urges I can feel but not describe, not even to
myself. Perhaps they were the same urgencies sweeping these dancers
into the music and the moment. Perhaps not. Hers might be her own,
after all.

Yet how indifferent the
world’s imperatives must be to have passed by so many with barely a
sideways glance, their primal promptings seemingly devoid of pity
or humanity or even acknowledgement. How little comfort they had
been to Solomon in his sea-coffin, to Maman and Mama in their
frozen loneliness, to Aunt Bridie or Uncle Chester or Papa in their
grave-grounds as alien as the moonscape above her now. How much
time, even, had she herself been given to mourn her lover, wild and
brave and cold as the snows that held his faithfulness forever from
the true earth? Who had decided then that she should go on? And how
often had she yearned to hear the voices of the good, dear gods –
the ones Old Samuels had promised her if she could only find the
shaman’s ground they worshipped from in the midst of their fear and
helplessness. They would surely have something to say to her, here,
now, not an arrow’s toss from the hallowed mounds where he and
Southener lay in perpetual something-or-other.

I am here. And Sophie is
already become another of those I can weep for only because they
are absent. Not so. Not true. The dead drive us forward, onward,
headlong towards the dark heart of what haunts them. They ache in
their knowing.

Without realizing it Lily had
drifted back into the quick heat of the ballroom. She felt the
blush of it across the nape of her neck, and instinctively removed
her coat. Something whisked it away to her right. Her scarf unwound
itself and slithered off. She registered only mild puzzlement. The
music rose up to meet her sudden attention. It filled her ears like
harp’s-wind through a seashell, its echoes celestially
infinitesimal.

“
It’s a waltz.
Would you like to dance?”

“
Yes. I think
so.”

A muscled hand, her own gently
crushed within it.

“
A tad
off-key, but our own, eh?”

Eager, masculine voice.
Accustomed to command?

She must have told him
her name, for it graced his lips as often as he dare allow between
the suave stint-and-glide of the waltz they were now so evidently
engaged in. Then she did hear her own voice, witty and demure and
only-just-withholding. Then the music took them both into the sweet
morphia of its all-encompassment, and she felt her body detach
itself from something ugly and abiding, and swing free, at last, of
its own longing.

Who cared that such music
was a prisoning bliss? And not once did she deign to glance down at
her partner to confirm what she already knew: that it was Tom on
that miraculous night of the Great Western Ball, that it was
Ti-Jean tender in the breathless music of their cabin, that it was
her husky sculler with arms like oars under the pavilion’s perfect
light. She was, after all, here. She was alive. She was Lily. She
was dancing.

BOOK
TWO

Shaman’s Ground

Granny

32

1

Granny Coote was dreaming she was awake
again. The sun’s velvet buzz on her eyelids was almost real, the
memory of its insistence sweet and bitter over the decades – but
she wouldn’t be fooled again. No fool like an old one, she thought,
especially one who has learned so little for the effort spent. More
and more she was having trouble keeping her dreams and her reveries
apart. Yesterday afternoon, for instance, she had sat down at the
kitchen table with the fresh tomatoes left for her by the
well-meaning Mrs. Buchan, and was about to slice the ripest one
with a shaky right hand when the room went dark. She was positive
she had not closed her eyes, had not fallen asleep, but the sun had
gone down without notice, it seemed, and the tomato lay neatly
carved on the breadboard in those little wedges she had been
fashioning for more than seventy years. The knife was still in her
hand. Arthur and Eddie had been visiting again: Arthur at the
piano, Eddie tapping his toes and letting the juice from the
tomatoes squirt down his chin, while his blue eyes – replica of his
father’s – never left his Granny: teasing, tempting, full of the
wondering beneficence of the happy child. “Eat your supper, then
sing,” she had told him, as always. “He’s singing for his supper!”
Arthur called from his dais, and broke into a verse from ‘A
Wandering Minstrel’ just to annoy her. “Let the boy finish his
supper, you old coot!”, but both the boy and the baritone broke
into unchastened laughter. “He’s just teasing, Granny,” Eddie said.
And she wanted to reach across the table and hug him with her bony
arms. Arthur was wailing out his parody of Katashaw’s song, his
grin as sun-lit as the meadows of Titi-pu.

But of course there was no music here; there
had been none since Eddie went away so many years ago. And Arthur,
bless him, slept near his wife in the village cemetery beyond First
Bush. So she had continued her meal as if she had not lost three
hours somewhere, glad to sit in the dark where it didn’t matter if
she were asleep or not. Still, it worried her, this lapsing, this
forgetting in the middle of an action – cutting flowers, mending
the old chesterfield Arthur loved so much, where they had made
their last, startling love, and where Arthur had closed his eyes so
she wouldn’t see his treachery as his hand stiffened forever in
hers. And she would wake suddenly to find herself away off in the
sunflowers or squatting foolishly beside the hedge that kept the
street at bay. So this is what it is to be senile, she thought; I
already know what it is to be old, I’ve had lots of practice
chewing on my gums and getting out of bed piecemeal with every
joint cracking like a rusted block-and-tackle. But this. This is
trouble. They’ll finally have an excuse to put me out of this
place, and lord knows they’ve been looking for one ever since
Arthur died and that thing happened with Eddie and the Ladies
Auxiliary suggested a ‘good home’ in the city she had spent her
life fighting. But then the tragedy of ’eighteen had struck like
the foul afterbreath of the Great War itself, and she had given
them something else to think about.

I’m not senile, she thought, refusing to
open her eyes, to acknowledge the supremacy of the dream and the
incursions of the night-world. I may be a bit ‘barmy’ as the
Alleyfolk used to say, but then I have cause, we all have cause.
When that thing happened to her throat after the news came, she had
been unable to tell them it was all right, that she understood
exactly why and how it had happened, had had to be. She saw her
neighbours turn away, their fright a reflection of her own, the
same stunned stare she had already seen in the eyes of the bereft –
the widows, mothers, betrothed – most of whom had lost a loved one
and a god also. They, too, were speechless in their
dumbfounding.

The rattle of pebbles across the glass of
the front window confirmed it: she was asleep and about to awake.
Her eyes opened to the richness of mid-morning August, 1921. She
was, she noted ruefully, fully clothed; her flower-print housedress
was soaked with sweat and wrinkled beyond redemption. They’d love
to come in and catch me like this, she thought, easing her brittle
body off the cot – still slim but no longer muscled, her breasts
about as lively as a couple of fallen cupcakes (“The trouble with
old age,” Sophie used to say, “is your arse gets too tight an’ your
cunny too loose”). Granny got seated upright, steadied herself on
the edge of the cot for a moment, then let the sun pour across her
bare feet from the vivifying east. As the circulation pushed
fretfully through her warming bones, she felt the rheumatic ache
subside to its daytime level. She flexed her legs and stood up. The
blood rushed back to her head and she grabbed the dressing table
just in time.

Stupid old woman, she muttered to herself.
Mrs. Buchan’d love to come in here the saft and find me sprawled on
the rug with a broken hip and lolling like a mute. It would be
Sunset Glades for sure. The village’d be rid of the last of its
eyesores, and the council would get its house back and the
urchins’d have to go all the way to Potts’ Lane for their
amusement.

She felt fine now, just a touch woozy, most
likely because she had merely fantasized having supper as the
wincing of her stomach reminded her. She glanced about the single
room that had been her home for five years, ever since she had shut
up the last of the two little bedrooms Arthur had added to the far
side of the place – Coote’s shack as it was known in the village.
However, it was a large enough room with the kitchen area facing
the south sun and the parlour with its spacious east window and two
‘port-holes’ in the north wall over Arthur’s piano with his music
sheets still opened upon it. The rug was bleached erratically by
the sun and stained where the roof had leaked before the Reeve had
come over to fix it for her.

Yes, her supper – vegetables from her garden
(and Mrs. Buchan’s) and some lumpish bread she’d made one cool
morning in the oven of the stove she’d picked up from the Lane, and
Eddie had squealed with delight when old Badger Coombs had let him
take the reins for a while, and pouted all afternoon till she baked
him his red-currant tarts. Her blood was flowing again, her muscles
loosened in the warmth of the room, the rheumatism in temporary
retreat. Granny felt strong enough to face the day – whichever one
it was – as surprised as ever at the resilience of her body’s flesh
and nerve, the unwilled potency that gathered its wits each night
and surged forth to greet each anonymous morning. In spring, summer
and fall there was the garden to occupy her body’s self-renewing
restlessness, the passage of people before her parlour window, the
cries of children from the fields and swamps below her yard, the
bleat and harrumphing of lake-steamers half-a-mile away on the St.
Clair, the clatter of the city-line streetcar on Michigan Ave., and
the periodic fart of Gassy Peter’s flivver jostling with the
gravelled lanes of the village. She needed all of them: she had not
left her property – except for the epidemic – since that black day
in September.

It was the winter that frightened her most:
the stark stretches of space between house and trees; the icy
desert of ragged swamp all the way down to the St. Clair and the
distant snow-shrouded freight-sheds; the river’s tongue stiffened
blue, vacant of vessel or human save for the odd dot of a fisherman
expunged by the slightest drift of wind. Birds fled or vowed
silence. The children emerged occasionally, as from cocoons, to
test the air or the ice, and on Sunday afternoons their cheers and
angel-gliding over the improvised rinks of the marsh saved her from
whatever form of darkness that was threatening the domestic and
habitable variety she had known and coped with for over eighty
years. Though her ancient bones invariably found some fresh and
independent source for hope, she was not sure she could survive
another winter. Why don’t you just pack it in, she often said to
her complaining flesh. After all I’ve given you a good run; there’s
nothing you haven’t tried or survived; no muscle, no gland has gone
unflexed or untitillated; no appetite untempted or unappeased. I’m
as sick and tired of your whining as you are of mine. I’m ready.
I’ve been ready for a long time. What sort of bribe will you
consider? Think about it, because I’m about to embarrass us
both.