Lily's Story (84 page)

There’s not a face I
don’t recognize, she was thinking. That would surprise most of
them. I can’t put a name to every one, but I know the family stamp:
big noses, weak chins, sallow eye, the unmistakable hybrid smile.
She could rhyme off their lineage – public and suppressed. She knew
whom their second cousins married in Goderich or Petrolia. She
remembered the high hopes their parents once had for them. And all
these years these good citizens figured it was they themselves who
were watching the sideshow of Mushroom Alley and the Lane. Who did
they think we talked about? Whose rebels and strays kept our
blind-pigs fed and our whorehouses wholesome? We took in rumours
like transfusions. We invented the last laugh.

The chairman-pro-tem had begun.
He called on Sandy Redmond, who repeated aloud the stale news about
the selection of Sam Stadler to design and build the monument. The
gathering added its applause to the speaker’s own.

“
However,”
Redmond continued when the last clap had exhausted its echo, “I
must tell you that the buildin’ fund will still need to be added
to, as the cost of the landscapin’ hasn’t been figured in. So we’re
askin’ you to dig as deep as you can. I think it’s fair to say your
council’s stretched a dollar as far as it can go.”

Like your
wife stretches them behind the counter
, Granny mused. You’ve got a grin and a handshake and a
gift for the gab, but it’s Olive who keeps the business afloat. Any
woman who’s been president of the WCTU knows how to dot the ‘i’ and
cross the ‘t’s’ in temptation. But does she know you used to slip
down to the Lane just like your Dad for a quick snort? I liked your
Dad. He had doe’s eyes.

“
Harry
Hitchcock will now give us his report on the selection of the
site,” said Chairman Stokes. “But before he does, I want to take
this opportunity –”

And every
opportunity you get
.

“–
to say a
special word about those who have sacrificed, in silence and
humility, their time and energy, and in one particular case more
than that, for a cause which we are all agreed is a noble one, even
a divinely inspired one.”

Oh no, he’s about to make a
platitude out of a beatitude.

“
Our Lord
said, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’,”
and be bent to acknowledge the frail being at the end of the table,
blessing her with his roast-beef smile.

And blessed
are the obese for they shall batten on the pastures of
heaven
. Sunny Denfield touched
her hand but she stared straight ahead.

H
alf-Hitch was on his
feet and sailing through his set-piece, which he managed to
complete without dropping a stitch. Into the sea of puzzled faces
he then said in his own voice, “Of course, you now see the special
sacrifice the good pastor was referrin’ to. We need to have back
the lot where Mrs. Coote now lives. Her house’ll have to come down
to make way for the monument. We’re all dreadful sorry about that.
But I’m sure we all know that progress has its price. And there’ll
be compensation for Mrs. Coote beside the reward of the Almighty
Himself. We’re gonna decide on it at our meetin’ next week. We
won’t bore you with the complicated details now, but I was asked by
council to tell you that Mrs. Coote’s generosity will not be
overlooked or ever forgotten. After all, a war memorial’s all about
sacrifice an’ rememberin’,” and he executed a little semaphore
motion with his wooden souvenir.

That’s some
remembrance you’re waving. You don’t know that I know how you lost
that hand, and it wasn’t in the trenches. I got a full description
from Eddie of you toppling off that barstool in some bordello at
Givenchy during an air-raid and getting your arm crushed between
two barrels of beer
.

The stingy applause for
Half-Hitch was cut even shorter by the Reeve’s rising and holding
up his hand. Half-Hitch sulked for a moment, but like the others
surrendered to curiosity and waited for the chief councillor to
speak.

“
I stepped out
of the chair,” he said to them quietly, “because I was the only
member of council not to vote in favour of the Coote property as a
site for the monument. I didn’t want to influence the decision
before you all had a chance to hear the explanations. Even though
the vote of council is legal and all, I’m sure nobody wants to do
anythin’ that would go against the conscience of the village. So I
feel duty-bound to present to you Mrs. Coote’s side of the
story.”

He waved before them what
looked like a handwritten letter. All eyes followed it.

“
As most of
you know, Mrs. Coote can’t speak for herself because she’s got an
affliction of the throat that stops her from talkin’. But I want to
tell you Cora Coote is as bright an’ sharp of mind as she ever was,
and I have here her feelings on this matter, which she wrote down
for me last night. I’d like to read these words if the chairman and
council will let me.”

There was consternation among
council but the assembly made the decision for them. “Agreed,”
seconded chairman Stokes.

The Reeve then read:
“Dear members of council: I wish you to know that I wholeheartedly
agree with your selection of a site for the monument. You have
chosen wisely and with good reason. I wish you to know also that I
will do nothing to stand in the way of your plans. My house and
land are yours. They are sacred to me for reasons no one but myself
could understand, but then so is the village. I was here when the
railroads arrived; I saw the townsite grow block by block, house by
home. I cheered when it was proclaimed a village. In a small way I
helped to name one of its streets. In all those years this house I
now live in was the only one I could really call mine. My hope was
to die in it. What I ask of the council is not compensation in
dollars, which are of no value to me, but compensation in kind. I
want to live out my days here in the village. I do not wish to be
cast into a home for the wretched. The property is yours, in any
event. I ask only that you think of me as you would any true
citizen of the Point. Yours respectfully, Mrs. Cora
Coote.”

The reform party in council
were devastated. No ploy, no plea or manoeuvre of any kind could
have been as effective as these words. The old dame’s a long ways
from being bonkers, Half-Hitch thought. She was giving up her
property but throwing her
eighty-year-old-frail-pathetic-hard-done-by body upon the mercy of
a boastfully Christian community. Even Reverend Stokes was able to
discern the sheer cunning behind the move. What could be done?
There was no public property to trade for hers, outside of
unimproved fringe lots near the dunes, the dump or the swamp. Any
solution that appeared in the least to be mean-spirited would crush
the communal joy in whose spirit the monument was to be
erected.

In the midst of these hushed
mutterings, few people noticed young MacIntosh rise and ask for the
floor. The Reeve, resuming command, rapped his gavel on the
table.

“
There is a
solution to the problem,” said the junior member of council, his
voice quavering ever so slightly. “A solution that’s fair an’
workable.”

“
Go ahead,
Horrie,” said the Reeve.

“
Well, I been
thinkin’ about fair compensation for Mrs. Coote all week, and I did
some askin’ around an’ some fishin’ in the County Court records.
You all know the old lane that used to run between the Savage house
and the Waggoner’s place right across from Coote’s? Hasn’t been
used as a lane I find for more than thirty years. The Savages now
grow potatoes on it, an’ Murray lets his grass grow over his half.
Well, it seems the actual allowance there is thirty feet, twice the
size of the lane. What I’m sayin’ is, there’s more than enough
property to build a small cottage on. My suggestion is this: that
we get together as a community, pool our skills, an’ with the help
of donations and any money Mrs. Coote can spare, build her a
cottage to live in an’ give her a deed to the property. When that’s
done, we can knock down the Coote house an’ start to build the
monument.”

As one, the village turned to
Granny Coote. She fought back the tears, with limited success. She
looked towards Sunny Denfield and – imperceptibly – nodded.

38

1

M
arch of 1922 was one
of those late-winter months which people are forever remembering as
part of a past that was not only better but more certainly
connected with God’s Grace and His grand scheduling of events for
the world’s good – before the rude intercession of wars,
pestilence, and apostasy shook the embedded railings of the Divine
Throne itself. Even God was growing nostalgic.

But here before the villager’s
immediate eye was proof of a larger beneficence, a firm hand on the
throttle of natural progress. The snow continued to fall but only
at night, silent and windless. Each morning it surprised and
delighted anew, fostering the hope that it had not fallen from an
empty sieve of the universe but rather had grown wondrously from
the essence of limb, eave and chimney pot. By day the thermometer
held steady at thirty degrees under a velvet sun, coaxing icicles
out of warmed gables and generally rounding, curving, mellowing.
Rinks glistened by noon but froze tight again overnight. Snowballs
packed as neat as baseballs yet struck like puffs of childish
laughter. The meanest shanty, suffering the neglect brought on by
war and the failure of hope, was transformed by the architecture of
ice and snow into a glittering edifice, bemused by the temporary
perfection of its impromptu scrolls, prisms, mossy filigrees. Some
folk even conceded that the old Coote shack was ‘almost
presentable’, though the latter sentiment may have been prompted
equally by the thought that, come spring, it would no longer grace
the village landscape in any of its transformations. During this
brief, cherished interregnum of the seasons, passers-by could not
help but notice the small, still, alert face of Granny Coote in her
front window. She seemed, to all her newly-hatched well-wishers, to
be staring intently across the street where, despite the weather,
several burly young men were to be seen, at noon-hour or after
work, clearing the snow and chopping out a rectangular trench that
would, when winter had yielded to necessity, hold the concrete
footing of a new house. Around them were conspicuously piled a
number of sections of ‘material’ – two-by-fours, joists, cedar
siding – purchased out of the public purse and the charity of the
citizenry, and carefully covered with several tarpaulins, all of
them turned outward to expose the donor’s identity: McKeough
Fishery, Point Edward, Canada.

Though her
attention was from time to time drawn towards the intermittent
construction activity – she noted with appreciation (and the pure
pleasure of memory) the presence of Charlie Brighton, old Mike’s
boy, out of work, his ‘nerves’ still bad from the War; of Wilf
Underhill, taking precious time from his new son; of Stu Macdonald
and young MacIntosh; and of Sunny Denfield who always came over
afterward – Granny Coote was more likely to be thinking back to
other days of renewal and starting over, to the gentle remembrance
of those few, joyous months with Lucien Burgher, and those years
afterward – unexpected, unearned – when she bore his name proudly
through some of the darkest times of her long, long life.
Cora. Cora Burgher. Cora Coote. Cora
the Cleaning Woman
. She was
all of them, none of them. And before that, through a haze of
memories deliberately but imperfectly obliterated, she remembered
being Lily – of Mushroom Alley, of Potts’ Lane…

2

T
he years between 1879
and 1885 saw the new nation gradually regain the confidence it had
lost during the great depression when for a few shameful moments
some citizens had suffered a lapse of faith in the ineluctability
of their own progress. Aided by crop failures and a cattle epidemic
in England and sanguinary adventures in Egypt and the Sudan, the
local economy turned pink with health. If good works were a certain
sign of election, then who could doubt the divine rightness of Sir
John A’s national hope, fulfilled at last in 1885: a
three-thousand-mile band of iron to weld the faintheart provinces
and empty territories together in a singular purpose. And add to
this a thousand breath-taking bridges and trestles, mathematically
graded inclines, brooding watchtowers, suspended steel arcs and
ballooning grain elevators stretched between Montreal and
Vancouver. The Canadian Pacific Railway swept all before it, the
juggernaut of the transcendentalist dream. By happy coincidence in
1882 the Grand Trunk finally succeeded in swallowing whole its
ancient rival, the Great Western, and within a year rumours of a
magical underwater tunnel began to circulate, an engineering
miracle that would not only confirm God’s allegiance to His chosen
creatures but also link the Canadian transcontinental grid with the
rich, spidering network of iron and affluence south of the
border.

In 1884 when
the world adopted Sir Sandford Fleming’s scheme for Standard Time –
made necessary throughout the civilized world if rational and
efficient train schedules were to be realized – who
the
n could doubt that the
railways, and the foundries forging their steel nervous-system,
carried with them the aspirations of mankind and the sanction of
the Almighty? True, a number of malcontents and Luddites (who
curiously enough preferred to set local time by the local sun) did
write strident letters to newspapers complaining of “railroad
tyranny” and accusing our noble men of science of “tampering with
God’s time”. But pusillanimous voices such as these were forever
silenced by the last spike driven home at Craigalachie.