Lily's Story (85 page)

3

F
or Lily the first two
years following the incorporation of Point Edward as a village were
deceptively peaceful. She mourned the death of Sophie quietly and
deeply, as she did all those she had lost, but around her the
seasons and the lives within them changed and throve. The surveys
along Potts’ Lane were duly carried out. The new half of the street
was a little less rambling than before but certainly not as
straight as the town’s other ones were (having been drawn on a map
with a ruler in some official’s study). Except for Lily and her
secret arrangement with Hap Withers, no one on the Lane was unable
to scrape together the fifty dollars to make their quietus with the
council and the railway. The surveyors ‘squared up’ the wandering
lot-lines, driving red stakes in the ground to prove their point.
The resulting deeds were then registered, fixed for all time. But
if the village worthies expected fences and hedges to spring up
along these fresh definitions of ownership, they were disappointed.
Nor was there a rush on paint and plaster at Lockwood’s Hardware by
the citizenry of Potts’ Lane. However, over a period of many months
some signs of proprietorship did become visible to the discerning
eye – a shingled roof (one side only), a single sparkling pane of
glass, a thrust of perennials along a barren wall permitted to
bloom if they were persistent enough, a stone fireplace that didn’t
quite get finished but was used and admired nonetheless.

Mushroom Alley evolved
slowly in the Lane in other ways, no more dramatic but much more
important to Lily and her own life there. People moved away and
were replaced – one or two at a time, so at first little difference
was felt: a brief break, a hiatus, some memories, a forgetting –
and you could reassure yourself that the Lane was still the alley
with a better truer name and that the requisite essentials for
one’s own continuance were still in place. Then one morning you
wake up and realize that everything has changed, that it has been
changed for some time, and people around you are looking at you as
if you’re the only thing that hasn’t. And you ask, how did it
happen?

That Stoker
Potts didn’t come back from the Bruce was no surprise to anybody on
the Lane. The house stood empty all that winter, the screen door
slamming in the wind till Rob finally went over for Lily and nailed
it shut. Next to Hazel’s it was the biggest and best-built house
among them. Rumours flew that some entrepreneurial stranger was
about to buy it with a view to gobbling up the neighbouring
properties to make room enough for a hotel larger than The Queen’s
– now that the depression was giving way to prosperity and
financial adventure. It was soon confirmed that the fifty dollars
had been duly paid and a deed transferred. There was considerable
relief when Peg Potts (now Granger) and her husband moved in,
bringing their own child, and her young brother, Bricky, with them.
But Peg, though she still had Sophie’s devilish eyes and
hair-trigger laugh, had got religion and was quite reserved,
‘standoffish’ according to Betsy and Winnie. Her husband was a
sober man who worked in Sarnia and tried to build a fireplace to
please his wife. “Still,” Hazel philosophized, “they’re really
not
the other
kind
.” Bricky spent a lot of
time with Rob, and when Rob was away, with Lily.

Cap Whittle, one windy autumn
day in 1880, leaned too far out on his topsail yardarm and tumbled
into the billows below, cracking three ribs and jarring another
dime loose in his overworked imagination. His lot was sold to the
eldest McCourt boy and his girlfriend, who proceeded to live in
splendid sin in the neat clapboard cottage they erected and painted
pale blue – once. Despite the impudence of the paint, they were
deemed to be genuine Alleyfolk (the girl being a cousin of the
Shawyers from Bosanquet Township). Lily had known Pippy McCourt for
years, and she waved to him every day as he passed on his way to
the freight-sheds. He always gave her a big smile. I wonder why,
Lily thought, then chided herself for such foolish
introspection.

In the bitter
winter of 1881-82 Hone
yman
Belcher caught pneumonia and died alone in his shack. The frozen
body was discovered three days later by his friend Stumpy.
Honeyman’s business was taken over by a man from Sarnia. Hazel
organized a campaign to raise money so that one of the Shawyer
girls and her husband could afford to buy the lot and make the
place habitable. It was something Sophie might have done – they all
thought but did not say. Another property have been preserved from
contamination, it seemed, but no one was willing yet to admit that
each change somehow put the whole enterprise – if indeed there was
one – in jeopardy. No one dared to even think that with Sophie’s
death something vital and irreplaceable had gone out of their
collective life, that in some mysterious way Sophie Potts
had
been
the Alley and that the Lane in which they had
immortalized her name was already something else.

Such sacrilege may have entered
the minds of one or two of the believers when in May of 1881,
without warning or explanation, John the Baptist capped his still,
chivvied Aquinas the boar onto a wagon with his furniture, and
moved to another shack in the south end near the recently
constructed racetrack and fairgrounds. “Got some French woman hot
for his product,” Hazel opined freely, but nobody laughed. A few
nights later a gang of hooligans put the torch to his shanty when
they found the still without sustenance. “I don’t believe in
signs!” Hazel snapped at Betsy to shut her up.

As it turned out, Stumpy
and Lily were the last of the hard-core Laners to survive there. In
the fall of 1882 Spartacus, complaining of “too damn much noise an’
interferin’ in a body’s business” moved in with John the Baptist.
Both lived and carried on their work into the ’nineties and were
missed when they passed on. They never returned to the Lane. Poor
Stumpy, whose supply of derelicts was not diminished by Sir John’s
‘economic miracle’, continued his good deeds until December of 1884
when one of his boarders stabbed him to death, mistaking him in the
dark for an avenging Beelzebub whom he had seen leaping from the
evening express just moments before. The assassin was shipped off
to the asylum in London.

S
everal weeks after
Baptiste Cartier’s place burned down, Violet arrived at Lily’s in
tears.

“
What’s
wrong?” Lily said.

“
Betsy an’
Shad are gettin’ married.”

“
What
else
?”

“
We’re all
gonna move.”

To a rambling brick house in
Forest, twenty miles to the north-east. “We’re goin’ legitimate
again, Lil,” Hazel explained, “in a town where we can start over.
Shad an’ my girls – Winnie an’ Betsy an’ dear, dear Vi – we’re
gonna fix it up an’ start a boardin’ house. I mean it, Lil, a
genuine boardin’ house. I’m goin’ back to cookin’ again. This
here’s been fun but we’re all too old for it. Winnie almost died
with her last abortion an’ Betsy’s insistin’ on keepin’ the one
she’s got in her now – at forty-six years of age – ’cause she’s
sure it belongs to Shad. So I headed off for Forest on the train
one day last week and I just up an’ bought this old place.”

“
Who’ll
get
this
house?” Lily asked.

“
Hap Withers
has already bought it – for his eldest.”

“
When’re you
leavin’, then?”

“
Next week,
after the holiday. Ain’t it excitin’? You can hop on the Day
Express an’ come up an’ visit us any time. Any time you
please.”

“
Yes,” Lily
said, “it’s not even an hour, I’m told.”

Hazel, almost white-haired now,
let her eyes mist over. “I remember when you was a red-haired
beauty with the shyest smile in the County an’ your little pony
Benjamin pullin’ you up Front Street every Saturday mornin’, an’
Betsy an’ Winnie were the worst teases ever.”

“
I remember,
Char.”

“
Christ in
Heaven, Lily,” she cried, “what’s to become of us?”

V
iolet came in to the
laundry shed to say goodbye. When Lily had gathered enough courage
to ask her why she wanted to go with Hazel and to assure her that
she could stay here and live and work and be happy as long as she
lived, Violet looked at the floor and said, “I got to go with
Hazel. She’s been good to me.” Like the mother you never had, Lily
was thinking when Violet stunned her with: “She needs me,
Lil.”

The two women embraced, and it
was Lily who let go first.

“
I got
somethin’ for you,” Lily said.

Violet glanced at the carpetbag
in which Lily had packed some of the clothes and trinkets Violet
had left here over the years and into which she had secretly tucked
the one hundred and fifty dollars of unclaimed income that Bachelor
Bill’s ‘retarded’ daughter had earned as her helper and her
friend.

“
Not that,”
Lily said. “Something my mother gave me I’d like you to have, to
remember me by.”

“
Hazel says
you’ll come up to see us on the train.”

“
Of course I
will.” Lily drew the gold crucifix and chain from her apron pocket
and as Violet leaned forward, Lily placed it around her throat
where it settled as soft as a butterfly’s dream on
clover.

“
Remember me,”
Lily whispered.

L
ily always intended
to visit Hazel and Violet, and did receive one letter months later
indicating that all was well: Betsy’s baby was robust and black,
Winnie’s health had improved, Hazel was practically running the
village, and oh yes, Violet had found herself a gentleman friend
and specially asked after Lily. With Brad’s help Lily composed a
stilted letter wishing them all well and promising once again to
climb on the train and visit. She couldn’t, of course, tell them
what sort of chaos her own life was sliding into.

4

G
ranny: in the belly
of the Night-Dream again from which mercifully there was no
remembrance, only the aftertaste of ash and self-loathing:
Birdsky’s child called Rabbit was dancing around her again on his
jackrabbit legs, his chestnut face burnished by the uninnocence of
the summer’s sun and his slim boy’s arms undulant as willow and
waving, wending them both backwards towards the bush towards the
forbidden dark at the reaches of the East Field and beyond the last
spot of sunlight reserved for Mama’s grave, its honey-heat pouring
longingly on her neck, her shoulders bare, on her gooseflesh calves
and casting a nine-year-old Lily-shadow upon the ghost of her
mother’s cold breathing but Rabbit’s happy-dance was hopping in the
bell-chambers of her little-girl’s heart and he was leading her
away from the hearth where death dwelt unabashed in the daylight
where Papa committed his treacheries upon the copper woman who
cried out like a night-jar, her baby Rabbit dancing his
two-foot/four-foot Indian jig into the crooked dank into the
sweated crotch of ancient branch and Cambrian bole and somewhere
out of the black interior the sound of music drifting out of brass
and violin and tympany striving towards the geometry of a waltz or
galop or durable lancers and Rabbit’s hand grew suddenly firmer and
in the glow of hoarded moonlight she could see he had sprung taller
and light-of-hair and his smile was Tom’s smile, a first-lover’s
smile and “Come on, come on” it crooned waltzing into the intricate
distance till it drew her at last into his dancer’s grip and she
saw that his eyes were pebble-blue, iced amethysts agleam like the
stiffened orbs of the long-drowned staring starward as the seasons’
rivers wash mockingly over them...

39

1

B
radley, as he was now
called, continued to do well in school. Studying was as effortless
as breathing to him and no amount of dereliction seemed to
interfere with the steady flow of A’s on his report cards. In
January of 1879 Lily agreed to let him stay at Mrs. Tideman’s
boarding house a block from the high school in Sarnia. Lily talked
for an hour with that good lady and concluded that she was a
sober-minded, conscientious Christian who specialized in haltering
the headstrong youth of the town. “He’ll keep his nose to the
grindstone here, and it’s lights out at nine-thirty!” She did her
best. So did Lily, but Bradley was rapidly turning into an
impetuous, brooding young man – taller than his father by a head at
age sixteen, with an oddly effeminate handsomeness that both
attracted and repelled the young women in whose company he was
increasingly seen. He deliberately cultivated the tubercular look
of a romantic poet, letting his blond curls droop wantonly over a
pale brow and wan cheek. He was supposed to spend his weekends at
home, and did so until he entered grade eleven and took up with the
likes of Paul Chambers, the solicitor’s son.

Even when Bradley was at
home, Lily often found herself at her wits’ end. Whenever she would
cut short his swaggering arrogance with a stare or a retort he was
unable to handle, he would sulk for hours, often ending up in a fit
of remorse and weeping until Lily wrapped her arms around him and
let him feel how deep and complete and unqualified her forgiveness
was. For days on end he would be a model son, provoking a smoky
fire at dawn and serving her tea and toast in bed, or sitting with
her and patiently explaining who the Tudors were or how the United
Empire Loyalists came to be and why they were hailed as the
founding pillars of Canadian society. He even helped her with her
writing which, he insisted, was coming along famously. But even
when Bradley was in one of his rare good moods, Rob would not stay
at the house nor in his backyard tent; he headed for solitude on
his own place – where she herself had lived so long ago with Bridie
and Uncle Chester, when she had been – it seemed forever – Lily
Ramsbottom. When Bradley left for Sarnia, Rob would arrive home for
supper and be so ill-tempered for days that Lily found herself
taking out her anger and frustration on the innocent one. With the
depression ending at last, Rob was working three days a week at the
sheds all year round. Whatever resentment he felt towards Bradley
was always swallowed for Lily’s sake; she knew this and tried her
best to be fair to him. But Rob was not a talker; Lily could feel
the currents reverberating deep in his body as she sat in the same
room with him, but they were rarely expressed in words – only
obliquely in looks. I wish I knew what he wanted for his life, Lily
often thought, then I would give it to him tenfold. But I
don’t.