Lily's Story (88 page)

Certainly she felt no
windburn on her face, her exposed throat, her ungloved hands. Her
eyes blurred in the keen chill of the night-air, but she had no
difficulty seeing what she had to see. Her heart pumped hotly in
her chest, like a featherless bird beating its bony wings against
invisible ramparts of ice. But she felt no emotion flow from its
exertion. It was connected only to her legs and to its own
mechanical instincts. The heart that had once stored her feelings
and stoked them out of memory on command was now dead. Numbed, then
drained, then irreconcilably dead. Considering what had happened to
her over these last months, these last years, the death of feeling
was no surprise. Only so much could be borne, lived through, and
accommodated to the adjusting heart. To bear more, as she had been
asked to after such pain and loss, was not to expand the borders of
her humanity but to deny that any of its elements was essential,
unshakeable, or rooted in necessities like love and steadfastness.
How many times during her travail had she promised herself: I will
not live just because my flesh yearns to continue and this flap of
muscle in my chest convulses in its own selfishness. I am more than
flesh and gulping blood. When I hurt I can feel the pain
everywhere, I can hear it running backwards all the way to my
youth, my childhood, the moment of birth.

What was
surprising was that she had carried on at all, that right from the
beginning she knew her daily trek to The Queen’s to repeat the
labours of a thousand previous days was not merely the
au
tomatic motions of a body
not knowing how to do anything different nor the trust of a numbed
will in the therapy of familiar routine. ‘Busy hands and the
seasons will mend the fractured heart’ was the village cliché.
Well, she had lived enough to know the worth of such homilies.
Nonetheless, the very next day after the dreadful news about Robbie
had been confirmed, she arrived for work on time. It was on the
same day also that she began this nightly ritual of wandering the
village paths and byways – in search of something, lost or
promised.

Tonight there was more
urgency. She felt it somewhere between her frost-bitten cheeks and
the haemorrhaging of her heart. She did not notice the snow begin
to fall just as the wind died. She failed to hear the shale-ice
crumble underfoot. The dark dissolved before her. The air was lit
by snow, by moving and motionless bits of the universe, by the
arctic friction at the heart of the snow’s design. Uninvited,
individual flakes touched her cheeks without regret, and made their
own tears. Somewhere something incorruptible was melting, gaining
radiance.

For a moment
the snow lifted and the night sprang back. She was lost – in the
marshlands that lay on the peninsula between the River and the
Lake. She was not frightened. She felt nothing but this vague edge
of urgency. Ahead of her, set out against the shadowy blur of
houses and gardens on the rise where the village began, she saw the
outline of some fantastic, multi-limbed figure stretched upward
through the veil of snow, the etch of its gesture somewhere between
yearning and defiance. Over its brief horizon, it presided: heroic
and doomed. The snow closed in again. Her walking recommenced. She
was moving towards the figure no longer visible. She touched it
shadow falling through a white daze. She heard its breath against
her own as she neared. She felt suddenly encompassed, kindled,
amnesiac, at home. Her back rested against its rooted bole. At last
she saw the snow as it was: dancing its intricate, hopscotch,
hornpipe fling for her eyes only.
This is it
.
The reason
. She sat down. She let her eyes close themselves. She
let the last magic take her.

“Y
ou give us quite a
scare,” Malloney said. He looked very uncomfortable, not certain
whether to sit on the captain’s chair that could barely contain his
bulk or to stand awkwardly above her with no place to plant his
hands. They were alone, in his room at the right-front of the
hotel. She cleaned it twice a week.

“
It’s lucky
for us all,” he said, glancing hopefully around, “we was havin’ our
Oddfellows’ meetin’ down there tonight.”

She coughed, and he sprang
cumbrously forward with a cup of hot tea in his grip. She saw that
it was half-consumed.

“
You’ll need
some more of this,” he said, then suddenly looked away.

She was crying.

She thought: poor Duckface.
That is what everyone called Kevin P. Malloney, some to his face,
others out of earshot. The epithet was descriptive of his large,
fleshly face that was pushed inward vertically along the
centre-line, resembling a ruffled duck’s tail, as if his mother, in
shock or despair, had struck her infant with an angle-iron. As a
result, his beady eyes had been squeezed even closer together and
his mouth, longing to be spacious, pursed and dilated
simultaneously. Hence it was very difficult for him to convey
emotion, the range of overt expression being limited, as it were,
from the outset. Most people were content merely to assume and
accept that he was, as his face forewarned the world, a saturnine,
obtuse, uncaring sloth of a man. It was widely reported that his
Irish eyes only danced to the jig of a cash-register.

She saw that her hands were
shaking as she sipped absently at the tea.

“
Almost froze
to death, you did,” Malloney said, automatically drawing one of the
shawls more firmly about her shoulders with a shy hand. “I saw this
bunch of clothin’ through the snow, scrunched under that big tree
back of the Hall and I says to old Redmond, I think somebody’s
fallen over, sick or somethin’. Just your imagination, he says. But
I goes over anyways. Thank the Lord.”

She felt nothing but the fierce
scald – on her tongue, on her cheeks – and a mocking pulse
somewhere below her throat. Malloney tried to catch the cup before
it toppled off the bed but he missed, burnt his finger, and stifled
a curse. All the mutant angles of his face grimaced inward to
corral the giant’s breath behind it. “Owww,” he squeaked, and,
pitched sideways by the congested pressure, he crushed the china
cup.

She giggled. My word, she
thought, I’m alive.

“N
obody’s got more
right than you to think about endin’ it all. There comes a time
when everybody, churchgoer or not, thinks about it. Few people in
this town or any other have gone through what you have: your
husband, your kids, not to speak of poor ol’ Sophie goin’ up in –”.
Malloney was clearing away the supper plate he’d secretly brought
into her. It appeared to her that he was intent on preserving his
reputation for toughness. Certainly he was aware that
she
had no reputation worth saving. She had never heard him
string so many sentences together before, but it didn’t surprise
her in the least. She’d lived long enough to know that even the
most taciturn being had inside him whole pages and chapters of the
unspoken – lamentations, indictments, confessions, recantations,
fervent manifestoes, poems of the beleaguered heart. She had heard
them all, in herself and in others.

“
What you need
most is to get out of here, away from this place. You been here too
long. You’ve had too much grief here. There’s ghosts on every
street. You been in most of the houses in this dump, so you can’t
shut out what you know they’re sayin’, even now. Every one of them
cheered when Riel was strung up, you could hear them on the docks.
Don’t matter to them what the Rebellion did to you an’
Rob.”

Later, when it was dark in the
room, he returned. He lit the small lamp by the bed. His face was
scavenged by shadow and lurid light, but the eyes shone out at her,
their message clear and unmistakable. Don’t do this to me, she
shouted, but his was the only voice in the room.

“
You’ve got no
hold here any more,” he said. “No kin, no land. What you had is all
gone. Wiped clean. No reason to stay. You’ve got to start fresh.
You ain’t fifty years old yet. You’re as healthy as a
yearling.”

Stop,
please
.

“
I got a
friend in Sarnia, works on the railroad there. They need a janitor,
a woman. I can arrange for you to have the job, right away. About
two blocks from the station there’s a boarding house run by the
Widow Jarvis, a former lady-friend of mine. She’ll take you in.
You’ll be a long, long ways from this place,” he said, “from this,
this
shit
.”

“
Could I have
more tea,” she said.

2

T
he Widow Jarvis was
an excessively discreet woman and kind-hearted to a fault if
obsessive interest in her acquaintances’ welfare (present and past)
were the criterion of measurement. “Don’t you worry now, luv,” she
soothed and patted in her English mum’s accent. “Ducky tells me you
been hard done by of late, downright abused, he says, an’ I should
take good care of you an’ not be askin’ too many questions about
what’s happened to you, leastways not for a while, till you settles
in an’ starts to feel at home with your bones again. Well now, luv,
he don’t haveta tell the Missus Jarvis a thing like that, now do
he? One look at you and I knowed it all, straightway. Cup-a-tea,
luv?”

“
Thank you,
yes. You’re very kind.”

M
alloney had been
right about the job. She was taken on immediately. Her duties were
simple, repetitive and comfortably numbing. She felt no twinge of
irony or resentment at being, after all these years, an employee of
the Grand Trunk Western. She was employed. She worked. She walked
two blocks to a boarding house made up with ferns, doilies, lace
curtains, carpets and comforters to resemble a home. She ate,
tolerated the chit-chat of the resident ladies, slept without
dreaming, walked to work again. The only change in routine occurred
when she switched on alternate weeks from day shift to afternoons –
when she worked from four till midnight. The tasks were much the
same. She assisted the male janitors in scrubbing and dusting the
waiting room of the huge, refurbished station – six passenger
trains a day between Chicago and Toronto and dozens of local and
highball freights. By herself, she kept the ladies’ toilets clean.
On the afternoon shift, at seven o’clock, she walked down the
platform and across the yard to the new bunkhouse complex where she
worked alone for an hour or so, washing dishes and tidying up.
Twice a week (she worked six days with Sundays off) she stayed
longer, moving to the attached laundry room where she ‘did’ the
dirty sheets and pillow-cases which had accumulated from the men’s
bunks. In the damp steam-chill of that room, arms up to elbow in
boiling water, hands like flails against the washboard, punching
into resistant shape these cotton sheets, wet-heaving as drowned
flesh – she felt, at last, bone-and-body take full possession of
her being. Why did I fight it so long, was all she
thought.

The long, empty Sundays
were difficult; so were the mornings and early afternoons before
the late shift. Usually she filled the hours with walking, often
following the old spur-line (no longer used since amalgamation)
southward to where it stopped in a field before the River. The
late-December wind blew forlornly over it. In the distance, an
ice-fisherman’s tent shivered.

“
That Mrs.
Marshall’s a quiet one, ain’t she?” Miss Spence
whispered.

“
Had her
troubles, poor dear,” Mrs. Jarvis countered.

“
Still waters
run deep,” reflected Miss Campbell, who had a high school diploma
and was soon to be married.

The Widow and her
boarders tried very hard to include the new arrival in their
conversation, whether she was present or not. When pressed, she
told them about her work, though its fascination waned somewhat
after the initial description. They asked about the fashions and
manners of the V.I.P.’s from exotic Toronto or scandalous Chicago.
She was not helpful.

Miss Spence was an angular
schoolteacher (third-class ‘local’ certificate) of indeterminate
age with a voice like a chalk-squeak always delivered at full vent,
as if she were trying to start each sentence somewhere in the
middle. Perhaps she felt this lent authority to her many strong
opinions.

“
He got what
he deserved, no more, no less. Where on earth would we be if we let
rebels and murderers run around scot free? Grandpa Spence fought
the Frenchies way back in ’thirty-seven, as you all
know.”

They knew.

“
An’ what’d
they do then? Let ’em all come back as smiling an’ rosy as ever
they was. Bad seed oughta be scalded at birth, my granny always
said, and if they’d done that for Mister
Loo-ee Ree-al
we’d all be a darn sight better off.”

Miss Campbell nodded
vigorously, her husband-to-be having just returned from the
North-West mercifully intact. Mrs. Jarvis was only half-listening;
her eyes were riveted on the one who had not spoken.

T
he bunkhouse was
relatively new and comfortable, having been built only two years
previously, following the merger of the Grand Trunk and the Great
Western. Being a woman, Lily was not allowed into the bunk rooms,
which formed a separate section of the complex. Being a woman, she
was expected to be at ease in the kitchen and laundry room, set on
the side of the building opposite the bunks. Between these
exclusively male and female demesnes lay the sprawling comfort of
the ‘parlour’, replete with tables and chairs (for eating,
poker-play, solitaire) and several chesterfield suites of chewed
leather (for snoozing, contending, yarn-spinning). Its hallmark was
tobacco smoke and the afterbite of spittoons. As a woman, she was
allowed in to clear the tables of dishes, to empty ashtrays, flush
out cuspidors, and when no one was present, scrub out a week’s soil
and smudge.