Lily's Story (93 page)

“
Are you all
right, Missus – un – ma’am?”

Waves of
nausea rolled up into her throat. She blinked at the young clerk.
His hand was very gently upon her arm, about to lift. Suddenly he
jerked back as if stung. He crab-walked away from her down the
hall, stumbling, reaching wildly behind him for the railing.
Stamped on the
tabula
rasa
of his boy’s face, she saw the
insignia of her misery.

“
I’ll g-get some help,” he
called hoarsely and disappeared.

Where? she thought, and was sick on the wool
roses.

Tell me, Mr. O’Boyle,” she said to him in
the lobby the next week, “what does the word ‘chancery’ mean?”

“
Don’t know, ma’am,” he
said warily. “Somethin’ to do with courts and b-bigwigs, I
think.”

“
Did you go to
school?”

He looked for help. “Yes, m-ma’am. We all
did, I got my l-leavin’ certificate. Did real good, my m-mum says.
She don’t approve of m-me slingin’ beer.”

“
Do you have one of them
books that explains all the words?”

“
A dictionary, you mean?
No, I don’t. But Mr. M-Mulligan’s got one in the office b-back
there. Belonged to his wife, b-before she run off.” Then as if he
felt the latter remark demanded exposition, he said, “That was all
she l-left him.”

It was heavy sledding,
decoding
Bleak House
with the aid of Noah Webster’s Dictionary and her own mother
wit. It wasn’t merely that the words were long and the sentences
interminable, but so much of the world being described therein was
itself so foreign. The strange speech; the courts and alleys and
traffic of an imperial metropolis; the exotic manners and customs –
all had to be learned part by part in a vain effort to get some
sense of the whole society, some feel for the meaning she was
certain lay locked between the words and their referents.
Sometimes, as she used to do, she read quickly, letting her
instincts and intuitions catch at the flutter of truth sweeping
past her. Gradually, assuredly, she felt the grip of the story, the
particulars fading the moment their impression was made. She felt
the loneliness and the spirit of the motherless heroine, her heart
went out to the poor and the abused, but most of all she was drawn
to Jo – she read the chapters about the abandoned street-urchin
many times over, struck by the pathos of a soul so orphaned by the
world he had less than half a name to call his own.

“
You’re gonna wear that one
out,” Lucien said.

“
I
will
get to the others,” she replied,
and seeing that look in his face, she brightened and said, “but
let’s get the cutter and go into the country. I feel like a little
travellin’ today.”

The air was clear and cold. The sun shone on
them. Across the fields the wind blew soft snow upon the week’s
bruising. The runners sang in the horses’ wake.

“
You ain’t travelled much,
have you,” Lucien said, turning for home.

A bit later, Cora opened her eyes, her
lashes laced with frost. “This is far enough for me.”

“
Someday soon, I’ll take
you for a real ride,” he said. “We’ll get on the C.P.R. an’ cruise
all the way over the prairies and up the backside of the Rocky
Mountains an’ slide down to the ocean out there past Vancouver an’
hop the first whale we see an’ sail the blue sea to
China.”

This was a voice she hadn’t heard before.
Still looking ahead she reached across and touched his hand, tight
on the reins. “An’ have a decent cup of tea,” she said.

When they pulled up in front of McPeck’s
livery, Lucien gave her a furry bear-hug in full view of the
astonished grooms.

“
You were right,” he
whispered. “She
was
beautiful.”

And she did get to the other books. For five
weeks on alternate days, she read and absorbed and puzzled and
thought more than she ever had in her whole life. She began to get
some sense of that ‘old country’ she had known till now only
through what she had heard and been told: that old old land where
her own parents and the parents of almost everyone she knew had
begun their lives, and who gave, through their stories and speech,
a temporary credence to exotic landscapes – gardens, hedgerows,
wobbly lanes, ancient abbeys among the meadow-growth – and peculiar
notions of town and village and dialect as indigenous as the local
loam or limestone. In some ways, thinking as she must about the
mighty River and the Freshwater Sea of the Hurons and the vast
prairie the scarlet soldiers had crossed, the old world was as
exotic as ancient China or some far Hindustan. Somehow, she
thought, alone in her brown study, I am one of them, yet not a part
of them. Then, like most of her thoughts, it wouldn’t stay still
long enough for her to grasp it fully, and she would be left
frustrated and aching with a great emptiness.

When she began browsing
through the other books, she noticed a peculiar thing: the fly-leaf
page had been cut out of each, probably with a razor, so neat was
the incision. She became aware of this only because in the copy
of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
the page had been crudely removed, as if in anger, leaving
jagged edges despite a subsequent attempt to disguise the initial
violence. Which was the moment she realized that every book was
supposed to have such a page, and began examining the others. She
said nothing to Lucien. He seemed more and more tense, and
absorbed, though at times he could be garrulously happy in the
usual manner. She would catch him staring at her at odd angles, the
mask of his face dissolved, leaving only his eyes to carry the
burden of whatever he could not feel or say. So she found herself
beginning to fill some of the more frequent silences by recounting
for him the stories, as she heard them, from the great tomes he had
brought her.

“
We’ll make a story-teller
out of you yet,” he said.

She put on a brave front. When he was away,
she thought: this cannot last. We’ve tried, but it can’t be done.
Whatever has happened to him, he’s needed me in the same way I’ve
needed him – to get through enough days with some feeling, some
pretence of caring, some ritual repeated enough to seem necessary:
just until we can decide whether there’s anything left worth
salvaging. But I don’t want this to stop. Neither does he, I think.
Why, then, should we not keep it going? Who is to tell us it can’t
be done? Just because it isn’t or isn’t supposed to. It was we
ourselves who decided to make the night we met the first day of our
lives. So be it. But it can’t last. Love, whatever it’s been, has
never been enough.

Absently, she leafed
through
The Last of the
Mohicans
, a novel she had started but left,
for some reason, till now. A page fell out. It was blank. A
fly-leaf ripped. From
Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
. She turned it over. She saw the
handwriting there, but it was several minutes before she could
disentangle it enough to be sure of the sense: ‘To my beloved Mary,
to while away the lonesome nights, from your devoted wanderer,
Luce; Christmas 1875’.

When he arrived home that afternoon – early
in March of 1886 – Lucien was all smiles. She’d heard him humming
to the banisters. “Get your bonnet on, Susie-Q,” he said. “We got
business at the Court House.”

They did. They were married by a drowsy
judge in cold chambers with a scrubwoman and a janitor gaping on.
They hurried home to a warm bed and made love as if it were New
Years.

“
You went an’ made an
honest woman outta me,” she said, watching him smoke.

“
Too late for
that.”

“
Too late long ago. An’
more than once.”

“
That wasn’t the main
reason, though,” he said.

“
Oh?”

He grinned. “Somebody had to do somethin’
about young Sudsy’s stutter.”

44

1

A
ll across the
reunited Confederation it had been a heartless, unrelenting winter.
Snow clogged the Laurentian trench, inundated the fields and fallow
of the south-west, blew without purpose across the vacant
prairielands, and settled like a mocking bride’s-veil over the
little graves at Batoche and Duck Lake. In March, a week after the
wedding of Cora and Lucien Burgher, came the great thaw. The world
around them sagged, glistened, and hummed with the promise of heat.
Then unexpectedly and just when the severest skeptic was about to
admit the possibility of spring, the unforgettable blizzard of 1886
struck home: in the middle of the night, howling from the
north-west.

For three citizens of the
Province, though, such a dramatic shift in the weather seemed like
an act of divine intervention, a pope’s blessing on the deed about
to be accomplished. Their meeting, if somewhat unorthodox, was
nonetheless predestined: sometime just before or just after the
trio’s singing of Auld Lang Syne at the Grand Trunk Ball, the
initial commitment had been made. The Honourable Halpenny Pebbles,
Mr. Margison Dilworth, Q.C., and Stanley R. Dowling, reeve of the
village, whispered the same word together and decided that after
due time for consultation and soul-searching, they should meet
again – in utmost secrecy – to put their particular seals upon
these first covenants. The word they whispered was ‘tunnel’.

It was a word
heard before in these parts. Both the Great Western and the Grand
Trunk has boasted of blasting a channel below the St. Clair River
to link the destinies, common ideals and profit margins of the two
great nations so unhappily divided by the inconvenience of a
natural border. It was all bluff. No one in Sarnia or the Point
took it seriously; before the merger of 1882, that is. With a
combined strength and an unabated capacity to plunder the public
purse at will, the Grand Trunk Western’s boasting about a tunnel
was henceforth received with joy in the village and muted applause
in the town. Naturally any such tunnel would be built across the
narrowest strip between the Republic and the Dominion: where the
GTR reached the very edge of Canada: Point Edward. Which meant that
some of the advantages gained by Sarnia at the original merger –
main passenger terminus on the principal line between
Sarnia-London-Brantford-Toronto, expanded switching yards and
car-shops – might well be stunted or, heaven forfend, wiped out by
the inevitable surge of power westward towards the heartland of
America – via a
Point
Edward
tunnel. Strangely,
though, little talk of any kind regarding such an engineering
miracle had been heard for more than a year. To those in the know,
of course – board-room bullies, intimates of the disbanded Compact,
the Scottish moneylenders – such silence signalled clearly that the
most feverish plans were afoot. However, only the most trusted
insiders – the directors of the Railway, the premier’s own privy
council – and one outsider, knew that the issue was no longer
financial or even technological. If the fittest were to survive,
then the survivors of this Dominion would be the fittest: the
dynamite and the air compressors were ready. What was holding up
the orderly advancement of the nation was something more pivotal
than money or technique: politics. Though merely a village, the
Point had become a symbol to many another small Ontario community
that had invested in railway promises only to be left holding
worthless debentures and their assigned mortgages. Indeed the
government-of-the-day was vulnerable in the villages and hamlets.
If Point Edward were seen to have been ‘done dirty’ by the Railway
or what-is-worse by a government in collusion with a railway, then
the upcoming election itself might be lost, with the resultant
chaos and inestimable human calamity. Word had just come from
Montreal by coded message: Hobson, the world-renowned Canadian
engineer, had completed his feasibility study. His news was
unequivocal and without prejudice: the geology of the terrain at
Point Edward absolutely precluded a tunnel ever being built there;
the ideal spot lay five miles to the south, near Sarnia.

Enter Reeve
Dowling, politician and former railway executive. The trick, he
announced, was simply to get the population of the village to
actually want the tunnel to be built at Sarnia. Vague promises were
to be made,
quid pro
quo
– the town gets the dirty,
noisy, hazardous tube but the village keeps its lucrative
car-shops, round-house, freight-sheds, and will certainly have its
port facilities expanded at public expense and the almost certain
possibility that a large steamship company – beholden to the
present government – would set up house at dockside.
Et cetera
. And who better to present such a package of delights
to wary constituents than the Reeve himself. For his part in the
melodrama, the Reeve would be offered – without contest – a safe
provincial seat to the north, from which redoubt he might well
eventually storm the gates of Queen’s Park itself. The key to
success, all agreed, lay in the Reeve’s gradual and delicate
revelation of details so that neither collusion nor
predetermination be apparent. It was this intricate series of
‘one-acters’ that had to be negotiated among the three interested
parties. The timing was all.

The blizzard of March 15
was both a blessing, then, and a sign. No one except a sleepy
yardmaster noticed, through the haze of snow, the arrival, around
suppertime, of a ‘special way-freight’ consisting of locomotive,
tender, three empty box-cars and a caboose. The sole occupant of
the caboose was deputy-premier Peebles. The conductor had sat
shivering in the engine-cab with the driver and fireman all the way
from Toronto. Mysteriously, this ‘ghost train’ was turned around,
then backed onto a far siding. Its crew, following prearranged
orders, left the locomotive primed and running, and headed for the
comforts of the bunkhouse. They had been commanded to return at
precisely seven o’clock and, without a by-your-leave, head back to
Toronto.