Reading by Lightning (41 page)

Well, if he did drown, it's better than being shot in the trenches, Lily's mother was saying to Betty. The way my brother Franklin was in the last war. He got a shell in the stomach, and he had to lay in the mud for two days before they could get him out.

Lily stood looking out the window at the chickens pecking around the henhouse, and then Betty noticed her and brought her a handkerchief, handing it to her with a tender little moan. It's a miracle he didn't bleed to death, Mother said, and Lily went outside, lifting her coat off the nail in the porch and shoving her arms into the sleeves. She had known it all along, she'd carried this truth home with her the way you might carry a stone in your mouth: that she had let him down and that he was gone. She'd known it all along, but now that the letter had come she found she could hold it away from her, she could trudge in the usual way with her shoulders hunched against the wind, along the edge of a stubble field with broken stalks of wheat bristling the clods of earth. After she reached the corner and turned her back on the wind, she found she could even switch briefly to the other side: to where he was alive, where he had slipped through their fingers like one of the Romanovs, or Bonnie Prince Charlie, or the dauphin. He was making his way incognito over the cobbled streets of a village — not an English village, he never managed to blend in very well in English villages, but one with a rounded bell tower like an inverted bowl, and villagers with wooden clogs and their faces shadowed by cloth hoods. She saw a woman standing in a doorway with a little girl leaning against her skirt. The woman handed George a round loaf of dark bread. They exchanged some words in her language, and she smiled, and then he waved and walked off down the lane. He was wearing a felt hat Lily had never seen on him before, but he had his old walking stick and he walked the way he had always walked, in that same loose-jointed way.

Suddenly they begin to get mail from England. She goes to town on her own when she can and one day there are three letters from Madeleine. She takes them out to the truck and
drives to the edge of town, pulling over onto the shoulder beside someone's spent garden, where broken carrots and dry cornstalks wait for snow. She checks the postmarks and opens them in order. The first one was mailed just three days after she left Oldham. Somehow Aunt Lucy's letter got ahead of it.

You've only just left and I miss you already. It was like having a real sister (don't tell Lois I said that). My legs are hurting like the dickens because — guess what, I have a job! Working for the Transport Authority! The day after you left it was in the paper that they needed conductors because they've doubled the tram schedule (not enough petrol to run the coaches). Mrs. Tupper said they were taking girls, so I went down to the office yesterday and I was hired. They gave me a uniform and put me to work that very morning. It's not bad, except for the lads who think a girl who will work on a tram is a certain kind of girl! Those lads need to realize that things are different now and we all have to help out!

Lily has never known Madeleine to pray, but she says that they are praying for George. They believe they know where he was sent, although she can't say in a letter.
He had that queer idea about not writing last year,
she writes,
but now that the action has really started, I hope the silly apeth will at least let us know how he is.
Lily can hear her, the anxiety in her breathless voice, she can picture Madeleine's small hand pressed like a starfish on her breastbone while she talks. She lingers over this letter. It's hard to open the next, as if she will make this thing happen, as if it will happen in the little moment between her reading the letters, while she sits with sunlight milkily pouring through the dusty windshield.

Finally she leans her head against the window of the truck and opens it. Madeleine's handwriting is large and round and childish:

By now you will have Mother's letter telling you about the telegram. I wish we could have you here with us, Lily. Mother is wretched and hasn't slept since it came, but she is still going to the depot every day. It's easier to keep busy and feel you are doing some good. Archie's stationed in Bournemouth now and Lois went down to visit him. It's very hard to know what to do, we can't even have a service. We feel as though our hearts are breaking and I know you will feel the same.

This must be the way women all over Europe have learned to say it, Lily thinks, folding the letter up with trembling fingers, that they feel as though their hearts are breaking.

The last letter is in a brown honour pledge envelope, the sort you can buy to ease the workload of the military censors. Madeleine has signed a pledge in a little box on the front:
I certify on my honour that the contents of this envelope refer to nothing but private and family affairs.
Inside she makes no effort to disguise names and places. She says that Wilf was home on leave and came to see her. He told her that the 71st Searchlight had been sent by frigate to the Orkney Islands to defend Scapa Flow, and that the night of October 16 they'd had engine problems and had to moor alongside the high cliffs at Duncansby Head. The officers were drinking in the stateroom and no one bothered to take roll call. The enlisted men were up on deck in the dark. George said there was a lunar eclipse — that was their pretext for being up on deck, the moon under blackout orders. There was a dreadful sea, and they were drinking on deck, and around midnight they
got into some sort of scuffle. A private from Liverpool went over. They had grappling hooks and they pulled him out half drowned, but they couldn't put searchlights on the water to see if there was anyone else. But then when they went below, George's bunk was empty. When Lily reads this she can see the tilting, slippery deck, the dark, confused shapes of the men, the waves lifting themselves to the obscured moon, smeared with its orange light, and her image of George walking at dawn through the cobblestone streets of an ancient village melts the way a dream melts at morning.

About the disposition of his body they have no information. Some sediment somewhere will draw him in, some ledge of molluscs, he will take his chances with all the other curiosities. That's not what she thinks about, exactly, that or his dying. When her mind goes slack what's there is their wild run in the rain along Oldham Edge that last night. Always there, the way a book falls open at the page where the spine was broken. And then her mind takes her onwards from there, follows George back to the city, takes her remorselessly with him back through the streets of Manchester, to the flat on Whittle Road where his mates were drinking, and then down another lane to the house George went into later, the narrow staircase with a soil line on the wall from people reaching blindly for a banister, and a girl climbing the stairs in high-heeled shoes too big for her (it's Ellen climbing the stairs, for some reason she pictures Cornish Ellen, who cleared the tables at Mrs. Slater's in Charmouth), George following, misery ticking at the fringes of his mind (but mostly it's the ale he's feeling), and Wilf and Tom and that other boy gloating on the pavement below, laughing the moronic laugh that boys laugh over things that are not funny. George climbing the stairs to sign his pledge to a new way of being. She does not quite go into the room, her
imagination lets her stop at the door, lets her roll over then and pull the quilt over her face. She knows him now, now that he is gone; she knows what was behind the elaborate ramshackle construction of his personality, that it was this one longing, to be like everybody else.

They don't talk about the news from England. Lily is aware of her mother watching her. She must know. Betty has a greedy, elevated look — she senses an opening, a wound. She's got a personal stake in Lily's spiritual condition: in her mind she was the one who led Lily to the Lord. One day Lily finds a page torn out of a notebook on her pillow:

Dear Lily,

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths. I am praying for you.

Your sister-in-law-in-Christ,

Betty

They don't talk about the news from England and they don't talk about the war. It's far away, they hear it the way you hear the sound of the parade on the day of the fair, drifting intermittently out of town on the wind. Lily picks up a day-old
Winnipeg Tribune
in town. On the second page are the lists, seventeen names today.
MISSING IN ACTION. MISSING AND PRESUMED DEAD. KILLED IN ACTION
. Evidently a name can progress daily through the lists, as though to take families gradually through the stages of shock and disbelief. Only Canadian names, of course, but somewhere else there must be lists of the English, and the Germans, and the Italians. And the Russians — they're fighting in Russia now.

Deep in the night she swims to the surface, her arms flung across the mattress as if across waves, and she can't keep her
pain in, it comes wrenching out of her. It's her mother who comes in the dark, clutching at the door frame and falling clumsily onto the bed. She pats Lily's arm, over and over. It's hard, I know it's hard, she says, her voice thick with emotion. We can't see a reason, but God always has a reason. A monster version of Lily leaps out of bed and yanks her mother to her feet, screaming,
Get the hell away from me,
digging her fingers into her mother's upper arm. Her mother is crying then too, with her mouth open like a terrified child, her head wrenched sideways by Lily's grasp on her hair.
Stay the hell out of my room,
the voice cries, a thrilling voice, plucking Lily out of the swallowing waves. But this is not what Lily does. Lily keeps her face against the pillow and all she actually says is, I'm all right, and after a few minutes her mother goes away.

Things happen in the night, but gradually, when sunlight twinkles off the scrolls of frost on the windows and the kitchen is full of the smell of coffee, the night draws them back in and opens a space in the day for ordinary pleasures. Betty is a great one for togetherness. She likes to make beds together, sheets floating down between them, she likes to stir while Lily pours. Before Lily went to England, she always wanted more talk in this house, and she has to laugh, remembering that. Betty tells them how many eggs she finds under which hen compared to how many she found last week, she tells them who drove down the road while she was walking across the yard. The less that happens in a day, the more she tells them. When she comes back from town she repeats both sides of every conversation:
And I said, We can't really use the whole thing, and he said, Well, do you want me to cut it in half for you? And I said, Sure, that would be good, and so he did, and then he said, Which half do you want? And I said, This one would be fine.
Lily can picture Phillip when he comes home with all his life in the war inside
him, sitting at Betty's table and the handful of words in his mouth drying into peas.

Betty gets a long letter from Phillip — a mystery in itself to contemplate — and comes to the table with her face puffy from crying. He's applied to be an airplane mechanic and will be sent to Mountain View, Ontario, for training, and then no doubt overseas. Lily has her school atlas from England and she brings it out, but Mountain View is not listed in the index. Ontario is just a pale orange patch in a map of Canada. She shows Betty approximately where the CP line runs across Northern Ontario. Betty traces the line slowly with her finger, considering how close Phillip will travel to the Great Lakes. For the first time Ontario is finding a place in her mind, by the prospect of Phillip travelling across it. Lily knows the way these brides think. On the train from Saint John there were a lot of Canadian brides who had gone east to see their husbands off. They took her in, even though she declined to produce a story about her sweetheart: they valued her as an audience for their special knowing. Then he went to
Trenton,
they would say, taking a pull on a cigarette,
Valcartier, Petawawa, Shilo.