Lily's Story Page 11

  Which was not often. And certainly never on Saturdays. She reined in Benjamin as they neared Exmouth Street, the edge of the vast, cleared plain that was soon to be an official town, a county seat. It was a new split-log road and very rough. She peeked anxiously back at her cargo of eggs and fresh raspberries – so neatly packed in the little boxwood containers Uncle Chester tacked together with such guarded delicacy. Auntie had given him part of the barn for a workshop, which he shared uncomplainingly with Sultana the Guernsey and this good-natured Indian pony. Indeed, even before Lily’s coming Uncle had fashioned the market-wagon with its double-leather springs and straw padding and custom compartments for Auntie’s eggs and seasonal specialties.

  Lily had no reason in this world to be sad – ever. She loved her Aunt and Uncle. She was loved by them. Auntie, her flame-red hair so earnestly harnessed during the day, would come to Lily in her own bed with its feather tick, her hair loose and haphazard, her ice-blue eyes weakened by fatigue, and bending over her bless Lily’s cheek with a dry, well-meant kiss. “Thank your maker for makin’ you and givin’ you such a day,” she would invariably whisper before snuffing the candle. It was the only religious sentiment ever known to have passed her lips. Auntie did not, it seemed, believe in “all this churchin’” and what-is-more preferred not to debate the point. Uncle Chester, if he held an opinion on the subject, did not offer it. Auntie taught Lily everything about “how to get along in this world”, taking the girl with her into the fields where, in the rich humus of the cleared pine-woods, they grew vegetables of every tint and texture. Not wheat like the farmers in the townships east along the London Road or north along the Errol Road, who had to haul their crop to the grist mills where they “left half their profits” and had to count on England’s wars in Russia and elsewhere to bump up the price or let it come crashing down. “Turnips are slow-growin’ but they eat easy and winter over,” Auntie said more than once during a back-bending weeding of the strawberries or a hoeing of the potatoes. Auntie’s skin never tanned, as Lily’s did if she persisted, so she always wore a bonnet that framed her sharp features like a sapper’s helmet and a linen shawl that came down over her wrists and was fastened with a workmanlike pewter clasp. In the August humidity sweat poured down her legs, staining the tops of her guardsman’s boots, but not once would she pause to mop her brow, swinging the hoe or rake or turnip-knife with dogged efficiency. Lily, wanting to cry out sometimes at her rebellious muscles, swallowed her aches and grew strong.

  These vegetables, and the eggs from their hundred Rhode Islands, were taken to town each Saturday where they found a ready market. Although most of the villagers had gardens of their own, the three hotels and five-boarding houses that served the numerous bachelor workers busy in the new factories and on the right-of-way clearance out to Enniskillen – along with the stopover sailors and passengers – needed a ceaseless supply of eggs and vegetables in season. Aunt Bridie had been the first to seize this opportunity, and though she had periodic competition from the farmer’s market and several other hopeful entrepreneurs, her reliability, home-delivery service, and unfailingly superior produce had won her – despite the suspicion with which she was viewed by the respectable burghers of the fledgling county seat – a steady and profitable business. “Well,” said Mrs. Salter, the lay preacher’s ample wife, “I’ll give the Devil her due, she’s a real worker, that woman.” “Take care of the pennies an’ the pounds’ll take care of themselves,” Auntie told Lily that day three summers ago when she had taken her along for the first time to “learn the business” and “see for yourself how the other-half lives.”

  “Your Auntie’s the smartest woman in this township,” Uncle Chester said, helping her stake the beans that second summer. “She knows how to keep the bugs off these plants better’n anybody else for miles around; learned it from a book she did, back in the London days. Then she sees this pine-bush when we first come lookin’ up here, an’ she says here’s the best spot for what we want but I says it’s a mile from town an’ nowhere near the cleared lots on the London Road, but she says the soil’ll be better here, and of course she was right, includin’ that sandy stretch towards the lakeside where the berries grow big as plums, an’ includin’ the pine itself which we sold the first year and every year since – never burnt a log, we didn’t.”

  Uncle Chester had lost his rhythm and a section of the bean plants crashed stupidly to the ground. “Mind you now, it was cuttin’ them pines that give me the crick in my back, so’s I ain’t been too good at weedin’ an’ heavy work ever since, which along with my fluctuatin’ ticker don’t make me the hardiest farmer.” The bean-bush, surprised, tripped again.

  “Then your Auntie decides to go in for eggs, so we buys the hens an’ I build the two coops and we’re in business.” Lil looked at the east field next to Bachelor Bill’s makeshift barn where their only field-crop – feed corn – was greening in the sun. “Yessir, it’s your Auntie’s got the head for business.” And the hands to straighten this crooked wood and the will to make soft things stiffen and yield.

  The sun was fully up when Benjamin went past the London Road crossing and kept southerly on Front Street at a brisk trot. To her right, Lily could see the cobalt of the St. Clair River, its beauty only slightly dimmed by familiarity. She had not yet seen the Lake, though every day steamers left the bay for distant points north, and its untouched beaches lay less than a mile through the pines behind her house – the muffled thunder of its breakers audible below the wind on stormy nights in April or November. Auntie did not appreciate young girls “traipsin’ off”. “Nothin’ to see up there but a lot of water,” she’d add, though Uncle’s look said otherwise.

  Past the London Road lay the town itself, boasting more than a thousand souls. Already a second main-street back from the River was filling up with clapboard and split-log houses and shops and a second tannery. She liked its name: Christina, which made her think of a copper necklace tinkling in a breeze. Benjamin, unaided, drew driver and cart straight down Front Street to the Western Hotel opposite the Ferry Dock, no more than half a mile from the site of the last gift-giving ceremony. She always started with the hotels since their staffs were up at dawn and happy to have her wide-awake greeting. Then she did the boarding-houses on the five east-west intersecting streets that stretched, houseless, into cleared land for more than a mile. To Lily this section looked like a graveyard for trees. By then it was usually after seven and she moved on to the fifteen or twenty scattered homes on the route – abodes of the well-to-do who, though they could afford gardens and gardeners, preferred to be observed dispensing cash for their produce.

  As she pulled up to the St. Clair Inn, Lily thought fleetingly of those early days when she had huddled under a shawl clinging to a straight-backed Aunt Bridie, afraid of things that even months before would not have fazed her. But she had suddenly become Lily Ramsbottom and strange people stared out at her and spoke at her in eccentric urban accents. Even so, she helped by handing Auntie the right boxes, rearranging those left in the cart, and feeding, watering and soothing Benjamin excessively. And she kept her ears and a sly eye open…

  “Good morning, Bridie,” said Mrs. McWhinney, the clothier’s wife, in an off-hand way from her watch at the rose bush. “Just take them right through the shed there and leave them on the right side of the bench by the sink, that’s a good dear,” she added, addressing her Sunday school class at the C. of E.

  Auntie set the eggs and case of cabbages raucously on a table by the shed door. “No need to stir, Maggie,” she called out, “I’ll collect next time.”

  Maggie inadvertently cut the throat of a prize rose.

  “Morning, Miz Ramsbottom,” said the Reverend McHarg’s missus from the back door of the red-fronted brick manse, her voice carrying to the far pews.

  “Three dozen today, Clara?”

  “Who’s the little bundle you brung with you?” Pince-nez poking around Auntie, glinting towards the cart on the street.


  “Got some late raspberries I think the youngster’d like. Like to see ’em?”

  “I’ll come out and have a look, I will,” burbled Mrs. McHarg, tying up the strings of her mottled bonnet and brushing past a startled Aunt Bridie, who recovered in time to insert her body between the pince-nez and the cowering shawl on the cart-seat.

  “Oh what a dear little orphling! Where did you pick such a precious thing up?”

  Auntie reached into the cart, drew out a quart of enticing berries, and said evenly: “These are free, for my best customer.”

  Mrs. McHarg, as a Presbyterian innured to temptation, faltered long enough to take the offering in both hands, but quickly regained the offensive. “A foundling?” she asked with the tip of her Calvinist nose.

  Auntie touched the reins smartly and Benjamin lurched forward. Looking straight ahead she said, “My daughter,” and was already moving too resolutely for any sort of riposte to be heard. There was none – though a berry-box may have cracked open as it struck the ground.

  “My gracious, you’re early! Barely got my bonnet on! But ain’t you a sight for sore eyes; an’ you brung the wee one along for company. How’s my Lily Blossom doin’ today? Cat got your tongue?” Mrs. Salter was constitutionally cheerful despite her husband being a Methodist lay preacher who could, according to Auntie “rant and roll with the best of them hell-an-damnationers.”

  “Heard a box of your berries went bad on you last week,” Auntie said from the side porch of the St. Clair Inn. “Here’s an extra two boxes of the best. Guaranteed.”

  The good lady blushed. “Goodness me, but it’s that big-mouth girl of mine blabbin’ an’ exaggeratin’ all over town. I’ll take the switch to her, I reckon.” She also took the berries.

  Vines of ivy and other exotica climbed about a third of the way up the walls of the stone cottage belonging to the Misses Baines-Powell, plump Caroline and fat Charlotte. The sign in front of their shiny oak door announced “Baines-Powell: Musical Instruction, By Arrangement.” Auntie tried to explain what that meant. Only one of the instructresses ever came to the back door, though not always the same one. The other one hovered in the draped shadows of the sitting room about five feet behind.

  “Found a slug in my cabbage,” said Miss Charlotte, peering past Auntie at Lily – who was holding a rack of berry-boxes – as if there were some direct but unnamable connection between slugs and girl-helpers of questionable kin.

  “Boil them like I told you?” Aunt Bridie said.

  “Of course. Made no difference. Ugly thing popped out onto Miss Baines-Powell’s plate an’ she almost ’et it, didn’t you dear?”

  Muffled assent from within.

  “Get a rollin’ boil, Charlotte, an’ keep at it for five to seven minutes. Nothin’ else can be done.”

  “Hard to get satisfactory service these days, isn’t it dear?” Caroline, recovered from her fright, agreed.

  Auntie took three boxes of berries from the rack and set them beside the eggs on the porch step. “Almost forgot the carrots. Lily, dash out an’ fetch the regular order of carrots, will you, dear?”

  “You hear about the new delivery service startin’ up next week?” Charlotte said. Caroline apparently had heard all about it and thought it a grand idea and high time, too.

  Aunt Bridie waited for Lily to come up. “There you are, Charlotte. That’ll be ninety-six cents. Any changes for next week? The corn’ll be in most likely.”

  Charlotte gave Auntie the money and stood watching them leave. Lily always lingered behind a bit, ears pricked.

  “Scruffy little ragamuffin, ain’t she?”

  “You think with the prices she charges a person she’d be able to put a decent dress on the little wretch.”

  “Might even be pretty, don’t you think, Lottie?”

  “It’d take some srubbin’, I’m afraid.”

  Auntie always walked steadily forward; she was not a lingerer. Once she turned and said, “Don’t let those two old maids go puttin’ a lot of tom-fool notions in your head.”

  2

  The Templeton house was special. There was about it an immediate and palpable magic that never left even after three years of weekly stops. (The first day she saw it, a voice as strong as Old Samuels’ said: “Someday you’re going to live here.”) It was the most attractive, though by no means the most ostentatious, house in town. It wasn’t even brick, but the siding was lovingly lapped and painted a shade of blue that resembled the river just as the ice leaves it in March. In spring and summer – even into fall – the gardens here flourished, rejuvenated, and bedazzled. Never had Lily seen such exotic, such wholly domestic, flora: delphinium, giant poppies, sunflowers, peonies, arboured roses, and marigolds and lilies with the tang of marsh still in them. In the winter the snow blossomed in its own way, keeping an echo of former lushness absolute. Mrs. Alice Templeton almost always intercepted them at the side door. Trim, silver-haired, neatly attired, smiling at you with both eyes, she invariably asked them to come into the little den. Sometimes even Maurice Templeton, the prominent lawyer, was there snoozing into a gray volume on his lap. Sometimes if it were raining or exceptionally cold, Auntie would accept, and Lily would slip in behind her and feast upon the book-lined walls, the porcelain figurines and wispy-blue chinaware tempting her from an adjoining sanctum. The odour of pipe-tobacco malingered and stirred the memory.

  “Do come in, for Pete’s sake, Bridie Ramsbottom,” Mrs. Templeton would say. “You think we hadn’t known one another for ten years.”

  “Well, then, just for a minute. The girl’s a bit chilled, I daresay. But we can’t stay long.”

  The girl was frozen through, and aflame with curiosity. On a lucky day there was Ceylon tea and tarts, and talk.

  “Got a schedule to keep,” Auntie would say, warming her fingers on the tea-cup. They always stopped here last. “Don’t tell Mrs. Templeton, though,” Aunt Bridie would say as they drove off. “We’d never get away from the old gabbler. Never did hear anyone like to carry on so and fritter away so much time. Besides, your uncle’d wear his shoes to bed if we left him alone too long.”

  “Your brother’s daughter, you say? I can certainly see your eyes there, no question about that.”

  “She’s had no upbringin’, mind you, but she’s a good worker.”

  “Another cake, Lily?”

  “No ma’am. Thank you.”

  “Go ahead, you look like it’d do you good.”

  Lily glanced at Aunt Bridie. “No, thank you, ma’am.”

  “Say, Bridie, my girls are both at boarding school in London, as you know, and I’ve never thrown away any of their dresses or slips, or God knows, there’s a pile of bonnets up there in a trunk –”

  Auntie rose to her full height. “Thank you for the tea, missus, but we really must be gettin’ along with our deliveries. Drink up,” she said to Lily.

  “But it’s still blowin’ out there. I haven’t paid you yet.”

  “Next time,” she replied; they were already at the door. Suddenly Lily wondered why Luc had never delivered Papa’s trunk.

  Against the flailing of the snow on their faces, Auntie said: “They’re all the same, Lily. You remember that. Never leave off interferin’ with people’s lives, they don’t.”

  Lily was not sure. “Waste not, want not,” was her aunt’s oft-repeated warning. Ought a body, then, to merely bury such dresses and bonnets – some of them as flagrant and impertinent and wonderfully hopeful as a summer’s bravest delphinium radiating enough blue to carry you through a winter?

  And long hard winters they were. The numbing repetitiveness of the planting, weeding and harvesting was exchanged for the dark, indoor tasks between seasons. Aunt Bridie made quilts out of cast-off rags she collected each September on her rounds. “That’s a nice job you done, missus, cuttin’ down the dress for the girl, looks real good on her, don’t it, Lottie?” Auntie soon discovered that Lily’s fingers were more nimble than her own, and was delighted to have the girl help
her at every spare moment when she wasn’t involved with the chores in the barn and coops, with the preparation of the cuttings and seed for the spring, with her share of cooking, regular sewing and repairs, or candle-making (for sale along with the quilts), and even chopping wood when Uncle Chester’s back “played its trump card” as it did more often of late. Lily found the fine needlework as fatiguing as hoeing lettuce; but she loved the harlequin swatches – their eccentric shapes and the unpredictable figures they assumed as her fingers played with them on the table, as if she were arranging Mrs. Templeton’s flowers: poppies on yellow iris, asters on gladioli – composing something beautiful that no one, not even the flowers themselves, had dreamed into being. From some lady in London, however, Auntie had learned two basic patterns which she scrupulously alternated so that by April – eyes strained and fingers paralyzed by monotony – they had produced eight quilts that would bring ready cash to tide them over the lean spring months and even buy them each a pair of leather boots fresh from McWhinney’s Haberdashery. (Uncle Chester drove into town with Lily proudly in tow; Auntie would not “set foot in that Tory’s den”. Nevertheless, she drew several silver coins from the butter-box under her bed, and sent the shoppers on their way.)