Lily's Story Page 13

  Beside her, not unkindly, the boy in Book One whispered: “Your bubs are peekin’.”

  “Well?” Aunt Bridie asked as she washed the dirt off her hands under the new pump beside the sink.

  “I don’t wanna learn how to read,” Lily said. “Ever.”

  “Don’t you fret about it, child. Not much learnin’ goes on in them schools anyway.” She was looking at Lily now. “Come September, we’ll teach you to read proper.” Then as if that were not enough, she said, “We’re not gonna spend all our life chewin’ dirt. Just remember that.”

  Uncle Chester, fresh from his stall, was all for driving into town and taking his buggy-whip to Miss Pringle. Of course Lily related few of the details, but when she went off to the hen-house, she heard him holler, “I know all about that hard-titted old bitch, I’ve a good mind to teach her a thing or two she won’t soon forget!”

  “Eunice Pringle is not old,” Aunt Bridie said calmly, and all the steam was gone from Uncle’s whistle.

  4

  The summer of Lily’s fifteenth year was not, as she feared, uneventful. Aunt Bridie seemed more obsessed than ever with expanding production and business. Bachelor Bill, content to let his wheat ripen unaided, was brought over to help with the incredible weeding, picking and preparations for marketing. Auntie herself “gave in” and opened a stall at the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings during the growing season, giving over the house-to-house sales to Lily, who now looked after the money-side of the operation as well. Uncle’s back seemed baukier than usual, but his new devices for storing and delivering the produce were, even Bridie had to admit, “helpful for a change.” In mid-July she astonished Uncle by announcing that she was going off for a few days to cook for the road-clearance workers who had set up a tent city near the Reserve. Rumours in the incorporated town suggested that some of the clearing was in anticipation of the railway coming, but no confirmation was available.

  “Your Auntie ain’t worked for nobody, cookin’ or cleanin’, since her days in Toronto. She don’t believe in it. Got her pride, that woman.” Lily nodded. “’Cept of course when she come to work for me at the shop in London, but then her main job was tutorin’ little Bertie.” He grinned only as he did after a couple of “snorts”, winked with one-and-a-half eyes, and said: “I had to marry her to get any house-cleanin’ done!”

  “We need the money,” was all Auntie would say. “I’m gonna hire a man to cut pine again. Those trees are doin’ nothin’ for us just growin’ there. They’re a cash crop like anything else. Besides, we’re gonna try for another two acres next year.”

  Aunt Bridie was so exhausted when she came home from her three-day stint at the camp that she went straight to bed and slept right through Bachelor Bill’s Saturday serenade. Lily was even persuaded to do a jig. The two men sipped from Bill’s flask and followed every graceful line of the dancer’s leg.

  “Why don’t you ever bring Violet over?” Lily asked, flushed and sweating. “I could teach her to dance.”

  “Oh, she don’t dance none,” Bachelor Bill said in his drawl that was as lethargic as his music was sprightly. “She’s a bit tetched in the head, you know. Been like that since she were a babe. No sir, she don’t like to come outta the house at all.”

  Uncle Chester asked Lily if she’d like to try a “wee drop”, and was so persistent that Lily made a great show of tilting the flask against her teeth, wincing and gasping in feigned pleasure. They seemed satisfied with her performance. To deflect their further hopes she called for a hornpipe and flung her body into the music’s coil. Uncle watched with his sad bloodhound’s look, and Lily thought back to that first summer when she had been given her own bedroom, wondering even then why they had built a cottage with two bedrooms and a hallway down the middle, and recalling, even as she spun towards a shaky climax, Uncle’s words to her less than a month ago: “She was a wonderful tutor, you know, she loved my Bertie like he was her own, she looked after both of us real good, an’ she loved to read that boy story after story, an’ him only nine years old. It was awful, Lily, one day he was playin’ an’ laughin’ and readin’ back stories to your Auntie, an’ the next mornin’ he just puffs up, turns blue and dies on us. Your Auntie, she ain’t read a book since, not a one.”

  The two men applauded zealously as Lily came to a stop in the middle of the room. She was facing the window over the sink. The last filament of Bachelor Bill’s music still quavered in the coal-oil light. A face was staring back at Lily through the glass: the eyes widened by music, intrepidly innocent, carnal in their longing. For a second Lily thought she was looking at herself.

  Then Violet let out the whirring, wordless cry she used for delight or despair, and vanished into the night.

  It was August. Auntie was off to the camp once more “just to help out a little.” At Uncle Chester’s insistence, Auntie consented to put their savings in the Bank of Upper Canada in Port Sarnia. At the beginning of the month the hired hand appeared to cut timber and be otherwise useful around the place. Uncle Chester was made to give up his workshop wherein a pallet and table were installed for the new arrival. Uncle’s back “did a dip” and he was laid up with lumbago for several days. Lily did the chores by herself. She might have tried to be a little resentful but then watching the hired hand proved to be adequate compensation.

  Based on past experience, Lily expected him to be old, grizzled, and down-on-his-luck. Instead, Cam was twenty, as sleek and muscled and firm-jawed as a muskellunge, with an open smile and black Scotch-eyes that were curious, cheering and bold. “A bit too bold if you ask me,” said Auntie, too exhausted to eat her supper. “But he’s a good worker, for what you’re payin’ him,” Uncle protested from his makeshift bed. He was quickly skewered into silence, and sulked for the remainder of the evening.

  To Aunt Bridie Cam was painfully polite and deferential: “Which section of trees ought to come down next, mum?” And he certainly was a good worker. In ninety-degree heat he stripped to his waist, confronted the four-foot girth of a pine, and slung his executioner’s axe. Sweat raced in rivulets down the small of his back, staining his trousers to the thighs. Positioning herself perfectly from row to row among the beans, Lily was able to keep a close watch on his performance for her Aunt.

  The feelings Lily was experiencing were new, and puzzling. She knew what animals suffered to procreate and what men and women, for inscrutable reasons, accomplished in their midnight chambers. That such acts might be imbued with the most exquisite configuration of emotion, titillation and imagining had not occurred to her outside the vague intimations of her dreams. Until now. Her legs, made sturdy with labouring, went to jelly, and she found herself having to squat on her knees while her heart yearned outward towards bursting and her mind swelled with images of Cam’s arms like axe-handles grappling her, bending her till she dissolved and floated through them.

  When he spoke to her at lunch or after supper as he lay in the hay-patch scrutinizing her feeding of the hens, she lost her breath, and his eyes would twinkle with accomplishment. Always he was polite, solicitous: “Can I help you with that, Lily?” “Looks too heavy for you, that pail.” But his glance clung to her, and she wondered frantically if he too could see them, if even the extra band of muslim Auntie insisted she tie around them were not enough to bridle them.

  “That young man’s got to go,” Aunt Bridie said near month’s end. “He never stops leerin’ at Lily.”

  “But the girl’s fifteen,” said Chester. “She’s bound to attract the boys.”

  There was more puzzlement than pique in Bridie’s glare.

  “I’ll stay out of his way, Auntie.”

  “He’s a real good worker, woman. You know how bad my back’s been lately.”

  “I know how bad your medicine’s been,” she shot back. Then full of weariness she said, “All right. He stays. But just till the next section’s done. Then out he goes, bag and baggage.”

  As if he had overheard the threat, Cam took his glistening bi
ceps and shoulders to the farthest corner of the timber stand, out of sight and harm’s way. He ate his lunch in the woods. At supper he wore a clean shirt and got Auntie talking about her business, the scandal of the Family Compact banks, and even radical politics. She was amazed to learn that one so young and handicapped by muscle could understand the imperatives of George Brown’s ‘true grit’ policies. Lily, naturally, had expected such genius from the outset. Uncle Chester swung between envy and relief.

  September came. The muggy weather remained. So did Cam. Aunt Bridie went off to cook “for the last time, I swear by all the snakes in Scotland!” Lily was now hurt because Cam made no attempt to break his vows to Auntie. He stayed in the bush after supper until twilight. Lily heard the punch of his axe against the yielding pine. Auntie would be coming home for sure next day. I’ll have to go to him, Lily thought. And why not? Something inevitable and foregone has already happened; it’s only the working out that’s left.

  Leaving Uncle Chester slumped in a stupor, Lily slipped out into the gloaming. It was a perfect night. Even Bachelor Bill had gone off to town in his buggy. They would be alone under a consenting moon. With no particular stratagem in mind Lily walked through the haze towards the barn. A sound, like the cry of a bird struck by talons, came from Lily’s left. She stopped. Now it was a soft mewling. Old Bill’s tabby sprouting kittens again? Lily sidled through the beanstalks and came up behind the Indian corn that bordered on Bachelor Bill’s property. His log barn was visible. Lily knew there were no animals behind that barn. The hair on her neck rose; she closed her eyes, but it made no difference: the images before her were inerasable.

  Violet was half-sitting with her back against the wall, her loose dress ripped open to expose her sac-like breasts, which Cam was pulling at with the stems of his fingers as if he were stretching dough, while Violet’s own hands were busy in Cam’s lap coaxing his flabby thing as they would the Guernsey’s nozzle. Even at this distance, Lily could feel all the hurt and excruciating joy in Violet’s unfettered wail of sexual release – with no word to mitigate its coarse, untongued violation of the night-air.

  “Shut up, ya goddam fuckin’ bitch! Shut the hell up!” He slapped her so hard her head snapped back and hit the boards behind her. Then he was shoving his instrument into his trousers and stomping away into the dark. Violet’s sobs pursued him, mongoloid and discordant. But, at the first nicker of Bachelor Bill’s pony in the lane, she stopped, touched her breasts tenderly where Cam’s hands had fed themselves, pulled her dress together, and scuttled towards the unlit cabin.

  Lily stood in the corn, letting the mosquitoes have their way. Above her the jib of the quartering moon luffed, and went out.

  5

  If it hadn’t been for Bachelor Bill, they would have had no warning at all.

  “Three of ‘em, city-biddies,” he said to Auntie at the doorstep, thrilled and appalled. “All dolled up for christenin’ by the look of it.” And he winked mysteriously towards Lily. “An’ they already made the turn, I reckon.”

  Aunt Bridie never panicked, especially on Saturday afternoons in September with the weather clement and the week’s marketing done. “If God hadn’t been Presbyterian,” she would say, “he’d've made his Sabbath on Sair’day afternoons so’s all of us could rest together.” Nonetheless, she went indoors at a trot, signaling for Lily to follow.

  “It’s the ladies aid for sure,” she mumbled. Wordlessly they hurried about “straightening up” the living area. Auntie covered the table, set it for tea and seeing that Lily had automatically stirred the ashes from the dinner-time fire, smiled shortly and put the kettle on. She turned to Lily. “This is about you, you can be sure.”

  No doubt they were coming to drag her away to Miss Pringle’s school. Well, they’d need a block and tackle, and some good chain.

  “Go an’ see that Uncle of yours is safe in his stall,” Aunt Bridie said, putting an apron over her Saturday housedress but otherwise making no further personal concessions to the visitors. Lily’s heart sank. “Oh, don’t start poutin’ before you’re pricked”, snapped Auntie. “I want you in here for this, I do.”

  Lily raced back to the barn, scattering a conference or two of hens en route. Uncle Chester was in his shop, now fully restored to him since Cam’s sudden departure. Uncle had not bothered even to remove the pallet, finding it a more convenient spot to rest between stints at the workbench. Uncle Chester was resting.

  The “delegation”, as Auntie called them afterwards, had arrived: the mistresses McHarg, Salter and McWhinney – in convoy, the minister’s wife leading.

  “I think we oughta get right to the point,” said Mrs. McWhinney with mercantilist efficiency, draining her cup and licking the sugar off the edges.

  “We’re grateful for the tea an’ all,” said Josephine Salter. “Them little tarts with the crunchy centre was superb; could you let me have the recipe sometime?”

  “The point,” said the Reverend McHarg’s ambassadress, “is Lily.” Lily watched the mobile ball-bearings of her eyes. Auntie poured Mrs. McWhinney another cup of tea. “The point is the baptism of this innocent, abused child.”

  “We know how good you been to her an’ all,” added Josephine hastily, though the accused seemed busy with estimating Mrs. McWhinney’s capacity for sugar. “Nobody can take that away from you. You been a wonderful momma to this dear little foundlin’ here. Just the other night I says to Mr. Salter –”

  “What Josie’s sayin’, Bridie, is that it may be all right for you to reject your Maker, to live out here in a state of sin and run the risk of eternal damnation –”

  “Go ahead an’ take it,” Aunt Bridie said to the C. of E. with her eye on the last of the walnut tarts. “Sorry, Clara, you was sayin’?”

  “She was talkin’ about the fires of Hell, she was,” said Mrs. Salter, warming to her husband’s favourite theme.

  “You’re a bright woman, Bridie. Nobody denies you that. You work hard an’ you keep your own counsel. Well an’ good. But we’re talkin’ here about the immortal soul of an innocent. Now we all might come from different churches, an’ we have our set-to’s from time to time, but we all agree on this – the girl deserves a chance to save her own soul.”

  “It don’t even matter who baptizes her,” added Mrs. Salter with Methodist charity. “It’s just gotta be done, that’s all.”

  Mrs. McWhinney agreed on behalf of the Church of England but her assent was muffled by walnut tart. No one had looked directly at Lily during this entire conversation though she was occasionally appropriated by flutters of a finger or a glancing nod. Lily was trying to catch her Aunt’s eye but Bridie was now seated with her back straight, watching each of the speakers with intense interest.

  “Do you intend to toss a coin?” she asked.

  “Bridie, this is serious. We’re just askin’ you to think about the girl, about her future.”

  “In Heaven or Port Sarnia?”

  The sudden edge to Aunt Bridie’s voice silenced the bumptious Mrs. Salter and the satiated Mrs. McWhinney. They hadn’t expected it to come to this. Mrs. McHarg, being Orange, had more ancient claim on self-righteousness.

  “Both,” she said.

  Mrs. McWhinney coughed, a portion of crust caught in her throat.

  Aunt Bridie leaned forward, occupying the silence. At last she looked over at Lily, who could not read the emotions held in check by that awesome will. “Well then,” she said. “We’ll let the girl decide. Lily, dear, what do you say?”

  Lily, concluding it was time to find out once and for all who this God was, answered, “Yes.”

  It was agreed that Lily Ramsbottom’s religious education would begin a week Sunday with an interview with the Reverend McHarg himself. In his study, in the Manse – for the purpose of determining the status of the girl’s ‘natural’ inclinations to religious sentiment, after which she would be placed, for a time, exclusively in the hands of Mrs. McHarg for special tutoring before being released to the general influ
ence of Sunday School and Service.

  On the Saturday before the scheduled interview, a parcel arrived from McWhinney’s haberdashery addressed to “Miss Lily Ramsbottom.” It was one of the new-fangled corsets worn by ladies of good standing and generous figure. Auntie said gruffly, “We don’t take charity in this house,” but Uncle Chester, buoyed by a nap in his stall, said, “The gift is for the lass, woman, not you,” and Auntie cut back with, “Go back to your bottle an’ button up.” But she didn’t order the trembling delivery boy to return the goods, and he left at a gallop.

  Lily was overwhelmed. Somehow she had been able to read her name on the parcel before a word had been spoken. She stared at the penciled block letters pretending to say each of them over in order. Maybe I am Lily Ramsbottom, she thought.

  Naturally the corset was a disaster though not a disappointment. The springs and whalebones and stiff cloth converged mightily to push the bosom upward and athwart, but Lily’s breasts were small and intractable, preferring their own propensities. And where the instrument was meant to chastise any amplitude of buttock, it swung freely, devoid of purpose. “We’ll send it back,” Lily said. “Not at all,” said Aunt Bridie. “We’ll just put it away till the time is ripe. After all, the lady meant well.” Auntie put the contraption safely away in her room, but Lily kept the brown paper package with the writing on it.

  So, attired in her furbished gingham rendered decent by the addition of a muslim camisole and proper slip, Lily stepped down from the cart in front of the imposing red-brick Manse where one of God’s spokesmen awaited. Uncle Chester held her hand, squeezed it, and tried to say something, but couldn’t. Lily watched the rig move west down George Street and stop in front of the Anglican Church whose spire glinted above the horizon. Uncle Chester got out and, a bit like a thief entering a shop, went in.