Lily's Story Read online

  “Come in, come in, my child!” boomed the Reverend Mr. Clarion McHarg, swivelling in his desk chair and waving the deaf housekeeper away.

  Lily obeyed. The woman had taken her shawl somewhere. She peered across the dimly-lit room embroidered with walnut and cherrywood and leather-skinned tomes of impressive dimension.

  “Sit,” said the Reverend pointing to a padded, armless chair perched on a scatterrug a few feet from the littered secretary. “My, don’t we look pretty, today,” he added, finishing up a sentence and blotting it. Adjusted now to the poor light, Lily saw that his features were all crags and cliffs and deep coombs, with eyebrows that bunched and released parenthetically – a pair of singed caterpillars. Despite the eager teeth of his smile, his eyes burned through you, like gallstones. The only thing soft about the man that was visible were his plump fingers, which lay during the first part of their conversation as motionless as raw sausages.

  The gallstones at last took her in. He had just remembered who she was. “You’re the…young lady from the township my wife was telling me about?”

  “Yes, your reverence.”

  While he was casting about for a suitable exordium, his stare consumed her, at a gulp.

  “I ain’t been baptized,” Lily ventured.

  “Haven’t been,” he said automatically.

  “Yes, sir. Auntie says I ain’t had a proper upbringin’.”

  “Do you know what being baptized in the Lord means?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, then, let’s find out, shall we, how much you do know.” The caterpillars hunched forward. “First of all, why don’t you remove that bonnet and give those pretty tresses some air?”

  Lily obeyed.

  “Much better. God will be pleased, I’m sure, to have you join His congregation of the Saved.”

  “Yes,” Lily said. “I come here to find out about him.”

  “What do you know about Him now?”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  The good Reverend smiled as if charmed by the naiveté of such a remark. “You may pray to Him.”

  “What’s that?” Lily wanted to hear it from the source.

  My word, the corruption of some of these country folks was complete! “You get down on your knees, close your eyes, and tell God about your sins and ask Him to offer you strength and succor.”

  “What’s sin?”

  The Reverend stared at Lily as if trying to catch her out at some trick. “You don’t know?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, I can see that Mrs. McHarg has some tough cloth to cut here.”

  “Can I talk to God, like this, like we are?” Lily said.

  “Of course not,” he snapped. “The Lord will answer your prayers if and when He decides. Our role is to try to be good, and obedient, and free from sin.”

  “When he does talk back to me, will it be in English?”

  The caterpillars jumped, even the sausages began to quiver. “Are you being blasphemous, child?”

  “What’s blasphemous, sir?”

  “God speaks to each man in his own tongue; He hears, sees and knows everything.”

  “Uncle Chester says that his Bible says that God talks in Hebrew.”

  “Damnation to Uncle Chester!”

  Lily looked at the floor, unable to contend with the fiery fusillade.

  “Excuse me, child. You see why we must all pray.”

  Lily didn’t. She straightened up, charily. “Would God, if I prayed to him real hard, talk to me in Pottawatomie?”

  The caterpillars popped close to the butterfly stage; the sausages sizzled. “Who put you up to this, eh? That heathen aunt of yours?” He had both of her shoulders in his grip.

  “No, sir. I just thought if your god can talk in every tongue, then he could if he wants talk to me in Pottawatomie. Or Chippewa or Attawan –”

  “Cease this sacrilege! Now!”

  Lily quaked before the upheaval of the Reverend McHarg’s notorious temper. She pressed the tears back into her head where they smouldered, unattended. His pulpy hands had now slipped down so that they were squeezing her exposed forearms. Suddenly he let go of her as if she were quarantined. He sat down again, gathering the frayed ends of his composure. Lily didn’t move. He seemed surprised, even discomfited, by the fact that she had not dashed out in disarray. He felt her presence in his room – the Lord’s anteroom, as it were – as something indefinably dangerous, something darkly feminine, and intricately tempting.

  “Mrs. Beecroft will show you out,” he said at last. When she reached the study door, though, he shouted in a desperate whisper, “Whatever becomes of you, miss, just remember this: God is not a Pottawatomie!”

  As best she could, Lily told Aunt Bridie what had trespassed at the Manse. Auntie listened with interest, not once interrupting. Then she said, “You may’ve had no upbringin’ an’ little educatin’, but you’re as smart as a June bug in July!” She scanned Lily’s face as if realizing for the first time that this was her brother’s flesh and blood, that they did indeed share lineament and lineage.

  “God’s not there,” Lily said. “I know it.”

  Auntie’s face clouded. “Just remember one thing, though. If you turn away from all the churchin’ these folk ’round here can’t do without, they’ll never ever forgive you. You’ll have to pay for that little luxury all your life.”

  “But you –”

  “Yes, I did it, I know. As far as I’m concerned, the god they pray to was invented by landlords and greengrocers. An’ now that I look at you, I see somethin’ in your face, somethin’ from that mad father of yours or the wild bush you was let roam in –” She didn’t finish, as if on principle she’d already said too much. Then: “Well, don’t just stand there with your legs in a knot, get that frumpery off, we got corn to shuck!”

  When they were again working side by side, Lily said, “Will you teach me how to read?”

  “Yes, honey, real soon. That’s a solemn promise.” And she tore at the stubborn shocks in a frenzy.

  6

  Aunt Bridie was off to cook at the camp “for the last time between now and kingdom come.” As many of the workers brought their families to be with them and moved to more permanent quarters, Bridie’s business followed them. Already she was plotting the use of the new acres cleared, cut and sold by Cam before he left, not even taking his last week’s pay. Two sets of orders were left with her subordinates: Lily was to bake two dozen pumpkin pies for a special Thanksgiving celebration at the camp, courtesy of the soon-to-be-announced candidate for mayor of the newly incorporated town: Maurice Templeton, Esquire. “I’m trustin’ you to do as I’ve showed you; somethin’ big could come outta this,” Auntie said. Secondly, Uncle Chester was to give the north coop a thorough scrubbing and white-washing as several hens had recently died from some mysterious cause.

  Lily was delighted; but Uncle Chester’s back went on leave. Lately Auntie had been more than usually stern and grumpy, snapping at her and Uncle Chester with little or no provocation. At night her deep snoring rattled the kitchen pots and often drove Uncle to the barn. Most of her wrath was directed towards him, though Lily failed to see why. Seldom would he talk back, and even then the rebellion always collapsed after a single strike. Sometimes he would look over at Lily, aggrieved and helpless, as if to say, “See, this is what it’s really like.” Once in September when Cam was still occupying his sanctuary, Uncle Chester, unaware he was being observed by Lily from her bed, picked up Auntie’s pince-nez – which she used to read The Observer and “do the books with” – and hid them under the mattress. Aunt Bridie searched high and low for them, more than routinely disturbed that she had been so careless as to mislay them. Uncle Chester meantime made a great fuss about helping her locate them: “Thought they might’ve fallen off in the fruit cellar when you was labellin’ the jars, but not so, I’m afraid,” he said solicitously. “Not like you to be so careless with your valuables.” Three days later when the spectacles
turned up magically between two butter-boxes on the kitchen shelf, Aunt Bridie gave Uncle Chester the oddest look, then went about her business.

  Uncle Chester, grumbling about his lumbago, went off to the north chicken coop, tools in hand. Lily went to the pumpkin patch and started the laborious task of loading the ripest ones into the barrow and pushing it through the loose soil to the dooryard. On the very first load Lily saw she had been too ambitious: the wheel buried itself in the ground, and when Lily got angry with it, it lurched sideways and sent the pumpkins thumping overboard. Uncle Chester was suddenly beside her. “I’ll help you with that,” he said. “Damn woman oughta know better’n to make you push a thing like this. There’s times I think she just forgets you’re a girl…a young lady,” he said, puffing and huffing a huge pumpkin into the barrow.

  “Be careful of your heart, now,” Lily said, but she was happy to have help. Together they managed to get three loads of the unwieldy fruit safely to a pile beside the stoop.

  “There now, my lass, you can go on with your woman’s work,” said Uncle Chester.

  Lily leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Maybe I can get this done an’ come help with the coop.”

  He sighed: “That’s a dog’s work,” and trudged off.

  Lily hummed to herself as she split and removed the pulp from the pumpkins. Beside her were three large kettles and just inside the door several dozen tin plates delivered by pony-cart from Mrs. Templeton. She felt useful and content, and let the Indian summer cast its blessings abroad.

  Lily felt the strange eyes upon her long before she looked up. Violet was watching her from among the sunflowers, their stiffened stalks askew, their heads puffed and blasted, their ebony eyes bulging with seed. She was motionless except for her bare toes which wiggled happily among the withered jaundice of abandoned petals.

  “Would you like to help?” Lily said.

  Violet whirled to flee. “It’s all right,” Lily said. “Nobody’s home but me.”

  Violet inched forward. “You could roll that big pumpkin over to me,” Lily said. Violet sat down, wholly relaxed now, on the dirt path, her fleshy thighs exposed almost to her hips. She made a sound, heavy and laboured like a horse wheezing through the pain of the heaves.

  Lily blinked hard: she was certain that Violet had just spoken to her, that through the distortion of the girl’s cleft palate and wayward tongue, she clearly detected the words “I watch”.

  “You want to watch?” Lily said.

  Violet’s eyes lit up. “Ahh waajjh, ahh waajjh,” she said over and over, contorting the vowels even more in her excitement. “Lily work, Lily work,” she said in her way, and laughed.

  So Violet watched in fascination as Lily’s fingers went about their practiced tasks. The sun warmed them equally. The afternoon rung its gentle changes. Lily found herself humming one of her mother’s Gaelic airs. When she paused for breath, the melody continued, an octave lower, in perfect pitch and cadence, and with no loss of the lamentatious joy that originally suffused it. Lily laboured while Violet sang.

  Lily had strained and prepared the pulp and placed the kettles in the cool of the back shed. She would have to build a hot, sustaining fire in the stove when the day cooled off some. They would eat a cold supper. Lily was tired and covered with the sticky effluent of pumpkin, and feeling a bit empty inside because as soon as Bachelor Bill’s cart squeaked around the bend, Violet had leaped up and frantically dashed across to the log hut, using the coops and her barn as camouflage. Moments after her brother entered the house, she heard him shouting, followed by two loud smacks, and then Violet’s familiar wail.

  She was also wondering where Uncle had been for the whole day. After getting a good fire started, she set out to fetch him home. The first place she looked was the barn. He wasn’t in his workshop; nor were there any signs that he had been there. Puzzled, she walked over to the north coop from which no noise save the clucking of hens had come since mid-morning. When she opened the door, she was greeted by a spray of feathers and dust; when it settled in the fading light, she saw Uncle Chester. He lay sprawled on his elbows and ankles, his clay jug overturned and empty beside him. He was awake, but his eyes were half-lidded as if he were just waking or about to drop off. His face glowed as if he had been sunburned. The place was a mess, and Uncle Chester lay fully in it; bits of cast-off straw and chicken droppings and hen-pecked dirt and disembowelled seed-husks and the spilled semen of Springer, the ageless cockerel.

  “Uncle?”

  “Ah, is it you, Lily? You see what she’s done now, you see what she’s driven us to?”

  “Come on, Uncle. Your supper’s ready.”

  “You’re the loyal one, though. Chester can always count on his little Lily.” She had him by the arm, and he made a half-hearted effort to get up. “You wouldn’t drive a man to this, would you, my sweet?”

  He was up, but when she let go, his eyes rolled and he slumped back into the muck. “Where’d the room go?” he said, trying to laugh through his coughing jag. When she got him up again, he leaned his bulk against her and they both toppled. “What’re we on, a whirligig? Jesus, let me off. Oh, sorry. Pardon my French,” he spluttered. “It’s all her fault, you know. The whole shitty mess.”

  Lily was able to wrap one of his arms around her shoulder and with great difficulty manoeuvre him out of the coop and onto the path that led to the house. The odours of whiskey and offal contended in the evening air.

  “You always thought she was so damn smart, didn’t you, pickin’ this spot out. Well, you’re old enough now to be told the truth,” he said, guiding his slurs. The revelation was interrupted when he had to stop and retch into the last of the cucumbers.

  “I’ll put some tea on,” Lily said.

  “Always thought she was so damn smart, she did. Picked this hell-hole in a pine-bush ‘cause it was next to the army reserve. They’re gonna build a fort an’ barracks right there, she says, an’ we’ll be right next to them. Some fort, eh? Nothin’ but pine trees an’ always will be! Some smart, eh?”

  “The fire’s already goin’,” Lily said, trying to change shoulders. Uncle’s limbs flopped joylessly over her.

  “She was good to little Bertie, I’ll give her her due there,” he said. “Then Bertie went an’ died on us.”

  They were at the house. Uncle Chester dropped to his knees and vomited copiously on the flagstones, spraying Lily in the process. Then he looked up at her as if he had just wakened from a messy dream and was wondering where he was: “Your Auntie’s a good woman,” he said softly. “An’ don’t you ever forget it.”

  “I’ll get out the tub,” Lily said. “I’ll bring your robe out. You can just sit right here.” Lily hurried inside, got Uncle Chester a cup of clear tea, which he spilled over his shirt, and then proceeded to prepare a bath for him. Using the extra kettles from the Templetons, she boiled enough water to almost fill the shiny metal tub Uncle had bought last winter to help “straighten out” his unreliable backbone. Auntie had objected, resorting to reason, then anger, then ridicule but eventually giving in, her fingers almost paralytic as she counted out the silver coins from her locked cash-box. Not once had she used it, nor had Lily – both of them continuing to wash at the outside pump in the sheltering dusk or once-a-week with a pail and warm water and soap in the dank kitchen.

  Lily went out to Uncle Chester with a flannel sheet, and after managing to slurp half-a-cup of tea, he wobbled to his feet and let Lily pull off his reeking shirt and trousers under cover. Somehow, with Lily keeping the sheet in place, he succeeded in removing his undervest and linens. Through the sheet Lily could see how thin his arms and legs had become in the last year or so, and how ludicrous his unhobbled belly looked as it jiggled and sighed against his knees. He held her hand like a little boy as he stepped into the tub, cupping his private parts in an automatic gesture. But Lily had already turned away, leaving the warm steamy room and walking wearily to the well-pump through the cloudless afterglow of twilight. Her
arm ached as she primed and pumped, and her skin recoiled at the icy touch of the water. Nonetheless, she stripped naked and scoured herself with lye-soap, letting it sting and purge. The chill air, free of mosquitoes, soon dried her, and she slipped her nightshirt on over the gooseflesh. Suddenly she felt famished, and very thirsty. She felt the moon’s weight on her back as she headed for the house.

  Uncle Chester was out of the tub, sitting in his wingback chair with the flannel ‘towel’ wrapped around him, toga-like. He was clean, but the fatigue and strain of the day’s excess was etched into his face. He’s an old man, thought Lily. He forced a sheepish smile.

  “What would I do without you, Lily?” he said wanly.

  “I’ll get some bread and cheese for us,” Lily said. She didn’t know why but she added, “Auntie won’t be back till tomorrow night.”

  “Come here an’ sit beside your old uncle,” Chester said, avoiding the lamplight over the sink. “Like you used to.”

  Lily hesitated, but sensing the pall of irreconcilable sadness over him, she padded across the room and sat gingerly on the left arm of the chair. Uncle took her hand in his as he used to after he had read to her or told her one of his fantastic tales about the lawless Ramsbottoms of Lancashire.

  “Sometimes, Lily my lass, I think you’re the only reason I carry on. Just the thought of you smilin’ at me in the mornin’s, or dancin’ for me in this room, or puttin’ your hand in mine like you’re doin’ now…” His voice trailed off. He squeezed her hand tight, closing his puffed eyes. The maple-wood in the firebox crackled. The lamplight wavered. Lily felt very very sad. She squeezed Uncle’s hand. She couldn’t think what else to do. Exhaustion was about to claim her. She was at the furred edge of a dream. Something male and insistent was trying to shape her right breast to its own liking. The left one cried out in its loneliness. A throaty version of her own voice was chanting: Cam, Cam.