Lily's Story Read online

  Uncle Chester, looking straight ahead, was kneading her breast with his left hand while the right one slithered unmolested up the wedge of her thighs. “Oh please, Lily, please…” he canted softly, like a plea from the near-dead. For a second Lily was paralyzed – not with fear but with the blind panic of indecision. The compulsion of this whispering in her ears – rising and falling across the whole spectrum of despair – left her unable to act or cry out or plead. Uncle’s fingers moved up to her belly where they caressed and marvelled as they would upon the pink sheen of a newborn. At last, dawning on some instinct as old as the species itself, Lily said calmly but directly into his ear: “Please don’t do this…Papa!”

  Uncle Chester jerked back, tilted and fell out of his chair. He put his face in his hands, and in a moment he was wailing uncontrollably into them.

  Lily was over by the stove. Uncle’s sobs stabbed into her back, begging absolution. After a while they subsided. She could hear him struggling to his feet.

  “Lily…lass…you won’t…you won’t tell –”

  “Sit down. I’ll get you your supper,” she said, shoving another faggot into the fire, and remarking in awe how much of her Aunt’s tongue she had already made her own.

  7

  1

  Much had happened to the world since 1855. The boom of the mid-fifties gave way to the bust of ’fifty-seven and ’fifty-eight. In the wake of the depression few if any in Lambton County prepared themselves for the imminent publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species and if they had, would have been conveniently outraged by its apostasy while simultaneously appropriating it to explain – despite temporary recessions – the inevitability of progress, North American style. The word itself was in the air and in the seasons, on the tongues of Tory and Reformer alike, and its principal articulation was in the pounding of spikes and chug of the locomotive. The Great Western Railway had hammered its cross-ties through the startled forests of Kent all the way to Chatham and Windsor, eclipsing villages and fathering towns, its patronymy as ineluctable as a mutant gene in biological ascendancy. Mr. Brydges, the celebrated British railroad architect, had already dreamt a horizontal line through the primeval maze between London and Port Sarnia. Unbeknownst to the good burghers of either town, the Grand Trunk had already hatched a nefarious scheme to drive a second line, slightly north, from Stratford to the military reserve at the junction of Lake and River, denoted on the official maps as Point Edward though known locally as “the ordnance lands” or “the rapids” or just plain “Slocum’s fishery”. At the stroke of an architect’s pen, the hamlets of Forest and Thedford were declared to have a future. The future also looked brighter for John A. Macdonald (later Sir John) who, having purchased a leasehold on said lands, carried off what may have been the first Canadian flip (as the quick turnover is now known in high finance).

  Important as these latter developments were, the most pressing concern for the Lambtonians of 1858 was the poor weather and the resultant general crop failure. It rained all spring, followed by weeks of summer drought. Every imaginable variety of blight and vegetable pestilence – taking their cue from Darwin – took full advantage of the situation and ravaged those inferior species in need of extinction. Whilst some of the cereal crops fared reasonably well, Aunt Bridie’s garden plot suffered most cruelly. They watched it mildew in the wet and wither in the desiccating heat, while slugs and mites and chiggers and rusts flourished, as if somehow they deserved such happenstance. In August, some paralytic bacterium swept through one of the coops; the corpses had to be burned, like stubble.

  For a time Uncle Chester even forgot about his weak ticker and bad back, and pitched in to salvage part of the potato crop and most of the hardy turnip. Lily flailed at bugs, pinched worms and popped caterpillars till exhaustion overtook her each night that summer, even though she could feel in every fatigued muscle of her body the surge of the inevitable: their business was in ruins.

  “We’ll start over again next spring,” Auntie said after each disaster. “That’s why we got cash in the bank.” In desperation she would mention the recent survey of the pine-bush and swamps of the ordnance grounds, and Uncle Chester would sigh knowingly.

  But there was more to it than the accidents of weather. Unable to keep up any deliveries except for a few eggs to the old customers, Auntie had been compelled, as other farmers had been tempted, to sell what produce her garden did yield to jobbers, who collected it at the farm gate with their great wagons and took it off to the expanding markets in town and to the wharfs where lake-steamers whisked it daily to the hostels of Detroit and Cleveland. Within months the stock-cars and hoppers of the Great Western would be shunting produce between towns within hours, not days. The ear of large-scale cash cropping had been inaugurated.

  “We’ll lick them,” Aunt Bridie said. “We’ll get by. We always have, haven’t we, Chester?” Uncle had succumbed to sleep.

  One stroke of good fortune was that Bachelor Bill, with his own farm in disarray, had abandoned it and become more or less their hired man. Without him they could not have managed to salvage anything of that summer. On the twenty-first of June he brought over a bottle of mulberry wine and they all toasted Lily’s eighteenth birthday. There was no coming out, however, unless you counted waltzing with your Uncle in the kitchen.

  After Uncle and Bachelor Bill had poured oil on the chickens and set them ablaze – the stench of their feathers and diseased flesh befouling the twilight air – Lily went into the house where Aunt Bridie sat at the table with her chin in her hands. She was ashen; the perpetual glint in her eyes was glazed with fatigue and disappointment; and something much worse. Lily saw immediately what it was: Auntie, with her intrinsic strength and constitutional optimism, could face up to any temporary calamity, indeed even to the despair and seeming hopelessness of the near-future; she would suffer any physical pain, any mental anguish and take any risks offered by Fate so long as there was hope of some kind – however faint – that she could escape the one thing in life she feared the most: being consigned to the drudgery of a labour which merely repeats itself in days, in weeks, in years – and gains for its victims merely a form of survival wherein the whole scope of one’s being, one’s reaching out, one’s caring is defined by a debilitating and inescapable regimen. Even the meaning of seasons would be lost. In the pleading of those eyes Lily saw the fear of a life lived without a future tense; she got her first clear look at what it was to be a woman in such times. She felt her heart lurch with inexpressible tenderness, unfocussed rage, and a boundless empathy with the oppressed.

  Aunt Bridie looked up. She spoke. “The worst of it, Lily, the very worst of it is somethin’ I’ve dreaded like the plague itself: you’ll have to go out to service.”

  Lily could think of nothing to say.

  “We’ll need the cash. I got plans to rearrange this place, I have. Next spring. When things get better. But we’ll have to have money.”

  By now Lily had found a voice to reply. “Who wants me?” she said.

  “I dread to tell you,” Auntie said. “Lord knows what’ll become of you in that town.”

  Lily tried as best she could to look concerned.

  “But she’ll pay well, no doubt, Mrs. Templeton will.”

  Lily burst into tears – of mixed origin.

  2

  Lily hardly ever cried. She never had. It was nothing to be particularly proud of nor ashamed of; it was just the way she was. “Weepin’ just messes up what you should be seein’” Old Samuels would say with special relish. “With me, it don’t matter.” But she never saw him cry, sad as he might become telling one of his stories of the disapora of the Attawandarons and the demise of their ancient tongue. Sitting in her new room, couched for the first time in her life with luxury, she examined her tiny chest of accumulated treasures – the rabbit’s foot, pendant, crucifix, Testament, the jasper talisman – and simply wept. Later when she was able to stop and present a decent, grateful face to the wonderful Temp
letons, she realized how utterly fatigued she had been on her arrival here at the end of September. From pre-dawn till deep dusk, they had all toiled in the devastated fields to salvage what they could of the harvest, to garner seed and cuttings for a doubtful spring, to pickle and can and store what they could to tide them over the winter and, most important for Aunt Bridie, to conserve their depleted supply of cash. By ten o’clock each night, barely able to stuff some cold mutton and sourdough bread into them, they collapsed into a drugged and dreamless sleep. In such circumstances conversation seemed not only redundant but threatening. Relying as she did on day-dreams and the spontaneous hum of music inside her, Lily soon found herself laboring without the solace of fancy or song.

  It was, then, almost a week before she was able to leave this pink and papered boudoir – young Pamela’s room before she left for school – and join her new family. Mrs. Templeton came in several times a day to talk to her, listen to her incoherent weeping with patience and near-understanding, and divert her with household talk or a display of Pamela’s “old” frocks for which she assumed Lily would be a “perfect match”. Gradually the numbness of the mental and physical fatigue wore off, and Lily felt the re-emergence of the self she was most familiar with. She fell asleep in the feather tick with the talisman in her clutch, and that night she dreamed of a fine-boned young man with loose, sandy hair and a careless moustache and a radium stare that held her in its power till he dissolved in an ambiguous mist.

  “You’re certainly not goin’ to be a servant in my house!” Mrs. Templeton exclaimed when Lily appeared on a Saturday morning attired in her own housedress and a maid’s apron she had found in the upstairs hall closet. “Gracious, what would Bridie think of me, then?”

  She marched Lily back up the carpeted stairs to Pamela’s bedroom and with commendable briskness re-attired her for her new role. Pulling Lily in front of a long mirror on the inside of the door of the black-walnut wardrobe, she said with satisfaction, “There, now. What do you think?”

  Lily was sure what Aunt Bridie would think. Since no mirror ever graced Auntie’s house – “Greatest time-waster and corrupter of good intentions ever devised” she huffed – Lily had little experience in physical self-assessment. On occasion she had peered at her rippled face in the goose-pond and watched fascinated as that other visage – fay, unmoored, incomplete – yearned back at her from the intensity of its own medium. Once when no one was around, she tried to discover in the pond’s mirror the whole, sudden shape of her body – with its new breasts, widening hips, furred vee – but she could not catch it all at once, only partial, curved tableaux or quick configurations that pleased without purpose. Lily’s reverie that day had been terminated by the lunge and honk of Booster the gander, who had a fetish for the exposed flesh of foolish humans.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “The dress is beautiful,” Lily said. “But how can I work with these petticoats on?”

  “The dress is not beautiful, pet, you are.” She beamed like Pygmalion surprised by Galatea. “It’s high time you realized that. Walk around for me. That’s it. See, you have no idea how graceful you really are. Bridie tried to take it out of you, no doubt, bein’ a closet-Presbyterian an’ all, turnin’ you into some sort of darkie slave out there, puttin’ calluses on your hands an’ lettin’ the sun burn an’ freckle that glorious Irish skin of yours.”

  Lily was abashed. She felt she ought to defend Aunt Bridie but couldn’t find ready words to do so. Mrs. Templeton was not looking for commentary.

  “She ought to be ashamed, though of course I know she ain’t – hasn’t – got any. My, my,” she sighed stepping back, “you’re goin’ to wow the gentlemen, you are. There’s no helpin’ that.”

  “How can I work for you like this?” Lily said, unable to prevent her mirror-image from bouncing back to her.

  “I got Iris to do the housework, pet,” she explained, “an’ Bonnie comes in to serve an’ scull at parties. But I do my own cooking an’ you’ll be a big help to me. Other times, like now, I want you to be my ‘companion’, to sit with me at teas, to talk to me when you feel like it, an’ to let me make a lady out of you.”

  Lily looked dubious.

  “I’ll send your wages to Bridie every month,” she said, picking up one of Pamela’s cloth-and-china dolls and fondling it.

  Lily did not smile on cue, as Pamela did, but she appeared resigned. Aunt Bridie was counting on her. “Will you teach me to read?”

  “Of course, pet,” said Mrs. Templeton, suddenly as serious as Lily. “Why do you think I arranged your rescue?”

  They began with recipes, just the two of them working in the kitchen. Mrs. Templeton was amazingly patient. She sounded out the recipe words slowly and repetitiously with Lily at her shoulder. They would say them together, Lily’s rich alto voice melding with the older woman’s strained soprano.

  “And I thought my Janie was the smart one,” Mrs. Templeton said. “She should’ve been a boy, Maurice always said when she done – did – her sums. But you, you take the cake.”

  After the second week Lily was reading the familiar recipes haltingly to Mrs. Templeton who matched her actions to Lily’s words. She felt like Old Samuels must have when his sight darkened and he discovered a fresh way of seeing that had been a hidden part of him all along.

  “Remember now, pet, read them words clear, ’cause I’m doin’ exactly what you say. If the pie wins a prize, then we’ll know you can read!” she giggled with a twinkle as silver as her hair.

  Towards the end of October Mrs. Templeton would sit with Lily before a blazing fire in the parlour – surrounded by daguerreotypes of her daughters and husband (“We’ll get you done soon, pet, when all the bloom in you is through workin’”) – and read from The Arabian Nights, a book that Auntie would have found scandalous not because of its racy tales but rather for its utter “silliness”. Lily began to ‘read’ parts of these stories aloud, easy sections carefully picked out by Mrs. Templeton and abetted by repetition and memory. One evening she was allowed to take the book to her room where she struggled once again through the early paragraphs of Aladdin and his magic lamp. There was some imperative in this story that drove her to try and decipher the huge, exotic words, to grasp at the central thread of events whose import she sensed but could not pin down. Suddenly the aura of meaning faded and went out like the genie himself. In frustration and disappointment she threw the book across the room and sat shaking for five minutes before she hurried over in panic to see if she had damaged it. Only her pride was bruised.

  Even his Worship the Mayor got into the game. He would call Lily into his den, detonate a cigar, wave her to a plump chair, and begin to read aloud from one of his legal tomes. “Know what that word means, Lily?” he’d say with mock-sternness, rolling off his tongue some arcane polysyllable. Lily would shake her head. “Neither does Judge Maitland!” he’d rumble. “And I doubt if the dolt who thought it up does either!” Then he’d go dead-serious again. “But that’s the law, Lily dear. Men have been hanged on it!” Lily soon realized that his was a game he had played with both his daughters before they left for school in London and marriage in Toronto. And some of the words she did remember.

  Lily found herself doing little work. The calluses on her hands shrivelled and dropped off. Bonnet and parasol soon whitened her skin. The freckles remained as permanent record of a different past. Lily even went to Church – the Anglican one – with the Templetons, though no word was ever said about baptism or question raised about her not taking communion. The Church of England seemed to be quite catholic and commodious. Lily watched, listened, and learned. After Church she would be given the pony-and-surrey and allowed to drive out to visit her Aunt and Uncle. Chester was always overjoyed to see her, though he would sometimes embarrass Lily and Bridie – for different reasons – by bursting into tears without proper notice. Aunt Bridie’s assessment of Lily’s gradual transformation to ladyhood was not discernible in her talk or her manne
r. She continued to refer to Lily’s “work” and as the girl prepared to leave each Sunday, she would grasp her hand and say, “Thanks, lass. You’re a good girl.”

  Most of Lily’s ‘work’ consisted of being at Mrs. Templeton’s side during her frequent ‘At Homes’, given in deference to her role as the wife of the new mayor. “Sweet but dreadfully quiet,” Lily overheard one of the dowagers remark to one of the duchesses. “Might be pretty, in time, though Lord knows where she comes from.” Because of previous experience with them during her days as an egg-lady, Lily had little trouble dealing with the women at tea. The surprise and challenge came from the gentlemen and grandees who frequented the bi-weekly political ‘socials’ (salons was a word not infrequently heard) held by his Worship. As hostesses, Lily and Mrs. Templeton engineered the distribution of food and drink by the servants co-opted for the evening, and were expected to provide casual divertissement for those gentlemen who found the strain of political discussion too hard on a thinning intellect.

  The political topics of that month in 1858 were about the coming of the Great Western and the machinations of its rival, the Grand Trunk. Much bitterness, not fully assuaged by the good brandy and home-made chocolates, was educed over the shabby treatment of the town’s noblest citizen, Malcolm “Coon” Cameron, whose moderate reformers had been outflanked by the chicanery of the Clear Grits who had recently abandoned “Coon” and his gang to the uncertain mercies of the new liberal-conservative party taking shape under John A. Macdonald. Lily was thus exposed to the intemperate talk of radicals as well as the lamentations of old-compact Tories and the hollow bellicosities of the local Orangemen – for though his Worship would soon depart Port Sarnia and later join the coalition as a repentant reformer, his hospitality was so lethal that the warring factions in town not only answered all invitations to attend, but often broke protocol by appearing unannounced. The result was a series of spirited and spirituous soirees which furthered Lily’s education in ways that might have surprised the participants.