Lily's Story Read online

  The hope that Aunt Bridie nurtured through the brutal winter of ice storms and blizzards and murderous thaws – auguries of disaster all of them – bordered on the hysterical. Lily took to spiking Uncle Chester’s Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral with some of his own hooch (discovered when they dismantled the north coop) just so he would sleep through the grating January afternoons. Several times at night Lily heard her Aunt crying alone in her room: not the sort of weeping women use to release or publish their sundry griefs, but the half-repressed anguish that is one part rage and two parts despair. The next morning she would be bright with forced cheerfulness as she pulled on her macintosh and headed back to the woodlot to help Bill with the cutting. “That’s pine’s cash in the bank!”

  More and more, also, Auntie seemed to be placing her hopes on the sounds not only of their own axes but those now ringing through the pinery that lay between their fields and the waters to the north and west. The long-rumoured arrival of the second and most ambitious of the great railway octopuses, was happening. And less than half-a-mile from them.

  “I told you, didn’t I, Chester, they’d build somethin’ big on that property. That’s why we moved way out here in the first place, Lily. Mayn’t be soldiers over there, but there’s gonna be trains,” she said wistfully, “an’ people, too. We’re gonna have neighbours, lass, a real town of our own to belong to. Didn’t I say so, Chester?”

  Chester was asleep, dreaming perhaps of an unscorched carpenter’s shop and a boy name Bertie – his Cherry Pectoral clutched in his hands like a rosary.

  2

  July was sweltering. Aunt Bridie, Bachelor Bill and Lily sweated and slaved in the fields. Lily burned, freckled, peeled and then burned anew. Uncle Chester took his first baby steps, tottered and sprained his wrist, after which he too sweated and whined. About the middle of the month, Violet ran off. Work was halted so that a search could begin. Lily went to the pond first because Violet had been peering into its coppery mirror on several recent occasions, near daybreak. Only Booster and his harem were there, looking on in bemusement. Throughout the afternoon they combed the pinery, and Auntie even walked as far as the oak ridge and Little Lake to the north-east, pausing as she crossed the freshly-laid imprint of the Grand Trunk to contemplate the future. But it was Lily who found her sitting in a daze in a field near the railway worker’s shanties down by the construction site for the new wharf and station. It was dusk, and Violet must have become alarmed enough to start crying. When Lily arrived, Violet was sobbing incoherently; even Lily could make out no word. She put her arm about the wretched girl and half-carried her home. Auntie intercepted them near the house and together they took Violet into the tallow-lit gloom of the log hut. Bachelor Bill, sitting with his head buried in his hands, looked up with mixed rage and relief, but said nothing. He glared at Lily as she stroked Violet’s hair and rubbed her neck and shoulders till the sobbing stopped. Auntie left to answer Uncle Chester’s piteous calls for aid, but Lily stayed, murmuring softly into the girl’s ear and watching Bachelor Bill. Finally she rose and with reluctance left the house. Outside she paused, waiting for the explosion within and deciding that somehow she would intervene. Aunt Bridie was suddenly beside her. Together, they listened in the dark.

  From the hut came the unmistakable sound of Bachelor Bill’s harmonica: thin strains of an old-country air, reedy and elegiac. The women went home.

  Lily decided to have a look at this railroad in which Auntie had placed so much of her faith. For a year she had listened to its saws, axes, hammers and curses of work-in-progress, but she had no desire to see the results. Towards November of ’fifty-nine, Auntie would walk over there every day she could and watch the ties straighten the landscape, foot by foot, amazed that such delicate calligraphy had printed its message from here to London and beyond, they were told, to the edge of the ocean itself. During the search for Violet, Lily had glimpsed in the dark the havoc wrought here, and felt an irresistible urge to return in the daylight.

  Nothing could have prepared her for such a sight. A few hundred yards north of their woodlot the destruction began. Lily had imagined a neat swath cut through the bush; there was no bush left. Every pine within a mile’s radius of the wharf-site, on the River just below the Lake, had been hacked down haphazardly as if some deranged troglodyte had avenged himself for some fancied slight. The areas near the right-of-way were efficiently trim, but the so-called townsite was a wasteland of split trunks, charred branches and smouldering needles. After a fashion Lily could see all the way to the River’s edge; she could see how the main-line curled in from the north-east across the ballasted swamps and aligned itself with boundaries formed by the water. The sprawling, unpainted wharfs and freight-sheds were three-quarters completed, and to the south at the periphery of the remaining stand of trees Lily spied the brick station-and-hotel towering three stories above the shoreline, the roof slates reflecting the sun and the several dozen glazed windows beaming ‘progress’ across a clearing that, it seemed, must inevitably yield houses and people to inhabit them. But why would they come here? Why would they want to? For now, only a handful of workers’ shanties, which had served the fisherman before them, gave any promise of domesticity. Below her Lily watched the ripple of muscle and sweat as the navvies raised their hammers and drove their spikes into wood like nails into the cross-struts of a coffin.

  Though she was curious, Lily didn’t approach the station-hotel. Something told her she would see the inside of it soon enough. Instead she walked down across the tracks to the point where the Lake and River joined, and stared out at the self-sustaining, generous beauty of the blue waters flowing out of the north-sky itself and condescending to the south. She glanced anxiously over at the scrub bush and dunes along the lakeshore, noting with relief that progress had by-passed the sleeping graves of the lost. You are safe, Southener, she thought. Satisfied, Lily turned to go and as she did she found herself looking back across the mangled plain for the first time. Smoke from the foundries was visible to the south, but her eye caught something more impending. About half-way across the curving rim of the tree-line she saw rising above the pines, a towering hardwood – its branches unfolding, outreaching – magnificent in is solitary grandeur. The troglodyte’s mad slashing had stopped less than twenty feet from its aboriginal root.

  As Lily picked her way through the wreckage towards home, the immense depression settling over her was partially relieved by the thought of this lone survivor, by the belief that not all the magic in the world had flown.

  “She’s gone again,” said Aunt Bridie sternly when Lily entered the garden.

  This time they did not find her. Not that evening nor the next morning. At noon several men on horseback rode up the lane and stopped in front of the shanty. Bachelor Bill was with them. Lily and Auntie hurried over, leaving Uncle Chester to fend for himself. When they arrived, Bachelor Bill, distraught, said to them: “They say she’s crazy an’ they have to take her away, an’ they just picks her up an’ she’s bleedin’ and squallin’ an’ her eyes is beggin’ me, an’ they just up an’ cart her off to London, they’re gonna lock her up, Bridie, they’re gonna lock her up somewheres.”

  Aunt Bridie took control, and got the whole story. But nothing could be done, they said. Three or four of the railway workmen had pulled Violet into a field where they raped her repeatedly, and then left her there bleeding and babbling in her alien speech. The incident had been witnessed by a minor official of the Grand Trunk who was inspecting one of the fancy new rooms on the third floor of the hotel. He couldn’t exactly see who the men were from such a distance, and didn’t report the incident till the next morning because he saw the girl get up on her own and wander towards Sarnia, and naturally he reckoned that it wasn’t really rape after all. As it turned out, no one was ever charged with the crime. No reliable witnesses could be found. Violet, her terror and pain locked forever inside her, “went crazy”, and the constable and the magistrate decided she would be better off “getting proper t
reatment”. Bachelor Bill was inconsolable. Aunt Bridie ranted against all officialdom and seethed and grew grim. Lily felt quite alone, bereft of something of immense and irreplaceable value. She got a taste of what despair would be like.

  3

  Some time towards dawn Lily was awakened by a blaze of lightning, followed soon by a crack of thunder that sounded as if Adam had pulled his own ribs apart. Then the rain came, slashing at the dry woods and vulnerable gardens. Soon it relented, easing off to a steady, sustaining downpour. When she arose with the sun, the air would be sweet with growth, the leafage radiant, the earth slaked and grateful. She turned back towards sleep, towards the hurting dream – anything to avoid such a day.

  When she did get up, hearing Auntie stir restlessly in her room, she sat on the cot for a long while letting the infant light brush over her, quicksilvering her skin. She reached into the applewood box below the cot and drew out the leather pouch. The jasper talisman felt cold in her cupped palms. She pressed it tightly, squeezing her eyes shut, and begging the wordless, driven thoughts in her mind to seek some shape, some release, some reconciliation. It occurred to her that she might be praying. The talisman grew warm, incarnadine, then pulsed – like the first flexing thrum of an embryo’s ventricle.

  “Are you up, dear?”

  “Yes, Auntie. You stay put a while. It’s a bit wet for weedin’ right off.”

  She heard the creak and shuffle of her Aunt rigging her body for the day ahead.

  Lily glanced up from her hoeing. Aunt Bridie was waving from the yard, something white and fluttering in her hand. When Lily came up to her, she saw that the stranger was only Silas, the butcher’s idiot son.

  “He’s brung a note from Alice Templeton,” said Aunt Bridie evenly. “Do you want me to read it?”

  “Please.”

  In a somewhat overly formal and halting manner, Bridie read: “Dear Lily: You are cordially invited to attend the official luncheon for His Royal Highness, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, to be held at the Grand Trunk Hotel at twelve noon, September 13, 1860. Please say you’ll come. Affectionately, Alice Templeton.”

  Aunt Bridie looked at Lily expectantly. “The writin’s funny,” she said to fill the silence. Silas nodded.

  “Tell her, thanks. But no.”

  “You want me to write that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lily, love, I think you oughta go.”

  Silas agreed.

  “What else is there?” Aunt Bridie said with feeling.

  “We got weedin’ to do,” Lily said, and started for the potato patch.

  Silas came back two hours later, having missed the turn-off and gone part-way to Errol before beating a meandering retreat. Again Aunt Bridie read the note aloud. Uncle Chester, who despite his ‘sprained’ wrist was walking now with two canes, came out to listen.

  “This is even queerer than the last one,” Aunt Bridie said. “It says: ‘Lily dearest: there will be a military escort from London.’ Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means he’s the Prince of Wales,” Chester said. “The heir to the throne.”

  “The English throne,” Bridie snapped. Silas sided with her.

  “Now don’t start again, woman, with them radical ideas. I got a bum ticker, you know.”

  “An’ how could the world ever forget it?”

  “Tell her yes,” Lily said to the startled trio.

  9

  1

  The visit of Queen Victoria’s firstborn son to Her Majesty’s dominions in August and September of 1860 was the biggest public event of that year and until confederation seven years later the most ‘historic’ occasion in the fledgling existence of British North America. The Yankees, busily preparing to dissolve their shotgun marriage with the South, had to be shown what it was like for a people to freely love a monarch and to accept with grace the authority of the ties that bind, etc. No fewer than four books were published to consecrate the events of the pretender’s ‘progress’ (one of them in Boston, no less) and newspapers everywhere devoted their column-inches to tracking each royal manoeuvre and recording the public’s response. Even the Prince’s dance cards were faithfully reproduced as if they were imperishable poems.

  Hence it is that the hour-by-hour sweep of H.R.H. through the County of Lambton on 13 September 1860 has been exhaustively delineated and willed to posterity. The Royal Party and a regiment of well-wishers and hopefuls boarded the Great Western in London at 9:00 a.m. (the Prince’s special car, however, belonged to the Grand Trunk: the rival railways had declared a truce to demonstrate their unshakeable faith in the Empire). At 11:00 a.m. they touched down in Sarnia where H.R.H. stepped from his mobile drawing room – flanked by railway moguls, hastily promoted lieutenant-colonels, and the young scion’s guardian, the unflappable Duke of Newcastle – onto a scarlet carpet variously reported to be either one hundred or three hundred yards in length (the latter being a local estimate). More than five thousand were said to be gathered around the Great Western depot and wharf – almost the County’s total population. The succession of toasts and responses which followed – in their quest for eloquence – managed to put out the schedule by almost an hour. The only speech worth the space given to it was that of Chief Kan-was-ga-shi (Great Bear of the North), one of the several hundred Ojibwas who had come down from the wilds of Manitoulin for the occasion:

  Brother, Great Brother – the sky is beautiful. It was the wish of the Great Spirit that we should meet in this place. I hope the sky will continue to look fine, to give happiness to both the whites and to the Indians. You see the Indians who are around you. It is their earnest desire that you will always remember them.

  It is not recorded whether any of those assembled caught the ironies either in the words themselves or the situation in which they were delivered.

  After presenting the chiefs with silver medallions, the Prince led a cavalcade of carriages, mounted citizenry and rearguard foot-soldiers from the less opulent parts of town to the magnificent station-hotel of the Grand Trunk near the wharf of the new townsite already being referred to as Point Edward. Therein, an hour late, the pooh-bahs received their luncheon and basked in the reflected glory and unabashed good humour of the young and future king. With no coaching whatsoever the Prince proposed a toast to the “Prosperity of the Grand Trunk Railway.” Its regional vice-president, Dunbar Cruickshank, seated beside Mad-Cap Dowling (now called somewhat ambiguously ‘Cap’ Dowling), responded with unforced enthusiasm.

  After the meal H.R.H. and a very select group of dignitaries boarded the Grand Truck steamer the Michigan and sailed up the River and onto the Lake. By 3:30 p.m. the Royal Cortege was back at the Great Western depot and entrained for London where the Prince gave a levee that same evening which outshone even the shameless extravagance of the one given at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall two nights earlier. The entire episode – emblazoned forever in local annals – had lasted a mere four-and-a-half hours.

  2

  When the royal train pulled into the station, Lily was standing beside Mrs. Templeton just behind the Mayor and his officials. She had a clear view of the Prince as he approached them gingerly across the red carpet, his chaperone at his elbow, both of them aglitter in military regalia. The next rank brought the railroad bosses – the one who had replaced Sir Oliver (dead of a mysterious stroke) and the fiercely ambitious Dunbar Cruickshank looking not a day over thirty-five. Next came a wider and less orderly phalanx of minor factoti and politicians, including one of the newest vice-presidents of the Grand Trunk, Cap Dowling, at whose elbow, Lily was not perturbed to see, ambled the dark lady out of her widow’s weeds just for the occasion. Fanned out behind were several scarlet-coated regular officers and blue-clad militiamen, including the young man Lily had waltzed with. Tom was not among them.

  Only Lily’s affection for the Templetons and her deep sense of gratitude towards them gave her the courage to continue smiling and pretending to be moved by the ritual references to her beauty and ch
arm. Certainly Mrs. Templeton had done her best with a sow’s ear. It was Aunt Bridie who’d insisted she come into stay with her benefactress for a full week before the event: “You’ll have to get used to city ways all over,” she said. “Won’t be easy gettin’ them feet of yours into shoes again.” Mrs. Templeton had sent two strapping farm-lads out to Bridie’s place “to help out”, but they returned crestfallen an hour later. Lily’s outfit had been made by Mrs. Templeton’s dressmaker “from the ground up this time”, with the addition even of a parasol, white gloves and linen handkerchiefs. “My word, Lily, what a figure you’ve got! Not even the farm can spoil you, though it’s tryin’,” said Mrs. Templeton, tears pressing against her lids as her fingers unconsciously brushed the calluses embossed on the girl’s hands. Lily tolerated all the fuss, tried to be joyful when his Worship whirled her about the parlour to the thump of the piano “for old times’ sake.” She knew how much they missed their daughters. From the maid she learned that both daughters had promised to come down from Toronto for the Prince’s visit but at the last minute received invitations, through their prominent husbands, to attend the Royal Ball at Osgoode. Despite her own personal anxiety about the coming event, Lily felt and responded as best she could to the special obligation placed upon her.

  “I don’t think you’ll see madam stay in this town much longer,” Bonnie candied to Lily one day. But she would say no more.