Lily's Story Read online

  “You gonna stay on that land, with Tom?” he asked in a sudden shift of tone.

  “Maybe,” Lily said. “It’s not that far away.”

  “Oh,” Uncle Chester said, “I didn’t mean it that way at all. It’s just that your young man, well, he –”

  “– don’t look like a farmer.”

  “I wouldn’t’ve said it quite like that,” he said, smiling as she did.

  “He was a lawyer’s clerk and a militia man,” said Lily with as much pride as regret. “He can be whatever he sets out to be.”

  Uncle Chester was a bit puzzled by the latter remark but said cheerfully, “I don’t doubt that for a minute. Not a minute.”

  Just then the door to one of the shacks opened and a young man about Lily’s age emerged, blinking and then blushing.

  “Don’t be shy now, Jimmy,” Uncle Chester said to him. “This here’s just my favourite niece come to see whether we’re doin’ a decent job.”

  “I’m Lily Marshall.”

  “When he gets his tongue untied,” said Uncle Chester, “he’ll tell you his name’s Jimmy Millar, won’t you, Jimmy?”

  “From Moore Township?” Lily said.

  “They got a lumber trail now goes from Black Creek here straight west to the big river,” said Uncle Chester into the sudden silence.

  Jimmy Millar even remembered the day when Lil and Papa left, though he was only eight years old and hiding behind his mother’s apron as they stood at the end of civilization and perhaps envied father-and-daughter as they headed north to cities and roads and talk of railways. Urged on by Lily’s soft but insistent questioning, Jimmy Millar related the details – embellished by local legend – of the deaths of Maman LaRouche and the Frenchman.

  “Some of the boys’re still there,” Jimmy went on, on his own. “But the place is a mess. They mostly hire out for booze money. None of ’em got married. Luc sometimes lives with a squaw. Madeleine died.”

  For a moment Jimmy did not understand Lily’s next question. “Oh, them,” he said, as light flooded in. “That squatters’ camp broke up right after you left. The government opened up those back lots and Old Samuels an’ his brood just melted into the trees. Nobody’s seen or heard of ’em since.”

  Lily didn’t respond.

  “What about you,” Jimmy said. “How’s your Pa doin’?”

  “He’s dead,” Lily said, knowing deep down this was not a lie.

  Tom and the others came into view. Uncle Chester lay snoozing in the shade. Armbruster’s voice reached her. “And this is just the part that pays the bills, Tom my boy, the real bonanza’s in the deep-drilling rig we’re moving in next week. Yessir, we’re going as far down into that rock as we can ’cause there’s an ocean of oil just waiting there to make us all millionaires. If I was you, I’d talk turkey to that Aunt of yours in London. A little capital’s all you need.”

  Tom was nodding his head politely. Aunt Bridie was walking between them. She seemed so much smaller than the men.

  “What’s the matter?” Tom said, rolling into the feathery shadows of their afternoon bed.

  “Nothin’,” Lily said, leaning over him and planting a series of frantic little kisses along his great chest and massive shoulders. “Nothin’ you can’t cure.”

  And she sighed extravagantly as he gripped her breasts and eased her towards acceptance.

  Nothing you can cure, she thought sadly, her loving of him trebled by that awful knowledge.

  7

  Aunt Bridie looked right at her and said, “You want to know why. Well, you’ve got a right to.”

  They were alone in the ‘sitting room’, the men having gone off to try their luck at the casino two doors down. “Men need their toys,” Auntie had said as she closed the door after them.

  “Not really,” Lily replied, “if you don’t want to tell –” She waited for her Aunt to move away from the window and sit down on the divan beside her. “I’m so happy I guess I just wanna make sure everybody else has a share.”

  Aunt Bridie appeared to be trying to recall something important, then brightened and said, “Yes. You’ve always been like that. That’s why Chester an’ me feel like we do about you.”

  “Then…”

  “Why did we up an’ leave you?”

  “Not that. I left you, remember.”

  Aunt Bridie was fiddling with the tassel on the oversize drapes. “We never felt that,” she said softly. “We knew why you went. It came near to breakin’ Chester’s heart when he found out. But it saved him, too, in a way. All through that horrible business with the railroad, he was a great strength to me. Imagine that. ‘Lily’s comin’ back,’ he’d say. ‘She’ll need a home more than ever now.’ An’ so I got mad, madder than I’ve been for a long time.” She peeked over at Lily and forced a thin smile.

  “At the railroad.”

  “An’ the damned government and all the petty do-gooders that made my life hell since I been a girl. So when they come an’ took what all of us built up with our sweat an’ bones for ten years, I must tell you, Lily dearest, I was about ready to call it quits. When I saw that Grand Trunk man drive those red stakes into our land, I felt like they were enterin’ my heart an’ splittin’ it in a dozen pieces. If it hadn’t been for Chester an’ they thought of you sufferin’ down there in London, I don’t know what I’d've done. I really don’t.” Her voice, always so strong and clear, shook with the memory of those weeks.

  “Auntie,” Lily said, reaching out.

  Bridie was not to be forestalled. “So when Chester’s friend in London suggested we pack our bags an’ take all our savings an’ make the craziest gamble of our lives, I took about thirty seconds to make up my mind. Chester’s still shakin’, as you can see.”

  “But all this,” Lily said carefully, “is so new an’ different from what you’re used to. This place, these…people.”

  Aunt Bridie smiled. “You mean Mel,” she said.

  “No, not just –”

  “Lily, you’re almost as smart as your Auntie. And as dumb, thank the Lord.”

  “But all this –”

  “Phoniness an’ sin an’ greed? It’s just another version of livin’. Remember, before I was a farmer an’ fruit vendor, I was a housemaid, an’ before that a rebel daughter who gave up her family an’ her country with less than a night’s thought. When I married your Uncle Chester, I knew less about him than you do about Tom.”

  The mellowing late-afternoon sun flowed into the room and around them. Bridie was still talking.

  “When you see Fate comin’ down on you, there’s nothin’ you can do, Lily, but get out of its way before it crushes you, an’ hope there’s one more run at the world somewhere else. A body can only fight so long without winnin’. After a while you’re not a fighter, you’re a fool.”

  Lily was only half-listening. She was thinking how fragile a thing the human heart was, whatever flesh or will or faith pretended to represent its spirit.

  “Pardon?”

  “I say you’ll come an’ live with us again?”

  “Here?”

  “Not right here, of course. As soon as the big well comes in, your Uncle an’ me we’ll build a cottage on the outskirts, with trees and a garden. A flower garden.”

  “We ain’t made any real plans yet,” Lily said.

  “Don’t you worry about Mel now,” Aunt Bridie said. “There’s a good man under all that blarney. I know. I’m Irish, remember?”

  “I’m sure there is,” Lily said.

  “All I’m askin’ is for you to talk it over with Tom. There’s plenty of work. Lots of opportunity for a man of his upbringin’.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Lily said, catching the strange look in her Aunt’s eye and searching for the source of some thought or feeling that fought to stay hidden there.

  “Tell him you gotta take chances in this world,” Bridie went on in the same tone.

  Lily crossed the room and took her Aunt by the arm. Bridie tensed. “But you
left me the deed,” Lily said.

  Bridie gave a wry smile full of tenderness and doubt. Then she stared out at the setting sun. Some time later she whispered, “It wasn’t for you.”

  “Oh –” Lily said. Then she put her arms around her Aunt and held her as she might her own daughter. Bridie’s body shrank, then the tears came, irregular and fugitive, not so much the release of pent emotion as a gentle questing for some feeling almost beyond remembrance.

  “There’ll be another one,” Lily said. “Soon. I promise.”

  14

  1

  Although they lived on the far edge of the new village, shielded from it by the last rows of aboriginal forest, Lily and Tom felt their lives growing in parallel with it.

  Very soon after their return from a week with Mrs. Edgeworth, now Aunt Elspeth, Tom took up his job with the Grand Trunk and settled into a daily routine that Lily wished to go on forever. Each morning just as the sun reached the tree-line and their cockerel reannounced his lustiness, Lily detached herself carefully and reluctantly from the cocoon of warmth she helped create with her lover’s body, and got a brisk fire going in the stove. The kindling she had chopped the previous afternoon snapped and thirsted after air. She would then pump the kettle full – the autumn dews cool against her bare skin, the hushed morning wordless with expectation – and having placed it over the open flame, would slip into the bedroom again and watch her husband’s face in its sleep. How pleasant it must be, she mused (noting his limbs fret and unwind beneath the comforter) to be wakened every morning by the crack of kindling, your home filling with heat to welcome your rising, your wife with her kettle on and bending down to bless your lips. She had to be quick, of course, or the day’s natural timing would be set ajar; Tom, pawing his way out of some dream or other, might ring her with his powerful arms – now thickened by the hauling of hundred-pound kegs and sacks – and pull her back into his lustful reverie. Beyond an initial cry of surprise and protest, she made on these occasions no resistance, for Tom’s loving would be slow and dream-like, drawing her down into her own fantasia, and she was glad she’d had no one to tell her exactly what love could or shouldn’t be. If Tom were somewhat taken aback by her aggressiveness at night, he very soon adjusted to it, and here in these improvised and illicit mornings they found a mutual pace that left them both adrift, dreamful, awash in desire without appetite. It was during one of these sessions late in September on a misty Sunday morning that Lily unexpectedly broke the spell and thrashed her way to a first, shuddering, eye-popping climax.

  “Good morning,” Tom said when he’d caught his breath and some of his dignity.

  Lily shut her eyes and clung to his shoulders, letting the last wavelets of shame and ecstasy fend for themselves. “Nobody told me about this,” she breathed against him.

  “Me neither,” Tom said. “And on a Sunday at that.”

  She felt the laughter rumble through his chest, and she hugged him, and marvelled at the whimsicality of the world’s working.

  Except for Sundays, she had learned to discipline herself to the point where Tom would have to dissemble sleep as she started breakfast and then spring like a lynx at her when she bent to watch him wake. She soon learned, also, that a sudden giggle or a quick tickle under the arms deflated his desires or the fancies that fed them, after which they would tussle and cavort like a couple of cubs until one of them toppled onto the cold floor and breakfast-and-work reasserted their sober priorities.

  Tom liked a heavy breakfast, so Lily cooked him back-bacon and eggs (provided by their own hens now), then joined him for toast, jam and tea. She didn’t mind in the least that he was often grumpy in the morning, as she was accustomed to rising at dawn and found herself unable to contain her humming and good cheer. Besides, she wasn’t eager to talk too much over breakfast since one of her recurring fears was that they would soon run out of things to say to one another, and barely a month had passed since the wedding. Once, walking through the oak-and-maple bush east of the house with the leaves crackling underfoot, Tom had turned to her and said: “Lily darling, if you and another just like you inherited the earth, there’d soon be no talking left at all.” Aunt Bridie had been more blunt: “Child, you’re about as gabby as a rabbit in shock.” But she was sure Tom loved her precisely because she was such a good listener. After supper or after a stroll through the woods on Sundays, he loved to tell stories about his wild school-days, his escapades with Mad-Cap Dowling and his ‘bunch’, or the absurdities of the characters he’d encountered in the practice of law in Toronto. Not that he wouldn’t try to prompt Lily herself to open up: “Why don’t you ever talk about yourself? You don’t have to tell me all,” he would laugh. “I just want to get to know as much of you as I can. Love is sharing, isn’t it?” So, on neatly spaced occasions Lily would take up the burden of story-telling, for that is how she conceived of these exchanges before a blazing fire or sometimes after early-evening love-making, with Tom puffing away at the clay pipe Aunt Elspeth had given him. As she cast back for suitable material she found herself selecting the happy, nostalgic events – her trips to Port Sarnia to peddle her fruits and vegetables, the eccentric Misses Baines-Powell, the boozy warmth of Char Hazelberry and her girls Betsy and Winnie, Mrs. Templeton’s kindness, Bachelor Bill’s antics. Moreover, she discovered that as she gathered momentum in the wake of Tom’s encouragement, she was using voices and phrasings – even cadence and intonation – that belonged more to others than herself: Aunt Bridie, Bachelor Bill, Mrs. Templeton, Maman LaRouche. Finally she realized that she was reliving these simple events through a variety of lenses, so that they came out fresh, droll and unscathed by repetition.

  However, for much of the time Tom continued to do a lot of the talking, and Lily found herself somewhat envious at the ease of his delivery and his confidence. Even now she had an intimation of the difficulty she would later have in this community – particularly a community of women where gossip, reminiscence, familial history and chronicles of daily life, and the comforting reciprocity of small-talk were the principal means of social intercourse and of dealing with the world at large. Here at home, though, during the honeymoon of their love, Lily discovered that while their talk for much of the time was being reduced, it was also being transformed into a much richer kind of communication, one at which she herself had always excelled. Over breakfast, for instance, Tom would raise his left eyebrow and Lily would fill his cup with tea. When he left for work they no longer exchanged ‘Goodbyes’; Tom would embrace her with one arm (his lunch-box in the other) as if to say “It’s all right, I’ll be back soon”, and she would briefly detain his outstretched hand and give it a single pat, intimating “I know you work hard, but I’ll be here when you get back.” So subtle had this range of gestures and subvocalizations become – even in a month or so – that one variation from the norm could be devastating. One day Tom seemed particularly grumpy over breakfast, and later when he put his arm around her on the stoop, she sensed the tentativeness, and as he withdrew it for her to bless, he pulled it back too quickly. Her caress ended in mid-air. It was like a slap in the face. But when he returned at dusk, he hugged her till he felt her forgiveness. The periodical evenings, then, when they exchanged narratives or speculated on the months to come were, like their carnal interludes, events of a discrete kind with their own indices of joy.

  Being a man of easy words, Tom was also more easily stung by them than she was. “You’ve got a midget’s tongue in your noggin’,” Aunt Bridie would say to her, “but it’s as tart as a bee-sting.” To Uncle Chester she said one night: “She may not talk a lot, but when she opens her mouth it’s trouble with two t’s. She’ll rue that sharp tongue of hers one day, mark my words.” Lily on the other hand was more hurt by an unthinking shrug of the shoulder than by any direct complaint Tom might make about his food or her not dressing up enough when Aunt Elspeth was “good enough to give you that trousseau of beautiful things” – salvaged from the outcasts of the daughters or Shakesp
eare she might have replied but bit her tongue, or more tartly still and more to the point: I thought you preferred me dressed down. I guess I’ve spent my life not reacting to words, she thought; I seem to prefer to observe them, absorb them, or find out what lies under them. But then women are better at absorbing things. And better, too, at waiting.

  For Lily, much of that first autumn was spent in waiting of one kind or another. Tom would trudge in to the early dawn, and she would stand in the partly redeemed garden and watch him till he disappeared through the trees. There was lots of work for her during the day – cleaning the house, tending the last of their meagre harvest, ‘doing down’ some of the wizened cucumbers, baking bread, and then – in the afternoon hours – chopping wood, mending, sewing, and planning the robust suppers Tom required. Several times a week she went over to see that Old Bill was all right – taking him baked goods and vegetables, and seeing that his cupboard was stocked with staples. Old Bill was growing worse, it appeared. More and more he seemed distracted and forgetful. Lily often had to remind him that he had promised so-and-so up the line a day’s chopping, or even point him in the right direction.

  Nonetheless, it was a day of waiting. Tom was everywhere: in the sock she was darning, a sweater she was knitting him for winter, the food she prepared sweating over the stove in the warm Indian Summer, his smell in the sheets as she changed them. The memory of his lovemaking, his stark worship of her flesh and its unpredictable surrendering, rippled through her all morning long or ambushed her at odd moments. Or some imagined, interrupted slight would fester during the interminable hour when she would expect his figure to rise in front of the setting sun and bring with it the kind of healing possible only at the end of day. At least the waiting-out of his absence was over. But there were the other, more minute types of waiting – visible only perhaps to women. Waiting to see what sort of toll the labour-of-the-day had taken upon his body – sore back, bruised arms, crushed finger – and upon his spirit – fatigue, anger, rebellion – and for her the myriad adjustments to be made and tolerated and woven into the harmony of home. And waiting to see what response, if any, he might make to the signals she gave of her own needs – to be touched, to be soothed with stories, to be his accomplice in lust. If Tom were watching her in the same way, she could not detect it, nor, she guessed, would he ever know how much giving – beyond the visible – she was offering him each day. When Tom was late, compelled to work overtime as the ice threatened to close down the shipping lanes for the season, the waiting was unendurable. I have made him my life, she thought, and even though I ought to, I seem to have no regrets.