Lily's Story Page 27

  2

  One day late in November, a week before the ice froze over the River and long after Tom had begun his nightly trudges homeward in the oppressive, autumnal dark, Lily sat beside her lamp and waited for her husband. Overtime again, she thought resentfully. For two nights in a row he had come home at eight o’clock too exhausted by a twelve-hour shift to eat his supper or do anything else but fall comatose on the bed. On the first occasion he woke her up and made perfunctory, routine love to her out of some misguided sense of pride or perhaps some ordinary sensitivity to her needs – she knew not which, though the result was a surge of depression she had not had since waving goodbye to her Aunt and Uncle in Oil Springs. The next night when she again felt his weary gesture, she murmured that her period was starting, and he slumped gratefully to sleep.

  It was past eight o’clock. The fire was almost out below the congealing stew. Never had Tom worked this late. Even the Grand Trunk admitted the limits of exhaustion. Her only comfort was that one more week of this and Tom would be transferred to the new car-shops beside the round-house. Here he would ply his carpenter’s trade, fixing broken boards in box-cars and other rolling stock. Lily had seen the glaze of defeat in his eyes these past few weeks, and she had done what she could. The labouring job, she recalled, had been all along a mixed blessing. Early on, it had put muscle on his fine frame and added a masculine air to his stride and his proud smile as he counted out the dollars on the table every pay day. Sometimes as he dressed in the mornings, Lily would effect a trip to the woodshed so that she could pause and watch him unobserved through the open door. Always he slept naked, and she would gaze – fascinated and ashamed – as he stepped into the chill air: clapping his arms across his chest like some haughty gorilla in a Congolese dawn, then pressing his palms between his legs like a little boy, and finally stretching for his undershirt so that for a second his body froze in a singular tableau of muscle and unreleased sexuality. She thought: he could crush me with one flex of a forearm. His man’s instrument, driving towards its own pleasure, could sunder her like a peach, those tiger-teeth on her breasts could mangle without a flick of remorse. Then, his sandy curls just emerging from the undershirt, he would spot her and grin innocently, and be her Tom again.

  But that body and that power had their own forms of vulnerability, she soon found out. Many an evening during late October she had repaired the damage of the day – rubbing liniment into his aches, putting plasters on his cuts and scrapes, and when those remedies failed, helping him forget in the yielding opiate of her flesh. But tonight he was not here to choose. It was at least ten o’clock by the moon’s position in the southern sky. Perhaps he had been seriously hurt; barrels and cartons were forever toppling and injuring the men. Already two workers had had arms broken, and disappeared – without recompense, of course: an incapacitated man was a threat to the health of the company. My word, Lily thought, what will we do if Tom can’t work? What we’ve always done: get by. I’m as strong as any man in my own way. He wonders why I don’t wear those London ladies’ dresses, but I don’t. I don’t have any flesh to fill them out. I’ve got no need for corselets, my backside is muscled, my hips are as lean as a boy’s, my breasts small and unwomanly. My skin is sun-burned, my hair blotched. I felt a fool in that wedding dress even though it was made for me. I don’t know for the life of me why a man as handsome as Tom would feel so passionate about me. But, then, I don’t intend to ask him. I only want him to come home safely, now, in one piece.

  During this reverie Tom came noisily up the path and flung open the door.

  “Hullo, Lily love,” he grinned loudly. “Think I might be a wee bit late.”

  Lily could smell the whiskey before she could rise to face him. She brushed by him to the stove, where she began poking aimlessly at the corpse of the fire.

  “Ah, the little woman’s saved supper for me. Thank you, darling. Thank you very much,” he slurred. He stumbled, caught a wary table, righted himself, and managed to land one buttock on a chair. “If that’s Irish stew, love, I can’t smell it from here.”

  “The fire’s out,” Lily said, blowing on some paper in a pathetic attempt to rouse it.

  “We worked some overtime,” he said, “then Gimpy and Bruce and me went down to the bunk house to toast our good future at being dray-horses for the Grand Trunk Railway.”

  The kindling had caught, smokily, and Lily shook the flaccid stew across the stove-lids.

  “Stop that infernal racket, woman!” Tom yelled. “I don’t need anything to eat, can’t you see that? Are you deaf and dumb? I’m drunk. Glorious and stupid falling-down drunk!”

  Lily headed for the bedroom.

  “Where in hell are you going now?”

  “To get the bed-warmer,” Lily said in a shriveling voice. “An’ the liniment.”

  “Come over here!”

  Lily stood her ground.

  “For Christ’s sake, woman, come over here before I puke in your stewpot!”

  Lily edged over towards Tom. He was sitting with his head between his hands, shivering no doubt from the cold and false embrace of the alcohol. Lily stopped about four-feet away, near the stove, but she made no move towards the simmering stew. Tom coughed in a series of ghastly spasms, but when she started to assist, he raised a warning hand. Finally, taking a deep breath, he looked up at his wife, the one soul on this earth he would give his life for, and said through the press of tears: “For God’s sake, Lily, why can’t you get made or scream or sulk or curse me or hit me with a frying pan. I’m no damn saint, you know. I’m a human being.” And to prove it, he sobbed into his hands and could not be consoled.

  3

  For a while Tom seemed pleased with his winter job. Since all the rolling stock in those days was made of wood and the climate of those times no less inclement than now, the repair business was secure and lucrative. In fact, the ‘car-shops’, as they were called, were to be a stable source of employment for the inhabitants of the Point for decades to come and eventually the centre-piece in the Great Betrayal of the ’nineties. But in the cold winter of 1861-62 there was no tunnel under the River St. Clair or bridge over it; the great highballs from the American mid-west thundered up from Chicago laden with corn and wheat and roared back with over-priced implements and calico from the factories of the eastern seaboard and now – thanks to the Grand Trunk – from the fledgling foundries of Montreal, Toronto and London. Situated on the narrowest neck of the mighty St. Clair, Point Edward had had its destiny already appointed: it was to be the gateway to a westering continent. However, by mid-December the River was jammed with ice, its own and that crushing down from the vast lakes above it. The same ice that silenced the freight-sheds – with steamers, paddle-wheelers, sloops and yawls alike out for the season – stilled the huge barges and ferries that wheeled up to a hundred box-cars a day back and forth between the two nations. Occasionally, during a January thaw or a freak contortion of the ice-pack, the fierce current would surge in the sunlight and a wild dash would be made across the divide – box-cars, deck hands and ferry-boat tilting, skidding and slewing in the northerly gales. On these occasions all the company hands were pressed into service, including the carpenters and joiners. The box-cars, many of them fully loaded, had to be pinioned to the ferry’s deck with ropes and blocks. Often several of them pulled loose in the lurching swells, and the desperate crew would try to jerk the lines back into place, sometimes improvising an ingenious brace but mostly using the brute strength of their backs, while icy spray broke over them and jagged floes flashed by at every turn. That winter they didn’t lose a single box-car. Three men were crippled, and dismissed.

  Tom insisted that Lily “get out of the house” and come down to watch one of these adventures. Finally, she agreed. As it turned out, the crossing was relatively uneventful except for one stock-car full of chilled cattle (on their way to Flint, Michigan) that tore loose from its moorings and slid part-way into the water before it could be winched back into place. Lily c
ould see the commotion and hear the vivid cries of the terrified beasts, but she lost sight of Tom, and when one of the men flipped into the water, her heart stopped. Seconds later the fellow was hauled back in on a safety rope, striking the deck with the thud of a frozen seal. In a minute he was up, and Lily was sure she could hear laughter; then the man who had engineered the rescue peered towards the wharf, towards Lily, and, she was certain, waved at her.

  Tom escorted her up to the little tea-room in the grand concourse of the station. Lily made no mention of the luncheon she had shared with royalty in the adjoining ballroom, and certainly no one present on that occasion would have recognized her as the object of a Prince’s attention. Lily was not thinking at all of such things. She was trying to understand the gleam in her husband’s eye, the sureness of his stride beside her, the jauntiness in his voice. He paid no heed to the rope-burns on his hands as he sat across from her, with his tea cooling, and recounted every detail of the crossing and the rescue.

  “We did it again,” he said. “You see why I wanted you to come down and watch. I only wish I could bring you on board. You can’t imagine what it feels like out there with the wind howling in your ears and the ice bouncing all around you like big boulders and the ropes stretching and everybody holding their breath waiting for something to break loose and knowing that one slip and you’ll either be crushed to death or dumped into the drink and froze like a brick. Did you see me yank ol’ Mason out of the pond? He’s not thawed out yet!”

  Lily said something she instantly regretted.

  “How many of them cows died?”

  4

  By mid-January winter had settled in for a long stay. No ferries challenged the ice. The snow bloomed and foliated in the hardwoods behind the house and plumped the pines along the lane towards the Errol Road. It was a soft, blanched, filigree world that threw into sharp relief those few surviving angularities of landscape.

  Lily found Aunt Bridie’s quilting frame in the shed and, near it, a bundle of scrap cloth collected from the cast-offs of Sarnia’s petite-bourgeoisie.

  “What’s that contraption?” Tom said that Sunday afternoon, glancing up from his labours over the broken chair.

  “It’s Aunt Bridie’s,” Lily said. “I’m gonna make quilts.”

  “Oh.”

  “An’ sell them,” she added.

  Tom went back to his repairs, but soon he was seated behind Lily as her hands played with the myriad shapes and hues of cloth scattered on the floor, out of which she was improvising patterns later to be meticulously duplicated and sewn into their own interim kind of landscape.

  “How do you know what goes where?” Tom asked quietly. Lily shook her head and continued. These were not like any designs he had seen at his Aunt’s or the bazaars she sponsored. Lily herself didn’t know what prompted her to select one piece and place it a certain way over another. She fiddled and nudged and tested – barely aware that some triangular, kendall swatch might have called to mind the corner of an elm once visible at a window’s edge, a maple leaf quartered by shadow, or a slice of fern thirsty for light. Under her fingers’ urging, bits of colour and cotton became half-cast suns, ovular moons, any-tree’s boughs arched, corniced, magically magenta in the blue, blue shade.

  The afternoon was gone. Tom was still there.

  That night he slowed his love to the most forgiving of rhythms, and Lily – released into gratitude unencumbered by guilt or diminution of self – sailed at her lover’s pleasure into the ecstatic and unconditionally sensate realm shared by fool-saints and mad-men.

  “You are a marvel,” Tom whispered as if in church, his forefinger caressing the sweat from her brow. “You’re so much more than I deserve.”

  “Don’t say such a thing,” Lily said when she was able to speak. “Ever.”

  Christmas had been one of those serene familial interludes appreciated in retrospect more for its happy interposition between events of more boisterous moment than for its own special ambience. A few days before the holiday two train-tickets arrived from Aunt Elspeth along with a touching invitation and word that Bridie and Chester were in London on business. Thus, Christmas day – its religious significance noted only, it seemed, by Mrs. Edgeworth and that “fine American gentleman” Melville Armbruster – was spent in feasting, toasting and voluable good cheer. Lily found herself tingling with a queer sort of pride at the sight of Aunt Bridie holding her own in such a household – her new clothes, serviceable yet always carrying one hint of extravagance (a bow at the waist, a tiny yellow hanky at the sleeve, a violet hidden among the folds); her upright bearing; her country speech undercut with wit and calculated humour; the ease with which the topics of the day were discussed and dissected. Mrs. Edgeworth was in awe; Armbruster was enthralled, kissing Bridie’s hand with Yankee hyperbole, sliding her chair in at the strategic moment. Lily reminded herself that, after all, her Aunt had once been an urban woman waiting on table and attending toilette in the bed-chambers and anterooms of what passed for high society in the provinces. Notwithstanding, Lily was puzzled by the nameless resentment that welled up at such thoughts. Aunt Bridie, in turn, waited for news that Lily could not deliver.

  Uncle Chester looked pale but happy and full of enthusiasm for his projects, as their drilling was to continue even through these winter months. Tom seemed in his element also, and after Christmas dinner he went up to his room and came down in uniform to entertain the guests with funny stories about the Battle of Montgomery’s Tavern and other escapades of the Province’s military past. Lily was seen not to be laughing.

  When it became obvious that winter had closed the river traffic for some time to come, Tom was unable to disguise his frustration. Lily had picked up every tic of irritation, careful now not to overcompensate with excess cheeriness or solicitude, though she did kill one of the hens for Sunday dinner and stuff it with Tom’s favourite dressing. He seemed pleased, and asked her to show him how the quilt was coming. Lily felt that she herself might have been the cause for Tom’s irritableness because she had been having bad dreams for the past while, which left her tired and shaken. One scene in particular was powerful and recurrent enough to obtrude into her daylight existence. Try as she might, she could not erase it. She saw a clearing at night, engulfed by moon-shadow, and yet in the centre of it a sort of tower made of some ghastly, luminous metal reared upward on its own – stark and imperious; and then without warning the entire landscape quivered epileptically, and the top of the tower burst apart in a cloud of spouting emulsive that might have been smoke or steam or some rabid foaming of the mouth; then all went black, the clearing empty and silent except for two objects that glistened in the grass like discarded wall-eyes.

  One day in early February Tom came home late, and slightly drunk. He seemed cheerful enough, however, and beyond banging a pot or two for effect and serving supper in its lukewarm state, Lily did nothing out of the ordinary. Tom seemed amused by her performance, and later his love-making was as playful as it was prolonged. For two days thereafter he arrived home on time in spite of the near-blizzard that buried the hen-house and erased the international border.

  “The men are organizing a sleigh-ride for the families and girl-friends,” he announced. “Next week. Be a good chance for you to meet some people.”

  Lily feigned interest, watching for signs.

  The following evening he was drunk again and decidedly uncheerful. He uttered nothing decipherable, fumbled with his supper, and finally vomited all over the freshly-scrubbed floor. By the time she got it cleaned up and dampened down the two fires and freshened the chamber pots, Tom was snoring, fully-clothed and stinking on the bed. Lily slipped into her old room. The dreams were not happy ones.

  At breakfast she said, “I’d like to go on that sleigh-ride.”

  The weather would be perfect for the ‘tallyho’, as the locals called it. The blizzard had been followed by five days of clear, below-zero skies; the snows had settled in the bush, been tramped smooth on the vill
age paths, and deceived the eye into accepting the altered horizons. The night before the planned festivities was immensely beautiful. The stars shone with such clarity even prophecy seemed possible; the completed moon sailed alone, serene and sibylline. Seated on a stool near the west window, putting the last stitches into a quilt pattern, and gazing for long moments at the universe expanding beyond her, Lily was hardly aware that the evening had passed her by and her husband was not yet home.

  It might have been midnight for all she knew when she saw two figures staggering through the drifts of the garden towards the house. The moon sketched their antic in cutting silhouette. They were singing a bawdy shanty of some sort, and laughing heartily as they pitched and yawed through the yard. The stranger, she guessed, would have to be Gimpy Fitchett: there was an extra stammer in his swagger. As they navigated in the general direction of the door – arms interlinked, voices joined in the hunt for harmony – Tom changed the tune, bellowing moonward in a mock-heroic Irishman’s lilt: