Lily's Story Read online

  In Dublin’s fair city

  Lived a maiden so pretty

  Her name was sweet

  Lil-lee my love!

  At least they’re happy, Lily thought, poking the fire into life and hoping for the best.

  “Come on, duckling, come over here and say hello to Gimpy,” Tom said as he tipped another dollop of whiskey into the coffee Lily had prepared.

  “I said hello to Gimpy,” Lily said. “Five times.”

  “I mean say hello, not just say hello,” Tom said.

  “It’s okay, Tommy. Just take it easy, eh.” Gimpy, more sober than when he’d first arrived, put a soothing hand on his buddy’s shoulder.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Tom said. “I get enough of that horse-shit at the shop all day long.”

  “Maybe some more coffee, missus,” Gimpy said with exaggerated politeness.

  “Are you gonna come over and say a nice proper hello to ol’ Gimp or aren’t you?”

  “You oughta have some supper,” Lily said. She stared at the lukewarm pots on the stove.

  “Ain’t that sweet now, Gimp ol’ boy, the little lady wants me to have some supper. I think maybe she don’t like me drinking coffee, eh.” He winked with the wrong eye.

  You go ahead, Tommy. But if it ain’t too much trouble, I’d like a bit of that grub, ma’am. Smells real nice.” He grinned, exposing his rotting teeth, and adjusted his stiffened leg, the result of an accident during his glory days as a trainman.

  “If you like horseshit,” Tom said, and started in with a barrack’s version of Molly Malone:

  Oh her blooms were so ample

  The lads love to sample

  The sweetmeats of –

  The grub which Gimpy alluded to had abruptly left the stove and was already on its way to an unexpected target. The potato-and-roast-beef hash struck the Irish balladeer flush on the tonsils. Tom blinked in disbelief as the sludge oozed onto his workshirt. Still dazed, he looked up just in time to receive the full venom of the vegetable soup. Before he could recover to mount any response, Lily had her boots and her coat on and was slamming the door with resolute finality. She heard the scuffling behind her, and as she marched towards the north-east woods, she heard their voices rise and then wane.

  “Goddammit, you come back here, woman! You hear me? You goddam well come back here!”

  “Now Tommy, Tommy. It don’t matter none.”

  “You get your carcass back here or I’ll –”

  “Let it go, eh. Come on now.”

  “Lil-eee!”

  “I think I better be goin’.”

  “You stay right here. Don’t you move. I’m gonna fix her wagon good. Lil-eeee!”

  Lily let a deer-trail lead her into the woods, into the silk oblivion of silence and deep snow. Here, thought was obliterated. She gathered the rhythm of her breathing from anonymity, she felt her heart pump with every stride, she let the wind-chill anesthetize the blood under her skin, she walked and walked till she found again some part of her being she could inhabit with impunity.

  She found herself sitting in a tiny cove of snow along the frozen creek. Underneath the camouflage she was sure she could hear the water still moving, its voice faint, tinsel, palimsest – like a dolphin’s song from a distant sea. She heard the weasel’s ermine belly dragging at the burrow’s edge, felt his ferret’s glare on her heart. Then he was gone, scrambling underground, his ears picking up the same sound that made Lily leap straight up and freeze.

  It was the crashing of masculine boots against the snow, punctuated by the snap of brittle twigs. Lily swung round in time to see a black figure staggering through the stark trees, its exaggerated shadow slashing and dissolving into the chiaroscuro of the moon-lit forest.

  Quickly Lily picked up the deer-trail to her right and fled as quietly as she dare. Against the hammering of her heart she heard the attacking footfalls fade, and when she stopped – it seemed like miles later and after a dozen curves and backtrackings – the silence of the bush had reasserted itself. Who could it have been? A drunken railroader? Not Tom, that was certain. What did he want? She let the aftershocks shiver their way out of her system, and then took her bearings. To her relief, she concluded that she had ended up less than a quarter-of-a-mile from the house. What time it was she could only guess. She headed south-west towards the remains of the pinery.

  A few minutes later she could see the opening in the trees ahead. She was almost home. The figure surprised her completely when it leaped out of the shadows to her left, flung its arms overhead like uncoordinated wings and stumbled forward, its eyes – if it had any in the black blur where its face lay – aimed at Lily. As she stood mesmerized, the creature seemed to half-fly, half-stalk towards her, the way a rabid crow might seize upon some fatally silver trinket. The cry that came from its torture was not a caw. It was a lament, a plea, a wail – and utterly human. The force of it stunned Lily so much that it was several seconds before the words were decipherable. By that time the creature was upon her, and she slipped to one side, grasped one of its wing-cloaks as it sank past her and tipped it into the snow, where it lay crumpled, as if dead.

  Gently, Lily drew back the fur flap of the Russian helmet.

  “I been lookin’ everywhere for Violet. She’s run off again. I been lookin’ all over and I can’t find her no place. You seen my Violet?”

  “Violet’s safe in London,” Lily said, trying to get Old Bill to his feet. “Let’s go home now.”

  “You ain’t Violet? I can’t go home without my Violet.”

  Lily ignored his desperate questions. She dragged him to his feet, and once up he seemed a bit more oriented. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Lily, Bridie’s little orphan girl.”

  Lily forced his arm over her shoulder. He was not much taller than she but he was still muscled and a dead-weight. She gasped as the stench of his breath struck her: something besides his teeth had died in there. One step at a time, through drifts and over felled trunks with the zero-chill icing up sweat and saliva and stiffening muscle against bone, Lily carried Old Bill the four hundred yards to the edge of the expropriated property. It took close to an hour because every few steps Old Bill would sag, then suddenly straighten, like a corpse sitting up in its coffin, and howl into the muffling night his one-word lamentation.

  The sudden illumination of moonlight-on-snow in the clearing seemed to jar something in Old Bill’s brain, and he said softly to Lily, standing on both feet, “You’re Lily. Are we home now?” And they tramped together towards his darkened hut. Lily saw a dim glow in the window of her own house as they passed it, but no sound carried outward. The chimney was smokeless.

  In the candlelight, Old Bill’s kitchen was dank, cold and stinking of rotted food, mould, urine, sweat. Her teeth chattering and her fingers numb, Lily found some bits of wood and paper, enough to get a smudged fire going in the ancient stove. She removed Old Bill’s outer clothing, shielding herself from his asthmatic breathing with one forearm. From a pile in a corner she retrieved a wool sweater and pulled it around him like a shawl. He leaned towards the fresh heat as Lily rubbed his stiff hands in her own. The flesh on his face drooped, sallow and cadaverous.

  “Ya’ see, Violet ain’t here. She run off again.”

  “When did you last eat anythin’?” Lily said, casting about for any signs of recent cooking. “Didn’t you cook up that bacon I brung you Tuesday? You like bacon a lot.”

  “Violet always cooks the bacon,” he said warily, his head slumping onto one shoulder.

  Lily managed to get enough of a fire going to warm the pathetic little room and start a kettle boiling. She made some tea and then threw into a pot some of the oatmeal she’d brought over for him. But Old Bill was asleep, breathing in double-time. Lily put an arm around his neck, held his bead back, nudged his lips apart with the tin cup, and gently poured hot tea into the sump of his mouth. His eyes opened part-way, and lolled expressionless. When the oatmeal porridge was ready, Lily tried to set the
spoon in his hand but it fell away. He was helpless.

  Very patiently she filled the wooden stirring-spoon with porridge and brought it to his lips. Old Bill’s tongue circled it, then he spit violently, sending the stuff all over Lily. Again she brought a fresh spoonful to his lips, this time holding his jaws open and slipping the food in, then clamping them together until he gulped and swallowed. She felt him shiver, and knew it wasn’t from the cold. Time and again she raised the spoon to his lips, struggled to establish a comforting – a pacifying rhythm. When or why she began to hum she didn’t know, but she felt Old Bill’s neck muscles relax under her grip, and then heard her own voice, deep and instinctive. At first there were no words, no need for them, but they surfaced on their own and bore no meaning beyond the memories of the time and place they evoked.

  Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o

  Hi diddly idly, hi diddle air-o

  Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um

  Old Bill settled into a profound, restorative sleep – snoring like an exhausted horse – his fingers, softened by the heat, curled in his lap like a baby’s.

  Lily didn’t leave. She sat in that befouled and moribund room and thought of Maman LaRouche baking bread in the open-air oven; of Mama’s hair unfolding in its last sunlight; of Old Samuel’s flow of words as smooth as hickory smoke; of Southener’s face as the sea-sands over it erased the sky; of Papa’s grief as he stood fixed behind some tree watching his child dissolve.

  When Lily came in, Tom was sitting in the glow of a single coal-oil lamp. He had heard her step in the yard and was fully awake to face her. He had plotted both an offense and a defense, but when her eyes came into the light, all premeditation was swept away. He wrapped her in his arms, even as he knew that forgiveness would never be enough.

  Lying with her lover before their mutual fire, half-way between midnight and dawn, Lily Marshall told of the things she had dreamed, then remembered, then realized – the words uttered as easy as spider’s silk towards a web. But even as the pain mellowed with each successive sentence holding out the possibility of accommodation, she sensed that she was passing the private burden of her own past to the public and unpredictable mercies of her husband. From this moment onward, these events of her history with their attendant joys and griefs would become part of the materiel of their relationship, unimmune to interpretation, retraction, emendation. By the time she’d finished talking, the fire was a low smouldering, the light in the room radiant.

  Tom rose beside her, the quilt slipping off the bare flesh of his torso, bronzed and promethean in the demi-dark. His voice bore the cut of a scimitar. It hacked at the air.

  “God damn me to hell, but if I ever get these hands on any one of the bastards that hurt a single hair on your head, I’ll squeeze the living shit right out of them."

  When he stopped shaking, Tom took Lily’s hand in his sword-grip till it softened inevitable in hers.

  The daylight brought them news of Uncle Chester’s death.

  5

  On February 19, 1862 Hugh Nixon Shaw’s drilling crew struck oil hundreds of feet below the gumbo surface of Enniskillen Township. It was to be the world’s first recorded gusher. It was also the world’s first uncapped wildcat. History does not record what the enfant terrible of Black Creek expected, but it was certainly not the gas-propelled blowout that shook the early-morning chill and began founting a hot, black syrup onto the snowscape around it. For three weeks the locals came and watched it spume, as the ground for miles around darkened and sagged. Oil was seen oozing in sticky rivulets towards Black Creek, where it slithered a ways in the ice and congealed. At last someone from Pennsylvania arrived who was able to improvise a method of staunching the wound. Meanwhile, thirty thousand gallons of oil were estimated to have been lost. Only temporarily, though, for in the spring an exotic sheen was observed on Black Creek and on the Sydenham River, and by early summer vast surfaces of Lake St. Clair and Erie glistened eerily. The world’s first oil slick had been achieved.

  The echo of that February blast reverberated far and wide, and the oil boom took on the intensity and surreality of a California gold rush. The town of Oil Springs would boast two thousand greedy souls by the year 1864 – before all boasting became bravado, the wells died of superfluity, and the rich and the broken departed on the same trains; already the steady, stable, Presbyterian good-sense of the burghers of Petrolia (five miles north) was reasserting itself. Ten years after the Oil Springs’ boom, the last board of the last saloon was consumed in some anonymous hobo’s bonfire among the twitch-grass and scrub hawthorn. Mr. Shaw was asphyxiated in his own well on February 11, 1863.

  On the morning of February 20, 1862, Chester Ramsbottom shook the sleep out of his eyes and stepped out of his warm shanty into the winter air. He liked staying out here alone even though Bridie worried about his occasional blackouts and his desultory eating habits. Here he could think and dream and conjure his little plans for the days and weeks ahead – as he had done so many years ago before the fire had destroyed his shop and that part of his life.

  The boys had already arrived; he could hear the steam-engine starting up in the drilling area, a cacophony he could never quite get accustomed to. Bridie and the Yankee fellow had gone over to the Shaw site yesterday afternoon and not returned. A loud blast had been heard from that direction and already rumours were flying. He could hear the excited buzz of the drillers under the relentless slamming of the bit into the rock fathoms below.

  Chester decided to take it easy. He was a bit short of breath this morning and, besides, he was well ahead of schedule: they would have more barrels than oil by spring. The Millar brothers had been sent home to attend the funeral of their youngest sister, felled suddenly by diphtheria. He thought of Lily.

  Near the lean-to which he had rigged up with boughs and furs, Chester built a slow fire, fried some bacon, found he couldn’t eat it, and lay down with his head against the supporting tree with a buffalo robe across his knees. Despite the nipping air and the thudding monotony of the drill, he drifted into sleep.

  Sometime about noon on that day, New York and Upper Canadian Oil Explorations also struck oil, at a hundred and fifty-two feet, a well only half the size of the Shaw strike, but a bonanza nonetheless. It too came with mere seconds’ warning, the crew scattering at the hoarse roar of underground breath released after eons of capture, and falling stunned into the brush as the top blew off with a volcanic crack and thunderous remonstration.

  Uncle Chester popped upright as if he had been struck by a dinner-gong – his eyes sprung from their dream, as wide and as vacant as a doll’s, and blue as ball-bearings.

  The funeral was held quite sensibly in the village of Petrolia where the Wesleyan Methodists has already erected a six-hundred-seat edifice to the glory of their version of the Divine Creator. Uncle Chester’s mother had been converted, once, to this church. The good Reverend Kilreath reminded the tiny, shivering band of mourners of that fact, though he could think of few others to include in a necessarily abbreviated eulogy. The wind was cold enough to make a trespasser confess.

  Lily stood beside Aunt Bridie and gazed at the casket (“Shipped straight from London by express,” Armbruster said in the hushed shout he had concocted for these solemn moments) set over a pit gouged out of the frozen earth. Tom was a step behind her, ready to take her arm. Nearby she could feel the bewildered, estranged presence of the Millar lads, three members of the crew, and the owner-operator of the Lucky Derrick. Who else was there? Old Bill had sobbed like a baby when Tom told him the news, but an hour later he said, “When did you say young Chester was comin’ back?” Lily had a feeling she was watching her own interment or that of someone who would become close to her far away in a future which seemed at this moment improbable.

  Aunt Bridie as usual contained her grief. She did not weep. Lily saw pain in her Aunt’s eyes only when she looked at her niece, her lips opening to say something (that might have – just a while ago – offered some solace, explanat
ion, consolation even) but then closing again in reluctant resignation. But as the minister drew the cross of sand over the coffin-lid and murmured the final words ‘dust to dust’, Aunt Bridie went faint, slumping against Lily’s grip. Melville Armbruster stepped forward and steadied her, and Bridie let her head fall gratefully against his shoulder. Lily scarcely noticed. She was staring at the only other gravestones in the newly consecrated grounds: three white tablets in a neat little row, each bearing the same name: “Morton: Elijah, age 6; Sarah, age 3; Joshua, age 1; taken into the bosom of Our Lord in September of the year 1861.” Last fall’s scarlet fever epidemic.

  Behind her, Jimmy Millar sobbed without shame.

  After the others had walked down to the carriages, Lily remained for a moment over her Uncle’s grave. Here, alone with whatever remained of his spirit, she was able to find thoughts of her own to give some meaning to these windfall happenings. Something Old Samuels said came back to her – about how the soul leaves its earthly housing only to seek some finer refuge out there in those spaces and seasons and harmonies that all along gave it nurture and definition. What spaces, old man? What seasons for Uncle Chester? What sense did his flesh make entering this ground? Earth that was forest only a year before? Oil spouting from its slaughtered heart? Your hands, she thought, were a shopkeeper’s hands, a woodcarver’s at home with a doll’s cradle or a toy gismo. What sort of place has been reserved for you, here?