Lily's Story Page 29

  Suddenly the incongruity of it all struck her so forcefully that Lily wanted to laugh, and she wanted Uncle Chester to join in and share the joke as he used to when Auntie wasn’t looking. Finally, she was able to weep, but not before she heard herself say – to Old Samuels or to the benign divinities wherever they were skulking on such a macabre afternoon – “Does all loving end like this?”

  “Are you all right?” Tom said, cradling her.

  “We missed the tallyho,” Lily said.

  6

  It was the kind of spring that made prolonged grieving seem an unwarranted indulgence. Crocuses and trilliums festooned the walkways in the woods and the more timid recesses beyond them. Winter wheat tossed its maiden-fuzz in the fields along the Errol Road. The earth turned easily under the spade. The air smelled of lilacs and orange blossom and wild crab. Along the creek banks, jack-in-the-pulpit promenaded his stationary lusts. The sun feigned perpetuance.

  Lily found she did not have to seek out private moments or places – dust settling on the workbench, the tools untouched, Last of the Mohicans under the washstand with its marker still there – in which to remember and work out her grief. The natural rhythms of her day were conducive to the kind of semi-reflection best suited to recalling the aura of loss, shorn of all cutting detail. Moreover, in the evenings with Tom she was able to share some of these feelings, not always by direct discussion – though she noted how Tom contrived to raise Uncle Chester’s name as often as he thought appropriate – but mostly by just having him in the room, breathing and caring somewhere beside her. It was a comfort she could not recall ever having had before in her life, and even as she allowed herself to soften into its consolation, she was only too aware of the evanescence of all things cherished-too-much.

  On one of their long Sunday walks, Tom steered her gently through the windbreak and across the wide meadow towards the townsite. Though the only sounds were the cries of killdeer over the grass and the clarinet rasp of redwing blackbirds among the reeds of the marsh, Lily could see from the skeletons of half-built houses that dotted the horizon ahead, that on weekdays the air must have clanged with the sounds of progress. The prevailing wind no doubt had carried them away from her to the Lake beyond: she had not known. The transformation of the ordnance grounds was well under way, and it was awesome. Almost four blocks of dwellings were completed or under construction, mostly single-storey frame cottages set in civilized rows along the premeditated streets named for Queen and Empire. Along Michigan Ave., the only anomalous face among the royal suite, several brick buildings announced the arrival of commerce: a post office, Redmond’s grocery, the Black Bass Inn and Tavern. Along Prince Street, facing the fields below the River, the first of the Grand Trunk hotels was rising brick by yellow brick.

  “Three stories and thirty rooms,” Tom said as they strolled by it. “The bigwigs will stay here, not overnight like they do in the Grand Station, but when they’re assigned here for a sizable stint – also, I expect the boosters and carpetbaggers we see getting off the trains more and more.” He grasped her hand tightly. “Come on over this way, I’ve got something to show you.”

  They walked east along Victoria where a block of cottages had been completed late last fall. Already the window boxes sprouted petunias and several families sat on shaded verandahs or under a leafy tree, digesting Sunday dinner and perhaps the sermon gathered in at one of the services in Sarnia. Tom stopped beside a cottage lovingly painted white, with a well-dug garden in back and a brand-new rose arbour in front.

  “My boss’s house,” said Tom. “He rents it from the Company.”

  “Are all these Company houses?”

  “More or less. It owns all the land, but it’s selling lots to the business guys, and if and when you can afford it, you can buy your house and property back from them. They don’t care as long as they make money.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well,” Tom said, “do you like it?”

  From somewhere inside they heard a baby squall and subside.

  From the foot of Michigan Ave., these or any other lovers could look north to the dunes and the Lake beyond them, west to the River and Fort Gratiot on the American side, and south to the vast railway yards and the great wharf. What had, only two years before, been merely fields, swamps and a pinery awaiting the arrival of soldiers, was now an octopus of energy and purpose. The Grand Trunk station-hotel loomed highest against the horizon and around it sprawled the freight-sheds, bunk-houses, round-house, repair-or-car-shops, and seventeen sidings each with its own shunting locomotive. Along the wharf and further on around the bay, the masts, rigging and funnels of dozens of ships could be seen – schooners and sloops and steamers and mail packets and fishing trawlers. The flow of goods and people was phenomenal. No one but the workers, of course, stayed put; all else was in flux. Here, motion was money. Those who must pause – to rest or reflect or indulge illicitly – found their wants, however eccentric, amply provisioned.

  As Lily and Tom walked towards the dunes, they noticed, where Prince Street ended in scrub-alder and sandburs, several makeshift shacks – like pencil smudges in the backdrop o a Sunday sketch. “Squatters,” said Tom. Lily flinched.

  Though no pact was formally signed, the accumulation of cash for an eventual move to the new village became a mutual endeavour for Tom and Lily. Tom worked as much overtime as he could get. Lily sold her quilts at the Baptist bazaar with the aid of Mrs. Salter. She extended the garden as far as their shrunken acre would go, and set up a stand at the end of the lane on Errol Road, now busy with traffic to the northern counties. She arranged for two township farmers to take some of the produce to Saturday market, though the profit was miniscule. They just could not afford to buy or keep a pony. Through the Misses Baines-Powell Lily got orders for quilts to keep her busy throughout the winter, as well as occasional requests for mind-numbing seamstress’ work. Their lovemaking suffered somewhat as their enthusiasm became tempered by common fatigue (or worse: one weary, one not); by the counter-romance of sweat and pickling juice; by periodic martyr-philia; and the sheer exhaustion of possibility. Nevertheless Lily felt their love itself was prospering. All around them things were greening, lives were changing, and civilities multiplied. It seemed improbable that they too should not be swept along on such an irresistible tide of progressive evolution.

  At night they continued to probe in one another the limits of trust, vulnerability and commitment – dimly aware that the flesh has its own disguises and dissemblings. Time after time Lily let Tom’s seed wash over her blood-lit gill where she kept in escrow some tiny variant of herself awaiting rescue. And though Tom sat one August evening at the kitchen table and wrote out a letter to Bridie in Lily’s words, then helped her read it back and watched her append her own name, shakily, to the bottom of the page – Lily had no news of the kind that might bring solace to a new widow. For weeks Lily waited in vain for a reply.

  One evening early in September Tom did not come home for supper. He had assured her that there was no overtime work to be had for several weeks to come. At first Lily was worried, then annoyed, then scared. There was still a little daylight when she saw Gimpy’s unmistakable silhouette crossing the fields towards the windbreak. She met him just as he was coming through the opening in the pines. She had known by the pace and tilt of his stride that something was wrong. His expression confirmed it.

  “He’s been hurt?” she said, trying to remember if the stove were okay to abandon as is.

  Gimpy shook his head, out of breath, his eyes casting about for some place safe to rest.

  “How bad?”

  “Real bad, ma’am. We can’t wake him up.”

  “Please take me to him,” Lily said, tightening her shawl.

  “You got a Bible?” Gimpy rasped, trying to be helpful.

  Tom was lying on the dock in the open where a barrel of nails had struck him on the head and felled him more than two hours before. Someone had covered him with several dusty sacks. His eyes
were seized shut, a dried trickle of blood in his hair and over his left eye. His breathing shallow but regular.

  “We tried, tried everythin’,” Bags Starkey, the foreman, said to Lily as she bent over her husband. “Cold cloths, ice from the barn, slappin’ his face, pinchin’ his cheeks, everythin’. He’s been lyin’ just like that ever since it happened.”

  “Where’s the doctor?” Lily said.

  “The one on Front Street, he’s drunk an’ can’t be rolled over. The other one’s out in the township somewhere on a call.” He turned to the others for confirmation and consolation.

  Lily leaned over the death-mask of Tom’s face and spoke softly but clearly into his ear. “It’s me, Tom. It’s Lily. I need to talk to you.”

  The onlookers were startled, even moreso when Lily put her arms around her husband and pulled him into her embrace, sitting beside him and holding his dead-weight with her own litheness – her knees and thighs inadvertently exposed to the stevedores. Several looked away. Lily continued to talk. Lily continued to murmur sharply into Tom’s ear until all of the men had averted their gaze, not knowing what to do or where to direct their pity.

  Moments later, Tom’s eyelids fluttered. He let out a huge, purging breath that sent chills up the spines of the men. Then a low groan as some particular pain was identified.

  “Tom, I need to talk to you. I got somethin’ important to tell you.” She pulled his limp hand across her belly. “I got your baby in here,” she said as shyly as she dare.

  A month later, when a scar on his temple and a crackling good yarn were all that remained of Tom’s brush with death, Lily was no longer lying.

  Tom took the letter to Aunt Bridie – jointly composed – down to the Post Office in Sarnia so it would reach her more quickly. When he came home from work that same evening, he had a different letter in his hand. “It’s from Aunt Bridie,” he said. “I picked it up at our own Post Office a few minutes ago.”

  He began to open it. Bridie’s familiar script graced the envelope. “What are you shaking for?” Tom said teasingly. “It’s your Aunt’s writing.”

  London, C.W.

  October 20, 1862

  Dear Tom and Lily:

  Just a short note to let you know that Melville and I were married today at the Middlesex Court House. We leave tonight for New York. We’ve sold everything at Oil Springs. I’ll send details from the City when we get there. Take care, Lily.

  Love,

  Bridie Armbruster

  15

  1

  By the winter of 1862-63 the world, or that part of it that was interested to know, realized that both the Great Western and the Grand Trunk railways had come to stay in Lambton County. Each, moreover, despite other more commercial intentions or manifest destinies, was foreordained to establish in its feverish wake a settled and hopeful community. Port Sarnia, later Sarnia, had begun corporate life as a deep-water harbour on the Great Lakes system, but the welcome arrival of the Great Western had opened it up to the hinterlands behind it and sealed its fate as county town. Point Edward, on the other hand, was an afterthought of the Grand Trunk, a place where the workers and their burdensome families might live while temporarily serving the noble cause of British mercantilist expansion. Where houses were necessary, so were streets – of a sort – and these must have names. Of more importance certainly were the station-hotel itself, the construction of a chain of subsidiary inns of lesser comfort and repute along Michigan Ave. and Prince Street nearest the rail-yards, and the erection – in the spirit of free enterprise – of several capacious, rambling three-storey clapboard houses to serve as warrens for the dozens of often itinerant and less-than-trustworthy navvies and stevedores. By the spring of 1863 such facilities were well in place, along with several stores, two taverns, a post office and a barber shop. It was a motley, uncoordinated, boyish hamlet – mere appendage to a grinding dynamo – and unlike its ambitious neighbour, puffed with Scots’ bravado and cunning, it had no sense at all of itself, of what it might become, of the pain it would eventually suffer merely to be born.

  South of the border, meanwhile, a much more murderous rivalry was still being played out with gun and hacksaw, pomp and propaganda. Over there, truths, it appeared, were not self-evident: America’s dream-of-Eden-regained had been momentarily stalled by fratricide.

  “You must stop working so hard,” Tom said.

  Lily almost said: Well, it didn’t do me no harm last time, but thought it best not to raise that topic at all. “I’ll let you know when I’m not up to it. Besides, I ain’t protrudin’ yet.” And she pushed him out into the overnight snowfall – the first of the season – and watched him plant his bootprints all the way up to the windbreak. Inside, she could feel the child clinging to her with both of its tiny hands.

  Humming, doing a shy two-step, she cleared up the breakfast dishes, banked both fires, ate an extra slice of bread-and-molasses, and settled in beside her quilting frame. This one’s for you, she thought aloud, whatever your name shall be. When her eyes grew strained and her leg cramped, she got up, put her coat and boots on, and walked across to Old Bill’s.

  “You gotta eat, Bill,” she shouted in his ear, the steam of her breath filling the hutch. She wrapped his shoulders with one of his stinking shawls and got a bit of a fire going. He had not eaten any of the bread or salt-pork she’d left him.

  Old Bill grunted something, but she was unable now to understand any of his words, if indeed any were intended. At times she thought he might be trying to sing or to recite some faded chant from his boyhood. He would open his mouth wide, his lips would freeze in some abbreviated contortion, and the air would sail up from his lung over the exposed chords and vibrate, it seemed, off the back of the tongue or the throat itself – for nothing in the front of his mouth moved. Yet out came an eerie, wavering note as if an errant breeze had blown over a castaway fiddle. Then he would reach out and clutch her wrist, hurting her. It was her turn to hum a tune from her own childhood – sweet, reminiscent, lullaby-low – until his grip softened and a mute rattle gathered in the back of his throat, and he would lie back in his chair by the window. Sometimes, then, he would eat.

  Lily had never seen Tom so happy. On most mornings they woke up in the dark, made cautious illicit love, then rose together into the bracing chill of the cabin to light the fires and watch the sun animate the snow that lay its gratuitous beauty everywhere about them. On Sundays they would go for long walks into the village, along the River, up the beach and then across the oak-woods to Little Lake, where they cheered on the skaters, some of whom brandished curved sticks with which they relentlessly pursued a frozen horse-bun.

  “I’d like to skate,” Lily said and despite Tom’s protestations and then his pleas, she did. Gimpy Fitchett borrowed several of the blades-and-straps from his cronies at work and all three of them made their maiden attempt the very next Sunday. Gimpy sort of levered his way along the margin of the circular pond as if he were rowing with one oar, managing to stay upright though deriving little other pleasure from the sport. Whenever he spotted Tom or Lily he would weigh anchor a moment, spin perilously as he waved and laughed, then laugh even louder as he retrieved his balance and continued his sounding of the shoreline. Tom slashed away with both blades, aiming himself at the centre of the ice-pond. He scissored, and fell on his nose. The blood had barely begun to congeal in the cold when his wings tangled and again he crashed spectacularly – this time on his nether side – to the unsuppressed delight of several young toughs out for an airing. Dazed and bruised, Tom slid across to the safety of the nearest snowbank, where he pouted, then looked up for Lily. She was floating twenty yards before him – a swan with its wings an inch from the glazed surface, its feathers lighter than breath cutting perfect curves in the glassy wake it left for all sckeptics.

  Twice a week Lily walked into the village to do some shopping at Redmond’s store and occasionally at Durham’s Dry Goods. The store-keepers nodded pleasantly to her, often called her by
name, sometimes chatted about the weather or the progress being made down ‘at the yard’. Lily smiled a lot and gradually, as she assured Tom over supper, she was learning how to chat idly and even enjoy it. Twice the Grand Trunk had let the round-house and car-shop gang use one of the small rooms in the station complex for a Saturday night gathering, and Lily and Tom attended both parties. The men drank whiskey by the cup from a barrel while the wives and lady-friends coaxed them away to the dance-squares or bunched in corners gossiping. Tom kept himself free from the whiskey and danced with Lily most of the night at the cost of much barbed teasing from his mates. Lily talked to several of the wives whose husbands she felt she knew thoroughly. They seemed to like her. She was invited to tea. She surprised herself and Tom by going.

  “Well, how did you like Maudie Bacon?” Tom asked, finally.

  “She’s very nice. She was raised on a farm in Moore township near Froomfield. She remembers the Millars. She was friends with the Partridge girls.”

  “So you did more than chank cakes and cheese?” he said, reaching for the muffins Lily had made on her return from the tea. “Well, this time next year we should be thinking about picking out a place of our own. Maybe in the same block as Maudie’s. You’d like that, eh?”