Lily's Story Read online

  Only the news that Peacock’s army was coming full-force saved the Canadians from being slaughtered. The Fenians pulled back to Fort Erie where an even more inept confrontation took place.

  The Fenians, again by misadventure, barged into a platoon of militia who were guarding enemy prisoners aboard a tug called the Robb. The Canadian commander here, Colonel Dennison, who it must be said was exonerated later on at his judicial hearing, ordered his fifty guardsmen to attack the six hundred approaching Fenians. Naturally they had some reservations about the order but gallantly followed it, sustaining seven wounded before capturing twenty of the invaders and abandoning the effort. They tried to retreat with some composure to the tugboat, but it had pulled out in a panic and left them on the dock to fend for themselves. They broke and ran for the houses nearby. Their Colonel scuttled into a farm-cabin, donned the garb of a hired hand and slipped away to take up the fight another day. News arrived at Fort Erie that the American government had decided Canada was not worth the risk and was cutting off all the aid it had denied giving to the Fenian Brotherhood. The war was over. Both sides claimed victory. As they usually do.

  “They’re keeping up an alert till the end of the summer,” Tom said. “We drill three times a week. The Company is giving us a day-a-week off to go on sentry duty. With half-pay,” he added with great emphasis.

  Robbie was fiddling with the bolt on his father’s rifle.

  “Stop that, Robbie,” Lily said.

  Robbie looked at Tom, and continued. He was stunned by his mother’s stinging slap across his fingers.

  “For Christ’s sake, woman, you’re impossible!” Tom shouted. He cradled Robbie in his trigger hand. “What in hell do you want from me anyway? What in hell do you expect me to do?”

  “You do what I say,” Lily said to Robbie, but all the strength had gone out of her voice.

  Robbie’s lips quivered but he didn’t cry.

  From the other room Brad whimpered in his sleep. Lily started towards him, then froze.

  “Go ahead,” Tom said, more in exasperation than anger.

  “I hate her! I hate her!” she heard Robbie say as she entered the room where Brad was thrashing in his bed, his jaws swollen shut by the mumps.

  “You say that again,” Tom said, “and I’ll stuff your mouth with soap.” Robbie wailed as loud as Ariadne on her island: I know how you feel, Lily thought.

  That night in bed Tom reached over, uncoiled her arms, softened her neck with his stroking, lay his head on her breasts, and when she was ready eased her thighs open and entered with only ecstasy he was still certain they could share. He wasn’t wrong. His timing was off, but he gasped to a climax, then held on as she hurried to join him. His ribbed strength ebbed into her; she translated it into something of her own, the alien wonder of her high cry never failing to leave her lover transfixed and triumphant. They stayed together. He tried to ease her burden by shifting onto his hands, but she pulled them away and down towards her breasts until his whole weight fell lengthwise along her and she pinioned him with her ankles. Without seeming to have moved, hours onward he climaxed again. She brushed his eyelids with her tongue, implanting there secret words that would blossom only later under light and speak goldenly of love. Her legs dropped away; he drifted onto his side.

  A long while after, he said: “They’re beautiful children. I love them both. Almost as much as I love their mother.”

  He expected no reply. Her fingers, as naive as if they had just been released from their cocoon, roamed the reaches and most delicate places of his body.

  The sun was just signalling the false-dawn when she said with no particular emotion, as if the thought had just occurred to her: “Why does there have to be a world out there?”

  When they awoke well after sunrise, Tom said, “The Company’s giving a special dance on Saturday. We should go.”

  “We must,” Lily said.

  Early in September two survivors of the Battle of Ridgeway were brought to Point Edward, courtesy of the Grand Trunk, to tell their stories to the local troops and invited guests. Following setbacks in Quebec and New Brunswick, the Fenian threat had subsided, but the Government was eager to keep patriotic fervour on high beam. After all, the Quebec Conference on Confederation was due to open in October and it never hurt to keep one’s citizens emotionally primed and not a little frightened of the bogeyman. The Grand Trunk felt much the same as the Government itself did.

  When Tom got home from the gathering well after midnight, he roused Lily from bed (but not sleep): “I need a cup of coffee,” he announced with understatement, dropping his watch and stumbling after it in the gloom.

  When Lily shook up the fire and boiled some water, Tom told her the whole story of the Canadian triumph over the cousins of Antichrist. What had begun at the start of the evening – before the booze was decanted – as mere fiction or harmless soldierly boasting graduated precipitately to fable and then soared blissfully towards fairy tale. Tom had an alcoholic grin on his face that wouldn’t be erased till morning. He kept pulling playfully at Lily’s nightshirt to make her look at him, at his happiness and at the pleasure he was having being himself in a world that once-in-a-blue-moon went right instead of wrong. She ignored the clumsy promise his fingers made against her breasts as she poured his coffee, and spilled some.

  “Hey, watch the equipment!” he laughed. “Ain’t got spare parts for that piece.”

  When she could no longer avoid it, she looked him in the eye, and through the whiskey-sheen she saw a far more compacted, more flammable brand of excitement.

  Later, as he thumped and wheezed against her body, she was grateful for the dark. When he sighed and salivated his pathetic little drool of semen into her, she gave a correspondent moan which he mistook for joy. He skidded sideways into a slug’s sleep. I love him, even now, like this, she thought, fighting her drowsiness. I love him even more. How can that be? Did love need an edge of panic, the wallow of sentiment? She envied his dreamless slumber, his lying there as if the peace that had seized his boy’s body had been deserved or sanctioned by some force beyond the muscle pumping plasma into his imagination.

  When she fell asleep she dreamed, as she feared she would, about the soldiers of Tom’s story – floundering in Smuggler’s Hole, their lungs boiling with blood they coughed onto lily pads, their hands spreading out like flippers in prayer as they sank oceanward, the sudden preponderance of their bones heavier than brine, they slipped under and down till the tip of their heads touched the earth’s eldest crust, and as the tadpoles and pollywogs and fingerlings adjusted their nether-dance above them, the soldiers’ eyes rolled up and cursed the sun with their death-gaze. Moments later a soldier in a different uniform, beardless and panicked, slipped to the edge of the pond, darted his eyes here and there like a spooked fawn, then pulled out his penis and, holding it as if it were a piece of slack rope, urinated into the murk.

  18

  1

  It was spring again. Because it was unlikely they would be able to afford the move into the village for at least another year, Lily decided to spruce up the homestead. She had planted bulbs in the fall and they were now green spires aimed at the sky. Tom had built a trellis beside the kitchen window and helped her transplant a rosebush from Maudie Bacon’s garden. Traces of pink were nudging through the bud-tips. Tom had made her a white flowerbox and set it under the front window in the south sun, and soon she would try her geranium cuttings nursed indoors throughout the winter. She and Brad made up a song about flowers. “Tu-lips, two-lips, do-lips” Brad sang, then rubbed his forefinger through his own lips, amazed at the world’s happy coincidents. Another year here, Lily thought, and neither of us will want to move. Tom was taking Robbie on his shoulders down to the creek to fish every Sunday afternoon. Brad routinely trailed after her as she spaded and harrowed the garden (though he didn’t much like getting dirty), distracting her with his banter and shy teasing.

  On a bright windless Sunday in May, Lily was sitting o
n the stoop cutting the roots out of the last of the winter potatoes when she heard Brad say with a sinking whine, “Some people comin’, Ma.”

  She looked towards the lane. Trouble. She could tell from the way the two figures held themselves sturdy in the black carriage, as if they were brunting a stiff Northerly. She could sniff rectitude at fifty paces. The horses, frothing against a strict rein, wheeled through the gateway and into the yard, where they stopped – much relieved.

  “Good morning, missus,” hallooed the large parson down the long nave of the lane. He wrapped the reins firmly in place and proceeded to dismount. He waddled around in front of the horses, giving their baleful stare a wide berth, and stretched out a pudgy hand to his companion. She took it automatically, as if lifting a latch-key, and stepped onto the grass with a practiced swirl. Hand-in-glove, they trundelled towards Lily.

  “I am the Reverend Dougall Hardman,” the parson announced, “of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Port Sarnia. And this is my good wife, Mrs. Hardman.”

  “Charity,” said the good wife without defacing her smile.

  “Yes, and you must be the young Mrs. Marshall we’ve heard so much about,” the preacher said, reaching unsuccessfully for her hand and glancing past her towards the house.

  Clara, thought Lily.

  “Lily, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, how do you do?”

  “And who’s this darling little creature?”

  Brad ducked behind Lily’s skirt.

  The Reverend Hardman cleared his throat with pre-sermon vigour. “Ah, we’ve come on official business.”

  “I can make some tea, if you can wait a minute. Would you like to come in?”

  “Is your husband at home, missus?”

  “No, he ain’t.” She hesitated, then said, “Him an’ Robbie are off fishin’.”

  The parson swallowed his astonishment long enough to say, “We’ll come in and wait, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

  “What a pretty little cottage,” Mrs. Hardman said.

  The Reverend Hardman was obese: his jowls jigged contrapuntally with the jawbone somewhere inside driving the bellows of his windy sentences. His cleric’s collar lay buried in his neck-flesh so profoundly that only a thin ring of it showed through, like a band on a turkey. When he sat at his ease in Uncle Chester’s chair, his great belly dozed on two bony knees; his plump fingers fed on the macaroons and tea-cakes like loose grubs. Notwithstanding, there was something different here from the usual parson fattened up by too many teas, bake-sales, middle-age, and ecclesiastical doubt. From the slim leg, the curse of the shoulder and the quick feet came the hint of a once-muscular frame, leathered skin, and agility. A circuit-rider, Lily thought, the memory striking deep.

  Mrs. Charity Hardman was a bosomy but well-proportioned woman, trussed, corsetted and handsomely turned out in a mauve dress whose flounces, cuffs, and lacy appendages might have been described by some as bounteous. She sipped her tea with white gloves intact; she resisted all temptation to indulge further. From the edge of her chair she kept her wifely eye on a point just below her husband’s lower jaw where his chins converged, and nodded ritually on some cue from him which Lily was unable to detect.

  Working from the general principle that anything he had to say was of rivetting significance to any bystander, Reverend Hardman proceeded to orate – with pauses to detassel a cup-cake or disfigure the odd macaroon – the long history of his Church in the country, winding his way eventually towards the good news that next autumn the Wesleyan Methodists were going to build a church in Point Edward that would rival the Anglican once now there in size, expense and depth of devotion. And in the true spirit of ecumenical Christianity, the edifice would be open to use by such demi-infidels as Congregationalists and Presbyterians (no Baptists, please) until such times as they could afford their own houses of worship.

  “You will agree that this is a signal achievement, indeed an honour for such a small and as yet unincorporated village?”

  Mrs. Reverend nodded.

  “Of course, I was quick to volunteer my services. As Mrs. Hardman can confirm, I have always been a man to take on a fresh challenge for the sake of Our Lord.”

  Mrs. Reverend tilted her petalled hat in Lily’s direction.

  “As minister to a new flock my duties are manifold,” he said, crushing a macaroon on the downbeat. “First, we shall need commitment, real commitment from our doughty band of believers.”

  “Money,” murmured Missus, delicately.

  “True, true. We are looking for pledges, for tithing in the old-fashioned sense.”

  Lily brought out the last of the macaroons made especially for Robbie and Tom.

  “Secondly, we’ll need the use of all the talents, the combined gifts, as it were, of our supporters.” He stared wistfully at his tea, dotted with crumbs.

  “Men to assist with the stone-work and the roof,” offered his help-mate.

  “Precisely. And finally we shall need the love and spiritual wishes of the whole Christian community, we need their prayers for our success as we seek most humbly to establish a fellowship of adherents among the workers of the Grand Trunk and their loving families.”

  Mrs. Hardman started to nod but was ambushed by a yawn. It went unnoticed.

  “As you can tell, missus, I am a blunt, straightforward man. Always have been, always will.” For the first time Lily felt his gaze encompass her, even though he had been more or less pointed in her direction throughout the service. “We would like you and your husband to think seriously about how much you can afford to give us in support of God’s work. More important even, we are hoping to open a Sabbath school in September. It is our understanding that your eldest – the one now, ah, fishing with his father – will soon be four-years old.”

  So it was Clara, Lily thought.

  “Mrs. Hardman has agreed, on top of all her other onerous duties, to take on the little ones, suffering them to come unto her, as it were.”

  Mrs. Hardman lengthened her smile a notch.

  “He ain’t been baptized,” Lily said.

  The parson showed no surprise. “Don’t be ashamed, my dear girl,” he said, glancing sideways at the vacant plate. “Remember, I’ve been a circuit rider, I know the country ways and country feelings. Things get put off. Spiritual matters are often suspended by more pressing demands of the moment. We shall make arrangements for both your children to be baptized. Why, we could inaugurate the Church with such a happy ceremony!” He smiled as if he’d just thought of the notion.

  “Such a beautiful child,” Mrs. Hardman said, looking about for Brad.

  Lily stood up. “When Tom gets home, we’ll talk over what you just said. It’s been nice meetin’ you.”

  Charity Hardman came back for her parasol. Lily met her at the door. The smile on her face had crumbled. Nothing remained but the pain of a frightened eye. She seized Lily by the wrist and whispered fiercely: “Clara’s told me all about you, Lily. Won’t you think hard about comin’ to the new church? It gets awful lonesome out here in the country. Besides, we got to stick together, you know. I mean us women.”

  “Mrs. Hardman!”

  “Coming!” she shouted back. With a desperate sort of malice she said to Lily, “An’ you don’t have to swallow all the malarkey you hear from that source!”

  As the carriage disappeared, Lily heard the crack of the whip over the horses’ heads.

  2

  The Fathers of Confederation set aside July the first as the day when the citizens of the new Dominion of Canada were to celebrate this historic act of collective paternity. That there may have been more cause for excitement in the boardrooms and on the front benches of the nation did not in any way diminish the general enthusiasm of the magic hour. Even before the ink was dry on the British North America Act, the yearning for a united land from sea to sea was already being translated into affirmative action. On June 28, 1867, The Sarnia Observer noted that a complaint had been received from the German emigran
ts heading west for Manitoba via rail, ship and cart-trek; to wit: the cattle cars that had been rigged out for their comfort contained (they said) only one bucket of water to last five-dozen souls from Toronto to the Point Edward wharf; naturally such ingratitude was dealt with curtly and correctly in the Grand Trunk’s statement of denial. Thirsty or not, the movement westward had begun, and was inevitable: a new destiny was becoming manifest.