Lily's Story Read online

  “It comes up for sale,” Tom said, “at the end of the summer.”

  Lily took hold of his other hand. “The school’s just down the street a ways,” she said to the boys.

  “I don’t wanna go to no school,” Robbie said.

  “He’s just mad ’cause we took so long,” Lily said quickly to Tom. He just laughed and embarrassed the boys by hugging her in public. To the north Lily could hear the waves repeating their chant on Canatara.

  What more could I want, Lily thought, watching Brad from her kitchen window as he sat on the oak-stump in the May sunshine staring past his brother’s antics into the woods beyond. The move into the village would be the last link in the chain of connection Lily felt all around her these days. They would at last become part of some larger community, one in which, though she herself might never feel fully a citizen, the boys could grow up inside so naturally they would think later on they had invented it. For Tom, it meant committing himself more certainly to a life he had taken up in large measure because of his love for her; company and family and town would be his domain. But there was a part of him – as with her – that would always remain irreconciled to domesticity, to the predictable rhythms of civility, to a God who hurled brimstone one moment and puffed on a pipe the next. I loved that in him too, she thought, I must have – that perverse will to hazard, to ride the flux, to play truth-or-dare with the random deities of the universe.

  Old Samuels was right: the gods don’t disassemble when the hedgerows and the houses and walled gardens go up. When the white man cleared the forest of the great trees that were left in the wake of the fleeing ice, the demons who lived in them did not perish in their ash, they were released into the volatility of air where they still whirl and collide and howl like schizophrenes. Even now they ride the winds of pestilence over the corrupt earth, mocking and vengeful.

  Lily had heard their mocking laughter many times. When Clara’s boy was stillborn and she had come down with childbed fever, Lily had wrapped the foetus in a blanket and covered its drowned eyes and begged Clara not to look. She had sat beside her friend for weeks, watching her twist and grimace with dreadful pain and with the dream of the dead child’s face. Most of the time they were alone in the dark, where Lily’s hand on a brow, a cheek, over the eyelids was Clara’s only link with life and its manifest horrors. When the fever broke and Clara was surprised to find herself alive, she gave Lily a look that said: so it was you who brought me back to all this? Later on, when Gimpy arrived and Lily had bathed the stink off her and washed her hair and put a bit of rouge on her ghastly face, Clara smiled and was able to offer something that was almost gratitude. Lily was not in the least offended.

  During the winter there had been a diphtheria scare. Quarantine signs dotted the village doors. Lily didn’t go into town for weeks. The boys complained but were not taken to Little Lake to skate. Word came via Tom that Maudie Bacon’s youngest was stricken. “She’s got Mary there to help,” was all Tom said. A week later Maudie’s little girl was dead but not before suffering the bewilderment of pain that no mother’s arms could diminish or explain. She was the first human creature to be buried in the cemetery grounds just donated by the Grand Trunk to the three churches. She’s near the woods and the shy trilliums, Lily thought, blotting out the nasal sentiments of the Reverend Hardman. Old Samuels would approve. But what would he say about Aunt Bridie encased in knickerbocker granite lintelled with a family name that would have shrivelled a leprechaun’s laugh. Or Uncle Chester buttoned up in the chaste Methodist grave of a sometime oil town, the name on the headstone a perpetual puzzlement to the locals ever after. Where were their spirits now?

  A few weeks after the funeral Lily caught Robbie in her room with a leather pouch wide open on the floor and one of its objects in his hand. “Uch!” he snorted, “a dead rabbit’s foot.” Lily scolded him more severely than he thought necessary, and then gently replaced the cross, pendant, stone and Testament. The rabbit’s foot she kept in her hand till it warmed. “Did Da shoot that?” Robbie said through his dried tears.

  Lily put the token in her apron pocket, and when Tom took the boys off to watch the ice break up on the creek, she put on her coat and scarf and headed into town. She went around the northern perimeter, avoiding the streets, walked along the tracks a ways till she could see the smoke from the shacks in Mushroom Alley, then veered north through the brush, coming out after a while into the windswept clearing she knew so well. She sat down and caught her breath. Soon the voices began, one by one, to detach themselves from the wind. She heard Acorn say something to Sounder and caught Sounder’s shrill laughter. Southener repeated words to her she had almost forgotten. She saw the outlines of his grave, now sunken below ground level with the weight of a dozen years. Where is he? She asked soundlessly, afraid that even a jarring step might be catastrophic. Slowly she felt her head turn to the north-east, and perhaps ten minutes later – how could she tell? – she was able to discern a slight rectangular hump in the sand, well disguised by grass and young aldershoots. She approached the grave, knelt down, said something reverential in a strange tongue, then scooped up a little sand, placed the rabbit’s foot in the hollow, and covered it. Goodbye, Old Samuels.

  Lily stood in the kitchen window remembering when Uncle Chester used to hold her aloft to see over the sill into the green world. It was hard to believe that by this September her life would have completed one of its great seasonal shifts, that the Grand Trunk would at last exercise dominion over Bridie’s land, in return for which they would put down fresh roots in the very village her Aunt had dreamed so intensely it had become real. What would you think of that, old Shaman?

  In the yard, Robbie had talked or bullied Brad into joining his game. Brad had been offered the sword with the broken blade as a bribe, while Arthur brandished Excalibur possessively. On these rare occasions when Brad was moved to enter into his brother’s fantasies, he did so, unbeknownst to Robbie, on his own terms. While Robbie pursued the treacherous Mordred or the cowardly two-faced Saxon (Hengest-and-Horsa), while he jousted and sallied and cut-to-ribbons – Brad played his designated parts, but Lily could see, as she did now, that in the kingdom of his own imagination he was reinventing a world for his pleasure alone. She could hear him humming or chanting away to himself as he dodged the wrath of Galahad’s forays. For Brad, no re-enactment of the old stories was real without the words tumbling through his head in magic metamorphoses. Suddenly, Galahad’s sword slashed spitefully across an exposed calf. Lily heard the smack and saw Brad fall into the grass. Robbie was stunned by the deed as the victim; he stood gazing at his weapon as if about to accuse it of some crime. Then he turned to watch his brother. Brad’s lower lip quivered as the red welt on his leg rose up, stinging. He glanced towards the house, straight into the morning sun. Robbie waited, something faintly pleading in his face. Brad began rubbing the wound, silent tears sliding out and down. Robbie suddenly sat down beside him. Instinctively Brad started to edge away but was stopped by Robbie’s arm as it came across his shoulder and gripped it. Very slowly Robbie opened the fingers of his brother’s left hand and placed in them the diamond-stubbed Excalibur from Camelot.

  Lily was watching it all from her window. A wonder, she thought. The random gesture. Love’s accidence.

  Lily had just begun getting Tom’s supper ready when he surprised her – standing in the doorway the way he always did when there was news.

  “It’s all right,” he said, seeing her reaction. “We’ve been called up, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

  Lily found herself sitting on the arm of the big chair, a kettle steaming in her hand.

  “We’re going west. There’s been some trouble with the half-breeds out there, but nobody expects we’ll have to do much shooting.”

  Lily felt the kettle brush the floor.

  “Say something, Lil. Don’t just sit there looking at me like that. You know I got to go.”

  “You’re a volunteer.”

  �
�You know I got to go.”

  Yes, I do know, she wanted to say. And I’ve tried to understand all these years, I really have. And maybe, too, its partly my fault for loving that unknowable night-thing in you, for being afraid of it, for wanting to bring it too close to the sunlight and tame it with familiarity, yet all along secretly cherishing it as I do those kinds of things in myself I keep hidden from you. I do know. And I know also that I could reach out at this moment and touch you in a way that would make you want to stay. If I do, I may regret it for the rest of my life. If I don’t...

  “We’re going to sail into the north,” Tom was saying, settling her into the chair and sitting beside her on the arm, “all the way to the lakehead, then cross the Rainy River system in canoes like the old voyageurs. Then we march over the Prairie to Fort Garry where we stay for a while to make sure the new province gets off to a proper start. No fighting, no war. Monsieur Riel won’t be there to greet us.”

  “Think of the boys,” she said.

  “I am,” Tom said. “With the money I’ll get from this stint we’ll be able to buy furniture for the new house, clothes and books for the boys when they go to school. You’ll be able to throw away that wretched quilting frame forever. We’ll come back here and put a torch to this old place and make sure it stays a part of our past. Lily, you don’t understand. I’ve got to go. Now.”

  Yes, it may be the last chance.

  “I’m gonna come back, you know.”

  Lily picked up the kettle. “Supper’s ruined,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  “I ain’t goin’ down to the boat.”

  Lily said her goodbyes at the gate. Gimpy had come with his buggy to take Tom and his gear to the troop-ship waiting at the wharf, and to supervise Robbie who was being allowed to cheer the soldiers off with his hankey-sized Union Jack. Lily waited until the horses had almost reached the bend before she began to tremble all over. Tom turned in his seat and waved back to her, his manly figure caught for a second in a burst of lilac-spray. It was an image she would hold unchanging in her heart for a long, long time.

  A few weeks after Tom left, Lily missed her second period.

  6

  Early in May of 1870 the new Dominion under the stewardship of Sir John A. Macdonald undertook its first large-scale mobilization and transfer of troops to a distant war zone. Railroad, lake-steamer, bateaux and forced march were splendidly coordinated so that in a mere ninety-six days Colonel Wolseley’s army of twelve-hundred volunteers and regulars arrived at the outskirts of Fort Garry, Manitoba to claim the province for Canada. No resistance was met. Not a soul to shoot at. A member of Wolseley’s staff recorded in his diary that day: ‘We were enthusiastically greeted by a half-naked Indian, very drunk’.

  But the getting-there was itself a triumph of Canadian ingenuity. Troop-trains left Montreal and Toronto, picked up volunteer units along the main-line and deposited them on the wharfs of Collingwood and Point Edward, where troop-ships – refitted freighters – whisked the battalions northeastward along the ancient fur-trading routes of Champlain, Radisson and Groseilliers, Marquette and Joliet, and the mighty LaSalle. At Fort William they disembarked, seasick but singing, and clambered into hastily constructed bateaux which were three-quarters canoe and two-quarters sailboat. In mid-May they disappeared into the bush and did not emerge again until August 23. Occasional scouts, of hardy native stock, returned to Base Fort William to report on morale and on progress made to a tense and bored populace. These messengers also brought out mail destined for the home front.

  So it was that Lily received five letters from Tom written over a span of six weeks, the last one dated ‘August 7, 1870, near Rat Portage’. Gimpy and Clara (who was pregnant again) came over, and they read through them. Though Lily found she could read much of Tom’s elegant script, she preferred to let Gimpy read aloud so that she could close her eyes and picture every event and hear the words Tom chose: to make each a part of him.

  Tom was attached to a forward unit, his company the only volunteer group to be so honoured. The first few days were jolly ones because the recruits could stretch out the muscles cramped by several days in steerage. The sun warmed them by day and the crisp stars overhead at night seemed to bless their enterprise. Then the rains came and the forty-two-mile portage up to Lake Shebandowan. Fire and torrential spring storms had destroyed the primitive right-of-way. Tom’s crew headed into the bush with axe and whip-saw. ‘I felt like one of the pioneers out there, hacking and cursing and blistering in places I didn’t know I owned.’ It took three weeks to clear a path wide enough for the rearguard to dismantle and carry their boats through, along with two-hundred-pound barrels of salt-pork, cannon, cannonballs, rifles and cases of ammunition. The bulkier craft had to be pushed ahead on rollers which disappeared into the muskeg as fast as Tom’s crew could cut them. Now did the muscles rebel in the wet bivouacs of a chilling dark, the mosquitoes take up the flies’ leavings and the rain wash entire tents away from their frail moorings. Exhausted but undaunted, the raw troops reached for fresh inspiration and found it on the smooth straits of Lac des Mille Lacs and the resurgence of July’s best sun. While the paddling arms had strengthened and spirits brightened again, the jolting pattern of shooting rapids, driving hullward into stiff winds on open lakes, making sharp, brutal portages, and searching hopelessly for a dry bivouac – these soon took their toll. The food worsened. Dysentery and the grippe left dozens of men to languish in the rear, slumped among the supplies, moaning to keep each other company. But Tom miraculously grew stronger, healthier, happier. He was placed in the vanguard of the paddlers, in the slick canoes manned by Iroquois and Métis scouts. He sang with them. He seemed to forget where they were going and why. He did not wonder at the arrival of Métis scouts sent by the ‘rebel’ Riel to welcome and guide them in. He revelled in the challenge of the white water, the muskeg like quicksand, the raw cold of the rivers lit by sun but never warmed even in the sweltering heat of early August. Lily could hear him singing, she could see the reddish-blond beard circling the elementary blue of his eyes, she could yearn to be under him anywhere, always, below the altar of the stars.

  On August 8 the expedition neared Rat Portage, passing through an uncharted narrows in the Winnipeg River. Lily held her breath as she watched the war-canoe tossed ponderously by the frantic rapid, tilting and dextrously righted by a dozen paddles with a touch as silk as a pianist’s, battered sideways by a furtive boulder to an edge of balance, only to be slung straight by the current itself as it hurtled westward blindly, without cause. All at once the lead canoe pitched left as if a sail had been punched by a gust; it yawed, skidded rudderless along a flat patch in the eye of something sinister, spun counter-clockwise like the earth itself only flatter, only laughing at gravity as the paddlers swung free of its burden and tumbled with military precision, one by one, into the gorge below. Lily saw her Tom strike the surface, lean on its buoyancy for a long second, wave his arms at some invisible rope in the air and go under, his head only – mouth, eyes, nose – bobbing up again farther down the roiling half-mile narrows full of rocks that had broached many a birch-bark or the drum of a man’s belly. He made so sound at all and after a while his eyes quit looking anywhere. When his body was hauled ashore, floating blissfully in a trout-pool miles away, the underwater rocks had battered it beyond recognition. They knew it was him because some of the white skin showed through the bruising. There was no bleeding because his body was frozen; the cold had killed him, they said, before he could be drowned or bludgeoned to death. Just as well.

  Still, there on shore it was August with a rotting sun overhead. Nothing to do but bury the soldier with as much dignity as possible, with due notation of his incredible valour, his unshakable patriotism. They gouged a shallow grave out of the muskeg and laid him there in a spruce coffin girdled by a Union Jack. The volunteers shivered in the heat as the Last Post rang emptily over the Barrens – haunted by stunted cedars, wreaths of sphagnum, and brackish moss-wa
ter still shaken by the memory of the Great Glacier rumbling backwards overhead.

  Two months later, after many of the troops had been quietly returned home by rail through St. Cloud and Chicago, Major Bolton came to the house to tell Lily the story of Tom’s heroic death. The details he provided her – in a kind and fatherly manner that genuinely touched her – added little to what she had already seen in her own way.

  After he left, Lily sat for some time, by herself, staring out of the kitchen window she had for so long now used to measure the ebb and flow of her small being-on-this-earth. She tried not to imagine a world that would no longer acknowledge the absence of Aunt Bridie or Uncle Chester, of Bachelor Bill and the moon-sad face of his Violet, of Old Samuels and all his kind, and Mama and Maman and Aunt Elspeth, and Papa wherever the woods was hiding him. She tried not to imagine a life without Tom, without the kind of love engendered only in the dream-songs of the young for whom the future is as real as a moment of touch-and-surrender. She tried not to think of such a place nor the gods mad enough to have contrived it. No deity – whatever its hue or cry – could have invented this, she thought. I cannot accept it. What do you think of that, old Shaman? Do you hear me calling out, shouting over and over again – as if my heart were stone-deaf – I am Lily Marshall, I am Lily Marshall, I am Lily Marshall. And who is there to care?