Lily's Story Read online

  Something urgent was poking itself into her ribs.

  “Mama,” Brad said at her side, still prodding.

  “Not now.”

  “Tell me a story, Mama, the one about Sir Galahad. Please.”

  And somehow, she did.

  PART THREE

  Sophie

  19

  1

  In the middle of October 1870 Maudie Bacon’s husband, Garth, returned home from the wars to a hero’s welcome. Riel and his Métis hooligans had been routed without a shot being fired; Manitoba was salvaged for the Confederation and the federalist cause materially advanced. The Grand Trunk – already rumoured to be vying with some upstart pomposity calling itself the Canadian Pacific for the rights to extend their brand of evolutionary capitalism all the way to the salmon-basins of British Columbia – honoured Corporal Bacon and four other local boys at a banquet held in the concourse of the station on the Point Edward wharf. Major Bolton, representing Colonel Wolseley, toasted the valiant and spoke reverently of Tom Marshall, the fallen comrade no one more than he, his commanding officer, could have wished to have been present here amongst them. His sentiments were echoed all round. The hero’s widow – alas – was not there to acknowledge them.

  Just as Lily feared, Robbie took Tom’s death very hard. For a little while he seemed almost pleased with the notion that his father had died in uniform while leading his men valiantly through impenetrable bush and over raging torrents and across waste marshes – every thicket treacherous with Indians who could twist their shadows at will into the shapes of monsters and trolls. From her place at the window Lily watched him slash his way into the underbrush, heard his bullying ululations rise and startle and scatter, then waited, heart-in-mouth, for her brave warrior to tramp out of the woodlot, his weapon trailing in the dirt like a sad plough, all the buoyancy vanished from the large eyes that periodically rolled from side to side in a vain attempt to identify the enemy who would not show himself. Carefully she had explained to him that his father’s body had stopped being – like the stilled rabbit’s or the frozen sparrows on the window-ledge, like Bachelor Bill under the earth a mile away – and that his spirit, his soul – the things they loved most about him, the way he smiled and listened and spoke – had flown back into the air and even now, if you closed your eyes quick, you could see them and hear them and almost touch them. But five minutes later he would scowl over at her and say with innocent ferocity, “When’s Da comin’ home?” When Lily suggested that he was seven-going-on-eight and that his Da would be proud of him if he would walk into town each morning and go to the big school to learn to read and write and start to become a man – he said shortly, “I want Da to take me.” That was that. When Lily propped him up on the chair-arm and began to read the story of Ali Baba to him (she’d memorized it word for word, though strangely enough she actually felt the letters crystallizing on the page, having their full miraculous say), he kicked the book out of her hands and stomped off. Later he allowed himself to be held while he cried, and cried out at the trolls and ogres whose deaths he had marked in black on his avenging scroll. Even then Lily knew these compulsory tears were but a tiny portion of the huge rage shaking him in her arms. That this would become for him the unanswerable anger of his life. When she wept – for herself, for Tom, for the deep absence no accumulation of days or other joys would ever fill – most of her tears were for her son, for the life he had dreamed that would not be, for the consolation she would be forever called upon to give and be rebuked for. Perhaps I am better off, she thought, because I never learned to dream too far ahead; Old Samuels taught us how to dream backwards and be content. Teach me to be lucky, she begged him one terrible November night as she sat in the dark swaddling her son’s fury

  Brad was different. He seemed to accept her account of body and spirit, though she could tell it had no more reality for him than the rhymes bouncing in his head at night or as he lay among the spent clover of the meadowlands above the village – flat on his back, extinguishing the sun with an Ali Baba command. Avid for company the boys often played side by side, but only rarely now did their discrete fantasies intersect, and when they did, the outcome was usually swift and violent. Brad accepted Robbie’s sudden unprovoked fists as part of his lot in the scheme of things, even his due – but when the latter added, if he remember to, “I hate you”, Brad would stop crying at once and grow very still. This seemed to please Robbie almost as much as the tears, for he could then carry on his own game without even the background annoyance of his brother’s silliness. As a result Brad drew even closer to her. He ventured out less. He begged her to read to him, and as soon as she had got beyond her repertoire of memorized pieces and slowed to a near-halt at the balking print, he would then throw a tantrum, sometimes yelling out with impudent mockery the meaning of a word that would not come off her tongue. Later, in bed, he would nuzzle against her and start to sing “A froggie came a-wooing” till she relented and joined him part-way through and they finished up with a harmonious roar. I’m spoiling him, she thought, but she couldn’t think how else she could love him. Once when he called out to her from his sleep, she came across to the boys’ room in time to hear him say, “I saw Da, in my dream. He talked to me.” Robbie awakened too, said, “Da’s dead.” She held them both. When she woke up in the morning, they were still there.

  “Ah, there goes Lily and her boys,” grocer Redmond remarked to a customer during one of Lily’s infrequent visits to town. Lily and her boys. That would be it – her life – at least as far as she could see.

  There was so little time, it seemed, to think about the pregnancy, now in its eighth month. Fortunately it felt like the first one, lively and healthful. She had no discomfort except for the weight of the girl herself – she knew it would be a girl and addressed it always as ‘she’. This one will be mine, my private treasure, she thought, tasting the bitter sweetness of the notion, there’s no helping it. I shall try to give her father to her – when she’s ready – but by then she’ll be bonded to me. You have your Papa’s smile, I’ll say to her, and we’ll hug one another, feeling your absence, Tom, in our separate ways. Stop it, stop this, remember Old Samuels – dream backwards, dream of your lover blessing your flesh with the fire you stirred and vanquished with your own desire, his seed tucked away already bequeathed.

  November of 1870 turned out to be a cold and nasty month. Sleet storms roared in off the Lake freezing the last leaves to their branches while gusting after-winds snapped them free again. Every morning Lily had to get a fire going early in order to boil gallons of water to unlock the ice choking the well-line under the sink and the one in the yard as well. Robbie and Brad carted wood in from the shed – several of Garth Bacons pals had come out in September and cut four cords – but already she had used too much kindling trying to get fast, hot fires going, and Robbie was coming closer each morning to cutting off his foot as he wielded his father’s hatchet uncertainly. Young Mary Bacon was sent out by Maudie every Saturday, but had to return weekdays to go to school – “A whim she’ll get over soon enough,” Maudie promised. Mary helped to clean and prepare food ahead, but she was less proficient with an axe than Robbie. One day she walked Robbie in and out of the village several times – once in the dark – to make sure he could find his way to Maudie’s house at any hour, should the baby decide to make an impromptu entrance. From Bacon’s a buggy would be despatched to pick up Dr. Dollard in Sarnia. “Sophie’s out of business,” Maudie said through Mary, “too drunk to deliver.” Robbie was delighted with his role as scout and forerunner. Lily was sure he rehearsed it secretly during the afternoons when she had to lie down to rest and he was ordered not to leave the yard. Brad ‘never told’, though he was treated as if he did – daily.

  At any rate, Lily could see that life was going to be no easier after the baby came. She would need help. Help would cost money, even if one of Clara’s sisters could be persuaded to give up school for a while and come. And money there was little of. They h
ad saved almost a hundred dollars towards the cottage in town, and the Government had promised some compensation whenever they could find time to pass the necessary legislation. She could live for a year or more on that. Perhaps longer if the boys didn’t go to school, an option she had never seriously considered. What then? The whole acreage could be turned over and made productive, provided she was strong enough in the spring. But prices were uncertain as the new Confederation sorted out its priorities, the weather was fickle and the competition fierce. As Maudie would say not ungenerously, “You see now, Lil, why so many of us cling to the church; what else’ve we got to protect us when we’re down, when our men desert us?” Late one afternoon when she was out in the garden area looking for Robbie, she saw his tiny figure zigzagging through the withered bull-thistle of the meadow, and her eye caught the pines on either side of the opening she stood in. The windbreak. Uncle Chester’s barrier against the encroaching world, Aunt Bridie’s signal to the Grand Trunk of defiance and separateness, Lily’s beloved evergreens that sang softly in the summer and held the stars aloft in black winter skies. The last of the ancient horizons, old sagamore, she whispered to his presence somewhere beside her. Say yes. Robbie’s death-shriek shook her awake. A bull-thistle toppled. Another. He waved to the sentry.

  They must go. This winter, white-pine would still be fetching a good price, before the peninsula was opened up for systematic slaughter. Also, she realized, it was time. The smoke from the cottages was less than half-a-mile away. Some of the timber she could take back as sawn boards; she’d get someone, perhaps the timber-cutter, to put up two chicken coops. Chickens she knew. Eggs were a sure living. She’d trade vegetables for grain. Her thoughts raced, full of figures, schemes, possibilities. She barely felt Robbie’s petulant tug on her sleeve.

  When Mary Bacon came that Saturday – the last in November – Lily was still excited, and some of her enthusiasm had rubbed off on the boys. “I’m gonna help cut the trees down!” Robbie announced, “an’ Brad an’ me’s gonna collect the eggs every mornin’, ain’t we, Brad?” and he demonstrated his technique for terrorizing any hen who harboured thoughts of saving an egg for her own pleasure. Lily came out with Tom’s writing pad, his quill pen and a bottle of thickened ink. “I’d like a message to be put up in the post office,” she said, and Mary, wide-eyed, picked up the pen, eager to display her newly-achieved skills. She left, skipping through the wet snow.

  “When the hens get too old to give eggs,” Brad said, “what’ll we do with them?”

  “Chop off their heads an’ eat ’em!” Robbie said. “Eh, Mama?”

  Lily didn’t hear. She was clutching her abdomen with both hands.

  “The baby kick you?” Brad said, open-mouthed.

  “You okay, Mama?” Robbie clasped her arm and steadied her.

  “Yes,” she hissed, sitting down, dredging up a thin smile.

  That was no contraction, she thought.

  2

  Whatever fears pursued him, Robbie Marshall acted with a courage and sense of purpose that would have made his father whistle with pride. Despite the galling pain that stabbed incoherently – spitefully – at her body, Lily found time to worry about her seven-year-old melting into the snowy dark, lamp in hand, the map of his voyage floating a foot beyond its shivelled glow, her life in his care, his life suddenly lost to hers. As each scream jolted through her clenched teeth, Brad jumped in the invisible ring that pinned him to one spot on the earth. Between jolts she was at last able to ask him to bring her some water and another blanket. A long time later, hours it seemed, he meandered back in, humming to himself. He put the blanket on and began tucking her in, one tiny fold at a time. There was no water. Her throat burned. The pain no longer sliced into her in slender arcs, it scoured at the entire abdominal cavity, as if some drunken ploughman were dragging a harrow-disc cornerwise across it. Then the air around her went numb. She dreamt of Maman LaRouche in her ice-house, the soothing cool of ice on the skin, a sunny room shorn of flies.

  Dr. Dollard arrived with a rush and a clatter that woke Brad out of his dazed sleep. He started to cry as if he would die were he to stop. Mary went straight to him, forgetting that Robbie was still in her arms dreaming he was awake and strong and not really lost. Maudie and the doctor headed for the bedroom. Garth Bacon tethered the horse and sat in the democrat shivering between ‘belts’ from his flask. He was only thirty but looked fifty – already he’d seen too much of this. Nothing could ever brace him against the kind of screams that came, undeflected by wood or grass or muffling snow or alcohol, straight into this brain. He thought of a pig being gutted alive by a deaf-and-dumb butcher. She’ll die, he thought. We’ll all die.

  Dr. Dollard, puffing and sweating like a lumberjack, swore at Maudie, the fickleness of chloroform, at God’s indifference – wishing to Christ the woman would stop rising out of her death-drowse just long enough to disembowel him with an accusing shriek. “I said give me the forceps, you stupid girl. Quick! I might be able to save the child!”

  Maudie stood frozen to her feet. She couldn’t understand what was holding her upright. She could see nothing but a brace of female thighs wrenched apart; a battering, bloody child’s skull driven back and up and in by some bellicose, furred sphincter the doctor’s paws plunged into with fury and disgust. Around her the air stank, like an outhouse in Hell. Mary caught hold of her sister-in-law just as she gave up the ghost. Then Mary herself handed Dr. Dollard his forceps and positioned the lamp so he could see. She saw the dried blood on their pincering grip. She wondered how she had been born, then forgiven, then loved.

  “Gotcha by the ears, you little bugger,” the doctor gasped, pulling back as if he were rowing a coal-barge upstream. Lily made no sound to interrupt the whooshing blast of blood and pus that greased the baby’s slide into the air. The force of it knocked the doctor back onto his rump. The foetus dripped onto the bed. Maudie was awake now. All was in motion. The age-old rituals. Garth had come in and was stoking the fire. He listened for the signal, the all-clear. It didn’t come.

  Lily opened her eyes to see the tears in those of the women. “Thank God, you’re alive,” Maudie said. “It’s a miracle.”

  “The baby’s gone,” said Dr. Dollard wearily. “Probably died yesterday.”

  Lily whispered something in Maudie’s ear. “She wants to know if it was a girl,” Maudie said.

  The doctor appeared puzzled. “As a matter of fact, it was,” he said. “But it was all for the best, Mrs. Marshall. Your little girl was hydrocephalic, a Mongolian idiot.”

  Maudie and Mary both shuddered. The Lord moved in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

  “Come on, ladies,” barked the doctor, “we’ve got work to do.”

  Three weeks later Lily, always a marvel to the skeptics of the medical profession, was feeling well enough to send Mary back to her studies. Brad had slept with Mary every night since the stillbirth of little Kathleen. When Mary left he crawled in beside his mother. Robbie announced he was ready to trek into the village to give school a try. After the holiday, Lily promised, and he dashed out into the snow to re-enact the legend of his pilgrimage he was longing to find an audience for.

  Lily was sound asleep on the kitchen cot when Brad shook her awake. His eyes directed her towards the doorway. She felt the draft over her bare legs, the thinness of her shift under the blanket. The door closed and before it, filling most of the space there, stood a tall dark-skinned young man whose moustache rubbed against his smile. He pulled the tuque off his head and held it in front of him.

  “Your boy,” he said with a grin that was both sheepish and bold, “he tell me to come in.” Robbie popped out from behind one of the powerful legs; he had an axe in his hands.

  Lily sat up, still blinking.

  The accent was familiar. “I come about the notice in the post office,” he said and ruffled Robbie’s hair.

  3

  Ti-Jean Thériault swung his big axe and another of the great pines went crashing
to the ground right where it was supposed to. The boys, well out of the way, jumped up and sprinted through the snow towards Ti-Jean, who posed for them, one foot on the fallen tree like a hunter beaming over a bull-moose. He grinned wickedly and flung Robbie through the air, laughing at his squeals of terror and glee. Brad laughed, too, seated as usual about three feet away from Ti-Jean in a place where he could observe him, secure and rapt. Often Ti-Jean would make teasing lunges his way but he always stopped just short, just in time. Robbie grabbed his father’s hatchet and under Ti-Jean’s tutelage soon became proficient at stripping away the small branches of a felled tree. Brad would follow behind, trailing his fingers along the bark and stubs, humming to himself, keeping an eye on Ti-Jean in hope that he would burst into his strange, loud, off-beat singing – as he often did when the work had eased a little. Once, while they sat on a log sharing jam sandwiches, Lily saw Brad lean over and press his face into Ti-Jean’s rough Hudson’s Bay shirt; Ti-Jean kept right on talking to Robbie.

  Voici l’hiver arrivé

  Les rivières sont gelées

  C’est le temps d’aller aux bois

  Dans les chantiers nous hivernerons

  Dans les chantiers nous hivernerons

  trolled the timberman, and Brad, dawdling behind Robbie and his chattering hatchet, repeated the music with his high, boyish flute, the backwoodsy accent flawless. Soon he drifted off into the shelter of the hardwoods while Robbie kept hacking dutifully and Ti-Jean lit his clay-pipe and uttered puffs of smoke through his frozen breath. Later on Brad circled back, coming up unnoticed behind the busy labourers – the song still singing in his head, possessed.