Lily's Story Read online

  Every morning now the boys were up before Lily. Robbie got a smoky fire going in the stove while Brad discomfited the embers into the fireplace. Moments after sunrise they headed out to the windbreak to watch for the jaunty figure of Ti-Jean cutting across the fields from the village. Lily could hear them arguing about who had seen him first. Robbie always won. Ti-Jean was boarding at Green House, a dingy hostel run by the Grand Trunk. He came every morning, Monday to Saturday – whistling, singing, puffing on his pipe, wool shirt open at the throat – and worked until four o’clock, when he waved the boys goodbye across the fields and disappeared. Lily made him and the boys a lunch, and brought hot tea out to the worksite from time to time. Robbie insisted on drinking out of a tin mug.

  Lily assumed that Ti-Jean would be returning home to his family in Woodston up in Huron County for the Christmas holiday, so she was surprised when he asked, in the diffident manner he invariably used when talking to her, if he might join them for the occasion. “Yes! Yes!” Robbie said before Brad could get in. Lily, who could deny her boys very little, said yes. Tom had always maintained the traditions of Christmas he had inherited from Aunt Elspeth and insisted that they keep them up ‘for Auntie’s sake’.

  When Ti-Jean asked her to come with them to select a tree, she said no, that she wasn’t feeling up to a walk in the woods yet, and he understood perfectly and the three men tramped off, axe and hatchets aloft, into the bush. Lily watched them go for a bit but had to sit down shortly. She felt dizzy; her heart fluttered and slammed. Get up, woman, she said aloud, you’ve got work to do and a life to lead.

  Somewhat later she put on her macintosh and boots and went out to wait for them. She noted that Ti-Jean was more than half-way through his work. He had cleared an opening in the windbreak almost fifty feet wide. She could see straight across to the village. When the job was finished, she realized that she would be able to stand in her kitchen window and view the entire sweep of the town from the rail-yards and docks in the south-west to the dunes and First Bush in the north and north-east. Between these extremes lay the cottages of the labouring folk, already four-streets square with hearth-fires aglow, smoke from their chimneys welcoming and insular, the cries of their children carrying freely over the fields. She thought she could see the tall brick chimney of the new two-room school on Victoria Street. Above the low snow-covered landscape before her, the winter sun burned without solace.

  At Ti-Jean’s behest Lily brought out the little Testament with Papa’s writing on it. “I read in English almost as good as French,” he announced after dinner, “that’s what my Maman say, an’ she’s never wrong, eh?” He winked at the boys and grinned shyly in Lily’s direction. “Always my job to read the Christmas story.” “After mass?” He laughed, went red in the face, then said, “Ah non, nous sommes Hugenots.”

  He read the St. Luke version of the nativity in a halting cadence that soon established its own authenticity, its own sort of flawed beauty – at least in the mind of one of the listeners. Though Lily had heard it before, she never lost her sense of the story’s magic, of its having happened in a longago time when such mysteries were radiant with possibility, as probable as the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter. She glanced over at Brad and was not disappointed.

  Some small presents were exchanged. Robbie’s eyes lit up at the sight of a bone-handled knife in its own leather case. Brad clutched the wooden carving of a Gryphon as if it were greased and likely to slip away. Lily blushed when she saw the Irish linen handkerchief. She went back into the shed and came out with a quilt under her arm. Ti-Jean stopped smiling. He took it in his hands, and she saw them shake a little. “Maman makes these,” he said. “But not like this.”

  “Not that one,” Lily said. “You can keep that one for now, but I’ll make you a proper one in the new year, when I’m feelin’ better.”

  Ti-Jean jumped up and went over to his haversack, the one he’d pulled the presents out of. He had a leather case in his hand. He drew out a fiddle, perched on a stool and began to play. And sing.

  Quand tu retourn’ chez son père

  Aussi pour revoir ta mère

  Le bonhomme est a la porte

  La bonn’femme fête la gargotte

  Dans le chantiers, ah ! n’hivernerons plus!

  Dans le chantiers, ah ! n’hivernerons plus!

  They all joined in on the chorus, several times.

  With both children asleep on the rug in front of the fire, Ti-Jean held the Testament in his hands for a moment, stared at Lily and said, “Who is Lady Fairchild?”

  “Somebody who lived a long time ago,” Lily said.

  Just after New Year’s when Lily arrived one morning with a jug of tea, Robbie looked up with a smug smile on his face and said, “Ti-Jean’s in the barn, ain’t he, Brad?” Brad’s smile confirmed the conspiracy.

  “There’s an old stove in there,” Ti-Jean said when he came up to them.

  “And a sleepin’ cot,” Robbie said.

  “We moved it there when Bachelor Bill’s place was torn down by the railroad,” Lily said.

  “A bit of glass on the broken windows an’ it could be fixed up real nice,” Ti-Jean said.

  “Nice an’ warm,” Robbie said.

  “But you’ll be through cuttin’ in two weeks,” Lily said.

  “Not if I rent a team an’ haul these logs to the mill before the break-up.”

  “I couldn’t afford to pay you.”

  “We’ll help, won’t we, Brad?”

  “After the mill pays you, that’s okay with me.”

  “It’d be cheaper in the long run,” said Lily slowly.

  “I could get some boards sawn,” he said, nodding to the boys.

  “To build the coops,” said Robbie.

  “For the chickens,” said Brad.

  “I’m real good with my hands.”

  Lily smiled. “Accordin’ to Maman,” she said.

  Robbie promised to give school a try as soon as Ti-Jean no longer needed him in the woodlot. It was nearing the end of January. Lily was feeling much stronger. She accompanied Ti-Jean and the boys to Little Lake but did not join them on the ice. Brad cried because he fell and couldn’t keep up with Robbie and Ti-Jean, but settled down when Ti-Jean sat and whittled a strange sea-monster out of a piece of frozen driftwood and told him a story about it half in English, half in French. Robbie found some older boys and showed them how good he was on skates. In a week or so the horses were due to arrive and both boys would get to drive them, Robbie first, then Brad. Ti-Jean fixed up Uncle Chester’s hideaway so that it was indeed warm and cozy. He loved the rope-rug Lily gave him for the floor and the curtains she adapted for the window over the bunk. He even had a little shelf where he kept some books – in French. “Junior Book Three,” he said proudly. “Best in the family.”

  Lily began to think ahead, to get herself organized for the spring. She hauled out of the shed Uncle Chester’s boxes and containers, still bearing the stamp of his patient hand. She set up the quilting frame once again, hoping to get four or five completed by April. With the boys out of her hair, even on Sundays, she could work miracles. However, she discovered she was short of rags and swatches. She knew she should go over to see Clara, who would supply her ten times over, but still she hesitated. Later, when I’m ready, she thought. Then she noticed the trunk where she’d tossed all of Tom’s clothes last August. She opened it quietly as one eases open a closet where some ghost has slept forever undisturbed. She lifted them, squeezed them, smelled them, let their hues and textures become vivid again. Then she took her scissors and one by one she cut the shirts, trousers, underclothes, socks and his navvy’s cap into neat geometric shapes she would weave into remembrance.

  Not every evening did Ti-Jean stay with them after their supper was done, though the boys made his periodic escape difficult. He had some young friends in town (“a girl friend,” Robbie breathed) or he had a book to finish reading in his refurbished quarters. But sometimes he stayed on for a
few moments after the boys were ordered to bed to have a quiet cup of coffee with Lily. As soon as they were alone, he became very shy, and only by gentle questioning could Lily – knitting or sifting patches for her quilts – get him to talk about himself. It wasn’t long before she learned to their mutual surprise that although he was born and raised in Woodston, his mother had come there from Sandwich in 1835. As a girl she had known Maman LaRouche, a LaPeche like her and a second cousin. Lily found it fascinating to hear of the Frenchman’s exploits in the War of 1812 narrated once again, but this time through a different set of filters. Maman herself came through as lively and as special as she had been in real life. Lily added some of her own favourite ‘Maman’ stories to the legend, the happier ones, the ones she cherished. Lily and Ti-Jean lapsed so easily into French that Lily was often unaware of it until some exotic phrase momentarily jolted the flow of their evening-soft, embering soliloquies. It was much later – and sandwiched between longer, more reminiscent narratives – that Lily was able to piece together his own story, and then only as a fragmented outline. His father had come to the Huron Tract with John Galt and Tiger Dunlop. He was a lusty primitive who lived for cutting trees and trekking miles into the snow-bound bushlands of the county. Ti-Jean was the oldest of eleven children, his mother wanted him to stay in school, he wanted to stay in school but at thirteen he was side by side with his father in a pinery. His father roughed him up on a whim or in a whiskey rage, he slapped his wife when she dared to intervene, and Ti-Jean, who was almost twenty and no longer petit, blackened both of his father’s eyes, keeping him out of the bush for a week, and his mother cried over her son and said she was ashamed of him, so he left to seek his fortune out of the bush, on the docks or the railroad or in a factory, he didn’t write and he didn’t go home for Christmas. He would never go home again.

  “It’s a beautiful baby girl with the sweetest big blue eyes I’ve ever seen,” Maudie said, then flushed and looked at her tea.

  “When was it born?” Lily asked.

  “Just before Christmas. A few weeks late.”

  “Clara was never one for bein’ on time,” Lily said and saw the puzzlement in Maudie’s face. “I’m kiddin’,” she added. Maudie appeared to be thrown into worse confusion, but after a strong dose of fresh tea she recovered.

  “You need to get into town more,” she said.

  “Sarnia’s a long ways for me.”

  “You know I mean the Point. Us. Our Wednesday afternoons.”

  “I know. I don’t want you to ever feel I’m ungrateful. You an’ Garth saved my life. I’ll come. Soon.”

  “Clara wants desperately to see you, but she’s shy about bringin’ the baby out here. She’d like you to come to the Christenin’ next Sunday.”

  Lily listened for a while to Robbie barking his hopeless commands at Dick and Diamond, the team of Belgians with a mind of their own. “I just can’t, Maudie. Not yet.”

  “We understand, we honestly do. But will you think about comin’ to the wedding in March, then? We’re cookin’ up a shivaree.” Lily smiled on cue. “You know Steve, Garth’s younger brother, an’ his girl Elaine is just the sweetest thing you’d ever wanna meet.”

  Lily waited for the codicil.

  “’Course, she’s Baptist, but still an’ all –”

  Ti-Jean let out an oak-rattling whoop and the horses, chained logs, master and apprentices could be heard moving through the woods towards the winding road that led all the way to Sarnia.

  Maudie dropped her voice into a deeper, minor key, full of inescapable regret. Lily leaned back. “You know, of course, it don’t mean nothin’ to me, or Garth for that matter, but I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t tell you what kind of ugly, disgustin’ gossip is goin’ around town.”

  “Folks don’t like me cuttin’ down the windbreak?”

  Maudie skidded a bit but got right back on the rails: “It’s about...him.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who, the Frenchie.”

  “Ti-Jean Thériault?”

  “Lily, I’m serious. I’m worried about your welfare even if you ain’t. You gotta remember your boys’re gonna be in school next fall. Think of them, for God’s sake.”

  “They like the Frenchie.”

  “That ain’t the point an’ you know it perfectly well. Folks are sayin’, out loud mind you, that he’s livin’ out here, that he used to be seen comin’ home from here every afternoon at a respectable hour but after New Year’s he’s only been back to town three or four times.” She cast a furtive glance towards the bedrooms, blushed, and plunged into the mire: “People are wonderin’ just where he’s hangin’ up his socks, if you get my meanin’.”

  “In the barn,” Lily said. She followed Maudie’s gaze around to the window and out across the drifts to where the smoke hung sweetly nicely above the chimney-pipe Ti-Jean had rigged up. “Ain’t that where Frenchie’s usually live?”

  “Thank the Lord,” sighed Maudie, depleted and relieved. “I’ll spread the word.” She finished her tea, took Lily by the hand and just squeezed it. For some occasions even Maudie had no words.

  “I will think about the weddin’,” Lily said and brushed her friend’s forehead with a kiss. “By the way,” she added, handing Maudie a package wrapped in tissue, “I made this little quilt for the baby.”

  The windbreak was down. The west wind that blew over the village now continued across the open fields and ruffled the shingles on the house where Lily Marshall and her boys lived. All the logs had been taken to the mill on Sarnia Bay. Ti-Jean received his pay. A wagonload of sawn boards and joists arrived in the last week of February and were stored in Benjamin’s stall until the first crack in the winter weather. A few days later it thawed a bit, and Ti-Jean and his helpers cleared the ground and drew the outlines of two coops in the softening earth. Indoors, they sketched plans and Ti-Jean explained the intricacies of squaring and gabling. The boys begged to go with Ti-Jean into Sarnia to buy nails and two tack-hammers. But Brad came down with a hacking cough, had to stay home, and despite having made up his mind to sulk all day, he was delighted to discover his mother could sing in French as well as that other weird tongue. He fell asleep and when he woke she was sitting on his bed.

  Just as Ti-Jean and Robbie came up the lane, the wind changed direction, slicing down unopposed from the north-west. By the time they had their boots off, the snow had started in earnest.

  Robbie was exhausted. Lily managed to get a little soup into Brad before he fell into a deep slumber beside his brother. She drew the comforter lingeringly over them. Ti-Jean was behind her in the doorway, watching. She kissed each of her sons, and when she turned to slip out, Ti-Jean was no longer there.

  She found him in front of the fire, propped on one elbow and staring into the flames, enlivened by the storm swirling above them. On the window sills fresh snow flowered. The room drew itself inward. Lily sat down on the sheepskin next to Ti-Jean, then lay back, succumbing to the languorous, sleepy heat of the fire already beginning to wane. Ti-Jean slipped his sweater over his head – his skin rubbed copper in the ebb of light. Behind her, the kitchen lamp sputtered, and she felt the darkness against the calves of her legs, her bare arms, the nape of her neck. Outside, the snow ceased, as if touched by a wizard’s wand.

  Ti-Jean rose up slowly dreamily – his torso bent like a paladin’s shield, burnished and rippled from splendid use, his eyes as bright as Lancelot’s might have been above Guinevere’s sudden beauty. He leaned over, captured her wrist and drew her up with him so they were standing together, only the fold of their hands fluttering between the reach and yearn of their bodies. His open hand folded around her waist, he eased her breast against his, he launched her clasped hand outward with his, upward like the wing of a revived bird, he was moving his legs against hers, nudging urging coaxing them into sensual motion. They were dancing. Hesitant, anapest, with no music but the song they were singing – separately – in their loneliness. They were dancing, in
a circle no rounder than the moon’s on All Hallow’s Eve. His teeth crushed her lips; she nipped his tongue with her own. A wave of chilling air shot between them.

  “I got to go home,” he said. “For a little while.”

  Lily gathered her breath, some strength and said, “Of course, you must. They been waitin’ a long time for you.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  “Don’t promise.”

  Lily helped him pack his few belongings. She was surprised to note that it was only about eight o’clock. The wind had eased off and fresh snow glittered as the moon sailed in and out of the thick clouds. Ti-Jean said that there was a way-freight leaving for the north from the rail-yards in about an hour. He knew the engineer; he could be home by midnight. He was a long time in the boys’ bedroom, though he did not wake them up to say goodbye. He held Lily again at the door, and for a second neither of them was willing to admit the impossibility of what they both desired. Then he turned and left. He didn’t stop to wave, as he did with Lily’s boys.

  Lily fell exhausted into Uncle Chester’s chair. Only the feeble glow from the spent fire gave any relief to the gathering gloom. Before she lit the lamp beside the quilting frame, she spoke into the darkness: “See what you’ve done? See what you’ve brought me to? Why did you leave me, Tom?”

  20

  When the snow stopped falling early in the evening, it seemed providential to the roisterers at the wedding of young Stevie Bacon and Elaine. The dining room of the Richmond House had scarcely been able to contain such exuberant well-wishing during the lengthy toasts and fractious dancing that followed. Several carollers toppled out-of-doors into the alleys behind, where they butted and boasted uproariously, making repeated use of the goosedown drifts. Nevertheless, there was a hearty cheer when the wind died and the moon intermittently winked their way again. It was nearing ten o’clock and almost time for the bride-and-groom to board the royal carriage and be whisked away to reconsummate their passion in the snug bower prepared for them at the very end of Victoria Street – where First Bush loomed and offered sanctuary to conspirators. Conspiracy had been afoot for days, led by the groom’s treacherous sibling, who had selected the brightest and the best only to take up the roles in his shivaree. “Just give ’em fifteen minutes,” Garth commanded with a fratricidal leer, “I know my brother!” A special ‘theme’ had been chosen for the costumes and musical score – wild creatures of the wood and tundra, a great notion somewhere confounded, however, when ten of the fifteen elect arrived wearing the ceremonial outfits of Blackfoot Indian Chiefs – the kind of natives invented to meet the original expectations of the first Europeans. But several pygmy-lie trolls, a diaphanous jinn (female class), and a brownish bear of indistinct origins served to vie the troupe-as-a-whole a more representative cast. Tom-toms abounded as well as horns to simulate the sounds of Arcady gone beserk.