Lily's Story Read online

  The wedding-sleigh had no sooner turned the corner at Edward Street when the revellers emptied out of a dozen secret places of the Richmond House into the vacant lot next door, where they hooted, admired, tested and tumbled towards assembly. The bear ambled after one of the squaws, licking her chin as if it were a honeycomb until she was, alas, rescued. From The Queen’s livery stable across the street a beer-wagon, devoid of barrels, came skidding behind the bit-chomping fury of matched Percherons. The coachman had some difficulty in checking their devotion long enough for the carousing tribesmen to come aboard, but even the bear was pulled, rump-first, into this racing, four-masted schooner of delight. The runners over the snow sang in sibilants only; the wassailers tipped their flasks starward and hugged and rehearsed the ages-old scenes of carnivale.

  As prearranged, the sled was brought to a halt a block away from the victim’s house. Garth Bacon, straightening his eagle’s feathers, called for silence, then peered ahead of him, looking at the ground in a puzzling manner that sent an icy shiver rippling back through the crowd. “No tracks.” The news was passed along in a sinking whisper. Garth came back from his inspection of the house and peered disconsolately into the faces agleam with war-paint and blazing, expectant eyes. “They sure didn’t come here,” he said loudly. “There’s no sign of horses and no footprints anywhere near the place. We’ve been hoodwinked.” “Where in hell’d they go?” Much fruitless speculation here. Two braves came to blows; no one noticed. Harvey Shawyer spoke up. “No wonder my Bess was actin’ queer all day.” “Queerer than usual, you mean.” “Shut up, Digger.” Harvey was the bride’s uncle by marriage. “She blushed every time I mentioned Woodston for the last two weeks.” “Woodston?” “Bess’s sister lives up there. An’ her husband’s the engineer on the way-freight!” “An’ the way-freight was sittin’ there, an hour late, waitin’ for them!” “Hoodwinked,” Garth said, his regalia adroop. “C’mon, Mose, turn ’em around, we still got a bit of the night left.”

  Most of the revellers clambered back onto the wagon and let it carry them at a forlorn trot back to the Richmond House, where a few would try to revamp their gaiety. The bona fide roisterers, however, remained – half-a-dozen strong: male, thwarted and bearish. They sat down on a snowbank outside the dark house and drank from a common flask. Digger Smythe stood up. His eyes ballooned in the moonlight like Bacchus before a binge. “Fellas, we might’ve missed some cozy bundlin’ in this here house, but I know where there’s some fresh snugglin’ takin’ place right this minute. And it ain’t been blessed by no minister and it ain’t been properly shivareed!” A chorus of whoops confirmed the righteousness of the suggestion, and the motley band of make-believe savages set out to the south-east across the fields in pursuit of pleasure. They were not a third of the way when the wind began to gust through their merriment. Then the snow came back in broken flurries, periodically blotting out the orange glow on the horizon ahead of them.

  The chieftain halted his troop with a raised palm. He bent over and out of his ample quiver a number of cattails fell into anxious hands. A match flared. The flames from the kerosene-soaked torches leapt wildly in the dark. The snow sizzled and retreated. A tom-tom began to search for a stag’s heartbeat. On the faces of the war-dancers the slashes of chrome and ochre shimmered like harlequin masks under gaslight. As if they were circling a wagon-train, the roisterers – fired by whiskey and disappointment and ineradicable envy – swarmed about the isolated cottage, beating the drum of their own pent passion, waving their flambeaux like flags from purgatory, and chanting over and over till the syllables separated one from the other and smote the air like incendiaries:

  Shame, shame, double shame

  Shame, shame upon your name

  In their zeal several of the harrowers broke ranks and dashed up to the windows of the seraglio, thrusting their torches against the tainted glass and grinning hideously, as if to deliver the devil a blow in kind. In their haste, two of them bumped into one another, stumbled, left their torches where they dropped, and began slugging it out. Around them the litany of mortification continued.

  At first Lily was not frightened. When she heard the shouting she got up from her quilting in time to see the torches flare up, then watched them approach raggedly through the snow. She recalled that Stevie Bacon was to have been married earlier in the day, and she guessed that this was the spillover from the customary shivaree. Their bizarre costumery and the derisive, taunting chant merely reinforced her suspicions. She decided to douse the lamp, slide the bar across both doors and wait them out: whiskey-valour, she knew, had a short life. And the boys were in a deep, safe sleep. But when the wild, uncoordinated whooping started and several of the savages made daring, unauthorized charges at the house, Lily decided that it might be better to waken the boys and tell them what was going on. Tom’s shotgun hung where it always did, near the main door.

  She had just started towards the boys’ room when she heard Brad shriek. Fumbling with the lamp, she ran in to find him paralyzed with fright in front of the tiny window over the bed. The afterimage of the demon’s visage still glimmered in the glass – a distorted grimace so real it could have been the Bogeyman stepped right out of an innocent’s nightmare. Then the torch-flames rose up and incinerated it. Brad leapt across the bed and grabbed Lily around the waist and buried his face in her skirt.

  “Mama, Mama, Mama,” he screamed. Lily picked him up and carried him into the big room; Robbie trailed them with a lamp.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she murmured, cradling him on the cot, “it’s only the men from the wedding, come to give us a little scare, like Hallowe’en. They’ll go away soon. Shh…shh…”

  Suddenly Robbie yelped as if he’d been stepped on. “There’s another one!” he cried. Across the kitchen window, Carcajou flashed through a gauntlet of fire and perforated shadow; a rabid Coyote’s grin swallowed his eyes, and his mouth became a wolverine’s howl, hovering and thinning. Robbie began to sob with fear and shame, reaching for his mother’s hand and jerking it away from Brad’s shoulder.

  “Make them go away, make them go away.” Brad’s screams connected and became one hysterical plea. Lily jumped when something thudded against the shed wall behind her. They’re coming in, she thought. Where are the shells?

  Shame, shame, double shame

  Shame, shame upon your name

  Marshall, Marshall, Marshall, Marshall

  Shame, shame –

  The chant stopped. Soft but urgent footfalls in the snow. Silence. They were gone. Brad was now blubbering contently in her lap. Robbie had let go.

  “Mama!” he shouted. “The shed’s on fire!”

  Lily whirled around. Smoke was pouring under the door to the shed. She ran across and flung back the bar. When she looked into the back room she saw the woodpile was ablaze, as was the outside wall behind it. Above her she watched the first, hopping blue flames take hold of the cottage roof.

  Lily spoke quickly. “Robbie, get your boots an’ your coats. We gotta get out right now.” She slammed the door shut and raced across to the bedroom, fighting the panic that was clutching at her throat and paralyzing her thoughts. Blankets, she muttered, it’s freezing out there and half-a mile to the nearest house. She grabbed whatever was nearby, stuffed mittens and scarves into her pockets and rushed back to the boys, neither of whom had moved an inch. The room was full of smoke and the roof over them seemed to be melting. Struggling with her own fear as best she could, Lily dragged both her boys through the front door and out into the night. She did not even know which direction they ran in, but they kept on running until she found herself winded and kneeling in a huge drift.

  “Mama, we’re freezin’,” Robbie sobbed with his arm around Brad, who was speechless, and coughing.

  Lily found two blankets still tangled in her arms. She wrapped the boys up and squeezed them against her. They had no boots. The boys had their thick night-socks on. She was barefoot. She looked back. She could hear the cr
ackling of wood ablaze, but saw nothing but the wild blizzard raging around them. The barn, she thought. We should have gone to the barn. Ti-Jean’s stove might still have been warm. Where was it? A charred beam crashed noisily, but she could not tell which direction the sound had come from. The wind-driven snow muffled and warped. We’ll freeze out here, she thought, in fifteen minutes.

  “Come on,” she said to the boys, “let’s start walkin’; we gotta get to town.”

  “I know the way,” Robbie said, “even in the dark.”

  There was no darkness to be seen, not a jot. They walked in what Lily prayed was a straight line. She picked up Brad and carried him swaddled in her arms. All the feeling left her feet. Robbie dissolved in front of her. She cried out his name. The wind blew it back. He rematerialized in her hand. “I saw a light,” he said, “I think I did. Over that way.” Her legs were gone, she couldn’t tell if they were moving or not. “Come on, Mama, come on!” She allowed herself to be dragged along. Suddenly, all the feeling and power returned to her legs, she was running swift as a deer towards an obliterating white light as big as the sun, it had a halo shimmering around it, she called out some words of welcome. “Get up, Mama, get up! Please.”

  She was being carried bumpily, head dangling, the snow melting and seeping down into her eyes. But the arm around her was powerful, and the stride under her was sure and unrelenting. Her feet were burning. She heard Robbie’s breathing, somewhere behind her. Where was Brad? They were slowing down. Some light pierced the snow-haze, then a wavelet of warm air as gentle as that from a baker’s oven. Kitchen smells. Feet on fire.

  Lily had been looking at Robbie and Brad for several moments before she realized she was awake. They smiled warily at her. They were alive. She peered around. They were sitting on a mattress of some sort on the floor of a shanty. She recognized the smells, the drafts, the excessive heat. Someone had rubbed her feet and slathered them with grease. She could feel the blisters rising against it. She looked for their saviour. He emerged from behind the stove, his arms loaded with elm. He smiled at her.

  At first she thought it was a trick of the candlelight or a result of the dizziness following her blackout, but in a moment she realized that what she was seeing was real. The man – grizzled, in his sixties, hair askew as if in a state of permanent fright – had only one arm, an elongated ape-like appendage that had grown in strength and bulk with the uses it had been put to since losing its coordinate. He had taken off his musty sweater, leaving only a sweat-creased undershirt that exposed the socket where the left arm had once joined his torso – a pouch of flesh as puckered as the grin of a toothless crone. His face was animated by wrinkles and abrupt gesticulating eyes unchecked by brows (that seemed to have been singed off while he leaned too close perhaps to the campfire along the hobo-glens of some distant rail-yard). A thin scar wriggled over one side of his grin.

  He was gesturing with his fingers and arm like a mimist drawing a map of his words with his body; Lily felt the tension and frustration in his eyes as she shook her head and tried to find her own voice. Suddenly, with a magician’s celerity he was out of the door and gone. Lily leaned over and drew Brad into her embrace. He was silent and still – deep in shock. Robbie crawled next to her and hung on, crying softly to himself. Wherever they were, they were safe, and together. She gritted her teeth against the searing pain in her feet, closed her eyes, and waited.

  Minutes, hours later, the door swung open. Lily felt the breeze of a great bustle and flurry against her eyelids but could not persuade them to open. The door rattled shut with resolution. Lily smelled garlic, whiskey, fresh sweat: a huge presence in the room.

  “Christ-take-me-ridin’-in-a-teacup, it’s Lily Marshall, an’ the two bairns I brung into the world!”

  Lily opened her eyes and saw the familiar face beaming down at her. “Sophie,” she whispered.

  “Spartacus here tells me your house burned down an’ he found you an’ your lads wanderin’ up Michigan Ave.”

  “He saved our lives,” Lily said.

  “Only Spartacus is dumb enough to be out in a storm like this, eh? But thank the Lord he was. My, my, look at those feet. C’mon, you old fart,” she snapped, “help me carry them across to my place.”

  Spartacus was peering over Sophie’s shoulder like a genie waiting to be recognized. Lily saw his eyes clearly in the light. She knew them. He hopped to one side and swept Robbie up onto his gnome’s shoulder. Brad clung to his mother.

  “We better get a sled,” Sophie said. “Don’t worry, Lily. We got lots of room at our place. You’re safe now. You’re in the Alley.”

  Spartacus went out carrying Robbie. Lily tried to get up.

  “Don’t worry about him, he looks queer but he’s okay. Can’t talk a word to strangers. Used to be a pedlar south of here years ago until some mark he was skinnin’ ripped his arm right outta the socket an’ then beat him over the head with it like a Chinaman’s gong. Ain’t been right since.”

  Brad moaned in his dreams. Lily was shaking all over.

  “Just a little fright,” Sophie soothed as she turned Lily’s feet over in her soft, soft palms. “And a twinge of frostbite.” Then she reached up and unhooked Brad from his mother’s death-grip. The child settled against her bosom – cradled by two sturdy, rocking arms – opened its eyes and then closed them peacefully. “He’ll be all right. One of my boys’ll be along in a minute with a sled.”

  “Thank you,” Lily murmured drowsily.

  “What’s that you got there?” Sophie said.

  Lily had pulled something out of the large pocket in her skirt. It was clamped in her left hand. She looked down. It was the leather sachet from under her bed, bearing its treasure. As she slipped into unconsciousness, she was sure she could feel the pulsing of the jasper heart.

  21

  1

  Sophie Potts was something else. Everybody in Mushroom Alley said so in one odd way or another, and Lily wasn’t about to deny one dram of the praise due her. From the moment she entered Spartacus’ hovel and saw Lily’s boys shivering with dazed refugee’s eyes, she took charge of the situation. “Bein’ a midwife, as I used to be, you kinda get used to fear an’ confusion,” she often said in her defence. “Some women used to think I was an angel an’ some tried to spit in my face like it was all my fault. Either way I just plunged in an’ did my job. You don’t expect thanks in this world or you’ll wait a long time for the train to come in.” The next day Sophie sent her older boys, Stewie and John, out to see what had happened. In the meantime she put salve on Lily’s burns, lay her down in her own bed and fed her broth a teaspoonful at a time “My Peg’s takin’ care of your boys,” she said, “they ain’t got a scratch on them.” The smell of bacon frying and singed toast floated through the house and lingered; Lily heard the skirl of children’s laughter and Robbie’s voice, low and brave, saying “It’s all right, Brad, everythin’s gonna be all right.” John and Stewie reported back, out of breath and saucer-eyed. Sophie came in and sat down heavily beside Lily on the bed. “Nothin’ left of the house. Just charcoal. Even the stove melted. The snow stopped it from spreadin’. Your little barn wasn’t touched.”

  Lily tried to take this in. Robbie suddenly peeked around the curtained doorway, half wrestling with two black-haired male replicas of Sophie Potts, and grinning. “We could set up in the barn for now,” she said. “Then…”

  “You could stay here, too,” Sophie said.

  And they did.

  As soon as Lily was able to walk, Sophie led her across the cart-path that served as a road towards a barnboard shack squatting forlornly among the scrub alders. For a big woman Sophie moved adroitly in a sort of ambling trot. When they came up to the shack, she eyed it with the zeal of a horse-trader, kicked the door open and seemed delighted that it stayed upright on its rusty hinges. “Solid wood,” she said, entering and motioning Lily in after her. “Christ knows where them Icelanders hooked it from.” To emphasize her point she slapped both palms do
wn upon a thick table that dominated the large main room. Dust skittered into the thin sunlight offered by two narrow windows with glass. Sophie pointed to a misshapen stone hearth unadorned by andiron or grate. “Only place in the Alley, except the hoorhouse, that’s got one of these. I don’t think the poor buggars knew what a stove was. Most of ’em live in igloos back home, I’m told.” She tested the resistance of a doorless cupboard over the washstand, loosening one shelf but otherwise seeming to approve. “For your best china,” she winked. Then she flung back a curtain that once might have been a velveteen skirt, and when the dust cleared she said, “Voilà, they left the beds! See, you could put a screen down the middle an’ have yourself two bedrooms, one for the boys.” Lily’s eyes were casting slowly about the room. “Back there?” she asked. “Ah, that’s what I really brung you over for,” Sophie said, and she pushed open the back door and squeezed herself through. “Them Icelanders, there was two of them, brothers we reckoned, sneaked off the train headin’ for Manitoba an’ set up house in the shanty that used to sit right here. Then they built this place, real sturdy. Didn’t talk to a soul, but I liked them. We could hear them jabberin’ away in their crazy lingo – either laughin’ to bust a gut or arguin’ fit to murder – and as the Alleyfolk usually do, we left them some food an’ essentials when they wasn’t lookin’. We figured they was plannin’ on becomin’ fishermen ‘cause they went down to the shore every day an’ stood watchin’ the pickerel netters real close. One day they started buildin’ a boat, just back of here, an’ then they added on this big shed.” She waved at the luxurious, spendthrift space all around them. “An icehouse, we thought. Who knows? One day soon after, some ‘official-lookin’’ gentleman come up the Alley an’ before anybody could figure out a way of warnin’ them, the two brothers was hauled away in irons, lookin’ awful sad. We never did find out what crime they committed.” The shed had no floor but it was spacious, had windows on the east side, and boasted several homemade tables and benches and two enormous cast-iron pots.