Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  “Let’s snuggle,” Lily said, climbing onto the last bench, arranging her dress, and pulling Tom and their suitcase up. “Nobody’ll see us back here.”

  “We’ll get all the mud from the wheels if we sit here,” Tom said. “Your dress’ll be ruined.”

  “What chance has it got anyway?”

  Finally he laughed and moved in beside her. “You’re a funny one,” he said, putting the shawl around her.

  “I’d like to be,” Lily said.

  Ten minutes after the coach, its foul-mouthed driver, its four horses and ten passengers left the ‘depot’ at Wyoming, they were swallowed by the bush so thoroughly and so possessively that the effronteries of the makeshift town were instantly forgotten. Even the farms cut only one concession deep into the glacial alluvium of hardwood stands, festering swamps, treacherous sloughs and gravel-beds, and oozing boils of pent-up petroleum – none of which were sympathetic to road-construction. Three times the Road-to-Oil express had to be reactivated by the passengers themselves – the lurid imprecations of the driver-conductor seeming to lose their miraculous power the further they penetrated these wilds. On the first two occasions, where sloughs had simply gulped down both planks and supporting logs, the three women passengers were implored to remain aboard while the combined animus of the seven gentlemen and the verbal efforts of the owner-operator succeeded in disgorging the wheels long enough for the horses to reach secure ground. Tom was soaked and muddy; Lily wrapped a shawl around his shivering: “You need somethin’ to warm you up,” she whispered. There was no reply. On the third occasion, when a ruptured plank caused one of the front wheels to snap off and flung the coach and all into the muck beside the road, even the ladies had to descend and pitch in, after brief and less-than-dignified trips into the underbrush. Lily looked as if she had just danced the night away in a hog-wallow. Only the intervention of two burly passengers prevented Tom from dismantling the driver’s cursing-apparatus.

  “Damn your Aunt anyway!” Tom said, putting the shawl between them and grabbing at a strut to steady himself.

  Lily held her laughter firmly in check. Half-an-hour later she was snoozing on his broad shoulder.

  “I don’t believe it,” Tom was saying in her left ear. “Civilization. Of a sort.”

  “That there’s Petroli-ar!” shouted the driver in his best tour-guide voice. “Don’t blink now or you’ll miss ’er!”

  To their left they could see a broad clearing, the steeple of a church, several brave storefronts, and a scattering of shanties, tents and open-air camps. But what caught every eye in the carriage except the driver’s was the huge brick refinery with its sixteen stills and its chimney towering above the highest elm or pine. In the distant clearings the passengers saw their first three-poled oil-rig, the jerker-lines pecking away at the earth below like robins after a rain.

  “My God,” Tom said as they plunged again into the bush, “where are we going? Three hours ago we were sipping champagne in a garden.”

  “Auntie says it’s a grand place for a honeymoon.”

  “If you’re a toad,” Tom said.

  Lily laughed out loud, waking the woman in front of her.

  “You must have some Aunt,” Tom said, struggling to keep a straight face.

  It appeared Aunt Bridie may have been right. Towards the end of their third hour of jouncing, with the sun beginning to weaken over the western rim, they saw the unmistakable signs of human habitation. No farms of any kind, but rugged clearings – large and small – had been hacked and slashed out of the wilderness. It looked like a war zone, as pines lay rotting where they had been slaughtered, stumps protruded and tilted every-which-way, while still other trees – giant ash or ironwood – remained afoot, though horribly gashed and left to cure themselves. A tent or a shack were the only visible dwellings, usually squatted right beside a tri-pod log-derrick or a mound of greasy clay or occasionally near a drilling-rig pounding into the rock below. Everywhere the odour of oil hung in the air – like the aura of temptation itself.

  The town proper began like most other pioneer communities: razed clearings with cabins or plank shanties arranged more-or-less along roadways that might – with effort, imagination and luck – become streets with names. Gazing upon the mud-spattered beauty of his bride, Tom felt his heart sink even lower, beyond anger. Lily opened her eyes and brushed his cheek with her lips.

  “Look!” she said.

  The rutted road had mysteriously flattened and smoothed to the gritty bounce of gravel. In the midst of the outlying shantytown, they now beheld – like a palm-sweetened oasis or some miracle akin to the loaves-and-fishes – a self-contained one-street town. The silvery dusk-glow may have lent it more allure than it deserved, but it was a wondrous sight to the travel-weary arrivals.

  King Street, so declared by the black-and-white signs on either side and repeated at the two crossroads interrupting its quarter-mile length, was a freshly planked broadway extending as far as the eye could see, surmounted by sidewalks of finer board and trim railings, and overlooked by posts carrying the telegraph wire and bearing what appeared to be lamps of some sort. The building and shops on King Street – many more than two storeys high – faced one another, complacent in their painted splendor, proud of their false fronts and perfectly satisfied in their mutual adoration. The coach rattled mechanically along, passing other, more elegant carriages and making the gleaming glass-and-clapboard facades of shops, taverns and offices a magical blur full of undefined promise.

  “Six hotels, five gambling dens and a dozen oil companies!” proclaimed their indefatigable guide. “An’ this here’s the one we stop at.”

  Lily looked up, and guessed from what she saw printed above the upper verandah that this was the Lucky Derrick Hotel. It was the second-to-last building on the broadway. Next to it at a little distance lay the livery stable, bustling with activity. Beyond that, bush reasserted its hegemony.

  Now that they were stopped Lily could see that the town was awash with people. Ladies with long dresses and parasols strolled along the walkways, gathered at corners, or sat happily on benches surrounded by flowerboxes and pink paint. Men in formal coats buzzed in front of the taverns, tradesmen rushed here and there with purpose, and the twilight air shook with the cries of draymen, the muted roar from the gambling dens and the barbed hilarity of loose-tongued women.

  “Well now, here’s the honeymooners!” boomed a voice with a twang as clear as a Liberty Bell. “You must be young Tom,” it carolled, and Lily saw the puffy flesh of an outflung hand. “Welcome to the oil capital of the world.” Tom was pulled heartily onto the boardwalk. “And by golly this has to be the blushing bride. We’ve been waiting for you, sweetheart. Now don’t you look a beauty.” Lily felt the pulp of his grip on her fingers and hopped down, as gracefully as she could manage, beside Tom.

  “I’m Melville Armbruster,” said the man with the florid face. “Just call me Mel.” His grin was as brisk as a shoeshine.

  Standing under the shadow of the porch roof of the hotel were Uncle Chester and Aunt Bridie. Lily went to them, the four months away feeling like four years. Uncle Chester stepped forward and without a glance at her despoiled dress or the mud caked around her left brow, hugged her with arms that said: ‘this is it, we’re not letting you get away again.’

  Lily turned to Aunt Bridie, who met her extended hands, and they held one another at elbow’s length, letting their eyes do the greeting, probing, forgiving. Too soon Lily had to disengage, not fully satisfied with the brief tenderness she glimpsed at last beneath the new layers of toughening brought on by the latest calamities. More-than-that, though, Lily was puzzled by the presence of some eccentric note of hope, barely disguised as most of Bridie’s feelings had been out of long habit. Does she really believe in all this? Lily could not help asking herself. Had Auntie let her guard down after so much straightening experience? Had she given up? Surrendered to some final, lethal euphoric?

  Aunt Bridie cast a speculative eye
across the handsome form of Tom Marshall. She took in Lily as she stood beside him.

  “I’m afraid we’re a bit of a mess, Mrs. Ramsbottom,” Tom said, releasing her hand.

  “Aunt Bridie will do,” she said firmly.

  “Now don’t fuss about the mud, folks,” said Melville Armbruster. “We got rooms and a bath and as soon as you’re changed we’re all going to sit down and have us a king-size family dinner.”

  Lily saw his gold tooth flash – like a fang.

  5

  During the dinner, between the polite conversation and explanatory narratives, Lily kept one eye on her beloved and the other on Aunt Bridie. Armbruster’s boasting about their ‘suite of rooms’ was not much exaggerated. The company formed by the unlikely trio, New York and Upper Canadian Oil Explorations Ltd., had leased the back quarter of the Lucky Derrick – two floors that included a living room and dining area and huge bathroom downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs with a water-closet at the end of the hall. They had their own entrance. “Twenty dollars a day,” the New York half of the company informed them before they could ask. Auntie had smiled ever so slightly at that, with a quick lilt of the brow, and Lily had picked up the message though she could not decipher it. What was even more curious – perhaps distressing – was the way in which she sat so close to Uncle Chester, spooning sugar into his coffee, turning to him for confirmation of a point not in dispute, and once even patting him on the hand affectionately when he described for Lily’s benefit the especially efficient method he had devised out at ‘the works’ for making barrels on the spot. “Your Uncle’s workin’ on a new kind of jerker-line,” she said. “He’s the king-pin in this operation,” said Armbruster, jiggling the champagne glasses. Uncle Chester blushed, then beamed. Lily felt the stanchions give way under some part of the world she had deemed substantial. I’m being foolish, she thought as she poured cream into Tom’s coffee; I want my own happiness to be so perfect I can’t rejoice in theirs. But I want the whole world to be happy, she said almost aloud. I do.

  “We’re not exactly rich yet,” Armbruster was saying, steak sauce a-drool on his woman’s chin, “but as you can see, we ain’t precisely starving either. We’re scooping up the surface slop quite regular and shipping it out to London and even to Boston, thanks to the railways. Greatest invention since the Lord pulled the rib out of Adam and gave us the fair sex.” He included Bridie and Lily in his generous assessment and no doubt the ample serving-girl who brought in from time to time silver tureens and bulging platters of food for their conspicuous consumption.

  “To the railways!” Uncle Chester blurted out, glass raised foolishly before he realized his blunder.

  “To the Great Western for bringing us together,” Tom said quickly into the embarrassed silence. Aunt Bridie gave him a look bordering on approval.

  The company president insisted that they all take the world-famous taxi-ride up and down the King Street mall. When they stepped into the handsome buggy awaiting them outside the hotel, it was nightfall and the landscape was transformed yet again.

  There may have been starlight generated in the heavens that evening but its sheen was annihilated by the blaze of manufactured incandescence along the entire broadway of Oil Springs. The southern arch, from which the wedding party sallied forth on their grand tour, was set aglow by two fiercely beautiful gaseliers, their dragon-tongues decimating dark at the menacing edge. Along each side of the street the largest kerosene lamps in the known world flickered bravely against the canopy enclosing them. Every window of every shop, every tavern, every den of iniquity flung out its own ersatz luminosity so that the whole city seemed to shimmer and reverberate in the vast blackness around it, like the rings of Saturn. Lily snuggled against Tom and watched in disbelief as the boardwalks, verandahs and alcoves – shadows in the omnipresent light – hummed with the motions of human intercourse. Never had she seen such colour, warped and fantastic in the weird moon-glow – scarves, bonnets, bustles, coifs, bosoms, top-hats, canes, waistcoats. Flesh was flamingo, falsetto, iridescent. At the northern arch under the braggadoccio of ‘Oil Capital of the World’, they wheeled and started back. Lily closed her eyes and clung to Tom as if he were the last capstan on a dissolving wharf. Around her she heard voices unhook and drift towards disconnection, towards the far harbours of loneliness. Beneath her the wheels seemed now to be turning faster, the horses’ canter transgress to a gallop, the night-wind wail past the vacuum of her eyes till she could no longer hear the drumming of hoofbeats or the rolling of iron on wood – only the breathless rush of starlight through sudden wings.

  After an interminable day that had been given over to others – the Templetons, Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester, condescending clergymen, foul-mouthed stage-drivers and would-be tycoons – the bride and groom at last found themselves alone and unencumbered in a room they could make their own. For a moment – drained by the shock of departure, the travails of the journey, the hut and puzzlement of abrupt reunion – Lily wondered if she could recover that special part of her she had conserved for her lover and husband. As Tom slipped in beside her – naked under the linen sheets, the feather mattress offering no resistance to whatever shapes they might wish to compose – all doubts vanished. Even the thought that this whole episode might be a charade, a little girl’s doll-house dream with a fairy princess and her toy soldier and a bloodless conjugation. Tom, too, might well have been wondering what he was doing here miles from the nearest parade ground, pledged to a future he had not even the pleasure of imagining, unbuckled and vulnerable beside a stranger (whose past he dare not mention) in a room overwhelmed by Persian carpets, rococo wainscoting, and Venetian wallpaper replete with ambidextrous angels in comprised configurations.

  So, like many others before and after them, emprisoned by the past and fearing for the future, Lily and Tom gave themselves up to love. They let their bodies be ambassadors for what they felt, hoped, craved, had no words to say. They foraged in the other’s flesh to take the pulse of their own. In the aftermath they clung together, even in sleep, like sole survivors.

  6

  After breakfast the next morning, during which Melville Armbruster managed to wink and drop his voice an embarrassing number of times, they all drove out to Black Creek to examine the oil-drilling operations of the new company. “There’s a bit of walking to do out there; hope the kids’ve got some energy left!” Wink. Wink.

  But it was Uncle Chester who had to stop every hundred yards or so as they hiked from the edge of the bush-trail towards the drilling site. “You go ahead, I’ll be okay,” he gasped, but Aunt Bridie said with genuine warmth, “Don’t be silly, Chester, we’re in no hurry. That oil’s been there a long time before we come lookin’ for it.” “Yessiree,” Armbruster chimed in on cue, and began explaining to Tom all about the geologic formations and glacial events that had miraculously convened to produce the very petroleum they could smell seeping out of the earth around them. Uncle Chester caught his breath, took his wife’s hand and strode forward. Aunt Bridie, Lily noted, turned briefly to Armbruster as if to say “Thanks”.

  A half-mile or so into the dense bush brought them to a ten-acre clearing, the home of New York and Upper Canadian Oil Explorations. Here Armbruster took full control of matters, guiding Tom firmly away from Lily and leading him from one piece of machinery to another, certain that his exposition was both fascinating and necessary. To Lily’s surprise, Aunt Bridie followed them, listening intently to the details, turning from one to the other as the monologue broke down occasionally, and even offering one or two comments herself – which seemed to please Armbruster. If Tom were bored he gave no sign of it, relying upon the engrained courtesies of a proper upbringing, Lily felt a twinge of something close to envy. “Show me your woodworkin’ place, Uncle,” she said more loudly than necessary.

  Having got his second (or third) wind, Uncle Chester smiled freely at her. “Lily,” he said, “you’re still a wonder to me. I want to tell you, while I got the chance, that I�
��m very, very happy for you. An’ no one in this world deserves happiness more than you.”

  “What’s this?” Lily said, pointing to some metal contraption off to the north.

  “That, my girl, is a little invention I’m workin’ on. To speed up the barrel makin’. Come on over and I’ll tell you more about it than you’ll ever wanna hear.” He offered her his arm.

  They crossed the litter of broken trees, gouged roots and scorched pits towards a series of shacks and wooden benches that formed the cooperage section of the operations. To the south, where the others had gone, lay the three jerker-lines perpetually pumping the thick oil from shallow wells that had been dug out several months before. A single steam-engine, shrouded somewhat by the nearby trees, provided power for the pumps and for Uncle Chester’s carpentry works. Lily could see several men in the bush, cutting and preparing firewood.

  “We got five young men workin’ for us,” Uncle Chester explained. “Two of them help me with the barrels an’ shippin’. Nice lads, they are, from over Moore township way.” Lily could see the pleasure, so long absent, now in her Uncle’s face, some sense that the world was not only still evolving but that it held some place for him in it. But she knew him too well to be totally taken in. As he hopped about the area showing off, as modestly as he dare, the intricacies of his efforts and his plans for the coming winter, Lily was faintly aware that his eyes more and more reflected the hysterical hope of an orphaned child who’s found a home as perfect as it is temporary.