Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  Aunt Elspeth, of course, did not come for Christmas but sent a lovely note and an heirloom silver cream-and-sugar set rescued from the bailiffs. Her letter informed them that Lucille had become engaged to a British regular stationed at Fort York, but had promised to ‘stay on’ as long as she was needed. Once January came, though, all attention was focussed on the Fitchett wedding. Particularly happy was the arrival of Bags Starkey with his cousin from London. He was manoeuvring quite well on his own with the aid of two crutches and a disarming grin. He marvelled at the vigour and wholeness of his namesake. Unfortunately he had to return to London right after the service because there was a chance he might get a job selling tickets for the Great Western there.

  The ceremony was held at the Methodist Church in Sarnia, where the Reverend Elmo Noseworthy managed to smudge with his homiletic proclivities an otherwise colourful and spontaneously joyful occasion. After the formalities of a dinner at the Grand Trunk, where the toasts were charged with apple-juice, the older folk said their farewells and the younger ones, including the bride and groom, remained to continue the celebration. Or start a new one. A cask of whiskey was discovered nearby, with a dozen bottles of iced champagne for the ladies. The working men and their wives sang, danced and caroused until they were kicked out at ten in the evening. The happy couple then repaired by cutter to the bride’s home, left vacant for them, where they were to spend the night before setting out on the day-express for Toronto and a week’s honeymoon.

  What they didn’t know was that they were not to be alone during their nuptial greeting. A charivari, or shivaree as it was called hereabouts, had been cooked up by several of Gimpy’s crew and avidly agreed to by at least a dozen others, including – against all entreaty – Lily herself. As soon as the couple left the station, the participants pulled out two canvas bags containing their costumes and instruments. While two fellows hitched up a team and sleigh, the others donned their cloaks and masks and hopped aboard, singing badly enough to wake even the most unappreciative sleeper. Under a crisp, condoning moon they floated across fields and through the cathedral arches of First Bush on to Errol Road. They sang and hugged whoever came within range. Silver flasks returned the silver moonlight.

  They arrived not more than fifteen minutes behind the lovers themselves. “Just time enough to get their nerve up!” some wag remarked to more laughter than he deserved. As they approached the isolated farmhouse of the Grocott’s, the revellers shushed each other repeatedly until only the comic jingle of the harness-bells could be heard. A wan light showed through the blind on an upstairs window. The buskers leapt soundlessly into the fresh snow and, as prearranged, formed a loose ring around the building. Lily had on a sort of bat’s costume with a black beaked mask, that had holes for the radar of her eyes, and a flexed cape attached to the wingbones of her arms. An outsize tambourine readied itself in her left hand. All I need is a broom, Lily thought, hoping the baby would not complain too loudly about the night’s ride. She’d had only one glass of champagne, hours ago, but her heart hammered with excitement and she longed for the signal to be given. Near her she could see Tom in a botchy deerskin coat with a set of rusting antlers strapped to his brow and shoulders. Between his legs he held, with both hands, a bulbous blood-sausage. Further down she spotted Maudie’s husband dressed like Bonhomme with coal eyes, a carrot nose and a waxed turnip where his legs should have joined. A battered bugle – flotsam from Sebastopol – sat poised for action. Maudie herself, habilled like a milkmaid in dramatic need of her own service – raised the alarm with a single clang of her cowbell. The din – sudden and relenting – would have stunned a deaf-mute: tuneless bell, oak rachets, soured horns of every ilk, tea-kettle drums, and underneath it all a thumping, manic tambourine. The window above shot open, and Gimpy, wrapped diagonally in a towel, blinked unbelievingly into the soft darkness, then staggered back as a chorus of chanting voices joined the accompaniment – each chorister contributing, in no precalculated order, one or more words or syllables to a love poem that might eventually have been translated thus:

  Gim-pee Fit-chett!

  Gim-pee Fit-chett!

  Give your all,

  Limpy, Limpy

  Ain’t no ball!

  Clar-ra Fit-chett!

  Clar-ra Fit-chett!

  Give him some

  Limpy Gimpy

  Ain’t any fun!

  Clara’s ghost appeared beside her husband, and a further cheer went up from the troupe who speeded up their continuous circling movement and began a new chant:

  Come down! Come down!

  Or we’ll wind you up

  And blow your house down!

  This encouragement was assisted by a tumultuous fanfare from all sections of the band and much lurid waving of props and appendages. Clara’s blush turned the snow on the sills pink.

  At last the wretched couple, hastily clothed, opened the front door and the troubadours entered en masse. Some untapped champagne was produced, toasts and cheers rained down upon Gimpy and Clara, who responded with the remnants of their dignity and good will. Following traditions as old as the habitant’s arrival itself, the well-wishers departed meekly, sat motionless in the woods for twenty minutes, and then when the time seemed propitious, sent up a final, deflating barrage of congratulation.

  Tom leaned over in bed and put his hand on her stomach. “You all right?”

  Her eyes shone past him in the dark. “We’re fine,” she said sleepily.

  2

  At Robbie’s nativity the father was drunk and the attending physician sober; at Bradley’s birth it was the reverse. Which was, when you looked at it from the long view, only appropriate. After all, nothing about the pregnancy had seemed normal, and certainly the birth itself was spectacularly unordinary. Bradley would not kick, as the other two did. Even by the seventh month – the middle of March – Lily had to lie on her side and press her fingers firmly into her abdomen at a point where she figured his forehead ought to be and then repeat her invitation before she got a faint ‘tunk’ returned to her from within, like a single tap on a toy drum. At least it’s alive, she thought, though it doesn’t seem anxious to come into the world. “It’s probably a girl,” Tom would soothe, “as shy as her mother.” “It don’t feel like a girl.” “And remember, you get to name her.” If by chance it should turn out to be a boy, Tom had already got Lil’s approval to call him Bradley, Aunt Elspeth’s family name. I’ve already named my little girl she wanted to say aloud.

  Lily suffered from cramps and from nausea, which struck her down at odd and inconvenient moments. She had missed two of the Wednesday teas because of it, even though Clara Fitchett had offered to give her a ride on her way past (she and Gimpy were living with her parents on the Errol Road until their new house in Sarnia was completed, after which Gimpy was planning to take a foreman’s job at the Great Western). She was beginning to feel quite isolated, but with Robbie now crawling about like a rambunctious baby-coon she was kept busy and alert and often laughing at his antics. He’s a show-off, she concluded, and we’re spoiling him rotten with attention. What else would I do? Her heart would skip a beat and stall while she watched him climb Uncle Chester’s chair, test the limits of his agility against the vindictiveness of gravity, then having breathlessly escaped, look up and laugh as if he had just played a joke on the universe and won. When he toppled, which wasn’t often, he would lie stunned, waiting for the pain and trying out his arms and the air tentatively – like a chrysalid with its limp wings – and then, reassured that the world’s kick was not lethal, snap his head across to glare at his mother: sometimes crying (more often not) but always letting her know that this humiliation was, deep-down, her doing, her failure to govern the forces aligned against him. Only in the most extreme instances – when the terror inside was wild and formless – would he consent to collapse in her arms for consolation. If Tom were watching, he never cried.

  Despite these daily joys and minor catastrophes, Lily found herself missing the
company of Maudie Bacon, Clara Fitchett, Alice Bowls and the other regular workers’ wives who visited one another, chatted on Michigan Ave. between shops, exchanged recipes and gossip, and admired one another’s children – to provide some relief from the never-ending labour of days and weeks. Like Lily these women were young and were new to town-life, just as the towns themselves had had to be improvised to circumstance. On their farms they had shared the labour with siblings and cousins and spinster aunts. Here they had increasingly to rely on one another. Little wonder, then, that the churches easily became the focus for social activity, and much more. As the wife of a fellow-worker Lily was accepted into their company cheerfully, but she found that most of the organized social events revolved around the church – its physical facility and the natural calendar it provided for the seasonal flow of Canadian life: Christenings, weddings, confirmation, baptism, concerts, temperance meetings, strawberry socials, bazaars and bees – each with its own sectarian colour and sanction. “Oh, just come along, Lily,” Maudie said again and again. “We love you. And I don’t believe half of what that old fart up there goes on about, nor do most of the girls.” “I can’t,” Lily told them, and she knew that after a while, when the village built its own churches and she kept on saying no, it would begin to matter more and more. “You do believe in God?” Clara once asked, shocked at her own question. Lily could find no words to answer her, and was immensely relieved that whatever look she was giving Clara was sufficient. “Well, then, come along, for Christ’s sake!”

  For the time being, though, she felt only that she missed their company and their curious kind of affection – given so freely, unencumbered by any expectation beyond the pleasure of her presence. But then she would gaze at Robbie asleep in his rocker-bed, feel the weightless burden of the baby at the centre of her, think about Tom’s coming through the kitchen door, and wonder how she could ever again feel sorry for herself. At such moments she was able to say: I have changed, my life is becoming what it is to be, I am Lily Marshall.

  The day before All Fool’s Day Tom came in for supper looking grim. He waited impatiently until young Mary Bacon, who had been helping with the housework and minding Robbie while she napped, left for the village. Then he spoke at length as if he were delivering a rehearsed speech whose import could not be changed no matter how it was presented. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” he said, “but before Christmas I wrote to the lawyers I used to work for in Toronto and asked them, as a favour to me, if they would check into the existence of an oil company controlled by Melville Armbruster in or around New York. I got a letter back the saft.”

  Lily flinched, one hand absently on her abdomen.

  “Maybe I should save this for –”

  “Go on,” Lily said. “It’s just the usual.”

  “They did find a company, a real estate company, registered in New York City, with Armbruster as president and chief owner. But it was sold – very suddenly and very mysteriously – in the spring of last year. After that, there is no trace of him anywhere in the business world of that area, as far as they can tell. They also wrote to his solicitors, Van Diemen and Cruickshank, and they said that he had gotten out of big business altogether, and if he had a forwarding address, they were not free to give it out.”

  Lily began clearing away the dishes.

  “I’d like to go down there and thrash it out of them!” Tom said.

  She’s alive, I know it. I hear the underwater voice, pleading.

  “Was that all?”

  “Uh huh. That was it.” And a dunner for twelve dollars.

  Lily flinched again, bent double by the pain.

  “Oh God, I knew I should’ve kept this till after,” Tom said, hurrying over to her. He got as far as one of the kitchen chairs.

  She was smiling through her grimace. “In a few minutes it’s gonna be after,” she warned him.

  “It can’t be! You’re only seven months –”

  “Started earlier this afternoon. An’ this ain’t false labour,” she said, and squeezed a scream shut to emphasize her point. “Feels funny, but it’s real.”

  “Damn, we should’ve kept Mary here. Never mind. I’ll get you set up in the bedroom. If Robbie wakes up, just let him cry. I’ll be back in forty minutes flat. With Sophie.”

  About two hours later, well after the sun had set and the night-chill was settling in over the trees, Lily heard the sound of multiple footsteps along the back-garden path. Nubbins was awake at her side, but restless and irritable. She felt numbed and disoriented by the pain. Blood had oozed and stiffened on her lower lip. The sheets were soaked twice through with her sweat. She was terrified the boy would tumble off the bed, strike his head on the floor, and lie helplessly dying while she lay equally helpless above him. However, he seemed to sense that something was very wrong, clinging to her damp fingers and complaining only fitfully. All this pain, Lily was thinking, and nothing is happening. The contractions seized, rolled downward in fierce, expulsive knots, sighed and hovered menacing until the next nerve trigged them again. But the foetus gave no sign of its willingness to be so crudely dislodged; it seemed to be fighting back, to be pounding the little battering ram of its brow against her stomach, her lungs, her heart, some place more secure and secret than whatever lay at the other end. But the expunging muscle was not to be denied. It was a sledge with breath and will, needing no name to intimidate or be moved, it was autonymous, life-lending, suicidal. It was driving the baby backwards into her heart like a tomahawk of raw flesh. She screamed as loud as she could but no sound reached her ears. She heard a distant thump. Robbie, fallen away, skull punctured...dead. The cramp eased and her mind let the room back in. Robbie was crying.

  “Cut that snivellin’, Marlene, an’ get the little tyke outta here! Hurry up or I’ll give you another cuff.” It was Sophie’s voice. Lily began to weep quietly with relief.

  “You go right ahead an’ cry, sweetie, Sophie’s here an’ everything’s gonna be all right.” She had gotten the lamp lit and was leaning over Lily, a plump, certain hand on her fevered head. Through her tears Lily saw the familiar but somewhat distorted face of the sage femme, swollen and lopsided, the colour of a fresh bruise.

  “Get that stove goin’ out there an’ set up my things, girl,” she shouted back to the other room. “I brung Marlene with me to help out,” she whispered to Lily with all the tenderness of a rasp on wood. Then she snickered gigantically in stinted bursts, as if part of her lungs were popping at will. Her large frame, which, through Lily’s blurred vision, seemed pudgier than ever, wobbled backwards towards the stool, landed one buttock unsuspectingly on it, and slid with it at an acute angle – clattering – to the floor. Her eyes bounced once, like a sturgeon’s hitting bottom, and stuck open in permanent surprise. There was a slithering sound as her fat, hydrocephalic flesh caught up with the escaping bones, and for a long second she sat beached on the floorboards.

  “Jesus-Murphy-and-a-pig’s-fart!” she hollered through her bull-horn. “Marlene, get your arse in here.”

  Marlene was already at the door, quailing. She inched towards the embayed whale – wedged between terror and fear – held out a quivering hand, and when it became attached, heaved back with all her fifteen-year-old might. Sophie came upright, wheezing and not overly grateful. Marlene scooted off to her duties. Lily could smell the alcohol breath that Sophie was spraying like weed-killer into the room.

  “Don’t worry none, Lily dear,” Sophie said, trying to blink. “I’ve had a bit to drink today. Hubby left me for the boats. Kind of a sad affair, eh? Gone for the whole month, he has. Don’t you worry none, ’cause I brung Marlene with me, an’ she’s got the coffee goin’ an’ I’m the best damn midwife in this county.” To prove it she belched and sat back on the stool without calamity.

  “Where’s Tom?” was all Lily could find the strength to say.

  Sophie snorted. “Ha! He’s gone after that quack, Dollard. That makes two aresholes I gotta deal with.”

&nb
sp; Marlene appeared several times with mugs of coffee which Sophie swallowed at a gulp. Robbie’s giggle bubbled above the girl’s soothing lilt. The wick on the oil-lamp singed and threw blotched light onto the wall. From the swamp, frogs sang as if they were the first and only spring. Lily remembered these things long afterward, as if, coming between the self-destructing spasms of pain, they were held to be precious beyond all normal possibility.

  As last something clicked and turned over in Sophie’s brain. She got herself up, roused no doubt by one of Lily’s shrieks-dissolving-to-a-wail. Shrieks she was accustomed to, she read their special code as easily as braille, and suddenly she did not like what she was hearing and what her brain had finally cleared enough to register. She put both hands over Lily’s flinching abdomen and kept them there while the spasms continued.

  “Holy shit,” she murmured. “Marlene!”

  Marlene was ready, with the cloths and steaming kettles. Right behind her came Tom.

  “What’s happening?” he said. He was gray from exhaustion and worry. He had run into the village and then all the way to Sarnia and then all the way into the township.