“You can set up in here,” Sophie said. “It’s perfect.”
What Lily set up, with a lot of help from Sophie and others, was a laundering room. After the Icelanders had been taken off to the wilds of the Manitoba Interlake, a woman named Mabel Trout had moved in with her two daughters and established herself as a washerwoman. She had five customers from the ‘big houses’ up on Victoria Street, and sometimes handled the overflow from the Queen’s after a ship or two had debouched its crews upon the lower town. “A hard-workin’ woman, I’ll give her her due,” Sophie said. “She deserved better than those sluts of hers – lazy as sows in the sun, they’d sit an’ watch her scrubbin’ her hands raw an’ never lift a finger. Had fancy ideas, they did, till one got the clap workin’ part-time up at Hazel’s an’ the other got herself knocked up an’ dumped by her so-called respectable gentleman-friend from Charles Street. Went bonkers, dear old Mabel did – scrubbin’ shit off too many nappies, I reckon. Anyways they had to cart her off to London, screamin’ all the way. And I’m tellin’ you, you gotta be far gone to be taken for crazy in this part of town!”
Mabel’s place had subsequently been taken up by a number of transients and hopefuls over the course of the winter. “None of ’em lasted much longer than a pig’s fart,” Sophie said. “People see these empty shacks an’ they think all they got to do is move in an’ settle down free-of-charge. Ain’t that easy. I seen a hundred come an’ go. It takes a special breed to live here for very long.” She paused, then grinned: “We got rules, you know.”
Although it seemed obvious to Lily that Sophie felt some special affection for her, the latter made no effort to explain the intricate code of behaviour that governed the lives of the permanent residents of Mushroom Alley. “You gotta learn them on your own, so you’ll know for sure whether you can stay,” Sophie told her. Lily learned some of them every day during those first few weeks in which, though no overt decision was made, Lily began to clean up and repair the Icelanders’ shack for habitation. Sophie was able to supply Lily and her boys with clothing to keep warm, drawing upon her vast, motley stock of wretched hand-me-downs. “When you got eight kids, nothin’ gets wasted.” Lily wore a moth-eaten sweater of Marlene’s, wondering where Marlene herself was and why Sophie, who gabbed on relentlessly about her children, never mentioned her. Robbie and Brad were well supplied with assorted tuques, mittens and piebald macintoshes. Spring was only weeks away.
There was no furniture, however, and not a single utensil. But the day after Lily began sweeping the filth out of the main room, she found several pots and pans and a kettle, well-weathered but intact, sitting on the table. Next day there was a chipped chamber pot and accessories. Then four shell-shocked wicker chairs. Finally a sofa desperately in need of a good home. When queried, Sophie just shook her head and jammed a spoonful of porridge into Bricky’s clenched jaws (Bricky was short for Baby Ricky, Sophie’s five-year-old, loudly proclaimed ‘love-child’). “Maybe it was the good fairy,” said nine-year-old Wee Sue, who still persisted in believing in such things. However, the moment the gifts stopped arriving, Sophie said, “Spartacus brung them over. If you don’t like them you can go over to his junkyard an’ pick out better ones. He likes to choose things himself for the first time. He won’t be hurt if you take them back for tradin’. He likes to trade. Got little use for money.”
“I got money,” Lily said. “How much do I pay him?”
“He likes coins best,” was all Sophie would say.
When Sophie suggested that Lily take over Mabel’s defunct business, Lily agreed mainly because she could think of no other course of action to pursue. She could not bring herself to return to her own property, to gaze on the ruins of the house she had spent nineteen of her thirty years living and growing in. Nor could she consider trying to stay, even temporarily, in the barn where Uncle Chester had gone to escape from himself, where Benjamin had waited so loyally all those years, where the jersey had died giving birth, where Ti-Jean had lain awake nights dreaming of her hurt eyes. It would be a long time before she went back there.
Right now they needed a stove to heat water, they needed firewood, they needed mangles and scrub-boards and irons (Mabel’s had been looted – “Here, we call it re-usin’,” Sophie explained). Lily had some money left in the bank but she was afraid to spend it. As soon as she could, she and Robbie walked down to McHale’s General Store and loaded up a sled with groceries. When Sophie was out, she stocked her shelves and pantry. Nothing was said.
“Don’t buy a stove,” Sophie said. “Stewie says there’s a good one in your barn. We’ll haveta get it here before all the snow melts.”
As far as Lily could see, no plans were made for moving the stove. She continued to fix up the Icelanders’ shack. The boys helped, still somewhat dazed by the sudden changes, but like most children unable to cope with being inactive. Without any advance warning the stove arrived on top of a large sled. “You Lily?” said the grizzled driver from his bench. In the keen air his odour preceded him by several rods. “Yes.” He put two fingers in between his toothless gums and sent an icy whistle up the Alley. Then he dropped his chin on his chest and appeared to doze off. The boys ogled the horses, easing up to them and venturing a pat or two. A quarter of an hour later several bulky young men – McLeods, McCourts and Shawyers from their genetic trademarks – trudged in from sundry directions and Bachelor Bill’s stove was carried into the workroom and its pipes set up and adjusted to fit the hole already in the roof. When Lily come out to thank the driver, he was gone. “Belcher, the honeyman,” Sophie said later. “An off sod, that one.” “How can I thank him?” “Leave him alone.”
By the time spring came and the earth around her heaved with tendril, bulb and root, Lily was ready to leave the rambling comforts of Sophie’s house. At first she thought there should be some ceremony to mark the occasion, but it soon became clear that none was called for. Sophie went off with Peg and Stewie in search of morels, and when she came home hours later, Lily and her boys were gone.
Lily got a rousing fire started and baked some extra biscuits in Bachelor Bill’s stove, whose whims she knew intimately. She sat on the boys’ bed singing softly to them and keeping one ear tuned to the outdoors. When Brad fell asleep at last, she sat at the table looking into the dark towards the River. No one came, that day or the next. Finally she walked over to Sophie’s house, knocked, and getting no response, eased the door open and sat down to wait. The kitchen felt queer. The objects in it began to sway. She grabbed the table-top to steady herself. A great emptiness was swelling up inside her, she was a little girl afloat on her own body, a wafer of ice on a steaming, featureless sea – she was marooned unalterably estranged. The tears, copious and scalding, assuaged nothing, purged nothing, not even the rage she aimed at her own heart.
When she looked up again, Sophie was standing off to one side; she had been there for some time, it seemed, from the stillness of her pose and the resolute composure of her face. “Cryin’ won’t help,” she said gently. “But not cryin’s worse. I done my share.” She went over to the stove, thrashed the grates and put a kettle on for tea. “When you’re ready, love, we’ll sit down an’ talk about the launderin’ business. An’ anything else you care to tell.”
2
Peg used to collect and deliver the laundry from the ‘fancy houses’ on Victoria Street, taking John or Stewie along to help pull the wagon over the tracks or through the mud of the Alley itself. Crazy Mabel gave them a nickel apiece. But according to Sophie, Peg was now too old for such a menial task, she was seventeen and ready to go out ‘into service’ if she wanted to. Although Sophie nattered and swore at all her kids indiscriminately and cuffed them whenever they were unwitting enough to loiter within range, she seemed to have almost no impact on the direction of their behaviour or their lives. “My Peg’s got the kinda boobies gentleman wanta use for door-knobs,” she’d sigh, but when Peg announced she intended to go to work as a maid for a bigwig at the refinery in Sarn
ia (“a notorious rake” who had “sprinkled the county with his bastards”), Sophie ranted and huffed like a storm-warning, threatened to “set your Pa on you”, sighed, and let her go. She even helped her pack her bags, and said to Lily, “Jesus, I envy her.” Thus it was that Fred – or Blubber as he was affectionately called – with Robbie dragged along ‘for training’, became the delivery boy for the Alley’s newest washerwoman. Lily didn’t ask how Sophie managed to regain the interrupted business, but all five customers returned to the fold. “I know more about them ladies than their priests,” was all Sophie had to say on the matter. It was more than enough. Spring arrived in full force. I may not be alive yet, Lily thought, but I’m living. That’s something. On April first they celebrated Brad’s seventh birthday.
Whenever Stoker came home Sophie was a different person. The changes in her, which Lily came to know intimately in the months ahead, began a week or so before he actually made his appearance. Blubber or Wee Sue would detect more sting in her glancing blows and glare back with lips aquiver. Sophie – who was rarely quiet for more than twenty seconds at any stretch, carrying on a marathon gossipy tale while giving Lily a cooking lesson, boxing the ears of the nearest ‘brat’, and breaking up a skirmish in the yard outside with a lash of her trumpet tongue – now fell into pockets of silence from which she had to be periodically roused. Her good humour, that often seemed as indigenous to her as the jowls that telegraphed it, began to fail her, and she would sting the handiest victim – child, neighbour, kettle – with a fearsome, Bible-shaking curse. “I lost forty pounds since I brought your Brad into the world,” Sophie said one day when Lily came into the kitchen and found her settled and steaming in a tin vat, formerly used to nurture beer and now being filled with an endless supply of hot water by Pet and Wee Sue. Sophie plopped a sponged into Lily’s hand and she automatically began to scrub the great dame’s back. Sophie released an elephantine sigh and then lay back among the cleansing suds; her voluptuous breasts, liberated from their natural function, floated before her like plump, spiced offering. Sophie was very vain about her skin; at the beach she had John and Stewie erect a portable sunshade over her, and when she bathed in the Lake, she donned a bonnet bigger than most parasols. “Stoker’s comin’ down from the bush,” she said languidly, probably not even aware that her fingers had reached up to emprison her engorged nipples. “Gonna be here five days before the boat leaves. Five whole – goddamn you, girl, that’s hot, you wanna scald my skin, you want your daddy to warm your ass so’s you won’t be able to sit down from here to next week!” Wee Sue ignored the comment on her work – being already well out of range and on her way for more healing-water. “Stoker’s real fussy about my skin,” Sophie said. “After all, the man’s had nothin’ to rub his hands over but the bark of a tamarack for almost three months.” At this point several mammoth towels – once white – were brought in by the servant-girls and held theatrically along one side of the tub. Lily offered her hand and Sophie rose out of the petal-scented waters – all pink curves and voluminous coombs and licorice curlicues and mahogany thatch and acres of scrubbed skin inviting touch.
“Get outta here, Stewie! You some kinda pervert or somethin’?”
Stoker Potts came home the next day, hopping off the way-freight as it slowed down for the curve behind his house and sprinting across the flats towards what appeared to be a flag-sized chinese-poppy waving to him from his verandah.
Lily was not introduced to any of the Alleyfolk. “They know you’re here,” Sophie said. “You’ll get to meet most of them, if they want to be met, and on their own good time.” In the early weeks Lily could not be sure that anyone in the Alley knew anyone else. One day a gangling black man, decked out in tie-and-tails three sizes too small for him, walked by and waved as if he knew her; an hour later he walked back up the Alley and studiously ignored her, even though she was pulling weeds right beside the path. Nobody was actually seen visiting anyone else; but information – fact, rumour, gossip – travelled quickly and certainly. A woman, vaguely familiar, in a purple-flowered dress and unmatched sunbonnet strolled past and smiled broadly at Robbie; “You must be Lily’s eldest” she was heard to say, but she kept on walking. “They’ll let you know when they’re ready,” Sophie said. “’Round here we give people whatever privacy they want. But that don’t mean we ain’t friendly.” Sometimes Lily could see Sophie herself in her back yard feeding Duchess, her sow, or urging on Stewie and John in their labours, and she would come right up to the fence and stand there, waiting, till finally she could wait no longer and called out “Good mornin’!” Many seconds later Sophie might glance over and give the intruder the meagrest nod of acknowledgement and then continue on with her own work. Even the children – the dozens of McLeods, McCourts, Shawyers – when they roved over the whole of the Alley in the dusk playing hide-and-go-seek, never hid out in Lily’s yard, nor did she ever see the catcher – desperate as he might be – venture across the invisible boundaries of her ‘property’. “Don’t ask me why,” Sophie said, “why is a question we don’t have to ask in the Alley.”
Stoker stayed for a week, as the ship on which he was chief fireman, the Princess of Wales, had been delayed in drydock at Collingwood. Lily knew enough to stay put; besides, she was busy setting up the laundry equipment in the Icelanders’ shed. John and Stewie soon arrived – exiled or prudent, she knew not which – and proved to be of great assistance. They came every day and helped Lily move the two cords of wood into the shelter (the arrival of wood purchased by Lily from the local supplier was a cause for much amusement along the Alley, as Sophie told her much later, since no one could ever remember an Alleyperson actually buying fuel before this; “How do you get it?” “We swipe it,” Sophie replied, “but only what we can use”). They made two spacious windows for her in the south wall and did the glazing perfectly. They walked out to the old property and hauled back some lumber out of which they constructed benches and tables. They promised to add a wooden floor before winter – “when we can pick up enough lumber,” they said matter-of-factly. Robbie and Brad watched every move they made. “I’m goin’ up to the bush with Dad come next fall,” John told them. Robbie asked him if he’d found a little hatchet when he went through the house that got burnt. Then he looked at his mother and said, “When’s Ti-Jean comin’ back?”
The day before he left, Stoker came over to say hello. Lily was in the workroom when John and Stewie came in looking irritated. “Dad wants to meet you,” Stewie said. Lily put down the pot she was holding and brushed her apron. “He’s out on the road.” “Oh.” Lily walked through the house and waved him in from the front door. He had no recollection of their earlier meeting. On Lily’s side, she was seeing a different man. He was still bearded, a bit more angular than muscular, with rugged handsome features and a bluff, engaging manner of speaking that seemed out of tune with long months spent isolated in the bush or hunched alone in front of a blazing furnace. His eyes danced lasciviously, like coal-dust in the fractured sunlight.
“Glad-ta-meet-ya, Lily,” he boomed. “When I come back from my layover in a couple of weeks, we’ll have ourselves a drink together, eh? In the meantime, anythin’ you need these lads for, you just whistle. They’re good boys, they are.”
There was no expression of any kind on the boys’ faces.
That evening as she lay in the sort of drugged semi-sleep she was getting used to, Lily heard a commotion from the Potts’ house across the way: escalating laughter as raucous as it was hollow, followed by male shouts – barbed and threatening – and a series of haranguing shrieks carrying their own brand of venom: taunting and mocking, a calling-of-all-bluff. Then silence. Lily dozed, grateful. The crashing of glass, as loud and as ominous as if Orion had just burst overhead, brought her wide awake. Brad stirred beside her and she put a hand on his fevered head: sometimes he coughed all night. “I’ll kill you, you fat bitch!” The words sailed clear and free down the whole of the Alley. Then a sort of muffled scuffling, as if
heavy furniture were being abused and feet reluctantly dragged. A low pleading voice against the grim music. Nothing more – though Lily waited till the sun trembled over the window-sill and exhaustion claimed her.
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