Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  Two days later when Lily came in to fix the boys’ dinner, Sophie was sitting at the table. This was a custom Lily was just beginning to understand. Though it seemed you never asked anybody his business or initiated a conversation without invitation or invaded his privacy in anyway, it was all right among genuine friends – indeed it may have been a symbol of such – to simply enter their homes or yards and ‘sit a spell’. Mind you, it put the host under no particular obligation; apparently you could keep on about your business if you chose without jeopardizing said friendship, and sooner or later the visitor would just leave. Like Old Samuels, she thought, in some ways. But it was also clear that such special intrusions often indicated a desire to talk. Lily sat down and squeezed out a smile. Sophie, the smudges of fatigue below her eyes almost completely faded, grinned and said “I hate to brag but that Stoker’s some man. If Christ was hung like that, there wouldn’t be a female heathen left upon God’s earth.” She stropped the nearest thigh and then snorted with the force of a crushed walnut.

  Later, after tea and a few nibbled-at biscuits, Sophie sighed and said, “Burton didn’t come back from the bush with Stoker.”

  “Who’s Burton?”

  “Our oldest boy,” Sophie said.

  3

  During those first few traumatic weeks Lily kept a close watch on her sons. In some ways the shock of their loss and removal was easier for Brad than Robbie. Brad developed a bad cold and an asthmatic cough that made him continually fretful and hence in need of constant mothering. He clung to Lily’s skirts everywhere she went during the day, and at night he slept beside her. He cherished her attention so much that it seemed to compensate, at least momentarily, for all the privations and physical discomforts. Robbie on the other hand would not stay put, he wandered beyond the margins of her supervision, his eyes fixed on the exotic rituals of the boy-herds and girl-flocks who ya-hooed, frisked and caromed among the bushes and dunes for much of the day (“Don’t none of them go to school?” “Some of them, sometimes,” Sophie said) and all evening till the moon went down or got swallowed by cloud. When a gang of boys about his own age would roar by on their way to the beach or the grassy flats, Robbie would stand in front of the house and watch them pass, his own feet longing simply to follow their own instinct and to take their own chances with rejection. Occasionally Lily would see one or two of the lads – dirt-streaked, barefoot ragamuffins – glance over at the motionless creature by the wayside (so much a replica of themselves), and then carry on as if impelled by the demands of some game none of them ever remembered learning the rules of. At last a few days before his eighth birthday, Robbie edged out to the road at the first yip of the approaching horde, so that when they swept by – spears poised for some imminent slaughter – he was almost naturally drawn into the irresistible current of their energy. So intent was this tribe upon the annihilation of its enemy that not one soul noted the addition of a whooping, fleet-footed brave whose heart was soaring with joy and relief and the gratitude of those forever-to-be-included. From that moment on, Lily’s main concern was the whereabouts of her eldest. “Don’t fuss,” Sophie soothed, “they always come back sooner or later.”

  Neither boy was able yet to sleep without violent dreams, that shook them in their beds like scarlet fever or St. Vitus’ Dance. Often just before bed, Brad would see behind the lamp-lit window some configuration of shadow – severed, truncate, bloating ogre-flesh – and shriek. And he would continue whimpering, even when Lily turned the lamp down so that only the blunt shadow of the night was visible anywhere. Even Robbie was susceptible to these sudden incursions from ‘out there’, and so it was not uncommon for Lily to have to sit with an arm around each boy, singing and murmuring them towards sleep, while the window-images continued to travel on through their dreams. Even so, Lily thought as she watched them fret, they’re lucky; the gremlins they’re scared of are the only ones that will do them no harm.

  Of course Robbie, who was unused to sharing his exploits and triumphs, had some difficulty adjusting to the inviolable rules of the Alley games. Three times in one week he came home with a bloody nose and scuffed knuckles. For hours he would sulk, never telling the horrid details of whatever humiliation he had suffered and glaring at his mother as if it were all her fault. But he always went back, grim-lipped. Lily felt proud of him and yet somehow betrayed, left out, found unworthy. She thought of Sophie’s Burton, and was ashamed.

  When Brad finally recovered from his cough and when Lily herself felt comfortable enough, she and her boys walked up Victoria Street to the Edward Street Common School. Up to this time Lily had not ventured out of the Alley except to go briefly along Prince Street past the Queen’s Hotel to the General Store for supplies or to walk along the cinder road to the rail-yards where she bought the firewood to get her business launched. For some reason she could not bring herself to go up Michigan Ave. to the familiar shops – Redmond’s, Durham’s Dry Goods Emporium – where she knew she would meet a dozen friendly, and perhaps even anxious, faces. Soon, she promised herself. Victoria was the last east-west street running parallel to Michigan Ave. and to the railroad tracks a hundred yards to the north. It boasted the largest private houses in the village. Robbie proudly pointed out the residences of their customers. “That’s Mrs. Saltman’s, the baker’s wife, she give me a penny for myself!” They came to the frame building that served as the public school – three teachers and eight grades. They stood on the boardwalk in the early morning sun and looked. The windows were wide open, a breeze was billowing the blinds. They could hear the scratch of chalk on slates. “There’s nobody in there,” Brad whispered. “Stewie won’t go to school,” Robbie said, “Mr. Grindly whips him.”

  “Shush,” Lily said. “Stewie’s just tryin’ to spook you. Come September, you boys’re gonna walk up here every mornin’. You’re gonna learn to read and write.” And that’s the only thing I know for sure, she thought.

  On Dominion Day most of the village turned up on the river flats to celebrate the beginning of summer and incidentally the fourth anniversary of the Confederation, now six provinces strong and still counting. The main attraction was a five-match lacrosse game between the Point and the Brantford Mohawks. The local squad was composed of all the healthy young men from the settled part of town, which meant the exclusion of Alleyfolk and most of the transient railroaders who populated the boarding houses on every block. “Gotta be baptized to play lacrosse,” Sophie said, “unless you’re an Indian.”

  The Alleyfolk set up some tents and marquees along the fringes of their own property adjacent to the proceedings, and sold refreshments (some of them legal), rented shade, and gave directions to gentleman tourists in search of a less strenuous but more invigorating sort of exercise. When the Point Edward Spikes scored to win the first match, the Alleyfolk cheered. When the Mohawks won the second one, they cheered more loudly. The Indians eventually triumphed, four rounds to one. “We gotta let them win sometime,” Sophie chuckled.

  The races that followed later in the afternoon were open to all contestants. Lily sat in the shade of Sophie’s tent and watched Robbie head out to the starter’s spot with Stewie and several of the McLeod boys. The athletes were sorted according to age and size by Sunday-school teachers with a keen nose for prevarication. Robbie was the smallest of the ‘ten-year-old’ group. “He’s got spunk, that one,” Sophie said. Lily waited for the starting pistol and then let out her breath. In the scramble of the start, Robbie was elbowed and knocked to his knees. He got up and pursued the pack, already ten strides ahead of him – a lot to make up in a two-hundred-yard (or so) dash. Robbie was robust and surprisingly quick. He caught up in a hurry. He took an outside position, and with twenty yards to go drew even with the leader, a rather elongated ‘ten-year-old’ who was obviously winded and fading fast. From the shouts of endearment that emanated from the wagering crowd nearby, he seemed to be the favourite. Robbie flashed ahead, but not before a stinging elbow caught him in the ribs. He kept his balance, te
etered briefly into the larger boy, and then pulled away to win by five full strides. The Alleyfolk and the Mohawks let out a patriotic cheer. First prize was a silver dollar. The judges later determined that the winner had fouled the runner-up and asked that the award be returned. The happy recipient had already disappeared – without a trace.

  “My word,” Lily said, turning from her beaming son and looking anxiously around, “where’s Brad?”

  “He was right here a minute ago,” Peg said without interrupting her survey of the silver dollar’s bas-relief.

  Lily dashed out from under the awning; no one else took up the alarm. Sophie had consumed a lot of mineral water and was snoring contentedly under cover. The whole area was bursting with children, all in motion. Lily didn’t know where to start. Peg, home for a brief visit, called out behind her, “They’re over there!”

  Lily saw them under a nearby alder: Brad was curled in the shade of the late afternoon, his eyes closed but his face tensed, listening; and Wee Sue, not two years older, was seated beside him with one arm around his shoulder and the other propping a book open on her knees. Her lips were spelling out words that bound them for this moment together.

  Lily decided it was time to walk up Michigan Ave. She picked out a sunny July day and in the glare of noon she came up from Prince Street all the way to Redmond’s. “Sorry to hear about your place burnin’ down,” the grocer said. “No insurance, I take it.” Lily nodded and gave him her order. “Bring the boys along,” he said. “I always got a licorice or two for my favourite tow-heads.” Lily promised she would, said goodbye to Mrs. Redmond and started home. Standing in front of Durham’s Dry Goods, chatting with three of the women from the Wednesday tea group, was Maudie Bacon. Shaking just a little inside, Lily walked towards them so that she could be face-to-face with Maudie. A few feet away, Lily opened her lips to say ‘hello’ just as Maudie’s eyes cornered her own for a telling second. The word froze in its frame, unspoken. Maudie turned back to her friends with a snap of her head, that conveyed to Lily so much more than the simple, lethal snub intended.

  Lily kept on walking down to the docks. At the coal company she ordered enough coke to last her the winter.

  22

  1

  Sophie was right. By the time the boys started school in September, Lily had met in one way or another most of the regular denizens of Mushroom Alley. One bright morning in early June as she was hanging out Mrs. Christie’s washing, Lily heard someone calling. The sound seemed to be coming from a clump of trees to the north of her yard: a high-pitched, plaintive call that could have been a command or a cry for help. That’s odd, Lily thought, there’s nothing between me and Hazel’s Heaven up on the dunes. Maybe somebody’s caught up in the short-cut running down to the beach. She craned her neck, and the call came again, a man’s voice echoing thinly in the empty morning of the Alley. He must be in a tree, Lily thought as she dropped her work and started through to the scrub, watching out for the sudden hawthorns.

  “Ship ahoy!”

  Lily came out into a little clearing which she was surprised to discover. A wretched hovel not much bigger than a pup-tent sat between two hummocks of sand. An open fire was smouldering in front of the entrance. There were no windows. Lily’s gaze was then drawn upward to what appeared to be a scaffolding erected on a steep hummock a few rods away but turned out to be the frame of a barn or coop that some previous tenant had begun in earnest and then abandoned.

  “Reverse engines! Reverse engines! Three points to the starboard, Mr. Collins. Steady now, steady on.”

  Perched on the upper rafters, with his feet on a cross-piece and his arms on the top-joist, was a tiny gnome of a man with snow-white hair frothing about his face like the first foam of a breaker, and a captain’s hat, and a uniform whose brass buttons glinted authority, glinted pride. One hand was on his brow shielding his eyes from the fierce sea-sun, the other steady as a rock on the bridge-rail. His knees swayed with the pitch of the waves, leaving his upper body resolute, the nerves unshakable.

  “Funnel off the port bow! All hands on deck. Prepare for May Day, Mr. Collins. No panic, please. No panic.”

  Suddenly his horizon burst apart with a dozen howling children, who dashed out of the bushes as if on cue, washed past Lily without a blink, and swarmed all over the scaffolding like tars littering a mainsail. Of indeterminate sex, they scrambled, hurled threats and boasts aloft, enacted duels to the death, sent pirates to their graves upon impossible planks, and steadfastly ignored their captain’s call to abandon ship. Neither the old man nor the children fully acknowledged the presence or legitimacy of the other, but they seemed intricately bound up in a similar game, never quite out of the other’s reach. Pirate kings lunged and skewered the old man countless times, and he in turn pleaded in vain with the blackguards to let the women and children enter the lifeboats first. It seemed to Lily – watching, ignored – that they had stumbled into each other’s dream.

  “Batty as a bull with three balls,” Sophie wheezed, “but harmless. Nice old guy, really. Billy Whittle’s his name, but everybody here just calls him Cap. That’s what he was. Used to pilot the Erie Shore till she cracked up in a tornado back in ’sixty-five. He got everybody off an’ then lashed him an’ his wife to the mast. He begged her to get into the last lifeboat but she wouldn’t. The storm broke them up. They were both washed ashore up near Port Franks. He was still breathin’. She wasn’t.”

  It was at the Dominion Day festivities that Lily formally met the three women whose celebrated fecundity had produced almost three-dozen offspring, neatly and incontrovertibly identifiable by their hair-colouring, a genetic miracle that might have delighted Mendel – red-headed McCourts (actually a hybrid orange shade unremarked anywhere else), tow-headed Shawyers (with characteristic cowlick) and black-haired/whey-faced McLeods (with pointed snotty noses that made them resemble starlings on the run). Until puberty, which attacked them disgracefully early, the sexes were indistinguishable by manner, instinct or dress. By age twelve, though, nature decided to have its way with them: the girls willowed and billowed shamelessly through the village, sending one kind of shudder through every respectable father and another kind through their curious sons. The boys toughened and grew lusty, and decent mothers everywhere locked up their puzzled daughters. Though Lily did not ever get to know them well – they were clannish, exhausted from day-labour and child-bearing, and not quite ready to admit they were stuck in the Alley for a lifetime – she admired and felt sorry for them. Later on when she herself was more settled, she was able to help them in the small, unobtrusive ways allowed her; she had tea and chatted with Mrs. McLeod on many occasions and once or twice with Mrs. Shawyer and Mrs. McCourt, but never with all three together. In that regard they formed an exclusive club, sharing their common miseries, shrivelled hopes and the need to exchange petty, emancipating spites. To these ends Lily was, in their limited view, a washout. Miseries they had aplenty: each had husbands who were unemployable because they were alcoholic or alcoholic because they were unemployable. Their men were rarely at home, eternally seeking odd jobs ‘digging ditches’ up north or down in Kent or in the States, coming home long enough to terrorize the kids, quench their abbreviated lusts, and contribute to the steady advance of progress-through-procreation. The older boys would get work, help support the brood for a bit, then take up with some girl and move off. The older girls went into service and helped feed the younger ones until they found a spouse or let their master get them pregnant, after which they returned home to bear the bastard and take up permanent residence among their own kind. These few families proved to be an endless drain on the charity of the three churches whose auxiliaries competed mightily in fruitless attempts at reform and repudiation. “Even typhoid wouldn’t wipe them out,” an exasperated elder was heard to say one Sunday morning in the vestry. Nonetheless, it was generally conceded that the girls were good workers: there were at least seven of them serving as maids or scullions throughout the village and the to
wn.

  Lily’s business was almost more than she could handle. She needed a much larger tub for soaking the huge bloodied sheets sent down to her from The Queen’s. She mentioned this to Sophie. Several days later she heard Honeyman’s wagon stop in the road near her front door, and when she went around to see what was up, Belcher waved to her and pointed at a shiny, coppery object behind him. Spartacus was already trying to wrest it loose, and soon three boys materialized to help carry it into the workroom. It was a brewer’s vat, somewhat tarnished and battered but otherwise serviceable. “Where’d he pick this up?” Lily asked Honeyman, who chewed his tobacco and looked at his toeless boots whenever he talked to a ‘lady’. “In the brewery junkpile down on Front Street. Surprisin’, ain’t it, what a sane man will throw out.” Nothing in Mushroom Alley surprised Lily. “Old Spartacus here, he’s got a keen eye for junk.” Lily got her cookie-box and counted out two dollars in change.

  “That’s too much, Lily,” Spartacus said in a clear and slightly accented voice.

  Honeyman was so startled he swallowed his cud.

  When Lily went to the beach, as she often did that sultry summer of ’seventy-one, she took the short cut that ran from the road past her place through the scrub and curved below the back-yards of the last two houses before the Lake – Hazel’s Heaven and Baptiste Cartier’s blind-pig. The boys were curious about the faded clapboard house with the mauve trim, the only house of unnatural tint in the Alley. They were equally puzzled by the flounces and underclothing that curtsied in the breeze off the water: pinkish corsets that drooped like parboiled lobsters; pennant-sized pantaloons fluttering in cerise, marigold and Kelly green; and innumerable pairs of silky stockings so sensuously fanned by the slightest kiss of wind. They kept their distance, though, because both boys were afraid of the bootlegger’s pig – Aquinas – kept in a pen very near the path. He was a gargantuan Polish China boar, who snorted and bristled at them, pawing the muck with his cleft trotters, ramming his malodorous snout into a trough of slime, and casting the baleful glare of his blood-puffed eyes at the smooth, white morsel of little boys who might venture too near and be eaten in a wink. As far as Lily could learn, John the Baptist (as he was known here) kept Aquinas as his pet, throwing the most dreadful tantrums whenever anyone – denizen or stranger – came too close to the creature or made some drunken slighting remark about its potency or suggested that it might be of singular service to certain females along the lane. Often he could be heard talking to it – in French or perhaps in some private joual they shared to keep mankind at bay. John himself was a morose man, utterly taciturn except when conversing with his pet or cursing trespassers. But he made the best and safest hooch in town, and try as they might, neither man nor boy inside or outside the Alley was able to trail him long enough to discover the whereabouts of his still. Once, a gang of toughs had set watch on his place day and night for a week. As far as they could tell he never left his yard, coming out only to feed Aquinas or sit gabbing with him in the middle of a moonless night. Yet, fresh supplies appeared for the weekend crowd of sailors and the overspill from Hazel’s.