On the way back from the beach, Lily often walked around the long way, up the little cliff and onto the lane itself, where the boys could gawk at the big windows beside the verandah on the whorehouse, hoping for a peek at the exotic plumage inside. The girls never came out in daylight, and Lily had warned them away from here after dusk. Across from Hazel’s and next to Honeyman’s place was another gray shack remarkable only for the fact that behind it were five or six sheds, several of them merely lean-to’s, and an old army tent that looked as if it had been recently shelled. “Stumpy lives there,” Sophie said. “He thinks God was a fish.” One day in July just as she and the boys climbed up the slope onto the lane, she spied a strange man coming towards them. He obviously saw no one ahead of him for he swung onto the path that led up to Stumpy’s shack. It was his way of walking that alerted Lily and half-prepared her: an ambling, rolling, almost bouncing gait that a deckhand might use in a high sea but only if his legs had been frozen from the shins down. Stumpy, Lily thought. He was dressed in overalls and a wool shirt, his beard and gray hair were as tangled and forlorn as fish-nets on some deserted tidal flat. Lily never would have recognized him from that face so completely altered in seven short years, but the walk was unforgettable. She told the boys to go on home, and then broke all the rules by trailing Stumpy into his house, and when he looked in astonishment at her intrusion, she smiled sadly and said, “Hello, Bags.”
“It’s Stumpy now,” he said with both resignation and pride. He sat out on a bench overlooking the beach below and told Lily his story, but only after she had told him as much of her own as she could bear. He had got a job in London as a clerk in the office of a stagecoach line, but he had been too miserable at being cooped up or just too ornery, because he was soon fired. He took straight to drink and got so bad even his cousin threw him out onto the street. Finally some preacher found him in the gutter, taught him to see God in all His glory, and sent him abroad to bear witness and teach the world how to overcome the accidents of fate. He cared nothing for material goods now, he lived only for God and to serve the outcasts of mankind. So he worked in the fish plant in the warm seasons to get enough money to aid the down-trodden and the lost all the year long. He showed Lily the shelters he’d erected in his yard to accommodate the hoboes and unemployed and outlawed who jumped train at the end of the line and wandered in here dazed, cold, crippled, without hope or the will to hope. Here he fed them, talked a little religion, listened to their woeful tales, and then showed them the stumps that God had blessed him with as proof of his own temptation, apostasy and resurrection.
“We all need God, Lily. I do hope you’ve found Him. Is there anythin’ I can do to help you? If so, you just holler an’ Stump’ll be there.”
Lily touched the back of his hand, felt how benevolent the sun was, recalled the cool clasp of the waves on her legs, the soaring delight of her boys at play. “I’d like a little music,” she whispered.
2
About a week before school was to open, Robbie came panting up behind her in the workroom and said, “Come quick, Mama, there’s a naked lady gettin’ beat up over in the dunes! She’s cryin’ an’ blubberin’, we heard her, didn’t we, Brad?” Lily looked at Brad who’d come running in just after his brother. “A big black man’s beatin’ her up,” he said. “Beatin’ her to death!” Robbie added, and Lily knew she must go.
The two boys dragged her along through the scrub to the edge of the dunes just behind Hazel’s place. Robbie was about to point triumphantly to the exact spot of the murder when Brad yelled, “Up there!” and they all turned and looked towards Hazel’s just in time to see a flash of leg, buttock and arm – bald as the sun, black and white blurred together as they disappeared hastily beyond the flapping bedsheets.
“She looks quite alive to me,” Lily said, pulling her hand free of Robbie’s.
“He took all her clothes away,” Robbie said, “an’ I heard her cryin’.”
Lily was about to drag her boys home and find some way to explain what they had probably seen, when she was stopped in her shoes by a rasping female voice.
“Goddam you, Shad, I told you to keep that black pecker in your pants and I meant it. Betsy Riley, I’m ashamed of you, runnin’ around starkers where anybody from the town could see you plain as porridge, I’m ashamed to know you, girl. Now get in there, both of you, before I take the rug-beater to your butts.” A door slammed amid some less-than-contrite giggling, and the woman with a voice like a claw-hammer emerged at the top of the rise and began jerking pegs out of the sheets as if they were hairs on the head of her victims. Her quick eye spotted the strangers below. Lily saw the sun ricochet from a gold tooth. The woman’s arm was waving them a welcome.
“You boys go on ahead to Sophie’s, don’t forget the carnival’s on the saft,” she said.
But the boys slipped into the bushes and watched from below as long as they dare. When Lily came up to the woman, they both stood stock still for a second, then spoke almost simultaneously.
“Lily Ramsbottom!”
“Char?”
Char Hazelberry, now known as Hazel, reached out with her scullion’s grip and pulled Lily to her bosom. “It is you, I can’t believe it, you ain’t changed a bit, Winnie said she was sure it was you but I didn’t believe her, now I got to believe my own eyes, don’t I? Come on in an’ meet the girls.”
Hazel added a dollop of whiskey to her coffee, sighed across her bosom and said, “We was all doin’ just fine, thank you, Winnie’s sister took the babe – real cute little fella, wasn’t he, Win – and our business was goin’ great guns. Then I decided to accept the job at the St. Clair Inn when the new owner took over. I was chief cook with my own staff – naturally I carted Winnie an’ Betsy along with me, an’ for a time we run the best cookery in town. We heard that from the drummers an’ regulars, didn’t we Bet, all the time. But that owner an’ his snooty lady was somethin’ else! Remember that wart on his nose?” She glanced at Winnie and Betsy and was rewarded with reminiscent snickers. “Well, to make a long story longer, the old geezer – he must’ve been sixty – corners me in the pantry on St. Patrick’s day an’ tries to lift my skirt, pretty as you please. Naturally I resisted an’ even threatened to tell his Bible-thumpin’ wife. That backed him up real quick. But not for long. I discover he’s been pesterin’ both Win an’ Bet, poor dears, an’ them not havin’ the wherewithal to resist, an’ so I goes straight to his office to have it out, an’ the very mention of his sin must’ve set his gong a-clappin’, ’cause he reaches over an’ flips both my bosoms right outta their harness. Well, I let out a screech that would’ve shook grandpa outta eternity, and in rushes the wife. Naturally I appeal to her as a woman and a believer, but you’ll never in a hundred years guess what happened. She sided with the old goat! She called me a slut and a hoor and a panderer, an’ she told me to take my girls an’ depart on the instant. An’ the last I see of them hypocrites, she’s soothin’ and’ cooin’ up to him an’ we’re out on the street without a pot to pee in. And, can you beat this, she blabs it all over Sarnia that we’re bawds an’ harlots, an’ we have no hope ever again of gettin’ work in a respectable place.”
“So we come here,” Winnie said with the bubbling natural giggle she’d had since she turned fifteen and that now seemed, in the tired and creased flesh of her forties, eccentric – as if she had just adopted such a youthful mannerism for effect. “What’s your excuse!” she laughed.
It took almost two hours for histories to be exchanged, but in this strange, enclosed space time seemed even of less importance than it did on the lane outside. The parlour where they sat might have graced the seraglio of a second-rate sultan – with its faded Armenian carpets piled and overlapping on the floor; damask curtains with gold tassels to repudiate the prying sun; sofas that were all curve and cushion and invitation; a myriad of tiny lamps with Oriental shades, the afterburn of incense still in the air; a black-skinned, white-shirted Dahomey cross-legged, with hookah, on the alb
ino bearskin spread before the portico which led to purdah and its languorous, mediterranean pleasures.
“This here’s Mr. Lincoln – I understand you met briefly out back – Mr. Shadrack Lincoln. We call him Shad.”
“And a few other things,” said Betsy, unable to take her eyes off Lily, whom she found to be so much the same and yet so much different and wondering if Lily were thinking the same thing about her.
“Shad might look dumb, but he’s quite smart, ain’t you, Shad?” Shad smiled dreamily, but Lily felt his eyes scan and appraise her. “He don’t talk, so folks around here think he’s stupid. But back in Philadelphia he used to be a lawyer’s clerk, readin’ law books an’ writin’ out lawyer’s briefs. He was a regular black gentleman. He’s still got some of his master’s suits given to him when he was set free.”
“What happened to him?” Lily asked, looking his way and letting their glances lock for a second, then peering through the opium daze, the comic’s costume, the mute pose of the face, and knowing full well what she might find in the dark history unreleased behind those eyes.
“After the kafuffle at Harper’s Ferry back in ’fifty-nine, you know when the niggers took a run at the federal army an’ got butchered, there was hell to pay among the slaves everywhere. Some vigilantes come in the night an’ drug poor Shad outta his bed an’ hauled him kickin’ an’ screamin’ off to the nearest woods.” She paused and checked out the victim. He now lay on his back upon the rug, the pipe beside him, breathing deeply.
“I think he’s left us,” Winnie whispered.
“Well, Lily dear, shame-to-say but them vigilantes went an’ cut his tongue out an’ they smashed all the fingers on his right hand so’s he couldn’t write no more an’ left him on his master’s doorstep, bleedin’ an’ sobbin’ his heart out.”
“But they didn’t know Shad was left-handed –”
“I’ll tell it, if you don’t mind,” Hazel said sharply, not quite ready to forget the recent transgression on the dunes. “Anyways, Shad recovered an’ was able to write but he couldn’t talk no more an’ from time to time, as he do now, he went a bit crazy in the head. So his master set him free an’ sent him up to Canada to work on the farm of a friend. We’re glad to have him. He’s a dear man, smart as a whip, an’ when them sailors get rambunctious in here on a Saturday night, all he has to do is roll them eyes, froth a bit at the mouth and start gargling out his dumb-language an’ they head outta here in a hurry. He does all our shoppin’ in town, too.” She sighed. “Poor Shad; he’s got to listen to Win an’ Bet chatter all day an’ night an’ he don’t get to say a word!”
When Lily got up to go, Hazel hugged her again and said, “We have tea up here every Monday – our day off – so why don’t you come? Sophie usually does. You can meet the other three girls – they’re still young an’ need their sleep – and of course our housekeeper an’ chief pot-scrubber.”
“That’s Vi,” Betsy said.
“She’s down at the beach for a swim,” Winnie said.
“Always down there, it seems to me,” Hazel added.
“Talkin’ to the waves.”
“They can understand her,” Winnie tittered.
“Hush up,” Hazel said to her. “Vi’s a sweet thing an’ you know it. You’ll come an’ see us, then, Lily?”
Lily nodded and waved goodbye several times before she came down to the path behind the brothel. Something urged her to turn towards the Lake, so she did.
The beach was deserted. Though it was a sweltering August afternoon, all the children were off to a travelling carnival and freak show down in Bayview Park. The immaculate sand, cleansed in the endless sieve of soft wavelets against the shore, glittered under a Grecian sun. Lily took off her shoes and stood wriggling her toes until they touched the cool damp granules below the surface. For a few moments she stood perfectly still and listened to the waves, scarcely nudged by a westerly breeze as they broke idly on the shale of pebbles and seashell that ringed the water’s edge as far as the eye could follow the miles into the northern haze. Farther out the Lake was calm, without current or direction, indifferent to the winds, an abiding and lucid blue beyond the reach of any sun or season. It was, and it shone for any eyes to see. Lily closed hers, and it was still there.
When she opened them she saw something move across the plane of the water’s dominion, about twenty yards out just where the bottom sailed from under your feet and you were adrift on your own weight. A swimmer – made elegant by buoyancy, the arms lifting in slowed sequence closer to the blood’s own beat, with a leg-kick like the silver spray of a mermaid’s fin, hair fanned out behind in winged ebony, the body aimed through some vital dimension with the grace of a dolphin’s dance. For a second Lily herself felt that wondrous free-fall moment between stroking and surrender. The swimmer touched down reluctantly – and only when the knees scraped bottom and the bones’ angles re-emerged – then stood upright among the taffeta froth of the rollers near shore.
It was a plain, female body clearly visible below the homemade bathing costume pressed wetly against the outlines underneath: lumpish curves, knob knees, a slack belly, masculine feet. Thick black hair was matted against the face, browned unevenly by the sun, the large eyes darkly innocent, the right side of the jaw crooked where it had grown accustomed to the hare-lip above it.
“Hello, Lily. They said it was you livin’ down there in the Icelanders’ shack, but I didn’t believe ’em. I ain’t allowed to go down that way.”
The words, distorted only by the narrow wheeze of the cleft palate, came out as clear and as natural as a gossip’s whisper. As Lily walked towards Violet she shed her outer clothing – skirt and blouse – and covered only by her shift she took the swimmer’s hand and together they turned back into the waves. When the first breaker foamed against her thighs and flattened the shift to their shape, Lily jumped and giggled and Violet let go of her hand and laughed and then began to run across the Lake lifting one foot out of the water and splashing it emphatically down just as the other one broke the surface. Lily came skitter-splashing behind her, laughter bubbling and evaporating from her throat, and moments later it was too deep to run, the Lake had them and they capitulated with a wild, surrendering dive into the green looking-glass dream of its depths, oh the cold total possession of its grip on the nippled breast, the silenced ear-drum, the pinioned arms, on the knees and the thighs and, ah, upon the paradisal vee at the soul of sensation. They rose again to the icy-hot surface, they were amphibian, they swam in unison as whale and dolphin do, they rolled dorsally, they lolled weightless on their backs facing the firmament, they turned in their own time and swam with slow synchronous ease back to the dry island of the beach. Linking hands again they walked up onto the white sand and lay down to contemplate the sky and bask in the body’s long thaw.
Why here, why now? Lily thought. What is it we do to deserve or not deserve such fitful collisions of joy? What is the sun seeing now, gazing down at us? Can it care the way we do? Do we make anything happen? She reached over and touched Violet’s hand. “I love you, Lily,” Violet whispered. “I always did.”
Yes, we do. We must.
23
1
Robbie and Brad started school in September. Lily felt she ought to accompany them on the first day but Sophie warned her away from such foolishness. Robbie was delighted to be able to walk ahead with the older boys, while Brad took hold of Wee Sue’s hand and headed up Victoria Street humming out loud and skipping inside. All summer long Wee Sue had taken Brad under wing – except for the two weeks he was quarantined with chicken-pox – and taught him how to read. They were both excited about the possibility of startling Miss Timmins into a moment’s silence, and Wee Sue squeezed his hand possessively and smiled at the envy in the eyes of the other nine-year-old girls who flocked about them from the adjoining side-streets and lanes. “I’m to take care of him,” she announced at every opportunity.
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