If Miss Timmins, the maiden lady who taught Primer and Book One were startled, she did her best to conceal the fact. Nevertheless it was clear that Brad could read the second primer-book with ease by the end of the month while others, like Robbie, were still stumbling through the recitation of the ABC’s. When his printing improved in October, Brad was moved into the front seat of the second row, a bona fide member of Book One. Brad loved school. He loved Miss Timmins. He stayed in at recess and helped Miss Timmins clean the blackboards. Wee Sue rejoined her own troop. On the way home from school he had to be saved from the fists and taunts of the other boys by his older brother, who returned him to his mother shaking but unscathed. While Lily could sooth Brad’s feelings in her arms, she could not explain away the bewilderment in his eyes, the child’s hurt questioning of the unjust order of things, of secret burdens already inherited without understanding or consent. A few feet away she could hear Robbie running cold water from the pump over the cuts on his knuckles, and the other chamber of her heart contracted. She knew better than to go to him now – to say one word of praise or consolation. Later, sometimes.
Though Wee Sue no longer dared to befriend Brad at school, she continued her affection guiltily at home. She smuggled over to his house a bundle of books, mostly readers and texts which the older Potts had ‘forgotten’ to return to the school following their various unorthodox departures. They had been locked in a trunk in Sophie’s room because no books of any kind were to be exposed in Sophie’s presence, on pain of death. Lily wanted to ask Sophie why, but could not find the opportunity to do so. “Mama hated school,” Wee Sue said. “Her teachers were mean to her.” This grievance notwithstanding, Sophie never complained when Principal Grindly took the strap to any of her charges, and she advised Lily to do likewise. “I got a simple rule: for every whack on the calluses they get there, I give ’em two on the backside when they get home. And if that don’t do the trick, I threaten to tell Stoker.”
Lily sat beside Brad on the battered settee Spartacus had recently picked up for them, and together they read their way through the first two primers. At first Brad was faster than she was, guessing the words quickly and triumphantly, running his finger under the magic letters a second in front of his nimble tongue, never forgetting a word once he had sounded it out, and prompting his mother’s halting efforts with wondering delight. After Christmas, though, Wee Sue brought over a large tome called McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader, and the stories and poems in there frustrated even Brad’s obsessive efforts. Lily herself found it hard to believe – impossible to understand – but she began to get the sense of such pieces as “The Wreck of the Hesperus”, Mrs. Moodie’s “Burning of the Fallow” and “Little Daffydowndilly” by Mr. Hawthorne, even without knowing all the words, while Brad became dazed, then numbed, then furious as the indecipherable phrases accumulated and mocked him. Brad went back to his own Reader and after a while, when he settled down, they would take turns again, reciting and listening, giving and accepting, till Brad fell asleep on her shoulder and she could open the big book silently and astonish herself once more by reading it – on her own, unaided, the ancient stories and fables coming off the page at her as if the bards themselves were sequestered among the shadows of this room and chanting towards eternity. I am thirty-one years old, she thought, and something magical is just beginning. She shivered but made no attempt to pull the shawl around her.
Robbie’s first season at school was not only difficult, it was a foreshadowing of the troublesome years to follow. In some ways he was as bright as Brad; by the end of the first grade he could read, print his letters, and do the simple sums required. But in temperament he was too much like his father – headstrong, impetuous and fiercely proud. In vain Lily searched for the first signs – any portent – of Tom’s redeeming qualities: his good humour, his trusting affection, his courage. Only the latter was visible for very long as Robbie continued to defend his brother, risking not only the inevitable bruises and scrapes but much much more – the fellowship of the ruffians and outcasts he needed unconditionally as companions. Somehow he managed to maintain their fickle admiration even while he punched out the bullies among them whenever he had to. They were a strange lot he hung out with, Lily thought. She made no pretense of understanding the contradictory laws of their code, and she had no doubt about the claims it made upon Robbie’s loyalties. Unfortunately in defending his brother for reasons which to him grew more obscure and untenable each time an enemy was silenced, Robbie’s feelings for Brad began to swing from blinding love to intermittent revulsion. When there was affection it was no longer of the open, trusting kind. Strangely Robbie did not seem in the least jealous of Brad’s brilliant progress in reading and writing, almost as if he didn’t consider achievements of that kind worthy of any response whatsoever. They existed in a world he had no desire to enter.
“He’s just like all my boys,” Sophie consoled. “Not one of them ever liked school. An’ why should they? They went there long enough to learn to read an’ write their names an’ count up to a hundred – just enough so’s the bigwigs an’ bosses won’t be able to cheat them outta their drawers. What else do you need to know to dig ditches or sling flour sacks on the docks, eh? My John’s gone off to the sheds this year, an’ Stewie’ll go next. For the girls it’s even sillier. How is book-learnin’ gonna help you be a parlour maid or save you from gettin’ knocked up by your mistress’s hubbie or son or stableboy?” She spoke this latter sentence with some bitterness.
“Peg?” Lily said.
“You guessed it, an’ the silly bitch didn’t have enough brains to go for the top, where there’s some money at least. A stable hand she tells me, who says he’s gonna make an honest woman outta her as soon as he can find another job. She can’t come back here, Stoker don’t approve of them kind of shenanigans. He’s got his pride.”
One day in the spring Robbie came home from school in the miidle of the morning. She stood up from her steaming wash and saw him standing forlornly in the open doorway of the laundry shed, his chin on his chest, his hands – always active, alert, poised to clench or welcome – drooped at his side. She heard him swallowing his tears.
“He sent me home. I ain’t goin’ back.” It was not a boast nor a threat nor a defence; it was spoken as an inevitable, regrettable truth. The pathos of it struck Lily so forcefully that she had to busy herself with taking off his sweater and getting him some tea and a cake before she could bring herself to get the whole story. Apparently he had used blasphemous language in the presence of several girls and within earshot of Miss Timmins. Mr. Grindly subsequently interrogated the blasphemer in his office and declared him, in official tones, to be a “little heathen devoid of any sense of the Christian religion.” He had been sent home to learn the Lord’s Prayer, after which he was to recite it ten times for Miss Timmins as punishment – a gesture of mercy since the alternative was the strap, and even Mr. Grindly did not recommend such extreme retribution for those in the first form, even if it was almost June.
“Robbie, you must go back,” Lily said, and in words she hoped he would understand she told him about her own brief career in school and the drastic effects it had had upon her life ever since. He nodded – dumbly, faithfully, letting his trust open up once again to her. While he watched her every move, Lily went to her bed and from under it drew the leather pouch. She took out Papa’s Testament and found printed in the front section ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. She read it through, puzzled. “I’ll teach it to you,” she said.
She was at a loss to explain the words to her son. They defeated her. She sensed some power under them, in their oracular cadence, but it was the potency of a charm, felt yet untranslatable. She exhorted Robbie just to commit the phrases to memory like learning a nonsense rhyme or a skipping song. It didn’t work. He tried, not because he wanted to return to the schoolroom but because he still had faith in the woman who was always at home when he came back, who had not gone away and died on him, and beca
use the underworld of masculine loyalties and camaraderie associated with school had put its brand on him. He tried but he could not do it. He couldn’t memorized the meaningless words and he couldn’t yet read them himself.
The next morning Lily persuaded Wee Sue to walk Brad to school. She was very abrupt with him, and he left in a sulk. Then she sat once more with Robbie and together they failed again the test before them. Lily took his hand in hers. Very quietly she said, “Robbie, you gotta go back to school. Your life depends on it. Do you follow me?”
Bewildered by his mother’s tears, he said, “If you want me to. I ain’t afraid.”
Lily walked beside him half-way up Victoria Street. He let her hold his hand until they were within sight of the school; then he broke away and strode ahead, his stiffening posture warning her off. She watched him hesitate before the large door marked in stone ‘BOYS’, and then enter. She followed after until she stood in the schoolyard a few feet away from the building but on the side without windows – unobserved, listening. Long moments later the crack of pebbled leather on stretched skin resounded down the hallway, through the senior and junior rooms, out the wide-open windows and over the spring gardens of the neighbouring houses. The cruelty of the sound stunned a robin in full flight. Lily let her heart disintegrate.
2
Lily worked hard to make her business a success. “I get exhausted just watchin’,” Sophie would say, settled in her director’s chair by the south window of the shed. Lily had added two more customers farther up Victoria Street, and the new owner of The Queen’s, Kevin Malloney, doubled the number of items she had been assigned under the former management. However, he did insist that she herself pick up and deliver them as he didn’t trust his property to wayward boys. Lily knew quite well why he preferred her to come in person. “He just looks,” Lily said in her own defence, but Sophie shot back, “No man only looks.” In the summertime the work was hard because the stove had always to be on, heat wave or no, the steaming water boiled your hands as well as the clothes and reddened your cheeks permanently, the iron skidded into palm and fingertip, the bulk of wet sheets hung out to dry bent the back into spasms and left the shoulders burning with aftershock. Sophie recommended brandy, then reluctantly some Indian herb tea she happened to have around. Sometimes the latter did help Lily to sleep, but the surest cure was a trek to the beach with her boys, with Sophie and her trailing ménage, or sometimes alone with only Violet to talk to and swim with. After the boys were in school, she got Hazel’s permission to walk with Violet to the Sarnia Cemetery where they lay white chrysanthemums on Bachelor Bill’s grave. On the way home they swung back through the woods and came out into the clearing where they had first met. No trace of the shanty remained, but Violet stood and stared at the rusting gate and at the mutilated tree-line behind it. Lily’s house was charred rubble. She was tempted to go through it, searching for what she had no idea, but resisted. Instead, like Violet, she stood watching the ruins and waiting in vain for some definable feeling to take shape out of the general numbness. They held hands as they hiked across the fields towards their village.
In the winter months Lily found that the front half of her got steamed and scorched while the back half froze. No amount of heat could warm the laundry room itself. The constant fog from the hot water rose and stiffened into rivulets of ice along the north wall, and over the course of the winter they became stalactites perfectly suited to the dark, cavernous atmosphere of the place. Lily developed chillblains, rashes and a continuous cold. So it was with as much relief as pleasure that she began to accompany Sophie up to Hazel’s on most Monday afternoons for a long, gossipy, hearth-cozy tea. Often Lily was too weary to say much or even be a good listener. At Hazel’s no one seemed to notice.
On his own or occasionally with Brad, Robbie continued to pick up and deliver the laundry, collecting the money and presenting it to his mother. He now chopped all of the wood. Some of his cronies began to tease him about being a ‘washerwoman’s suck’, and so he often returned in a black pout. But whatever standing he might have lost during the week, he made up for on Saturday when he used the nickel Lily gave him to buy it back. He needs a friend, Lily thought, not companions.
In June Robbie was promoted to Book One and Brad all the way to Senior Book Two. With her winter cough completely gone, Lily put up fresh gingham curtains and wondered who she might offend by trying a little paint on the outside of her house. Already bored by the forced vacation, Brad looked up from his reading one July day and said, as if he had thought the question out carefully, “Mama, are we really Alleyfolk?”
24
1
In the early hours of Wednesday, August 23, 1872 the gunboat Prince Alfred slipped unnoticed from its berth in Goderich Harbour and steamed southward through the soft summer darkness. Just as the sun rose over east Lambton, the ship and its precious cargo eased into the first down-currents of the St. Clair River and docked at the Point Edward wharf. The sun lifted fully into the sky, sizzling and solitary. Nothing stirred on the Prince Alfred until about nine o’clock when stewards in white suits were seen fluttering from cabin to galley and back. As the morning advanced, the movements aboard seemed to take on a greater urgency: dark marine uniforms were noticed trailing or leading the stewards, and always at double match. Several doors were slammed in undisguised anger. The stevedores on the dayshift stopped to watch. Something momentous was at hand.
This latter suspicion was confirmed around eleven o’clock when a private coach-and-four were spotted coming down Michigan Ave. with as much haste as was compatible with the decorum of its occupants and the occasion. The vehicle wheeled onto the wharf, clattered woodenly to a standstill before the gangplank (just lowered), and debouched two distinguished gentlemen already sweating in their morning-coats and stiff collars. They brushed past the paid help with the unmistakable briskness of the provincial politician. They were observed entering the captain’s quarters on the rear-deck. Fifteen minutes later they re-emerged, blinking straight into the sun and sweating more profoundly than before. A crowd of thirty people had gathered on the wharf as rumour continued to sweep through the village. The local hosts were now seen to be moving along the deck in a decidedly deferential manner, Uriah-Heaping their way towards the gangplank in the van of the very-important-person, who upon espying an audience tipped his hat and uttered an automatic smile. Several persons below cheered mightily as Sir John A. Macdonald, the Prime Minister of the five-year-old Dominion and the first Father of Confederation, stepped shakily towards their approbation.
August twenty-first had been designated as nomination day for Lambton County in the federal elections of 1872. Candidates for both parties, the Conservatives and the Reformers, would take the stand, make their pitch and be judged by the members of their own group. The hustings had been erected only the day before in the middle of Market Square in Sarnia, and in the gathering heat of mid-day, sawdust and pine-tar perfumed the air. The rumour that Sir John A. himself would attend to speak on behalf of Mr. Vidal and directly confront, in his own riding, the man he feared and disliked the most had been actively disseminated by the local Conservatives even though they themselves had learned of its legitimacy only moments before the Prince Alfred had departed Goderich. After all, Sir John A. was not well, the weather was semi-tropical, the County was a bastion of Brownite Reformism anyway, and not much could be gained by contending with Alex Mackenzie, Sarnia stonemason and Leader of the Opposition, on his home ground. But then, the story went, Sir John A. had never been a conventional politician, so even Mr. Vidal and his Tory colleagues did their best to swallow their astonishment when the great man himself stepped out of the coach onto the soil of Market Square for the first time and glared at the raw hustings in the way an exhausted tragedian might glower at the bare, unlit stage before him.
Sir John A. was not well. Although recovered from the kidney stone that had almost killed him two years before, he had been drinking and travelling and speaking and drinki
ng for nearly six weeks as the election dragged on – according to the sequence he himself had arranged – for that whole wretchedly hot summer. At fifty-nine, he was already old, a grizzled veteran with a long record of victories and defeats behind him. But, he said to himself in the nightly coma he had substituted for sleep, he had one last mission: to get the railway built to the Pacific and thus consolidate the nation’s grip on the continent and its vast resources. Re-election was necessary if the country were to survive. No means to that glorious end was to be excluded. Sir Hugh Allen’s support – bribe money it would later be called by the impious – was not to be eschewed whatever its colour. But the revelation that the Montreal financier’s consortium for constructing the C.P.R. was two-thirds American; the presence of one of those Yankees in the Premier’s own office at three in the morning to bully and condescend; and the telegram from Sir Hugh which had reached him en train between London and Goderich on Tuesday morning, threatening to expose the whole sordid mess – all these were the burdens upon his conscience that made sleep impossible. Now here was his eldest enemy seated across from him – composed, plebian in his open shirt, unsweating as befits a man accustomed to the sun, his probity as rigid and unyielding as the stonemason’s trowel he flashed like a patriot’s badge wherever he went. When the several hundred participants and onlookers had gathered by one o’clock, Sir John was already in need of a drink. Mr. Vidal passed him a crystal goblet brimming with ice-water.
Mr. Gemmil of The Sarnia Observer has recorded the details of the political square-dance which ensued. Sir John with obsequious humility and a clear sense of occasion deferred to his rival, begging that he of local prominence should speak first and foremost, etc. Beginning to feel the heat a bit himself, the stonemason conceded and the proceedings got underway. Alex Mackenzie was duly nominated by a regional worthy, Peter Graham Esq. of Warwick, who pointed out, not for the first time, the unique virtues of the candidate: he was a genuine, not a self-dubbed member of the working class who required no well-stocked purse to win elections nor did he need, as Mr. Vidal apparently did, the support of outsiders like the Knight of Kingston and his posse of political hacks. Mr. Vidal himself was then nominated in yet another lengthy, uninformative speech. More interest was shown when Sir. John A. himself was nominated (a ploy to allow him to speak later) along with half-a-dozen other nominal candidates with a thirst for rudimentary oratory. Thus it was almost three o’clock when Alex Mackenzie himself rose to accept the nomination of his enthusiasts still able to cheer in spite of the heat, the absence of shade and the petrifying boredom of the speeches to date.
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