The stonecutter stood up to thunderous applause. His angular features forewarned the weak-at-heart that here was a man of little compromise when truth and honesty were at risk. His eyes were as sharp as a jeweller’s chisel. First of all, he said that he was flattered to have the Premier of the Dominion, who had so often supped with the gods, among them. He, as a common mortal, might indeed feel abashed in his presence. His tone now darkened, cumulonimbic and foreboding. He attacked Sir John’s pretense of a coalition government, ridiculed the Tories’ attempts to pass themselves off as ‘progressive’, and excoriated the Government’s ruinously generous terms for British Columbia’s entry into Confederation especially in light of the fact that Ontarians had had to give their own land gratis to the railroads and feed them besides a million dollars a year from the public trencher forever after. It was quarter to four when he sat down to prolonged cheers. In the eaves of the Town Hall behind them even the pigeons had wilted, dreaming of cool breezes and evening dews.
No one left the square. A number of marketeers and strays who had entered the drama stayed to see the outcome. All eyes were on the Prime Minister, who, if his supporters had not known better, might have been thought dozing through some of the lesser encomiums. However, the fireworks that erupted at this point brought everyone out of his stupor as the arch-tory Mr. Vidal popped up to read a damning letter which clearly discredited Alex Mackenzie on a local drainage issue. The crowd, ninety per cent of them Reformers, roared their disapproval and just as fisticuffs were about to be deployed in settlement of the question, Mr. Vidal – realizing that he was not destined to be the butt of the afternoon’s entertainment – finished reading the last half of the letter, which – coincidentally – happened to exonerate his opponent. The Observer reported that ‘a scene of uproar and confusion ensued that beggars description’.
It was only the figure of Sir John rising and assuming the podium that instantly calmed both the outraged and the outrageous. At four o’clock the heat had reached its zenith; in the far south-west, convection clouds were building. Sweat, unthinned by alcohol, thickened on the statesman’s upper lip, dribbled down his pale, beardless face and hung in parchment nodules from his chin like cast-off syllables from old speeches. He tucked his left hand in his waistband to keep it from quivering and with his right he sawed the air erratically as a conductor will when he has lost his place and must read the score from memory. In front of him, where his eyes refused to focus, he heard in his mind a cacophony of rejoinders, putdowns, exordia, crippling witticisms, perorations, bombast, retorts, sentences in the old clean high style: a phrase (a word even) with some touch of the truth still unuttered in it. The shallow applause from a thousand previous masterful efforts hissed on the whiskey-drum of his skull. He needed a drink. The sun’s heat congealed in his gut, malarial and maggoty. He would open his mouth and he would vomit all over Mr. Vidal’s handshake. From the left side of the platform Mr. Mackenzie skewered him with his presbyterian eye. He blinked, and began – one more time.
The Observer comments on the speech thus: ‘We regret that our limited space will not permit our giving a detailed report of Sir John’s speech in this issue. We will merely say that for a gentleman of his fame, it was one of the most miserable attempts at public speaking we ever heard; while it was at the same time so full of misrepresentations and misstatements...that it has led to the conclusion that he was either so much indisposed as not to know what he was saying, or that he purposely occupied his position in the hustings in order that he might wickedly and maliciously traduce and slander a man infinitely his superior. Such reckless, unfounded and abominable charges...coming from the lips of the Crown in the Dominion of Canada is sufficient to cast a stigma on the whole population, in the eyes of every civilized people’.
When the token candidates had withdrawn, the preordained nominees were confirmed and the meeting disbanded. Partisans kicked their dogs and horses awake and set out to slake their thirst. Some stayed to watch the demi-royal party disappear into the Town Hall for a formal dinner and self-congratulatory toasts. There was some spirited wagering as to whether His Highness would make it past the soup course, but he was definitely seen boarding a carriage under his own impetus about nine o’clock that evening, just after the equatorial fury of the summer storm had subsided. By the time he reached the safety of his gunboat at the Point Edward wharf, the master builder could look up, if he so wished, and remark upon the orderly revolution of the starts along their appointed orbits.
2
It was one of those flash-floods that cuts through the brooding heat, cleanses and revivifies the air for a precious hour or two, and leaves the browning grass superficially refreshed. Along the lanes and alleys of the Point it also left vast pools of murky water, child-size puddles, dizzying rivulets and thick patches of gumbo. The Alleykids filled the twilight with the dissonant song of their happiness. As darkness descended, more steeply now as September nighed, their voices dwindled and thinned. By ten-thirty the Alley was silent except for the occasional hushed exchange of sailors approaching Hazel’s Heaven in twos and threes. The moon rose unobserved.
Around midnight a pair of sailors, having satisfied their thirst at John the Baptist’s and their lust at Hazel’s ersatz Eden, sloshed noisily down towards Michigan Ave. One of them apparently slid into a slough, cursing and coughing up slime while his buddy sniggered in sympathy. Pressing a damp cloth against Brad’s fevered brow, Lily heard them clearly somewhere below her front path, but Brad just moaned a little and turned over. In a while his breathing became steady. Lily slipped back to her own bed. She was very tired, having washed and ironed the hotel’s weekly quota of sheets in the intense heat of the day. Even the flies had capitulated. She peered out the side window and in the moonlight she could see the puddles and sudden bogs glistening all the way along the lane. The two sailors had recovered and disappeared. Lily lay her head on the sash and sucked in the damp-cool air.
When she looked up much later, she was surprised to see a solitary figure making its way towards her. At first she thought it might be wounded because it was staggering and then stopping up short, as if calculating the extent of some pain, only to step out again and teeter its way forward another few feet. The man, for so it was from the cut of his gentleman’s coat, grunted out a curse every time a wayward foot deposited him in a puddle, but to no evident effect as the splashing and cursing continued at an accelerated pace. He’ll never make it to John the Baptist’s, Lily mused as she turned away. It was not an uncommon sight, but she was a little puzzled by the clothes and by something unique in the gestures, something melancholy and alone. Just as she was about to blow the night-candle out, she heard a loud splash, then nothing.
Wrapping a shawl over her shift, Lily went out into the yard and looked down the lane. Grass and mud oozed between her toes. She whispered sharply, “You all right out there?” Nothing. Drunk and passed out, was her first thought. Well, he won’t freeze out here tonight. But something urged her to continue, and a few yards farther down where the curve widened the path, she saw the man, as she had surmised, face-down and unmoving. But he was not on the ground, he was in the middle of a small slough with his hands stretched out in front of him, his feet splayed, and his face completely buried in the six-inch slime. He’s drowned, she thought, racing over and grabbing him by the shoulders and flinging him on his back. His eyes were sealed shut with mud, the nostrils plugged, the mouth gagged. On her knees in the water, she wetted her fingers and scooped the muck out of his mouth, at the same time splashing him all over the face with handfuls of water. Then she struck him on the back with her balled fist as if he were a newborn resisting breath. A wheezing rattle started up from somewhere deep inside, and the man coughed once wrenchingly, as if scraping the catarrh from his lungs. His eyes popped open and welcomed the pain of the grit against them. For several minutes he gagged and spat, swinging between disgust and fury, it seemed. Then he began to weep softly just before he slid into unconsciousness
in the arms of his saviour.
One minute longer, Lily thought as she carried the frail victim up the path to her house, and he would have been a dead man. Maybe he wanted to be.
When Lily woke it was still dark. A fresh breeze fluffed the curtains beside her head. She uncrooked her neck and peered across the room. The fire she had set in the hearth glowed weakly; the clothes-horse she had brought in from the shed still held the suitcoat, trousers, socks and linen underthings she had removed from the soaked, shivering, comatose body of the stranger. He sat exactly where she had propped him up on the settee with pillows and a quilt, but his eyes were wide open. They were staring at the last nugget of firelight, which in its turn kindled some flickering vitality in them. Lily saw at once that these eyes were intelligent, guarded, caring, and as alert and quick as a hare’s in the open field. He had been awake for some time – watching her perhaps – because he seemed quite settled in the coziness of the room with his chin resting comfortably on his chest, his breathing regular and his face pallid yet void of any real tension. He appeared to be a man who was accustomed to waking up in strange places with colossally harmless hangovers and no memory of what indiscretions led him thence.
“Don’t be alarmed, madam. I’ve just been watching you sleep.”
She picked out his Scotch burr somewhat undercut by the vowels of the countryside. Though softened to suit the room and the occasion, the voice was deep and resonant.
“You’ll pardon my dishabillement, I trust, particularly because you appear to have taken a major role in effecting it.” His eye twinkled and she sensed the effort behind his words. “I hope the sight of unaccommodated man has not discouraged you forever from respecting the species?” He pulled the quilt across the upper reaches of his hairy chest, and his lip curled towards a smile.
“You one of them politician fellas?”
The smile completed its trajectory. He was scrutinizing her through the semi-darkness. “Could we have some light?”
“Of course.” Lily got up and lit the small lamp beside her. She glanced over at the curtained-off section where the boys slept. Then she realized she was dressed only in her shift, so she went into her own cubicle and returned wearing the floral kimono Sophie had given her (“Don’t worry, it’s Marlene’s, she don’t need it no more”). She stirred the fire and put the kettle on for tea. For a moment she felt embarrassed to be standing here with a man clothed only in a quilt and his most intimate apparel displayed on a rack before them like the severed parts of his body set out in the sun to be cured. Then she recalled – with a slight, rueful smile – that she had dragged him through the mud of her own yard up the steps and into this room – only hours before – and with no other course open to her had stripped away every shred of clothing from his tremoring body and laid his unconscious form on the settee. Then she had proceeded to rub him dry with a thick towel from The Queen’s, apply a vigorous sheen of liniment, and mummify him with blankets. When she had made him comfortable and was certain his breathing was normal, she took his clothes into the shed and by the light of a candle, scrubbed the mud and vomit off them. She lit a fire, despite the warmth of the night, and set them on the horse to dry. What a pathetic withered creature had been revealed to her beneath the gentleman’s disguise – hardly an ounce of flesh to float the brittling bones into old-age, every rib registering its own protest, the shrivelled penis and hairless seed-sack as smooth as a boy’s after a chilling swim in the great wide waters of the Lake. Lily could make no connection between that flesh and this voice, these darting eyes.
She handed him his tea and sat down in the chair near him. “You been up to that meetin’ in Sarnia?”
“I confess that I have.”
“Government man?”
“I must plead guilty to that also.”
“How’d you get way down here?”
He chuckled grimly and sipped his tea with a greedy, unsteady hand. In the lamplight his complexion had the pallor of a gutted mullet. “That’s a long story, only part of which I can recall. I’m staying on the big boat docked up by the station; one of my friends from the town was in the process of leading me to a local watering-hole with the refreshing name of John the Baptist’s when his legs went numb and he retired to the wayside. Being the intrepid type, I continued apace.” He held out his cup for more tea and when he had trapped her glance, he said, “You are definitely not John the Baptist.”
“You give me a terrible fright, I thought you was dead for a minute.”
“No doubt I was,” he said, letting fatigue take hold of his face for a few moments. He dozed off, and Lily just caught the teacup before it tumbled to a certain death.
The clothes were dry now. The false dawn told her it must be close to four o’clock. The boys still slept soundly, undisturbed by the deep snoring from the stranger on the settee. When the snoring stalled suddenly, she turned around and looked into his wideawake, bemused smile. There seemed to be no border land between his sleeping and waking states. Probably he doesn’t even dream, Lily thought. She held the quilt up as a screen behind which, labouring for breath, he donned his gentleman’s vestments once more.
“We lead a difficult life,” he was saying. “Politicians are a greatly misunderstood breed, especially in this wretched, ill-informed country. You take this county, for example. It’s one of the richest places in the Dominion, on the whole continent. I see farms from the train and the shoreline, wealthy beyond description, and owned by men who were, like my own parents, slaves and vassals in their home country, without a pot to spit in. Naturally, they attribute their success to their own hard work, clearing and ploughing and harvesting – and we know all about that because most of us are the sons of farmers. They don’t seem to understand that it was the government and their politicians who negotiated the Reciprocity Treaty which kept the wheat flowing to the United States throughout the Civil War, and yet when that treaty is abrogated by the intransigence of the Yankees they are quick to blame us for their troubles, including, if you please, the foul weather and the bugs. We have done everything imaginable for the people of this county, and what is our reward? Vilification and perpetual calumny! A hotbed of unrepentant Reformers whose laissez-faire mumbo jumbo would ruin every farmer in Lambton. But can they see that? Why aren’t they grateful? What have we to do to please them?” He looked at Lily.
“Maybe they just want to have a little say in what’s bein’ done for them,” she said.
He opened his mouth to say something profound or orotund but nothing came out. She went over to the clothes-horse where his morning-coat still hung and began brushing the residual dried-mud off it, one speck at a time.
“The railroads are an even more egregious example of ingratitude,” he continued while she worked. “What was this town before the Grand Trunk? How did the farmers move their wheat to the markets of the whole continent or the lumbermen their timber to the mills of America? Would there be an oil boom without rail-cars to deliver crude to the refineries? Would there be a factory of any kind in Sarnia? They whine and they complain about the expense, about the loss of a few acres of land in a county that has millions to squander, about a few tarnished hands in the till when there’s enough in the general larder to make all of us rich. But everyone wants it now, wants it cheap and wants it without pain. They have no vision. But I tell you there will be no country from sea to sea without the Canadian Pacific to bind it into one. Again, they cry foul! They cavil and belittle, laughing at a band of steel stretching across prairies occupied only by a scattering of aborigines, but I see those grasslands full of people and wheat and British towns and villages. The same detractors wept their crocodile tears when we sent an army to establish dominion in Rupert’s Land. They fussed and channered over a ragtaggle band of half-breeds as if the world could be stopped long enough to grieve over lost causes. But even out there – with their own province now and their own government, they grumble and claim they are misunderstood.” He sighed, intermittent between exhaustio
n and the ignition of fresh fervour. He turned for sympathy, anywhere.
Lily shook the suitcoat and held it up to the lamplight. “Did anybody ask them Indians what they wanted?” she said.
He looked irreparably aggrieved but soon recovered sufficiently to say “I take it you don’t approve of railroads, either?”
Lily nodded.
“You have a personal grudge?”
Lily thought for a moment, then said, “No.” Something in her face and in the manner of her denial arrested his attention. He peered around at the room, at the shabby furniture, the cracks in the siding and the patchwork roof as if he were seeing it for the first time. “Why do you live here?” he said softly.
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