Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  “My husband died. Then our house burned down. We came here, me an’ my two boys.”

  “I have a daughter,” he said. “She’s not well.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Your husband had no insurance? No pension?”

  “No. He died up north.” She hesitated as if contemplating some revelation which might alter the course of the strange feeling that now lay between them as vivid as it was precarious. Then she said, “But we get along here just fine. I got my own work, an’ my boys are goin’ to school. We’re all right.”

  “Yes, I can see you are,” he said. “And things will be better for all of us, soon. You have to believe that the sacrifices you’ve made – that all our forebears made – are for the best, that life will get better. You are still young, you are a vigorous and attractive and kind woman. You will marry again.”

  He put out his arm and she slid the coat over it. Suddenly he winced and clutched at his eyelid. “Damn, got something stuck in here,” he said.

  Lily bent over him with a damp cloth and gently rolled the upper lid back till the mote was revealed. “Just a piece of grit,” she said, swabbing it away.

  She felt the chuckle rumble all the way through him. “It’s not clear grit, I hope?”

  “You make sure you keep your boys in school,” he said, letting her do up the buttons and straighten the lapels. “Right now ignorance is our only enemy. We’re going to need an educated populace if we’re to preserve this democracy from the corruption of Yankee republicanism and from the excesses of our own greed. I want to see the schools of this county bulging with happy, learning faces. Maybe then, long after I’m dead and buried, they’ll be able to understand what we’ve built here out of a wilderness and against all the odds. I try not to let the whining and the ingratitude get me down too much, I do try to remember that few of our citizens have had time to learn much history or comprehend the difference between tyranny and constitutional freedom. When they get particularly vehement I just skewer them with my Scot’s glare and I say: ‘You registered your opinion with your vote – a privilege shared by few in this irksome world – so kindly shut up till the next election’. Of course, over half the people in this county don’t even bother to vote and when they do, they haven’t a clue what the issues are. No, you tell your boys to stay in school as long as they can. We’ll need them. No democracy can long survive if its citizens don’t inform themselves of the issues and go out and vote. Is that not an absolute truth?”

  Lily handed him the leather case she had retrieved from the puddle beside him, carefully tucking the official-looking papers and letters back in. “Can’t say,” she said. “I don’t get no vote. I’m a woman.”

  They were on the wooden stoop. The sun was up, simmering and blood-shot over First Bush, and whorls of mist skittered above the vanishing pools along the grassy lanes of Mushroom Alley.

  “Thank you, Lily Marshall. I shall never forget what you’ve done. I shall not forget you, either.” He leaned back to take her in just one more time. “You must believe in Fate,” he said, “in your own personal destiny. It’s the only way.”

  She watched him till the mist clothed him in its own kind of obscurity.

  25

  1

  The five-year reign of the reform Government from 1873 to 1878 was not a happy one. In the winter of 1873 the Pacific Railway Scandal had broken over its authors’ heads so resoundingly that it has been capitalized ever since. The succeeding Liberals under Alex Mackenzie of Sarnia tried hard, and proclaimed their virtues even harder, but there seemed to be no quick cure for the economic ills of the fledgling nation: it had caught the world’s disease, or rather the fallout from its ceaseless wars, famine, pestilence, and all the human skulduggery that kept the maggots jigging in a carcass which could rot but not perish. Free trade or reciprocity, responsible government in a chastened monarchy or the licensed chaos of republicanism, laissez-faire or the Temperance Act – the shibboleths that men lived by and shaped their existence to were falling all over the earth like the pillars of Sodom or the columns of Gaza. The Great Depression – that was to last the whole decade – settled everywhere at once with the stealth of the ash from Aetna. The railroad to the Pacific inched ahead, then rusted in the prairie rain. Tricked out of their inheritance in Red River, the Métis slipped through the shadows and reappeared a thousand miles from the nearest spike. No one noticed. Wheat, unsaleable, fermented in the field; factory workers were laid off; the employees of the Grand Trunk had their pay cut in half. In the township, Clara Fitchett’s brother hanged himself in the family barn.

  In the Point the depression was felt everywhere except in Mushroom Alley. The railway slump affected every respectable household and incidentally stalled the attempts of its most prominent citizens – storekeepers, foremen, civil servants and clergymen – to wrest the village from the benign paternity of the Grand Trunk. Though almost all the homes and shops were now owned outright, no one in such uncertain times wanted to ruffle the king’s feathers. By mutual unspoken consent, all talk of incorporation ceased. Still there was some excited, under-the-counter buzzing when a distinguished gentleman recently retired from the railway wars arrived in town without prior notice one day in the summer of 1876 and within weeks had established an independent industry not fifty yards from the round-house. It turned out to be a factory of sorts, bigger than a hay barn and clanking with impressive machinery. Ten local men were immediately employed; Hap Withers was made foreman. By September the facts were irrefutable: the entrepreneur himself had purchased the Blakely home on Victoria Street and was settling in to oversee his handiwork. Every morning at nine, Stanley R. ‘Cap’ Dowling promenaded down Michigan Ave., offering his profile equally to the shop windows on either side of the thoroughfare before disappearing down the cinder path to his foundry. Independent industry, he was heard to say at the haberdashers, that’s what we need at this moment in our history, and the words were repeated with annotation and gloss all over town. Just how independent the industry was, was a matter of personal interpretation, however. The welders and smithies inside Dowling Enterprises manufactured plates, spikes and various latches used in coupling devices on box-cars. Most of these, it was rumoured, were transhipped fifty yards or so to the Grand Trunk Railway. Nevertheless, people kept an eye on Cap Dowling, entrepreneur.

  Except the Alleyfolk. They were too busy to notice anything for long. Depression or no, the necessity of the services they rendered remained unchanged. There was no diminution in the number of clients demanding to be inspired at Hazel’s Heaven. Someone had to scrub off or bleach out the weekly blood and semen splashed on the bedsheets of McHale’s and The Queen’s. Respectable householders defecated at the customary rate and so the talents of Honeyman Belcher were in steady demand. Not a single McLeod, McCourt or Shawyer lost her job as maid, though the salaries were attenuated and the after-hours requests somewhat more importunate. Spartacus had to pick more judiciously through the corporate garbage for gems, but with his magpie instinct and his carrion’s pride, he kept the boulevard as impeccable as ever. The only businesses to increase their trade were those of John the Baptist (whose inexhaustible still frothed away like Parnassus in its secret bower) and Stumpy’s elymosenary institute now overflowing with the destitute and the dazed who dropped off the way-freight every morning and evening. Sophie Potts bred her sow every season and sold the suckling to Duckface Malloney, and she tended her chickens with the same smothering carelessness she offered her children. “We always do okay for ourselves,” she would tell anyone within earshot. “After all, mushrooms come rosier in manure, don’t they?”

  2

  For Lily these would be remembered as good years, growing years. McHale’s Hotel and two large boarding houses on St. Clair Street were added to her business. She asked Spartacus if he would act as her delivery man and even though it meant a drop in his status, he smiled and shook his head yes. Then one Monday, when the afternoon session at Hazel’s had been
prorogued, she asked that good woman if Violet could come down several days a week and work for her. Hazel was almost too quick to agree, Violet was ecstatic, and the arrangements completed within the hour. “You’re putting the money you earn in a safe place?” Lily asked her a few weeks later. Violet nodded her head vigorously. Hazel’s taking every cent, Lily thought. When she saw the panic in Violet’s face, she patted her on the arm and said, “You can give some to Hazel, for your room an’ board.” “Anythin’ you say, Lily.”

  Violet was a wonderful, joyous companion to Lily’s own labours, which continued every day of the week except Monday afternoons. The good part of it was that they could take an hour or two off whenever the weather or mood tempted them. While they worked side by side they hummed – to themselves or mysteriously in sudden, improvised concert – and sometimes they swapped stories, though Violet’s speech always tightened and splayed as the momentum of an anecdote increased. Whenever they were together, they felt the overpowering presence of the shared space between them – lending its shadow to the body needing it most. When the clothes could be hung out in the breeze, they sang the French song Lily had learned from Ti-Jean and taught with ease to the ‘idiot’ daughter of Bachelor Bill. They sang it lustily like an extravagant surrogate for joy, and loud enough to shiver the testicles of Baptiste Cartier’s bachelor boar.

  With the profits she made from her work Lily began to make the house more comfortable for her boys. What Spartacus couldn’t salvage for her, he managed to purchase second-hand and deliver to her door. He loved a cup of tea but always drank it from a mug with one foot on the front stoop. Lily got proper beds and ticks for all of them, a plush chesterfield and chair, two large reading lamps, a set of dinner plants and cups that almost matched, a small cooking stove for the main room, and a handsome walnut bookcase with glass doors only one of which was cracked. Hap Withers supplied two of his many sons to rebuild her floor, partition the sleeping quarters, seal the windows and eaves to discourage mosquitoes and drafts, and put a slatted platform over the bare dirt of the laundry room. Lily tried knitting again but she was too exhausted, and so she had to spend precious dollars on clothing for her sprouting, handsome schoolboys. After Violet came to help out, Lily tried putting in a garden, but nothing would grow in the sand on her property except burs and sawgrass. She gave up even though a few shrunken vegetables would have meant more money for important things. Like books for Brad.

  Brad was a wizard at school. He did everything with an ease and a confidence that was absolute, even arithmetic. But reading and writing were the things he loved most. Lily marvelled and worried. Miss Timmins kept him only two years before she passed him along to the senior teacher, Miss Constance Stockton, newly arrived in relief of the footsore Mr. Grindly. Miss Stockton had a First-Class Certificate from the Normal School and she came to them from one of the better academies in Toronto for reasons still being speculated upon. The village folk were honoured merely by her presence among them. Brad thrived under her aggressive tutelage. Though such preferment usually spelled disaster among one’s peers as it had that first year, Brad’s start was so high and so bright that he became an object of wonder among them, a person wholly apart from them and hence immune from the cruel sanctions of their fraternity. In his second-last year – Junior Book Four – he wrote a play for the Christmas concert and the lesser breed of the senior school allowed themselves to be flattered and bullied by his direction of it. Lily sat in the back row with Sophie and watched in awe. “You better put the kibosh on this schoolin’ business right now,” Sophie said afterwards. “It starts to go to their heads an’ then all hell breaks loose. There’s nothin’ you can do once they get too much of it in their blood. Like Marlene.”

  Sophie demonstrated her views by taking Wee Sue out of school in the middle of grade eight – a few months before her Entrance Exams – and shipping her off to keep house for a retired shed foreman on Alfred Street. “At least he’s too old to get her in the family way,” she laughed. “He might be able to get it half-way up on a good day but he sure as hell can’t catch her.” Wee Sue continued to read books despite her mother’s embargo on them in the Potts’ house, smuggling them in from her employer’s surprisingly interesting collection and lending them in turn to Lily and Brad. When in 1875 a proper street railway was opened to connect Sarnia and Point Edward with an hourly service, Lily could take Brad and Wee Sue with her to the new public library on Wellington Street. Brad loved fiction and poetry, devouring the romances of Scott and much of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. For a while Lily tried to read along with him, to feel vicariously some of the pleasure she could see in his eyes and the way his whole frail body bent towards the book he was reading – sucked willingly into the vast rebellious landscapes that dazzled the white side of the page. But she was just too tired; her eyes silted with fatigue; the print crumbled into meaningless alphabets; and she would shake the book with rage, then resignation. Often she would come awake, still sitting with a book in her hand, the chimney-glass scorched, and discover Brad in the other chair with his eyes alert and tirelessly skimming page after page. Sometimes she would sit beside him and put her arm around his shoulder and he would snuggle against it, continuing to absorb the magic print before him but letting her take a full part in his own joy, imperceptibly acknowledging the primacy of her claim, her uncertificated love. When she prompted, he would recount the seven wonders of Midlothian or leave her breathless by reciting those poems about Lucy and the last green field. At other times he would stiffen the moment her hand touched his shoulder and she would be shut out, even if he relented later, as he often did, and included her in his re-enactment of the story. When typhoid fever struck the village in ’seventy-six and swept away two of the Sawyer children, Lily kept her boys at home; she wouldn’t even let them out in the yard.

  Brad didn’t mind much, but Robbie did. Robbie could never be cooped up for long. Maybe that was why he had so much trouble in school. He longed to be outdoors, and the stuffy, fly-ridden weather of Miss Timmins’ room was more than he could bear. He never got out of the junior division, though he stuck it out – uncomplainingly – for almost six years. What he loved most was fishing and hunting with the older boys of the Alley and Fred Potts in particular – now known simply as Blub. Robbie skinned the rabbits they shot (with Blub’s twelve-gauge) over at Potts before he brought them home for Lily to cook. He was saving the furs for a jacket he hoped his mother would make him. Sometimes he and Blub would ‘borrow’ a boat from the fishery and head out into the Lake for the day. Fresh perch could be sold in town for cash; Robbie was saving his money for a gun. When Lily expressed her concern about his truancy and his passion for hunting, Sophie gave a ruminative chuckle and said, “He’s just tryin’ to wear a man’s socks – a little bit too soon maybe but then Blub’s almost three years older, ain’t he? Why don’t you just give in an’ let the kid quit school? Let him get a job an’ make his way in the world. We don’t own them, you know.” I know, Lily thought, thinking of Sophie’s own brood scattered and dissident all over the province.

  “With John and Stewie off workin’ for the Great Western in Sarnia an’ Peg married to that no-good-nick chauffeur, I only got but three left home myself. But if we don’t let go of ’em, they let go of us.”

  Lily gave in. After driving the truant officer off her place with a broom and then sitting for an hour in the privy before she stopped shaking, Lily said yes, and in the spring of 1877, two months before his fourteen birthday, Robbie left school for good. Mr. Redmond, true to his word, gave Robbie a part-time job on the delivery wagon. When Lily suggested that he might rent the wagon to deliver laundry as well, he stared at her with a resentment that dumbfounded and then cut deeply. She saw the word of assent on his lips but recovered in time to say, “Never mind, really, it was a silly idea.” Relief flooded his face but did not wash away the other, darker emotion. At least he has a friend, she thought, watching him dash off towards the Potts’ house, trying not to resen
t in her own fragile way the hundreds of sleepless nights and restless afternoons she had already spent worrying – wondering when and if he would come home, and what new bruise he would have to camouflage in the coming days: any healing words of expiation or remorse stitched like scars in his throat. They spoke little now beyond the brief courtesies of the day. Moreover, Robbie and his brother seemed merely to coexist, chillingly polite in her presence. I am losing them, she thought one day in her desperation. The more I love them and want them to be themselves, the worse it gets. How can that be? If not love, then what?

  When Brad came down with pneumonia in the terrible winder of 1877-78, she sat at his bedside night after night cooling him with iced cloths, steadying with her own strength the terror that flickered in his eyes as he began for the first time perhaps to question his own immortality, to doubt the voices prophesying glory to the credulous. Often when she fell into a doze in her chair, she would rouse to his soft moans and find Robbie across from her cupping his brother’s flaxen head in a hunter’s hand and spooning fresh soup onto those limp poet’s lips. Lily closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. After a while she heard the low murmur of their little-boy voices. If not love, she thought, then nothing. That’s all I know.

  3

  Like most relationships in the alley the one that developed between Lily Marshall and Sophie Potts over the depression years was marked by both intimacy and independence. Whenever Lily felt down or in need of company, she would slip over to Sophie’s place where, summer or winter, the iron stove crackled and the kettle whistled. Without knocking she would slide into the rambling kitchen where ‘her chair’ would be waiting. Likewise, Lily would often look up from her scrubbing, bathed in steam, and gradually make out the ample silhouette of her neighbour fixed to the old rocker by the south window. If Sophie were busy – cajoling Duchess’ farrow towards plumpness, doing her own never-quite-finished laundry with a bare-bottomed Bricky hopping behind her, or hacking at her garden lathered in sweat and cursing the ill-fortune that made her soil the most arable in the Alley – then Lily would simply make herself a cup of tea, talk to Wee Sue or play cat’s cradle for Bricky. Sometimes she would just sit and let the myriad little dramas of the Potts’ household absorb her interest and draw her gratefully away from herself for that one hour she needed to recuperate or to become aware once again that there existed other lives, other acts of caring and slight and needing-more-love-than-there-was-anywhere. If Sophie were about to go out on an errand, she would nod at Lily – usually – and then simply disappear down the lane. No offense was meant or taken. In the summer Lily might hear the cries of Sophie’s youngest ones, and pulling Brad out of his chair, drop her scrub-board and head up the path towards the beach with towels and swimsuits in hand until they caught up with the Potts’ clan, already augmented by several McLeods and Shawyers. Lily would fall in beside Sophie, who pitched and yawed in the sand, and together they would lead the children down to the water, certain that they had established a bond for the long, lazing afternoon. It was only on holidays and other rare occasions that formal plans were made to picnic or go skating on the flats or sledding over the dunes. In the Alley it was better to let things happen. Somehow word was passed along as needed, movements were detected by some inner radar, random sound was read with the clarity of print. Here, a pact was signed without recourse to clause or declaration, and rarely broken, and yet the independence of each participant was re-established as soon as the hour or afternoon or safari was complete. It was as if, not having any legal claim to their property, they chose to guard themselves – their time, feelings, rights, dreams – with double the zeal of any mere ratepayer.