For example, Lily knew that two days before Stoker came home for his three-day layover in the summer or week’s rest-and-recreation in winter, she could not engage Sophie in anything but the most superficial conversation. Even then Sophie might lash out at her or cuff little Bricky without cause as her anticipation took full possession of her – with its eccentric blend of fear and longing. And when Stoker did waltz up the lane, braying out some bawdy sailor’s song loud enough to alert the entire Alley of his arrival and his territorial imperative, Lily knew enough to stay away and mind her own business no matter what concatenation of squeals, groans and leathery collisions breached the night air. In the Alley no one interfered. Lily did not speak five words to Morton Potts in five years. She saw him only from a distance – bare-chested in the sun, sleeping off a hangover on his verandah, tilting after his little ones in some mock fable he was the ogre in, roaring out loud as they squealed with laughter and scampered away at will. As far as Lily could see, Stoker was either shaken by uncontrollable hilarity or he was comatose. What she knew of him she heard from Sophie who spoke of nothing else for three days after his departure – until she had exorcised whatever demons had driven them both through these furloughs of ecstasy and retribution. Always she would downplay the bruises on her arms and neck – even though no one ever remarked upon them. “The tokens of love, Lil,” she would sigh. “When you marry a lumberjack and a stoker, you gotta expect some rough lovin’.” Then she would roll her eyes theatrically to mask any feelings she might let free, and say without fail: “As my old granny always said, you can’t make a primrose out of a preacher’s arse.” Then she would manufacture a belly-laugh that Boadicea might have borrowed to stymie Caesar’s waves.
Monday afternoons were reserved for tea at Hazel’s, but of course there were no invitations and an absent guest was under no obligation to explain or justify. Most of the regulars arrived, feigned surprise at the sight of the pewter tea-service and sweetcakes, and stayed to chat. Sophie was almost always present – except when Stoker was at home – as was Lily, yet they never walked up the lane together by design, and often returned according to their own schedule. When they did share the walk home, they might well continue a discussion begun earlier or simply stroll silently along, happy in one another’s company. Hazel had two favourite topics – local gossip and politics whenever it could be reconstrued as local gossip. With the constant comings-and-doings of many powerful but undertitillated gentlemen through her portals and bedsteads, the latter bit of legerdemain was not too difficult. Shadrack Lincoln, the mute, was often seen reading the radical newspapers – abandoned by the clientele in their haste to pursue less intellectual delights – but he could not contribute to the debates except by grunting approval or disgust or occasionally, when his frustration built to a point where no other release was possible, by scribbling upon the schoolboy’s slate Lily had brought for him one day (Stewie had ‘forgot’ to return it when he quit school). Sophie often dominated the political discussion though no one knew where she acquired her extensive knowledge of provincial and federal affairs. Her source of local ‘intelligence’ was well-known: every week or so and never on the same day twice in a row, she waddled past the General Store in McHale’s where most of the Alleyfolk shopped, and headed straight up the street to the main concourse of stores and services, the hub of respectable gossip and social interchange. Dressed in her orange smock or her squirrel-fur with the heads attached and chattering – according to season – Sophie paddled her way blithely upstream, deliberately fixing victims in her wicked sights and greeting them with boisterous familiarity. The ladies of the town had no choice but to respond: she was too large and garrulous, and besides she knew more about them and had seen more of their flesh-and-blood than they themselves had. It was in these brief shell-shocked exchanges that vital information was spilled into public view, or in the longer conversations that Sophie-the-Wise carried on with the storekeepers, who genuinely liked her and much appreciated the stir she made among the village hens and their imperturbable pecking-order. It took days for the dust to settle. Once, after Sophie had lampooned the Prime Minister for two-and-a-half acts (“He’s got a voice like a crow with the palsy!”), Shadrack motioned Lily over to his corner and pointed at the words on his slate: ‘I give her the papers every week’.
“No wonder this country’s in a depression. Every one of you thought with old Alex up there in Ottawa we’d all be shittin’ shamrocks. Now don’t get me wrong – Alex’s a good man, got a heart as big as a squash – but he’s got the brains of a stonecutter and he’s as straight-laced as they make ‘em. Wouldn’t say poop if his tongue got tangled in it.” She paused for effect or breath, then said “Every muscle in that man’s body is stiff as a steel poker – ’ceptin’ the one that oughta be!” Her cackle shook Hazel’s hens out of their four-o’clock drowse.
When Lily got to know Sophie well enough, she asked her why she had given up being a midwife. Sophie gave various answers depending on her mood – “Too many of them damn quacks from the university tellin’ me what I didn’t need to know,” or “All the women out there want the doctors anyway, why should I fight it,” or “I gave it up in ’sixty-five just a little after your Brad was born – I could see the writin’ on the wall, I was just a woman with not a shred of schoolin’ to my name,” or “Women feel safer with a man rummagin’ around down there, they’re used to it!” – but finally one morning after Stoker had left, she sat bathing the cut on her cheek by the stove and confessed to Lily that Stoker had ordered her to give it up because he said it interrupted their brief times together and “he accused me of neglectin’ my own kids for the sake of other people’s. He said I was a piss-poor mother. What could I say, I was already pregnant with precious little Bricky, our love child. What could I say, Lil?”
So it was that the women of the village had to rely upon the distant charity of the Sarnia doctors several miles and sometimes desperate hours away. Mildred McLeod, the youngest of the McLeod servant-girls, got herself pregnant (“By immaculate conception, it appears,” Sophie whinnied), and one night near her time, Lily was awakened by a savage scream that sounded as if some cat was being flayed alive under her window. She hurried through the dark down to the source of the agony and met Sarie McLeod with her gray hair fanned around her face like a shriek and not one word in her wild eyes.
“Calm down, Sarie,” Lily said, trembling all over. “Has the doctor been sent for?”
“Hours ago, hours ago,” Sarie mumbled at last and could find nothing better to say for some time. Lily was thinking: these screams will wake the whole lane, Sophie will hear them and come down. But she didn’t. Lily went in to the stricken girl and before she realized what she was doing, she was giving orders to young Kathleen and Frieda and soothing Mildred who was suffering more from terror than pain. Lily whispered into her ear the things she remembered being told herself by the sage-femme who had brought her comfort in her own labour. She found her palm resting on the girl’s spasming belly like a benediction of some sort, and though she had little idea of what she was supposed to feel there or actually do, she soon had Mildred relaxing between contractions, turning her fawn’s gaze up at the visiting angel, and inhaling deeply when she was told. Behind her, preparations for the event itself seemed to have fallen into place as they would have if Sarie, exhausted by one-too-many of these melodramas, had not panicked and sent the household into chaos. Moments later Dr. Dollard arrived, himself exhausted from twenty hours on the road, and together he and Lily gave nature a brief assist and the child nosed its way into the world. It had not occurred to Lily, or anyone else, to go up to Sophie’s – Sophie had heard, and once that fact was known, nothing else could be done. That was the way it was in Mushroom Alley.
Word spread beyond the Alley, however, and during the middle years of the Liberal regime Lily was called out into the village proper to ‘assist’ Dr. Dollard in the safe delivery of six or seven babies. Along her own lane she guided another McL
eod, a McCourt and a brace of Shawyers into the waiting air, occasionally before the arrival of the harried doctor. Lily described each trauma in detail to Sophie, and Sophie felt not the least embarrassment in commenting and dealing out advice. Or in reminiscing about her own glory days: “So there I am washin’ the blood an’ muck off the baby’s bottom, an’ Missus Christie perks up and says to me, ‘do it look like it’s Da?’ and I says ‘I can’t tell, dearie, I ain’t seen your hubbie with his pants all the way down yet!’” When the baker’s daughter, Fanny Saltman, gave birth to a foetus so deformed that Dr. Dollard didn’t even try to smack breath into its misery, and when Fanny died later that day with her eyes open and the sunlight streaming over the bed, Lily told Dr. Dollard that she couldn’t help out any more. And she didn’t, though she lived in dread that some female scream would jolt her awake some night and she would have no choice. It never did. “You got the brains for it an’ the heart,” Sophie had predicted, “but not the stomach.” The closest Lily ever came to discovering what might have happened the night Sophie did not come down to McLeod’s, was when she suggested that Sophie return to the service as it was obviously needed, even if she could only do it in the winter months when Stoker was away for six weeks at a stretch.
“Once I quit somethin’, I quit it,” she said with virtuous finality.
“Like you did with readin’?” Lily said.
4
“The kids wanna go to the circus,” Sophie announced.
Robbie and even Brad had talked of little else since the posters went up on the fenceposts of the village: Darling Brothers Circus and Travelling Sideshow, they boasted in black capitals, the place and date hand-stamped below the engraved horse with the mane like a mermaid’s hair: Bayview Park, Friday and Saturday. Most of the village was waiting in formation for the circus train when it pulled into the Grand Truck station and then backed down a siding which took it past the grain elevator almost to the edge of the park that lay between the town and the village.
Though it was less than a mile’s hike, the Potts and the Marshalls climbed aboard the new Sarnia Street Railway that Saturday and rode in style ‘on the rails’, even if the smart leather-seated carriage was drawn along by a single dray who clumped over the fickle ties. Sophie had her two youngest in tow, Wee Sue and Bricky, and Brad sat with them imagining he was really older than Sue. Blub and Robbie had run on ahead of them, with their own well-rubbed coins jingling in their pockets.
“We’ll be lucky if we get a ‘hello’ outta them two today,” Sophie said, fluffing up the tired ruffles on her pink party dress and sniffing at the toilet water she had spilled on the flanks of a partially exposed bosom. “Fred’s been in a devil of a mood lately, ever since they laid him off at the sheds. I keep tellin’ him his brothers’ll get him into the Great Western, but he won’t listen to me or anybody else. He oughta be more like your Robbie – content with his lot.”
By the time the trolley stopped at the park and the bright minarets of the circus tents floated into view across the green green grass, Sophie had forgotten all about Blub and any other sorrows she may have been harbouring. Brad decided he wanted to see the show under the Big Top with the clowns, animals and acrobats. So did Wee Sue, but since the first performance was not due to start for an hour, it was decided that the mothers should escort Bricky through the kiddies’ section – complete with roundabout, a pony-ride, and a corral full of exotic but harmless creatures deemed to be ‘cute’. Brad and Wee Sue headed in the direction of the side-show tents with their striped cupolas and brass balls and grisly promise.
“I hope we’re doin’ the right thing – lettin’ them two go off together on their own.”
“Brad’ll behave,” Lily said.
“Ain’t Brad I’m worried about, “ Sophie laughed, and jammed another taffy apple into Bricky’s face. He was looking somewhat peaked after a mere four rides on the roundabout. “You want a meat-pie to settle your tummy?” Sophie said.
Lily loved the colours and sounds and odours around her. They stopped to admire the visible music of a steam-organ and then a leather-skinned man who played an Irish ditty on slender bottles bubbling with melodic dyes and then a juggler who defied geometry with his dizzying blue triangles. Barkers and grifters called out to them to come win their fortunes, try their luck, take a chance, carry off the main prize – in a lingo as old as bazaars or gypsies or the wind-swept Caucasus. Hawkers from the shadow of awnings spread their walnut eyes over every patch of pink female flesh that passed them by.
Sophie sat Bricky down in the shade of a tree, jammed two fingers down his throat and ducked as he brought up the excess of her affection. Wee Sue and Brad came up, flushed and giggling. Sophie gave them a searching look, then said to Wee Sue, “Why don’t you an’ Brad stay here with Bricky for ten minutes. We’ll meet you at the entrance to the Big Top.”
Before Lily could say anything, Sophie was trundling ahead of her towards the games-of-chance. She stopped to catch her breath, her great breasts flexing like independent bellows unsupported beneath the frumpery of her costume, garish as a hollyhock. “Did you get a gander at him on the first round?” she puffed and without waiting for a response, aimed her slow-motion trot in the direction of a sign which said: Guess Your Weight Within Five Pounds or You Win. Standing below this standard near an impressive set of scales was a dark muscular man with a Moroccan’s moustache and Neanderthal eyes. They lit up with larceny and other lusts as soon as they spotted the two women approaching. Lily felt herself skewered and turning slowly on a spit.
“Ready to give away one of them kewpie dolls?” Sophie blared with the brass section of her voice.
“Haven’t lost one today,” said the grifter, his voice swarthy, salted, montenegron. “But you look like you could fool a man, even a man of great experience such as myself.”
“How much is it gonna cost me?”
“Depends on what you’re willin’ to give, but a nickle’ll do. For a start.”
“I never start nothin’ I can’t finish.”
Lily slipped back into the small crowd that had formed around the scene and its possibilities. Behind them she could hear the ‘thunk’ of a hammer and the clank of a rusty bell. Sophie turned just enough to acknowledge the claims of the spectators without actually looking at them, and then made a surprisingly nimble pirouette somewhere inside the gaze of the guess-your-weight man. The onlookers gasped as if they had just seen an elephant do a cartwheel, then applauded both the feat and its elegance.
“That’s all of me,” she beamed, “or almost all.”
“Could there be more?” said the carny, winking to the front rows.
“You gonna frisk me for hidden objects?”
“An’ where would you hide them, eh?” the carny said, brandishing a white card and ostentatiously writing down his educated guess. “Three hundred and ten pounds,” he announced, “of the prettiest pink flesh this side of Chicago.”
Sophie snorted and stepped onto the scales. “With or without my bonnet?” She flipped off her enormous hat and shook out her curling, chestnut hair. The contrast between it and her Irish skin, uncaressed by any sun, was dazzling. Several cheers went up. The carny slipped the weights along the scale as dextrously as if he were milking a cow, but the outcome had never been in doubt. He was more than twenty pounds out.
“Your lucky day, madam!” he cried to the ‘marks’ gawping at the prize-table, and he waved the biggest, rosiest kewpie past their avid stare and placed it gently on the upslope of Sophie’s bosom.
“My lucky day,” Sophie said. She wheeled to her supporters. “And I didn’t even haveta put that brick between my tits!”
A grown man in the crowd blushed, but the carny laughed and said, “Honey, you couldn’t get a toe-nail down there!”
Lily's Story Page 48
