Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  “You blubber bucket! You bulb-bellied slop-cunt of a pig’s hooer! You fat-tit, slant-eyed son-of-a-boar’s bitch!” She hollered through her megaphone at the stunned sow – its eyes red as raspberries – and continued improvising her medley of curses, whose foul effluence rose into the air above the Alley and like an irresistible spoor drew to it all manner of curious creature. Indeed, by the time Lily had seduced Duchess to one of the trundle-wagon’s uprights and pulled Sophie to her feet, they were surrounded by McLeods, McCourts and Shawyers of every size and sex. All were eager to help.

  Sophie, canary-yellow from the front and mud-umber from the back, re-established what she took to be her dignity by hurling commands into the chaos, and somehow, amid much laughter and several temporary setbacks, managed to assist the terrified sow up the plank and into the wagon. Lily hopped aboard and tried to sooth Duchess with some nonsense patter she thought might approximate a porcine lullaby, a manoeuvre which, while having little evident effect on the beast, did succeed in reducing Lily and Sophie to a state of paralyzing mirth. Sophie leaned the mighty ballast of her body against the rear of the rig while a dozen ululating children pushed from the side and pursued some invisible Pied Piper up the dusty trail towards the bootlegger’s shack. Other pleasure-seekers, large and small, joined the procession en route. Cap Whittle was seen scrambling down a yard-arm. Spartacus and Stumpy fell in behind, and Honeyman Belcher left his pony to graze where it stood.

  As the tumbrel lumbered past Hazel’s Heaven, the hoots and cries of the cavalcade awoke the drowsy concubines within, and by the time it reached the stamping ground of John the Baptists’s soul-mate, the afternoon was aflutter with petticoat and tinkling laughter. As the circus crowd gathered and jostled for the best view, Sophie halted the carriage with a toss of her head and waddled aggressively towards the abode of the victim. All commentary ceased. Wavelets could be heard stroking Canatara beach.

  Aquinas had come out of his sanctuary to accost the intruders. In some ways his pen was the sturdiest and most impressive structure on the Alley. A commodious corral – of stout split-logs and deeply-augured posts braided with chicken-wire – allowed him freedom to exercise his bulk, loll in the soothing mud, or intimidate children and idling strangers by stamping his trotters on the gravel pad and grunting like a tusked peccary in the wild. Behind him stood a hutch-like affair lovingly constructed by his friend and helpmate. It was water-tight, being shingled with cedar-shake, and the south side of it could be opened completely to the air merely by raising the two wall-size shutters on their hinges and laying them flat across the roof. This transformation occurred on warm sunny days when Aquinas preferred to lie in his manger, shaded and content, and peer out at the fevered world beyond – his feed trough less than a head-loll away, and if he were pressingly hungry, as he often was, he might even nudge open the lid of the large grain-box where the goodies were stored.

  When he espied the crowd ringing his demesne on three sides, he stopped in his tracks and tilted forward the horn-shaped ears he often brandished like the sabres of his jungle cousins. Aquinas was a purebred Polish China boar, black as silt except for the tufts of white on his feet, tail and snub-snout that made him look, no matter how fiercely he agitated his bristles, slightly comical. But his grunting in itself could be awesome, and when the foolish or unwary ventured so close as to touch the walls of his monastery, he swung his bullocks in a frenzy and stabbed the air with his progenitive wand. Unfortunately, the only sins of the flesh he had ever committed were those of gluttony and gormandizing. His celibacy was the talk of the Alley, and beyond. Baptiste Cartier, if he himself knew why, would not say. He treated the boar like a favoured pet, feeding him grain and Jersey milk and windfall apples and a lap or two of homemade stout when he was extra good. After dark Baptiste could be heard gabbling in joual to Aquinas, who listened with exaggerated politeness and allowed his itching brow to be stroked and stroked. Sometimes it would be three in the morning before John the Baptist rejoined his customers in the shack at the very end of Mushroom Alley.

  At this moment, though, with the afternoon sun blinding him, Aquinas was alone, surrounded by silent, gawking faces and under siege from a large female who had just – incredibly – entered the gate beside the open hutch as if she were waltzing into church. Trying hard to ignore the presence of those arrayed behind her, he pawed the turf with his right trotter and stiffened his jowls like a rooster’s wattles. He belched volcanically and aimed a vicious snort in Sophie’s direction. As he looked about, ready to mount a charge of some sort, his beady eye caught sight of Duchess, who was being escorted down the wagon-ramp right behind the invading force. His nostrils flared, appraised the available odours, and tightened. Sophie hauled Duchess by the ears fully into the pen and Lily slammed the gate shut in back of them. This acted as a signal for the silent chorus to erupt in a series of whoops, hollers, lewd anatomical suggestions and general merriment.

  Aquinas froze, and waited in the middle of the sty as the dust from his terrible stomping settled in pools around him. He didn’t seem to know which of the approaching hags he ought to be most chary of. Something in the aura about Duchess – with her pink plumpness, her undulant softness, her wobbling, fetid underparts – prevented him from outright retreat, from unqualified terror. He watched in rapt trepidation as Duchess, veteran breeder that she was, waddled into the muddy wallow a few feet away, tipped forward on her knuckles and presented herself for servicing.

  A rasping cheer went up from the well-wishers. Sophie picked up its inspiration. “All right you black-balled son-of-a-bitch” she yelled at Aquinas, “Let’s see what kinda stud you really are!” She turned to the crowd for support, rocking with belly-laughter, and brushing off the mud dried on her backside with lewd aplomb. Aquinas, tempted and shivering, stumbled forward two steps, all caution momentarily overpowered by the incense of passion just beyond his nose. At the last possible second, however, with Duchess braced for capture and rude entry, he lunged diagonally, splashed through the muck and headed for his manger. But the lady’s duenna was even swifter; Sophie cantered after the spooked hog, cutting him off at the corner of the opening to his hutch, where they collided with a blubbery thud. A collective ‘ooh’ was emitted by the throng. Both combatants went down but Sophie was up first, spitting sludge and umbrage. She flopped on top of Aquinas, who made no pretense of resistance. He had given up all emotion but fear, and as she threw a choke-chain of flesh around his neck and jerked him vertical, he closed his eyes, squealed like a piglet without a nipple, and then howled as piteously as a barrow staring at his clipped testicles.

  “Grab him by the handle!” someone offered.

  “He ain’t got one!”

  Sophie was dragging him stiff-legged across the wallow towards the puzzled sow, and might actually have succeeded in carrying out such a forced congress if Duchess herself had not decided she required more privacy than this to satisfy her procreative longing. She stood up, unstuck her front trotters from the mud and stumped past the purblind Aquinas towards the shelter.

  “The other way! The other way!”

  Sophie uttered an oath that sprung something inside the boar’s head and he went limp, all six hundred pounds of him. Undaunted, Sophie gripped him by the knuckles and inched him back towards the sow now settled in the shade of the manger. The crowd whooped. Suddenly Lily was at Sophie’s side. Together they tugged Aquina’s deadweight slithering through the slough, tumbling into it themselves, popping up again with only their eyes and teeth to signal the manic delight of their laughter and fury, and finally – riding a crest of hysterical cheering and good-will – they pitched the wretched male creature into the straw beside Duchess. Lily fell back against the stool John the Baptist used when conversing with his bachelor friend, and let the tears wash over the mud on her cheeks. But Sophie – fuelled by some darker, unspoken purpose – belly-flopped between the dazed beasts and made a lunge for Aquinas’s crotch. There was no need. In panic or dread or desire – who
would ever know? – the Polish China boar rose up and then down, and with a savage thrust did his pedigree proud.

  Before the crowd could confer its ultimate accolade on Sophie’s daring, however, two more unexpected things happened. First, Cap Whittle, athwart an alder branch, cried out, “Man ahoy,” and John the Baptist was spotted tearing across the flats towards the mêlée. Second, the combined plentitude of sow, boar and human attendants caused the ground to give way under them. Not all at once but steadily, like quicksand, and accelerating with each floundering second. Straw, dirt, pigshit, rotting timbers, splintered floorboards – all caved inward and down and swept a cargo of flesh into the vortex. Moments later, through a maze of squeals, whimpers, gasps and settling dust – first Lily, then Duchess, then Aquinas, then Sophie clambered up and rolled onto firm ground. And just in time.

  As the throng parted and drew back to allow for the entrance of the aggrieved party whose French oaths and howl of desolation preceded him by two hundred yards, they gasped as one when the earth under them rumbled and exploded, and a geyser of smoke-and-steam shot up no more than a handspan behind Sophie’s rump. The shock of it bowled her over against Lily, and, arms enlinked, they followed the goose-white plume as it hissed skyward from its underground eruption. Moments later Cap Whittle caught the first whiff of raw whiskey.

  A few weeks later Sophie stopped Lily on the lane and said, “Hey, I got news. Duchess is up the stump.” She grinned her most wicked grin: “Must’ve been the holy water!”

  28

  Stoker had left for the boat. Lily watched twelve-year-old Bricky trail after him across the ragweed fields towards the docks. She waited a full day, then slipped across to Sophie’s.

  Lily found her in the back shed sprawled on a pile of sheets and scraps of clothing, half of which was dirty and half in one or more stages of being washed. She was absent-mindedly sipping homemade beer from one of the brown pint bottles once used for some medicinal end. She made no sign to acknowledge or sanction Lily’s presence. Lily came gently up beside her and eased down onto a stack of overalls. Sophie was staring at one of the cracks in the siding where the morning sun pounced. Lily reached over, detached the bottle from Sophie’s hands, and took a large gulp. The beer was warm and fizzy.

  “Needs to settle a bit,” Sophie said. “Stoke made a batch special for me. He made me promise I’d wait till it settled for a week.”

  “How long’s he gone for?”

  “The usual.”

  “Where’s Bricky?”

  “Who gives a shit. Quiet around here, ain’t it?”

  “It’s not bad, for not bein’ settled.”

  “Since when did you start likin’ any kind of beer?”

  Lily swallowed an ostentatious mouthful.

  “Christ’s sake, gimme that before you waste it all!”

  Lily rolled away, holding the bottle aloof and foaming.

  “Shit, woman, you’re drippin’ it all over my laundry!” Sophie heaved the flotsam of her flesh forward in an effort to sit up, almost made it, but teetered backwards, wobbling towards gravity.

  “Come on, Lil, I ain’t kiddin’. That’s the last goddam bottle. Stoke’s puttin’ me on a diet.” As Lily danced close to her, Sophie lashed out with her right hand and cuffed a pair of men’s underwear.

  “You skinny bitch! You bag o’ bones! You fly-titted little Jezebel! Gimme that booze!”she snorted. “That’s a present from my husband. That’s sacred stuff. Put it down!”

  Lily set the bottle down, and while Sophie floundered through heavy seas towards it – her shark’s eye on its last trickle – Lily scurried about reorganizing the laundry and restarting the fire in the kitchen stove to heat more water. Later, when she came back into the shed, she brought two brown bottles of beer with her, pulled the corks out with her teeth and squatting beside Sophie once again, handed her one of Stoker’s precious gifts.

  Sophie sighed: “What on earth would I do without you, eh?”

  It turned out that Sophie was in one of her periodic states of false inebriation, where the alcohol merely puts a glaze on the lethargy or despondency or glee already present in its own right. For no sooner had Lily finished up the wash and begun to gather it together to hang outside when the comatose Sophie revived on the instant, climbed onto both feet, and flashed a mischievous grin.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “It’s time I showed you something’.”

  They took a bit of the medicine with them.

  The windowless old relic of a shed had always been locked. Its rusty tin roof sagged preposterously, its vertical barn boards split apart like a sprung barrel. The sun riddled its secret interior unopposed, yet not once did Lily or anyone else in the Alley remember seeing anyone put a key to the seized padlock or in any way disturb the sanctum behind it. At least not for years. Several of the oldtimers did recall that back in the ’sixties Sophie was seen entering the premises with a lantern and several twelve-quart baskets.

  Lily followed Sophie up the shaggy path towards the shed. Sophie was navigating with some difficulty, using her arms for balance.

  “I reckon you’re old enough to see certain sights,” she said confidentially as they reached the padlocked door and set the empty bottles down. “Damn lock’s gone an’ seized up,” she said. She grabbed the hasp and jerked it backwards. Screws popped everywhere. Sophie let the whole door fall out of her grasp. “Son-of-a-bitch,” she muttered and disappeared into the darkness ahead.

  Lily followed. The odours of the dank interior wafted over her and rolled on out into the August sunshine: must, mildew, the mouldy cob-webbing of neglect, the tuberous pungency of root rot and festering, imploded bulbs. But something else as well: an emanation only; an afterscent of something not quite sweet nor tart – herbal perhaps; something that had been lovingly dessicated till only its quintessence remained to impress the believer. Lily was trying to adjust her eyes to the gloom when Sophie pulled up a hinged shutter and the sun shot in from the south with the force and clarity of a lightning flash. The room, unillumined for a dozen years, leapt immediately into view, garish and eerie.

  What caught Lily’s eye first were the brown leaf-like rags draped over several clotheslines that crisscrossed just above her. Some looked as large as tobacco fronds, others as tiny as mint or thyme. Still others, she now saw, were whole plants – roots, stems, leaves, stunted flowers – dangling from clothes pegs like the shrivelled corpses of aborted, unnamed creatures of mythology. Sophie reached up and flicked her finger against a spade-shaped leaf so thin the sun lit up its bloodless veins. There was a gasp of dust as fine as powdered gold.

  “Ground that stuff up in my cough medicine,” she laughed. “Over here,” she said.

  Lily saw the workbench and thought of the chemist’s lab in Sarnia – with apothecary jars, mortar-and-pestle, burettes, filter screen, gas-burner and bottles of every contortion and hue imaginable, some still winking. Sophie slapped her hand down on the top of the bench and two shallow dishes coughed their bluish powder effortlessly into the air.

  “Didn’t know your dear Soph was a witch, did ya?”

  In a butter box at the end of the bench Lily noticed three neat rows of dried roots stacked four or five deep and looking quite forlorn. They’re like the wizened penises of capons, she thought, as a giggle tickled the back of her throat.

  “Not funny, Lil. Not funny at all. That’s what all the decent folk thought, and even some of the loonies ’round here. Why d’you think I had to build this here shanty an’ put a burglar’s lock on the door, eh?”

  “What did you do in here?”

  “Mixed up potions,” she said. She held a fruit jar up to the slanting light where its contents glowed like honey. “Pure linseed oil,” she said. “Made it myself. Used it on some of the poultices. Now this,” she said, displaying a jar in which some purplish precipitate quivered ominously, “is a gen-u-ine witch’s brew. Kill a Tomcat in heat at twenty rods.”

  “These are Indian medicines,” Lily
said, suddenly serious.

  Sophie ignored the remark and went rummaging among some boxwood cases in a shadowy corner still unopened by the sun. She caught her sleeve on an offending nail. “Jumpin’ be-Jesus,” she hissed, “that’s the last of my party dresses.” She peered blearily at the slight tear, grabbed the sleeve with her other hand and extended the fracture all the way to the armpit. “That’ll teach ya’ to trip on a nail,” she said. “Now where in Christ’s Calvary are those little buggers?” There was a clatter of shaken glass and some further profane encouragement.

  “Them medicines you gave me for Robbie an’ Brad, you made them yourself?”

  “I know they’re back here somewhere. Jesus-be-jumpin’!”

  Lily heard the other sleeve go. “Where did you learn all this?”

  “Here they are, right where I left them.”

  “Why did you go an’ give it up?”

  Sophie had a crate of wobbly medicine bottles flush against the folds of her bosom and was struggling to find her way into the light with her treasure. “Goddam quacks, that’s why. Just too many of ’em, dearie. I got sick an’ tired of fightin’. Besides, people get money an’ they want real doctors, don’t they? I quit before I wasn’t wanted any more. Just like that.”

  The crate of bottles clattered down onto the bench. For a moment Sophie pretended they weren’t there and turned to face Lily for the first time since they had come into the arcanum. “You’d never guess by lookin’ at this baby-pink complexion of mine that I got Indian blood pumpin’ in these veins.”