Sophie put up a hand, not to protect herself but to sooth the stinging welts on the left side of her face. She began shuffling backwards like a paraplegic tortoise, whimpering and all the while attempting to find a way to get herself upright. Lily stepped between Stoker and Sophie. She looked directly into Stoker’s eyes, less than a foot away from him.
They were infernos, not merely of the rage and outrage and brute animosity she expected to see but also of self-loathing and frantic, contending appetites. “Get outta my way, you interferin’ bitch, or I’ll bash your face in, too.”
Behind her Sophie was scrabbling to her feet. “Do what he says. It’s none of your business.”
“Hear the woman, eh? She wants you to butt outta our business.” Despite the slurring of his voice, Lily could see plainly that he wasn’t stupid drunk, that he probably never was, since he appeared to use alcohol as some sort of fiery fuel which he rapidly consumed.
“Get outta here, Lily Marshall,” Sophie cried from the narrow hallway behind them, her words sandwiched between choking sobs. “What right’ve you got pokin’ your nose in here?”
Stoker was trying to peer around Lily to see where Sophie was going, but Lily wouldn’t release him from her gaze.
“You hear me, Lily? Get the fuck otta here!”
“Don’t you try runnin’ off, woman!” Stoker shouted, his spittle sizzling on Lily’s cheek. But he didn’t move an inch. He was trapped between the sideboard and the overturned table, with Lily ahead and a coward’s retreat in back of him. His quarry’s sobs were fading down the hallway towards safety.
“You gonna move, bitch, or do I beat the shit outta you, then outta her, an’ then come back here an’ give you somethin’ you been needin’ for years!”
“Go ahead,” Lily said quietly, “beat up a woman half your size an’ brag about it all over the Alley.”
Stoker went back on his heels.
“You don’t think I’d keep my mouth shut like that poor creature back there?” Lily said.
For a second nothing moved, or spoke. Then a door rattled, squeaked open, slammed shut, and a latch dropped into a slot.
“Well, you bitch, she’s safe now.”
“I ain’t leavin’ here till you promise not to touch her,” Lily said.
Stoker turned upon Lily the full blaze of the bottled fury in his eyes. They burned like bitterroot. They scalded the tears that assaulted them.
“Have a drink with me,” Stoker said, tilted forward in the chair with his head in his hands. “Please.”
Lily drew up a stool beside him and steadied his grip as he poured out two glasses of whiskey from a jug. Lily sipped at hers while Stoker downed his in two gulps.
“I need to talk.”
“People’ve told me I’m a good listener,” Lily said.
Stoker dredged up a smile for her but it did little for his face which, drained of its prevailing animus, was a hollow, devastated mask. The voice he chose came from a person deep inside and intricately hidden, unaided by external expression. Lily stared into the moon-shadows around the stove and simply listened.
“Nobody on this Alley would believe it, but I love that woman. I never meant to hurt her, not once. We been together a long, long time, ever since we was practically kids ourselves, and I only hit her a few times. I love her; I never, never meant to hurt her.” He took Lily’s silence as reassurance of some kind, and continued.
“We got married real young, an’ God we was happy. We lived in Sarnia for a long while an’ we took some boat trips together an’ when Burton an’ Marlene was born, I was the happiest soul alive. Sophie was beautiful then; I know you find that hard to believe, but she was, and I worshipped the ground she walked on. I swear it.”
He paused while they both contemplated such an improbability, and Lily poured herself a half a glass of whiskey. “Everybody on this lane thinks I’m a wife-beatin’ bastard, and I guess I am, but they don’t know what I been through. It was her idea to move here when I first went stokin’ on the boats, an’ she promised on her grandmother’s grave we’d move into a nice house for the kids’ sake just as soon as we got the money. And I made plenty of money, slavin’ in the boiler rooms of a dozen stinkin’ tubs an’ cuttin’ timber in the township before we cut all the trees down. But she would spend it, every penny of it; I’d leave her with the money an’ by the time I got back she’d squandered it, spoilin’ the kids or givin’ it away to her poor relations up in Huron an’ havin’ buggerall to show for it. It drove me mad, so I started hidin’ some of it an’ savin’ up to move out of this, this pig-sty!”
He assumed Lily was assessing the room they were in, its smell of unwashed dishes and vegetable rot. “At first I tried to keep it lookin’ respectable, ’cause I could see the older kids was gettin’ ashamed of it; I built the verandah an’ the back sheds an’ shingled the roof an’ put a coat of gray paint on the outside. Then she took up midwifin’ an’ things got worse; she was never home night or day, the house turned into a garbage dump, I was desperate to move so I told her about the money I’d hidden away; an’ it was then I knew she would never move from this place, she actually liked it here. I bought the seven kids we had then some new boots an’ clothes and I went off for the winter to the bush up north.” He located the whiskey glass and drank. “I ran away from it all.”
Lily listened for any sound from the back room.
“I know I’m to blame, that’s what drives me crazy sometimes. I should’ve come home an’ grabbed her an’ carted her off to a nice home in Sarnia an’ laid down the law an’ took care of my kids. But you don’t know how Sophie can be. She’d see me thinkin’ that way an’ she’d start to sweet-talk me an’ get ’round me like she’s done since she was sixteen. Even now, as fat an’ ugly as she seems to other people, she’s got a way with me. Till I get mad,” he added softly.
“Sophie has a way with folks,” Lily said.
Stoker finally looked up. He continued to speak calmly but his words were blurred by the aftertaste of rage. “She drove my children away. All but Bricky. She spoiled them an’ beat them an’ doted on them an’ left them to fend for themselves. She was a slob and a heathen. But they loved her, every last one of them, an’ yet every time I come home, she’s driven another one away.”
“An’ Marlene?”
Stoker stared at Lily as if realizing for certain what he had assumed all along: that Lily might be made to understand. “Every hypocrite on this lane knows I slapped Marlene an’ that she left an’ ain’t never spoken to either of us since. But none of ’em knows why. Only me. An’ Soph.” He hesitated, then went on with vehemence that was more menacing by being whispered than shouted. “That hooer in there did it right in front of her own children! Can you imagine that? Hardly a curtain between her an’ Marlene lyin’ there in the next room, listenin’ to such disgust an’ filth.” His hands shook helplessly on his knees and he started to rock back and forth in the chair.
“Lily, as God is my witness – and I’ve never stopped believin’ since I was a kid – I’ve never been with another woman since I married Sophie MacGregor thirty years ago. No one. All those weeks an’ months on the boats and in the bush, an’ not one woman, though the squaws an’ hooers was lyin’ all around us – quarter a throw. Not one goddamn time. Then I got to find out from my own daughter that her mother’s no better than those pitiful hooers on the streets of Port Arthur. Only worse. An’ worse than that, I go an’ slap my daughter around – the child I loved the most in the world – ’cause I know she’s lyin’; and every time I come home that summer I slap her again, for nothin’ at all, ’cause I’m ragin’ inside. An’ so she leaves, an’ then I find out she’s been tellin’ the truth. That girl ain’t spoken to us in ten years, we don’t even know where she lives ’cause Burton won’t tell.” After a while he added, as if it were somehow essential, “We was so happy once, but nothin’ turned out the way we planned it.”
Lily leaned over and touched the back of Stoker’s hand
. “Most of the time it don’t.”
A sharp groan from the other room broke the deep silence that had fallen between them. “I got to go to her,” Lily said.
“It’s all right.”
As she hurried towards Sophie, Lily heard the front door open and then the sound of Stoker’s heavy body slumping into the wooden rocker out there.
The left side of Sophie’s face was blue and so swollen she couldn’t see out of that eye and her speech was as slurred as a harelip’s. For a while, seated on the edge of Bricky’s bed, Sophie pretended not to notice Lily’s presence beside her, letting the moonlight bathe her bruised flesh and breathing asthmatically through a slit in her mouth. She paid for every breath with measured pain. To this, eventually, she added the sting of words. Against the ear, they were gentle and evocative. Lily was not prepared for what she was about to hear from the woman she felt she knew so well.
“When I was Sophie MacGregor I was the cat’s meow, an’ gloried in it. We lived in a brick house in Goderich overlookin’ the river. My Dad was a lowland Scots who dabbled in land an’ was sometimes rich an’ sometimes broke. He had a laugh that would crack granite. Mother was half Irish an’ half Chippewa, though she did everythin' possible to hide that honour. I spent every summer on the Kettle Point Reserve with my Grandma, a daughter of Chief Wawanosh, soakin’ up the wild ways my mother hoped a lot of schoolin’ would soon cure. Funny though, I liked school, too. I read every book in the common school an’ every tome in my dad’s library. So when I was twelve, it was decided I ought to be shipped off to a proper school where there’d be enough books an’ smart teachers to keep me from gettin’ too uppity. My dad’s maiden sister, Aunt Harriet, lived in London, so that’s where I landed, on Princess Street a few blocks from a private grammar an’ continuation school for would-be ladies. Soon I became their star pupil, every teacher’s pet, and I played it to the hilt. When I complained of being lonely, my mother sent me a new dress or money to have one made. I still managed to get a couple more wild summers in before Grandma died, but by then I’d decided to like both city-life and education. I sailed into my third year with straight A’s an’ dotin’ teachers an’ frantically jealous schoolmates. My head was bulgin’ with math an’ literature, but so were certain curious parts of my body. I was sixteen but whenever I started to take public notice of my best parts, I got frowns an’ horrified stares from my elders. So I plunged into my studies. I had it in mind to sit the normal-school exams an’ become a teacher. I fancied a country school of my own where I’d be a queen-bee and empress an’ lady-saint all rolled into one. In March of 1847, when I was just a year from gratuatin’ an’ was headin’ for another semester of honours, I met Morton Potts. He’d come up from Windsor to cut timber for the proposed railroad; I’d seen the wagons one mornin’ pickin’ up the men at the end of Princess Street. Mort was boardin’ with a great aunt a few blocks away. He spotted me right off. On wet days when their work was cancelled, he’d follow me home from school, and of course I pretended I was too good to pay any attention to the likes of him. Aunt Harriet saw him talkin’ to me at the corner an’ threatened him with the constable. He laughed in her face, and I probably loved him from that second onwards.”
Lily wanted to say something, touch some part of her friend’s sorrow, but she dare not. The voice continued.
“Oh, he was a handsome, clever, devil-take-the-hindmost man. When he kissed me behind the bushes or against a snowbank, the promises I made to my Aunt turned to water. He loved every part of me, it seemed, especially those parts I was so shy about an’ so curious to know the meaning of. He made me laugh an’ he made me talk a blue streak an’ he made me feel good all over. I felt like Lochinvar’s bride. Of course I didn’t really know as much about love an’ life as I thought I did, so when Mort cooked up a scheme to get us alone for a whole weekend, I said yes right off. I told my Aunt I was goin’ home for a few days to visit a sick friend, and I did plan to do that but not for the five days I told Aunt Harriet about. When the stagecoach reached Lucan, I got off an’ practically fell into Mort’s arms. He put me in a cutter an’ we whisked off into the nearby woods to a cabin that belonged to a chum of his. We stayed there two whole days before I got back on the stage for Goderich. It snowed all the time we was there. Mort kept a glorious blaze goin’ in the stone fireplace and it was warm as toast all the time. Which was a good thing because we didn’t spend much time in our clothes. I can close my eyes this very minute an’ see an’ hear an’ feel every speck of them days – as if it was snowin’ outside right now and I was as round an’ innocent an’ clear-skinned as I was at sixteen years of age, when my lover’s eyes popped like mulberries every time I turned over a new way or let his hand find a new surprise. We loved an’ talked an’ made eternal promises an’ loved some more, we gloried in our bodies an’ we cared for nothin’ that didn’t agree with the feelings we could only make when we were together. We pledged our faith.”
Lily wanted to tell Sophie something of her own, but again, held back. After this, she knew, there would be time, lots of time.
“Of course, my mother and Aunt soon compared recipes an’ found us out. My God, what a row there was! I was locked up an’ chaperoned an’ tuttutted over day an’ night. If I hadn’t been the star pupil I’d’ve been thrown outta school as ‘damaged goods’ sure to corrupt on touch. For a while I may have believed, just a little bit, that they were right – I really was seduced an’ drugged an’ led astray by an accomplice of the arch-fiend himself. But not for long an’ not very much.” Lily heard the wince of a chuckle, some stinted breathing, then: “Stoker never gave up for a minute, he knew what kinda passion he’d stirred up in that snowy cabin. They’d got a judge’s warrant to keep him away from me; they’d have charged him with rape if they thought they could’ve survived the scandal, but we managed to meet within a few weeks when I ran off from an Arbour Day outing an’ we made wild love in the clover that was scarcely green enough to smudge our bare bottoms, but it was so good an’ Stoker was big enough an’ strong enough to beat the world off if he had to. I was hooked – on sex and all the wonderful sideways feelings it sent bubblin’ through me. Lily, I loved that thing between his legs so much and I wanted it so bad, I’d have kissed a parson’s arse for it. I would.”
Lily felt the jiggling of Sophie’s mirth up through her tears, the hurting purge of her unique laughter.
“I gave it all up – my books, my family, the life I dreamt ahead-of-myself. I cut them off like a turnip-top and I never looked back.” When she had retrieved enough breath, she said, “So that oughta tell you why I’m the way I am.”
2
By the time Lily dragged herself out of bed and back into the laundry shed, Violet was starting the second round of washing. The first was flapping smugly in the last breeze of Indian summer. Lily had slept well once she had reached her bed shortly before dawn. Though she was still groggy and somewhat enervated by the trauma of the night, she found it easy to smile for the faithful Violet and pick up the rhythms of the workday with a fresh buoyancy. By noon she was humming and tattling away to Violet about the crazy time Maman LaRouche set about baking a gingerbread man for her and little Guy and convincing them that she had put one of the Millar boys inside the dough for being un bébé fou until Guy started crying and Maman laughed and cuddled him, soothing him with Ah, Ti-Guy, mon pauvre bébé, and then accidentally saying mon bébé fou which sent him into such hysterics he let Lil eat the entire cookie with Billie Millar baked alive inside. They laughed about this through their brief lunch at the outdoor table. They were suddenly stopped by a loud, clear voice that could only have been Stoker Potts’: “Don’t you ever throw Marlene up to me again, you hear!” Nothing audible had preceded it and nothing followed, though the women sat deathly still for a long minute. Lily got up and peered around the corner of the house: she could detect no sound or movement over there. After a bit, Stoker waltzed out of the woodshed, a bundle of trash under his arm and, whistling a sea-sh
anty of sorts, headed for the refuse fire out by the flats.
Lily and Violet worked extra hard that afternoon to take advantage of the good drying weather. Lily was just pegging the last of the sheets from The Queen’s onto the line when she heard the thud of running footsteps, a heavy body crashing through the dead-stalk and wizened burdock leaves. She whirled in time to meet Stoker Potts as he plunged blindly into the yard – dishevelled, his face smeared with soot as if he had just crawled out of his engine-room, his look deranged and feral. But the voice was a little boy’s – pleading and frightened beyond guilt or reason.
“I didn’t mean to, Lily, I didn’t mean to, oh Christ-in-Heaven I didn’t mean to, it was an accident,” he said in a singsong cadence wholly out of tune with his flailing arms that were begging someone anyone to come and help.
“Where is she?”
“Hurry, please.”
“Where is she?”
“Out back, oh Christ, we gotta hurry.”
“What’ve you done?”
“Nothin’, she just fell, I didn’t mean for anythin’ to happen,” he babbled after Lily who was already racing across the lane towards the river flats, her heart in her throat, flapping and nauseous. “I love her!” he shouted at Violet as she ran past him. “I love her!” he screamed wildly up and down the Alley, till his legs gave out and he sank to his knees, choking on his own sobs.
“Get back, Vi!” Lily yelled as she neared the trash-fire and spotted something grotesque twisting in the dead grass. “Go get a doctor, anybody!” But Vi stood frozen in her own fear a few feet away.
Sophie’s huge body lay in the weeds which were still smouldering from the impact of her blazing flesh. Charred swatches of orange cloth had welded to the jellied muscle of her back and buttocks. Lily could see where the pink skin had shrivelled, then puffed, then dissolved, leaving the raw red flesh to thicken in the air. The body seemed to be shaking from within as if the bones had just felt the shock, and Lily heard what sounded like a prolonged sigh on a single note, as if that one sound would have to make do in expressing whatever grief or rage or goodbye were needed. Lily shuddered at its intensity, this pelvic hiss that might in other circumstances have been taken for a woman’s cry of elucidation at the apex of love. Then with a gasp of greasy smoke and a stench of singed flesh, the body rolled part-way over and slid bonelessly into the cradle of the grass. Lily looked for one horrified second at the dead face. Stoker’s bruises were still visible on the skin of both cheeks now swollen into two ghastly sacs about to burst. Between them the mouth was rigidly ajar, lips stretched back over the lunging teeth, the tongue bloated and immobile – the last grimace of lockjaw, the death-grin she had seen so often on the faces of muskrat or beaver caught alive in one of Papa’s traps. Sophie’s eyes, buried in the flesh that had never been able to contain them, said nothing, not even for Lily.
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