Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  31

  1

  It was the largest funeral the village had ever seen. Not that it was meant to be, for none of the local ministers would consent to give Sophie Potts, infidel and blasphemer, a Christian burial in the non-denominational cemetery, and most gentlemen of public esteem (and ambition) publicly announced their support for the clergy’s stand. However, the son of the Methodist minister who had baptized Sophie and ferried her through Sabbath School in Goderich agreed to come down and hold a service in the Potts’ home and to superintend the interment. The good weather prevailed, despite the odds, and luckily so, for the several hundred mourners who drifted in one by one from the township, hamlets, backwaters and (thinly disguised) from the respectable avenues of the village were pleased to stand in the sunshine and hear the sacred homilies tolled once again for one amongst them so rudely taken away. Reeve-elect Dowling was there, and even walked solemnly behind the horse-drawn hearse all the way to the gravesite where the closed coffin was lowered with earnest gentility into the wide earth. It was noted that there was an unduly large number of women in attendance. Some puzzled notice was also taken of the native people who, although not appearing at the service, did show up at the cemetery where they stood quietly among the fallen leaves, and watched. As Lily was being led away between Hazel and Winnie, she looked back long enough to see the Chippewa men, gray-haired and austere, slip out of the shadows and across the grass to form a ring about the grave. She was sure their lips were moving, as in song.

  All of the Potts’ children were present except for Fred, whose whereabouts were unknown, and Marlene. What rearrangement of loyalties and patterns of retribution were to take place among them over the coming months Lily knew little about and could not bring herself to care. At the inquest a few weeks later, Sophie’s death was ruled accidental. Stoker was the only witness called since he was the only one who had seen the unfortunate fall. If I had been called, Lily said to herself, what difference would it have made if I’d told what I thought I knew? None at all. Stoker went off to the bush as usual, but did not return in the spring.

  Back at Hazel’s the evening after the funeral, the Alleyfolk decided to hold a proper wake. Baptiste Cartier brought in a supply of newly-minted hooch, Stewie and John carted up a batch of Sophie’s own homemade beer, and Angus Shawyer was kept sober long enough to play his fiddle. They might as well have hauled in a dirge-drum and pounded it sepulchrally, for no one danced, no one sang for fear they would weep: the mourners collected in fragile clusters about the haunted rooms where Sophie had presided so often, and whispered into the gathering gloom stories that had once evoked irrepressible laughter.

  “God damn it to hell,” Hazel blurted out to staunch her pain, “what a shame, what a rotten shame. All her life she lives on this Alley, she slaps half the kids in this town on the bottom before they’re a second old, she works an’ slaves to make a home for her family, an’ just a month before that home is about to become her own for keeps, she up an’ dies. Not only that but she’s the one with the gumption an’ the brains to give us all a chance at owning what’s ours. Now where’s the justice in all of that, I wanna know?”

  “The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” offered Stumpy.

  “Fuck the Lord!” Hazel snapped.

  Hazel’s lament set off a wave of grumbling and apostasy and boozy self-pity.

  “A year from now an’ she’ll be a nobody, forgot like all of us are the second we’re outta mind,” sighed Winnie, snuffling and making a great fuss over the silent, tearless Violet.

  “Damn shame.”

  “But true.”

  “It don’t have to be.”

  The parlour went quiet, as if the corpse had slipped in and just been noticed. It was Lily Marshall who had spoken, and the mourners were not listening so much as watching.

  “I said it don’t have to be true. About Sophie. There’s one way to make sure the town remembers an’ to make sure nobody on this Alley ever forgets what she done for us.”

  “What’re you talking about, Lily?” Stumpy said because no one else seemed ready to ask.

  “You all know the council is gonna change the name of Prince Street to Prince Edward Boulevard in January when we get to be a village. Then they’re gonna hook it up with the Alley. I say we oughta suggest to the Reeve that the whole street be called Potts’ Lane.”

  The rightness of the suggestion struck home. Murmurs of assent rose from all quarters, and one or two defiantly whispered a call-to-arms.

  “You think the Reeve’ll go for this?” Stumpy said. “After the pressure we used on him to get the land title? I’m afraid we’ve used up all our tokens.”

  Reluctant, grumbling assent to this.

  “We oughta try,” Lily said. “We’re only askin’ for what’s fair.”

  Stumpy was appointed sole legate for the task of broaching the question to the Reeve-elect. He returned to inform a grim afternoon session of the rump parliament that their request had not merely been denied but ridiculed. Dowling’s words, as reported, were: “What in the name of Satan makes you think this town would name its most sacred street after a whoring, whiskey-peddling tub of blubber?” Or metaphors to that effect.

  Honeyman offered to stuff the Reeve-elect down a suitable sinkhole and Spartacus brandished a set of pliers capable of transforming him into a capon, but when such displays of resolution and solidarity ended, Lily asked if she might speak. Violet came and stood beside her and squeezed her arm tightly.

  “We’ll get him to change his mind,” Lily said into the awed quiet, and no one doubted her word. They waited for her proposal.

  “Once the Reeve’s made up his mind, he’ll get the council to do what he wants. Now, I want Shadrack to write down the main points of a story I know an’ then Stumpy’ll go to the Reeve an’ tell it to him. When he hears it, he’ll change his mind.”

  Hazel and Stumpy had urged Lily to do the talking when they went to Dowling’s house but she adamantly refused. “I can’t talk fancy,” she said, and held her ground. The notes outlining the story were tucked into Stumpy’s coat pocket. The story was one that Tom had told to Lily during the first winter of their marriage as the hearth-fire blazed and her lover did all things possible to make her laugh and see the world through his eyes. Like all of Tom’s anecdotes, she recalled this one word for word, detail for detail. The north-east wind blew a dusty snow in their faces as they trooped up Victoria Street that Tuesday morning: Stumpy ahead with his sailor’s amble, followed by Hazel in her best hat, Maggie Shawyer, Honeyman Belcher and Lily. Dowling must have spied them before his maid did because he was on his verandah just as they wheeled through the gap in the hedge, a white silk scarf tossed about his exposed throat.

  “I’ve heard the last petition from you gang of rascals that I intend to hear,” he shouted against the wind. “Take your causes henceforth to the council and its official meetings. Be off before I call a constable!” This latter remark was flung into the ear of Honeyman Belcher as his two-hundred-pound bulk brushed Dowling aside and barged through the front door. The others followed, and by the time they had removed their galoshes and coats in the vestibule, the shivering Reeve had decided to join them.

  “Five minutes,” he snapped with his back to them, warming his hands by the fire and absorbing most of its welcome. “Then it’s the constable.”

  “This won’t take five minutes,” Stumpy said. “We come to ask you to change your mind about namin’ Potts’ Lane.”

  “Don’t call it that!” he roared. “It’ll never have a name like that as long as I’m reeve of this town. You’re wasting your breath. Go home to your seedy little hovels. At least you own them, thanks to me.”

  Stumpy didn’t reply. He pulled two sheets of paper out of his pocket, and when Dowling’s curiosity was piqued, he said to him, “I brought along a story to help you change your mind.”

  A flicker of fear or animal wariness passed across Dowling’s face but was quickly erased by a belligerent r
uffling of feathers. “What in hell are you talking about?”

  His hands shaking, Stumpy started to recite the story as best he could from memory and the blurred notes. The gist of it was this: nineteen years ago this month the Great Western Railway held a gala ball in the armouries at London and at that ball the well-known and beautiful wife of the railroad’s vice-president was seen to dance more than once with a handsome, young, dark-haired gentleman, also an officer of that company. The lady returned to the watch of her husband as the dancing ended, but several hours later she was observed, poorly disguised in a coachman’s cape, entering a nearby hotel and without a by-your-leave slipping up to the second floor and sailing into a gentleman’s room without a knock. At six in the morning she was spotted by a drayman skipping down the alley behind the hotel.

  From the first mention of the month and year Dowling dropped his bully’s stance and started to listen. By the time Stumpy had finished, Dowling’s face was an impassive mask, closed to all secrets. He looked past Stumpy and speared each of the others with a questing glance, but found nothing he needed to know. Vaguely he recognized several of the faces or figures but could attach no certain name to them, make no connection between the narrative and this crew of outcasts.

  “A droll story, I’m sure,” he said at last. “And a nasty one as well. Good enough to smear the reputations of a dozen honest men.”

  Stumpy’s jaw dropped, and he heard the sag of confidence behind him. Desperately he wanted to turn to Lily. He was both shocked and relieved to hear Hazel’s voice, clear and cold.

  “London House, October 31, 1859, room 218, the lady’s name reminds one of a flower, her husband was –”

  Dowling stared incredulously at Hazel when he cut her off. “That’s enough.”

  “What you did back then ain’t none of our concern,” Hazel said, “and won’t ever be anybody else’s. We only come to ask you for what we think’s fair.”

  The Reeve-elect smiled at her as if she were Dame Justice herself and he a lifelong servant of the helpless blind. “Just so,” he said.

  On January 1, 1879 Point Edward was officially incorporated as a village, and without fanfare or the world’s notice quietly gave birth to itself.

  2

  The first act of the duly inaugurated village council was to pass a resolution declaring the third Saturday of that month “Point Edward Day”, a motion that was declared unanimous (until the principal form of celebration turned out to be a dance, at which juncture there was a Methodist retraction). The second motion, as Lily had predicted, was passed with much grumbling dissent but no audible nays: the extended street facing the River along its whole meandering length was officially denominated “Potts’ Lane”. Even the Prince might have approved, Lily thought.

  The dance was held in the newly-constructed Oddfellows’ Hall, an imperial edifice of brick and mortar and mitred glass which stood at the edge of the sprawling marsh below and beyond – as solid and respectable as a redoubt or a medieval keep. Inside, though, it had been transformed into a miniature, temporary Camelot. Against the starred January dark that stiffened the myriad mercurial panes, crystal light splashed from chandeliers or blazed defiance from ceremonial rushes clamped to the north wall. That afternoon a soft snow had fallen briefly, blessedly, and then the skies had been brushed clear of configuring cloud by some moon-impelled wind just in time for evening’s ascension. Anyone gazing down from that perspective would have seen a village unmarked by tread or traffic of any kind, as if its streets and alleys and byways had just been reinvented for the occasion. By seven o’clock, though, there was not a path or passage of any sort which did not bear the imprint of some one of its citizens – and not one of these pointed anywhere but towards the momentary heart of the village itself, and its communal, celebratory beat.

  The band was makeshift – two fiddles, a squeeze-box, a battered army bugle and matching drum, a lone asthmatic harmonica, undermined by assorted, improvised percussives – but it was of local genesis and propelled by an imperturbable optimism. Unfettered by sheet-music or conductor’s baton, it poured out the latest waltz from old Vienna, the jazziest lancers from the Buckingham Guard, the airiest jib from Londonderry. At first the Alleyfolk – awed by the garish ostentation of cutaway coat and puffed silk, and ever chary of releasing even the smallest atom of their secret selves to public scrutiny – huddled in clumps under the fiery rushes along the windowless wall. Not one of them, despite the heat and press and sweat, inched towards the crystal bowl beneath the main arch where Reeve Dowling’s personal tangerine punch winked and rippled its welcome (though Baptiste Cartier was observed passing an unobtrusive jug of white vinegar from hand to hand among the most reticent of the Alleymen). Then, without warning, during one of the intermittent reels, the druggist’s son crooked an errant arm into the waiting loop of Miss Shawyer’s elbow and swept her out of her flock and out of the Alley and into the ages-old anonymity of the reel itself. If it was a signal, it worked. If not, it worked anyway. As the fiddles sizzled and sang their ancient solipsisms, one by two and two by three the choruses in the wings of the great hall emptied into its epicentre of sets and squares, where – enthused by a music bereft of word and sign and the tautology of time – they convened, divorced, colloquied, parted forever, resumed at once, met and kissed goodbye, remembered and forgot their names: Shawyer with Redmond, McCourt with Durham, burgher with ragpicker – and only the character of the sexes (and of course the jig-tune itself) remained constant and preserved and happily at odds.

  Lily stood alone at the open door. Behind her: the music and the fragmentary revels. She peered west towards the Evening Star, just risen; towards the River, iced tight, its winter’s-long scream cached and pulsing blackfathoms beneath all hearing; towards the ragamuffin boys skating out some ritual game on the frozen pond a few rods below her. She listened to the crisp snub of their blades against any resistance, the boasts and yelps and elbowing affection of their careless buffoonery; and she knew that Rob and Brad somehow were among them, or of them, Brad, most likely, crouched in a moon’s halo and watching, weighing, reading the shadows and the shapes under them; and Rob, inevitably, buffering headfirst into whatever shoulder offered its challenge, and whooping, with the others, the last and the loudest of their boyhood salvoes.

  What would become of them, fatherless as they were? And now growing more out of their own stock than out of hers. And out of this place, too. That was something, there was something here that could not be got round. And we’ve made it better, Sophie, she whispered into the pure dark ahead of her. We made it more real, anyways. You did. But how can we believe in it now that you’ve left us? It seems like just as soon as I get to know something, it goes and dies on me.

  Strange, but just before she had decided – for Sophie’s sake – that she ought to come here, Lily had surprised herself by digging out Sounder’s pouch where it had lain, dust-covered, for the longest time. Had she given up entirely on the aboriginal promise of magic in this world? Trembling, she’d drawn open the leather sachet and one by one fingered the contents: Mama’s crucifix with its forlorn sheen under the muted winter-light; Papa’s Testament still unread and the Lady Fairchild of its inscription having long ago relinquished her titles; the cameo pendant with the ivory profile someone said might have been a grandmother undiminished by seas or eons; and Southener’s jasper amulet – magic’s own heart-chamber once – where no echo now embered anywhere. For a second she had wanted to weep, girlishly, not at her irreconcilable loss but at the absence of feeling itself. Just then Rob had called from the lane, “C’mon Ma, everybody’s leavin’!” She put the pouch aside, and flung her scarf resolutely about her throat. The Alleyfolk cheered as the nightchill struck the warmth of her greeting.

  Lily laughed, then glanced around to make sure none of the buskers had seen her smiling through the tears congealed on her cheeks. She was remembering something Sophie had said only a few months ago. Hazel had asked her if she was interested in having
her picture taken by one of those daguerreotype men who came around to the Heaven every once in a while. “Christ, no,” Sophie snapped. “I don’t need no picture of myself to be remembered by. Who’d ever forget this shape once they laid their unsuspectin’ eyeballs on it? Stoke calls me the pink poppy with the purple dropsy, an’ he ain’t far afield on that one!”

  The skaters had started a bonfire near the rink. Its avid orange flame tongued the black penumbras above it. It twisted and grew fabulous as she watched, unleafing its fragile intensities in scrolls ever widening, brightening, taunting the very edges of expiry. Lily shuddered, blood-deep in her being. I am still here, she thought. I don’t know why and I never have. I am carried along by urges I can feel but not describe, not even to myself. Perhaps they were the same urgencies sweeping these dancers into the music and the moment. Perhaps not. Hers might be her own, after all.