She was hoeing the cauliflower, the instrument perfectly tuned to her intricate gymnastic – learned and repeated and refined and remembered deeply. No thought was required. She could close her eyes after ‘sighting’ down a row and carry on blindly without missing a plantain or chokeweed. These motions evoked neither pleasure nor pain, satisfaction nor ennui. They were as effortless as breathing, and as necessary.
Granny stopped to enjoy the shade of the only tree left on her lot by the Grand Trunk choppers seventy years ago. It soared defiantly above the marsh below it and the neighbouring houses with their pathetic, prearranged maples. Don’t boast, Granny whispered to it, you’re here because you’re lucky not invincible. She waved to Ethel Carpenter working in her tomatoes, recalling their former intimacies, their shared tragedies and the desperate confusion on that good woman’s face when Granny’s mouth contorted helplessly and the air was chilled by its alien vowel. Now she just waved, exchanging remembrances.
Granny heard the child’s step in the hedge before she saw Flora, Ethel’s six-year-old, emerge – tiptoed, head tilted to dart away – into the dazzling light. Elfin, blond, the blue eyes star-fed, she edged into the yard, then stopped. One eye was on the old, old woman rigid under the hickory tree, the other on the harlequinade of iceland poppies at her feet.
Granny felt a rush of emotion, a surge of recognition, but she made not the slightest move. Slowly without stepping towards the child, she indicated in pantomime that Flora should go ahead and pick the flowers her fancy had claimed. The meaning was instantly comprehended. The girl’s quick fingers one-by-one gathered in a fragile bouquet. She took one step towards the old woman, hesitated, saw what she hoped for, and came right up to her with a sidling skip-and-shuffle. The shade encompassed them. A breeze tufted the girl’s hair, the poppies a-flutter, swept the aged hand upward to accept the gift offered.
Bless you, she said with her eyes, and the girl smiled a shy acknowledgement.
“Can I bring you some cheese, Granny? My uncle brung some in from the farm.”
Granny Coote felt the words of response shape themselves in her lower throat, the consonants coil and stretch across the rampant vowels, the inchoate syllables contenting towards articulation rise noisily up the hollow nave to the threshing, trapped tongue gonging madly in its belfry. The consonants froze in their chambers while the vowels twisted and howled in anguished release. The shock of them against the open air stunned even her own ears. She reeled backwards and fell. The child’s cry was soundless but complete. Her fleeing form was swallowed by the hedge. In Granny’s fist the poppies shed a garish blood.
Bless you anyway, child, she was thinking. Bless you for being. I held you in my arms days after your birth, I held the wasted body of your dying brother in these hands and tried to invent some comfort for his mother. These hands that have pulled many a ruby-skinned pollywog kicking and squalling into this world, such as it is. And to what end? In hopes that one or two of my own would live to soften my dying? Well, where are they? Only a neighbour’s child to bring me in her innocence a bouquet of flowers, a nosegay for the old girl – may she soon pop off and leave us in peace.
Granny opened her eyes. The sun had burned her arm right through its leathery tan. When she rolled sideways to see how far the sun had moved, she was jolted by a pain in her right leg. A scab was already congealing on her elbow. How long have I been here? Panic stabbed at her more sharply than her bruised thigh. She touched the dried tears on her cheek. My lord, have I been bawling and jabbering out here all afternoon? They’ll be coming to get me, just like they tried that time with old Malloney. She started to get up but the grass swayed and she hung on, closing her eyes to let her breath catch up with her heart.
When she opened them – feeling once again the regular, sturdy beat of her pulse – it was almost dark. She was very cold, but the ache in her leg was gone and she was able to totter to her feet. No broken bones anyway, she thought, you stupid old woman, letting yourself forget that thing in your throat, scaring little Flora half to death, then falling down and snivelling your way through the afternoon, almost breaking a hip and an arm in the process. “Get your arse in harness and giddyup!” Sophie always said when things looked bleakest.
Monitoring each step, Granny walked through the hazy twilight towards Arthur’s house. At the corner of the front hedge she spotted Flora, her nimbus of golden hair still ablaze in the fading light. A pale face like a moon’s satellite peered out of the shadowed honeysuckle, aiming its amber invitation unequivocally in her direction. She stopped breathing. The figure was fully into view now; it was not Flora. The hair was too native, too radiant; the dress simple and unadorned; the posture questioning, braced against something only half-comprehended.
It was her. There was no doubt. She had seen the face, the stance, the elemental flame of the hair too many times not to know it. She had dreamt this very scene, this tableau of Madonna and lost child, many times over.
Suddenly the child’s eyes materialized in the otherwise blank face: save me, save me they cried for the village, the county, the country to hear. Granny heard her own feet hitting the earth, her heart ricocheting in its prison, her breath catch against her gums. She was running towards the little lost girl, the figure that had beckoned to her just so in a dream they had shared for decades. The name of the child fought at the torque of her tongue, gained her lips, the night-air, the ears of the mother uttering it aloud to make it real.
Granny hit the crushed stone with both knees – snapping her body forward onto her splayed palms and whiplashing forehead, and silencing for the moment the tremor of her hyena-howl which those who heard it afterwards declared to be as much the laughter of the mad as the grief of the inconsolable.
“It’s a miracle there’s nothin’ broken.”
I’m all right, I’m all right: she was trying to make the words with her lips, fighting the treachery of tears and trying to get up.
“Don’t worry, Cora,” the voice soothed. “It’s me, Bob Denfield. I’ll take care of you.”
Yes, Cora thought, the Reeve is a man of his word. Like Arthur.
But my name is Lily, she remembered thinking absurdly – just before the blackness struck again. At least it was, once.
33
1
It was a January without thaws, that first month of 1922 in the village between the Lake and the River. The snows were Russian-deep and full of forgetting. In their beauteous violence, their Arctic grip and their long quiescence, the memories of Ypes, Passchendaele and the Somme were permitted a momentary absence. The streetcar from the City squealed on its icy rails, the smoke from the war-inspired foundry billowed and froze, the lonesome switching-engine shunted a desultory box-car or two beside the freight-sheds, the pickerel beneath the ice dreamt of fingerlings and white sun. In the meantime, notwithstanding the vagaries of season, commerce or réalpolitik, the public business of a municipality must proceed.
The council meetings were held twice a month on Thursdays in the small room that housed the library. Below it lay the four jail cells normally unoccupied till the weekend. Next door sat the newly purchased scarlet fire-engine, close to its crew. If ever there should have been a fire on a Thursday evening during an odd week of any month, the council chamber would have been instantly cleared – to a man. When special meetings of wider public interest were held, as they often had been during the Great War and its dreadful aftermath, the tiny library was given over in favour of the more spacious Oddfellows’ Hall next to the old Coote shack. In the opinion of the Reeve, looking at the agenda for this January evening of 1922, the time was fast approaching when such a ‘town-meeting’, as their Yankee neighbours termed it, would have to be called. Tonight, for the time being, the library-cum-jail would suffice.
As usual, Reeve Denfield was there early, with his recording secretary, the younger of the Misses Robertson, staunchly beside him. She had just finished writing the agenda items on the portable slate blackboard behind the squar
e table (composed of several reading tables conjoined for the occasion). They read:
1. Reclamation of the Coote property
2. Report of the Cenotaph Finance Committee
3. Setting up a Cenotaph Search Committee
a. Site
b. Designer, builder.
As the younger Miss Robertson finished up with a schoolteacher’s flourish, she flashed a hopeful smile at Reeve Denfield. It went unacknowledged, however; the Reeve was deep in a brown study.
“No one is more sensitive than I,” Councillor Stokes was proclaiming from his pulpit, “as a minister of the Church of England and servant among you now for these eighteen years, to the plight of this wretched woman. It would take a heart of stone not to bleed with pity at the thought of her living out her last days in utter squalor and loneliness. Our Lord said ‘blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’, but shall we stand idly by while Mrs. Coote suffers in her long wait for that Light to shine at last upon her? I appeal to your conscience as Christians,” and he gestured dramatically to the far pews.
What did he know about her long wait? thought the Reeve. About the poor in spirit? He, too, wanted her out of sight and out of mind, tucked away safely in a cubicle in an old people’s home, condemned to slience. Unconsciously he fingered the smooth, pink scald that was the left side of his face. Behind him he felt the whisper of snow against the window like the breath of a child.
Councillor Garnet Fielding – “Choppy” to his cohorts – was on the counter-atttack, barking orders against the odds to his shell-shocked gunnery. “I mean no disrespect to the cloth when I say we’ve got no right to treat the widows and homeguard who stood by us so well during the darkest days of the War in such a manner. I was born in this village more than forty years ago, and I was raised to respect, to revere, my elders. This woman who you youngsters and Johnny-come-latelys call Granny Coote has been a citizen of the Point for most of her life. I recall my parents talking about her heroic actions in the ’seventies, and everyone in this room knows what she did for us during the terrible autumn of ’eighteen.” Choppy was surprising everyone, even himself, for he was a laconic man despite his high school education and his sergeant’s stripes, his clerk’s job in the City and the Distinguished Service Medal riveted over his heart. Moreover, his speech was somewhat impeded by the prosthesis which formed the major part of his jaw. “Took my breath an’ half my chin away,” he always said in recounting the explosion that had kept him out of action for several months.
“Some citizen!” huffed Councillor Harold Hitchcock – ‘Half-Hitch’ to his wife and other detractors. “Thirty years an Alleywoman before old man Coote went senile an’ rescued her.” He waved his gloved, wooden hand like a pointer and accepted Miss Robertson’s nod.
“Would you like the floor, Hitch?” the Reeve said icily.
“Everyone in this room’s been through the hell of war,” Half-Hitch informed the multitude, brandishing as he did so a legal-looking document proudly tweezered between his mechanical thumb and forefinger. “Except one,” he added, looking purposefully away from young Horrie MacIntosh who somehow – lacking credentials, battle-experience, and years – had got himself elected to council at the troublesome age of twenty-four. “We can’t be accused of callousness, we’ve suffered to much, we’ve lost too much,” he cried through his oscillating glove. “But the facts’re clear; so is our duty. Accordin’ to this record in my hand, the village council granted Arthur Coote back in 1888 a lease on the village lot number 82 at one dollar a year for as long as he remain organist of the Methodist Church and thereafter if he retire in good standing unto his death.” He had spent hours memorizing the heady lingo of the document and found the words in actual presentation happily satisfying, even appropriate. “My point here is this: we’ve let this woman stay illegally on municipal land for ten years. We’ve shown mercy and pity for the wretched soul. But enough is enough. Her contributions to the community are well known. But everyone here knows what an eyesore that shack’s turned into. All of us know the stories of how Granny Coote has scared the sam hell out of children an’ babies with her crazy babble. An’ last fall you all know she was ridin’ on a broom in her back yard. How much more can we take?”
“Hitch is right,” said Lorne ‘Sandy’ Redmond, the elderly grocer, rousing himself at last in his chair, the thunder of the Boer guns receding, the sting of their smoke sharpened by the jabber of Dutch tongues. “Olive’s asked me to remind the council that the City car goes right by that shanty every hour. She says she can’t hardly go to a WCTU meetin’ down there without some gossip or other comin’ up about Granny Coote. How can those of use who’re older,” and here he fixed the victims of his jab, “forget she was a shantywoman, a crony of bootleggers and” – he glanced at the younger Miss Robertson “– scarlet women, an’ she was a boozer and a heathen to boot.” He stopped lest the effect be overwhelming. Murmurs of assent suffused the room.
“I am prepared,” said the Reverend Stokes, “to suggest that a public collection be taken up for the perpetual support of this ancient citizen who, though she has fallen on sad times, seems worthy of our forgiveness and charity.”
And we could cast a bronze medal for her, the Reeve mused, to hang in her miserable vestibule at Sunset Glades.
More enthusiastic yeah-saying followed. Young MacIntosh had not yet spoken. It was three for and one against, so far. Sunny Denfield’s views were well known. If Horrie were to follow his own feelings, the best that could be achieved was a tie. Grant Griffiths, the sixth Councillor, was down at the ‘hospital’ in London being treated for recurring shell shock, and wouldn’t be back till God-knew-when. Still, he held back.
“An’ what’s your opinion, Horrie?” said the Reeve.
Reeve Denfield was on his feet. “The legal aspect of the matter’s clear,” he said very quietly, a pulsing glow in the garish pink of his war wound. “The lease to Arthur Coote, accordin’ to our lawyer in the City, was to last until his death, and if his wife was still livin’, she was to be allowed to buy the property at market value. When Arthur died, nobody gave a damn about another vacant lot. Nothin’ was done. Till now.”
He paused and stared out at the falling snow as if counting the individual flakes in the general mass curling over the sill. Then into the shuffle of embarrassment, he said as if he were confiding to an intimate in a small room: “So we haven’t any case, one way or the other. But I’d like to say to you, my friends and fellow soldiers, that I see a strong link between this discussion and items two an’ three on the agenda. The buildin’ of the cenotaph, the monument to our dead in the War, is the most important thing we’ve ever done as a village. In 1914 we had fifteen hundred souls livin’ here, just over three hundred families. Two hundred an’ fifty boys an’ men went off to France in 1915 – almost one per family. Almost a hundred of them were casualties, almost half of ’em maimed or dead. I’ve got the two lists here. Most of you could read the names off by heart. We fought for different reasons, I guess, but all of us were proud to be from the Point. In the past we survived the greed an’ the treachery of the railway; we fought off the City politicians an’ big-wigs who’ve been tryin’ to get this town for forty years. When I came here from the biggest city in 1901, I was eighteen years old. I saw the vacant lots where the houses had been pulled up by the roots an’ carted off. It was a ghost town. We built it all back up board by board. An’ the War tried to do us in again, killin’ an’ maimin’ the best of our men. We owe them a monument.”
The councillors sat stunned, as shocked as they might have been when the words of a dull sermon suddenly jelled into meaning.
“So what are we doin’? We’re sitting around this table jawin’ away about takin’ a harmless old lady – our most senior citizen who’s fought as hard as any of us to keep the political chisellers and city-types out of here – we’re actually thinkin’ of pullin’ her out of the house she’s lived in for twenty years an’ dumpin’ her in
a poorhouse run by the riff-raff of Sarnia. We’re behavin’ here just like the people we’ve despised an’ battled against all our lives. Don’t you see the connection?”
If they didn’t, none of the municipal legislators was prepared to admit it in this most public of forums. Young MacIntosh wished he had followed his heart. Occasionally it paid off.
The remainder of the meeting now progressed smoothly. With luck, the third period of the hockey match would not be out of reach. When the younger Miss Robertson opened the door to let the starch out of the steam-heat, the councillors could hear the drum of wood on wood and the choric encouragement of the village crowd, could visualize with ease the violent ballet, and hear the music of silence under it.
First, the members fell over one another suggesting ways in which the unfortunate Mrs. Coote could be aided in her final days. It was agreed unanimously that someone should approach her to explain her legal position vis à vis the property and assure her that no precipitate action would be taken. Reeve Denfield volunteered, but the Reverend Stokes respectfully pointed out that as a longtime friend and semi-regular visitor to the shack – house – the Reeve might be perceived by the befuddled old soul to be a biased report, when what was emphatically needed was someone official of sufficient probity and evident neutrality who would be seen by Mrs. Coote to represent the will of the council and the village. While the Reeve failed to see the logic of this sophistry, he reluctantly agreed. When the council promptly nominated the good Anglican pastor for the task, however, he revealed his profound humility by refusing the proffered honour and suggesting that in his place go the Reverend Buchan whose Methodism and common touch were ideally suited to the delicacy of the venture. Moreover, he himself would speak personally to that man-of-God on the morrow. The amended motion was passed.
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