Sandy Redmond then reported that the finance committee for the cenotaph now had sufficient monies – in pledges and cash – to allow the project to move forward to the next stage. He further outlined a series of benefit hockey games, raffles, spring bazaars and government promises which would enable the village to erect a glorious monument. His greengrocer’s eye glowed as he spoke, and a round of self-inflatory applause ensued that might have shamed the hockey crowd down on the river flats.
The Reeve resumed the floor. He pointed out that new committees could now be struck to search for a designer-builder and to select a suitable site. The former committee was to be composed of the Reeve, the Reverend Stokes and Sandy Redmond. The latter, less onerous, one of Choppy Fielding, Harold Hitchcock and young MacIntosh.
On a wave of optimism and good cheer they swept out into the snowy night and managed to see the hometown Flyers wallop the hapless Wanderers of Landsend 9-2. The auguries were in place, and they were smiling.
34
1
It had snowed again in the night – in her dream and in the world out there. It must be almost February, Granny thought, lifting the kettle from the stove and staring across the unblemished tundra that fell away to the frozen River and the ice-edge of the Lake as far as the eye could travel to the north-west. She had no calendar except the one over the sink with the bleached buffoon’s visage of King George grinning possessively down at his faceless subjects – the one she had left unchanged since that terrible September day. But more than eighty years of superintending the passage of the seasons had left her with a clock more subtle than almanacs or Swiss watches. She had heard the special shout of school children passing by and knew the Christmas holiday had begun. The church bells rang from the trinity of God’s Houses in the village, and so she counted the Sundays as they held fast in spite of sleet, thaw and squall. The silence of Christmas Day was as awe-inspiring and as puzzling as it had always been. No one came; the snow lay uncreased over her yard and dormant gardens. Next day, though, Sunny Denfield and his boy, Boots, came around with a dish of turkey and dressing and fruitcake. She nodded her gratitude at the door, and they seemed thankful that she didn’t motion them inside. Obviously forewarned, Boots tried hard to smile and not stare at her too long but managed only the latter. Nonetheless, the boy had the inerasable kindness of his father’s eyes. He will be another one who will suffer, she thought, watching them leave their eccentric prints in Saturday’s drift.
From time to time parcels of food – clothing even – would appear mysteriously on her porch, the tiny trails in the snow betraying the identity of the secret heralds. Bless the children, she thought; they’re afraid but they don’t hate easily. To some of them Granny Coote’s a witch from the Lane, but at least they think of me as somebody, as a creature with her own peculiar power, magic, and brand of terror. What am I to the others? Something that was, and got left over.
The snow was comforting. Without it she knew she wouldn’t survive another winter intact. Not die, of course. That was out of the question given this body of sinew, gristle, bones of oak. Once the arthritis unstiffened in the morning and the blood honeyed the desiccated veins one more time, her body – with its muscle-memory, its own receding legends, and its mindless optimism – went about its daily exercises and evacuations. Pain she was accustomed to; it was relegated to some lower order of response, and forgotten. You don’t die of pain, she thought, or we’d all be soon dead. Nor loneliness.
The snow, re-estabilishing its beauty every fortnight or so like a goose ruffling its plumage after a roll in the dust, created spaces between the trees, houses and hedges. Into these blank meadows she was able to pour her thoughts – half-memory and half-feeling – filling them until they rebelled and she had to pass her eye along to the next one. Thus she could spend a morning or afternoon, starting with the Carpenter’s yard and moving at the pace of her own musing across the windowed landscape section by section till it ended at the high point where the dunes began – cutting off from her vision the vast shore of the Lake. Memories she would never run out of. They returned as whole sequences of events – tragedies, comedies, farce, melodrama – or as a single moment of action radiating endless wavelets of feeling, some of it fresh and uncorrupted, some of it coloured by intruding events that enriched or mitigated, some of it redeemed or crushed by the perspective of eighty years of remembering and pretending to remember. But I can still think , she reminded herself emphatically; my tongue may be as thick as a gelding’s fetlock, but these memories don’t come sliding by on their sentimental honey without comment or appraisal. I still know a foolish sentiment when I feel one even if the damn tear-ducts don’t. I remember so I can stay alive, so I can be myself, whoever that is. But then you don’t really want to stay alive, do you, old woman with the sagging breasts and brindled hair? Be honest. You close your eyes every night and hope they won’t open again, that something will stop the nightmare machine. Yes. Yes. But I won’t go before my body does. I am not my body, though enough people have thought so over the years.
The nights – these winter nights – were eternal and terrifying. Dream was not memory, though it brewed its maelstrom from the remnants thereof. Nor was dream prophecy, though its phantasmic imagery sometimes stunned the future, sometimes held out the illusion of augury. There had been magic in the world, that much she knew, and she herself had had those very dreams which touch upon its tenderest mystery, whose tremors brought the body – awakening – to the brink of belief. No more. In these present nightmares the same tale was told and retold, a masquerade of her own life parading as the truth, calling out to her for acceptance and validation, begging her to accept its mutant reconstruction of reality, whispering to its apostles the soft promise of annihilation. In the daylight she could dream or doze or resurrect; she could defend herself against such depredations. In February the nights were longest. And if the night-dreams ever began to eclipse those of the day, it would be all over. Then I’ll be as batty as people think I am, she thought. They’ll cart me off to London in a cattle car, and I won’t even care. You can’t have a nightmare, if you’re in one.
Even if she should ever talk again and people around here didn’t think she was loony, it wouldn’t make too much difference. Who would she talk to? There was nobody left from her generation. Not one. Old Duckface Malloney’s still alive, she recalled, innkeeping at the Sunset Glades, though he’d had four strokes, none kind enough to do him in. Half the people she had known left after the tunnel fiasco of 1890; the Boer War got a few more. Several had died from the pressures of the Great War – losing sons and grandsons and staring at the gray months stretching forever ahead, and just giving up. As she should have.
All the original Alleyfolk older than she were long dead. She had watched them enter the earth one by one, mostly in sorrow, occasionally in envy. The Potts’ Lane crew began to move away and drift off – as she had done – because no one arrived to renew their own naïve faith in that perverse community; even the kids found jobs, respectability and excuses not to visit. After the War and the epidemic had wiped out the last of the Laners along with just about everybody else over seventy-five, the European refugees had begun to discover the shacks and improvised abodes. And Granny knew why. I wish I could go there, she thought. I want to hear their stories. I’ve heard them since I was six. I would know what comfort, if any, to give them. You don’t need a war to make you an outcast, though I’ve seen four of them if they care to swap miseries.
Not only was there no one of her generation left here, very few of the second and third generation knew her or anything about her. She had lived in and around this very spot for seven decades; she knew every family who’d ever put down roots here. She knew their relatives, connections, feudal histories, pretensions and genial follies. They did not know her. “You’ve made yourself an outsider,” Cap used to say with that arching smirk, “because you enjoy watching and judging, and because you are afraid deep-down to take part in the rituals
that sustain their daily lives for fear they will swallow you up. You’ve judged these values before you’ve had the courage to try them. I tried them and then, with a little help from Dame Misfortune, gave them up. I may be a bum, but I know who I was, and what I am.”
Not true, not so, she found herself arguing with him again – between the hedge and shriven hickory tree. You don’t know what I’ve lived through before I was even an adolescent, what horrors were inlaid already for these old-woman’s nightmares you couldn’t have survived for one night without a quart of brandy. What-is-more-to-the-point, you were not a woman. To be woman – here, then – is to be consumed by ritual. If I forget, my nightmares remind me.
Many of the basic stock of the village – Brightons, Barbers, McCourts, Carpenters, Savages – had been here since the beginning, but the children of these pioneers would know her only through the stories told of her by their church-going, upright parents. And she had heard them all in their variously embroidered forms; that was the price – one of many – she had paid for living on the fringe. So be it. She had never complained then and wasn’t about to start now. Certainly Sophie’s yarns and epic jokes about the citizens-in-good-standing gave back more than they’d received. “That old mister Redmond, if you stuck a turnip up his arse, he’d ask you the price-per-pound!” Or, after an Easter Sunday promenade: “By the Judas, did ya see the riggin’ on the Reverend Missus? Four corsets wrapped in a mainsail. One fart an’ she’d’ve blown us all to Kingdom Come!” To the children she was just Granny Coote, or worse. To their elders she was queer-old-Arthur’s second folly. To others still older she was Cora Burgher, the cleaning woman. Before that there was no one to remember that she had once been Lily. Or care.
2
The Reeve cared. After Limpy Jenkinson (shrapnel at St. Eloi) and his retarded son Wally (Walleye to the kids) delivered a cord of wood in November and again in February, Sunny Denfield would come over after work at the Foundry and split enough kindling to last her through. When it got real cold he would lug a scuttle of soft coal over for the Quebec heater. Granny would smile her thanks, but shake her head when he left: after all, like so many others her age she had been raised in drafty cabins and shacks. She knew how to keep warm, if she wanted to.
Last week following Limpy’s delivery, the Reeve arrived promptly and began splitting wood in the tiny shed off the kitchen area. Granny lay on the chesterfield where she often slept since Arthur died and listened to the two-step cadence of the axe on wood – one of the earliest, abiding sounds of her long life. There was comfort in it, and reassurance. She must have dozed a bit, half-dreaming of someone of whom Sunny Denfield reminded her – the questing eyes, the softness unclothed by false masculinity.
“That should carry you through to the spring, Cora,” he said, a vee of sweat on his shirt-front. “Goin’ to be an early one, they say.”
He always called her Cora because she had been that when he had arrived in Sarnia to take advantage of the boom created by the tunnel under the River. Something, lord knows what, prompted him to take up residence in the Point where Prudie KcKay espied him and persuaded him to make the move permanent. “Good mornin’, Mrs. Burgher,” he would say to her – dropping imperceptibly into the local accent – as he met her each day outside the Queen’s Hotel in his brief bachelor period: he heading for the streetcar stop at the end of Potts’ Lane and she trudging up the steps towards another day of housecleaning. Even then his reputed good breeding (“black sheep of a fine Toronto family, they say”) shone through: a tip of the workman’s cap and the impeccable “Missus”. Her first thought had been: I’ve seen those eyes.
Instead of saying good night and returning to his family, the Reeve went over to the stove and put the kettle on.
“Don’t budge, Cora. I know where everything is. I’m goin’ to make us a cup of tea, an’ then I’ve got somethin’ very important to tell you.”
Granny was fully awake now.
“It’s good news,” he said immediately.
I’ll believe it when I taste it, she thought.
When he had poured the tea, Reeve Denfield sat beside her on the chesterfield and began talking. For some reason he was the only person besides Wilf Underhill who did not stiffen before her apparent silence – perhaps because he realized that she was not at all silent, that her nods, looks, minute shades of gesture and quick touches of the hand represented a fierce desire to communicate. Somehow she always felt he was talking with her. Over the years since he had been visiting her, he had come to know by patient trial and error not only every nuance of her response to his questions or proposals but also what subjects she liked him to talk about, what village tales she wished to be told and retold. He was her lifeline to that part of the world out there – small as it was – which she had marked out for her own. It wasn’t a matter of keeping up with the gossip – she’d lost the passion for that when Sophie had died so horribly – but as the Reeve himself soon discovered and approved, a question of maintaining the continuity of one’s being, of keeping operational the connective tissue and the nerve-beds of a lifelong existence in one place over time. Lucien’s bride, Cora the cleaning-woman, Eddie’s granny, Mrs. Arthur Coote, Granny Coote – these lives and the others she had temporarily inhabited were kept coherent and drew their meaning only if the person she now was, was also moving in time – touching, colliding, being broken and revived, fully sentient. If not, then the web of these memories sustaining her would be loosened from all anchorage, and set adrift to be engulfed by the alien Night-Dream itself.
“Don’t look so sceptical,” the Reeve smiled knowingly. “It is good news of a sort.”
I told you so.
“You’ve heard that up-and-comin’ types like Harold Hitchcock are keen to get this property back. Yes, I know he’s a phoney, but he’s also cunning. He’s playin’ to certain prejudices an’ sentiments in town, as you know so well. I was hopin’, and I still am, that the spirit of cooperation brought on by the War and the epidemic would carry on. I think it can, Cora, really, I do.” Her stare had almost stopped him.
“We’re goin’ to need that spirit, as I’ve told you before. This town’s in rough shape. No one knows better than you what the village went through during the railroad years an’ the tunnel scandal and the wholesale depopulation.” Did he know what had happened? The details? Were they written down somewhere? She hadn’t considered that possibility.
“When I came here, there were fifty vacant lots and a dozen houses rottin’ where they sat. The Anglican Church was boarded up. Even the Lane was half-empty.”
I left it, too. A deserter, like the rest.
“You stuck it out as long as you could. Don’t deny it now.”
She did, emphatically.
“Anyway, you know how hard we struggled to get the stone works and the Foundry in here. Then the War and all those men, our neighbours, gone, like that. An’ the fever attackin’ the young an’ the helpless.” He paused, seeing the pain in her face, but she urged him on.
I need to cry she said to him, I need to feel.
“Well, times are boomin’ again. But just stand at the car-stop any mornin’ at seven an’ watch three-quarters of our men leavin’ town to work at the Refinery or the railroad shops. How long can that go on before they start feelin’ like City people? An’ how long before Sarnia decides to make another move to take over and fulfil the dream they’ve had for forty years? The War come close to breakin’ us. Unless we get back our sense of bein’ a community, we’ll go under.”
Granny nodded her agreement.
“That’s why the monument means so much to us. It’s goin’ to be bigger an’ nobler an’ more lastin’ than the one in the City. To get the job done, I need to keep the council together. This business of your property has to be settled. Oh, don’t be alarmed. You know where I stand. I told them last week that our lawyer said you have the right to buy the lot before any other kind of move can be made.”
Granny’s eyes filled wi
th tears. Oh damn, she thought, there you go, acting like a half-senile old woman, snivelling at every turn of emotion in the conversation. But as usual the tears just fell.
“I’ve had the property assessed, without the council’s knowledge. What I have to know is, do you have any money? Did Arthur provide for you?”
She nodded, yes.
“Three hundred dollars?” he said with great hesitation.
She was comforted by the concern in his voice. Her smile was all he needed.
“In the bank?”
No. In a much safer place.
“Don’t tell me,” he laughed, much relieved. “I’ll make all the arrangements. The council meets again next week. I’ll have the deed, if we can find one, in your hands by then. That is, if you want to stay here.”
There was little doubt about that. Suddenly Granny got up and went over to the steamer-trunk next to the locked door of Arthur’s room. She pulled out a small slate, the one Eddie used before she got him into school. A piece of used chalk lay on the ledge at the bottom. The Reeve was watching her with intense curiosity.
She came back and sat beside him again. She lay the slate on her knees and took the chalk up in her left hand. The Reeve saw the concentration in the furrows of her brow. He saw the tendons mount on her wrist, the skin draped and useless. Then the hand flexed and began to write in shaking, tentative curls across the slate. When she finished she smiled grimly at him and gave him the board. He could just make out the message there: “Tell the council I wish to die in this house.”
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