She felt pain firing through both her knees. She was on the floor among the spilled cinders and ash. The kindling had burned itself out, the smoke had escaped with the brief heat through the cracks in the walls. Had she blacked out? A tumour? Tiny strokes? She winced at the bruising in her knees and the scalding of tears. Get up. Get up. The room spun on the axis of a single candleflame in the front window. Lie down. Let it be.
The temporary blaze was taking the chill off quite nicely, and the hot tea warmed wherever it went. Granny pulled the kimono more snugly around her throat and continued her vigil at the snowy window overseeing the street. Arthur was such a sweet man, so different from the others. He loved to walk, as she did, with no aim or purpose other than the pleasures of being in motion in the woods or along the beaches or among the cattails or under the parliament of stars that had supervised conception and birth and all the rest. Often they would pull Eddie on his sled through snows like this over to the dunes, where he would fling himself into semi-flight down their slick slopes to the borderless prairie of the beach below. When they got home, after a brisk fire and some mulled wine – with Eddie snug in his cocoon – she would make slow mutinous love to Arthur. Always he was too shy, too untrusting of the tender impulses that throve in him, to initiate lovemaking. She would think of him, though she never told him so, as an instrument – say a curling rosewood mandolin – that she would rub and thrum till its music wakened and overwhelmed. “We shouldn’t, love, we’re too old, too ridiculous,” he’d murmur unconvincingly, and she’d say, “Keep your eyes closed, sweet; it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful in here.”
So rare in a man was that refined reticence, that rare combination of resignation and engagement, gentility and passion, music and masculinity that she – Cora Burgher – would have scoffed at the very notion; certainly Cap would have laughed out loud, and Sophie no doubt would have smiled indulgently and offered some devastating quip: “I know he’s sweet and kind and does the dishes, dearie, but has he got a dick or a doily down there?”
In a letter she wrote but never sent to Eddie, she said about Arthur: ‘He was the kind of man every woman should marry. As lovers only should we take the adventurers, the wanderers, the plunderers; and when we’ve taken our pleasure on them, we’ll turn them loose again to waste themselves upon the world’.
I’ve had my share of the other kind, she thought. And their children. They’re dead and gone, all of them: willing victims of whatever demons drive the male flesh to annihilation. And the innocents along with them. Eddie. Eddie, I can’t even say your name out loud. The gods that could have helped us are still in hiding. When Arthur left he took some of the earth’s music with him, but you were my last cause for hope. What am I doing here now? The gods won’t answer from their skulking-places. Even death has passed me by. Cap was right: waiting is not living.
You’re waiting for something to happen. Yes, of course. That’s it. I almost forgot.
She heard a commotion in her front yard and turned in time to see the blurred outline of Sunny Denfield, the puffing portliness of Mortimer Stokes and the loping strut of Harry Hitchcock. From the gait and bearing of these harbingers she recognized, from long and repeated experience, the peculiar footfall of officialdom. And the news it bore, she knew, was never good.
3
And Granny again dreaming Lily, dreaming the longago as if it were real or had actually happened or could happen again only differently so everything would be changed in the wake-up world, she was eight and she was alone under the moon and the shadows around her blurred into smoke when she touched them and the night-air was jarred and riven by a music that had no sound to it, no melody in it, only cadence and verberation and blood-thrumming titillation, she was wild with it and as her body’s bird-bones sang and sailed in their weightless jubilance, she was aware that the smoke-wreaths and shadow-substances about her were other souls twisting in the same silence, driven by the same yearnings towards the bliss of oblivion, and they shared a simultaneous cry of release and not-a-single-regret as the dark struck back, as the shadow reclaimed its dominion in the fallible flesh of all dancers young and old, native and alien and she awoke to find herself sleeping the sleep of the exhausted upon the shoulder of the Southener, the last of the Shawnees from the legendary battles of the war-with-the-States, his eyes half-lidded and undreaming and his arm around her more fatherly than she had ever known and in the clearing among the Pottawatomie wigwams around them they watched with their separate intensities and under the moon’s clairvoyance the midnight ceremony repeating itself before them as for the first-and-only time the virgin among the priests of her family and the ghosts of her ancestors and the wraiths of the children she would bequeath to the future, the shivering Pottawatomie girl-child with woman-needs bone-deep and thriving in her to be blossom and spur, and when all the chanting was done and all the fleshly transformations had taken place within their spheres, she was able to smile into the moon-varnished dark with the face of her new name, no longer White Blossom was she but Seed-of-the-Snow-Apple and all that was promised therein if summer should ever come or the darkness imbedded above the moon ever lifted itself from the dreamer’s eye…
36
1
On such a night as this – with the stars frozen in place, the quarter-moon windless with wonder, the inheld breath of all snow – did Lucien the locomotive man, thirty-six years ago to the month, baptize his bride “Mrs. Cora Burgher”. To the astonishment of the other burghers and burgesses of the village, no doubt. On the other hand, nothing fazed them concerning the behaviour of any former inmate of Mushroom Alley. In fact, being one of its superannuated denizens, Granny thought, granted one a comforting sense of immunity, a licence to commit extravagant social irreverencies. Not that being made an honest woman by Lucien Burgher was all that irreverent. Lucien: with the great grappling hands; with a laugh titanic enough to be recognized over the competition of steam-whistle, grinding iron and the wail of wind through the open windows of the cab. With a heart as hot and propulsive as the firebox he fed lovingly each night with lozenges of beach and elm. You were the only one willing to take me away, take me out of myself, take me sailing on the white wave that sweeps us clear of our body’s weight. We made our secret pact and we kept it without compromise. Less than three months. But I remember still, for both of us. And, Lucien my love, the gods of either hue were watching – in trepidation and cowardly delight. Yes, all that really did happen.
Even when you left, I thought to keep your name. I braved the taunting and snobbery to make them say it long enough to forget I’d ever had another. With you gone, I had to grow into it alone. You’d have been proud of me, but pride, as we both knew, was never a substitute for the wonderful meshing of our brief nights together. You would have roared with laughter, or cried, to overhear – as I did many times at The Queen’s scrubbing out a room at eight in the morning – the wheezing and whimpering next door, the off-key giggle, the under-rehearsed moans and yelps, the slap of dead flesh, sadness like an aftersmell in the room hours later no scouring could efface. Only the memory of our love and your courage not-to-be kept me going in that black year after your leaving.
I kept your name; it grew around me in the Lane and in the village. The graft took. When Eddie came, he needed something to call me. Granny. I resisted, gently. The child needed a surname. I gave him yours, and mine. When sweet Arthur carried us off together, I surrendered it with reluctance. You know that. We talked it over at the time, remember? I told you what a sacrifice Arthur Coote was making, offering his widower’s hand to a woman thrice fallen, risking all for love as one of his theatrical publicists might have put it. Don’t laugh. Driving down to the Sarnia Court House in a borrowed butcher’s cart to be “hitched” by a judge was one of the most courageous acts I’ve seen any man ever perform. Of course, I told him to pretend he was on stage and he did, and I gave him rave reviews for a week. You would have come to like the Arthur I was privileged to see. Don’t forget, he was
an actor, an entertainer. He played The Royal in Victoria and the Lyceum in San Francisco. Being organist and choir director at the Methodist Church was his greatest role, though you wouldn’t like me saying that, would you, Arthur?
She was thinking now – in this stasis of starlight and snow, with the gentle foraging of Sunny Denfield back in the woodshed – of that night a few weeks after the ceremony when Arthur sat over there at his piano and began to play, in slow time, the opening bars of “I am a model of a modern major-general” and young Eddie, barely ten and wide-eyed with wonder and fright, picked up Arthur’s baton, tucked it under his chin like a swagger stick and started marching up and down to the music. As Arthur, his own shyness finally easing, began to speed up towards the song’s regular triphammer gallop, little Eddie’s legs hopped in rapid synchronization, his arm jerking up and down in perfect parody, his eyes dancing in accelerating cadence till at last they left the safety of his granny’s and garnered their own delight. She herself had grabbed a saucepan and began beating it with a spoon, unable to catch the presto-con-brio of the ditty as it soared to an apex of divine stillness. When the cups on the shelf ceased to rattle from the final chord, Eddie scooted past her waiting arms and flung himself at Arthur, who recovered in time to hug the child so tightly he could feel the diminuendo of music still humming in the tiny bones.
2
The front room was as warm and cozy as it had ever been. Sunny Denfield had removed the clinkers and cinders, and then built a fast, hot maplewood fire to take off the chill. As it died down, he put a chunk of Wilf Underhill’s coke on the ash, where it simmered contentedly. Sunny stayed for his tea even though he knew Prudie would get that hurt, puzzled look in her eye again, certain that there was some sinister explanation for his unconscionably long visits with such a strange soul who sat without speech winter after winter cheating death. Charity had its limits. God would not credit such excess.
“I didn’t tell you, did I,” he was saying, “that I got another letter from my cousin Ruth-Anne in Toronto. Yes, it’s true. Seems like the hoity-toity side of the family has decided to acknowledge its black sheep.” He was fully aware of her own acknowledgement, reflected in her face which he always observed, as he spoke, at a three-quarter angle, reading the slightest quiver of her lip or brow, assessing each shift of labyrinthine light in eyes that had not, he sense, changed their essence since they dawned upon the world.
“You remember, of course, the callow bachelor who set up shop in The Queen’s back in the fall of ’nineteen-one. I was only eighteen, would you believe? I didn’t tell my parents where I was till after I got settled in the job at the sheds and was pretty certain Prudie McKay would say yes. What few people know even today is that I ran away from private school. My family was, an’ still is, high mucky-muck.”
Granny acknowledged the accuracy of the term.
“My grandfather was a minister in the old Union government of Baldwin-Lafontaine. My father was a fancy city solicitor in Toronto. He died during the War. Lucky for me, I stopped to see him on my way overseas in ’fifteen. He knew he was dying, I think, because he made a great show of forgivin’ me. I was sure I’d die before him, an’ maybe he thought so too.”
Granny pushed another of Mrs. Savage’s cookies in his direction.
“Anyway, it seems my Aunt Grace, my mother’s sister, who died just a year or so ago, got interested in her family tree. She’d married Bramwell Beattie, a sort of junior tycoon, a guy I hated all my life. But Aunt Grace was a pet, the sweetest, kindest soul there was. Since my own mother died havin’ me, Aunt Grace was the closest thing to a mother I ever had. I wrote to her all along. I’m sure she understood my rebellion. At any rate, she kept my secret. I wrote to her a lot during the War.”
Granny’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“Well, anyway, accordin’ to my cousin Ruth-Anne MacEnroe – that’s her married name – who was Aunt Grace’s only child, we’ve got some distant relatives on my Aunt’s side of the family who lived in Lambton County at one time. Trouble is, they seem to have moved away an’ nobody can now locate them. Since her mother died, Ruth-Anne’s been like a fanatic about tracing her roots. You’d think with cabinet ministers an’ lawyers an’ tycoons on your family tree, you’d be satisfied an’ leave well enough alone.”
Granny underlined the irony in the remark and Sunny smiled broadly. Reluctantly draining the cold tea from his cup, he rose to go.
“That stove should behave till spring,” he said, pulling on his mackinaw. Granny watched every move he made. He reached sort of nonchalantly into his tool kit and pulled out a notepad, the brown wrapper still on it. He placed it over on the kitchen table, then looked across the room at her.
“The mass meetin’s tomorrow night,” he said quietly. “Right next door. I want you to write out on this paper whatever you want to say to the people of the Point. I’ll read it aloud to them. You have some rights in all of this, you know.”
Her eyes said neither yes nor no.
At the door, with his scarf tucked in, he said, “I think you should be there. “I’ll come for you around eight.”
An icy draft from the open door struck her a sideways blow before the heat of the cleansed stove replenished itself.
37
By seven-forty-five the Oddfellows’ Hall was almost full. More than half the town’s six hundred adults were gathered to hear confirmation of the facts which were already public knowledge and spice for the rumour mill. The infirm, of whom there were more than the usual number, sat on wooden benches arranged especially for the occasion. Everyone else stood in clusters, buzzing, or leaned elbows on sills and wainscoting, happy to observe and judge. On the dais at the north end, the councillors peered down at their constituents, secure behind the trestle-table now littered with official-looking papers that were being shuffled more than necessary. The Reeve’s chair remained unoccupied.
Just before eight o’clock the door opened and Reeve Denfield entered. Granny Coote was beside him. A stunned hush gripped the assembled: no rumour of this sort had tested the village breeze. What they saw, through their surprise, was a tiny old woman, barely five-feet tall with mottled gray hair pulled back into an uncustomary bun and tamed with a frayed blue ribbon. The Irish-white skin was blotched with liver-spots and yellowed from too much indoor light, but the eyes incandesced in their shrinking flesh, like two jets set in a shaman’s mask. Although she allowed herself to be guided by the Reeve’s arm, it was plain she wasn’t feeble. Indeed, after the flaring of the eyes, it was her bearing that arrested the viewers’ attention: she walked with an autonomous, erect grace that reminded the hunters in the hall of the way a white-tail lopes through a maze of brushwood, never once condescending to take a sideways glance; the women thought wistfully of queens at ease in crowded drawing rooms.
To the further surprise of the gathering and to the councillors themselves, Sunny Denfield escorted ‘mad Granny’ to a place beside him at the table. There they nonchalantly removed their coats and sat: downstage centre. Needless-to-say, the subsequent proceedings were scrutinized with more than usual interest.
First of all the Reeve announced that for reasons which would become clear later on he was turning the chair over to the Reverend Stokes, and then he and Granny Coote moved down to a less ostentatious position at the west end of the table. The old woman did not flinch under the obsessive watch of the assembly. She didn’t even take the Reeve’s arm, though the impression she left was one of determined fragility. Throughout the speeches that followed, she sat straight up in the wooden chair and looked out at the townspeople she had lived amongst for decades. Her eyes shone with a sanity that shamed them.
There’s not a face I don’t recognize, she was thinking. That would surprise most of them. I can’t put a name to every one, but I know the family stamp: big noses, weak chins, sallow eye, the unmistakable hybrid smile. She could rhyme off their lineage – public and suppressed. She knew whom their second cousins married in Goderich or Petroli
a. She remembered the high hopes their parents once had for them. And all these years these good citizens figured it was they themselves who were watching the sideshow of Mushroom Alley and the Lane. Who did they think we talked about? Whose rebels and strays kept our blind-pigs fed and our whorehouses wholesome? We took in rumours like transfusions. We invented the last laugh.
The chairman-pro-tem had begun. He called on Sandy Redmond, who repeated aloud the stale news about the selection of Sam Stadler to design and build the monument. The gathering added its applause to the speaker’s own.
“However,” Redmond continued when the last clap had exhausted its echo, “I must tell you that the buildin’ fund will still need to be added to, as the cost of the landscapin’ hasn’t been figured in. So we’re askin’ you to dig as deep as you can. I think it’s fair to say your council’s stretched a dollar as far as it can go.”
Like your wife stretches them behind the counter, Granny mused. You’ve got a grin and a handshake and a gift for the gab, but it’s Olive who keeps the business afloat. Any woman who’s been president of the WCTU knows how to dot the ‘i’ and cross the ‘t’s’ in temptation. But does she know you used to slip down to the Lane just like your Dad for a quick snort? I liked your Dad. He had doe’s eyes.
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