“Harry Hitchcock will now give us his report on the selection of the site,” said Chairman Stokes. “But before he does, I want to take this opportunity –”
And every opportunity you get.
“– to say a special word about those who have sacrificed, in silence and humility, their time and energy, and in one particular case more than that, for a cause which we are all agreed is a noble one, even a divinely inspired one.”
Oh no, he’s about to make a platitude out of a beatitude.
“Our Lord said, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’,” and be bent to acknowledge the frail being at the end of the table, blessing her with his roast-beef smile.
And blessed are the obese for they shall batten on the pastures of heaven. Sunny Denfield touched her hand but she stared straight ahead.
Half-Hitch was on his feet and sailing through his set-piece, which he managed to complete without dropping a stitch. Into the sea of puzzled faces he then said in his own voice, “Of course, you now see the special sacrifice the good pastor was referrin’ to. We need to have back the lot where Mrs. Coote now lives. Her house’ll have to come down to make way for the monument. We’re all dreadful sorry about that. But I’m sure we all know that progress has its price. And there’ll be compensation for Mrs. Coote beside the reward of the Almighty Himself. We’re gonna decide on it at our meetin’ next week. We won’t bore you with the complicated details now, but I was asked by council to tell you that Mrs. Coote’s generosity will not be overlooked or ever forgotten. After all, a war memorial’s all about sacrifice an’ rememberin’,” and he executed a little semaphore motion with his wooden souvenir.
That’s some remembrance you’re waving. You don’t know that I know how you lost that hand, and it wasn’t in the trenches. I got a full description from Eddie of you toppling off that barstool in some bordello at Givenchy during an air-raid and getting your arm crushed between two barrels of beer.
The stingy applause for Half-Hitch was cut even shorter by the Reeve’s rising and holding up his hand. Half-Hitch sulked for a moment, but like the others surrendered to curiosity and waited for the chief councillor to speak.
“I stepped out of the chair,” he said to them quietly, “because I was the only member of council not to vote in favour of the Coote property as a site for the monument. I didn’t want to influence the decision before you all had a chance to hear the explanations. Even though the vote of council is legal and all, I’m sure nobody wants to do anythin’ that would go against the conscience of the village. So I feel duty-bound to present to you Mrs. Coote’s side of the story.”
He waved before them what looked like a handwritten letter. All eyes followed it.
“As most of you know, Mrs. Coote can’t speak for herself because she’s got an affliction of the throat that stops her from talkin’. But I want to tell you Cora Coote is as bright an’ sharp of mind as she ever was, and I have here her feelings on this matter, which she wrote down for me last night. I’d like to read these words if the chairman and council will let me.”
There was consternation among council but the assembly made the decision for them. “Agreed,” seconded chairman Stokes.
The Reeve then read: “Dear members of council: I wish you to know that I wholeheartedly agree with your selection of a site for the monument. You have chosen wisely and with good reason. I wish you to know also that I will do nothing to stand in the way of your plans. My house and land are yours. They are sacred to me for reasons no one but myself could understand, but then so is the village. I was here when the railroads arrived; I saw the townsite grow block by block, house by home. I cheered when it was proclaimed a village. In a small way I helped to name one of its streets. In all those years this house I now live in was the only one I could really call mine. My hope was to die in it. What I ask of the council is not compensation in dollars, which are of no value to me, but compensation in kind. I want to live out my days here in the village. I do not wish to be cast into a home for the wretched. The property is yours, in any event. I ask only that you think of me as you would any true citizen of the Point. Yours respectfully, Mrs. Cora Coote.”
The reform party in council were devastated. No ploy, no plea or manoeuvre of any kind could have been as effective as these words. The old dame’s a long ways from being bonkers, Half-Hitch thought. She was giving up her property but throwing her eighty-year-old-frail-pathetic-hard-done-by body upon the mercy of a boastfully Christian community. Even Reverend Stokes was able to discern the sheer cunning behind the move. What could be done? There was no public property to trade for hers, outside of unimproved fringe lots near the dunes, the dump or the swamp. Any solution that appeared in the least to be mean-spirited would crush the communal joy in whose spirit the monument was to be erected.
In the midst of these hushed mutterings, few people noticed young MacIntosh rise and ask for the floor. The Reeve, resuming command, rapped his gavel on the table.
“There is a solution to the problem,” said the junior member of council, his voice quavering ever so slightly. “A solution that’s fair an’ workable.”
“Go ahead, Horrie,” said the Reeve.
“Well, I been thinkin’ about fair compensation for Mrs. Coote all week, and I did some askin’ around an’ some fishin’ in the County Court records. You all know the old lane that used to run between the Savage house and the Waggoner’s place right across from Coote’s? Hasn’t been used as a lane I find for more than thirty years. The Savages now grow potatoes on it, an’ Murray lets his grass grow over his half. Well, it seems the actual allowance there is thirty feet, twice the size of the lane. What I’m sayin’ is, there’s more than enough property to build a small cottage on. My suggestion is this: that we get together as a community, pool our skills, an’ with the help of donations and any money Mrs. Coote can spare, build her a cottage to live in an’ give her a deed to the property. When that’s done, we can knock down the Coote house an’ start to build the monument.”
As one, the village turned to Granny Coote. She fought back the tears, with limited success. She looked towards Sunny Denfield and – imperceptibly – nodded.
38
1
March of 1922 was one of those late-winter months which people are forever remembering as part of a past that was not only better but more certainly connected with God’s Grace and His grand scheduling of events for the world’s good – before the rude intercession of wars, pestilence, and apostasy shook the embedded railings of the Divine Throne itself. Even God was growing nostalgic.
But here before the villager’s immediate eye was proof of a larger beneficence, a firm hand on the throttle of natural progress. The snow continued to fall but only at night, silent and windless. Each morning it surprised and delighted anew, fostering the hope that it had not fallen from an empty sieve of the universe but rather had grown wondrously from the essence of limb, eave and chimney pot. By day the thermometer held steady at thirty degrees under a velvet sun, coaxing icicles out of warmed gables and generally rounding, curving, mellowing. Rinks glistened by noon but froze tight again overnight. Snowballs packed as neat as baseballs yet struck like puffs of childish laughter. The meanest shanty, suffering the neglect brought on by war and the failure of hope, was transformed by the architecture of ice and snow into a glittering edifice, bemused by the temporary perfection of its impromptu scrolls, prisms, mossy filigrees. Some folk even conceded that the old Coote shack was ‘almost presentable’, though the latter sentiment may have been prompted equally by the thought that, come spring, it would no longer grace the village landscape in any of its transformations. During this brief, cherished interregnum of the seasons, passers-by could not help but notice the small, still, alert face of Granny Coote in her front window. She seemed, to all her newly-hatched well-wishers, to be staring intently across the street where, despite the weather, several burly young men were to be seen, at noon-hour or after work, clearing the snow and
chopping out a rectangular trench that would, when winter had yielded to necessity, hold the concrete footing of a new house. Around them were conspicuously piled a number of sections of ‘material’ – two-by-fours, joists, cedar siding – purchased out of the public purse and the charity of the citizenry, and carefully covered with several tarpaulins, all of them turned outward to expose the donor’s identity: McKeough Fishery, Point Edward, Canada.
Though her attention was from time to time drawn towards the intermittent construction activity – she noted with appreciation (and the pure pleasure of memory) the presence of Charlie Brighton, old Mike’s boy, out of work, his ‘nerves’ still bad from the War; of Wilf Underhill, taking precious time from his new son; of Stu Macdonald and young MacIntosh; and of Sunny Denfield who always came over afterward – Granny Coote was more likely to be thinking back to other days of renewal and starting over, to the gentle remembrance of those few, joyous months with Lucien Burgher, and those years afterward – unexpected, unearned – when she bore his name proudly through some of the darkest times of her long, long life. Cora. Cora Burgher. Cora Coote. Cora the Cleaning Woman. She was all of them, none of them. And before that, through a haze of memories deliberately but imperfectly obliterated, she remembered being Lily – of Mushroom Alley, of Potts’ Lane…
2
The years between 1879 and 1885 saw the new nation gradually regain the confidence it had lost during the great depression when for a few shameful moments some citizens had suffered a lapse of faith in the ineluctability of their own progress. Aided by crop failures and a cattle epidemic in England and sanguinary adventures in Egypt and the Sudan, the local economy turned pink with health. If good works were a certain sign of election, then who could doubt the divine rightness of Sir John A’s national hope, fulfilled at last in 1885: a three-thousand-mile band of iron to weld the faintheart provinces and empty territories together in a singular purpose. And add to this a thousand breath-taking bridges and trestles, mathematically graded inclines, brooding watchtowers, suspended steel arcs and ballooning grain elevators stretched between Montreal and Vancouver. The Canadian Pacific Railway swept all before it, the juggernaut of the transcendentalist dream. By happy coincidence in 1882 the Grand Trunk finally succeeded in swallowing whole its ancient rival, the Great Western, and within a year rumours of a magical underwater tunnel began to circulate, an engineering miracle that would not only confirm God’s allegiance to His chosen creatures but also link the Canadian transcontinental grid with the rich, spidering network of iron and affluence south of the border.
In 1884 when the world adopted Sir Sandford Fleming’s scheme for Standard Time – made necessary throughout the civilized world if rational and efficient train schedules were to be realized – who then could doubt that the railways, and the foundries forging their steel nervous-system, carried with them the aspirations of mankind and the sanction of the Almighty? True, a number of malcontents and Luddites (who curiously enough preferred to set local time by the local sun) did write strident letters to newspapers complaining of “railroad tyranny” and accusing our noble men of science of “tampering with God’s time”. But pusillanimous voices such as these were forever silenced by the last spike driven home at Craigalachie.
3
For Lily the first two years following the incorporation of Point Edward as a village were deceptively peaceful. She mourned the death of Sophie quietly and deeply, as she did all those she had lost, but around her the seasons and the lives within them changed and throve. The surveys along Potts’ Lane were duly carried out. The new half of the street was a little less rambling than before but certainly not as straight as the town’s other ones were (having been drawn on a map with a ruler in some official’s study). Except for Lily and her secret arrangement with Hap Withers, no one on the Lane was unable to scrape together the fifty dollars to make their quietus with the council and the railway. The surveyors ‘squared up’ the wandering lot-lines, driving red stakes in the ground to prove their point. The resulting deeds were then registered, fixed for all time. But if the village worthies expected fences and hedges to spring up along these fresh definitions of ownership, they were disappointed. Nor was there a rush on paint and plaster at Lockwood’s Hardware by the citizenry of Potts’ Lane. However, over a period of many months some signs of proprietorship did become visible to the discerning eye – a shingled roof (one side only), a single sparkling pane of glass, a thrust of perennials along a barren wall permitted to bloom if they were persistent enough, a stone fireplace that didn’t quite get finished but was used and admired nonetheless.
Mushroom Alley evolved slowly in the Lane in other ways, no more dramatic but much more important to Lily and her own life there. People moved away and were replaced – one or two at a time, so at first little difference was felt: a brief break, a hiatus, some memories, a forgetting – and you could reassure yourself that the Lane was still the alley with a better truer name and that the requisite essentials for one’s own continuance were still in place. Then one morning you wake up and realize that everything has changed, that it has been changed for some time, and people around you are looking at you as if you’re the only thing that hasn’t. And you ask, how did it happen?
That Stoker Potts didn’t come back from the Bruce was no surprise to anybody on the Lane. The house stood empty all that winter, the screen door slamming in the wind till Rob finally went over for Lily and nailed it shut. Next to Hazel’s it was the biggest and best-built house among them. Rumours flew that some entrepreneurial stranger was about to buy it with a view to gobbling up the neighbouring properties to make room enough for a hotel larger than The Queen’s – now that the depression was giving way to prosperity and financial adventure. It was soon confirmed that the fifty dollars had been duly paid and a deed transferred. There was considerable relief when Peg Potts (now Granger) and her husband moved in, bringing their own child, and her young brother, Bricky, with them. But Peg, though she still had Sophie’s devilish eyes and hair-trigger laugh, had got religion and was quite reserved, ‘standoffish’ according to Betsy and Winnie. Her husband was a sober man who worked in Sarnia and tried to build a fireplace to please his wife. “Still,” Hazel philosophized, “they’re really not the other kind.” Bricky spent a lot of time with Rob, and when Rob was away, with Lily.
Cap Whittle, one windy autumn day in 1880, leaned too far out on his topsail yardarm and tumbled into the billows below, cracking three ribs and jarring another dime loose in his overworked imagination. His lot was sold to the eldest McCourt boy and his girlfriend, who proceeded to live in splendid sin in the neat clapboard cottage they erected and painted pale blue – once. Despite the impudence of the paint, they were deemed to be genuine Alleyfolk (the girl being a cousin of the Shawyers from Bosanquet Township). Lily had known Pippy McCourt for years, and she waved to him every day as he passed on his way to the freight-sheds. He always gave her a big smile. I wonder why, Lily thought, then chided herself for such foolish introspection.
In the bitter winter of 1881-82 Honeyman Belcher caught pneumonia and died alone in his shack. The frozen body was discovered three days later by his friend Stumpy. Honeyman’s business was taken over by a man from Sarnia. Hazel organized a campaign to raise money so that one of the Shawyer girls and her husband could afford to buy the lot and make the place habitable. It was something Sophie might have done – they all thought but did not say. Another property have been preserved from contamination, it seemed, but no one was willing yet to admit that each change somehow put the whole enterprise – if indeed there was one – in jeopardy. No one dared to even think that with Sophie’s death something vital and irreplaceable had gone out of their collective life, that in some mysterious way Sophie Potts had been the Alley and that the Lane in which they had immortalized her name was already something else.
Such sacrilege may have entered the minds of one or two of the believers when in May of 1881, without warning or explanation, John the Baptist capped
his still, chivvied Aquinas the boar onto a wagon with his furniture, and moved to another shack in the south end near the recently constructed racetrack and fairgrounds. “Got some French woman hot for his product,” Hazel opined freely, but nobody laughed. A few nights later a gang of hooligans put the torch to his shanty when they found the still without sustenance. “I don’t believe in signs!” Hazel snapped at Betsy to shut her up.
As it turned out, Stumpy and Lily were the last of the hard-core Laners to survive there. In the fall of 1882 Spartacus, complaining of “too damn much noise an’ interferin’ in a body’s business” moved in with John the Baptist. Both lived and carried on their work into the ’nineties and were missed when they passed on. They never returned to the Lane. Poor Stumpy, whose supply of derelicts was not diminished by Sir John’s ‘economic miracle’, continued his good deeds until December of 1884 when one of his boarders stabbed him to death, mistaking him in the dark for an avenging Beelzebub whom he had seen leaping from the evening express just moments before. The assassin was shipped off to the asylum in London.
Several weeks after Baptiste Cartier’s place burned down, Violet arrived at Lily’s in tears.
“What’s wrong?” Lily said.
“Betsy an’ Shad are gettin’ married.”
“What else?”
“We’re all gonna move.”
To a rambling brick house in Forest, twenty miles to the north-east. “We’re goin’ legitimate again, Lil,” Hazel explained, “in a town where we can start over. Shad an’ my girls – Winnie an’ Betsy an’ dear, dear Vi – we’re gonna fix it up an’ start a boardin’ house. I mean it, Lil, a genuine boardin’ house. I’m goin’ back to cookin’ again. This here’s been fun but we’re all too old for it. Winnie almost died with her last abortion an’ Betsy’s insistin’ on keepin’ the one she’s got in her now – at forty-six years of age – ’cause she’s sure it belongs to Shad. So I headed off for Forest on the train one day last week and I just up an’ bought this old place.”
Lily's Story Page 61
