Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  “Who’ll get this house?” Lily asked.

  “Hap Withers has already bought it – for his eldest.”

  “When’re you leavin’, then?”

  “Next week, after the holiday. Ain’t it excitin’? You can hop on the Day Express an’ come up an’ visit us any time. Any time you please.”

  “Yes,” Lily said, “it’s not even an hour, I’m told.”

  Hazel, almost white-haired now, let her eyes mist over. “I remember when you was a red-haired beauty with the shyest smile in the County an’ your little pony Benjamin pullin’ you up Front Street every Saturday mornin’, an’ Betsy an’ Winnie were the worst teases ever.”

  “I remember, Char.”

  “Christ in Heaven, Lily,” she cried, “what’s to become of us?”

  Violet came in to the laundry shed to say goodbye. When Lily had gathered enough courage to ask her why she wanted to go with Hazel and to assure her that she could stay here and live and work and be happy as long as she lived, Violet looked at the floor and said, “I got to go with Hazel. She’s been good to me.” Like the mother you never had, Lily was thinking when Violet stunned her with: “She needs me, Lil.”

  The two women embraced, and it was Lily who let go first.

  “I got somethin’ for you,” Lily said.

  Violet glanced at the carpetbag in which Lily had packed some of the clothes and trinkets Violet had left here over the years and into which she had secretly tucked the one hundred and fifty dollars of unclaimed income that Bachelor Bill’s ‘retarded’ daughter had earned as her helper and her friend.

  “Not that,” Lily said. “Something my mother gave me I’d like you to have, to remember me by.”

  “Hazel says you’ll come up to see us on the train.”

  “Of course I will.” Lily drew the gold crucifix and chain from her apron pocket and as Violet leaned forward, Lily placed it around her throat where it settled as soft as a butterfly’s dream on clover.

  “Remember me,” Lily whispered.

  Lily always intended to visit Hazel and Violet, and did receive one letter months later indicating that all was well: Betsy’s baby was robust and black, Winnie’s health had improved, Hazel was practically running the village, and oh yes, Violet had found herself a gentleman friend and specially asked after Lily. With Brad’s help Lily composed a stilted letter wishing them all well and promising once again to climb on the train and visit. She couldn’t, of course, tell them what sort of chaos her own life was sliding into.

  4

  Granny: in the belly of the Night-Dream again from which mercifully there was no remembrance, only the aftertaste of ash and self-loathing: Birdsky’s child called Rabbit was dancing around her again on his jackrabbit legs, his chestnut face burnished by the uninnocence of the summer’s sun and his slim boy’s arms undulant as willow and waving, wending them both backwards towards the bush towards the forbidden dark at the reaches of the East Field and beyond the last spot of sunlight reserved for Mama’s grave, its honey-heat pouring longingly on her neck, her shoulders bare, on her gooseflesh calves and casting a nine-year-old Lily-shadow upon the ghost of her mother’s cold breathing but Rabbit’s happy-dance was hopping in the bell-chambers of her little-girl’s heart and he was leading her away from the hearth where death dwelt unabashed in the daylight where Papa committed his treacheries upon the copper woman who cried out like a night-jar, her baby Rabbit dancing his two-foot/four-foot Indian jig into the crooked dank into the sweated crotch of ancient branch and Cambrian bole and somewhere out of the black interior the sound of music drifting out of brass and violin and tympany striving towards the geometry of a waltz or galop or durable lancers and Rabbit’s hand grew suddenly firmer and in the glow of hoarded moonlight she could see he had sprung taller and light-of-hair and his smile was Tom’s smile, a first-lover’s smile and “Come on, come on” it crooned waltzing into the intricate distance till it drew her at last into his dancer’s grip and she saw that his eyes were pebble-blue, iced amethysts agleam like the stiffened orbs of the long-drowned staring starward as the seasons’ rivers wash mockingly over them...

  39

  1

  Bradley, as he was now called, continued to do well in school. Studying was as effortless as breathing to him and no amount of dereliction seemed to interfere with the steady flow of A’s on his report cards. In January of 1879 Lily agreed to let him stay at Mrs. Tideman’s boarding house a block from the high school in Sarnia. Lily talked for an hour with that good lady and concluded that she was a sober-minded, conscientious Christian who specialized in haltering the headstrong youth of the town. “He’ll keep his nose to the grindstone here, and it’s lights out at nine-thirty!” She did her best. So did Lily, but Bradley was rapidly turning into an impetuous, brooding young man – taller than his father by a head at age sixteen, with an oddly effeminate handsomeness that both attracted and repelled the young women in whose company he was increasingly seen. He deliberately cultivated the tubercular look of a romantic poet, letting his blond curls droop wantonly over a pale brow and wan cheek. He was supposed to spend his weekends at home, and did so until he entered grade eleven and took up with the likes of Paul Chambers, the solicitor’s son.

  Even when Bradley was at home, Lily often found herself at her wits’ end. Whenever she would cut short his swaggering arrogance with a stare or a retort he was unable to handle, he would sulk for hours, often ending up in a fit of remorse and weeping until Lily wrapped her arms around him and let him feel how deep and complete and unqualified her forgiveness was. For days on end he would be a model son, provoking a smoky fire at dawn and serving her tea and toast in bed, or sitting with her and patiently explaining who the Tudors were or how the United Empire Loyalists came to be and why they were hailed as the founding pillars of Canadian society. He even helped her with her writing which, he insisted, was coming along famously. But even when Bradley was in one of his rare good moods, Rob would not stay at the house nor in his backyard tent; he headed for solitude on his own place – where she herself had lived so long ago with Bridie and Uncle Chester, when she had been – it seemed forever – Lily Ramsbottom. When Bradley left for Sarnia, Rob would arrive home for supper and be so ill-tempered for days that Lily found herself taking out her anger and frustration on the innocent one. With the depression ending at last, Rob was working three days a week at the sheds all year round. Whatever resentment he felt towards Bradley was always swallowed for Lily’s sake; she knew this and tried her best to be fair to him. But Rob was not a talker; Lily could feel the currents reverberating deep in his body as she sat in the same room with him, but they were rarely expressed in words – only obliquely in looks. I wish I knew what he wanted for his life, Lily often thought, then I would give it to him tenfold. But I don’t.

  “He’s living out there in that shack with some tramp,” Bradley pouted. “Why don’t you do something about him?”

  “With Sue Potts, you mean,” Lily said and Bradley went white, then silent.

  But in the fall of Bradley’s entry into grade eleven, Wee Sue eloped with the baker’s son.

  Paul Chambers was bright and ambitious and rich. Mrs. Tideman, throwing up her hands, declared him “a bad influence” capable of leading “the Virgin Mary astray”. But vexed and puzzled as she was by the whole affair, Lily was inclined to believe that he was a kindred spirit that Bradley, for reasons she could not yet define, had sought out and bonded himself to. His head is full of words he hasn’t found things to pin them to, was one way she thought of the restless, tethered creature he kept inside him; if he stays here he’ll suffocate, he’ll tear his own brains out. So she watched and hoped, and kept putting money into the crockery jar under the bed. There’s love inside him, too, she consoled herself when the rheumatism started up; words are a way of feeling, I know, and Bradley’s only got to get them aimed away from himself and towards something bigger and more wonderful, out there.

  In Paul Chambers he found a purpose fo
r poetry and politics – Canada First, the frenzied ultra-nationalist club of writers and apprentice thinkers that was sweeping the salons and tearooms of the confederation. Chambers had founded a local chapter of the society, used his father’s money to rent a club room at the St. Clair Inn every Tuesday and Thursday evening, and gathered about him a group of like-minded believers. It was reported that they smoked cigars and drank French wine. Most of the adherents were between seventeen and twenty-two years of age, youthful, idealistic, bent on literary careers and affecting (without achieving) the Byronic form of ascetic Hedonism. Only Bradley was successful in getting a poem accepted for publication in the society’s national organ, Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly. For a time the legendary Goldwyn Smith was their idol and mentor.

  On the rare weekends when Bradley did come home during his senior year, Lily was made an honorary inductee and subjected to lengthy expositions of the Canada First manifesto. Bradley’s eyes would flash with righteousness and confidence of youth, and there was in them a purity of purpose that frightened Lily, but also amazed and gratified. Mostly, though, she was inundated. It seemed that people like her were representative of the provincialism, the parochialism, the homespun timidity that was keeping Canada from taking her place among the senior cultures of the world; that was holding back the natural development of a larger national spirit, a more capacious transcontinental loyalty and a more transcendent view of citizenhood; that was, moreover, sabotaging the very free and unlocalized and politically independent forms of literature and philosophy which were necessary to the growth of civility itself. When Lily protested that she failed to see how she personally was at fault in these matters, he merely grew more vehement and repeated his arguments with an increasing number of polysyllabic words. And when she had the temerity to ask him how much of the Maritimes and Prairies and Rockies he had seen, or questioned the sincerity of ‘St. John’ Macdonald, he threw a tantrum, then retreated into his morose/remorse routine. She soon realized that she was not meant to comment or defend or reprove but merely to listen as the lava of his words hardened in the clear air around them, to become – as she had once done so long ago when he had been afraid to sing to the dark – the trustee of his secret self. And so she came to accept in silence his wheedling and badgering and elocutionary harangues until tears shattered and regrouped behind her eyes and Bradley slumped exhausted on the table, staring at her with the look of a pneumoniac. Once, Rob was in the shed chopping wood during one of these gruelling sessions, and came in just as Bradley finished. Bradley glowered and went out, slamming the door. Lily released her tears more in annoyance than hurt. She felt Rob watching her, axe in hand. She looked up at him for some gesture of help, comfort, understanding – anything. He flung the axe-blade into the floor and stomped out the back way.

  When Bradley graduated magna cum laude in June of 1881, Lily was fussed over by Hazel, Betsy and Winnie until they could declare her ‘a regular town lady’. Hazel contributed a fancy hat and Betsy a parasol – both of which Lily politely refused. But she did allow them to stitch and tuck the dress they’d created out of partial cloth until she was respectable enough to pass muster. She did not want her son to be embarrassed on the most important occasion of his life. In fact Bradley seemed surprised and not altogether pleased by the bearing of his mother during the ceremony and the apparent ease with which she made polite conversation with her betters at the reception. “I bet she could joke with the old Queen and get away with it,” Paul Chambers burbled. “Where have you been hiding your mother, you rascal?” Bradley was not amused, though he too was unable to take his eyes off his mother. When Counsellor Chambers himself asked her to dance, Bradley blushed from half a dozen contending emotions. Rob did not come.

  The following week, just after the news of Hazel’s decision to leave reached her, Lily was buoyed by word from Mr. Axelrod that Bradley’s application to University College in Toronto had been accepted and that a modest scholarship of twenty-five dollars was proffered with the promise of much, much more down the line. That night as an early summer storm raged around them, Lily and Bradley sat down to map out the details of his future. Bradley held the principal’s letter in his hand as if it were an executioner’s telegram. All the blush and bravado had drained from his face. In his trapped blue eyes Lily watched a boy’s fear of the crooked dark, sly moonlight, bat-shadows under eaves, the giant’s fee-fi-fo-fum. She braced herself but he would not say it.

  “You must go,” she said.

  “I will, I will,” he said, “but I can’t. Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as I have enough money. I was expecting a much bigger scholarship. Twenty-five dollars is an insult.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “Paul says at least four hundred dollars over the four years.”

  “But I got two hundred an’ fifty already – in the crockery jar. An’ the principal says you can expect more scholarship money by second year.”

  “What in hell does he know? He’s never been east of London.”

  “Okay, then, tell me when.”

  “I need a year off. I’ve talked it over with Paul and his father. He has agreed to take me on as a clerk for a year; I’ll earn enough money to put myself right through, and we won’t have to be beholden to anyone.”

  “Is Paul going?”

  Bradley paused before he answered, scanning his mother’s face with anger and amazement. “No,” he said almost inaudibly. “Paul’s going to tour Europe for a year, and then register at University College after that.”

  When Violet left, Lily tried to carry on alone with her business. But the summer was exceptionally hot and she soon became exhausted. Rob found her one day in a faint, seated beside the mangle as if she were taking a snooze. She couldn’t remember where she was or how she’d got there, and when Rob clasped her arm to raise her up, she screamed with pain. She spent three weeks in bed exorcising the fever. Rob was at her side much of the time. Bradley came on weekends.

  “You don’t need to do this, you know,” Rob said in exasperation as she tottered back to the shed and surveyed the accumulated laundry Rob himself had not been able to clear away. “There’s only yourself to take care of.”

  “I’ll get a couple of the McLeod girls to help me. They need the money.”

  And she did.

  2

  Frieda and Mitsy proved to be good workers and kind, grateful neighbours. But nothing could replace the loss of Violet and the others, and Cap Whittle’s fall and Honeyman’s death made Lily feel very much older and very, very tired. Rob was lugging freight full-time and talking about adding some animals to ‘his place’ in the spring, and Bradley was working diligently in the law office and starting to talk again with enthusiasm about university, particularly, Lily noted, after the arrival of a letter from Paul with a postmark from Rome or Paris. So Lily wrapped herself in sweaters and plunged each morning into the frost and singe of the laundry shed in winter. Frieda and Mitsy sang off-key in shy, tin-whistle voices, but sing they must, and laugh – as everyone around Lily eventually did.

  Paul Chambers arrived home on the first of May for a month’s visit before touring New York, Baltimore, Chicago and the far west by train. Bradley informed Lily that he and Paul were going to Toronto for a few days to inspect the campus and make preliminary arrangements for their entrance in the autumn. “We’re going to stay at the Royal York, and see the sights,” he said, his guilt at the twenty dollars or so he would have to spend drowned in his excitement. When he left, with an extra five dollars from Lily to buy some new clothes, she sat by herself and drank a slow cup of tea. It’s going to happen at last, she allowed herself to think, very quietly and scarcely in words.

  When he returned five days later with his tweed jacket torn and a bruised carnation in his lapel, Lily heard little talk of the university. The subject was Wilde, Mr. Oscar Wilde, whom they had heard lecture twice at the Botanical Gardens and spied up close in the flesh during one of h
is ‘progresses’ up York Street.

  Bradley’s eyes blazed with something hard and radium and irreducible. They held Lily in their spell while their author paced back and forth across the kitchen like a frantic Socrates, gesticulating and querulous, his pale, thin body whipped and fanned by a zealot’s fire.

  “We’ve been wrong, Paul and me, all along. Not completely wrong because we’ve been trying to expand our sense of the world, to cut all the ties that bind us here, and to reach for something larger and more wondrous and unknowable – like the spirit of a nation, something beautiful and sacred because it is bigger than the miserable little lives that combine to make it up, the wretched lives that have no poetry in them unless they’re stretched and broken and consumed by the idea of nationhood. Not blind, stupid patriotism but the noble conception of a collective consciousness, an invisible oversoul that moves and directs a country’s destiny, just as Emerson has said. And you know how passionately Paul and I have held to this notion, and how we’ve begun to put our own poetry and our schoolboy philosophy at its service, but then, then to have heard Oscar Wilde speak to us as he did from that dais, and tell us in words I shall never forget – I shall take them to my grave – that we were only partly right, that Beauty, and the arts that create Her, are valuable for their own sake, that there’s a magic universal truth that inspires beauty and goes beyond the spirit of nation-states, German philosophies and pious moralities. Don’t you see, Ma, we were headed in the right direction, we were trying to learn more and more about the world out there, about the unseen powers that regulate its fate, about ideals that would allow us to transcend our petty day-to-day lives, about the forces of poetry and art and history – but we just didn’t go far enough. There are universal truths we can’t begin to grasp until we’ve disentangled ourselves from politics and moralizing, until we are ready to devote our lives to the pure contemplation of what is beautiful.”