Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  Lily picked up the carnation that had fallen on the table and brushed it partly back to life. “This was Mr. Wilde’s?” she said.

  Bradley nodded, then sat down, still shaking, and let Lily pin it carefully back onto his lapel. “I’ll stitch your jacket up before you leave.”

  Bradley caught her hand in flight. “You do see, Ma, why I’ve got to go to Toronto. There’s so much I have to know. There’s so much out there to see. There’s so much buzzing around inside my head I think someday it will just explode and that’ll be the end of me. I got to keep going, Ma. I got to find out what I am.”

  Rob was actually the one who found the note on the table and the smashed crockery jar beside the bed. Lily had been over at Peg’s helping her nurse the babe through the whooping cough. Frieda, terrified by the look that Rob had given her, came dashing across the Lane to fetch her. Lily and Rob read the note:

  Dear Ma and Rob:

  I love you both more than my life. I’m sorry I have never been able to show it or prove it to you. But I must make the break now and for awhile it must be complete. I’ve got to have a look at the world out there. When I do, I’ll be back.

  In the meantime, please don’t try to find me. Take good care of her, Rob.

  Bradley

  3

  Lily waited only a few weeks before she walked down to Hap Withers’ cottage and told him he could have her house as well as the property. He moved the last of his numerous brood into the place and, being a widower and now alone, asked Lily if she would like the use of his two front rooms in return for a few housekeeping duties. Since they were already furnished, Lily brought nothing with her but a laundry bag full of clothes, a bookcase, a few trinkets and keepsakes the boys had given her as gifts over the years, and Sounder’s pouch with Papa’s Testament, the talisman, and the cameo pendant with her grandmother’s face on it. She put the pouch under her bed and left it there.

  Rob was very good to her. He stopped by often for tea or supper with her and Hap Withers. He took her down to Sarnia on the trolley for supper at a fancy English tearoom on Christina Street. He urged her to come over and help out with his garden. He was full of plans for expanding the operation. He had fixed up the little barn so that it was comfortable in a rustic way, shingled and shuttered, with white-pine floorboards and a split-log table he built himself. Nearby he had constructed a pigeon-cote full of homers and tumblers, each with a name and pedigree. Below it, his pet angoras lived in luxurious innocence. He’d adopted a stray dog, who slept with him at night and guarded the premises by day. He seemed content most of the time, but still she knew there was a restlessness in him, inarticulate but deep. Only when he got a letter from his only friend, Fred Potts (who had run away with the circus and was now in charge of all the animals and had just married one of the bareback riders in Texas) – did he let his regret and helplessness show. She left him alone, with his pigeons and his dog.

  Lily went to Duckface Malloney at The Queen’s, who readily agreed to let her do the hotel’s wash in the new sheds he’d just added at the back. Her other customers she let go, though she decided that since she was now alone she ought to get out and around more, and so she was often seen during the next couple of years working in the households of Mrs. Durham, Mrs. Saltman, Mrs. Blakely and others – washing, ironing and most of all minding the children. Three mornings a week, then, she toiled at The Queen’s where there was company if you wanted it and solitude if you needed it.

  She went out to Rob’s place two or three times a week during the growing seasons, working away in the garden with Rob at her side whenever he could be. She heard at The Queen’s that he was seeing a young lady at Camlachie up the lakeshore a bit, and so on many a summer evening it would be almost dark when he got home, and he’d pitch in beside her, chopping away like a fiend at the offending weeds. Still, despite their joint efforts, the garden seemed always in a state of imminent disorder. One day when she came over in the afternoon while Rob was at the freight-sheds, she was surprised to see a bedraggled young woman and her three children pulling up beets and tearing off tomatoes, trampling as much as they were retrieving. “Rob told us to come an’ help ourselves, mum. Sorry if we give you a scare.” When Lily casually mentioned the event a few days later, Rob grunted and said, “Yeah, I said they could take what they wanted. Her husband died last winter up in Camlachie.” He got up. “I gotta go out for a while. Don’t go fussin’ too much over the cabbage patch, eh.” Lily didn’t. She sat on the bench beside the cooing pigeons and let some of the realities of her life sweep over her, one of which was the fact – now irrefutable – that Rob had kept this miserable patch going for her sake alone. He had come to despise the sight of it.

  Since Lily never went up to the Post Office for her mail, the postmaster decided it was his duty to deliver the letter to her door. She thanked him and then stared at the florid, feminine calligraphy on the envelope. She could barely recognize her own name. She unwrapped the vellum paper and read:

  Toronto, October 10, 1884

  Dear Mrs. Marshall:

  You do not know me. My name is Sarah Crawford. I am a good friend of Bradley, your son. I met him last year here in Toronto, and we shared the same boarding house. Before he went to Montreal, we belonged to the same literary circle. He was the most promising poet among us. A few months ago he wrote me from England, where he was staying with Paul Chambers, who was there for the summer break. He told me he was on the verge of something great and important in his life, and that he would write again soon. He never did. But I did get a letter from Paul Chambers. He too had decided to give up school and make his way in England. He never mentioned Bradley until the letter that came yesterday morning. Oh Mrs. Marshall, I cannot write this without weeping. Paul told me that Bradley took his own life a short while ago. He left a note begging Paul to tell no one, and just walked into the Thames. Paul arrived in time to see him go under and disappear forever. Paul does not know that I found your name and address in Bradley’s room after he left for Montreal. I felt it my sad duty to write you immediately. I loved your son, Mrs. Marshall. I tried to save him. I hope that some day we shall meet.

  Yours respectfully,

  Sarah Crawford

  I tried too, Lily thought. And I loved him.

  4

  The second Riel Rebellion was in every way different from the first. Where it had taken a ragtaggle, improvised militia almost three months to traverse the northern wilderness by paddle and portage, the modern Canadian army boarded trains all along the old Intercolonial line and embarked on a three-day excursion to the Saskatchewan River courtesy of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Militia or regulars, this was, moreover, a pan-Canadian force of crack troops under seasoned leadership. At the other end, the rebellious natives and half-castes were also better organized and armed than their forebears had been along the Red and Assiniboine. But muskets and religious fanaticism were no match for rifles, the drill of discipline and the spanking new Gatling gun on loan from the U.S. Army, who were anxious to test the latest ‘improved feed’ model in legitimate combat. It performed splendidly, spitting out a record twelve hundred bullets per minute and scaring crows for miles around. The major battle at Batoche was won in less than a day. The hillsides where the Métis had dug themselves into the earth were littered with their dead, the log cabins behind them where their women and children crouched were razed by the efficiency of six-pounders, and the mad secessionists were silenced for all time. It was a clear victory for mechanized order in the service of benevolent civility. The integrity of the fledgling nation had been breeched, and that breech was not healed with blood. Only seven citizen-soldiers died in the cause. And if this first great national military action was not on the same scale as the American Civil War – with its million dead and million maimed – it was nonetheless a landmark victory for the universal cause of nation-making. It was also, in miniature, a curtain raiser for the horrors-to-come less than thirty years later.

  Naturall
y there would have to be a little political fence-mending in the squalid aftermath of the shooting, but nothing Sir John could not accomplish over time. Certainly few loyal citizens wished to see the publication of those letters sent home by militiamen who, upon seeing the pathetic condition in which their adversaries had been forced to live, decided they had more in common with the Métis than with Mr. Macdonald. Such naive emotional lapses are to be expected under duress, and a generous victor can afford to be forgiving. Louis Riel was hanged.

  Rob surprised her in the pantry of The Queen’s where she was fetching a jar of marmalade for the cook.

  “Hap Withers said you’d be here,” he said.

  Lily saw the blue of his uniform, nothing else.

  “I got to go, Ma.”

  “Yes”, she said.

  “I’m not Brad. I’ll be back. I swear.”

  She had heard those very words before.

  The night before the battle of Batoche Lily dreamt she was the angel of innocence, floating over the battleground with the folds of her shift swept upward into wings as warm as a swan’s throat. In the grassy shadows below here, scythed here and there by a quartering moon, lay the corpses of the seven who died. One by one she settled over them and the winnowing of her angel-arms awoke in them some instinct sharper than death, and each in his turn rolled over, as in sleep, yawned and opened his eyes abruptly, like a doll’s. The seventh figure did not respond to the angel’s wing-breath no matter how fervently it was offered. Sadly, very sadly the kindly seraphim eased the body over into the moonlight. The face was dead. It was Robbie’s.

  5

  And Granny, once again or still, in the sea-warm, abdominal home of the Night-Dream where all that was precious had to be remembered and re-remembered with all its pristine pain intact and bright as foetal blood against the pitch of almost-morning, had to be remembered fresh and bruising or be forever claimed by the place of forgetting that lay at the bottom of all sleep whose oblivion was absolute: she was in the Lambton swamp once more, still-called Lil and only eleven and very much alone, the River-of-Light pouring past her mere yards away like some maddened tributary of the Styx through its underground grottoes and moon-starved dark, she was chilled to the marrow, the chill of abandonment that runs as deep as childhood itself, the prodigal heart orphaned under the indifferent stars, and drifting towards the sleep where death’s welcome seemed a kind of comfort, and waking, surprised a second time, in the presence of the stranger from the lost south, the Shawnee or Southener as he was known, but when she reached to touch the warmth his kindness had brought, the robes over his ancient flesh weakened and thinned in the pre-dawn radiance around them, and when she tried to speak to him in one of the ancient tongues she knew his gentle face cringed and clenched, the lips crying no, no before they began to fade and the face with them, the copper flesh first so only the wrinkled outlines were preserved and the old, old eyes grew correspondingly larger till they filled the smoky space around them with their sad brilliance and promise of a thousand sagas curled in the shadows behind them and it must have been the eyes that spoke to her because there was no longer a mouth to utter its oracles, crooked or straight, but the air was filled with its voice and suddenly a hand, no bigger than a father’s lovingly in his daughter’s, floating in the immeasurable distance between them and on its upturned proffering palm there glowed the jasper talisman – scarlet as a hummingbird’s throat in the sun’s full thrust, as rooted as radium, and the voice shimmered in its carnal incandescence and she remembered the words in their alien consonance – intact – because all that was precious has to be remembered bruising and fresh: “This will bring you luck all your days, it will help you find a home here and in the hereafter; I received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as such by generation upon generation of tribes who have dwelt in these woods and waters and passed on, as we all do; the days of its guardianship are almost over, there is little magic left in the forests and the streams, older now than our legends; the locomotives of the white man’s soul are on their way, so when you have no more use for the stone’s power, I ask that you return it to the sacred grove whence it came; you will know when you are standing on it because it resides beneath the protecting branches of a giant hickory on a knoll just where the forest begins, and when you look west and north you will be able to see, at the commencement of summer, the joining of the Lake and the River set perfectly on a line to the North Star, whom we call the eye of Wendigo” and the words of the Southener echoed and re-echoed in her long dream until daylight came to quench them...

  40

  1

  It was bitterly cold when Lily left the hotel after her shift. Normally the fresh December wind, sweeping across the open water of the Lake and slashing randomly at the village, would have blown her quickly north-eastward towards the shacks along the Lane. Instead she walked west towards the River. There was no hurry in her walking, no evident purpose. The River was frozen tight, its rage arrested. Locomotives languished on sidings, their armour-plate complaining in the cold. One or two lamps glowed feebly in the dockside hotel to her left. Nor was her walking quite aimless, even though she soon left the road that wound its way to the freight-sheds, and seemed to drift into the frozen verges of the marsh. It was as if she were walking towards some end that lay about to reveal itself yards or rods ahead of her, or that lay curled inside her near the heart ready to declaim its desires only when this ritual walking was somehow complete.

  Certainly she felt no windburn on her face, her exposed throat, her ungloved hands. Her eyes blurred in the keen chill of the night-air, but she had no difficulty seeing what she had to see. Her heart pumped hotly in her chest, like a featherless bird beating its bony wings against invisible ramparts of ice. But she felt no emotion flow from its exertion. It was connected only to her legs and to its own mechanical instincts. The heart that had once stored her feelings and stoked them out of memory on command was now dead. Numbed, then drained, then irreconcilably dead. Considering what had happened to her over these last months, these last years, the death of feeling was no surprise. Only so much could be borne, lived through, and accommodated to the adjusting heart. To bear more, as she had been asked to after such pain and loss, was not to expand the borders of her humanity but to deny that any of its elements was essential, unshakeable, or rooted in necessities like love and steadfastness. How many times during her travail had she promised herself: I will not live just because my flesh yearns to continue and this flap of muscle in my chest convulses in its own selfishness. I am more than flesh and gulping blood. When I hurt I can feel the pain everywhere, I can hear it running backwards all the way to my youth, my childhood, the moment of birth.

  What was surprising was that she had carried on at all, that right from the beginning she knew her daily trek to The Queen’s to repeat the labours of a thousand previous days was not merely the automatic motions of a body not knowing how to do anything different nor the trust of a numbed will in the therapy of familiar routine. ‘Busy hands and the seasons will mend the fractured heart’ was the village cliché. Well, she had lived enough to know the worth of such homilies. Nonetheless, the very next day after the dreadful news about Robbie had been confirmed, she arrived for work on time. It was on the same day also that she began this nightly ritual of wandering the village paths and byways – in search of something, lost or promised.

  Tonight there was more urgency. She felt it somewhere between her frost-bitten cheeks and the haemorrhaging of her heart. She did not notice the snow begin to fall just as the wind died. She failed to hear the shale-ice crumble underfoot. The dark dissolved before her. The air was lit by snow, by moving and motionless bits of the universe, by the arctic friction at the heart of the snow’s design. Uninvited, individual flakes touched her cheeks without regret, and made their own tears. Somewhere something incorruptible was melting, gaining radiance.

  For a moment the snow lifted and the night sprang back. She was lost – in the marshlands that lay
on the peninsula between the River and the Lake. She was not frightened. She felt nothing but this vague edge of urgency. Ahead of her, set out against the shadowy blur of houses and gardens on the rise where the village began, she saw the outline of some fantastic, multi-limbed figure stretched upward through the veil of snow, the etch of its gesture somewhere between yearning and defiance. Over its brief horizon, it presided: heroic and doomed. The snow closed in again. Her walking recommenced. She was moving towards the figure no longer visible. She touched it shadow falling through a white daze. She heard its breath against her own as she neared. She felt suddenly encompassed, kindled, amnesiac, at home. Her back rested against its rooted bole. At last she saw the snow as it was: dancing its intricate, hopscotch, hornpipe fling for her eyes only. This is it. The reason. She sat down. She let her eyes close themselves. She let the last magic take her.