Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  Enter Reeve Dowling, politician and former railway executive. The trick, he announced, was simply to get the population of the village to actually want the tunnel to be built at Sarnia. Vague promises were to be made, quid pro quo – the town gets the dirty, noisy, hazardous tube but the village keeps its lucrative car-shops, round-house, freight-sheds, and will certainly have its port facilities expanded at public expense and the almost certain possibility that a large steamship company – beholden to the present government – would set up house at dockside. Et cetera. And who better to present such a package of delights to wary constituents than the Reeve himself. For his part in the melodrama, the Reeve would be offered – without contest – a safe provincial seat to the north, from which redoubt he might well eventually storm the gates of Queen’s Park itself. The key to success, all agreed, lay in the Reeve’s gradual and delicate revelation of details so that neither collusion nor predetermination be apparent. It was this intricate series of ‘one-acters’ that had to be negotiated among the three interested parties. The timing was all.

  The blizzard of March 15 was both a blessing, then, and a sign. No one except a sleepy yardmaster noticed, through the haze of snow, the arrival, around suppertime, of a ‘special way-freight’ consisting of locomotive, tender, three empty box-cars and a caboose. The sole occupant of the caboose was deputy-premier Peebles. The conductor had sat shivering in the engine-cab with the driver and fireman all the way from Toronto. Mysteriously, this ‘ghost train’ was turned around, then backed onto a far siding. Its crew, following prearranged orders, left the locomotive primed and running, and headed for the comforts of the bunkhouse. They had been commanded to return at precisely seven o’clock and, without a by-your-leave, head back to Toronto.

  A few minutes after they had left the train seemingly deserted, the doodle-bug from Stratford arrived and debouched a handful of well-chilled passengers (the heating apparatus, clogged with snow and striations of ice, gave up in Ailsa Craig). One of these, distinguished in black, did not enter the faint warmth of the waiting-room, with its windows steamed tight, but instead turned and, pausing to confirm his anonymity, slipped through the snow towards the mystery locomotive, panting inexplicably on its lonely siding. The male figure – at ease anywhere, even in a blizzard as if he might at any second command it to cease at his convenience – glanced up at the deserted engine-cab, nodded with satisfaction, then walked casually down past the three box-cars to the caboose, whose single lamp flickered bravely outward. Vice-President Margison Dilworth hopped nimbly aboard, shutting the caboose door deliberately behind him, disdainful of the privy councillor’s teeth-chattering ‘hello’, and apparently unmindful that his boot-prints were already half-obliterated by the still-falling snow.

  A second pair of prints, suffering a like fate, were fast approaching along the tracks from the north where they curved and ran down Front Street towards the outskirts of Point Edward.

  2

  By six o’clock the snow was deep enough to impede all walking. So Lucien and Cora decided to celebrate the first week’s anniversary of their marriage in the dining room of the St. Clair. After a light supper they began toasting one another (and several recruits from nearby tables) with champagne and a heartiness only partially forced. There was in Lucien’s eye a manic twinkle that had taken spark sometime before his arrival home early in the afternoon, and that was not in the least assuaged by their fiery coupling nor its amber aftermath, that prospered with each tumbler of elixir he lavished upon it with the abandon of a dispossessed leprechaun.

  “Tonight,” he said, “I’m gonna take you on that ride I been promisin’.”

  “In this?” she said lightly, scanning his eyes for some sign of what the fire in them was shielding with its glee-glint.

  “Snow never stopped a train,” he said.

  When they stepped outside, Cora could just discern the outlines of a horse-and-cutter. Lucien silenced the muttering of the driver with a silver dollar, swept his beloved onto the snowy seat, and proclaimed: “To the station, my good fellow. And hurry. We’ve got a train to catch!”

  Cora snuggled against him. H is heart was drumming through layers of wool. The sound of the horse’s hooves never reached them. It was hard to believe that somewhere behind the muffling veil around them there was a night full of darkness punctured by stars. No lights blinked at their passing along Front to Cromwell. The driver closed his eyes, sagged forward, and gave up the reins. Only the instinct of beasts brought them at last before the looming shadow of the former Great Western depot.

  The waiting-room was deserted, its gas lamps blazing foolishly. Brushing the snow from his coat, Lucien said, “You wait here. Scrubby Parsons said we could hop on his way-freight down to the Point. About seven o’clock. I’ll see if he’s in the bunkhouse.”

  Cora spotted Big Meg in the doorway of the Ladies, and pulled her scarf further up across her face. She felt a twinge of shame. Meg didn’t see her. “It’ll be just an hour’s run to the Point an’ back,” Lucien had explained, “but you’ll get the feel of it. There’s nothin’ on this earth like it.”

  His hand touched her shoulder. “Can’t find him anywheres. One of the boys thinks the run might’ve been cancelled.” She saw in his face the deep disappointment, the souring of the champagne’s sheen, and beneath it the germ of something black and combustible. “I’ll just check the back sidings. They may be out there waitin’ for us.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Cora said.

  “Okay, but wait on the platform,” he said quickly. “You can’t tell a tie from a T-bar out there.”

  She followed him outside and stood in the passenger area beside the main-line as Lucien headed across the half-acre of tracks normally visible to the south-east. Within seconds he was gone. The snow beat against her face like the frayed wings of winter-sparrows. She shivered but was not cold.

  Lucien reappeared, flushed. “I found it,” he puffed. “Six tracks over behind the car-man’s shed. She’s primed an’ ready to go.”

  Cora hesitated, her head tilted to one side. She seemed to be listening for some sound in the mute threshing about her – a warning perhaps, an all-clear, a starter’s gun – like a robin waiting for the ground to heave with the worm’s appetite.

  “Come on,” he said, no longer able to mask the desperation behind his excitement.

  Above them the clock hanging over the platform, if it had been unobscured, would have read ‘five minutes to seven’.

  Hand in hand they crossed the tracks they could not see.

  The locomotive stood rigid in its berth, huffing and fitfully sighing to itself. The snow sizzled on its hot metal and, dripping downward, froze instantly into stalactites – which lent an illusion of immobility, of rootedness, of fossilized behemoth. The great gulping steam-chambers, hissing inside it, said otherwise. Lucien pulled her into the cab with a gentleman’s grace and slid the flap closed behind them. They were alone.

  “Where’s Scrubby? An’ the crew?”

  His broad shoulders were turned towards the dials and levers in front of him. “Sleepin’ it off in the caboose, I reckon. We’ll do them a big favour, takin’ it down there on our own.”

  Any response she may have been contemplating was cut short by the shriek of the steam-whistle – two short blasts, repeated. “She’s steamed up an’ ready to go,” he shouted back. “All set?” He hopped over to a leather bench on the right, slid open the window, leaned out and with his left hand grasped a lever and slowly eased it towards him.

  Everything metallic around them shivered, creaked, strained against gravity. The creature lurched, skidded, lurched again. A tremor of motion hummed through their bones and shook its way back through the coal-tender, box-cars and caboose. Safe in this cab, surrounded by steel, Cora could sense the power of the released steam as it crashed into the cylinders like stunted thunder, and poured its dissipating energies into the pleasures of motion and speed. Lucien pointed to the stoker’s seat under the left-hand
window. She looked out in time to see several blotched shadows below her. They appeared to be waving. She waved back.

  I got her up to thirty,” he called across, peering at a smoky gauge an inch beneath his nose. “She was well-primed.”

  The only light was cast by two fixed lamps above the benches that shivered and threatened to jump ship with every jerk and skid of the locomotive over the drifted, erratic roadbed. The slitted firebox, near Cora’s side, glowed with radiant, welcoming heat, but cast over wall and ceiling scraps of fretting shadow that reminded her of moths caught in a coal-oil lamp.

  “Feels like we’re curvin’ to the left,” she said. “Shouldn’t we have veered right by now?”

  He slipped open his window a little ways, pushing his face into a white flail. “Yup, we would’ve,” he said, “if we was goin’ towards Point Edward.”

  Cora looked out her side. She was certain she could see a ragged horizon line bouncing just beyond the storm’s fury. “I see the bush,” she said. “We’re headin’ for London!”

  “We were, old sweetheart, until this very second!” As he spoke the cab jumped sideways, spilling Cora onto the stippled steel floor and pinning Lucien to his perch. The screech of iron rebelling against iron pierced the ear, stunning them both. Then as each of three box-cars and the caboose met the crossover switch behind them, they were struck again. The whole train tilted wildly to the right, yearning to roll over into the battened ditches beside it.

  Lucien’s powerful throttle-hand was under her. He helped her back to her bench, mouthing endearments and apologies, then starting to laugh uncontrollably. Without the least notion why, she joined him. Whatever direction the beast had chosen, it seemed perfectly content to travel on its own. Lucien’s lips closed her eyes. After a time, he drew back. They could hear again: the steady, imperturbable cadence of Pegasus en route to anywhere.

  “I don’t know why we got turned east,” he said. “We hit the main-line just past the bunkhouse. I figured we’d spend the night in London, but somebody left ‘number-three switch north’ where it was an’ now we’re aimed up the spur-line that don’t end till Woodston. Up in Huron County.”

  “Are they expectin’ us?”

  “Ain’t got much of a choice!” He was laughing and trying to holler over from his side where he was scrutinizing the steam-gauges. “There’s nothin’ between us an’ them an’ we sure ain’t gonna park out here tonight. In fact, we got a straight run in there. Oughta make it in about forty-five minutes.”

  “I know someone in Woodston,” Cora said. “I’m sure she’d let us stay overnight.”

  Lucien didn’t hear her. He had his window wide open. The blizzard poured into the cab and spent itself in miniature frenzies. “Hang on, sweetheart! Woodston, here we come, and if you don’t like it, we’ll shove somethin’ hot up your ante room!” He pushed his head outside and wailed: “Ya-hoooo!”

  The whistle skirled in unison with the engineer’s taunt. Cora was astonished to find the cord in her own grasp.

  “She’s losin’ pressure! You’ll have to take over while I stoke her.” He motioned Cora over to him. Carefully he took her hand and placed it on the throttle beside his. Then he eased away. “Hold her steady an’ keep an eye on the pressure gauge,” he said, starting to strip off his coat.

  Cora felt the lever seize her hand. It throbbed in her grip and she felt simultaneously through it the monumental trembling of the whole apparatus – furnace, boiler, cylinders, pistons, driver-wheels, the cold ignition of metal on metal, its hair-trigger touch.

  As Lucien flipped open the firebox door, a jet of flame shot across the cab, scalding the walls. He was bare to the waist. His torso gleamed with sweat and the wash of infra-red. She saw the crevasses between muscle and muscle, tendon and bone, as he leaned back towards the opened shute, scooped up a huge shovelful of coals as nimbly as if they were beans on a spoon, swivelled around, and in unbroken arc of motion and strength hurled them into the furnace. At first his pace was slow and methodically beautiful; soon it accelerated, gaining momentum and urgency. The firebox roared, then howled, then frothed into a white, wordless delirium. The stoker’s motions became blurred, no one part distinguishable from another. Suddenly the motion ceased and the stoker leaped sideways, kicked the door shut, and punched a knob just below the pressure gauge. A cloud of steam burst from each of the creature’s nostrils. They heard its death-scream and the hail of melted snow and ice crystals flung against the windows.

  “Can’t have her blowin’ on us, can we?” His cheeks were as scarlet as a berry harrowed in Hades, his grin was as wide as Beelzebub’s. “Open her up! Let’s make her fly!”

  Cora pulled back on the throttle. All the needles on all the gauges flinched.

  “Use these,” Lucien shouted.

  She slipped on the goggles, slid open her window and peered out, not letting go of the throttle, the microscopic value that somehow enflamed the steaming heartstrokes of this leviathan-on-a-toot. She had to see what her lover saw, what he felt, what he could forget to remember. She peered ahead.

  The storm had tapered off to intermittent squalls. At this moment, between sieges, she was able to see the glint of the piston-levers, the patina of exertion along the bevelled boiler plates, the thrust of the stack with its charred smoke blanched and flattened by the wind, the head-lamp pinpointing a thousand discrete, induplicate snowflakes for the quarter-second it took them to self-destruct and be replaced. She could see no sign of the track. Somewhere below and beyond must be a meridian, however thin or obscure, guiding them magnetically across a landscape blown featureless by the blizzard and past the reach of star or sextant.

  Lucien was at her side. His warmth enveloped her. She lay her cheek beside his along the ledge. She was aware of her eyes closing with his. She held him holding her. They took their breath together. Wherever they were pointed became their destination. In them the snow dazzled, deepened, blossomed with crystal flowers untouched by grief. Without moving, with not a whisper of expended passion, hurtling at seventy-miles-an-hour through a blinding snowstorm in an iron box alternately freezing and searing, dumb-founded by cacophony and inviolate silence – Lucien and Cora made patient, handwritten, memorial love.

  Lucien was talking. She had screamed a tacit, unending no, he had frozen his lips with her kiss, she had yanked the throttle-lever as far back as it could go until the struts and bolts of the beast rattled like coffin-bones in an earthquake. But no ground can hold a voice whose words must be spoken.

  “Her name was Mary. I met her through her sister, who was married to a friend of mine, a fireman like me on the Great Western. I was no longer young but rich, as I thought, an’ footloose. I let her charm me, an’ she did. But she said she knew from her sister’s experience how much hell was in store for the wife of an engineer. I hadn’t had a chance to ask, but she’d already said no. Of course, I kept seein’ her, an’ she was always unattached, so I begun to wonder; an’ besides, I was getting a bit tired of stokin’ an’ cattin’ around in Detroit an’ them places. So I told her if she’d marry me I’d settle down an’ become a respectable family man. When she doubted me, I quit the Great Western an’ joined the Grand Trunk, breakin’ all my old ties. For two years, though, I stayed on the road, but when Mary became pregnant, I gave in. I hired on as a clerk in the Yard Office. So that’s what I became at age thirty-five. I hated it as much as I loved my wife. It was like workin’ in a rabbit’s den, you couldn’t breathe, you sucked in the stink of everybody’s body, you had no place to run or feel free in when you needed to. But I did it, for five years I loved an’ hated. We had two beautiful children, a girl first, then a boy. But my salary wasn’t a third of what I made stokin’ on the road. We rented a house in the east and down near the rivermouth by the lake. It was a shanty-town, really, though we painted the place, an’ put a fence round it an’ planted ourselves a garden. But it was swampy down there and in the winter the snow piled up, thawed an’ froze, an’ the dampness went right th
rough the wood, you couldn’t keep enough paint or pine-tar on it to stop it from rottin’ under you. In the daytime the bugs devoured the vegetables in the heat, an’ the mosquitoes come out at night to torment us. I begged Mary to let me go back on the road. She said she would get a job as soon as the kids were older – she had a high school certificate. So I went off one mornin’ an’ hopped on a freight an’ never went back to that stinkin’ clerk’s den. I took only short day-runs. I lied every day to my wife an’ kids. I hadn’t been at this long, though, when my punishment was revealed to me in all its horror. My little girl complained of a headache after supper one day. It got worse by bedtime. By the middle of the night she was screaming in agony an’ bewilderment. When the fever hit the next day, we knew it was typhoid. We’d seen it in summers past. An’ shuddered, an’ prayed. Her little body was burnin’ an’ tremblin’ at the same time. The diarrhea weakened her terribly. Like a thief, I stole away, I took the money I’d secretly earned an’ went for a doctor. Not many would come down to our slum for any sort of money. But I found one who would; he told us it was typhoid fever, that only one of us should stay in the house as nurse, that we should boil our water, an’ so on. He gave us some laudanum for the pain an’ suggested we pray. He wasn’t gone an hour when my boy, barely a year old, was struck down with it. Mary and I did what we could. We knew full well only the strongest survived. We needed more medicine. Mary hadn’t slept in three nights but she said I must go back to work to get some money for the kids, an’ to keep my job which I could lose at any moment for being absent. So I did. I took a way-freight to Jackson’s Point. When I got back that night I was stopped about a block before my house by Mrs. Putnam, our neighbour. ‘Don’t go there,’ she said. ‘Come to my place. It’s best.’ But I tore away from her. I ran down that muddy street like a madman. I saw the crowd gathered ’round the spot where my house had been. There was nothin’ left but cinders an’ charred bits of wood an’ bone – who could tell? ‘Just as the sun was settin’,’ Mrs. Putnam said, ‘she come out the front door carryin’ a lantern an’ wavin’ it frantically all about. They’re dead! she hollered. They’re gone! An’ before we could stop her, she ran back inside, an’ seconds later smoke poured out the cracks in the sidin’ an’ then flames shot into the air, an’ we never heard a single sound come from inside the house. Not one.’ She died alone, my Mary, without leavin’ me a word. Everythin’ was gone, burned to ashes. Later I found out she’d loaned her sister the books I’d bought her over the years. They’re all that’s left. That was eight years ago. I been on the move ever since.”