Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  When the sounds stopped ringing in her head, miraculously she was still walking. It was getting dark or misty, or both. She was in a sort of hollow, for though she could hear the lake-breeze high in the distant trees, she felt no wind at all on her face. The ground beneath her walking was resilient, kindly, sown with the tender grass found only on the graves of children. She was lost, her legs had gone numb, but she was not in the least afraid. She felt serenely at ease. At any moment of her choosing, she could lie down on one of those sandy mounds, close her eyes and sleep the longest, deepest, sunniest sleep of her life. The air around her trembled with invitation. There were voices in it but they spoke directly to the weariness of her bones; they carried the news of consolation. It’s time to lie down, she thought.

  A shadow flicked, off to her right. A bird, returned from its journey? A mourning dove? Something bright and shifting caught the last of the daylight and transformed it. It’s alive, she thought. Am I?

  Then a sound, the last quarter of a whimper. She forced her legs towards it, gritting with the pain. Don’t worry, she cried, I’m coming.

  The voice reassembled. The sun froze in the entanglement of a child’s hair: glinting and going out as it twisted in the grip of something perilous. It was a cry. A child’s cry. A little girl’s cry. The sun went blood-red. It jerked the blond tresses of the little, lost girl upward into a scarlet, lungless scream.

  “Mom-mee! Mom-mee! Mom-mee!”

  The child’s face caught fire. The features blurred and congealed. The hair flared like a halo and cindered. The lips alone remained to surround their one word, emptying it again and again into the empty air.

  Granny felt her heart burst. Her knees hit the sidewalk, then her elbows, then her chin. She was looking up. The sun grinned down at her. She read the faded letters of the Queen’s Hotel on a yellow brick wall. This is not Heaven, she thought, just before the pain blinded her.

  46

  1

  Granny Coote lay in her new house and listened to the warm wind stirring against the unexpected gables. She heard every errant sound that the house contrived to interrupt her sleep: the complaint of green lumber along the eaves, the slap of an ill-fitted shutter, the rattle of windows not yet settled into their glaze, the fluting of air across the chimney-pot, the exotic tick of the pendulum clock in this strange space. I must not be ungrateful, she told herself a dozen times a day. There was a time when this is what I wanted most, foolish as that notion might seem now. We all want a moorage of some kind; though the space it takes to launch us out of this world is not nearly so large nor so anchored as we would suppose. The day after Wilf Underhill, Sam Brighton, Limpy Jenkinson and the others had moved her furniture and belongings – the baggage of many decades – across the street to this house, she had begun to undo their patient work. They had put the table and chairs in the kitchen at the back with the queer gas-stove and ice-box; the chesterfield and piano went into the front room, Arthur’s bed and her cot into the bedroom at the back left, and then they carefully set up her Quebec heater near the tiny vestibule and next to the bay window overlooking the street. Arthur’s theatre trunk went into the bedroom. Out back was a neat woodshed with a privy off it so she would never have to brave the elements again. She regarded the electric lamps – donated by the Methodist Auxiliary – with a mixture of suspicion and wonder. But none of this could be. As soon as they were gone, she dragged the cot into the front room, marvelling at her frailty as she struggled to move it a few inches at a time. She set it up across from the heater. She managed to get the table and one chair out of the kitchen and into a spot near the cot. Perhaps when she had a chance to get a garden in, she would eat in the strange, closed kitchen and look out the window at the dense greenery. For now she felt she needed only this solitary room, surrounded by these few necessities and comforted by them. From here she could gaze westward, at a moment’s notice, through the bay-window where the empty rectangle stared blankly back at her from across the street, where the familiar side-hedges yet flourished, where the stems of tulips combed the rim of the sky at the edge of the marsh, where the arching hickory allowed its thick-gnarled limbs once again to fringe the breeze with its maidenhair green. “They’ll take the front hedges out but not the side ones, and of course they’ll leave the flowers as is for this year,” Sunny assured her. “The builder an’ his helpers’ll be comin’ in next week. You got a front-row seat.”

  She tried to get Arthur’s trunk into its proper place – she wished she’d just had the courage to tell them she wanted everything in this room, but she didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Besides, she thought, they think I’m queer enough as it is. By sitting on it and pushing off with her feet she managed to get the trunk as far as the doorway, where it wedged itself in quite permanently. Sunny arrived just as she was trying to lever it up with a stick of kindling.

  “I’ll do that for you,” he said. And did. After a cup of tea and a scone (Anglican Auxiliary), he said: “And if you want to go walkin’ again, you just let me or Purdie know. No need to go off by yourself.”

  And fall on your face, she added, in front of The Queen’s and suffer the double mortification of a bloody nose and having been rescued by Half-Hitch Hitchcock, who promptly assured the whole town that he had told her so but what can you do with doddering old ladies who don’t know enough to die when they have the chance.

  “The deed should be ready in two or three weeks,” Sunny said. “But you know lawyers, don’t you, Cora?”

  She did indeed.

  2

  Cora Burgher surprised the village in a number of ways when she returned a few days after Lucien’s death. Her coming back to live there was itself a surprise, considering what happened to her, what painful memories must have lain all about her. Second, she did not return to the Lane though the meagre room she rented again in old Hap Withers’ cottage was as close as you could get to the Lane without actually being a citizen of that nether-town. Third, she not only brought her new name with her but flaunted it all over the place, despite the fact that it had had only a few months itself to settle in. She seemed obsessed with having herself addressed as Mrs. Burgher or, worse, Mrs. Cora Burgher. When she wasn’t – even by the gang at The Queen’s who had known her best – she appeared not to hear or became merely distracted. But then she had suffered more than a body could be expected to bear – without the sustenance and solace of religion, poor thing. What surprised no one who bothered to notice was that she returned to her job at the Queen’s Hotel and to that itinerant society still regarded by the villages with disdain and raw envy. For a few months, then, Mrs. Cora Burgher was discussed litigiously, then taken for granted, then forgotten.

  Cora herself was so numbed by Lucien’s death that she recalled little of those early weeks back in the Point. She did now know why she was here, why she was even living at all, except that any decision not-to-be required more effort than merely going through some deadening ritual dredged up from the past and substituted for existence. Happy Withers found her wandering in front of The Queen’s and simply took her in again, as if she were an orphan dropped on his doorstep a second time. What else could he do? When she became coherent, he fetched her things from the St. Clair Inn and then took her down to Malloney. Within hours she was back at work.

  When Malloney or Gertie Flounder called her Lily or Mrs. Marshall, she flinched and said automatically in a low, thin voice: “I’m Cora Burgher, Mrs. Cora Burgher,” and kept repeating it till Malloney, bewildered as he always was face-to-face with any feeling he couldn’t count, would say “Yes, Mrs. Burgher,” startling the bench-warmers in the lobby. It took Gertie quite a while to say “It’s all right, Cora, we know.” Thus it was soon ‘Mrs. Cora Burgher’ almost everywhere. When some of the numbness turned to mere pain, to the slow singe of grief she recognized and welcomed, she carried that name in her heart like a gift, a legacy of their brief love. For a while it would be her reason for being.

  Gertie, of course, had been pr
omoted in her absence, so Cora was content to clean the lobby, beverage room, Malloney’s suite and the kitchen area out back. This meant more scrubbing on hands-and-knees, emptying spittoons, scraping up grease and crushed cigars, and scrubbing out the foul toilets near the bar. Gertie was the upstairs maid, making the beds and tidying up the half-dozen suites on the second and third floor. When there was extra scrubbing to be done – clogged fireplaces, debauched carpets and duvets – Cora was called upstairs to assist. She didn’t seem to mind. She arrived shortly after seven, had a bit of breakfast with the cook, and worked until six or seven in the evening, when she would take a cold supper and trudge the single block back to Hap’s cottage.

  At first Cora preferred to work alone in the back corners of the place, but gradually she came to like those moments when she could slip into the lobby – a large front room really with a double door and scenic window overlooking the flats leading to the River and the Lake – and quietly dust or empty the brass ashtrays while the commerce of a busy railway village passed before her. The three suites on the third floor were still advertised as elegant and often played host to smartly attired executives, officious politicians or blustering entrepreneurs – all of whom were in themselves worth the observing and who provided fodder for days of follow-up analysis and commentary by those seated on the sidelines. For the lobby, with its hospitable stove, drew to its domain an unchanging cast of locals: a half-dozen or so elderly denizens who spent half the day in the barbershop up the street and the other on these benches (and the two stools given to those with seniority). They called themselves the Smokehouse Gang, comprised of whey-faced pensioners, discarded elderly uncles and a pair of defrocked patriarchs – all from the respectable part of town and all with much to say about the decline and fall of the human race. Some of them Cora knew from earlier days – when they were unwrinkled and God-fearing – Pudge Grogan, Tubby Trout, Ballroom Baker. Others she knew only by their trade names: Wart, Dicer, Shotgun. Through some pact worked out years ago, it seemed, they were never to arrive before two o’clock nor stay later than five-thirty. And though they would always be certain to arrive one at a time to establish their independent worth, the benches were full by three-fifteen and deserted by five-forty. Soon Cora was organizing her chores so that the lobby required her presence in the late afternoon. Malloney seemed relieved, though he never said anything to Cora about that night in his room and made no overture that might be misconstrued as friendship.

  More than a year passed. If the great world around her were moving, Cora didn’t notice.

  “Tunnel don’t matter a fig’s tit,” opined the Wart. “Railroad ain’t gonna move the shops an’ sheds outta here till the day before doomsday.”

  “How d’ya figure it?” Shotgun said, watching for an opening.

  “They still own half of this here town, that’s why. A crow don’t shit in its own nest.”

  “Just in everybody else’s,” Shotgun said and sat back to bask in the stringy laughter of his easily amused colleagues.

  “Never get her built anyways,” said Pudge Grogan, who used to build things.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Gravity, that’s why. Never heard of Newt’s first law of gravitations?”

  Before the next riposte could be delivered, all eyes turned in silent appraisal upon two figures just coming through the double-doors. Both were dressed in expensive business suits but the young one – a bright-looking chap with a scrubbed face and soft eyes – was supporting almost the full weight of the older man, who stumbled on the doorjamb, uttered a ghastly cough and fell to his knees. Duckface Malloney stood at his ledger behind the desk-counter, grimaced, but did not look up. None of the onlookers made a move or sound. The young man reached down and as gently as he could raised the older one to his feet. “He had one too many at the meeting,” the fellow said. A dozen heads nodded we know. “I’ll need some help getting him up to his room.”

  “Elmer, get out here!” Malloney shouted without looking up, and moments later a skinny lad appeared from the barroom and helped gather the drunk into a manageable lump to be carried upstairs.

  Cora came in just in time to hear them clumping onto the second-floor landing. Someone up there let out an elongated retching noise, Elmer cursed, and the clumping resumed. Cora went for her mop and pail.

  Over the course of the winter, it became evident that there was one spot she was never asked to clean – the spacious bed-sitter on the northwest corner of the third floor, the one with the view of both river and lake. When she asked Gertie about it, all she got was a blush and a forefinger laid against the lip. Gertie herself, as far as Cora could tell, seemed to go in there intermittently. Finally she confided: “He don’t go out much, an’ till he does, I got orders to stay outta there.” No more was said on the subject.

  One day early in July Gertie was off sick and Cora was told to do the third-floor rooms. “Stay away from 3A though,” Duckface said and Cora detected more fatherly admonition than command in his voice. When she searched his face for more, he swung abruptly away. It was stifling up there, even in the morning with the hall windows wide open and a hot breeze wafting the curtains. When she had finished the other two suites, Cora came down the hall to do the water-closet. As she passed the mysterious bed-sitter, she thought she heard a groan, as if someone were in extreme pain. She eased over to the heavy door and put her ear against it. Nothing. She was about to leave when it came again, a breathy groan as if someone were being punched, followed a half-second later by the tight whine of a second voice, descant and linked to the pain of the other. Again: in a staggered cadence and vocal accompaniment which she had heard inadvertently many times before from these rooms around her – unmistakably sexual. As she headed back towards the stairway, wondering only vaguely who the lovers might be, she was pursued by the coupled climactic cry, and there was something alien in it, chilled and yearning, not even close to pleasure. She shivered and descended.

  Gertie returned the next day and Cora forgot about everything except surviving in the swelter of that summer. She took to walking down to the River in the cool of the mornings and evenings, catching the wind off the water before the parched fields heated it up for distribution over the village. Malloney suggested that she and Gertie lie down in one of the empty rooms during the blaze of the afternoons and finish up their chores after supper. So it was that Cora happened to be scrubbing out the pantry one evening about seven o’clock when she heard a commotion in the lobby. She put her pail down, got up and walked along the hall in the direction of the noise, which now became more clearly defined: men’s voices raised in anger and the thump of bony flesh on wood. She hurried into the front room.

  First of all she was surprised to see four or five of the Smokehouse gang seated in place; then she remembered that they too had taken to coming in after the heat – with Malloney’s grudging permission. The Wart, Shotgun, Dicer and several others were all staring towards the stairs near Malloney’s desk. Their eyes were popping as if they’d all just inherited the same goiter. Cora stepped further into the lobby until she could see the stairway itself. She went no further.

  Malloney, his duckface squeezed horribly inward in rage, had a huge hand on the collar of a man whom he was, it appeared, dragging down the stairs and across the carpet towards the door. The man was resisting by flailing his arms and digging his black leather oxfords into the rug. His bulk, which was considerable, was entirely in Malloney’s fierce grip.

  “Get on your feet you fat-assed bum an’ haul yourself outta here,” Malloney shouted into his ear.

  The victim’s gray hair was askew, covering a good portion of his face, but Cora could see the flush of humiliation and amazement there. His arms flopped uselessly, girlishly, about him, as if he felt he ought somehow to be striking out though all the time knowing it was hopeless.

  “You’re lucky I don’t call the constables to come down here an’ kick the livin’ shit outta you!” Duckface opened his fist and the man
dropped to the floor. The crack of his elbows shot through the room like a whiskey-glass on a bar-top. The Smokehousers flinched en masse, their mouths agape, salivating.

  Cora watched the man. He rubbed at the smudges on his worsted trousers, got himself seated upright, then peered out to see where he was, where the next attack might come from.

  “Get on your feet, you drunken deadbeat. You got thirty seconds to haul your ass outta here.” For the first time Malloney seemed aware that he was not alone. He whirled towards the benches, his beady eyes defiant and daring. He got no challenge. The old men rocked back onto their seats, appalled and thrilled. Their collective rheumy-eye swept the room with the instincts of a gunsight. Malloney did not see Cora.

  The man was now up to a crouching position. The sweaty hair had fallen away from his eyes. He had the look of a pig the second after the sledge hits – when no regret will do. She could see him desperately trying to garner some fury, some outrage, some word of reprisal. Nothing could penetrate his amazement.

  With no warning, Malloney kicked out his foot and caught him in the lower back. Stupidly, he seemed to teeter towards uprightness, pause at the suddenness of his ascent, and then he canted forward onto his face. For the first time he let out a cry, high-pitched, a little boy’s stunned by undeserved pain. When he rolled over onto one side, blood spurted from his smashed nose.

  Malloney, who had his foot raised for another blow, froze. The man whimpered, caught sight of the onlookers and said in a whisper, “Please help me.”