Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  On the third Saturday in October the pestilence reached right into the heart of the village. Within an hour everyone who could listen heard the news that young Dr. Simon had succumbed to the disease he had helped so many to survive. The funeral was held on a Sunday, an unprecedented event. The cortege included most of those who could still walk, had already recovered, or were brave enough to venture out at any cost. The Methodist bell tolled for an hour. The other two bells had been struck dumb by the plague itself.

  Granny did not attend the graveside ceremony. She was busy nursing Rose Underhill through the critical period of her delirium.

  As she watched young Rose sweat out her fever, she felt the desperate need for speech. She had begun to realize that it was the fear – the unmasked, tongueless, viral fear of death, that tic under the heart’s shadow – that was most hazardous, especially at the point just after the delirium panicked and fled, and the victim gazed into a mirror or a loved one’s anguish and saw reflected there the bloated flesh, the charred skin, the frog’s-stare that they had become – then was the danger most severe. Then came the lapse into the lethargy and ache of the final stage, out of which only the strongest climbed. Afterwards Sunny told her it was because she was unable to speak that so many people claimed she had saved their lives – people who did not even know who she was or whence she had come.

  More recently he had told her that many victims still swore she had appeared to them out of nowhere like an apparition. Her silence served only to convince them even more of her incorporeal origins. Whereas they normally looked up into faces full of grief or shock or morbid foreshadowing, they were able in her case to fix on a face that was impassive and yet remotely beneficient with not a hint of fear for itself or the stricken one. With her as miraculous visitant, they had no call for a brave front nor would their cowardice, their pleas for mercy or a warm death, their last-second repentances – none of these be necessary or expedient. Indeed, she would respond to nothing but the courage they needed for the effort at hand – to survive or bear it out to whatever end this spirit from the earth’s pantheon had foreordained but would not give away by nod or wink. Sunny had convinced himself that all this was true, that it really happened that way.

  Sitting in Rose’s bedroom, not knowing then that Wilf would outlast his wounds and return here to give her a son, Granny simply wished she could once again speak to her friend with a woman’s compassion: once she had begun, the words would surely fall into place. Instead, she held Rose’s hand like the others, and winced at the fever’s tremor. I’m as helpless as she is, was her thought. After all these years, I still know nothing.

  Granny had watched four people die – close up, and each different. Young David had opened his brave eyes, stretched out a hand to the comforting one offered him, and, released from his pain, walked towards the warm sunshine he sensed in the valley just over the hill. Mrs. Thibeault, who hadn’t missed a Sunday school class in thirty years, sang hymns in her delirium, refused to believe her nurse wasn’t a seraphic envoy, and shut her ears to her husband’s cries of rage and despair in the adjoining room. Moments before the light dimmed in her eyes, though, she’d looked straight at Granny and said, “Cora, I’m sorry for what I done to you; can you forgive me?” A few minutes later she whispered, “Will you come with me? I’m scared of goin’ alone.”

  Gladys Monk, a preacher’s daughter, stared at her with the same unspoken questions any thoroughgoing pagan might have raised: Why me with three children and a one-legged unemployable husband? Why Dr. Simon, a saint? Why not you, withered and without speech, feeding on misery, without faith? Granny wiped her brow tenderly and trusted that Gladys’ god was strong enough and forgiving enough to absorb the curses these wretched hypocrites intended for the heathen and the lost. When Gladys died, Granny closed her eyes as quickly as she could. “She looks so peaceful,” Herb said, hobbling over to her.

  In the last shack on the Lane, just before the dunes, Granny found the Wollochuk brothers, come here from one of the innumerable pogroms of Europe to work at the new foundry. They spoke little English. Both were down with the flu. The youngest was in the last stage, but some colour had returned to his cheeks and there was a glint of expectation, of astonishment, in the general glaze of his eyes. His brother, a year or so older, strapping and exuberant only a week ago, lay on the dirt floor, burning with fever. Alien syllables spurted from his lips in a frenzy, wild and sing-song and manic – like a holy-roller speaking in tongues with the devil half-a-note behind him. At the height of this babble, everything stopped. He lay ominously still, the death-rattle beginning to leak up his throat. Granny stood horrified, unable to believe such a powerful man would not make it out of the second stage. Afterward the recovered brother said to her, “Yevi die with the Black Death.” His own recovery was deemed a miracle. It had to be.

  “The plagues that followed a war,” Cap said, “were not unlike the year-long sieges of an enemy castle in the late Middle Ages. The shells or missiles or fireballs or arrows fell at random in no fixed sequence. People died under them regardless of the precautions they took, the prayers they incanted, or their own self-evident worthiness. In such cases over a prolonged period of time, the random marauding of Master Death often cause the victims to blame themselves and prompt the survivors to look for new configurations of the heavens or new canons of blessedness to explain their own good fortune. A plague is a devilishly unsettling affair.”

  Rose Underhill got well. Flora searched in the garden for her brother. The bells tolled twelve times in all during that month. Five of the souls were Anglican.

  Granny returned to the sanctuary of Arthur’s shack. But not before she overheard, on her final trip to the Church kitchen, this one-sided ‘conversation’ between the Reverend Stokes and several senior churchwomen.

  “She may be a bit queer – who isn’t at her age – but I tell you, ladies, she’s a candidate for sainthood, if you’ll pardon the expression. You saw the way she worked throughout this dreadful month. A hundred times she risked her own life, going right into the dens of disease where no one else but dear Dr. Simon would venture. It was as if she knew that god Himself had chosen her for this mission of mercy and would offer her all the protection she needed. Rarely have I seen such an example of God’s love and the spirit of Christianity ‘bodied forth’ in the actions of a single parishioner. My own feeling is that the dear soul, even though she’s not attended service these many years, decided that during the few months remaining before her own imminent entry into paradise, she would bear witness in a way that would atone for a lifetime of neglect or perhaps even rejection. We must find a way of honouring such valour, such selflessness, such preeminent charity.”

  Safe in her own kitchen, Granny curled her hands around a cup of tea and said softly into the glow behind the stove: “I’m sorry, Arthur. I’m still here. You’ll have to wait a little while yet.”

  With more than three-hundred-and-fifty thousand German troops incapacitated by the Spanish influenza that had already killed more than twenty million people world-wide, a halt was called to the mutual slaughter in Europe. On November 11, shortly after noon, Granny heard the bells ringing out the news.

  2

  Across the street a battered, lime-encrusted pick-up farted and coughed to a standstill in front of the vacant lot. A middle-aged fellow, swarthy and lithe, jumped from the open cab and, hands on hips, surveyed the site for the monument. Out of the passenger’s seat hopped a very old man, who scuttled over to the younger man’s side. They were both smiling.

  The stonemasons, come at last.

  51

  1

  The hardest thing Cora had ever done in her fifty-some years on this earth was to start walking up the Lane a few doors in order to tell Peg Granger that she couldn’t keep the baby, she’d have to give him up. Peg had been looking after him while Cora nursed Bradley; she had not set eyes on the thin, quaking thing since. Ten years ago any decision not to accept the responsibility of re
aring an orphaned creature – especially one with her own blood in its veins – would have been unthinkable. Those ten intervening years, then, had brought her to this pass: where, for two nights following Bradley’s interment in the Point Edward cemetery (not many yards from Cap’s resting place), she had lain awake rehearsing the speech she would deliver to Peg explaining why the child ought to be placed in the Sarnia orphanage. That Peg herself might offer to raise it with her own large brood – two of them almost grown – had not figured into her stream of excuses and pleas. I am old, she had thought, not necessarily in years but in experience, in the expenditure of human feeling. After all there was only so much pity or remorse or hurt, only so many tiny jolts of joy or vacant acres of grieving loss that any one set of flesh-and-bones could be expected to endure. Something had to be kept in reserve: for oneself, for the last days. It took energy to die, as Bradley had just shown her, and reserves of feeling. With Cap, she had known this from the moment she had interceded to prolong his life. There was to be no redemption for either of them, but at their age and in their circumstance something more vital and prized: a rich living-through of select hours, one by one by one. That she was there in his room to shepherd him towards death and towards some version of dying he could accept as appropriate, was never in question. But it had been only towards the end that she had come to the realization that Cap himself began to understand how much it was she who needed him. And when he died, she did not feel the stabbing sense of loss and dismemberment that followed the other deaths small and large, expected and sudden. She missed him, she would have to reorient her remaining days to exclude their daily collaborations, but Cap’s voice persisted inside her – not as a lapsing memory or object of endearment (as the others were, still) but as part of her own speech and the thoughts it shaped – a live, thrashing verb whose argument would not be quelled, nor patronized by the simple affection with which the dead are decorated. You will never be anybody’s memory, she said. Not like Brad, she thought sadly, resurrected, for what? To die again? To let me play out once again the mockeries of nurse and angel?

  But a child, six-months old, who deserved to grow and breathe the wide air and become something in a world partly of his own making – that was asking more than she was capable of giving. That the dark gods were heartless she had known since she was eight or nine, and ever since had gathered evidence for the case against them. That they were capable of such a cruel jest as this, that their laughter was a joker’s guffaw –she was now certain. In her own view, she was a tired, worn-out, benumbed creature, disenfranchised of the earth’s aboriginal blessings. She desired now only the small comfort of a quiet, brief old-age, a little time to dream backwards, to reacquaint herself with the shy deities of woodland and brook. Then, out of the jester’s joke-book – or the world’s will as Cap might say – presto: the return of the prodigal son, dead twice already, and the babe, the boy – Eddie. How can I play the mother again? she thought in a panic. My fingers are arthritic, the skin droops from my cheeks, I’ve lost a tooth, my breasts are withered pods, I am a parody of motherhood, I haven’t smiled with any semblance of innocence in ten years, the little tad will shriek when he sees me, as he did the first night in his fever. And what if I should dredge up, somewhere, some facsimile of mother’s love, some fissure of untapped affection from which to nurture that miniature being – what then? I might die when he’s four or eight or twelve, when he’s still becoming and mercifully dependent – where will be he then? Who would care for him enough to embrace his orphaned heart? I am alone. I have no one. I rent two rooms in an old man’s house. I have nothing to give but the derelict self. And what if some perverse miracle should occur and we both survive? When he’s twenty and a man, I will be over seventy years – a creaking, babbling buffoon of a woman with cataracts and a weak bladder and the temper of a nanny-goat. It can’t be done, she concluded. It would defy reason and nature. It was just the sort of misguided world-desire that Cap’s all-seeing Will found to be as pathetic as it was common.

  So when she had left her place that bright morning in October, she had irrevocably decided to have Peg carry the babe straight to the orphanage. She wouldn’t even ask to see it. But in the few minutes it took her to reach the tracks and cross them, she changed her mind. She decided to take Eddie back with her. Reasons were never enough. Don’t you dare laugh, Cap Dowling, she said, swinging her arms vigorously to work out the kinks.

  “He’s an angel,” Peg Granger said. “Good as gold; you won’t ever be sorry for keepin’ him.”

  Cora had steeled herself against the worst: nights of fretful crying, daytime tantrums, the numb suffering under the fever of measles, chicken-pox, mumps, whooping cough or worse. She had seen it all, survived and not survived, and if she must do it again, she’d take the bit as far forward in her teeth as she could and smile through the grimace. Eddie soon let her down. He was a joy, a child with happiness and good humour born in him. He slept right through most nights, and the few occasions when the colic struck he needed only to feel her arms around him and the rhythm of the rocker to be soothed again. And just before he’d drift back to sleep, without fail he would grasp her by one of her thumbs and squeeze it. When he did get the measles, at two, he whimpered with the pain in his sunless room till she thought she’d go mad with her own, but the moment the fever subsided he cast the pale, blue gratitude of his eyes upon her and begged for a story. Even then he never took advantage of an illness, as most children quite naturally do. Whenever he complained, Cora was certain he was hurting somewhere. Whenever he had a choice, he chose joy.

  Where did such feeling originate? she often wondered. I loved all my own children as much, doted on them more than I do Eddie because I was then young and vigorous and foolhardy. During the first winter she left him on his own more than she should have – when the arthritis or the black-mood would come upon her and leave her frozen to the bed for hours on end while the fire took its chill from the room. Once in February when he was starting to crawl everywhere and she lay in a daze dreaming of snow and fiery locomotion, she was brought back from the brink of something wondrous and lethal by a tug on her left thumb. She opened her eyes. Eddie was pulling himself upright so that his face was parallel with hers. He grinned in delight at his triumph and her sharing of it. He pushed his nose against her stiff cheek and made his ‘choo-choo’ sound, and laughed. She let him pretend he was drawing her upright by the thumbs out of her delirium.

  Hap Withers, now over seventy, went up to the Lane to live with his son and family. He told Cora she could have all four rooms of the cottage if she wanted, for a dollar a year. All he needed to know was that the couch in his old room would be available on those few occasions when he felt like “coming home for a spell”. He never did, and that room became Eddie’s when he was ready for it.

  When the decline of the village began in earnest, Cora found herself working only two days a week at The Queen’s. She bundled Eddie up, tucked him in a wicker basket and hauled him on a sled down there with her, where the staff did their best to disrupt his even disposition. With her savings over the years she really didn’t need to work full-time, but she found it helped to get out and around and see familiar faces and places, even though many of them jarred old griefs from their manageable grooves. By spring, Eddie was beginning to toddle and say his first words, and she could see that he deserved better than to be cooped up day and night with an old crone. On sunny days while she coaxed her vegetable patch into reviving, she tied Eddie onto a long rope so he could roam a bit and get the feel of what walking would be like when it was unfettered. Still, he had little company except the maids at The Queen’s. She watched his eyes perk up at the animal calls of the urchin boys back in the dunes.

  So she went out and arranged to do some housecleaning for Elizabeth Sanders, the schoolteacher and, incidentally, helped mind her slightly retarded son, Sammy (Slowboat to the kids). She was recommended in turn to Maggie Hare, the wife of the manager of the freight-sheds.
From time to time she worked also for Agnes Farrow and Mrs. Thibeault, scrubbing or ironing or helping with a meal on special family occasions. “She’s quick and quiet,” Mrs. Thibeault said all over town, “and what’s more, she keeps her mouth shut afterwards. For some queer reason, the kids go for her.”

  Eddie was brought along – on a sled in winter, a wagon in summer – and spent much of his second year of life sitting on a pile of laundry, playing second or third fiddle to the children of the household, watching Cora as she watched him, and in general enjoying the constant shift of scene and character. His cheerfulness was so infectious that it often obstructed the premeditated whining of the little brats unofficially abandoned to her care. If Sammy lunged after a certain toy of his, Eddie would look hurt for a fraction of a second, weigh the effects of a pathetic glance at Cora, then pick up a less-prized object and before long begin to play happily with it. Sammy, who was a year older than Eddie but spoke with a slurred stutter, soon started to call her ‘Gran-nee’, despite repeated warnings from his mother. When Eddie’s words began to arrive – fresh and tumbling over each other – the one he chose for her was Granny. And Granny she became, even at The Queen’s among the staff and old-timers in the lobby, several of whom remembered most of the names she had accepted as her own in the long years past.

  Granny in turn decided to give Lucien’s name to young Eddie. Eddie Burgher. Why not? she thought. I have been Mrs. Cora Burgher now for eight years. It is the name I will take to my grave. All she ever told Eddie about his real parents was that his mother died having him in Toronto (which was almost the truth) and that his father had been an engineer on the Grand Trunk, whose locomotives still roared by their back window several times a day. “When you’re grown up, I’ll tell you all I know about them,” she promised him after he’d been teased about it in the schoolyard. And, trusting her with a naive faith which afterwards led her to weep alone in her room, Eddie never once raised the subject again.