Still, many days were spent at the little cottage Hap Withers so generously provided for them. Sometimes Hap could be persuaded to leave his own clan and join them for a Saturday supper. Eddie, normally very shy around males, took to him immediately. Hap whittled him a tiny flute out of willow and showed him how to tease a skidding, dizzy music out of it. The neighbourhood near the tracks was populated not only by Hap’s numerous grandchildren but by second and third generations of Shawyers, McCourts and McLeods. Gangs of ruffian boys combed the shadows at dusk with their signal cries, and bruited danger in the long afternoons of summer. One day when Eddie was three, they came for him, and she could no longer hold him back.
“We’re just gonna play hide-and-go-seek,” he begged her. “I won’t go near the water.”
From her place in the garden she scanned the flats and the blotches of bush, detecting the tell-tale signs of his running, the glee of his cries on the wind, the teasing crouch behind a shrub or sandbank, the soar of his little-boy voice “Home free!” against the derision and mockery everywhere about him. When he came home, he had a scrape and a bruise on his cheek. “I fell down chasing Jimmy Shawyer,” he lied. Though he never really became part of the residential gangs, he would gladly join them for games or swimming at the beach, seemingly content to take what the moment offered and always always making up his own mind about what he wished to do or how far he would be absorbed into their tribal rites. Oddly enough they could not cope with his cheerful outlook or his irrepressible goodwill. One day when one of the bullies challenged him by jerking his prize apple out of his hand and chomping into it, Eddie grabbed him so quickly by the wrists that the bully’s back was against a tree-trunk with his dignity collapsing before he could bleat out a protest. With the entire retinue watching (and Granny from behind her raspberry canes), Eddie glared at his tormentor, threatened him with a devastating knee, then slowly let a smile overtake his whole countenance, his laugh gently coaxing a guarded one out of the bully till they were both laughing and Eddie relaxed his grip and turned around to let the others know that it had all been in good fun, even the gesture of contempt that had initiated the coward’s game. He’s going to be all right, Granny thought. Whenever he can, he’ll choose happiness.
One of the accidental side-effects of Eddie’s playing with the neighbourhood children was his request, the summer before he entered grade one at Edward Street School, to be allowed to accompany Meg and Burt Granger to the Methodist Sunday School. He studied the indecision on her face with growing puzzlement, and the stalling tactic of “we’ll see” died on her tongue. “Course you can,” she said. She covered her guilt next day by showing excessive interest in his grooming, and when the Granger kids – all five of them – arrived to escort him up Michigan Ave., she said loudly enough for all to hear, “Put on your Sunday smile, Eddie”. She was genuinely surprised when he reported that he had enjoyed the experience, that they did a lot of singing and hand-clapping, and a funny old fellow came in near the end and played hymns on the piano and sang till his eyes almost popped out. He went back every Sunday after that. Mrs. Sanders gave him lessons to bring home and learn. Granny sat with him and taught him the verses, one by one. Do I laugh or cry? was her thought at the close of each Sabbath. Not once did Eddie ask her why she herself never went to church.
By that Christmas, though, Eddie was in school and reading well enough to commit the innocent homilies to memory on his own. He’s going to be a reader, too, she thought. Like his father. Then what?
2
The effects upon Point Edward of the new tunnel under the St. Clair River were not immediate. Indeed, people in the Point at first joined in the general bubbling of self-congratulation over having one of the century’s great engineering achievements. ‘Let the Yankees top that one’ was a common sentiment. The first cheer was echoed when the passenger service from London – despite the skeptics and doomsayers – was maintained right through to the Point Edward wharf. And even though the ferries, which had begun service before the first log-hut was built on the site, were silenced forever, the car-shops and round-house and the freight-sheds to service the steamships were left intact and thriving – in the last boom years before the depression of the early ’nineties.
But when some strangers arrived one morning in 1893 and began chipping away at the brick and stone of the grand station as if it were some sort of pagan temple whose gods had abandoned it to the conquerors, people began to talk – on corners, in the barbershop, over tea, in smoky taverns. Then when the wrecking crew came shortly thereafter and proceeded to demolish the round-house without a care to what they smashed or burnt brazenly in the fields for all to see – the talk turned to whispers, half-hearted jokes, jittery silences between sidelong glances. No one was consulted. Everyone and no one knew what blow would next be struck or from what quarter. Half the town either worked in or supplied the wants of the car-shops, where every damaged coach or hopper in western Ontario was hauled for rehabilitation. It was discovered that a small local car-shop had been constructed in Sarnia near the new round-house which was near the new tunnel. A few men were transferred there. No one panicked yet. Obstinately the transferees stayed put, taking the trolley to work every morning. They were lauded from three pulpits.
In the spring of 1894, Harmon Hayman, the milkman, and his wife, Billie, returned home from a weekend visit with relatives in Wyoming. Harmon was unhitching the horse by the barn at the very edge of Alexandra Avenue when he heard Billie shout from the raspberry patch, a sharp ‘yip’ as if she’d been stabbed with tynes. When he reached her side and was relieved to discover no blood or bruises, he looked across in the direction of his wife’s trembling forefinger and the sight that had stopped her speech for the first minute since they’d left Wyoming after dinner. Jeb Stuart’s house was gone, as was his chicken coop and tool-shed. Posts, fencing, everything that was portable was gone. The vegetable patch was stripped clean. On Friday when the Haymans had waved goodbye, everything had been in its customary place, though as Billie remarked later and often, the Missus had been a ‘mite teary-eyed’. The Haymans stood silently together and simply stared at an absence, a failure of permanency they could not accept. The Stuart house may have been the first of the Point Edward homes to be dismantled and removed overnight to the more favourable climes of Sarnia, but it was not the last. Between 1893 and 1901 the village population dwindled from well over two thousand to just seven hundred and eighty. Two of the churches closed for a year because they could not muster enough souls to pray for the town’s survival. Folks kept a wary watch on their neighbours, searching for early signs of faithlessness, as they would invigilate sadly the homes of the quarantined that carried in them pestilence enough to undo them all.
Entire streets disappeared, ragweed and wild carrot rioted on the wounds, and boys flew kites over the grassy graves in the autumn. It was a common sight during these years to see a gaggle of wagons, tumbrils and overpacked drays moving up St. Clair Street towards Sarnia, invariably through the mist of a spring morning with the bricks and mortar and salvageable boards of their lives stacked beside chesterfields and weeping children, with forlorn dogs – foolish in their faith – trailing in the dust behind. ‘Gotta go where the work is’ was the universal plea of exculpation. It was a sad truth no villager would care to deny.
The thriving hotel trade, the verve of boarding-house life, the cosmopolitan flux of sailor, bagman, bigwig, drummer, carny and capitalist – all followed the romance of the rails elsewhere. As one of The Queen’s philosophers put it: “We rolled to riches an’ glory on the wheels of progress, an’ now they just up an’ run over us.”
Eddie loved to sing, and though he remained shy whenever strangers were about, he announced that he was going to take part in the Methodist Christmas concert. He had agreed to be one of the three kings. “I get to give the gold,” he said, “and I get to sing ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are’.” Granny showed commendable enthusiasm – it would be good for him to get on st
age, get over just a little of his shyness, or more accurately, his natural reticence to put himself forward. “What are Kings of Orient?” he asked. “I don’t think it matters,” she said. “You’re gonna come?” he said, and there was no answer but “Yes.”
Thus it happened that Granny found herself in the basement hall of the Methodist Church on the twenty-third of December, 1899 to watch Eddie, a few weeks short of his eighth birthday, take his place on a makeshift stage, draped in ersatz gold lamé, with a cardboard crown on his temple and Mrs. Sanders’ jewel-box in his hands and the nervous smile of Herod’s Innocents on his beautiful, upturned face. Granny nodded politely to several of the older women she recognized, brushing aside their stares and resisting any of the droll rejoinders that echoed easily in her head. Mercifully, Eddie’s number – shared with two other regal personages whose soprano was suspiciously high – came early in the programme. Eddie’s voice was pure tone, like the A-note struck on the unvarnished oak of a xylophone. It sweetened all the air it sailed through. Granny was irked that several boorish women in front of her began mumbling before the last piano chord of the piece had faded.
For the remainder of the pageant Eddie stood at the back of the stage and poured his kingly gaze upon the manger and a host of other late arrivals. Only once did he allow his eye to catch hold of his Granny’s, satisfy itself of something important, and return stalwartly to his duties. Long before the pageant ended with a multi-sided rendition of ‘Joy to the World’, Granny had ceased observing the drama before her. The music itself began to make an impression upon her, in particular the robust yet nimble choreography of the piano accompaniment. Naturally she was drawn again and again to the instrument itself, and to the fingers that hopped and sprang and babied and ambushed the high-strung keys, till the ancient carols and roundelays shook the cornerstones and belfry-beams of the Lord’s edifice. Finally she dared to peek up at the eyes fathering such divine mayhem, and discovered them in search of her own.
One of the odd jobs Granny had taken on in order to supplement her diminished savings was sweeping out the Oddfellows’ Hall each Thursday morning after the regular meeting the evening before. Beside the Hall sat the ‘Coote shack’ as it was known around town. It had not always been so, because when Arthur Coote arrived here in 1888 with his bride, Helen, to take up his duties as organist and choir director for the Methodist Church, a grateful congregation had talked the village council into leasing them a town-lot beside the Oddfellows’ Hall, upon which they built with their own hands a pleasant cottage quite suited to a childless couple. Granny herself recalled the whitewashed siding, blue shutters and scrolled flower-boxes straining with geraniums. But when Helen Coote died suddenly around 1894, the place ‘went to pot’ by degrees. No more paint ever touched its outer walls, the shutters dangled, rotted, retreated into the weeds and stuck up through the winter snows like mangled thumbs. The geraniums had thinned, grown emaciate, sucked at the summer air, and suffocated just before the bottom fell out of the boxes and ragamuffin boys ripped the sides off them to make weapons with. But Arthur remained inside with his piano and his memorabilia. He continued to rouse congregations with unrehearsed Bach or Schubert, patiently assembled the wayward voices of his choir, and even found time to give piano lessons to a number of village prodigies. “I think your grandson may have musical talent,” he said to Granny at tea after the concert. “I’d be happy to have him come over. Free of charge, of course.” She didn’t mention anything to Eddie.
On New Year’s eve, the last day of the nineteenth century, an appropriately grand and progressive ball was held at the Oddfellows’ Hall. Four blocks away, seated in a wooden rocker reading the ‘Tale of the Sleeping Beauty’ to a drowsing Eddie, Granny could hear the brass and drums and wild shenanigans, and long into the night and the first dawn of the new age, her sleep was disturbed by the whoops and fireworks and the casual discharge of rusty carbines.
When she arrived in the morning to clean up, she was not dismayed by the mess left by the celebrants. Eddie was safe in the hands of one of the Granger girls, so the whole day lay before her. She surveyed the debris and wreckage around her, mentally plotting a path through it towards a semblance of order. Humming to herself, she started in to work.
She didn’t know exactly when but at some point the hum in her head began to match the tune on the piano coming faintly from afar. For a second she thought she might be imagining its coexistence, but when she stopped and arched an ear towards the high windows on the south side, the lilt of the Londonderry Air was unmistakable. It was coming from Arthur Coote’s shack. At the tea after the concert she remembered him saying, “They tell me I’m a very good teacher; I wouldn’t know about that, but I do get along well with children. You should come over some time and let me play for you”. He had glanced down to include Eddie in his invitation, but before he could blush and continue, he was spirited away by an anxious-looking Mrs. Sanders.
When Granny stopped to eat her bread and cheese at noon, she heard the piano start up again. The song was a strenuous marching-version of ‘John Brown’s Body’. She mouthed the words, and tapped her toe on the dance-floor.
Come over some time and let me play for you.
Now was as good a time as any.
52
Every Thursday afternoon at three o’clock Cora Burgher, the cleaning woman, left her job at the Oddfellows’ Hall and joined Mr. Arthur Coote, the Methodist choir director and church organist, for tea in his salon next door – every afternoon for two hours during the months of January through April. Tongues wagged without charity. On his sixty-fifth birthday Arthur Coote retired, and at the May-the-first dinner to honour his twelve years of faithful service, he delivered a touching valediction, concluding his remarks with the announcement of his engagement to “the lady who has been the subject of your most heartfelt concern these past months, dear Mrs. Burgher.” In the respectful silence that attended his sitting down, a teacup shrieked.
When Granny explained that she could not be married in the Methodist Church, Arthur said with a patient smile, “Well, then, how about the Anglican? I was raised C. of E. and didn’t terribly mind it.” When she quietly let him know that she meant no church of any kind, he paused just slightly, as if he’d lost his cue for a second, and said cheerily, “Then it will be the judge’s chambers for us, luv; just like my first time.”
Though she didn’t know him well then, she knew enough to realize how difficult a decision he had just made, for while he was no religious zealot, Arthur Coote had given many years of faithful service to his church, and he continued to be loyal to it – in spite of everything – until his death. Oddly enough, she felt even then that it was his own passionate commitment to certain ideals and principles which enabled him to understand so adroitly and without explanation her own position on the issue. At any rate he accepted her wishes as worthy of his own unquestioned support, and once he made up his mind, he was not one to glance back with a moment’s regret. Although he loved to regale her with tales of his legendary and shady past on the frontier, he was not one to dwell there. Those events, sad or comic, had been completed, lived-through, like the scenes in a play writing themselves so naturally they were now freed up to be re-enacted, shuffled, mocked, or adored – by the survivors – as objects of wonder. Often she found herself wondering what he dreamt about in his deep unhaunted sleep, or if he dreamt at all. “I certainly do dream,” he’d proclaim, feigning umbrage. “Why, last night I dreamt of sweet LuLu Sweet,” and then he’d wink his all-purpose wink.
With her and later on with Eddie, Arthur was lively and fully at ease, jubilantly talkative, and thoughtful, ever alert to the tones under and between their words. With strangers he was still diffident despite his years on the stage, and with those he knew casually – like his acquaintances in the Church and town – he was courtly and reserved. It was only when he got en rôle, as he was when she first saw him at the Christmas concert, that the hobgoblins and trolls and minor demons were allo
wed into the light, and only when there was enough music to animate and camouflage. The sparkle in his eye came from something so clear and aboriginal in his childhood, it was unquenchable. He reminded her of someone she’d known almost fifty years ago.
“Just because we’re gonna get ‘hitched’ in the judge’s broom closet doesn’t mean we can’t do this thing in style,” Arthur said. And he meant it.
On the first Saturday of June, as many of the labouring men traipsed home from the sheds and docks through the afternoon sun, and most of their women gathered on street corners or under the awnings of the shops on main street and all of the children roamed loose about the alleys and vacant lots – a buggy was observed conspicuously decamping from the livery behind the Queen’s Hotel and heading, without shame, up Michigan towards St. Clair, where it turned and in a sedate jog moved towards Sarnia. Everyone who looked, and there were few able to resist, recognized the vehicle at once. It was the butcher’s cart: actually a regular two-wheeled touring buggy of vintage descent with scuffed leather seats and applewood doors and a garish tin box improvised behind the passengers section just big enough to hold ‘on ice’ a morning’s delivery of steaks and roasts. Bobbin, the buckskin mare, was in her accustomed pace, a pertness in the arch of the mane and the carriage of the tail. Someone had tossed a sprig of lilac over her withers.
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