Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  “I have read this epicurean saga with great care and much expense of time and spirit, not to speak of sweat. About the monumental text itself I can find nothing to say, which in its own way might be the highest form of perverse praise possible in these dreadful pedestrian days. Nonetheless, I do have some personal advice for you which I hope you will take to heart.”

  “It was suddenly still and silent; the air was perfumed with belladonna as the room readied itself for a proclamation from the messiah of the Beautiful. “My suggestion is that you should concern yourself with writing about...bricks. A word, wouldn’t you agree, that has a certain granite ring about it, that conjures up – if that isn’t too cogent a phrase – wonderfully rustic images. And think of the bucolic possibilities for rhyme: sticks, ricks, picks, ticks, hicks, not to mention the myriad cricks which I am assured decorate your unlettered landscape in America.”

  “Naturally there was appreciative laughter, and for a moment, despite the terror just below my throat, even I was willing to believe for a few seconds that these remarks were just a preliminary but necessary part to the game. But soon Wilde began quizzing Robbie Ross about life as it was presently lived in the backwoods of Ontario, tossing severe glances in the direction of Bosie – now slumped in a comatose embrace with a startled young man who professed to be a playwright but was at the moment beginning to doubt the authenticity of his muse. The shadows deepened and exposed. The conversations continued, desultory and fragmenting. I was numb, beyond panic. I closed my eyes. Wilde’s voice carried on through its own fatigue. He was arguing with Whistler in a whining, strident tone that said ‘we’ve been over this ground before, why are we doing it again, why can’t we let the damn thing lie, what is left to be gained – not pride or point or jot of mother wit, we are tangled in the wearisome toil of language itself’. In rumpled corners I heard the slithering contact of septic flesh.”

  “Somehow I managed to reach over and retrieve my manuscript – the labour of eight years – and held it in my hands as if I were gazing at my own corpse not quite confined. Wilde’s hand was on my shoulder. He swung his tall, sad face down to mine, and said for my ears only in the voice he might have used when talking to himself in a dream, ‘Go home, lad. Your people are merely crazy; here they all claim to be sane. If you must grow roses for the world’s consumption, start by digging in your own shit.’ For a moment no hint of mockery creased his gaze. Then as if he sensed he might have been overheard and realized how much might have been revealed under the mask, he flicked open the high-speed shutter of his eyes just as a purpled lip pursed around the barb of his blackened tooth: ‘I speak metaphorically of course,’ he said with a fatigued glance at the revived Bosie.”

  “Somehow I found the courage to say goodbye to Paul Chambers, whose devotion to a cause and selfless loyalty to his friend’s was a galling contrast to my own wasted existence. There was no one I had not let down. Everyone who had dared to love me I allowed to suffer with callous indifference as I pursued some demon disguised as an angel. He pressed some money on me and saw me off at the quayside. He said tearfully that he himself could never go home; I told him I had no other choice. When Landsend was no longer visible and I had not yet taken my first drink, I walked out onto the stern-deck and sitting on a canvas stool I opened the folder containing my epic to Eternal Beauty. There was a heartening breeze from the west, and one by one I lifted up each of those thousand misbegotten pages and let them blow into the wayward swells where they hung for a moment like swan’s feathers before melting into the universality of the sea. I did not weep for a single page.”

  “When I finally got off the train in Toronto, after a typically rough March crossing, I was too sick to take another drink. I staggered into the station and fell onto a bench, trying to breathe. With the few dollars remaining, I planned to buy a ticket on the Grand Trunk express for Point Edward. Above me a calendar, with a fresh page turned, told me it was April1, 1891. My birthday. I was twenty-seven years old.”

  “A cabbie came over when he heard me coughing, and asked if there was any place in the city he could take me. I started to tell him I was going on to Lambton County when I was wracked by a coughing spell that left me dizzy and helpless. I could hardly hang on to his arm as he lifted me into the coach. I whispered an address to him, the only one I could remember. When we came to the wholesaler’s on King Street, the old fellow kindly went upstairs to see if anyone there still knew me. When he returned, Sarah Crawford was running ahead of him.”

  “Isabella had died four years before but Sarah had stayed on, living with a succession of distant cousins eager to try out the big city. Her beauty had deepened, and sick as I was, I was terrified by those eyes where I saw undiminished the love she had long ago squandered on some evanescent ideal. However, I was too weak to make any protests as she took me in that weekend, cared for me, talked to me, veiled whatever disenchantment she must have felt, and finally got me into a profound, restorative sleep. By Sunday afternoon I was sitting up, taking soup and eager for the taste of news, some sign that the world had kept going in spite of my personal apostasy. Of course, nothing I thought or felt or said during those hours made any real sense – I was a man benumbed, hollowed out, incapable of coherent speech. That Sarah was ready to bless it with comprehension was a miracle I only dimly realized the danger of. Some thread of decency, voiceless but pressing, was telling me I must escape before it was too late, that I had no right to put another life at risk. The last thing a condemned man wants is salvation when he’s already resigned himself to something less painful. But sometime later in the evening I felt her warmth unbending beside me; her flesh, never ample, descended like a comforter over my everywhere-aching; her breath, her murmuring, her cry of completion spun transcendent through my desperate dreaming. Before I woke to regret her absence, I dreamt that Isabella was across the room from me, seated in her straight-backed chair, her hands steadfast in their clasp against reality, the eyes in quest of the myths locked in the landscape’s obscure angularity, the courage-to-be and of being-in-verse still shining out of the unshadowed face not yet ready to acknowledge the stopped heart. Even then I knew, as I did later when I read her poems again, that she had always been right. So had Wilde.”

  “I left next morning while Sarah was at work, leaving her a jumbled excuse of a letter. I still had some of Paul’s money left, but I never got to the station. I was hale enough to reach The Tankard, the old haunt, and promptly got drunk with two journalists I recalled having despised. I remained drunk for a year. I was a beggar, a skid-row bum. I had hit bottom.”

  “I knew that Sarah would try to find me, so I arranged for my ‘pals’ to intercept her and tell her that I had gone home, and when I was recovered would return to Toronto. Under no circumstances was she to contact me first. With that good deed completed, I could settle down to destroying myself in earnest.”

  “It was August of this year – sixteen months later – when I woke up in a hospital and lay there helplessly while doctors and nurses forcibly revived me. I’d had my third bout of the D.T.’s, and the next one, the doctor reassured me, would be the last. Penniless, dried out and looking fifty years old, I tottered out into the midsummer heat of downtown Toronto. Sarah was waiting at the gate. Someone had been suborned. She too looked much older, much wearier. I was unable to offer resistance anyway, and allowed myself to be escorted home. Eddie was waiting for me. My son. Seven months old. Whole. He smiled at me as if it were the natural thing to do to your enemy.”

  “It was hard but I didn’t take another drink. I knew full well that I couldn’t build another life for myself. There was nothing left. But I thought I could perhaps borrow whatever of me remained in Sarah and the boy, and hang on as long as I could. I owed the world something. As soon as I was better, I planned to bring Sarah and Eddie here for a while. At long last I realized what I could never admit all those years, whether I was up or down: that it was you I must see – not to reconcile or expiate, but merely to release.
Though less merciful, love is more binding than death.”

  “Suddenly a few weeks ago, I began writing poems, scraps of verse, lines only but powerful ones, expunging ones, untranslatable, with images so stark they seemed to have been drawn with the ink of dreams. Every one of them was about Sarah. I finished only one. It’s in my satchel; I want you to have it. It’s not much, but it’s all that’s left of me. I read it to Sarah in the evening before she died.”

  3

  Granny woke up with the sun on her back, streaming through the kitchen window and the open doorway behind her. Stiffly she rose and went in to put the kettle on. She fidgeted with the new-fangled gas range until it popped into flame. Well, well, she thought, that wasn’t too difficult, was it? Maybe I’ll even get used to it.

  At least you came home, Brad. That’s something.

  59

  1

  Knowing she would not sleep much the night before the ceremony, Granny switched off the electric lights in the front room, lit the coal-oil lamp and placed it on the table beside Arthur’s trunk. She sat down and began leafing through the memorabilia of a lifetime. Each of the playbills recalled the story Arthur had associated with it, something bizarre in event or character, something that always ended with a chuckle or a wink in her direction that said ‘the world’s a funny place if you don’t die laughing’. The lingering twilight – they were just past the high solstice – had just succumbed to the deep darkness of the summer night when she reached into Bradley’s satchel and drew out the loose scraps of paper on which he had scrawled his last words. Among their blotted, unfinished number she found the copy of his poem to Sarah, the one she had made before sending the original off to Eddie. Had he read it before he died? Did it make any difference?

  She stared at the five stanzas – not quite filling a single page with lines that touched neither margin. So this is it, she thought, this is what all the pain of birth and loss and absence and wishing-to-be has come down to? A few lines of shrunken verse. This is where all the joy of foolish affection and helpless love and desire under the dark has finally landed? In this let’s-pretend house confected out of pity, with a worn-out skin-and-bones scarecrow of a crone who can’t even say hello or goodbye or it’s time to go. All that energy of genesis, all that procreative hope, all that suffering smothered in the mouth and held in and mined against the future. For this. For nothing.

  After Mama’s death Old Samuels, wise in his blindness, had said to her, “We must listen to the good gods and keep them on our side; they will help those who listen for them. But we must also help the gods. Sometimes the demons are strong and the good gods go into hiding.” Well, she had done her share of listening and she had tried her best to help. So had the others. Old Samuels assured her she was one of those chosen to hear their special music and dance it for the world’s sake. Well, she had danced in her time, but not enough perhaps, perhaps without the purity of purpose the music needed to prevail.

  A series of images passed before her eyes. Maman LaRouche kneading fat buttocks of dough before the outdoor oven and sliding them into its wombing heat where they would pop into being like fairy-tale babies, and Maman LaRouche lying ever so quietly in her bed of ice afraid of waking the robins before spring arrived, and the Frenchman dead with the clench of a curse unuttered against the malign spirits of that place he could never recognize as home and knowing with his last breath his children would scatter before his flesh was cold and not a kinsman left even to tend a grave or whisper a purgatorial prayer, and her own Mama rocking to the rhythms of the brushstrokes through her hair as the sun mellowed in the little room she was preparing to enter alone, and Papa’s voice above the embers telling of ocean voyages and rescue at sea and brave departures and love broken by effort and fatigue and failure against the deities of the bush and Papa’s arm about her at last shepherding her into sleep, and Old Samuels’ pipesmoke and the words that came through it and lifted some feeling/some hope that floated in her all the years and even now, and the dances she did to resurrect the twinkle in the old sagamore’s eye, and the mask of Southener’s face in the stillest of dawns and the sad auguries breaking there like raw light through ancient mist, and the graveyard of the lost and the dispossessed not a mile away where some of the benevolent spirits still crouched in anxious wait and where the wind-tossed grasses took root in that more ample quietude, and Aunt Bridie at twenty wrapped in her mother’s shawl against the sea-wind, standing alone on the foredeck and staring ahead where some land was supposed to be in which even orphans could find love, and Uncle Chester among the workshop shavings coaxing wood into toy shapes his son would never see, and Tom dancing at the Great Western Ball happy and handsome and unaware that across the room an eye had caught him in its prophecy, and Tom’s arms and Tom’s laugh and Tom’s touch in the near-dark and the mutual yearning that gave them Robbie and Brad and sent them off to cultivate the minor gods of this ground they hoped at last to be able to call home – but you left me, Tom, you left me and I don’t know why and I never will and I’ve missed you every day since, even those days when I refused to say your name aloud and banished your treachery from all thought, and I think of you haunting some barren-ground above Superior with a ghost who can’t find his way back, just as Uncle Chester lies among Baptists and do-gooders in a town he never saw and would have hated, as Aunt Bridie lies caged in some Yankee mausoleum with her emigré soul battering forever at the cold bars, as Solomon lies in his underwater coffin staring up at the chilling sun, as Mama and the La Rouches lie unvisited under nameless markers in a stranger’s cemetery even the bees are ashamed to attend, as Lucien lies reclaimed by the territory he spent a lifetime fleeing from, as Sophie lies in the grief of the deep, cool earth and dreams of fire and air, as Robbie lies in his soldier’s tomb at Batoche where the curious come to cluck and wonder, as Papa lies in a Negro churchyard worshipped in anonymity by puzzled blacks, as Eddie lies nowhere and everywhere in the charnel-house of Europe.

  You, Eddie, you were the reason for it all, the reason the world held out to us in derision. You came like a son of Lazarus, conceived in a moment of miraculous randomness. You had the mark of redemption on you from the beginning. You redeemed the wastrel who fathered you and passed along to you the gift of speech and its poetries. You brought me back to the best part of myself, you reminded me that the benevolent gods Old Samuels talked about – always under siege – could in the midst of their powerlessness make subversive music, you showed me again what I had always known: that belief is a hard flame to extinguish; you brought me back to the words Cap had nourished me with before he could die, you brought me to Arthur and together we pledged allegiance to the future you promised just by your being.

  It had come to naught. There was no meaning after all in events, in words, in the sufferings of the human heart. They were random and terrible. Cap was right: history is a fiction, a weak disguise for our disordered desires.

  She was looking at Bradley’s poem. Though she knew it by heart, she went through the motions of reading it.

  COLLOQUY, FOR SARAH

  MAN:

  December’s grasped my soul,

  stark, leaf-bereft of

  all but spite

  at autumn’s fall –

  from the infidel dark

  I curse you’

  for having loved.

  Alone, in your grave

  you sing with the

  strength for two

  of olives and January

  light

  WOMAN:

  Across the winter’s

  width a cruising wind,

  brute sun, a

  lecherous petal

  licking light.

  In your distress

  you rake the

  bruised map

  of my face with a

  treacherous kiss

  I draw down

  towards the dappled

  acre of my

  tenderness.

  We go under

 
and wait.

  Not enough to keep Eddie alive, she thought. But it was, without question, beautiful.

  Just before she drifted into a clear, dreamless sleep, a single image asserted itself – without preface or prologue: she was five years old, she was in the woods, she was watching a tiny head squeeze out of some fleshly crevice like a water-logged chestnut, until its gleaming skull burst forth in a halo of blood whose petals spun at her feet, whose medallions dripped from the slow leafage. As the scene faded, she distinctly heard the sound of Rabbit’s boyish laugh.

  2

  When she woke it was mid-morning, and she felt surprisingly rested. Moments later Prudie Denfield arrived, all smiles and about to make a to-do over getting her ‘frumped up’ for the grand occasion. Prudie noted with some satisfaction that Granny had been using the gas range. Prudie heated lots of water and helped her bathe and powder her wrinkles and ease her angles into the deceiving curves of the dress. A scarecrow in a tux is still a scarecrow, she thought, suddenly wishing she could speak – to murmur all the pleasantries and reassuring simplicities of woman’s casual conversation. Prudie, bless her, gabbed on as if Granny were holding up her end of the bargain. There was perhaps something odd in that effusiveness, some special feeling of affection behind it that was not carried at all in the words or even the tone. Also, she caught Prudie more than once staring at her when she thought she was unnoticed, with a sort of wondering appraisal, the way one searches the face and gestures of a person you’ve just been told is a friend you haven’t seen for thirty years. When she was caught out, Prudie blushed briefly, then began to talk with even greater urgency about the trivia of dress and protocol. Something strange was afoot.