Lily's Story (53 page)

L
ily stood in the
kitchen window remembering when Uncle Chester used to hold her
aloft to see over the sill into the green world. It was hard to
believe that by this September her life would have completed one of
its great seasonal shifts, that the Grand Trunk would at last
exercise dominion over Bridie’s land, in return for which they
would put down fresh roots in the very village her Aunt had dreamed
so intensely it had become real.
What would you think of that, old Shaman?

In the yard,
Robbie had talked or bullied Brad into joining his game. Brad had
been offered the sword with the broken blade as a bribe, while
Arthur brandished Excalibur possessively. On these rare occasions
when Brad was moved to enter into his brother’s fantasies, he did
so, unbeknownst to Robbie, on his own terms. While Robbie pursued
the treacherous Mordred or the cowardly two-faced Saxon
(Hengest-and-Horsa), while he jousted and sallied and
cut-to-ribbons – Brad played his designated parts, but Lily could
see, as she did now, that in the kingdom of his own imagination he
was reinventing a world for his pleasure alone. She could hear him
humming or chanting away to himself as he dodged the wrath of
Galahad’s forays. For Brad, no
re-enactment of the old stories was real without the words
tumbling through his head in magic metamorphoses. Suddenly,
Galahad’s sword slashed spitefully across an exposed calf. Lily
heard the smack and saw Brad fall into the grass. Robbie was
stunned by the deed as the victim; he stood gazing at his weapon as
if about to accuse it of some crime. Then he turned to watch his
brother. Brad’s lower lip quivered as the red welt on his leg rose
up, stinging. He glanced towards the house, straight into the
morning sun. Robbie waited, something faintly pleading in his face.
Brad began rubbing the wound, silent tears sliding out and down.
Robbie suddenly sat down beside him. Instinctively Brad started to
edge away but was stopped by Robbie’s arm as it came across his
shoulder and gripped it. Very slowly Robbie opened the fingers of
his brother’s left hand and placed in them the diamond-stubbed
Excalibur from Camelot.

Lily was watching it all from
her window. A wonder, she thought. The random gesture. Love’s
accidence.

L
ily had just begun
getting Tom’s supper ready when he surprised her – standing in the
doorway the way he always did when there was news.

“
It’s all
right,” he said, seeing her reaction. “We’ve been called up, but
it’s nothing to worry about.”

Lily found herself sitting on
the arm of the big chair, a kettle steaming in her hand.

“
We’r
e going west.
There’s been some trouble with the half-breeds out there, but
nobody expects we’ll have to do much shooting.”

Lily felt the kettle brush the
floor.

“
Say
something, Lil. Don’t just sit there looking at me like that. You
know I got to go.”

“
You’re a
volunteer.”

“
You know I
got to go.”

Yes, I do
know, she wanted to say. And I’ve tried to understand all these
years, I really have. And maybe, too, its partly my fault for
loving that unknowable night-thing in you, for being afraid of it,
for wanting to bring it too close to the sunlight and tame it with
familiarity, yet all along secretly cherishing it as I do those
kinds of things in myself I keep hidden from you. I
do
know. And I know also that I could reach out at this moment
and touch you in a way that would make you want to stay. If I do, I
may regret it for the rest of my life. If I don’t...

“
We’re going
to sail into the north,” Tom was saying, settling her into the
chair and sitting beside her on the arm, “all the way to the
lakehead, then cross the Rainy River system in canoes like the old
voyageurs. Then we march over the Prairie to Fort Garry where we
stay for a while to make sure the new province gets off to a proper
start. No fighting, no war. Monsieur Riel won’t be there to greet
us.”

“
Think of the
boys,” she said.

“
I am,” Tom
said. “With the money I’ll get from this stint we’ll be able to buy
furniture for the new house, clothes and books for the boys when
they go to school. You’ll be able to throw away that wretched
quilting frame forever. We’ll come back here and put a torch to
this old place and make sure it stays a part of our past. Lily, you
don’t understand. I’ve got to go. Now.”

Yes, it may be the last
chance.

“
I’m gonna
come back, you know.”

Lily picked up the kettle.
“Supper’s ruined,” she said.

“
I
promise.”

“
I ain’t goin’
down to the boat.”

L
ily said her goodbyes
at the gate. Gimpy had come with his buggy to take Tom and his gear
to the troop-ship waiting at the wharf, and to supervise Robbie who
was being allowed to cheer the soldiers off with his hankey-sized
Union Jack. Lily waited until the horses had almost reached the
bend before she began to tremble all over. Tom turned in his seat
and waved back to her, his manly figure caught for a second in a
burst of lilac-spray. It was an image she would hold unchanging in
her heart for a long, long time.

A
few weeks after Tom left, Lily missed
her second period.

6

E
arly in May of 1870
the new Dominion under the stewardship of Sir John A. Macdonald
undertook its first large-scale mobilization and transfer of troops
to a distant war zone. Railroad, lake-steamer, bateaux and forced
march were splendidly coordinated so that in a mere ninety-six days
Colonel Wolseley’s army of twelve-hundred volunteers and regulars
arrived at the outskirts of Fort Garry, Manitoba to claim the
province for Canada. No resistance was met. Not a soul to shoot at.
A member of Wolseley’s staff recorded in his diary that day: ‘We
were enthusiastically greeted by a half-naked Indian, very
drunk’.

But the getting-there was
itself a triumph of Canadian ingenuity. Troop-trains left Montreal
and Toronto, picked up volunteer units along the main-line and
deposited them on the wharfs of Collingwood and Point Edward, where
troop-ships – refitted freighters – whisked the battalions
northeastward along the ancient fur-trading routes of Champlain,
Radisson and Groseilliers, Marquette and Joliet, and the mighty
LaSalle. At Fort William they disembarked, seasick but singing, and
clambered into hastily constructed bateaux which were
three-quarters canoe and two-quarters sailboat. In mid-May they
disappeared into the bush and did not emerge again until August 23.
Occasional scouts, of hardy native stock, returned to Base Fort
William to report on morale and on progress made to a tense and
bored populace. These messengers also brought out mail destined for
the home front.

So it was that
Lily received five letters from
Tom written over a span of six weeks, the last one dated
‘August 7, 1870, near Rat Portage’. Gimpy and Clara (who was
pregnant again) came over, and they read through them. Though Lily
found she could read much of Tom’s elegant script, she preferred to
let Gimpy read aloud so that she could close her eyes and picture
every event and hear the words Tom chose: to make each a part of
him.

Tom
was attached to a forward unit, his
company the only volunteer group to be so honoured. The first few
days were jolly ones because the recruits could stretch out the
muscles cramped by several days in steerage. The sun warmed them by
day and the crisp stars overhead at night seemed to bless their
enterprise. Then the rains came and the forty-two-mile portage up
to Lake Shebandowan. Fire and torrential spring storms had
destroyed the primitive right-of-way. Tom’s crew headed into the
bush with axe and whip-saw. ‘I felt like one of the pioneers out
there, hacking and cursing and blistering in places I didn’t know I
owned.’ It took three weeks to clear a path wide enough for the
rearguard to dismantle and carry their boats through, along with
two-hundred-pound barrels of salt-pork, cannon, cannonballs, rifles
and cases of ammunition. The bulkier craft had to be pushed ahead
on rollers which disappeared into the muskeg as fast as Tom’s crew
could cut them. Now did the muscles rebel in the wet bivouacs of a
chilling dark, the mosquitoes take up the flies’ leavings and the
rain wash entire tents away from their frail moorings. Exhausted
but undaunted, the raw troops reached for fresh inspiration and
found it on the smooth straits of Lac des Mille Lacs and the
resurgence of July’s best sun. While the paddling arms had
strengthened and spirits brightened again, the jolting pattern of
shooting rapids, driving hullward into stiff winds on open lakes,
making sharp, brutal portages, and searching hopelessly for a dry
bivouac – these soon took their toll. The food worsened. Dysentery
and the grippe left dozens of men to languish in the rear, slumped
among the supplies, moaning to keep each other company. But Tom
miraculously grew stronger, healthier, happier. He was placed in
the vanguard of the paddlers, in the slick canoes manned by
Iroquois and Métis scouts. He sang with them. He seemed to forget
where they were going and why. He did not wonder at the arrival of
Métis scouts sent by the ‘rebel’ Riel to welcome and guide them in.
He revelled in the challenge of the white water, the muskeg like
quicksand, the raw cold of the rivers lit by sun but never warmed
even in the sweltering heat of early August. Lily could hear him
singing, she could see the reddish-blond beard circling the
elementary blue of his eyes, she could yearn to be under him
anywhere, always, below the altar of the stars.

On August 8 the
expedition neared Rat Portage, passing through an uncharted narrows
in the Winnipeg River. Lily held her breath as she watched the
war-canoe tossed ponderously by the frantic rapid, tilting and
dextrously righted by a dozen paddles with a touch as silk as a
pianist’s, battered sideways by a furtive boulder to an edge of
balance, only to be slung straight by the current itself as it
hurtled westward blindly, without cause. All at once the lead canoe
pitched left as if a sail had been punched by a gust; it yawed,
skidded rudderless along a flat patch in the eye of something
sinister, spun counter-clockwise like the earth itself only
flatter, only laughing at gravity as the paddlers swung free of its
burden and tumbled with military precision, one by one, into the
gorge below. Lily saw her Tom strike the surface, lean on its
buoyancy for a long second, wave his arms at some invisible rope in
the air and go under, his head only – mouth, eyes, nose – bobbing
up again farther down the roiling half-mile narrows full of rocks
that had broached many a birch-bark or the drum of a man’s belly.
He made so sound at all and after a while his eyes quit looking
anywhere. When his body was hauled ashore, floating blissfully in a
trout-pool miles away, the underwater rocks had battered it beyond
recognition. They knew it was him because some of the white skin
showed through the bruising. There was no bleeding because his body
was frozen; the cold had killed him, they said, before he could be
drowned or bludgeoned to death. Just as well.

Still, there
on shore it was August with a rotting sun overhead. Nothing to do
but bury the soldier with as much dignity as possible, with due
notation of his incredible valour, his unshakable patriotism. They
gouged a
shallow grave out of
the muskeg and laid him there in a spruce coffin girdled by a Union
Jack. The volunteers shivered in the heat as the Last Post rang
emptily over the Barrens – haunted by stunted cedars, wreaths of
sphagnum, and brackish moss-water still shaken by the memory of the
Great Glacier rumbling backwards overhead.

T
wo months later,
after many of the troops had been quietly returned home by rail
through St. Cloud and Chicago, Major Bolton came to the house to
tell Lily the story of Tom’s heroic death. The details he provided
her – in a kind and fatherly manner that genuinely touched her –
added little to what she had already seen in her own
way.

After he left,
Lily sat for some time, by herself, staring out of the kitchen
window she had for so long now used to measure the ebb and flow of
her small being-on-this-earth. She tried not to imagine a world
that would no longer acknowledge the absence of Aunt Bridie or
Uncle Chester, of Bachelor Bill and the moon-sad face of his
Violet, of Old Samuels and all his kind, and Mama and Maman and
Aunt Elspeth, and Papa wherever the woods was hiding him. She tried
not to imagine a life without Tom, without the kind of love
engendered only in the dream-songs of the young for whom the future
is as real as a moment of touch-and-surrender. She tried not to
think of such a place nor the gods mad enough to have contrived it.
No deity – whatever its hue or cry – could have invented this, she
thought. I cannot accept it. What do you think of that, old Shaman?
Do you hear me calling out, shouting over and over again – as if my
heart were stone-deaf –
I am
Lily Marshall, I am Lily Marshall, I am Lily
Marshall
. And who is there to
care?

Something urgent was poking
itself into her ribs.

“
Mama,” Brad
said at her side, still prodding.