Lily's Story (107 page)

The stonemasons, come at
last.

51

1

Th
e 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 rearing 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.

“H
e’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.

H
ap 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.

S
till, 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.