Lily's Story (108 page)

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
in
terest 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

T
he 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, ragwee
d 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.”

E
ddie 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 stage, 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.”

T
hus 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.

O
ne 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.

W
hen 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
diff
icult 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.