Lily's Story (117 page)

O
ne day towards the
middle of June, Sam and his sons hoisted the last section of the
obelisk into place and fitted the bust of the unknown soldier on
top of it. It had rained all morning, keeping the curious villagers
at bay. When the weather unexpectedly brightened in mid-afternoon,
Sam got up from his nap under the hickory and signalled for the
work to begin immediately. Thus it was that Granny was the only
observer that day when the monument was completed. While his boys
dismantled the rough scaffolding which still marred any appropriate
view of the finished object, Sam and Granny walked across the
street and stood in the yard of her new house. He did not speak,
and there was no need. They were both looking west, and waiting.
Young Pat pulled the last timber away from the base and dragged it
to the edge of the lot. He peered over at them, grinning. Harry was
on the other side. Rabbit was still asleep in the shade.

The four o’clock sun was
just visible above the roof of the hickory, burning down over its
steaming green and striking with glorious force the upthrust altars
of the village memorial, its elegant pedestals as pure and sudden
as Athenian light, the limestone obelisk with the weight of the
village dead on its facades soared aloft into the vivid air as if
it had been carved whole from a pictographic-cliff high above
Superior and anchored to the granite of the earth.

“
I wanted to
see it from here, with the trees behind it and the sun along the
solstice line. It will be beautiful in the mornings as well. The
shadow of the column will fall along the trunk of the
tree.”

Granny wanted to touch his arm
but she dare not.

“
Uncle Jack
thinks we’ve sold out our heritage,” Sam Stadler said in a voice
that was clearly meant to have her remain within the ambience of
the wonder they were sharing. “But that happened a long time ago,
before Rabbit himself was born. When I came here, I knew right away
this place had once been a magic ground. I felt the ghosts all
around me. When I was a boy, Rabbit told me that magic was the
hardest thing in the world to kill. Well, the old ways are gone for
good. But that don’t mean we have to forget them, do
we?”

4

T
hat night when Granny
woke from a dream she didn’t care to recall, she went over to her
chair by the window and stared into the darkness until she was
safely awake. Darkness as she knew was never an absolute quality,
and soon the play of shadow on shadow arrested her deliberate
misattention. The stars were etched like Braille on the infinite
black, and somewhere behind her a low moon began to scatter a
random light. Across the road the pillar of the monument glowed as
if it had absorbed the sun all day and was now relinquishing it,
like radium. The words inscribed there were more visible now that
they were filled with night-shadow, and she strained to be able to
read them, to be able to read one of them. Suddenly the whole
facade of the memorial tablet went dark, as if a bat’s wing had
flicked over it. The slow light leaked back. She chanced a quick
look to the right and left but nothing moved in the blackness
behind. No wind touched the young leaves high in the hickory. But
somewhere she could hear singing, not a human voice but one very
like it, a horn simulating a perfect soprano so real you could
almost whisper the near-words it devised to tantalize and tempt the
forsaken. This time the shadow that flickered across the scroll of
the dead was as diaphanous as an angel’s wing, you could blow your
breath through it. It dissolved, then came again, not actually
touching the face of the stone but brushing it with the urgency of
the singing that rose and fell in time with it. The singing
stopped. The veil, which could have been a wing or a scarf, was, it
was now clear, a sleeve with an arm in it and a tiny white hand
unfolding out of it and fluttering. Granny followed the arm to the
edge of the column where it ceased, though a spill of flaxen hair –
unripened hair, a little girl’s hair – fell absently over the
sleeved limb now stretching, as if on tiptoe, towards the engraved
sad letters. The fingers paused, then began tracing their way over
one of the names in a fevered, amateur way – as a blind child might
finger the face of a smiling stranger.

No, no, she heard the cry deep
in her, and rose up with its surge. She struck her head sharply on
the sash and fell back into the chair. When the dizziness subsided,
she looked out again. The moon was down. Nothing moved, or
shone.

Silly, silly woman. You must
stop this. You must stop these foolish tears. The old ways are gone
for good.

57

“
It’s goin’ to
look beautiful for the opening ceremonies, now isn’t it,” Sunny
Denfield said. Granny tilted her head slightly in agreement. “By
then the sod’ll be somewhat stitched together, an’ your delphinium
an’ poppies’ll be in their glory back there.”

She accepted the compliment,
knowing it was well-meant, and she was, she had to admit, secretly
pleased that most of the flower-beds she had planted for Arthur had
been left in their natural state, at least until next year. All the
hedges except the one adjoining the Carpenter property had been dug
up and the whole area around the monument turned into lawn and
park. By autumn both monument and greenery would have taken hold,
and who would there be to remember that they did not always belong
to this place?

“
We’ve set the
date,” he said. She held her teacup rigid. “The first of July at
eleven o’clock.”

She swallowed her tea but did
not look up.

“
For Dominion
Day,” he explained hastily.
And butchery along the Somme
.

She flashed him an ironic smile
he pretended to miss.

“
The unanimous
choice of the council, though I suspect we didn’t all vote for the
same reasons. The vets will form up at Bayview, they’ll be led by
our own small drum-and-bugle corps down St. Clair to the monument.
We’ve covered the Honour Roll with a flag, as you can see, and at
precisely 11 A.M. I’ll unveil the memorial plaque an’ the first
wreath of remembrance’ll be laid.”

He paused. She was listening
intently.

“
Could I have
a bit more tea?”

She reached for the pot,
stopped and peered over at him with a gesture which clearly said,
‘Tell me what’s really on your mind, I can take it’.

“
The council –
recognizin’ all you’ve done an’ meant to this community for sixty
years, an’ seein’ that you’re now a deed-holdin’ landowner,” – he
was unable to complete the smile here – “would like you to lay the
wreath. It was unanimous. Even Hitch. The rightness of the choice
was self-evident. They – that is, I don’t see how anyone else could
possibly do.” Finally he turned to face her. The burn-scar on his
left cheek glowed softly in the muted sunlight of the room.
Unconsciously he drew his fingers over its numbness.

“
Look, Cora, I
know how much we’re askin’ of you. And I have a pretty fair idea of
what you think of the War an’ politicians an’ pooh-bahs. But that
part of it’s over, you see. We let Lord Byng an’ his Lady an’ his
entourage of party hacks come here an’ have their say back in
April. You can’t keep them away from a thing like this. So we
invited the whole shebang includin’ a brass band. They come an’
they said their piece an’ they went. Not
a one of them will ever remember again where Point
Edward is without checkin’ a map first. What we’re plannin’ for
July is goin’ to be our own. Sure, we couldn’t say no to the local
M.P. an’ his cell-mate from the Legislature, but that’s all. Not
even His Worship from the City will be here. Just us. The people
who suffered an’ the people who sacrificed. The people who wanted
this monument built, an’ know, each one of them, what it
means.”

The flies along the
window-ledge buzzed in the local sun.

“
I think you
know, Cora, that in some ways you’ve been almost a mother to me.
Sometimes Prudie gets annoyed with me comin’ over here so much, and
I’m at a loss to give her an explanation she can believe.” He
paused, drew a deep breath, and said more quickly, “This
monument’ll mean different things to different people, but let me
tell you what I think, an’ what I believe many others in the
village think deep down inside. This monument isn’t a memorial to
war or the so-called triumph of good over evil. There’s nothin’
glorious about war whether you win or lose. We know that for
ourselves. There’s not a man between twenty-five an’ forty in this
town who isn’t limpin’ or half blind or wakin’ up screamin’ in the
middle of the night from the shrapnel that ain’t come out yet or
the nightmares of shell-shock. An’ the women know even better than
we do – they suffered here at home for four years, they looked into
the grim faces of the bereaved, an’ most of them felt that pain
themselves before it was over.” He swallowed hard. “No one felt it
deeper than you did.”

She tried to deny it but her
eyes failed her.

“
I’ll tell you
what I think that monument means to most of us when we walk past it
by ourselves, when we’re sure no one is watchin’ or listenin’.
You’ve seen them already, haven’t you, from this window? To them
it’s not a fancy pillar to the glorious dead. It’s a memorial to
those of our own who left us for a cause we thought to be right.
They died, and I know that some of them found courage before they
died and others didn’t. That don’t matter. They were ours, they
left us, and if we don’t remember them no one else will, no one but
us will really care. We want our grandchildren to know, years an’
years from now, whenever they see this column an’ the names on it,
that once there was a village here, with people who were brave an’
foolish an’ caring. This is goin’ to be a monument to ourselves as
a village, what we been through in the past, how much we can be
together in the future. This is only
one
of the wars we’ve
already been through. Who knows that better than you?” He got up
and stood at the window looking across to the cenotaph and the
ancient tree behind it.

“
So you see
why it has to be you to lay the wreath.”

When he found the courage to
face her, she gave a reluctant consent.

“
The council
also asked me to give the dedication address,” he said. “I agreed,
of course. And I will. But I’d like you to write out the words for
me.”

Granny made no attempt to
brush away the tears that would do as they pleased anyway. When
Sunny started towards her, she held up her hand, and smiled. As he
watched in a sort of anguished awe, she got up, joints creaking a
bit, went over to Arthur’s trunk on top of which she kept her
writing tablet, and wrote something on it in slow, stiff surges. He
waited as she brought the paper across to him.

It read: ‘Not necessary, you
already have’.

S
unny Denfield wrote
out for her a detailed description of the ceremonies and her small
role in them. “By the way, my cousin Ruth-Anne is comin’ down for
the occasion. She hasn’t had any luck in tracin’ her mother’s
relatives, but I guess she’s heard so much about this fabulous town
lately, she decided she had to come an’ see it for herself. I’m
delighted. I haven’t seen her in eight years. We ain’t been much of
a family, I guess, and I’m anxious to make amends. I think you’ll
like her.”

As he was about to leave,
Granny wrote on her pad: ‘I wish to give you a gift, something
personal, for all you have done’. While he was energetically
refusing such undeserved kindness, she reached into Arthur’s trunk
and brought out a leather pouch. She loosened the drawstring and he
saw two objects inside: a pendant with what appeared to be a cameo
portrait of some kind and a calf-bound book, perhaps a miniature
Bible. He could tell from the way she fingered them that these
objects were heirlooms of great value. Again he demurred, but she
held out the book until he took it, gently, into his hands. On her
tablet she wrote: ‘This belonged to my father and he got it from
his mother. He inscribed it for me and asked me to keep it until I
could pass it along to my own children’.

58

1

T
hree days before the
ceremony Prudie Denfield came over. She insisted on showing Granny
how to use the new-fangled gas range in the kitchen, and after a
brief one-sided tea, the two women went through the dusty trunks in
the uninhabited bedroom until a presentable dress was unearthed. It
was the black one she had worn to Arthur’s funeral. How thin she
had become since that time, ten years ago almost to the month. I
thought I’d be with you long before now, she said quietly to him
when Prudie’s back was turned. But then I never was lucky at
planning anything for long.

Prudie fussed over her, pinning
the dress with elaborate care for the alterations she was
threatening to carry out. She even promised to bring over a boxful
of vintage hats – representing all sizes and generations – from
which a choice eventually could be made. Before she left, she sat
Granny down in her padded rocker and began brushing her hair with
long, rhythmic, drowsing strokes. When her eyes opened, the room
was dark. She let her dream continue. She was dreaming of Bradley
and the night he came back from the dead...