Lily's Story (121 page)

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,

s
tark, leaf-bereft
of

al
l but
spite

a
t autumn’s fall
–

f
rom the infidel
dark

I curse you’

f
or having
loved.

Alone, in your grave

you sing with
the

s
trength for
two

o
f olives and
January

light

WOMAN:

Across the winter’s

w
idth a cruising
wind,

b
rute sun,
a

l
echerous
petal

l
icking
light.

In your distress

y
ou rake
the

b
ruised map

o
f my face with
a

t
reacherous
kiss

I draw down

t
owards the
dappled

a
cre of my

t
enderness.

We go under

a
nd wait.

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

J
ust 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

W
hen 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.

About ten o’clock, an hour
before the ceremony, as Prudie was putting the final touches on her
stitchery, Granny saw three figures coming along the sidewalk
towards her house. Prudie spotted them, too, and dropped her pins,
said, “Oh my, Cora, it’s time for me to go and get ready. I’ll just
let myself out the back way.” And she did.

Sunny Denfield turned into her
yard, resplendent in his uniform. Beside him, keeping pace, was a
young woman of medium height whose brown hair, straight nose and
curious dark eyes suggested close kinship with the Reeve.
Ruth-Anne, she thought, the cousin from Toronto. The tailored
clothing and confident bearing at once bespoke a woman from the
city, with breeding and inherited urbanity. Between them, and
struggling to keep pace with a sort of dancing skip-and-a-jump, was
a waif of a creature, blond as a Viking water-sprite, with freckles
as big as her blue eyes, in a flounced yellow dress as bold as a
butterfly wing, out of which the narrow, tapered little-girl limbs
sashayed with all the awkward grace of an apprentice ballerina.

G
ranny let them in,
unable to take her eyes off the little girl. When she finally met
Sunny Denfield’s gaze, she knew something had happened since his
last visit three days before, something more profound and
unsettling than the arrival of a cousin and her daughter. He was in
turn staring at her in a way which suggested that some
long-suspected truth had been confirmed, though not unattended by
surprise. The young woman was also staring at her with a mixture of
curiosity and awe. The little girl hopped up and down on the spot
between them. She couldn’t have been more than six years of
age.

These exchanges took
seconds only, and Sunny said, “Mornin’. I brought you someone I
know you’ve been anxious to meet.”

She nodded to indicate that she
knew who they were and was happy to receive them. When Sunny paused
mysteriously, like a bad tragedian before a soliloquy, his cousin
made as if to speak on her own behalf and he cut in quickly. “I’d
like you to meet my first cousin, Ruth-Anne MacEnroe. Ruth-Anne,
this is Mrs. Coote, my longtime friend, an’ your long-lost
grandmother.”

Ruth-Anne opened her mouth to
speak, but could not. What she had already seen, whatever form it
had taken, had confirmed the impossible, and she let several
unladylike tears escape through her astonished smile.

Sunny pressed
ahead. He put his hand on the little girl’s shoulder and she looked
up at the old woman. “An’ this is –” he said, his own voice on the
verge of breaking...
Victoria
, Granny said
to herself in a rush before Sunny said, “Victoria, your great
granddaughter.”

A
t fifteen minutes
before eleven, just as the first strains of the drum-and-bugle
corps were carried southward on the soft breeze of that special
day, four figures emerged from the new house and crossed the street
to join the host of villagers already assembled before the
monument.

3

O
ver the next two
weeks, and before Ruth-Anne and Victoria had to return to Toronto,
the stories on both sides were gradually and lovingly told. Granny
wrote out her responses to the questions of her granddaughter and
her ‘foster nephew’ – as Sunny now called himself – in a cramped
hand that only gradually began to flow and curve with the urgency
and excitement of the impossible narrative.

When Mrs. Edgeworth in
the spring of 1861 had written down ‘Lily Fairchild’ on a calling
card and given it to the government man who had come to repossess
the Prince’s daughter, no one had any idea of the consequences of
the act. Apparently the card accompanied the child, whom Lily had
secretly named Victoria, to her new home in Toronto with Olive and
Parker Macdonnell. Macdonnell was a busy minister in the
Baldwin-LaFontaine cabinet and thus left the raising of their
adopted daughter mainly to his wife. The little girl was christened
Grace and a year later, as often happens in such cases, a natural
daughter was born to the Macdonnells, and called Faith. Faith and
Grace were raised together, without prejudice. Both married, Faith
to a barrister named Harvey Denfield and Grace to an entrepreneur
named Bramwell Beattie. Just before she died in 1890, Olive
Macdonnell summoned Grace to her bedside and told her that she was
an adopted child, and that even though she had promised on her
husband’s grave not to break her vow of silence, she felt compelled
to do so now that she faced her own death. She gave to Grace, who
was pregnant with Ruth-Anne at the time, the note revealing her
true mother’s name – Lily Fairchild. She added that she had been
able to discover only two other facts about her identity: she had
aristocratic – perhaps even royal – blood in her veins and her
mother came from Lambton County, probably Sarnia. While Grace was
shocked by the revelation, her life was too crowded with feeling
and activity to do much about it. For a long time, watching over
her own daughter and her orphling nephew, Sunny, kept her thoughts
entirely away from her royal lineage, but as she neared the end of
her own life, just as her stepmother had done, she called her
daughter to her and passed along the only scraps of information in
her possession. Ruth-Anne has asked for Sunny’s help in tracing any
existing Fairchilds in the County. Mitch Strong, the postmaster,
and a librarian friend of his in Sarnia, got hold of several old
directories and gazetteers, and Sunny himself searched the registry
records. No Fairchild of any sort had ever lived in Lambton. There
were, of course, a thousand Lilys. The search came to an abrupt
end.