Lily's Story (16 page)

Aunt Bridie waited for Lily to come up.
“There you are, Charlotte. That’ll be ninety-six cents. Any changes
for next week? The corn’ll be in most likely.”

Charlotte gave Auntie the money and stood
watching them leave. Lily always lingered behind a bit, ears
pricked.

“
Scruffy little ragamuffin,
ain’t she?”

“
You think with the prices
she charges a person she’d be able to put a decent dress on the
little wretch.”

“
Might even be pretty,
don’t you think, Lottie?”

“
It’d take some srubbin’,
I’m afraid.”

Auntie always walked steadily forward; she
was not a lingerer. Once she turned and said, “Don’t let those two
old maids go puttin’ a lot of tom-fool notions in your head.”

2

The Templeton house was special. There was
about it an immediate and palpable magic that never left even after
three years of weekly stops. (The first day she saw it, a voice as
strong as Old Samuels’ said: “Someday you’re going to live here.”)
It was the most attractive, though by no means the most
ostentatious, house in town. It wasn’t even brick, but the siding
was lovingly lapped and painted a shade of blue that resembled the
river just as the ice leaves it in March. In spring and summer –
even into fall – the gardens here flourished, rejuvenated, and
bedazzled. Never had Lily seen such exotic, such wholly domestic,
flora: delphinium, giant poppies, sunflowers, peonies, arboured
roses, and marigolds and lilies with the tang of marsh still in
them. In the winter the snow blossomed in its own way, keeping an
echo of former lushness absolute. Mrs. Alice Templeton almost
always intercepted them at the side door. Trim, silver-haired,
neatly attired, smiling at you with both eyes, she invariably asked
them to come into the little den. Sometimes even Maurice Templeton,
the prominent lawyer, was there snoozing into a gray volume on his
lap. Sometimes if it were raining or exceptionally cold, Auntie
would accept, and Lily would slip in behind her and feast upon the
book-lined walls, the porcelain figurines and wispy-blue chinaware
tempting her from an adjoining sanctum. The odour of pipe-tobacco
malingered and stirred the memory.

“
Do come in, for Pete’s
sake, Bridie Ramsbottom,” Mrs. Templeton would say. “You think we
hadn’t known one another for ten years.”

“
Well, then, just for a
minute. The girl’s a bit chilled, I daresay. But we can’t stay
long.”

The girl was frozen through, and aflame with
curiosity. On a lucky day there was Ceylon tea and tarts, and
talk.

“
Got a schedule to keep,”
Auntie would say, warming her fingers on the tea-cup. They always
stopped here last. “Don’t tell Mrs. Templeton, though,” Aunt Bridie
would say as they drove off. “We’d never get away from the old
gabbler. Never did hear anyone like to carry on so and fritter away
so much time. Besides, your uncle’d wear his shoes to bed if we
left him alone too long.”

“
Your brother’s daughter,
you say? I can certainly see your eyes there, no question about
that.”

“
She’s had no upbringin’,
mind you, but she’s a good worker.”

“
Another cake,
Lily?”

“
No ma’am. Thank
you.”

“
Go ahead, you look like
it’d do you good.”

Lily glanced at Aunt Bridie. “No, thank you,
ma’am.”

“
Say, Bridie, my girls are
both at boarding school in London, as you know, and I’ve never
thrown away any of their dresses or slips, or God knows, there’s a
pile of bonnets up there in a trunk –”

Auntie rose to her full height. “Thank you
for the tea, missus, but we really must be gettin’ along with our
deliveries. Drink up,” she said to Lily.

“
But it’s still blowin’ out
there. I haven’t paid you yet.”

“
Next time,” she replied;
they were already at the door. Suddenly Lily wondered why Luc had
never delivered Papa’s trunk.

Against the flailing of the snow on their
faces, Auntie said: “They’re all the same, Lily. You remember that.
Never leave off interferin’ with people’s lives, they don’t.”

Lily was not sure. “Waste not, want not,”
was her aunt’s oft-repeated warning. Ought a body, then, to merely
bury such dresses and bonnets – some of them as flagrant and
impertinent and wonderfully hopeful as a summer’s bravest
delphinium radiating enough blue to carry you through a winter?

And long hard winters they were. The numbing
repetitiveness of the planting, weeding and harvesting was
exchanged for the dark, indoor tasks between seasons. Aunt Bridie
made quilts out of cast-off rags she collected each September on
her rounds. “That’s a nice job you done, missus, cuttin’ down the
dress for the girl, looks real good on her, don’t it, Lottie?”
Auntie soon discovered that Lily’s fingers were more nimble than
her own, and was delighted to have the girl help her at every spare
moment when she wasn’t involved with the chores in the barn and
coops, with the preparation of the cuttings and seed for the
spring, with her share of cooking, regular sewing and repairs, or
candle-making (for sale along with the quilts), and even chopping
wood when Uncle Chester’s back “played its trump card” as it did
more often of late. Lily found the fine needlework as fatiguing as
hoeing lettuce; but she loved the harlequin swatches – their
eccentric shapes and the unpredictable figures they assumed as her
fingers played with them on the table, as if she were arranging
Mrs. Templeton’s flowers: poppies on yellow iris, asters on
gladioli – composing something beautiful that no one, not even the
flowers themselves, had dreamed into being. From some lady in
London, however, Auntie had learned two basic patterns which she
scrupulously alternated so that by April – eyes strained and
fingers paralyzed by monotony – they had produced eight quilts that
would bring ready cash to tide them over the lean spring months and
even buy them each a pair of leather boots fresh from McWhinney’s
Haberdashery. (Uncle Chester drove into town with Lily proudly in
tow; Auntie would not “set foot in that Tory’s den”. Nevertheless,
she drew several silver coins from the butter-box under her bed,
and sent the shoppers on their way.)

By the third summer – after her fourteenth
birthday – Lily Ramsbottom was making half of the deliveries
herself. More and more, Aunt Bridie was leaving the
egg-and-vegetable side of the business to Lily while she herself
drummed up further trade in the expanding sections back of
Christina Street, peddled her candles and quilts, or scouted the
competition’s prices at the Saturday market beside the St. Clair
Inn. As far as Lily could tell, her Aunt was never tempted by the
garish displays of finery in the shops along Front Street.

“
Tell me, Lily dear, what
Church is your Aunt raisin’ you in?” asked Mrs. McHarg, sweetly,
for her husband’s sake.

“
The green peppers’re good
today, ma’am. Crisp as ice.”

“
You
are
attendin’ a Church of some kind,
aren’t you?”

“
No, ma’am.” Lily felt her
eyes drop, a flush of red staining her cheeks.

“
You poor, poor thing,
you.” The woman’s voice trembled with delicious shock. “An’ why
not?” she ventured.

“
We work on Sundays,” Lily
said, looking up proudly.

Mrs. McHarg was speechless. Lily was already
giving Benjamin a hug when she heard faintly from the back doorway:
“That woman oughta be hanged!” Then: “Lily, you tell that so-called
Aunt of yours not to bother comin’ round here again!”

Lily did no such thing.

“Carrie, come an’ see, quick! Lily’s on her
own!”

Miss Caroline stayed in her place. “Where’s
the old bat?” she whispered.

“
Nowheres in sight. Down
with the gout, I hope.”

Lily came up to Miss Charlotte with the
order.

“
Aren’t we all grown-up
now?
She’s got a bonnet on, ain’t that
grand?” Carrie thought so.

“
There’s be change from
that quarter,” Miss Charlotte said, peering up the
street.

“
I’m on my own,” Lily said
with the correct change already in hand.

“
We hear you and your
Auntie labour on the Sabbath, don’t we dear?”

“
Will there be any special
order for next week?”

“
Such a scandal, an’ this
pretty little thing caught up in it. What’s to be done, dear? Do
you suppose we can carry on givin’ out good cash for the Devil’s
work? No wonder them cabbages is full of slugs no amount of
boilin’ll kill off!”

“
Same order for next
week?”

“
Just don’t see how we can
carry on an’ call ourselves decent folk, I don’t. You agree
completely, don’t you, Carrie?”

Lily walked carefully to her cart.

“
Can’t get over how pretty
she is, can
you
,
dear?”

Lily loved the boarding houses, especially
the rambling clapboard one on Lochiel Street run by Char
Hazelberry. If she wished, which was often, Lily got right inside
the cozy kitchens where aproned servants cooked and scrubbed and
gabbled; where some of the working men – dilatory, hungover or
recuperative – lingered about to tease the landlady. When Lily
appeared puzzled by the oddity of the landlady’s name, Badger
McCovey whispered breezily in her ear: “Short for Charity, but she
ain’t got none, get it?”, and Walleye Watson, his good peeper next
to hers, said, “It’s the way she cooks the food!” and burbled so
rapturously his veined hand slipped down and across Lily’s bottom.
He tried to wink, with absurd results, and she laughed with the
rest of the room.

“
Hi, toots, gonna take me
to the shindig, Saird’y?”

“
What mine d’you stash all
that silver in, eh?”

“
I get first dance,
promise?”

“
Not me, I’ll take the last
one, eh Lily gal?”

“
Don’t you pay them geezers
no mind,” Char would say, taking Lily under wing as usual. She’d
cock her head towards the scullery crew, wink and say in her stage
whisper, “Most of them’s well past it anyways! They couldn’t raise
dust in a hen-house.”

“
Leavin’ so soon, sweetie?
Ya ain’t give Badger his nighty-night kiss.”

“
You take off them diapers
of your’n,” roared Char to her audience, “an’ you might just get
yourself a live one!”

Lily usually left Char’s place feeling
faintly wicked, cheered, welcomed, guilty – and humming all the way
to Exmouth.

Once, Char pinned a purple iceland poppy in
Lily’s hair and in front of the girls – Betsy of the shimmering
ringlets and apple-cheeked Winnie with her sudden belly – and
several of the men called her “the sweetest strawberry blonde in
the county”. Lily kept the compliment intact until Benjamin made
the turn off the Errol Road towards the farm, where she held it up
till the wind blew the waferous petals far and wide. At Christmas
Char let her take just a wee sip of dry sherry and gave her a beery
hug, almost as if she were her mother.

Mrs. Templeton was in her front garden among
the zinnias. She waved at Lily, pulled her gloves and apron off,
and called out: “Take the things all way round to the back yard,
would you dear? I’ll be there in a jiffy.” And she hopped to her
front porch and headed through the house.

Lily carried the last order of the day to
the back of the blue cottage – under the rose arbour in primary
bloom and into the meadow of the Templeton’s dooryard. She was
delighted to see the cedar table covered with a linen cloth and set
for tea. The missus must be planning a garden party, she thought.
And by the looks of the fancy cakes and scones and the silver
tea-set, the company expected must be from the hoity-toity. Mrs.
Templeton popped from her shed, brushing back her unbonneted hair,
and swept across the lawn to Lily.

“
Well, young lady, don’t
just stand there lookin’,
sit
down
.”

Mrs. Templeton showed Lily the proper way to
pour tea and how to hold a scone with three digits and some
dignity. She smiled sideways and whispered, “Wouldn’t want to upset
the good ladies of the town, now would we?” She took Lily’s arm and
escorted her about the English gardens, explaining carefully how
one nursed and groomed such unruly beauty, prompting Lily to talk –
even a little – about the wild blossoms of the townships.

“
Well, Lily my sweet,” she
said with a sigh, “you must go now. Bridie will soon be frettin’.”
She tied Lily’s bonnet snugly below her chin. “I just hope your
Auntie knows what a prize she’s got.”

Lily blushed. Aunt Bridie, she knew, would
not approve of such “spoilin’” that could “turn a girls head” in a
direction which would eventually – one had to assume – prove
regrettable.

As Lily was leaving, Mrs. Templeton turned
suddenly and called after her, “Oh, Lily!” She had a note in her
hand. “I almost forgot to tell you. Maurice and I are holdin’ a
campaign meeting here in a week, we’ll need a lot of extras,
delivered early in the mornin’ if that’s all right.”

“
Yes, ma’am.” Lily’s eyes
were fastened on the fluttering note.