Lily's Story (18 page)

“
Your Auntie ain’t worked
for nobody, cookin’ or cleanin’, since her days in Toronto. She
don’t believe in it. Got her pride, that woman.” Lily nodded.
“’Cept of course when she come to work for me at the shop in
London, but then her main job was tutorin’ little Bertie.” He
grinned only as he did after a couple of “snorts”, winked with
one-and-a-half eyes, and said: “I had to marry her to get any
house-cleanin’ done!”

“
We need the money,” was
all Auntie would say. “I’m gonna hire a man to cut pine again.
Those trees are doin’ nothin’ for us just growin’ there. They’re a
cash crop like anything else. Besides, we’re gonna try for another
two acres next year.”

Aunt Bridie was so exhausted when she came
home from her three-day stint at the camp that she went straight to
bed and slept right through Bachelor Bill’s Saturday serenade. Lily
was even persuaded to do a jig. The two men sipped from Bill’s
flask and followed every graceful line of the dancer’s leg.

“
Why don’t you ever bring
Violet over?” Lily asked, flushed and sweating. “I could teach her
to dance.”

“
Oh, she don’t dance none,”
Bachelor Bill said in his drawl that was as lethargic as his music
was sprightly. “She’s a bit tetched in the head, you know. Been
like that since she were a babe. No sir, she don’t like to come
outta the house at all.”

Uncle Chester asked Lily if
she’d like to try a “wee drop”, and was so persistent that Lily
made a great show of tilting the flask against her teeth, wincing
and gasping in feigned pleasure. They seemed satisfied with her
performance. To deflect their further hopes she called for a
hornpipe and flung her body into the music’s coil. Uncle watched
with his sad bloodhound’s look, and Lily thought back to that first
summer when she had been given her own bedroom, wondering even then
why they had built a cottage with
two
bedrooms and a hallway down the
middle, and recalling, even as she spun towards a shaky climax,
Uncle’s words to her less than a month ago: “She was a wonderful
tutor, you know, she loved my Bertie like he was her own, she
looked after both of us real good, an’ she loved to read that boy
story after story, an’ him only nine years old. It was awful, Lily,
one day he was playin’ an’ laughin’ and readin’ back stories to
your Auntie, an’ the next mornin’ he just puffs up, turns blue and
dies on us. Your Auntie, she ain’t read a book since, not a
one.”

The two men applauded zealously as Lily came
to a stop in the middle of the room. She was facing the window over
the sink. The last filament of Bachelor Bill’s music still quavered
in the coal-oil light. A face was staring back at Lily through the
glass: the eyes widened by music, intrepidly innocent, carnal in
their longing. For a second Lily thought she was looking at
herself.

Then Violet let out the whirring, wordless
cry she used for delight or despair, and vanished into the
night.

It was August. Auntie was off to the camp
once more “just to help out a little.” At Uncle Chester’s
insistence, Auntie consented to put their savings in the Bank of
Upper Canada in Port Sarnia. At the beginning of the month the
hired hand appeared to cut timber and be otherwise useful around
the place. Uncle Chester was made to give up his workshop wherein a
pallet and table were installed for the new arrival. Uncle’s back
“did a dip” and he was laid up with lumbago for several days. Lily
did the chores by herself. She might have tried to be a little
resentful but then watching the hired hand proved to be adequate
compensation.

Based on past experience, Lily expected him
to be old, grizzled, and down-on-his-luck. Instead, Cam was twenty,
as sleek and muscled and firm-jawed as a muskellunge, with an open
smile and black Scotch-eyes that were curious, cheering and bold.
“A bit too bold if you ask me,” said Auntie, too exhausted to eat
her supper. “But he’s a good worker, for what you’re payin’ him,”
Uncle protested from his makeshift bed. He was quickly skewered
into silence, and sulked for the remainder of the evening.

To Aunt Bridie Cam was painfully polite and
deferential: “Which section of trees ought to come down next, mum?”
And he certainly was a good worker. In ninety-degree heat he
stripped to his waist, confronted the four-foot girth of a pine,
and slung his executioner’s axe. Sweat raced in rivulets down the
small of his back, staining his trousers to the thighs. Positioning
herself perfectly from row to row among the beans, Lily was able to
keep a close watch on his performance for her Aunt.

The feelings Lily was experiencing were new,
and puzzling. She knew what animals suffered to procreate and what
men and women, for inscrutable reasons, accomplished in their
midnight chambers. That such acts might be imbued with the most
exquisite configuration of emotion, titillation and imagining had
not occurred to her outside the vague intimations of her dreams.
Until now. Her legs, made sturdy with labouring, went to jelly, and
she found herself having to squat on her knees while her heart
yearned outward towards bursting and her mind swelled with images
of Cam’s arms like axe-handles grappling her, bending her till she
dissolved and floated through them.

When he spoke to her at lunch or after
supper as he lay in the hay-patch scrutinizing her feeding of the
hens, she lost her breath, and his eyes would twinkle with
accomplishment. Always he was polite, solicitous: “Can I help you
with that, Lily?” “Looks too heavy for you, that pail.” But his
glance clung to her, and she wondered frantically if he too could
see them, if even the extra band of muslim Auntie insisted she tie
around them were not enough to bridle them.

“
That young man’s got to
go,” Aunt Bridie said near month’s end. “He never stops leerin’ at
Lily.”

“
But the girl’s fifteen,”
said Chester. “She’s bound to attract the boys.”

There was more puzzlement than pique in
Bridie’s glare.

“
I’ll stay out of his way,
Auntie.”

“
He’s a real good worker,
woman. You know how bad my back’s been lately.”

“
I know how bad your
medicine’s been,” she shot back. Then full of weariness she said,
“All right. He stays. But just till the next section’s done. Then
out he goes, bag and baggage.”

As if he had overheard the threat, Cam took
his glistening biceps and shoulders to the farthest corner of the
timber stand, out of sight and harm’s way. He ate his lunch in the
woods. At supper he wore a clean shirt and got Auntie talking about
her business, the scandal of the Family Compact banks, and even
radical politics. She was amazed to learn that one so young and
handicapped by muscle could understand the imperatives of George
Brown’s ‘true grit’ policies. Lily, naturally, had expected such
genius from the outset. Uncle Chester swung between envy and
relief.

September came. The muggy weather remained.
So did Cam. Aunt Bridie went off to cook “for the last time, I
swear by all the snakes in Scotland!” Lily was now hurt because Cam
made no attempt to break his vows to Auntie. He stayed in the bush
after supper until twilight. Lily heard the punch of his axe
against the yielding pine. Auntie would be coming home for sure
next day. I’ll have to go to him, Lily thought. And why not?
Something inevitable and foregone has already happened; it’s only
the working out that’s left.

Leaving Uncle Chester slumped in a stupor,
Lily slipped out into the gloaming. It was a perfect night. Even
Bachelor Bill had gone off to town in his buggy. They would be
alone under a consenting moon. With no particular stratagem in mind
Lily walked through the haze towards the barn. A sound, like the
cry of a bird struck by talons, came from Lily’s left. She stopped.
Now it was a soft mewling. Old Bill’s tabby sprouting kittens
again? Lily sidled through the beanstalks and came up behind the
Indian corn that bordered on Bachelor Bill’s property. His log barn
was visible. Lily knew there were no animals behind that barn. The
hair on her neck rose; she closed her eyes, but it made no
difference: the images before her were inerasable.

Violet was half-sitting with her back
against the wall, her loose dress ripped open to expose her
sac-like breasts, which Cam was pulling at with the stems of his
fingers as if he were stretching dough, while Violet’s own hands
were busy in Cam’s lap coaxing his flabby thing as they would the
Guernsey’s nozzle. Even at this distance, Lily could feel all the
hurt and excruciating joy in Violet’s unfettered wail of sexual
release – with no word to mitigate its coarse, untongued violation
of the night-air.

“
Shut up, ya goddam fuckin’
bitch! Shut the hell up!” He slapped her so hard her head snapped
back and hit the boards behind her. Then he was shoving his
instrument into his trousers and stomping away into the dark.
Violet’s sobs pursued him, mongoloid and discordant. But, at the
first nicker of Bachelor Bill’s pony in the lane, she stopped,
touched her breasts tenderly where Cam’s hands had fed themselves,
pulled her dress together, and scuttled towards the unlit
cabin.

Lily stood in the corn, letting the
mosquitoes have their way. Above her the jib of the quartering moon
luffed, and went out.

5

If it hadn’t been for Bachelor Bill, they
would have had no warning at all.

“
Three of ‘em,
city-biddies,” he said to Auntie at the doorstep, thrilled and
appalled. “All dolled up for christenin’ by the look of it.” And he
winked mysteriously towards Lily. “An’ they already made the turn,
I reckon.”

Aunt Bridie never panicked, especially on
Saturday afternoons in September with the weather clement and the
week’s marketing done. “If God hadn’t been Presbyterian,” she would
say, “he’d've made his Sabbath on Sair’day afternoons so’s all of
us could rest together.” Nonetheless, she went indoors at a trot,
signaling for Lily to follow.

“
It’s the ladies aid for
sure,” she mumbled. Wordlessly they hurried about “straightening
up” the living area. Auntie covered the table, set it for tea and
seeing that Lily had automatically stirred the ashes from the
dinner-time fire, smiled shortly and put the kettle on. She turned
to Lily. “This is about you, you can be sure.”

No doubt they were coming to drag her away
to Miss Pringle’s school. Well, they’d need a block and tackle, and
some good chain.

“
Go an’ see that Uncle of
yours is safe in his stall,” Aunt Bridie said, putting an apron
over her Saturday housedress but otherwise making no further
personal concessions to the visitors. Lily’s heart sank. “Oh, don’t
start poutin’ before you’re pricked”, snapped Auntie. “I want you
in here for this, I do.”

Lily raced back to the barn, scattering a
conference or two of hens en route. Uncle Chester was in his shop,
now fully restored to him since Cam’s sudden departure. Uncle had
not bothered even to remove the pallet, finding it a more
convenient spot to rest between stints at the workbench. Uncle
Chester was resting.

The “delegation”, as Auntie called them
afterwards, had arrived: the mistresses McHarg, Salter and
McWhinney – in convoy, the minister’s wife leading.

“I think we oughta get right to the point,”
said Mrs. McWhinney with mercantilist efficiency, draining her cup
and licking the sugar off the edges.

“
We’re grateful for the tea
an’ all,” said Josephine Salter. “Them little tarts with the
crunchy centre was
superb
; could you let me have the
recipe sometime?”

“
The point,” said the
Reverend McHarg’s ambassadress, “is Lily.” Lily watched the mobile
ball-bearings of her eyes. Auntie poured Mrs. McWhinney another cup
of tea. “The point is the baptism of this innocent, abused
child.”

“
We know how good you been
to her an’ all,” added Josephine hastily, though the accused seemed
busy with estimating Mrs. McWhinney’s capacity for sugar. “Nobody
can take that away from you. You been a wonderful momma to this
dear little foundlin’ here. Just the other night I says to Mr.
Salter –”

“
What Josie’s sayin’,
Bridie, is that it may be all right for you to reject your Maker,
to live out here in a state of sin and run the risk of eternal
damnation –”

“
Go ahead an’ take it,”
Aunt Bridie said to the C. of E. with her eye on the last of the
walnut tarts. “Sorry, Clara, you was sayin’?”

“
She was talkin’ about the
fires of Hell, she was,” said Mrs. Salter, warming to her husband’s
favourite theme.

“
You’re a bright woman,
Bridie. Nobody denies you that. You work hard an’ you keep your own
counsel. Well an’ good. But we’re talkin’ here about the immortal
soul of an innocent. Now we all might come from different churches,
an’ we have our set-to’s from time to time, but we all agree on
this – the girl deserves a chance to save her own soul.”

“
It don’t even matter who
baptizes her,” added Mrs. Salter with Methodist charity. “It’s just
gotta be done, that’s all.”

Mrs. McWhinney agreed on behalf of the
Church of England but her assent was muffled by walnut tart. No one
had looked directly at Lily during this entire conversation though
she was occasionally appropriated by flutters of a finger or a
glancing nod. Lily was trying to catch her Aunt’s eye but Bridie
was now seated with her back straight, watching each of the
speakers with intense interest.

“
Do you intend to toss a
coin?” she asked.