Lily's Story (20 page)

Lily felt the strange eyes upon her long
before she looked up. Violet was watching her from among the
sunflowers, their stiffened stalks askew, their heads puffed and
blasted, their ebony eyes bulging with seed. She was motionless
except for her bare toes which wiggled happily among the withered
jaundice of abandoned petals.

“
Would you like to help?”
Lily said.

Violet whirled to flee. “It’s all right,”
Lily said. “Nobody’s home but me.”

Violet inched forward. “You could roll that
big pumpkin over to me,” Lily said. Violet sat down, wholly relaxed
now, on the dirt path, her fleshy thighs exposed almost to her
hips. She made a sound, heavy and laboured like a horse wheezing
through the pain of the heaves.

Lily blinked hard: she was certain that
Violet had just spoken to her, that through the distortion of the
girl’s cleft palate and wayward tongue, she clearly detected the
words “I watch”.

“
You want to watch?” Lily
said.

Violet’s eyes lit up. “Ahh waajjh, ahh
waajjh,” she said over and over, contorting the vowels even more in
her excitement. “Lily work, Lily work,” she said in her way, and
laughed.

So Violet watched in fascination as Lily’s
fingers went about their practiced tasks. The sun warmed them
equally. The afternoon rung its gentle changes. Lily found herself
humming one of her mother’s Gaelic airs. When she paused for
breath, the melody continued, an octave lower, in perfect pitch and
cadence, and with no loss of the lamentatious joy that originally
suffused it. Lily laboured while Violet sang.

Lily had strained and prepared the pulp and
placed the kettles in the cool of the back shed. She would have to
build a hot, sustaining fire in the stove when the day cooled off
some. They would eat a cold supper. Lily was tired and covered with
the sticky effluent of pumpkin, and feeling a bit empty inside
because as soon as Bachelor Bill’s cart squeaked around the bend,
Violet had leaped up and frantically dashed across to the log hut,
using the coops and her barn as camouflage. Moments after her
brother entered the house, she heard him shouting, followed by two
loud smacks, and then Violet’s familiar wail.

She was also wondering where Uncle had been
for the whole day. After getting a good fire started, she set out
to fetch him home. The first place she looked was the barn. He
wasn’t in his workshop; nor were there any signs that he had been
there. Puzzled, she walked over to the north coop from which no
noise save the clucking of hens had come since mid-morning. When
she opened the door, she was greeted by a spray of feathers and
dust; when it settled in the fading light, she saw Uncle Chester.
He lay sprawled on his elbows and ankles, his clay jug overturned
and empty beside him. He was awake, but his eyes were half-lidded
as if he were just waking or about to drop off. His face glowed as
if he had been sunburned. The place was a mess, and Uncle Chester
lay fully in it; bits of cast-off straw and chicken droppings and
hen-pecked dirt and disembowelled seed-husks and the spilled semen
of Springer, the ageless cockerel.

“
Uncle?”

“
Ah, is it you, Lily? You
see what she’s done now, you see what she’s driven us
to?”

“
Come on, Uncle. Your
supper’s ready.”

“
You’re the loyal one,
though. Chester can always count on his little Lily.” She had him
by the arm, and he made a half-hearted effort to get up. “You
wouldn’t drive a man to this, would you, my sweet?”

He was up, but when she let go, his eyes
rolled and he slumped back into the muck. “Where’d the room go?” he
said, trying to laugh through his coughing jag. When she got him up
again, he leaned his bulk against her and they both toppled.
“What’re we on, a whirligig? Jesus, let me off. Oh, sorry. Pardon
my French,” he spluttered. “It’s all her fault, you know. The whole
shitty mess.”

Lily was able to wrap one of his arms around
her shoulder and with great difficulty manoeuvre him out of the
coop and onto the path that led to the house. The odours of whiskey
and offal contended in the evening air.

“
You always thought she was
so damn smart, didn’t you, pickin’ this spot out. Well, you’re old
enough now to be told the truth,” he said, guiding his slurs. The
revelation was interrupted when he had to stop and retch into the
last of the cucumbers.

“
I’ll put some tea on,”
Lily said.

“
Always thought she was so
damn smart, she did. Picked this hell-hole in a pine-bush ‘cause it
was next to the army reserve. They’re gonna build a fort an’
barracks right there, she says, an’ we’ll be right next to them.
Some fort, eh? Nothin’ but pine trees an’ always will be! Some
smart, eh?”

“
The fire’s already goin’,”
Lily said, trying to change shoulders. Uncle’s limbs flopped
joylessly over her.

“
She was good to little
Bertie, I’ll give her her due there,” he said. “Then Bertie went
an’ died on us.”

They were at the house. Uncle Chester
dropped to his knees and vomited copiously on the flagstones,
spraying Lily in the process. Then he looked up at her as if he had
just wakened from a messy dream and was wondering where he was:
“Your Auntie’s a good woman,” he said softly. “An’ don’t you ever
forget it.”

“
I’ll get out the tub,”
Lily said. “I’ll bring your robe out. You can just sit right here.”
Lily hurried inside, got Uncle Chester a cup of clear tea, which he
spilled over his shirt, and then proceeded to prepare a bath for
him. Using the extra kettles from the Templetons, she boiled enough
water to almost fill the shiny metal tub Uncle had bought last
winter to help “straighten out” his unreliable backbone. Auntie had
objected, resorting to reason, then anger, then ridicule but
eventually giving in, her fingers almost paralytic as she counted
out the silver coins from her locked cash-box. Not once had she
used it, nor had Lily – both of them continuing to wash at the
outside pump in the sheltering dusk or once-a-week with a pail and
warm water and soap in the dank kitchen.

Lily went out to Uncle Chester with a
flannel sheet, and after managing to slurp half-a-cup of tea, he
wobbled to his feet and let Lily pull off his reeking shirt and
trousers under cover. Somehow, with Lily keeping the sheet in
place, he succeeded in removing his undervest and linens. Through
the sheet Lily could see how thin his arms and legs had become in
the last year or so, and how ludicrous his unhobbled belly looked
as it jiggled and sighed against his knees. He held her hand like a
little boy as he stepped into the tub, cupping his private parts in
an automatic gesture. But Lily had already turned away, leaving the
warm steamy room and walking wearily to the well-pump through the
cloudless afterglow of twilight. Her arm ached as she primed and
pumped, and her skin recoiled at the icy touch of the water.
Nonetheless, she stripped naked and scoured herself with lye-soap,
letting it sting and purge. The chill air, free of mosquitoes, soon
dried her, and she slipped her nightshirt on over the gooseflesh.
Suddenly she felt famished, and very thirsty. She felt the moon’s
weight on her back as she headed for the house.

Uncle Chester was out of the tub, sitting in
his wingback chair with the flannel ‘towel’ wrapped around him,
toga-like. He was clean, but the fatigue and strain of the day’s
excess was etched into his face. He’s an old man, thought Lily. He
forced a sheepish smile.

“
What would I do without
you, Lily?” he said wanly.

“
I’ll get some bread and
cheese for us,” Lily said. She didn’t know why but she added,
“Auntie won’t be back till tomorrow night.”

“
Come here an’ sit beside
your old uncle,” Chester said, avoiding the lamplight over the
sink. “Like you used to.”

Lily hesitated, but sensing the pall of
irreconcilable sadness over him, she padded across the room and sat
gingerly on the left arm of the chair. Uncle took her hand in his
as he used to after he had read to her or told her one of his
fantastic tales about the lawless Ramsbottoms of Lancashire.

“
Sometimes, Lily my lass, I
think you’re the only reason I carry on. Just the thought of you
smilin’ at me in the mornin’s, or dancin’ for me in this room, or
puttin’ your hand in mine like you’re doin’ now…” His voice trailed
off. He squeezed her hand tight, closing his puffed eyes. The
maple-wood in the firebox crackled. The lamplight wavered. Lily
felt very very sad. She squeezed Uncle’s hand. She couldn’t think
what else to do. Exhaustion was about to claim her. She was at the
furred edge of a dream. Something male and insistent was trying to
shape her right breast to its own liking. The left one cried out in
its loneliness. A throaty version of her own voice was
chanting:
Cam, Cam
.

Uncle Chester, looking
straight ahead, was kneading her breast with his left hand while
the right one slithered unmolested up the wedge of her thighs. “Oh
please, Lily, please…” he canted softly, like a plea from the
near-dead. For a second Lily was paralyzed – not with fear but with
the blind panic of indecision. The compulsion of this whispering in
her ears – rising and falling across the whole spectrum of despair
– left her unable to act or cry out or plead. Uncle’s fingers moved
up to her belly where they caressed and marvelled as they would
upon the pink sheen of a newborn. At last, dawning on some instinct
as old as the species itself, Lily said calmly but directly into
his ear: “Please don’t do this…
Papa!
”

Uncle Chester jerked back, tilted and fell
out of his chair. He put his face in his hands, and in a moment he
was wailing uncontrollably into them.

Lily was over by the stove. Uncle’s sobs
stabbed into her back, begging absolution. After a while they
subsided. She could hear him struggling to his feet.

“
Lily…lass…you won’t…you
won’t tell –”

“
Sit down. I’ll get you
your supper,” she said, shoving another faggot into the fire, and
remarking in awe how much of her Aunt’s tongue she had already made
her own.

7

1

Much had happened to the
world since 1855. The boom of the mid-fifties gave way to the bust
of ’fifty-seven and ’fifty-eight. In the wake of the depression few
if any in Lambton County prepared themselves for the imminent
publication of Darwin’s
On the Origin of
the Species
and if they had, would have
been conveniently outraged by its apostasy while simultaneously
appropriating it to explain – despite temporary recessions – the
inevitability of progress, North American style. The word itself
was in the air and in the seasons, on the tongues of Tory and
Reformer alike, and its principal articulation was in the pounding
of spikes and chug of the locomotive. The Great Western Railway had
hammered its cross-ties through the startled forests of Kent all
the way to Chatham and Windsor, eclipsing villages and fathering
towns, its patronymy as ineluctable as a mutant gene in biological
ascendancy. Mr. Brydges, the celebrated British railroad architect,
had already dreamt a horizontal line through the primeval maze
between London and Port Sarnia. Unbeknownst to the good burghers of
either town, the Grand Trunk had already hatched a nefarious scheme
to drive a second line, slightly north, from Stratford to the
military reserve at the junction of Lake and River, denoted on the
official maps as Point Edward though known locally as “the ordnance
lands” or “the rapids” or just plain “Slocum’s fishery”. At the
stroke of an architect’s pen, the hamlets of Forest and Thedford
were declared to have a future. The future also looked brighter for
John A. Macdonald (later Sir John) who, having purchased a
leasehold on said lands, carried off what may have been the first
Canadian
flip
(as
the quick turnover is now known in high finance).

Important as these latter developments were,
the most pressing concern for the Lambtonians of 1858 was the poor
weather and the resultant general crop failure. It rained all
spring, followed by weeks of summer drought. Every imaginable
variety of blight and vegetable pestilence – taking their cue from
Darwin – took full advantage of the situation and ravaged those
inferior species in need of extinction. Whilst some of the cereal
crops fared reasonably well, Aunt Bridie’s garden plot suffered
most cruelly. They watched it mildew in the wet and wither in the
desiccating heat, while slugs and mites and chiggers and rusts
flourished, as if somehow they deserved such happenstance. In
August, some paralytic bacterium swept through one of the coops;
the corpses had to be burned, like stubble.

For a time Uncle Chester even forgot about
his weak ticker and bad back, and pitched in to salvage part of the
potato crop and most of the hardy turnip. Lily flailed at bugs,
pinched worms and popped caterpillars till exhaustion overtook her
each night that summer, even though she could feel in every
fatigued muscle of her body the surge of the inevitable: their
business was in ruins.

“
We’ll start over again
next spring,” Auntie said after each disaster. “That’s why we got
cash in the bank.” In desperation she would mention the recent
survey of the pine-bush and swamps of the ordnance grounds, and
Uncle Chester would sigh knowingly.

But there was more to it than the accidents
of weather. Unable to keep up any deliveries except for a few eggs
to the old customers, Auntie had been compelled, as other farmers
had been tempted, to sell what produce her garden did yield to
jobbers, who collected it at the farm gate with their great wagons
and took it off to the expanding markets in town and to the wharfs
where lake-steamers whisked it daily to the hostels of Detroit and
Cleveland. Within months the stock-cars and hoppers of the Great
Western would be shunting produce between towns within hours, not
days. The ear of large-scale cash cropping had been
inaugurated.