Lily's Story (22 page)

Regardless of
party affiliation or ideological bent, Lily learned that there were
four elements common to a politician’s life: food, liquor, gossip
and sex. Indeed, she soon became adept at identifying parliamentary
loyalties not by the swagger and fire of the rhetoric but by the
method through which the fourth element was realized. The very
first evening she attended one of these salons – radiant in
Pamela’s ‘best’, her hair brushed to perfection, her eyes alight
with curiosity and undirected intellige
nce – Lily was standing suitably aloof from a heated
exchange about the abomination of separate school rights, intent on
following the swing of the argument, when she felt a broad,
fingerless appendage slink its way across the stretched silk at her
lower back.

“
Don’t let
those Orangemen put ideas into your pretty head,” whispered the
owner of the errant hand into her left ear. Lily turned to see Dr.
Michaelmas, the ardent Reformer, smiling behind his trimmed
moustaches.

“
It’s not my
head concerns me at the moment,” Lily said, slipping to one side
and casting him an ambivalent smile. Without a doubt, she
concluded, you could tell a Reformer because they were all sly
touch, accidental nudge, a fleshy press in tight corners. She
assumed they believed too passionately in the causes of justice and
individual liberty to take full-frontal advantage of maids or
vulnerable lady’s companions. The Old Tories, on the other hand,
because of their advanced infirmities or belief in divine right,
where the boldest. Judge Maitland, for example, stalked her in the
den on the pretext of discussing recipes and tried to pinch her bum
through two layers of crinoline. “My God, you’re a little beauty,”
he drooled, aiming a claw at the exposed pink of her bosom, his
lust positively aquiline. Lily knew she could scream for help, but
instead she curled up her fingers and delivered a muted rebuff to
the old scarecrow’s lower abdomen – not hard enough to cripple his
intent outright yet insistent enough to make him wheeze, double,
clutch his ringing bells, and hobble towards the parlour. She
watched him trying to straighten his stride as he headed for the
brandy. “Got your limp again?” said McWhinney, the clothier. “Touch
of the gout,” whistled his Honour. At the close of the evening Lily
came up to the startled jurist and said, “Here’s the recipes you
asked for. Mrs. Templeton helped me write them out for
you.”

The radicals,
or Clear Grits as they styled themselves, so loved the buzz of
their own perorations that they made their passes at her in verbal
terms only: innuendo,
double
entendre
,
a
sotto
voce
vulgarism when desire
overwhelmed – though she had little doubt that, were their sundry
propositions to be accepted, they might have flashed the genuine
metal. However, they soon discovered that this waif “from the
sticks” was unconscionably swift at rejoinder and not as accustomed
to “holding her peace” as a real lady would be.

“
Women’ll
never play a role in politics,” declared Andrew Plympton, sitting
member for Kent. Lily had been nodding politely to his insatiable
sermonizing for almost twenty minutes. “You ask them to talk and
they gossip; you ask them to act and they dither. Politics is a
tough, hard grind to hold your nose to. Women,” he said, lowering
his voice and leering into her bodice, “are not
up to it
,
their house is
divided
, they’re
a
soft
touch
, if you get what I
mean.”

“
Like this?”
Lily said, squeezing a forefinger with unimpeachable naiveté into
the pudge of his protruding belly. His blush bordered on
rouge
.

“
That orphling brat of
Templeton’s got a wicked tongue in her head,” he told a consoling
judge later. “She needs to be taken in hand.” But of course they
had already tried that.

Not once had she been accosted by any of the
Orangemen. They were either uninterested in anything but the
eradication of popery or were put off by the gold cross she wore on
these occasions.

Lily’s rebuffs and inventive parries did not
escape the notice of Alice Templeton. “You’re learning fast and
well,” she said with undisguised admiration.

“
Are they all like
that?”

“
Most of them, I’m afraid.
It’s the climate.”

Lily laughed but then said soberly, “Why do
we put up with it?”

Mrs. Templeton sighed deeply enough to
accommodate the feelings of most of her sex. “There’s an awful lot
more we have to put with,” she said.

Not me, Lily thought. There must be another
way.

3

When Mrs. Templeton heard
that Lily had never seen the Lake, she was shocked, and set about
to remedy the situation. Lily politely refused her offer of a
cruise on the
Michigan
or one of the other steamers now plying the water routes on a
regular basis.

“
You mean you wish to walk
down there and just look at it?” she said, swivelling on the piano
bench to face Lily.

“
Yes, that’s
all.”

“
But, pet, why didn’t you
do so when you lived at Bridie’s? The sand beach is no more than
half-a-mile through the pinery back of your place. You mean to say
in all the years you lived there you never once saw the
Lake?”

“
Auntie was strict about
that,” Lily said defensively. “She was always worried about the
fishermen. Besides, she never liked me just traipsin’ off on my
own. Could you blame her?”

“
Not at all,” said Mrs.
Templeton, closing the sheet music. “Goodness knows a number of the
town girls’ve been accosted by the riff raff down there cuttin’
brush for the railway. Fishermen, I hear tell, are even worse.” Her
tone was less-than-serious.

“
May I go,
then?”

“
Of course, pet. I’m
teasin’ a bit. You just follow Front Street until it turns into the
train the Slocum people sometimes use to get down to the fishery.
Just before it comes out at the swamp below the beach, veer right –
you’ll see an Indian trail that’ll take you over the dunes to
Canatara beach. Of course, you could also walk up the coast past
the fisherman’s shanties, but I wouldn’t advise it.”

“
I’ll go right now, if I
may?”

“
Well, all right. But
I
was
tunin’ up
here to start your dancin’ lessons,” she said. “We mustn’t wait too
long. Never know when a big fancy-ball might be
upcomin’.”

Though it had been seven years since she had
walked through thick brush, Lily felt quite at home on the fishery
trail with the pines flaring overhead, the undergrowth spare and
cushioned – inhabited mainly by shadows and sudden gusts of
brilliant light where the sun fitfully penetrated. This trail was
worn and clear. Ten minutes or so into it, she heard the shouts of
the men with their nets along the river bank sweeping for pickerel.
Just ahead the woods brightened, so Lily, her instincts
surprisingly sharp, peered to the right and spotted the
crossed-blaze – perhaps ten years or more in age – that signaled a
Pottawatomie trail. She entered its welcoming shadow and with
mounting excitement moved from mark to mark towards the sound of
waves breaking in the near distance. She was scanning the trunks at
eye-level when she found herself abruptly in the full glare of
early afternoon sun. The roaring of the waves was much louder, but
when she looked ahead expecting to see the Lake, she saw only a
series of sand-dunes about twelve feet in height.

Lily took off her shoes and
stockings, dashed barefoot through the hot sand, fell scampering up
the nearest dune, got up – her palms burning, her legs scything
until she stood on top and caught her first glimpse of the
Freshwater Sea of the Hurons. What she saw initially was a single
colour – blue – stretching to the north and west so far that it
became indistinguishable from the sky. The sun’s light and the
sun’s heat were lost in a greater immensity: the vast, tense energy
of water on the move – homeward. When Lily was able to pull her
gaze from the vanishing point directly to the north-west – the very
spot where Arcturus would find his reflection that night – she saw
and heard at last the reach and yearn of the wavelets on the shore.
Their sound was the intermittent, quiescent breath of a hibernating
bear. Below the brassy surface that lay so placidly across the
whole of her vision, Lily could feel the pulse of a cobalt heart
whose energies charged the secret and vital and imperishable parts
of the earth’s anatomy. There was here,
she knew
, the sign of some pilgrimage
whose spirit she shared.

Then, a girl again, she dashed across the
crystalline beach and splashed and paddled and strutted and planted
her footprints in the permeable sands. It was Indian summer: the
air was warm and thin as new wine, the water icy, the sand purging.
She did not care to leave.

When she did, she mounted the highest dune
north from the trail and looked back towards the townsite. The
houses of Port Sarnia were not yet visible. But she could see –
where the Lake poured into the chasm of the St. Clair only
half-a-mile across – the shanties in which Slocum’s people kept
their nets and cleaned their catch. The north-west breeze blew the
stench of dead fish inland. Between the edge of the pinery and the
River lay a quarter-mile of swamps full of disheveled cattails and
yellowing milkweed. Could they ever build a railroad over that? To
the far south-west Lily saw also the palisades of Fort Gratiot, the
Stars and Stripes saluting self-importantly above it. Overhead,
herring gulls whirled and rehearsed their mating dance.

As she was about to start looking for the
blazed trail, Lily noted that to the north the sand-dunes were
thicker, reaching far back into some brush composed of runt alders
and hawthorn. Something drew her that way, away from the marked
trail. The dunes gradually diminished, as if at one time they had
been waves whose reward for such brave and ceaseless repetition had
been the blessing of silication. At the last of these unfulfilled
crests lay a small, rolling field dotted with dwarf trees. The
pinery enclosed it on the three remaining sides. Though there was
nothing visible to the unpractised eye to suggest that something
unnatural lay here concealed, Lily sensed immediately that she was
in a graveyard. The breeze did not penetrate this far but Lily felt
the eddies and parabolas of moving, sentient beings occupying
space. She stepped carefully ahead. The grave plots were not
clearly evident, the knot-grass and hoarhound and sand-burs
slightly smaller and less robust than those at the edges of each
site. Moreover, the ground had sunk almost imperceptibly, marking
the modest dimensions of these nether abodes.

After a while, Lily spotted the new grave;
its sand was piled two inches above ground to accommodate the
natural sinking later on; clusters of grass had been replanted to
root and flourish and camouflage in the coming spring. Winter would
soon provide its own disguise.

You are here at last, Lily thought. You came
under cover of dark and they laid you to rest among the other
nameless wanderers and refugees, the outcasts and pariahs and
survivors of genocide, the renegades, and the prophets like you,
Southener. I haven’t forgotten the jasper heart. Already it has
brought me more luck that I ever hoped for. I wish I could tell you
about it. And I won’t forget the vows. Somehow I’ll find the sacred
place in these woods and return the magic to it. I’ll come here
every time I can, and honour your grave. Surely here, with swamps
and dunes all around, you’ll be safe. No one would ever want this
land for anything. No one but me will ever know you’re here.

Suddenly she thought of her
mother’s headstone, alone in an unfrequented corner of some
stranger’s field, the script of her name chipped out by Sounder so
crudely no one would recall whose soul sought refuge below it. I
must go back there.
I
will.

“Lily, pet, you’re back at last,” said an
excited Mrs. Templeton.

“I hope you weren’t worried,” Lily said,
embarrassed by the state of her attire.

“
Heavens no, I just
couldn’t wait to tell you. It’s all been settled. The new
station’ll be ready in a week and the first train is comin’ in on
the nineteenth. There’ll be a dinner and a ball.”

“
Are we invited?” Lily
said.

“
Invited? We’re givin’ it!
And you got exactly two weeks to learn how to dance!”

4

A few minutes after the appointed hour, the
crowd, gathered on either side of the cleared cut that cradled the
tracks, heard the first sound of a locomotive in Lambton. Two
thousand necks craned south-eastward where the rails, a mere three
hundred yards away, curved past the town’s edge and sank into the
gloam of bushland. Nothing was seen but a glint of cold sun on the
shine of iron. The dignitaries, more than a hundred of them, pulled
their coats tightly over their chests and felt the crushing
obligation of having to appear moderately disinterested.

The sound – when it came – was low, ferric,
iron-on-iron, gaining volume and pitch as its mechanical, pistoning
repetitions consumed miles and scattered wildlife helter-skelter
through the shuddering swamps and fernshaws. Trunk and bole and
root quivered like tuning forks in its wake. Its thunder drowned
forest-sounds unchallenged since the ice laid down its alluvial
silence. Mouse and mole abandoned hollows in the earth eons-old and
fled, dizzy and blind, through the slicing light. Unable to
recognize its own voice, a trumpeter swan went mad in its music. In
unison, the engine shrieked steam.