Lily's Story (27 page)

“
My God,” he
said, his regimental swordgrip bracing her breasts, “you’re the
most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”

Lily reached up, seized the
engorged sceptre with both hands and guided the royal seed-pod
home.

10

1

L
ily was cleaning out
the stalls of Benjamin and the Guernsey – as well as that of Gert,
the little Jersey they’d acquired from Old Bill. Both cows had been
bred to an itinerant bull who showed up at their gate one day with
his master in tow, but it appeared as if only the Jersey was about
to bear the fruits of that brief, awesome fusing. Lily poked at the
mess in front of her. At least in January there was little smell,
and the frozen manure and straw could be forked rather than
shovelled. Aunt Bridie and Old Bill were in the woodlot see-sawing
the stiff pine logs into portable lengths – finding the packed snow
and tightened earth a convenient, almost hospitable, environment in
which to labour. Uncle Chester, walking, unaided now, would be
keeping himself “useful” by replenishing the wood in both stove and
fireplace, and peeking out the window every once in a while in
order to be amazed by the filigreed snow on boughs he was now
seeing as if for the first time.

As Lily jerked a forkful of
manure onto the sled, she felt a twinge in her lower abdomen. She
stood stock-still as the wavelets of pain worked themselves ashore.
She leaned on her fork, catching her breath and waiting for worse.
Something fibrous and alien cramped in her, seeking expulsion. I’m
going to faint, she thought, I’m going to fall face-first into that
cow-shit and smother, and then maybe the thing will abandon me.

The sharp air in her
lungs brought her steadily upright again. Well, she thought, I
can’t do this sort of work anymore. I’ll have to tell Aunt Bridie.
The question is no longer when but how much?

L
ily waited until Old
Bill had tucked Uncle Chester into his robes and set off in the
cutter with him for a leisurely ride through the oak ridge to
Little Lake, where it was reported the town’s best mingled with the
township hopefuls upon the ice-pond. Uncle Chester had even talked
of fitting himself out with skates. “So’s he can sprain his other
wrist an’ his neck to boot,” Auntie said not unkindly when they had
disappeared into the snowy woods.

Not having spent long
enough in polite society to become practiced in its subtle arts,
Lily could think of no indirect way of conveying her news. “I got
somethin’ I have to tell you,” she said when they had settled at
opposite ends of a half-finished quilt.

“
I figured so.
You ain’t stopped fidgetin’ once since dinner. A body’d think you’d
contracted St. Vitus’ Dance or somethin’.”

“
I’m
pregnant,” Lily said. “Four months and three days.”

Whatever story Bridie
Ramsbottom had braced herself for, this one was not it. Over the
next hour her responses, largely monologic, bridged the
generational silences in that intense woman’s room.

“
That’s not
possible! What on earth do you know of such things?”

Then, following the succinct
disclosure of certain irrefutable biological events: “My lord,
child! Do you know what you’ve done? You got a babe inside of you,
growin’ away in there. Do you have any idea what that means? What
that can do to you?”

Lily said she assumed she was
going to be a mother, in June.

“
You feelin’
all right?”

“
I’m
fine.”

“
Don’t you go
shovellin’ manure now, you promise me?”

“
I can’t work
in the barn no more. I’m sorry.”

“
I knew I
never should’ve let you go with that woman. Look at what she’s
done! I told you the city ways’d destroy you, didn’t I? But I don’t
blame you, child, I really don’t. I put the blame onto the
shoulders of Alice Templeton, I do. An’ somethin’ll be done about
it, I promise you.”

The life and mores of the
Templetons were recounted at length.

“
But want can
we do, eh? You an’ me? If I go rantin’ an’ ravin’ across town,
everybody’ll know, an’ your life’ll be in tatters. I warned you,
Lily, I did, why didn’t you listen to me, why didn’t you listen to
your…Auntie?”

As simply as she could, Lily
suggested that no one had seduced or deceived her.

“
Who
was
the scoundrel, then? You can’t tell me a girl of your age
an’ your innocence wasn’t abused by some blackguard bent on
corruption. You forget, child, I lived in Toronto an’ London, I
went out to service with no family to back me up. There’s nothin’
you can tell me about ‘gentlemen’ I don’t already know twice over.
Why do you think I tried so hard to keep you here? An’ I went an’
trusted that woman who calls herself a Mayor’s wife, with her fancy
flowers an’ her fancy manners an’–”

Lily refused to divulge the
name of her seducer.

“
Every girl
who’s ever been in your position – an’ I say plenty in Toronto –
has said the same thing, at first,” Aunt Bridie said with
surprising gentleness. “But there’s no other way out of the mess,
lass. He will have to make amends. We’ve got the law, such as it
is, on our side. You are still a minor after all. If you can stand
him, then he must marry you. If not, then other arrangements can be
made.”

“
I can’t tell,
ever,” Lily said. “No one’d believe me anyways.”

“
Not
the
Mayor
?” Aunt Bridie went white.

“
Not anybody
you know; besides, he’s gone off to another country, where he’s
from. I’ll never see him again.”

“
Not a
Yankee?” She went green. “One of them visitors from the
Port?”

“
He’s gone,
Auntie,” Lily said firmly. Then: “I don’t want to see him
again.”

“
Don’t talk
such drivel! Look at me. Look me straight in the eye. I’m goin’ to
tell you what it means if we can’t get redress from the father of
this babe. You are an unmarried young woman, a minor, an’ you are
pregnant. In another month your belly will swell up an’ stick
straight out for all the world to see. An’ when it’s seen, the
tongues of the town will start waggin’, an’ you can’t dream in your
worst nightmare what they’ll say as they pass along the ‘gospel
truth’ from one to the other – they’ll whisper that your Uncle is
the father or Old Bill or worse, they’ll say you’ve been seen down
by the railroad shacks just like Violet hangin’ round them navvies
an’ deservin’ everythin’ you got from your sinnin’.”

Lily had no reply.

“
You won’t
ever be able to go into town without bein’ accosted by ruffians
believin’ you’re a scarlet woman an’ free game. Your Uncle an’ me
will have people whisper an’ snicker behind our backs when we’re in
Cameron’s or McWhinney’s. Now you know I don’t give a sweet fig for
the opinion of such people, but will
you
ever get used to
them churchin’ ladies thinkin’ an’ callin’ your child a bastard an’
keepin’ it out of school an’ makin’ it an outcast. What I’m sayin’
to you, Lily – you are the most precious thing that’s happened to
me since ever I was born – what I’m tellin’ you is as long as we
stay right here on this plot of land, our lives are our own, but as
soon as we step off, they belong to those people out there.” For a
moment she looked weary, beyond recovery. “We are women, Lily, an’
poor; the world’s not ours to make.”

“
I know,” Lily
said.

“T
hen there’s no hope
of the father bein’ found?”

“
No, Lily said
softly. Then more strongly: “I want to have the baby. Here. At
home.”

Bridie saw in the girl’s
face the very strength and determination and fragile naiveté that
had coalesced early in her own life and led to rebellion, flight,
engagement and exile. For the first time in two years she felt a
surge of the old, lost, pure anger uncorrupted by doubt or the
angst of repeated failure. Once again her girl’s mind was abuzz
with plans and stratagems.

“
We’ll
keep the babe,” she said. “No one,
not even Old Bill will know it’s yours. We’ll move you into the
kitchen for the winter, make you some large housedresses, keep
Chester in the dark as long as we can. An’ after it’s born, we’ll
say the child belongs to my cousin, an’ I’ll…go off to London an’
pretend to come back with it an’ –”

Auntie’s eyes glinted with
intrigue.

“
Oh, Lily,
we’ll manage,” she said. “We always have.”

Lily fell against Aunt Bridie’s
chest, pulling her arms about her, wanting to feel in the mere
closeness of flesh some mutual future. For a second Bridie
permitted the contact – a brief transfer of energies and
vulnerabilities – then drew resolutely back.

“
We’ll have to
be strong, little one,” she whispered.

Moments later – pretending to
stir the fire, her back turned – she released her tears. But these
were not the now-familiar sobs of rage and recrimination that shook
through her bones in the deep of the night; these were a woman’s
fresh, unguarded, outwelling tears of sadness and joy-of-being and
irretrievable regret. They poured unabashed down the unfamiliar
terrain of Bridie’s cheek as she turned to marvel again at the
slight marrowing swell of the girl’s abdomen.

“
After that
thing with Bertie,” she said. “I wanted so bad for Chester an’ me
to have a babe of our own.”

2

T
wo days later as Lily
was preparing a mustard plaster for the cold Uncle Chester had
caught while travelling to the ice-pond, the patient whispered
behind her: “Love, if you have anythin’ you need to tell your
Uncle, go right ahead. You can trust me. And if I need to, I can
handle your Auntie.” The last remark was qualified somewhat by a
spasm of coughing. But the import of his commentary was clear. That
evening when Aunt Bridie shuffled in wearily from the woodlot,
Uncle was sworn to secrecy and taken into the conspiracy. He beamed
for days.

T
he plot went well
throughout the winter. The ruse of having Lily work exclusively
indoors was quite plausible, though few of the stray accidental
visitors who found their gates in the muffling snows of that season
bothered to persevere with their inquiries, and Old Bill simply had
none of any ilk. Ever since Violet had been taken away, he had
become even more taciturn and withdrawn, though his work for Auntie
was done with a conscientious concern verging on the sycophantic.
Occasionally he would consent to take Sunday dinner with them, but
most of the time he ate on the job or took Auntie’s offerings back
to his hermitage. Two or three times that autumn they heard the
discordant strains of the mouth-organ seeking some elusive
harmonies, and would know that he had ‘fallen off the wagon’ again.
Mostly though he slept off his excesses and popped up a day later
at dawn ready for work as if nothing had happened. One December
night after an exhausting day with Aunt Bridie in the woodlot, Old
Bill went to his hut, downed a couple of slugs of ‘rheumatism
juice’, and took up his instrument. The disjunctive jangling of
tones startled him more than it usually did, and be blew all the
more stridently – desperate for some chording, some key he could
recognize as his own. But the discordances mocked him, skirled to a
mad laughter – their decibels jarring and random. Old Bill’s wild
shriek brought Lily upright in her sleep. It was followed by two
sharp howls of pain, then the long silence of the nether solstice.
Aunt Bridie marched across to his hut first thing in the morning,
expecting the worst. Old Bill was slumped on a pile of filthy rags
some of which had been his clothes. Dried blood coated his mouth,
jaw and throat. He saw Bridie and gave a clenched grin. The stumps
of his last two teeth flashed at her jaggedly, their blackening
nerves adrift in the icy air like sprung lute strings.

“
They fell
out,” he laughed, and winced horribly.

I
f old Bill, in seeing
Lily shuffle flat-footed about the kitchen, had any suspicions, he
kept them locked away with all the other secrets, precious and
malign, he stored away for a future he’d already given up on. Nor
did the occasional traveller caught in a January squall or one of
the ice-storms of February, do anything more than smile their
gratitude for the warmth of Lily’s hospitality. In fact the only
visitors to arrive with a predetermined purpose were three
gentlemen who said they were from “the railway” and asked to see
Aunt Bridie alone. Lily and Uncle Chester went for a slow walk
through the arbours of snow, holding each other upright and sending
their laughter skyward. When they got back, Aunt Bridie forced a
smile to acknowledge their evident happiness, but Lily recognized
the subtle signs telling her the news was grim. “They wanted to buy
us out,” she scoffed. “I told them where to go, and it ain’t cool
there.”

One of the side-effects
of the conspiracy was that more quilts – some with an interesting
new design that could have been interpreted as either a mushroom or
a baby’s fist – got made that winter than last, and the woodlot was
cleared on the north-east side right back to the Grand Trunk
property. Only a windbreak of pines on the north-west side
separated them from the village-to-be. Auntie could now cut and saw
and haul and also keep an appraiser’s eye on the phantom townsite
wherein so many of her hopes now lay. In March during a great
snowsquall, Bridie was called from her woodlot and Lily from her
stove to attend the birth of the Jersey’s first calf. Lily took a
more than usual interest in the event.