Lily's Story (34 page)

The railway expropriation left them with so
little land that they dismantled what was left of the hen-houses to
make room for more garden. A make-shift coop was rigged up near the
barn, but no chickens were to be installed until after the wedding.
In the meantime, Booster the gander was made a gift of three
lubricious females, whom he trod regularly and flamboyantly near
the pond below Lily’s window.

On the last day of August she heard Tom’s
step in the field; he wasn’t whistling. She came out to meet him,
apprehensive. He stopped just where the stunted sunflowers grimaced
in the thinning light.

“
What’s
happened?”

“
Nothing much. They’ve
finished the new freight-shed.”

She brightened.

His smile was genuine but guarded. He was
looking directly in her eyes, as if searching for some valuable
that might not ever have been lost, for some certainty the
knowledge of which could have been as deadly as it was
redemptive.

“
They’re taking on
stevedores. Full time.”

Lily waited.

“
I’m one of
them.”

After supper they set the date. The harvest
moon – ovular, increscent – was almost wholly above the horizon
before Old Bill saw the cottage door open and a male figure bound
towards the barn in a step that was somewhere between a quick march
and a gavotte. He smiled toothlessly, and thought again of Violet,
and absence.

3

The ceremony itself took
place on a warm Saturday morning in September ‘on the porch’ of the
Anglican Church, the latter expedient being resorted to as the best
compromise, considering the lapse faith of the groom and the
apostasy of the bride. “It would mean a great deal to Auntie,” Tom
had said and Lily replied, “Well, one of our Aunts anyway,” and
smiled in the hope that Bridie herself might savour the ironies.
Mrs. Edgeworth was too ill to travel, and so it fell to Alice and
Maurice Templeton to serve as witness and as family for the
occasion. Mrs. Templeton was deliciously horrified at the thought
of a semi-sanctified union under some shady portico in the far
reaches of the nave. She insisted that Lily wear the dress she had
worn to the Great Western Ball three years before, and though it
needed some alterations, Lily was happy with the results – and the
appropriateness.
He
won’t remember, she thought, but I will. A small reception –
just tea, cakes and chilled champagne among the rusting flowers –
with the Templeton’s daughters and their prospering husbands down
from Toronto to supervise the move of their parents. For Mrs.
Templeton, and Lily, too, that was the only sad aspect of an
otherwise happy series of events. Maurice had at last been
persuaded that his business and political fortunes lay ahead of him
in the provincial capital, and his wife – eager to be near her
first grandchild – was in no position to second his reluctance. The
decision had been made. Both Lily and her benefactress well knew
that, despite the miracle of railroads, a separation of two hundred
miles and a full social stratum in that day meant it would be many
years before they were likely to meet again, if ever.

Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester did not come.
Lily had got Tom to write them a letter a few days after his
arrival, telling them of the impending marriage, and several days
later a long letter arrived from “Oil Springs, Enniskillen
Township.” Needless to say, Aunt Bridie was relieved to learn that
Lily was all right, and delighted with the proposed union. No
mention was made of the baby’s death.” “We are doing fine,” she
went on. “Please don’t worry. When you come to us I’ll explain why
we did what we did, though I’m not sure I even understand it
myself. Anyway, I reckon you won’t believe this but Chester and me
took all the money from the sale – robbery – of the farm and all
the savings in the bank we all helped to earn, and we packed up in
one day and moved down here. Your Uncle’s friend in London said we
should join up with his friend from New York and form a company to
search for oil. I didn’t know anything about oil but I’m learning
fast. Mr. Armbruster is a wonderful man. We’re all living for a
while here in the Lucky Derrick Hotel. We have a huge piece of land
out by Black Creek. Uncle Chester is back making things like
barrels and rigs. Mr. Armbruster and I look after the business end.
We are doing very well. We may be rich some day. But you know,
Lily, your happiness means so much to us. We want you and Tom to
come and stay with us as soon as you can.”

As it turned out, after several exchanges of
correspondence, Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester, because of their
work it seemed, were unable to come to the wedding, but Tom and
Lily were to go to Oil Springs for their honeymoon, and then go on
to London for a week to visit with Mrs. Edgeworth.

For Lily none of this seemed real. For her
the only grip upon reality in the days leading up to the ceremony
was the presence of Tom: in the flesh she clove to daily and in the
dreams she cherished and prolonged through the solitary nights. I
must not believe in such happiness, she thought. I may enjoy it,
regret it, kindle it, remember it – but it’s not mine to possess
outright. But her dreams whispered ‘yes’.

4

After the morning vows and the afternoon
champagne and the extended goodbyes, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Marshall
were carried off by the engines of the Great Western Railway as far
as Wyoming Station, where they disembarked in preparation for the
fifteen-mile journey south to the gum-beds of Enniskillen.

“
At least we don’t have
trunks to lug about,” Tom said, looking around in bewilderment at
the prospectors and their families as they dragged steam-trunks,
roped-in suitcases, haversacks, tool-boxes and assorted bundles of
blankets and clothing along the plank platform and down the
improvised alleys of the shantytown. Babies squalled, draymen
cursed, women wept, husbands railed and cuffed. Somehow bag and
baggage managed to find its way onto the waiting carts. Driven by
the fearsome oaths of the teamsters, the horses lurched and skidded
southward on what appeared to be a road through the
bush.

“
Plank road all the way to
Oil Springs,” a grizzled veteran of these wars yelled whiskily into
Tom’s face. “Just built her last month. A joy to ride
on!”

Lily squeezed Tom’s arm in a reassuring
gesture. It struck her forcefully how much of an urban man he was.
She wondered if he knew or would be upset to know how much at home
she felt here looking beyond this ephemeral paraphernalia and
seeing the rows of farms backing sleepily onto the right-of-way, a
team of oxen currying the earth with unfathomable patience, the
distant chime of an axe in some field-to-be, the curl of woodsmoke
from homesteads secure among the trees, a small girl near the
tracks gathering wild columbine.

“
There’s our coach,” Lily
shouted.

Anyone remotely prejudiced by the
romanticism of the stagecoach in the American wild-west would have
been shocked by the contraption that went under that guise in
Lambton County in 1861. Tom was speechless. What he saw was a sort
of haywagon on which had been erected five backless benches set in
theatrical rows and over which there perched a wooden roof held up
by several stilts that also served to lend the allusion of windows
and doors. Some prankster had tacked an orange fringe around the
perimeter of the roof, on which were hand-printed these
already-fading letters: ‘Enniskillen Coach Lines: the Road to
Oil’.

“
Let’s snuggle,” Lily said,
climbing onto the last bench, arranging her dress, and pulling Tom
and their suitcase up. “Nobody’ll see us back here.”

“
We’ll get all the mud from
the wheels if we sit here,” Tom said. “Your dress’ll be
ruined.”

“
What chance has it got
anyway?”

Finally he laughed and moved in beside her.
“You’re a funny one,” he said, putting the shawl around her.

“
I’d like to be,” Lily
said.

Ten minutes after the coach, its
foul-mouthed driver, its four horses and ten passengers left the
‘depot’ at Wyoming, they were swallowed by the bush so thoroughly
and so possessively that the effronteries of the makeshift town
were instantly forgotten. Even the farms cut only one concession
deep into the glacial alluvium of hardwood stands, festering
swamps, treacherous sloughs and gravel-beds, and oozing boils of
pent-up petroleum – none of which were sympathetic to
road-construction. Three times the Road-to-Oil express had to be
reactivated by the passengers themselves – the lurid imprecations
of the driver-conductor seeming to lose their miraculous power the
further they penetrated these wilds. On the first two occasions,
where sloughs had simply gulped down both planks and supporting
logs, the three women passengers were implored to remain aboard
while the combined animus of the seven gentlemen and the verbal
efforts of the owner-operator succeeded in disgorging the wheels
long enough for the horses to reach secure ground. Tom was soaked
and muddy; Lily wrapped a shawl around his shivering: “You need
somethin’ to warm you up,” she whispered. There was no reply. On
the third occasion, when a ruptured plank caused one of the front
wheels to snap off and flung the coach and all into the muck beside
the road, even the ladies had to descend and pitch in, after brief
and less-than-dignified trips into the underbrush. Lily looked as
if she had just danced the night away in a hog-wallow. Only the
intervention of two burly passengers prevented Tom from dismantling
the driver’s cursing-apparatus.

“
Damn your Aunt anyway!”
Tom said, putting the shawl between them and grabbing at a strut to
steady himself.

Lily held her laughter firmly in check.
Half-an-hour later she was snoozing on his broad shoulder.

“
I don’t believe it,” Tom
was saying in her left ear. “Civilization. Of a sort.”

“
That there’s Petroli-ar!”
shouted the driver in his best tour-guide voice. “Don’t blink now
or you’ll miss ’er!”

To their left they could see a broad
clearing, the steeple of a church, several brave storefronts, and a
scattering of shanties, tents and open-air camps. But what caught
every eye in the carriage except the driver’s was the huge brick
refinery with its sixteen stills and its chimney towering above the
highest elm or pine. In the distant clearings the passengers saw
their first three-poled oil-rig, the jerker-lines pecking away at
the earth below like robins after a rain.

“
My God,” Tom said as they
plunged again into the bush, “where
are
we going? Three hours ago we were
sipping champagne in a garden.”

“
Auntie says it’s a grand
place for a honeymoon.”

“
If you’re a toad,” Tom
said.

Lily laughed out loud, waking the woman in
front of her.

“
You must have
some
Aunt,” Tom said,
struggling to keep a straight face.

It appeared Aunt Bridie may have been right.
Towards the end of their third hour of jouncing, with the sun
beginning to weaken over the western rim, they saw the unmistakable
signs of human habitation. No farms of any kind, but rugged
clearings – large and small – had been hacked and slashed out of
the wilderness. It looked like a war zone, as pines lay rotting
where they had been slaughtered, stumps protruded and tilted
every-which-way, while still other trees – giant ash or ironwood –
remained afoot, though horribly gashed and left to cure themselves.
A tent or a shack were the only visible dwellings, usually squatted
right beside a tri-pod log-derrick or a mound of greasy clay or
occasionally near a drilling-rig pounding into the rock below.
Everywhere the odour of oil hung in the air – like the aura of
temptation itself.

The town proper began like most other
pioneer communities: razed clearings with cabins or plank shanties
arranged more-or-less along roadways that might – with effort,
imagination and luck – become streets with names. Gazing upon the
mud-spattered beauty of his bride, Tom felt his heart sink even
lower, beyond anger. Lily opened her eyes and brushed his cheek
with her lips.

“
Look!” she
said.

The rutted road had mysteriously flattened
and smoothed to the gritty bounce of gravel. In the midst of the
outlying shantytown, they now beheld – like a palm-sweetened oasis
or some miracle akin to the loaves-and-fishes – a self-contained
one-street town. The silvery dusk-glow may have lent it more allure
than it deserved, but it was a wondrous sight to the travel-weary
arrivals.

King Street, so declared by the
black-and-white signs on either side and repeated at the two
crossroads interrupting its quarter-mile length, was a freshly
planked broadway extending as far as the eye could see, surmounted
by sidewalks of finer board and trim railings, and overlooked by
posts carrying the telegraph wire and bearing what appeared to be
lamps of some sort. The building and shops on King Street – many
more than two storeys high – faced one another, complacent in their
painted splendor, proud of their false fronts and perfectly
satisfied in their mutual adoration. The coach rattled mechanically
along, passing other, more elegant carriages and making the
gleaming glass-and-clapboard facades of shops, taverns and offices
a magical blur full of undefined promise.

“
Six hotels, five gambling
dens and a dozen oil companies!” proclaimed their indefatigable
guide. “An’ this here’s the one we stop at.”