Lily's Story (41 page)

South of the border, meanwhile,
a much more murderous rivalry was still being played out with gun
and hacksaw, pomp and propaganda. Over there, truths, it appeared,
were not self-evident: America’s dream-of-Eden-regained had been
momentarily stalled by fratricide.

“Y
ou must stop working
so hard,” Tom said.

Lily almost said: Well, it
didn’t do me no harm last time, but thought it best not to raise
that topic at all. “I’ll let you know when I’m not up to it.
Besides, I ain’t protrudin’ yet.” And she pushed him out into the
overnight snowfall – the first of the season – and watched him
plant his bootprints all the way up to the windbreak. Inside, she
could feel the child clinging to her with both of its tiny
hands.

Humming, doing
a shy two-step, she cleared up the breakfast dishes, banked both
fires, ate an extra slice of bread-and-molasses, and settled in
beside her quilting frame. This one’s for
you
, she thought
aloud, whatever your name shall be. When her eyes grew strained and
her leg cramped, she got up, put her coat and boots on, and walked
across to Old Bill’s.

“
You gotta
eat, Bill,” she shouted in his ear, the steam of her breath filling
the hutch. She wrapped his shoulders with one of his stinking
shawls and got a bit of a fire going. He had not eaten any of the
bread or salt-pork she’d left him.

Old Bill grunted
something, but she was unable now to understand any of his words,
if indeed any were intended. At times she thought he might be
trying to sing or to recite some faded chant from his boyhood. He
would open his mouth wide, his lips would freeze in some
abbreviated contortion, and the air would sail up from his lung
over the exposed chords and vibrate, it seemed, off the back of the
tongue or the throat itself – for nothing in the front of his mouth
moved. Yet out came an eerie, wavering note as if an errant breeze
had blown over a castaway fiddle. Then he would reach out and
clutch her wrist, hurting her. It was her turn to hum a tune from
her own childhood – sweet, reminiscent, lullaby-low – until his
grip softened and a mute rattle gathered in the back of his throat,
and he would lie back in his chair by the window. Sometimes, then,
he would eat.

L
ily had never seen
Tom so happy. On most mornings they woke up in the dark, made
cautious illicit love, then rose together into the bracing chill of
the cabin to light the fires and watch the sun animate the snow
that lay its gratuitous beauty everywhere about them. On Sundays
they would go for long walks into the village, along the River, up
the beach and then across the oak-woods to Little Lake, where they
cheered on the skaters, some of whom brandished curved sticks with
which they relentlessly pursued a frozen horse-bun.

“
I’d like to
skate
,” Lily said and despite
Tom’s protestations and then his pleas, she did. Gimpy Fitchett
borrowed several of the blades-and-straps from his cronies at work
and all three of them made their maiden attempt the very next
Sunday. Gimpy sort of levered his way along the margin of the
circular pond as if he were rowing with one oar, managing to stay
upright though deriving little other pleasure from the sport.
Whenever he spotted Tom or Lily he would weigh anchor a moment,
spin perilously as he waved and laughed, then laugh even louder as
he retrieved his balance and continued his sounding of the
shoreline. Tom slashed away with both blades, aiming himself at the
centre of the ice-pond. He scissored, and fell on his nose. The
blood had barely begun to congeal in the cold when his wings
tangled and again he crashed spectacularly – this time on his
nether side – to the unsuppressed delight of several young toughs
out for an airing. Dazed and bruised, Tom slid across to the safety
of the nearest snowbank, where he pouted, then looked up for Lily.
She was floating twenty yards before him – a swan with its wings an
inch from the glazed surface, its feathers lighter than breath
cutting perfect curves in the glassy wake it left for all
sckeptics.

Twice a week Lily walked
into the village to do some shopping at Redmond’s store and
occasionally at Durham’s Dry Goods. The store-keepers nodded
pleasantly to her, often called her by name, sometimes chatted
about the weather or the progress being made down ‘at the yard’.
Lily smiled a lot and gradually, as she assured Tom over supper,
she was learning how to chat idly and even enjoy it. Twice the
Grand Trunk had let the round-house and car-shop gang use one of
the small rooms in the station complex for a Saturday night
gathering, and Lily and Tom attended both parties. The men drank
whiskey by the cup from a barrel while the wives and lady-friends
coaxed them away to the dance-squares or bunched in corners
gossiping. Tom kept himself free from the whiskey and danced with
Lily most of the night at the cost of much barbed teasing from his
mates. Lily talked to several of the wives whose husbands she felt
she knew thoroughly. They seemed to like her. She was invited to
tea. She surprised herself and Tom by going.

“
Well, how did
you like Maudie Bacon?” Tom asked, finally.

“
She’s very
nice. She was raised on a farm in Moore township near Froomfield.
She remembers the Millars. She was friends with the Partridge
girls.”

“
So you did
more than chank cakes and cheese?” he said, reaching for the
muffins Lily had made on her return from the tea. “Well, this time
next year we should be thinking about picking out a place of our
own. Maybe in the same block as Maudie’s. You’d like that,
eh?”

Lily nodded. “First things
first, though,” she said, glancing down.

Lily went again to
Maudie’s house, a neat white cottage with a brick chimney and a
fancy metal stove to keep it cozy through the winter. Maudie was
friendly and incurably chatty; she quizzed Lily on every aspect of
her history in Moore township, and to her surprise Lily found
herself not only answering but volunteering extra detail,
embellishment, even. The ladies – farm girls every one of them who
had married young and willingly trailed their husbands to the
excitement of the new towns – seemed particularly titillated by her
stories about Old Samuels, Sounder and Acorn. Sometimes they
tittered in the strangest places. Afterwards she felt vaguely
guilty and if Tom asked her how her ‘hen session’ went, she would
snap at him or keep a morose silence as long as she could bear to.
He put her moods down to the delicacy of her ‘condition’ and kept
smiling.

Tom
smiled because he was genuinely
happy. He liked the winter work, in part she supposed because he
hated the slave-labour of the summers in the freight-sheds. But
also because in the car-shops he could use his hands and his
brains. He could work in concert with a select crew assessing
problems and improvising solutions as the rolling stock limped or
was dragged into their repair depot with all manner of fracture and
trauma – after a rough stint on the open rails that now stretched
from Portland, Maine to Chicago. And even though Tom would never be
a master carpenter, he liked the challenge, the camaraderie and the
unpredictability of their daily routine. And of course there were
the thrills of emergency ice-jams, of which he was forbidden to
speak over supper. And the son growing in her belly towards its own
day.

Early in March, after
Lily had complained of unusually severe cramps in her stomach, Tom
arrived home from work with a brisk little man in tow.

“
This is Dr.
Dollard from Sarnia,” Tom said, unwrapping him from his black
beaten-lambswool coat and looking for an appropriate place to
install it.

“
How do you
do, Mrs. Marshall,” the doctor intoned absently, waving her to a
nearby cot.

“
I’ve had some
crampin’, doctor. Maybe somethin’ I ate.”

Dr. Dollard ignored this
and all subsequent remarks from Lily and from Tom who was
determined to be helpful. Primly he drew Lily’s skirt and half-slip
away to expose the stretched skin beneath. He tapped, tamped, and
plumbed, giving out every once in a while significant but
untranslated ‘ahs’ and ‘hmmmms’.

He wheeled around to
Tom.

“
What is it?”
Tom said, afraid to look at Lily.

“
Your wife is
at least seven months pregnant,” he announced. “She is not eating
enough to sustain two life-systems, hence the stomach cramps. She
is getting too much exercise, hence the general faintness and the
wan complexion. I recommend a bottle of
Ayer’s Sasarsparilla
for the stomach. That’ll be sixty-three cents for the
medicine and a dollar for the visit.”

Tom
blanched.

“
Pay me when
you can,” Dr. Dollard flashed an avuncular smile at Lily. “The
young lady’s health is the main thing. When she goes into labour,
send a message for me, day or night, and I’ll come straightway. You
know where I am.” He put a bottle of patent medicine on the table,
shook Tom’s hand, rescued his coat and decamped.

“
Tom,” Lily
said, waving off the
Sasarsparilla
, “I want
you to promise me one thing.”

“
Anything,” he
said.

“
I want a
midwife for this baby.”

B
y the next day Lily
was feeling fine. She got some food into Old Bill and walked him
out to his privy and back. When he spotted the medicine bottle in
her apron pocket, he grunted avidly. She left it beside him on the
arm of his chair and by the time she got the door jammed shut, he
had consumed it all. I hope he’s not pregnant, she thought,
skipping through the snow to get the baby’s attention. It responded
with a surly kick. No sense of humour, she laughed, and stretched
her lungs against the brisk late-winter air.

Tom
was waiting. “Your informants are
correct,” he said. “There
is
a local midwife. I
went to see her. She said she knows where we live. In fact, she
seemed to know all about us. She’ll come when you need
her.”

“
Thanks,” Lily
said. “But you look worried. Somethin’ wrong with her?”

“
She’s got a
terrific reputation around here,” Tom said slowly, selecting his
words with care, “but she lives down there in that place, you know,
down past Prince Street towards the dunes, where the squatters
are.”

“
Oh.”

“
She lives in
a sort of – well – a hovel.”

“
You don’t
think she oughta come?”

“
I didn’t say
that,” Tom said and his glance told her:
don’t remind me, I know, I promised
.

No more was said on that
particular subject.

2

O
n the first day of
spring the screw-prop grain-carrier
Lake Erie
nudged its
bulk through the scattered ice-floes of the River St. Clair and
docked at the Point Edward elevator. A day later Tom was moved from
the car-shops to his summer job in the freight-sheds: lugging
crates from ship to box-car and box-car to ship. The new regional
manager, Warden Hargreaves, who set up temporary personal quarters
in the luxury suite of the Queen’s Hotel on Prince Street, promised
Tom that there was a good chance he could be made part of the
permanent repair crew by the following spring. That hope and the
more certain promise of a child to carry on his name buoyed his
spirits considerably. So much so that only Lily could detect the
minute signs of tension and strain that habitually afflicted him at
this time of year. Although her own back had begun to throb –
especially after a full day over her quilting (she’d sold two to
Mrs. Salter, and Tom had put the cash in the Sarnia bank) – she
spent the evenings of early April rubbing liniment into Tom’s back
and arms. Outside, the snow-flushed creek and sudden freshets
chattered their way across the wakened landscape.

“
We oughta
start diggin’ the garden,” Lily said.

“
We don’t need
a garden this year,” Tom said. “And next year somebody else can
worry about this place. Don’t you go near it, you hear?”

Lily heard. Nonetheless,
she did slip out as soon as the sun was up and burning through the
green gauze of the trees and bushes and shrubs and looping vines.
But the baby had dropped and she felt as wobbly as a pear, so she
merely pruned the perennials as best she could and scraped away the
detritus from the fall harvest. No spading, she thought, I’ve got
to be very careful. Unless I can rouse Old Bill to some work. She
could tell by the sun that it was barely mid-afternoon. She turned
and started over to Bill’s hut when her eye caught a movement near
the windbreak. It was Tom, coming at full tilt across the field
which lay between them and the village proper. She met him,
breathless, at the tree-line.

“
It’s Bags
Starkey,” Tom said. “A crate carrying half a locomotive boiler fell
on his legs. Crushed both his feet. He’s bleeding real bad. They
don’t want to move him too far. They need sheets for
bandages.”

Lily was running across
the dead garden towards the house. “For God’s sake, Lil!” Tom
yelled, but he fell to his knees, panting helplessly, tears
spurting from his eyes.