Lily's Story (55 page)

Dr. Dollard, puffing and
sweating like a lumberjack, swore at Maudie, the fickleness of
chloroform, at God’s indifference – wishing to Christ the woman
would stop rising out of her death-drowse just long enough to
disembowel him with an accusing shriek. “I said give me the
forceps, you stupid girl. Quick! I might be able to save the
child!”

Maudie stood frozen to
her feet. She couldn’t understand what was holding her upright. She
could see nothing but a brace of female thighs wrenched apart; a
battering, bloody child’s skull driven back and up and in by some
bellicose, furred sphincter the doctor’s paws plunged into with
fury and disgust. Around her the air stank, like an outhouse in
Hell. Mary caught hold of her sister-in-law just as she gave up the
ghost. Then Mary herself handed Dr. Dollard his forceps and
positioned the lamp so he could see. She saw the dried blood on
their pincering grip. She wondered how she had been born, then
forgiven, then loved.

“
Gotcha by the
ears, you little bugger,” the doctor gasped, pulling back as if he
were rowing a coal-barge upstream. Lily made no sound to interrupt
the whooshing blast of blood and pus that greased the baby’s slide
into the air. The force of it knocked the doctor back onto his
rump. The foetus dripped onto the bed. Maudie was awake now.
All
was in motion. The age-old
rituals. Garth had come in and was stoking the fire. He listened
for the signal, the all-clear. It didn’t come.

Lily opened her eyes to see the
tears in those of the women. “Thank God, you’re alive,” Maudie
said. “It’s a miracle.”

“
The baby’s
gone,” said Dr. Dollard wearily. “Probably died
yesterday.”

Lily whispered something in
Maudie’s ear. “She wants to know if it was a girl,” Maudie
said.

The doctor appeared puzzled.
“As a matter of fact, it was,” he said. “But it was all for the
best, Mrs. Marshall. Your little girl was hydrocephalic, a
Mongolian idiot.”

Maudie and Mary both shuddered.
The Lord moved in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

“
Come on,
ladies,” barked the doctor, “we’ve got work to do.”

T
hree weeks later
Lily, always a marvel to the skeptics of the medical profession,
was feeling well enough to send Mary back to her studies. Brad had
slept with Mary every night since the stillbirth of little
Kathleen. When Mary left he crawled in beside his mother. Robbie
announced he was ready to trek into the village to give school a
try. After the holiday, Lily promised, and he dashed out into the
snow to re-enact the legend of his pilgrimage he was longing to
find an audience for.

Lily was sound asleep on the
kitchen cot when Brad shook her awake. His eyes directed her
towards the doorway. She felt the draft over her bare legs, the
thinness of her shift under the blanket. The door closed and before
it, filling most of the space there, stood a tall dark-skinned
young man whose moustache rubbed against his smile. He pulled the
tuque off his head and held it in front of him.

“
Your boy,” he
said with a grin that was both sheepish and bold, “he tell me to
come in.” Robbie popped out from behind one of the powerful legs;
he had an axe in his hands.

Lily sat up, still
blinking.

The accent was familiar. “I
come about the notice in the post office,” he said and ruffled
Robbie’s hair.

3

T
i-Jean Thériault
swung his big axe and another of the great pines went crashing to
the ground right where it was supposed to. The boys, well out of
the way, jumped up and sprinted through the snow towards Ti-Jean,
who posed for them, one foot on the fallen tree like a hunter
beaming over a bull-moose. He grinned wickedly and flung Robbie
through the air, laughing at his squeals of terror and glee. Brad
laughed, too, seated as usual about three feet away from Ti-Jean in
a place where he could observe him, secure and rapt. Often Ti-Jean
would make teasing lunges his way but he always stopped just short,
just in time. Robbie grabbed his father’s hatchet and under
Ti-Jean’s tutelage soon became proficient at stripping away the
small branches of a felled tree. Brad would follow behind, trailing
his fingers along the bark and stubs, humming to himself, keeping
an eye on Ti-Jean in hope that he would burst into his strange,
loud, off-beat singing – as he often did when the work had eased a
little. Once, while they sat on a log sharing jam sandwiches, Lily
saw Brad lean over and press his face into Ti-Jean’s rough Hudson’s
Bay shirt; Ti-Jean kept right on talking to Robbie.

Voici l’hiver arrivé

Les rivières sont gelées

C’est le temps d’aller aux
bois

Dans les chantiers nous
hivernerons

Dans les chantiers nous
hivernerons

trolled the timberman, and
Brad, dawdling behind Robbie and his chattering hatchet, repeated
the music with his high, boyish flute, the backwoodsy accent
flawless. Soon he drifted off into the shelter of the hardwoods
while Robbie kept hacking dutifully and Ti-Jean lit his clay-pipe
and uttered puffs of smoke through his frozen breath. Later on Brad
circled back, coming up unnoticed behind the busy labourers – the
song still singing in his head, possessed.

Every morning now the boys were
up before Lily. Robbie got a smoky fire going in the stove while
Brad discomfited the embers into the fireplace. Moments after
sunrise they headed out to the windbreak to watch for the jaunty
figure of Ti-Jean cutting across the fields from the village. Lily
could hear them arguing about who had seen him first. Robbie always
won. Ti-Jean was boarding at Green House, a dingy hostel run by the
Grand Trunk. He came every morning, Monday to Saturday – whistling,
singing, puffing on his pipe, wool shirt open at the throat – and
worked until four o’clock, when he waved the boys goodbye across
the fields and disappeared. Lily made him and the boys a lunch, and
brought hot tea out to the worksite from time to time. Robbie
insisted on drinking out of a tin mug.

Lily assumed that Ti-Jean
would be returning home to his family in Woodston up in Huron
County for the Christmas holiday, so she was surprised when he
asked, in the diffident manner he invariably used when talking to
her, if he might join them for the occasion. “Yes! Yes!” Robbie
said before Brad could get in. Lily, who could deny her boys very
little, said yes. Tom had always maintained the traditions of
Christmas he had inherited from Aunt Elspeth and insisted that they
keep them up ‘for Auntie’s sake’.

When Ti-Jean asked her to come
with them to select a tree, she said no, that she wasn’t feeling up
to a walk in the woods yet, and he understood perfectly and the
three men tramped off, axe and hatchets aloft, into the bush. Lily
watched them go for a bit but had to sit down shortly. She felt
dizzy; her heart fluttered and slammed. Get up, woman, she said
aloud, you’ve got work to do and a life to lead.

Somewhat later she put on her
macintosh and boots and went out to wait for them. She noted that
Ti-Jean was more than half-way through his work. He had cleared an
opening in the windbreak almost fifty feet wide. She could see
straight across to the village. When the job was finished, she
realized that she would be able to stand in her kitchen window and
view the entire sweep of the town from the rail-yards and docks in
the south-west to the dunes and First Bush in the north and
north-east. Between these extremes lay the cottages of the
labouring folk, already four-streets square with hearth-fires
aglow, smoke from their chimneys welcoming and insular, the cries
of their children carrying freely over the fields. She thought she
could see the tall brick chimney of the new two-room school on
Victoria Street. Above the low snow-covered landscape before her,
the winter sun burned without solace.

A
t Ti-Jean’s behest
Lily brought out the little Testament with Papa’s writing on it. “I
read in English almost as good as French,” he announced after
dinner, “that’s what my Maman say, an’ she’s never wrong, eh?” He
winked at the boys and grinned shyly in Lily’s direction. “Always
my job to read the Christmas story.” “After mass?” He laughed, went
red in the face, then said, “
Ah non, nous sommes Hugenots
.”

He read the St. Luke version of
the nativity in a halting cadence that soon established its own
authenticity, its own sort of flawed beauty – at least in the mind
of one of the listeners. Though Lily had heard it before, she never
lost her sense of the story’s magic, of its having happened in a
longago time when such mysteries were radiant with possibility, as
probable as the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter. She
glanced over at Brad and was not disappointed.

Some small presents were
exchanged. Robbie’s eyes lit up at the sight of a bone-handled
knife in its own leather case. Brad clutched the wooden carving of
a Gryphon as if it were greased and likely to slip away. Lily
blushed when she saw the Irish linen handkerchief. She went back
into the shed and came out with a quilt under her arm. Ti-Jean
stopped smiling. He took it in his hands, and she saw them shake a
little. “Maman makes these,” he said. “But not like this.”

“
Not that
one,” Lily said. “You can keep that one for now, but I’ll make you
a proper one in the new year, when I’m feelin’ better.”

Ti-Jean jumped
up and went over to his haversack, the one he’d pulled the presents
out of. He had a leather case in his hand. He drew out a fiddle,
perched on a stool and began to play.
And sing.

Quand tu retourn’ chez son
père

Aussi pour revoir ta mère

Le bonhomme est a la porte

La bonn’femme fête la
gargotte

Dans le chantiers, ah !
n’hivernerons plus!

Dans le chantiers, ah !
n’hivernerons plus!

They all joined in on the
chorus, several times.

W
ith both children
asleep on the rug in front of the fire, Ti-Jean held the Testament
in his hands for a moment, stared at Lily and said, “Who is Lady
Fairchild?”

“
Somebody who
lived a long time ago,” Lily said.

J
ust after New Year’s
when Lily arrived one morning with a jug of tea, Robbie looked up
with a smug smile on his face and said, “Ti-Jean’s in the barn,
ain’t he, Brad?” Brad’s smile confirmed the conspiracy.

“
There’s an
old stove in there,” Ti-Jean said when he came up to
them.

“
And a
sleepin’ cot,” Robbie said.

“
We moved it
there when Bachelor Bill’s place was torn down by the railroad,”
Lily said.

“
A bit of
glass on the broken windows an’ it could be fixed up real nice,”
Ti-Jean said.

“
Nice an’
warm,” Robbie said.

“
But you’ll be
through cuttin’ in two weeks,” Lily said.

“
Not if I rent
a team an’ haul these logs to the mill before the
break-up.”

“
I couldn’t
afford to pay you.”

“
We’ll help,
won’t we, Brad?”

“
After the
mill pays you, that’s okay with me.”

“
It’d be
cheaper in the long run,” said Lily slowly.

“
I could get
some boards sawn,” he said, nodding to the boys.

“
To build the
coops,” said Robbie.

“
For the
chickens,” said Brad.

“
I’m real good
with my hands.”

Lily smiled. “Accordin’ to
Maman,” she said.

R
obbie promised to
give school a try as soon as Ti-Jean no longer needed him in the
woodlot. It was nearing the end of January. Lily was feeling much
stronger. She accompanied Ti-Jean and the boys to Little Lake but
did not join them on the ice. Brad cried because he fell and
couldn’t keep up with Robbie and Ti-Jean, but settled down when
Ti-Jean sat and whittled a strange sea-monster out of a piece of
frozen driftwood and told him a story about it half in English,
half in French. Robbie found some older boys and showed them how
good he was on skates. In a week or so the horses were due to
arrive and both boys would get to drive them, Robbie first, then
Brad. Ti-Jean fixed up Uncle Chester’s hideaway so that it was
indeed warm and cozy. He loved the rope-rug Lily gave him for the
floor and the curtains she adapted for the window over the bunk. He
even had a little shelf where he kept some books – in French.
“Junior Book Three,” he said proudly. “Best in the
family.”

Lily began to think
ahead, to get herself organized for the spring. She hauled out of
the shed Uncle Chester’s boxes and containers, still bearing the
stamp of his patient hand. She set up the quilting frame once
again, hoping to get four or five completed by April. With the boys
out of her hair, even on Sundays, she could work miracles. However,
she discovered she was short of rags and swatches. She knew she
should go over to see Clara, who would supply her ten times over,
but still she hesitated. Later, when I’m ready, she thought. Then
she noticed the trunk where she’d tossed all of Tom’s clothes last
August. She opened it quietly as one eases open a closet where some
ghost has slept forever undisturbed. She lifted them, squeezed
them, smelled them, let their hues and textures become vivid again.
Then she took her scissors and one by one she cut the shirts,
trousers, underclothes, socks and his navvy’s cap into neat
geometric shapes she would weave into remembrance.