Lily's Story (57 page)

Most of the revellers clambered back onto
the wagon and let it carry them at a forlorn trot back to the
Richmond House, where a few would try to revamp their gaiety. The
bona fide roisterers, however, remained – half-a-dozen strong:
male, thwarted and bearish. They sat down on a snowbank outside the
dark house and drank from a common flask. Digger Smythe stood up.
His eyes ballooned in the moonlight like Bacchus before a binge.
“Fellas, we might’ve missed some cozy bundlin’ in this here house,
but I know where there’s some fresh snugglin’ takin’ place right
this minute. And it ain’t been blessed by no minister and it ain’t
been properly shivareed!” A chorus of whoops confirmed the
righteousness of the suggestion, and the motley band of
make-believe savages set out to the south-east across the fields in
pursuit of pleasure. They were not a third of the way when the wind
began to gust through their merriment. Then the snow came back in
broken flurries, periodically blotting out the orange glow on the
horizon ahead of them.

The chieftain halted his troop with a raised
palm. He bent over and out of his ample quiver a number of cattails
fell into anxious hands. A match flared. The flames from the
kerosene-soaked torches leapt wildly in the dark. The snow sizzled
and retreated. A tom-tom began to search for a stag’s heartbeat. On
the faces of the war-dancers the slashes of chrome and ochre
shimmered like harlequin masks under gaslight. As if they were
circling a wagon-train, the roisterers – fired by whiskey and
disappointment and ineradicable envy – swarmed about the isolated
cottage, beating the drum of their own pent passion, waving their
flambeaux like flags from purgatory, and chanting over and over
till the syllables separated one from the other and smote the air
like incendiaries:

Shame, shame, double shame

Shame, shame upon your name

In their zeal several of the harrowers broke
ranks and dashed up to the windows of the seraglio, thrusting their
torches against the tainted glass and grinning hideously, as if to
deliver the devil a blow in kind. In their haste, two of them
bumped into one another, stumbled, left their torches where they
dropped, and began slugging it out. Around them the litany of
mortification continued.

At first Lily was not frightened. When she
heard the shouting she got up from her quilting in time to see the
torches flare up, then watched them approach raggedly through the
snow. She recalled that Stevie Bacon was to have been married
earlier in the day, and she guessed that this was the spillover
from the customary shivaree. Their bizarre costumery and the
derisive, taunting chant merely reinforced her suspicions. She
decided to douse the lamp, slide the bar across both doors and wait
them out: whiskey-valour, she knew, had a short life. And the boys
were in a deep, safe sleep. But when the wild, uncoordinated
whooping started and several of the savages made daring,
unauthorized charges at the house, Lily decided that it might be
better to waken the boys and tell them what was going on. Tom’s
shotgun hung where it always did, near the main door.

She had just started towards the boys’ room
when she heard Brad shriek. Fumbling with the lamp, she ran in to
find him paralyzed with fright in front of the tiny window over the
bed. The afterimage of the demon’s visage still glimmered in the
glass – a distorted grimace so real it could have been the Bogeyman
stepped right out of an innocent’s nightmare. Then the torch-flames
rose up and incinerated it. Brad leapt across the bed and grabbed
Lily around the waist and buried his face in her skirt.

“
Mama, Mama, Mama,” he
screamed. Lily picked him up and carried him into the big room;
Robbie trailed them with a lamp.

“
It’s all right, it’s all
right,” she murmured, cradling him on the cot, “it’s only the men
from the wedding, come to give us a little scare, like Hallowe’en.
They’ll go away soon. Shh…shh…”

Suddenly Robbie yelped as if he’d been
stepped on. “There’s another one!” he cried. Across the kitchen
window, Carcajou flashed through a gauntlet of fire and perforated
shadow; a rabid Coyote’s grin swallowed his eyes, and his mouth
became a wolverine’s howl, hovering and thinning. Robbie began to
sob with fear and shame, reaching for his mother’s hand and jerking
it away from Brad’s shoulder.

“
Make them go away, make
them go away.” Brad’s screams connected and became one hysterical
plea. Lily jumped when something thudded against the shed wall
behind her. They’re coming in, she thought. Where are the
shells?

Shame, shame, double shame

Shame, shame upon your name

Marshall, Marshall, Marshall, Marshall

Shame, shame –

The chant stopped. Soft but urgent footfalls
in the snow. Silence. They were gone. Brad was now blubbering
contently in her lap. Robbie had let go.

“
Mama!” he shouted. “The
shed’s on fire!”

Lily whirled around. Smoke was pouring under
the door to the shed. She ran across and flung back the bar. When
she looked into the back room she saw the woodpile was ablaze, as
was the outside wall behind it. Above her she watched the first,
hopping blue flames take hold of the cottage roof.

Lily spoke quickly. “Robbie, get your boots
an’ your coats. We gotta get out right now.” She slammed the door
shut and raced across to the bedroom, fighting the panic that was
clutching at her throat and paralyzing her thoughts. Blankets, she
muttered, it’s freezing out there and half-a mile to the nearest
house. She grabbed whatever was nearby, stuffed mittens and scarves
into her pockets and rushed back to the boys, neither of whom had
moved an inch. The room was full of smoke and the roof over them
seemed to be melting. Struggling with her own fear as best she
could, Lily dragged both her boys through the front door and out
into the night. She did not even know which direction they ran in,
but they kept on running until she found herself winded and
kneeling in a huge drift.

“
Mama, we’re freezin’,”
Robbie sobbed with his arm around Brad, who was speechless, and
coughing.

Lily found two blankets still tangled in her
arms. She wrapped the boys up and squeezed them against her. They
had no boots. The boys had their thick night-socks on. She was
barefoot. She looked back. She could hear the crackling of wood
ablaze, but saw nothing but the wild blizzard raging around them.
The barn, she thought. We should have gone to the barn. Ti-Jean’s
stove might still have been warm. Where was it? A charred beam
crashed noisily, but she could not tell which direction the sound
had come from. The wind-driven snow muffled and warped. We’ll
freeze out here, she thought, in fifteen minutes.

“
Come on,” she said to the
boys, “let’s start walkin’; we gotta get to town.”

“
I know the way,” Robbie
said, “even in the dark.”

There was no darkness to be
seen, not a jot. They walked in what Lily prayed was a straight
line. She picked up Brad and carried him swaddled in her arms. All
the feeling left her feet. Robbie dissolved in front of her. She
cried out his name. The wind blew it back. He rematerialized in her
hand. “I saw a light,” he said, “I
think
I did. Over that
way
.” Her legs were gone, she
couldn’t tell if they were moving or not. “Come on, Mama,
come
on
!” She allowed herself to be dragged along.
Suddenly, all the feeling and power returned to her legs, she was
running swift as a deer towards an obliterating white light as big
as the sun, it had a halo shimmering around it, she called out some
words of welcome. “Get up, Mama, get up!
Please
.”

S
he was being carried
bumpily, head dangling, the snow melting and seeping down into her
eyes. But the arm around her was powerful, and the stride under her
was sure and unrelenting. Her feet were burning. She heard Robbie’s
breathing, somewhere behind her. Where was Brad? They were slowing
down. Some light pierced the snow-haze, then a wavelet of warm air
as gentle as that from a baker’s oven. Kitchen smells. Feet on
fire.

L
ily had been looking
at Robbie and Brad for several moments before she realized she was
awake. They smiled warily at her. They were alive. She peered
around. They were sitting on a mattress of some sort on the floor
of a shanty. She recognized the smells, the drafts, the excessive
heat. Someone had rubbed her feet and slathered them with grease.
She could feel the blisters rising against it. She looked for their
saviour. He emerged from behind the stove, his arms loaded with
elm. He smiled at her.

At first she thought it
was a trick of the candlelight or a result of the dizziness
following her blackout, but in a moment she realized that what she
was seeing was real. The man – grizzled, in his sixties, hair askew
as if in a state of permanent fright – had only one arm, an
elongated ape-like appendage that had grown in strength and bulk
with the uses it had been put to since losing its coordinate. He
had taken off his musty sweater, leaving only a sweat-creased
undershirt that exposed the socket where the left arm had once
joined his torso – a pouch of flesh as puckered as the grin of a
toothless crone. His face was animated by wrinkles and abrupt
gesticulating eyes unchecked by brows (that seemed to have been
singed off while he leaned too close perhaps to the campfire along
the hobo-glens of some distant rail-yard). A thin scar wriggled
over one side of his grin.

He was gesturing with his
fingers and arm like a mimist drawing a map of his words with his
body; Lily felt the tension and frustration in his eyes as she
shook her head and tried to find her own voice. Suddenly, with a
magician’s celerity he was out of the door and gone. Lily leaned
over and drew Brad into her embrace. He was silent and still – deep
in shock. Robbie crawled next to her and hung on, crying softly to
himself. Wherever they were, they were safe, and together. She
gritted her teeth against the searing pain in her feet, closed her
eyes, and waited.

Minutes, hours later, the door
swung open. Lily felt the breeze of a great bustle and flurry
against her eyelids but could not persuade them to open. The door
rattled shut with resolution. Lily smelled garlic, whiskey, fresh
sweat: a huge presence in the room.

“
Christ-take-me-ridin’-in-a-teacup, it’s Lily Marshall, an’ the
two bairns I brung into the world!”

Lily opened her eyes and saw
the familiar face beaming down at her. “Sophie,” she whispered.

“
Spartacus
here tells me your house burned down an’ he found you an’ your lads
wanderin’ up Michigan Ave.”

“
He saved our
lives,” Lily said.

“
Only
Spartacus is dumb enough to be out in a storm like this, eh? But
thank the Lord he was. My, my, look at those feet. C’mon, you old
fart,” she snapped, “help me carry them across to my
place.”

Spartacus was peering over
Sophie’s shoulder like a genie waiting to be recognized. Lily saw
his eyes clearly in the light. She knew them. He hopped to one side
and swept Robbie up onto his gnome’s shoulder. Brad clung to his
mother.

“
We better get
a sled,” Sophie said. “Don’t worry, Lily. We got lots of room at
our place. You’re safe now. You’re in the Alley.”

Spartacus went out carrying
Robbie. Lily tried to get up.

“
Don’t worry
about him, he looks queer but he’s okay. Can’t talk a word to
strangers. Used to be a pedlar south of here years ago until some
mark he was skinnin’ ripped his arm right outta the socket an’ then
beat him over the head with it like a Chinaman’s gong. Ain’t been
right since.”

Brad moaned in his dreams. Lily
was shaking all over.

“
Just a little
fright,” Sophie soothed as she turned Lily’s feet over in her soft,
soft palms. “And a twinge of frostbite.” Then she reached up and
unhooked Brad from his mother’s death-grip. The child settled
against her bosom – cradled by two sturdy, rocking arms – opened
its eyes and then closed them peacefully. “He’ll be all right. One
of my boys’ll be along in a minute with a sled.”

“
Thank you,”
Lily murmured drowsily.

“
What’s that
you got there?” Sophie said.

Lily had pulled something out
of the large pocket in her skirt. It was clamped in her left hand.
She looked down. It was the leather sachet from under her bed,
bearing its treasure. As she slipped into unconsciousness, she was
sure she could feel the pulsing of the jasper heart.

21

1

S
ophie Potts was
something else. Everybody in Mushroom Alley said so in one odd way
or another, and Lily wasn’t about to deny one dram of the praise
due her. From the moment she entered Spartacus’ hovel and saw
Lily’s boys shivering with dazed refugee’s eyes, she took charge of
the situation. “Bein’ a midwife, as I used to be, you kinda get
used to fear an’ confusion,” she often said in her defence. “Some
women used to think I was an angel an’ some tried to spit in my
face like it was all
my
fault. Either way I
just plunged in an’ did my job. You don’t expect thanks in this
world or you’ll wait a long time for the train to come in.” The
next day Sophie sent her older boys, Stewie and John, out to see
what had happened. In the meantime she put salve on Lily’s burns,
lay her down in her own bed and fed her broth a teaspoonful at a
time “My Peg’s takin’ care of your boys,” she said, “they ain’t got
a scratch on them.” The smell of bacon frying and singed toast
floated through the house and lingered; Lily heard the skirl of
children’s laughter and Robbie’s voice, low and brave, saying “It’s
all right, Brad, everythin’s gonna be all right.” John and Stewie
reported back, out of breath and saucer-eyed. Sophie came in and
sat down heavily beside Lily on the bed. “Nothin’ left of the
house. Just charcoal. Even the stove melted. The snow stopped it
from spreadin’. Your little barn wasn’t touched.”