Lily's Story (60 page)

“
My word,”
Lily said, turning from her beaming son and looking anxiously
around, “where’s Brad?”

“
He was right
here a minute ago,” Peg said without interrupting her survey of the
silver dollar’s bas-relief.

Lily dashed out from
under the awning; no one else took up the alarm. Sophie had
consumed a lot of mineral water and was snoring contentedly under
cover. The whole area was bursting with children, all in motion.
Lily didn’t know where to start. Peg, home for a brief visit,
called out behind her, “They’re over there!”

Lily saw them under a nearby
alder: Brad was curled in the shade of the late afternoon, his eyes
closed but his face tensed, listening; and Wee Sue, not two years
older, was seated beside him with one arm around his shoulder and
the other propping a book open on her knees. Her lips were spelling
out words that bound them for this moment together.

Lily decided it
was time to walk up Michigan Ave. She picked out a sunny July day
and in the glare of noon she came up from Prince Street all the way
to Redmond’s. “Sorry to hear about your place burnin’ down,” the
grocer said. “No insurance, I take it.” Lily nodded and gave him
her order. “Bring the boys along,” he said. “I always
go
t a licorice or two for my
favourite tow-heads.” Lily promised she would, said goodbye to Mrs.
Redmond and started home. Standing in front of Durham’s Dry Goods,
chatting with three of the women from the Wednesday tea group, was
Maudie Bacon. Shaking just a little inside, Lily walked towards
them so that she could be face-to-face with Maudie. A few feet
away, Lily opened her lips to say ‘hello’ just as Maudie’s eyes
cornered her own for a telling second. The word froze in its frame,
unspoken. Maudie turned back to her friends with a snap of her
head, that conveyed to Lily so much more than the simple, lethal
snub intended.

Lily kept on walking down to
the docks. At the coal company she ordered enough coke to last her
the winter.

22

1

S
ophie was right. By
the time the boys started school in September, Lily had met in one
way or another most of the regular denizens of Mushroom Alley. One
bright morning in early June as she was hanging out Mrs. Christie’s
washing, Lily heard someone calling. The sound seemed to be coming
from a clump of trees to the north of her yard: a high-pitched,
plaintive call that could have been a command or a cry for help.
That’s odd, Lily thought, there’s nothing between me and Hazel’s
Heaven up on the dunes. Maybe somebody’s caught up in the short-cut
running down to the beach. She craned her neck, and the call came
again, a man’s voice echoing thinly in the empty morning of the
Alley. He must be in a tree, Lily thought as she dropped her work
and started through to the scrub, watching out for the sudden
hawthorns.

“
Ship
ahoy!
”

Lily came out into a little
clearing which she was surprised to discover. A wretched hovel not
much bigger than a pup-tent sat between two hummocks of sand. An
open fire was smouldering in front of the entrance. There were no
windows. Lily’s gaze was then drawn upward to what appeared to be a
scaffolding erected on a steep hummock a few rods away but turned
out to be the frame of a barn or coop that some previous tenant had
begun in earnest and then abandoned.

“
Reverse
engines! Reverse engines! Three points to the starboard, Mr.
Collins. Steady now, steady on.”

Perched on the upper rafters,
with his feet on a cross-piece and his arms on the top-joist, was a
tiny gnome of a man with snow-white hair frothing about his face
like the first foam of a breaker, and a captain’s hat, and a
uniform whose brass buttons glinted authority, glinted pride. One
hand was on his brow shielding his eyes from the fierce sea-sun,
the other steady as a rock on the bridge-rail. His knees swayed
with the pitch of the waves, leaving his upper body resolute, the
nerves unshakable.

“
Funnel off
the port bow! All hands on deck. Prepare for May Day, Mr. Collins.
No panic, please. No panic.”

Suddenly his
horizon burst apart with a dozen howling children, who dashed out
of the bushes as if on cue, washed past Lily without a blink, and
swarmed all over the scaffolding like tars littering a mainsail. Of
indeterminate sex, they scrambled, hurled threats and boasts aloft,
enacted duels to the death, sent pirates to their graves upon
impossible planks, and steadfastly ignored their captain’s call to
abandon ship. Neither the old man nor the children fully
acknowledged the presence or legitimacy of the other, but they
seemed intricately bound up in a similar game, never quite out of
the other’s reach. Pirate kings lunged and skewered the old man
countless times, and he in turn pleaded in vain with the
blackguards to let the women and children enter the lifeboats
first. It seemed to Lily – watching, ignored – that
the
y had stumbled into each
other’s dream.

“
Batty as a
bull with three balls,” Sophie wheezed, “but harmless. Nice old
guy, really. Billy Whittle’s his name, but everybody here just
calls him Cap. That’s what he was. Used to pilot the
Erie Shore
till she cracked up in a tornado back in ’sixty-five.
He got everybody off an’ then lashed him an’ his wife to the mast.
He begged her to get into the last lifeboat but she wouldn’t. The
storm broke them up. They were both washed ashore up near Port
Franks. He was still breathin’. She wasn’t.”

I
t was at the Dominion
Day festivities that Lily formally met the three women whose
celebrated fecundity had produced almost three-dozen offspring,
neatly and incontrovertibly identifiable by their hair-colouring, a
genetic miracle that might have delighted Mendel – red-headed
McCourts (actually a hybrid orange shade unremarked anywhere else),
tow-headed Shawyers (with characteristic cowlick) and
black-haired/whey-faced McLeods (with pointed snotty noses that
made them resemble starlings on the run). Until puberty, which
attacked them disgracefully early, the sexes were indistinguishable
by manner, instinct or dress. By age twelve, though, nature decided
to have its way with them: the girls willowed and billowed
shamelessly through the village, sending one kind of shudder
through every respectable father and another kind through their
curious sons. The boys toughened and grew lusty, and decent mothers
everywhere locked up their puzzled daughters. Though Lily did not
ever get to know them well – they were clannish, exhausted from
day-labour and child-bearing, and not quite ready to admit they
were stuck in the Alley for a lifetime – she admired and felt sorry
for them. Later on when she herself was more settled, she was able
to help them in the small, unobtrusive ways allowed her; she had
tea and chatted with Mrs. McLeod on many occasions and once or
twice with Mrs. Shawyer and Mrs. McCourt, but never with all three
together. In that regard they formed an exclusive club, sharing
their common miseries, shrivelled hopes and the need to exchange
petty, emancipating spites. To these ends Lily was, in their
limited view, a washout. Miseries they had aplenty: each had
husbands who were unemployable because they were alcoholic or
alcoholic because they were unemployable. Their men were rarely at
home, eternally seeking odd jobs ‘digging ditches’ up north or down
in Kent or in the States, coming home long enough to terrorize the
kids, quench their abbreviated lusts, and contribute to the steady
advance of progress-through-procreation. The older boys would get
work, help support the brood for a bit, then take up with some girl
and move off. The older girls went into service and helped feed the
younger ones until they found a spouse or let their master get them
pregnant, after which they returned home to bear the bastard and
take up permanent residence among their own kind. These few
families proved to be an endless drain on the charity of the three
churches whose auxiliaries competed mightily in fruitless attempts
at reform and repudiation. “Even typhoid wouldn’t wipe them out,”
an exasperated elder was heard to say one Sunday morning in the
vestry. Nonetheless, it was generally conceded that the girls were
good workers: there were at least seven of them serving as maids or
scullions throughout the village and the town.

L
ily’s business was
almost more than she could handle. She needed a much larger tub for
soaking the huge bloodied sheets sent down to her from The Queen’s.
She mentioned this to Sophie. Several days later she heard
Honeyman’s wagon stop in the road near her front door, and when she
went around to see what was up, Belcher waved to her and pointed at
a shiny, coppery object behind him. Spartacus was already trying to
wrest it loose, and soon three boys materialized to help carry it
into the workroom. It was a brewer’s vat, somewhat tarnished and
battered but otherwise serviceable. “Where’d he pick this up?” Lily
asked Honeyman, who chewed his tobacco and looked at his toeless
boots whenever he talked to a ‘lady’. “In the brewery junkpile down
on Front Street. Surprisin’, ain’t it, what a sane man will throw
out.” Nothing in Mushroom Alley surprised Lily. “Old Spartacus
here, he’s got a keen eye for junk.” Lily got her cookie-box and
counted out two dollars in change.

“
That’s too
much, Lily,” Spartacus said in a clear and slightly accented
voice.

Honeyman was so startled he
swallowed his cud.

W
hen Lily went to the
beach, as she often did that sultry summer of ’seventy-one, she
took the short cut that ran from the road past her place through
the scrub and curved below the back-yards of the last two houses
before the Lake – Hazel’s Heaven and Baptiste Cartier’s blind-pig.
The boys were curious about the faded clapboard house with the
mauve trim, the only house of unnatural tint in the Alley. They
were equally puzzled by the flounces and underclothing that
curtsied in the breeze off the water: pinkish corsets that drooped
like parboiled lobsters; pennant-sized pantaloons fluttering in
cerise, marigold and Kelly green; and innumerable pairs of silky
stockings so sensuously fanned by the slightest kiss of wind. They
kept their distance, though, because both boys were afraid of the
bootlegger’s pig – Aquinas – kept in a pen very near the path. He
was a gargantuan Polish China boar, who snorted and bristled at
them, pawing the muck with his cleft trotters, ramming his
malodorous snout into a trough of slime, and casting the baleful
glare of his blood-puffed eyes at the smooth, white morsel of
little boys who might venture too near and be eaten in a wink. As
far as Lily could learn, John the Baptist (as he was known here)
kept Aquinas as his pet, throwing the most dreadful tantrums
whenever anyone – denizen or stranger – came too close to the
creature or made some drunken slighting remark about its potency or
suggested that it might be of singular service to certain females
along the lane. Often he could be heard talking to it – in French
or perhaps in some private
joual
they shared to
keep mankind at bay. John himself was a morose man, utterly
taciturn except when conversing with his pet or cursing
trespassers. But he made the best and safest hooch in town, and try
as they might, neither man nor boy inside or outside the Alley was
able to trail him long enough to discover the whereabouts of his
still. Once, a gang of toughs had set watch on his place day and
night for a week. As far as they could tell he never left his yard,
coming out only to feed Aquinas or sit gabbing with him in the
middle of a moonless night. Yet, fresh supplies appeared for the
weekend crowd of sailors and the overspill from Hazel’s.

On the way back from the beach,
Lily often walked around the long way, up the little cliff and onto
the lane itself, where the boys could gawk at the big windows
beside the verandah on the whorehouse, hoping for a peek at the
exotic plumage inside. The girls never came out in daylight, and
Lily had warned them away from here after dusk. Across from Hazel’s
and next to Honeyman’s place was another gray shack remarkable only
for the fact that behind it were five or six sheds, several of them
merely lean-to’s, and an old army tent that looked as if it had
been recently shelled. “Stumpy lives there,” Sophie said. “He
thinks God was a fish.” One day in July just as she and the boys
climbed up the slope onto the lane, she spied a strange man coming
towards them. He obviously saw no one ahead of him for he swung
onto the path that led up to Stumpy’s shack. It was his way of
walking that alerted Lily and half-prepared her: an ambling,
rolling, almost bouncing gait that a deckhand might use in a high
sea but only if his legs had been frozen from the shins down.
Stumpy, Lily thought. He was dressed in overalls and a wool shirt,
his beard and gray hair were as tangled and forlorn as fish-nets on
some deserted tidal flat. Lily never would have recognized him from
that face so completely altered in seven short years, but the walk
was unforgettable. She told the boys to go on home, and then broke
all the rules by trailing Stumpy into his house, and when he looked
in astonishment at her intrusion, she smiled sadly and said,
“Hello, Bags.”

“I
t’s Stumpy now,” he
said with both resignation and pride. He sat out on a bench
overlooking the beach below and told Lily his story, but only after
she had told him as much of her own as she could bear. He had got a
job in London as a clerk in the office of a stagecoach line, but he
had been too miserable at being cooped up or just too ornery,
because he was soon fired. He took straight to drink and got so bad
even his cousin threw him out onto the street. Finally some
preacher found him in the gutter, taught him to see God in all His
glory, and sent him abroad to bear witness and teach the world how
to overcome the accidents of fate. He cared nothing for material
goods now, he lived only for God and to serve the outcasts of
mankind. So he worked in the fish plant in the warm seasons to get
enough money to aid the down-trodden and the lost all the year
long. He showed Lily the shelters he’d erected in his yard to
accommodate the hoboes and unemployed and outlawed who jumped train
at the end of the line and wandered in here dazed, cold, crippled,
without hope or the will to hope. Here he fed them, talked a little
religion, listened to their woeful tales, and then showed them the
stumps that God had blessed him with as proof of his own
temptation, apostasy and resurrection.