Lily's Story (62 page)

Yes, we do. We must.

23

1

R
obbie and Brad
started school in September. Lily felt she ought to accompany them
on the first day but Sophie warned her away from such foolishness.
Robbie was delighted to be able to walk ahead with the older boys,
while Brad took hold of Wee Sue’s hand and headed up Victoria
Street humming out loud and skipping inside. All summer long Wee
Sue had taken Brad under wing – except for the two weeks he was
quarantined with chicken-pox – and taught him how to read. They
were both excited about the possibility of startling Miss Timmins
into a moment’s silence, and Wee Sue squeezed his hand possessively
and smiled at the envy in the eyes of the other nine-year-old girls
who flocked about them from the adjoining side-streets and lanes.
“I’m to take care of him,” she announced at every
opportunity.

If Miss Timmins, the
maiden lady who taught Primer and Book One were startled, she did
her best to conceal the fact. Nevertheless it was clear that Brad
could read the second primer-book with ease by the end of the month
while others, like Robbie, were still stumbling through the
recitation of the ABC’s. When his printing improved in October,
Brad was moved into the front seat of the second row, a bona fide
member of Book One. Brad loved school. He loved Miss Timmins. He
stayed in at recess and helped Miss Timmins clean the blackboards.
Wee Sue rejoined her own troop. On the way home from school he had
to be saved from the fists and taunts of the other boys by his
older brother, who returned him to his mother shaking but
unscathed. While Lily could sooth Brad’s feelings in her arms, she
could not explain away the bewilderment in his eyes, the child’s
hurt questioning of the unjust order of things, of secret burdens
already inherited without understanding or consent. A few feet away
she could hear Robbie running cold water from the pump over the
cuts on his knuckles, and the other chamber of her heart
contracted. She knew better than to go to him now – to say one word
of praise or consolation. Later, sometimes.

Though Wee Sue
no longer dared to befriend Brad at school, she continued her
affection guiltily at home. She smuggled over to his house a bundle
of books, mostly readers and texts which the older Potts had
‘forgotten’ to return to the school following their various
unorthodox departures. They had been locked in a trunk in Sophie’s
room because no books of any kind were to be exposed in Sophie’s
presence, on pain of death. Lily wanted to ask Sophie why, but
could not find the opportunity to do so. “Mama hated school,” Wee
Sue said. “Her teachers were mean to her.” This grievance
notwithstanding, Sophie never complained when Principal Grindly
took the strap to any of her charges, and she advised Lily to do
likewise. “I got a simple rule: for every whack on the calluses
they get there, I give
’em two
on the backside when they get home. And if that don’t do the trick,
I threaten to tell Stoker.”

Lily sat
beside Brad on the battered settee Spartacus had recently picked up
for them, and together they read their way through the first two
primers. At first Brad was faster than she was, guessing the words
quickly and triumphantly, running his finger under the magic
letters a second in front of his nimble tongue, never forgetting a
word once he had sounded it out, and prompting his mother’s halting
efforts with wondering delight. After Christmas, though, Wee Sue
brought over a large tome called
McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader
, and the stories and poems in there frustrated even
Brad’s obsessive efforts. Lily herself found it hard to believe –
impossible to understand – but she began to get the sense of such
pieces as “The Wreck of the Hesperus”, Mrs. Moodie’s “Burning of
the Fallow” and “Little Daffydowndilly” by Mr. Hawthorne, even
without knowing all the words, while Brad became dazed, then
numbed, then furious as the indecipherable phrases accumulated and
mocked him. Brad went back to his own Reader and after a while,
when he settled down, they would take turns again, reciting and
listening, giving and accepting, till Brad fell asleep on her
shoulder and she could open the big book silently and astonish
herself once more by reading it – on her own, unaided, the ancient
stories and fables coming off the page at her as if the bards
themselves were sequestered among the shadows of this room and
chanting towards eternity. I am thirty-one years old, she thought,
and something magical is just beginning. She shivered but made no
attempt to pull the shawl around her.

R
obbie’s first season
at school was not only difficult, it was a foreshadowing of the
troublesome years to follow. In some ways he was as bright as Brad;
by the end of the first grade he could read, print his letters, and
do the simple sums required. But in temperament he was too much
like his father – headstrong, impetuous and fiercely proud. In vain
Lily searched for the first signs – any portent – of Tom’s
redeeming qualities: his good humour, his trusting affection, his
courage. Only the latter was visible for very long as Robbie
continued to defend his brother, risking not only the inevitable
bruises and scrapes but much much more – the fellowship of the
ruffians and outcasts he needed unconditionally as companions.
Somehow he managed to maintain their fickle admiration even while
he punched out the bullies among them whenever he had to. They were
a strange lot he hung out with, Lily thought. She made no pretense
of understanding the contradictory laws of their code, and she had
no doubt about the claims it made upon Robbie’s loyalties.
Unfortunately in defending his brother for reasons which to him
grew more obscure and untenable each time an enemy was silenced,
Robbie’s feelings for Brad began to swing from blinding love to
intermittent revulsion. When there was affection it was no longer
of the open, trusting kind. Strangely Robbie did not seem in the
least jealous of Brad’s brilliant progress in reading and writing,
almost as if he didn’t consider achievements of that kind worthy of
any response whatsoever. They existed in a world he had no desire
to enter.

“
He’s just
like all my boys,” Sophie consoled. “Not one of them ever liked
school. An’ why should they? They went there long enough to learn
to read an’ write their names an’ count up to a hundred – just
enough so’s the bigwigs an’ bosses won’t be able to cheat them
outta their drawers. What else do you need to know to dig ditches
or sling flour sacks on the docks, eh? My John’s gone off to the
sheds this year, an’ Stewie’ll go next. For the girls it’s even
sillier. How is book-learnin’ gonna help you be a parlour maid or
save you from gettin’ knocked up by your
mistress’s hubbie or son or stableboy?” She spoke this
latter sentence with some bitterness.

“
Peg?” Lily
said.

“
You guessed
it, an’ the silly bitch didn’t have enough brains to go for the
top, where there’s some money at least. A stable hand she tells me,
who says he’s gonna make an honest woman outta her as soon as he
can find another job. She can’t come back here, Stoker don’t
approve of them kind of shenanigans. He’s got his
pride.”

One day in the spring
Robbie came home from school in the miidle of the morning. She
stood up from her steaming wash and saw him standing forlornly in
the open doorway of the laundry shed, his chin on his chest, his
hands – always active, alert, poised to clench or welcome – drooped
at his side. She heard him swallowing his tears.

“
He sent me
home. I ain’t goin’ back.” It was not a boast nor a threat nor a
defence; it was spoken as an inevitable, regrettable truth. The
pathos of it struck Lily so forcefully that she had to busy herself
with taking off his sweater and getting him some tea and a cake
before she could bring herself to get the whole story. Apparently
he had used blasphemous language in the presence of several girls
and within earshot of Miss Timmins. Mr. Grindly subsequently
interrogated the blasphemer in his office and declared him, in
official tones, to be a “little heathen devoid of any sense of the
Christian religion.” He had been sent home to learn the Lord’s
Prayer, after which he was to recite it ten times for Miss Timmins
as punishment – a gesture of mercy since the alternative was the
strap, and even Mr. Grindly did not recommend such extreme
retribution for those in the first form, even if it was almost
June.

“
Robbie, you
must go back,” Lily said, and in words she hoped he would
understand she told him about her own brief career in school and
the drastic effects it had had upon her life ever since. He nodded
– dumbly, faithfully, letting his trust open up once again to her.
While he watched her every move, Lily went to her bed and from
under it drew the leather pouch. She t
ook out Papa’s Testament and found printed in the front
section ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. She read it through, puzzled. “I’ll
teach it to you,” she said.

She was at a loss to explain
the words to her son. They defeated her. She sensed some power
under them, in their oracular cadence, but it was the potency of a
charm, felt yet untranslatable. She exhorted Robbie just to commit
the phrases to memory like learning a nonsense rhyme or a skipping
song. It didn’t work. He tried, not because he wanted to return to
the schoolroom but because he still had faith in the woman who was
always at home when he came back, who had not gone away and died on
him, and because the underworld of masculine loyalties and
camaraderie associated with school had put its brand on him. He
tried but he could not do it. He couldn’t memorized the meaningless
words and he couldn’t yet read them himself.

The next morning Lily persuaded
Wee Sue to walk Brad to school. She was very abrupt with him, and
he left in a sulk. Then she sat once more with Robbie and together
they failed again the test before them. Lily took his hand in hers.
Very quietly she said, “Robbie, you gotta go back to school. Your
life depends on it. Do you follow me?”

Bewildered by his mother’s
tears, he said, “If you want me to. I ain’t afraid.”

Lily walked beside him half-way
up Victoria Street. He let her hold his hand until they were within
sight of the school; then he broke away and strode ahead, his
stiffening posture warning her off. She watched him hesitate before
the large door marked in stone ‘BOYS’, and then enter. She followed
after until she stood in the schoolyard a few feet away from the
building but on the side without windows – unobserved, listening.
Long moments later the crack of pebbled leather on stretched skin
resounded down the hallway, through the senior and junior rooms,
out the wide-open windows and over the spring gardens of the
neighbouring houses. The cruelty of the sound stunned a robin in
full flight. Lily let her heart disintegrate.

2

L
ily worked hard to
make her business a success. “I get exhausted just watchin’,”
Sophie would say, settled in her director’s chair by the south
window of the shed. Lily had added two more customers farther up
Victoria Street, and the new owner of The Queen’s, Kevin Malloney,
doubled the number of items she had been assigned under the former
management. However, he did insist that she herself pick up and
deliver them as he didn’t trust his property to wayward boys. Lily
knew quite well why he preferred her to come in person. “He just
looks,” Lily said in her own defence, but Sophie shot back, “No man
only looks.” In the summertime the work was hard because the stove
had always to be on, heat wave or no, the steaming water boiled
your hands as well as the clothes and reddened your cheeks
permanently, the iron skidded into palm and fingertip, the bulk of
wet sheets hung out to dry bent the back into spasms and left the
shoulders burning with aftershock. Sophie recommended brandy, then
reluctantly some Indian herb tea she happened to have around.
Sometimes the latter did help Lily to sleep, but the surest cure
was a trek to the beach with her boys, with Sophie and her trailing
ménage, or sometimes alone with only Violet to talk to and swim
with. After the boys were in school, she got Hazel’s permission to
walk with Violet to the Sarnia Cemetery where they lay white
chrysanthemums on Bachelor Bill’s grave. On the way home they swung
back through the woods and came out into the clearing where they
had first met. No trace of the shanty remained, but Violet stood
and stared at the rusting gate and at the mutilated tree-line
behind it. Lily’s house was charred rubble. She was tempted to go
through it, searching for
what
she had no idea,
but resisted. Instead, like Violet, she stood watching the ruins
and waiting in vain for some definable feeling to take shape out of
the general numbness. They held hands as they hiked across the
fields towards their village.

In the winter months Lily found
that the front half of her got steamed and scorched while the back
half froze. No amount of heat could warm the laundry room itself.
The constant fog from the hot water rose and stiffened into
rivulets of ice along the north wall, and over the course of the
winter they became stalactites perfectly suited to the dark,
cavernous atmosphere of the place. Lily developed chillblains,
rashes and a continuous cold. So it was with as much relief as
pleasure that she began to accompany Sophie up to Hazel’s on most
Monday afternoons for a long, gossipy, hearth-cozy tea. Often Lily
was too weary to say much or even be a good listener. At Hazel’s no
one seemed to notice.