Lily's Story (65 page)

Lily handed him the leather
case she had retrieved from the puddle beside him, carefully
tucking the official-looking papers and letters back in. “Can’t
say,” she said. “I don’t get no vote. I’m a woman.”

T
hey were on the
wooden stoop. The sun was up, simmering and blood-shot over First
Bush, and whorls of mist skittered above the vanishing pools along
the grassy lanes of Mushroom Alley.

“
Thank you,
Lily Marshall. I shall never forget what you’ve done. I shall not
forget
you
, either.” He leaned back to take her in just one
more time. “You must believe in Fate,” he said, “in your own
personal destiny. It’s the only way.”

She watched him till the mist
clothed him in its own kind of obscurity.

25

1

T
he five-year reign of
the reform Government from 1873 to 1878 was not a happy one. In the
winter of 1873 the Pacific Railway Scandal had broken over its
authors’ heads so resoundingly that it has been capitalized ever
since. The succeeding Liberals under Alex Mackenzie of Sarnia tried
hard, and proclaimed their virtues even harder, but there seemed to
be no quick cure for the economic ills of the fledgling nation: it
had caught the world’s disease, or rather the fallout from its
ceaseless wars, famine, pestilence, and all the human skulduggery
that kept the maggots jigging in a carcass which could rot but not
perish. Free trade or reciprocity, responsible government in a
chastened monarchy or the licensed chaos of republicanism,
laissez-faire
or the Temperance Act – the shibboleths that men
lived by and shaped their existence to were falling all over the
earth like the pillars of Sodom or the columns of Gaza. The Great
Depression – that was to last the whole decade – settled everywhere
at once with the stealth of the ash from Aetna. The railroad to the
Pacific inched ahead, then rusted in the prairie rain. Tricked out
of their inheritance in Red River, the Métis slipped through the
shadows and reappeared a thousand miles from the nearest spike. No
one noticed. Wheat, unsaleable, fermented in the field; factory
workers were laid off; the employees of the Grand Trunk had their
pay cut in half. In the township, Clara Fitchett’s brother hanged
himself in the family barn.

In the Point
the depression was felt everywhere except in Mushroom Alley. The
railway slump affected every respectable household and incidentally
stalled the attempts of its most prominent citizens – storekeepers,
foremen, civil servants and clergymen – to wrest the village from
the benign paternity of the Grand Trunk. Though almost all the
homes and shops were now owned outright, no one in such uncertain
times wanted to ruffle the king’s feathers. By mutual unspoken
consent, all talk of incorporation ceased. Still there was some
excited, under-the-counter buzzing when a distinguished gentleman
recently retired from the railway wars arrived in town without
prior notice one day in the summer of 1876 and within weeks had
established an independent industry not fifty yards from the
round-house. It turned out to be a factory of sorts, bigger than a
hay barn and clanking with impressive machinery. Ten local men were
immediately employed; Hap Withers was made foreman. By September
the facts were irrefutable: the entrepreneur himself had purchased
the Blakely home on Victoria Street and was settling in to oversee
his handiwork. Every morning at nine, Stanley R. ‘Cap’ Dowling
promenaded down Michigan Ave., offering his profile equally to the
shop windows on either side of the thoroughfare before disappearing
down the cinder path to his foundry. Independent industry, he was
heard to say at the haberdashers, that’s what we need at this
moment in our hist
ory, and the
words were repeated with annotation and gloss all over town. Just
how independent the industry was, was a matter of personal
interpretation, however. The welders and smithies inside Dowling
Enterprises manufactured plates, spikes and various latches used in
coupling devices on box-cars. Most of these, it was rumoured, were
transhipped fifty yards or so to the Grand Trunk Railway.
Nevertheless, people kept an eye on Cap Dowling,
entrepreneur.

Except the Alleyfolk.
They were too busy to notice anything for long. Depression or no,
the necessity of the services they rendered remained unchanged.
There was no diminution in the number of clients demanding to be
inspired at Hazel’s Heaven. Someone had to scrub off or bleach out
the weekly blood and semen splashed on the bedsheets of McHale’s
and The Queen’s. Respectable householders defecated at the
customary rate and so the talents of Honeyman Belcher were in
steady demand. Not a single McLeod, McCourt or Shawyer lost her job
as maid, though the salaries were attenuated and the after-hours
requests somewhat more importunate. Spartacus had to pick more
judiciously through the corporate garbage for gems, but with his
magpie instinct and his carrion’s pride, he kept the boulevard as
impeccable as ever. The only businesses to increase their trade
were those of John the Baptist (whose inexhaustible still frothed
away like Parnassus in its secret bower) and Stumpy’s elymosenary
institute now overflowing with the destitute and the dazed who
dropped off the way-freight every morning and evening. Sophie Potts
bred her sow every season and sold the suckling to Duckface
Malloney, and she tended her chickens with the same smothering
carelessness she offered her children. “We always do okay for
ourselves,” she would tell anyone within earshot. “After all,
mushrooms come rosier in manure, don’t they?”

2

F
or Lily these would
be remembered as good years, growing years. McHale’s Hotel and two
large boarding houses on St. Clair Street were added to her
business. She asked Spartacus if he would act as her delivery man
and even though it meant a drop in his status, he smiled and shook
his head yes. Then one Monday, when the afternoon session at
Hazel’s had been prorogued, she asked that good woman if Violet
could come down several days a week and work for her. Hazel was
almost too quick to agree, Violet was ecstatic, and the
arrangements completed within the hour. “You’re putting the money
you earn in a safe place?” Lily asked her a few weeks later. Violet
nodded her head vigorously. Hazel’s taking every cent, Lily
thought. When she saw the panic in Violet’s face, she patted her on
the arm and said, “You can give some to Hazel, for your room an’
board.” “Anythin’ you say, Lily.”

Violet was a wonderful,
joyous companion to Lily’s own labours, which continued every day
of the week except Monday afternoons. The good part of it was that
they could take an hour or two off whenever the weather or mood
tempted them. While they worked side by side they hummed – to
themselves or mysteriously in sudden, improvised concert – and
sometimes they swapped stories, though Violet’s speech always
tightened and splayed as the momentum of an anecdote increased.
Whenever they were together, they felt the overpowering presence of
the shared space between them – lending its shadow to the body
needing it most. When the clothes could be hung out in the breeze,
they sang the French song Lily had learned from Ti-Jean and taught
with ease to the ‘idiot’ daughter of Bachelor Bill. They sang it
lustily like an extravagant surrogate for joy, and loud enough to
shiver the testicles of Baptiste Cartier’s bachelor
boar.

W
ith the profits she
made from her work Lily began to make the house more comfortable
for her boys. What Spartacus couldn’t salvage for her, he managed
to purchase second-hand and deliver to her door. He loved a cup of
tea but always drank it from a mug with one foot on the front
stoop. Lily got proper beds and ticks for all of them, a plush
chesterfield and chair, two large reading lamps, a set of dinner
plants and cups that almost matched, a small cooking stove for the
main room, and a handsome walnut bookcase with glass doors only one
of which was cracked. Hap Withers supplied two of his many sons to
rebuild her floor, partition the sleeping quarters, seal the
windows and eaves to discourage mosquitoes and drafts, and put a
slatted platform over the bare dirt of the laundry room. Lily tried
knitting again but she was too exhausted, and so she had to spend
precious dollars on clothing for her sprouting, handsome
schoolboys. After Violet came to help out, Lily tried putting in a
garden, but nothing would grow in the sand on her property except
burs and sawgrass. She gave up even though a few shrunken
vegetables would have meant more money for important things. Like
books for Brad.

Brad was a wizard at
school. He did everything with an ease and a confidence that was
absolute, even arithmetic. But reading and writing were the things
he loved most. Lily marvelled and worried. Miss Timmins kept him
only two years before she passed him along to the senior teacher,
Miss Constance Stockton, newly arrived in relief of the footsore
Mr. Grindly. Miss Stockton had a First-Class Certificate from the
Normal School and she came to them from one of the better academies
in Toronto for reasons still being speculated upon. The village
folk were honoured merely by her presence among them. Brad thrived
under her aggressive tutelage. Though such preferment usually
spelled disaster among one’s peers as it had that first year,
Brad’s start was so high and so bright that he became an object of
wonder among them, a person wholly apart from them and hence immune
from the cruel sanctions of their fraternity. In his second-last
year – Junior Book Four – he wrote a play for the Christmas concert
and the lesser breed of the senior school allowed themselves to be
flattered and bullied by his direction of it. Lily sat in the back
row with Sophie and watched in awe. “You better put the kibosh on
this schoolin’ business right now,” Sophie said afterwards. “It
starts to go to their heads an’ then all hell breaks loose. There’s
nothin’ you can do once they get too much of it in their blood.
Like Marlene.”

Sophie
demonstrated her views by taking Wee Sue out of school in the
middle of grade eight – a few months before her Entrance Exams –
and shipping her off to keep house for a retired shed foreman on
Alfred Street. “At least he’s too old to get her in the family
way,” she laughed. “He might be able to get it half-way up on a
good day but he sure as hell can’t catch her.” Wee Sue continued to
read books despite her mother’s embargo on them in the Potts’
house, smuggling them in from her employer’s surprisingly
interesting collection and lending them in turn to Lily and Brad.
When in 1875 a proper street railway was opened to connect Sarnia
and Point Edward with an hourly service, Lily could take Brad and
Wee Sue with her to the new public library on Wellington Street.
Brad loved fiction and poetry, devouring the romances of Scott and
much of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. For a while Lily tried to read
along with him, to feel vicariously some of the pleasure she could
see in his eyes and the way his whole frail body bent towards the
book he was reading – sucked willingly into the vast rebellious
landscapes that dazzled the white side of the page. But she was
just too tired; her eyes silted with fatigue; the print crumbled
into meaningless alphabets; and she would shake the book with rage,
then resignation. Often she would come awake, still sitting with a
book in her hand, the chimney-glass scorched, and discover Brad in
the other chair with his eyes alert and tirelessly skimming page
after page. Sometimes she would sit beside him and put her arm
around his shoulder and he would snuggle against it, continuing to
absorb the magic print before him but letting her take a full part
in his own joy, imperceptibly acknowledging the primacy of her
claim, her uncertificated love. When she prompted, he would recount
the seven wonders of Midlothian or leave her breathless by reciting
those poems about Lucy and the last green field. At other times he
would stiffen the moment her hand touched his shoulder and she
would be shut out, even if he relented later, as he often did, and
included her in his re-enactment of the story. When typhoid fever
struck the village in
’seventy-six and swept away two of the Sawyer children,
Lily kept her boys at home; she wouldn’t even let them out in the
yard.

Brad didn’t
mind much, but Robbie did. Robbie could never be cooped up for
long. Maybe that was why he had so much trouble in school. He
longed to be outdoors, and the stuffy, fly-ridden weather of Miss
Timmins’ room was more than he could bear. He never got out of the
junior division, though he stuck it out – uncomplainingly – for
almost six years. What he loved most was fishing and hunting with
the older boys of the Alley and Fred Potts in particular – now
known simply as Blub. Robbie skinned the rabbits they shot (with
Blub’s twelve-gauge) over at Potts before he brought them home for
Lily to cook. He was saving the furs for a jacket he hoped his
mother would make him. Sometimes he and Blub would ‘borrow’ a boat
from the fishery and head out into the Lake for the day. Fresh
perch could be sold in town for cash; Robbie was saving his money
for a gun. When Lily expressed her concern about his truancy and
his passion for hunting, Sophie gave a ruminative chuckle and said,
“He’s just tryin’ to wear a man’s socks – a little bit too soon
maybe but then Blub’s almost three years older, ain’t he? Why don’t
you just give in an’ let the kid quit scho
ol? Let him get a job an’ make his way in the world.
We don’t
own
them, you know.” I know, Lily
thought, thinking of Sophie’s own brood scattered and dissident all
over the province.