Lily's Story (67 page)

“
Once I quit
somethin’, I quit it,” she said with virtuous finality.

“
Like you did
with readin’?” Lily said.

4

“T
he kids wanna go to
the circus,” Sophie announced.

Robbie and even Brad had talked
of little else since the posters went up on the fenceposts of the
village: Darling Brothers Circus and Travelling Sideshow, they
boasted in black capitals, the place and date hand-stamped below
the engraved horse with the mane like a mermaid’s hair: Bayview
Park, Friday and Saturday. Most of the village was waiting in
formation for the circus train when it pulled into the Grand Truck
station and then backed down a siding which took it past the grain
elevator almost to the edge of the park that lay between the town
and the village.

Though it was less than a
mile’s hike, the Potts and the Marshalls climbed aboard the new
Sarnia Street Railway that Saturday and rode in style ‘on the
rails’, even if the smart leather-seated carriage was drawn along
by a single dray who clumped over the fickle ties. Sophie had her
two youngest in tow, Wee Sue and Bricky, and Brad sat with them
imagining he was really older than Sue. Blub and Robbie had run on
ahead of them, with their own well-rubbed coins jingling in their
pockets.

“
We’ll be
lucky if we get a ‘hello’ outta them two today,” Sophie said,
fluffing up the tired ruffles on her pink party dress and sniffing
at the toilet water she had spilled on the flanks of a partially
exposed bosom. “Fred’s been in a devil of a mood lately, ever since
they laid him off at the sheds. I keep tellin’ him his brothers’ll
get him into the Great Western, but he won’t listen to me or
anybody else. He oughta be more like your Robbie – content with his
lot.”

By the time the trolley
stopped at the park and the bright minarets of the circus tents
floated into view across the green green grass, Sophie had
forgotten all about Blub and any other sorrows she may have been
harbouring. Brad decided he wanted to see the show under the Big
Top with the clowns, animals and acrobats. So did Wee Sue, but
since the first performance was not due to start for an hour, it
was decided that the mothers should escort Bricky through the
kiddies’ section – complete with roundabout, a pony-ride, and a
corral full of exotic but harmless creatures deemed to be ‘cute’.
Brad and Wee Sue headed in the direction of the side-show tents
with their striped cupolas and brass balls and grisly
promise.

“
I hope we’re
doin’ the right thing – lettin’ them two go off together on their
own.”

“
Brad’ll
behave,” Lily said.

“
Ain’t Brad
I’m worried about, “ Sophie laughed, and jammed another taffy apple
into Bricky’s face. He was looking somewhat peaked after a mere
four rides on the roundabout. “You want a meat-pie to settle your
tummy?” Sophie said.

Lily loved the colours
and sounds and odours around her. They stopped to admire the
visible music of a steam-organ and then a leather-skinned man who
played an Irish ditty on slender bottles bubbling with melodic dyes
and then a juggler who defied geometry with his dizzying blue
triangles. Barkers and grifters called out to them to come win
their fortunes, try their luck, take a chance, carry off the main
prize – in a lingo as old as bazaars or gypsies or the wind-swept
Caucasus. Hawkers from the shadow of awnings spread their walnut
eyes over every patch of pink female flesh that passed them
by.

Sophie sat Bricky down in the
shade of a tree, jammed two fingers down his throat and ducked as
he brought up the excess of her affection. Wee Sue and Brad came
up, flushed and giggling. Sophie gave them a searching look, then
said to Wee Sue, “Why don’t you an’ Brad stay here with Bricky for
ten minutes. We’ll meet you at the entrance to the Big Top.”

Before Lily
could say anything, Sophie was trundling ahead of her towards the
games-of-chance. She stopped to catch her breath, her great breasts
flexing like independent bellows unsupported beneath the frumpery
of her costume, garish as a hollyhock. “Did you get a gander at him
on the first round?” she puffed and without waiting for a response,
aimed her slow-motion trot in the direction of a sign which
said:
Guess Your Weight
Within Five Pounds or You Win
.
Standing below this standard near an impressive set of scales was a
dark muscular man with a Moroccan’s moustache and Neanderthal eyes.
They lit up with larceny and other lusts as soon as they spotted
the two women approaching. Lily felt herself skewered and turning
slowly on a spit.

“
Ready to give
away one of them kewpie dolls?” Sophie blared with the brass
section of her voice.

“
Haven’t lost
one today,” said the grifter, his voice swarthy, salted,
montenegron. “But you look like you could fool a man, even a man of
great experience such as myself.”

“
How much is
it gonna cost me?”

“
Depends on
what you’re willin’ to give, but a nickle’ll do. For a
start.”

“
I never start
nothin’ I can’t finish.”

Lily slipped back into the
small crowd that had formed around the scene and its possibilities.
Behind them she could hear the ‘thunk’ of a hammer and the clank of
a rusty bell. Sophie turned just enough to acknowledge the claims
of the spectators without actually looking at them, and then made a
surprisingly nimble pirouette somewhere inside the gaze of the
guess-your-weight man. The onlookers gasped as if they had just
seen an elephant do a cartwheel, then applauded both the feat and
its elegance.

“
That’s all of
me,” she beamed, “or almost all.”

“
Could there
be more?” said the carny, winking to the front rows.

“
You gonna
frisk me for hidden objects?”

“
An’ where
would you hide them, eh?” the carny said, brandishing a white card
and ostentatiously writing down his educated guess. “Three hundred
and ten pounds,” he announced, “of the prettiest pink flesh this
side of Chicago.”

Sophie
snorted and stepped onto the scales.
“With or without my bonnet?” She flipped off her enormous hat and
shook out her curling, chestnut hair. The contrast between it and
her Irish skin, uncaressed by any sun, was dazzling. Several cheers
went up. The carny slipped the weights along the scale as
dextrously as if he were milking a cow, but the outcome had never
been in doubt. He was more than twenty pounds out.

“
Your lucky
day, madam!” he cried to the ‘marks’ gawping at the prize-table,
and he waved the biggest, rosiest kewpie past their avid stare and
placed it gently on the upslope of Sophie’s bosom.

“
My lucky
day,” Sophie said. She wheeled to her supporters. “And I didn’t
even haveta put that brick between my tits!”

A grown man in the crowd
blushed, but the carny laughed and said, “Honey, you couldn’t get a
toe-nail down there!”

Then he did an
astonishing thing. He glanced curiously at Sophie for a long
second, then pushed his way through the throng over to the
sledge-hammer game, yanked the ten-pound mallet out of a customer’s
hand and cried out, “Another kewpie for the great lady!” He raised
the hammer as easily as a match to light his pipe and brought it
crashing down on the button; the clapper shot up the stiff pole as
if it were greased, and slammed into the bell so vehemently the
ringing shook the lions awake in their cages a hundred feet
away.

O
f all the magical
fairy-tale acts in the centre ring Lily was thrilled most with
Mademoiselle Mimi and her Flying Arabians. A fanfare of trumpets
and a drumroll heralded their entrance through the beribboned
portcullis at the east end: six snow-white geldings surmounted by
six beautiful female riders clad entirely in florescent red satin
that shimmered under the arc-lights leading them into the ring. The
crowd, still stirring from the acrobat’s mile-high sleight-of-hand,
was drawn reluctantly towards this fresh commotion of colour and
brass and galloping drum. Into the ring they pranced, steed and
maiden, jogging in happy tandem to the music which – the moment the
beasts formed the unbreakable circle of head and tail and head
again – quickened to a brassy canter. The scarlet riders took the
cue, jettisoned the reins and all hope of control, as the pace of
the geldings accelerated – their manes and tails blown back in
immaculate fans – Mademoiselle Mimi stood upon her alabaster saddle
and uncurled her scarlet arms like a tanager’s wings on a morning
breeze. One by one her nestlings did the same, and while the crowd
applauded with appropriate awe, the Arabians began to gallop with a
rhythmic frenzy that pulled the music with it – trumpeting and
martial. Mademoiselle Mimi, with no expression on any kind on her
face, did not return to the safety of her saddle; she lifted one
foot in the air whirling past her and using it as a rudder or
fantail she titled outward from the centre of the vortex, and by
the time her chorus had repeated this folly, the chargers were
circling so rapidly they began to blur at the edges, till Lily
could see only hoof and flank and flared nostrils and wild
desert-eyes and music-driven muscle and a halo of centrifugal hair;
and above them in a separate corona of motion, attached to the
lower one only by six fragile stems, whirled the scarlet forms
skating some incredible edge of gravity and cadence. Just before
the band stopped and the tableau ended, Lily was certain that
Mimi’s toe floated free of its pinion, her body, already blurred
and insubstantial – a mere penumbra of blood brushed into
air.

So it was that Lily did not
notice little Bricky had fallen asleep in her lap.

L
ily carried him into
the sunlight where he awoke, pale and peevish.

“
Funny, we
ain't seen Blub or Robbie all day,” Brad said, blinking at Wee
Sue.

“
They went to
the freak shows, I bet,” said Wee Sue, reluctant to let go of
Brad’s hand.

“
You take
Bricky along with you on the trolley,” Lily said right through
Brad’s frown. “I need to walk some. Sophie’ll likely be home by now
anyway.”

“
I never knew
Ma to get sick to her stomach before,” Wee Sue said. But she picked
up her brother and gave Brad a look that brought him trailing along
after her, muttering. She’s two years older than him, Lily
thought.

With the music of the
Flying Arabians still echoing inside her, Lily set out across
Bayview Park. Something more than music had made her anxious, she
was sure. Something to do with Brad or with Robbie who’d been
depressed lately, or with Sophie herself. If I walk it off, perhaps
nothing will happen, she told herself. The unlandscaped section of
the park was very pleasant. She avoided the stone bridge, took off
her shoes and waded across the drain thick with aging lily-pads and
young jack-in-the-pulpit. On the other side she veered off the path
into the swail that wound its way through the scattered maples and
brought you out behind St. Clair Street.

Lily was upon
them before she could stop herself. They were sprawled in the
tender grass at the bot
tom of
the swail. The carnyman lay on top of her with neither his hands
nor feet touching the ground, his knees braced on the promontories
of her thighs, his torso nestling in the crevasse of her breasts,
the gnarled brown root of his back twisting and flinging the
buttocks forward in frantic spasms. He seemed to be floating
entirely on flesh, a-bob on the blood-tinted acreage of her skin
like some scorched Casanova riding the cornucopia of Aphrodite’s
thighs, the coral shell of her bedchamber, and the resurrecting
wave under it. Against the sea-heave of his paramour’s breath, the
carnyman exhaled a sequence of abrupt barking sounds, like a dog
being kicked repeated in the ribs. Sophie opened her eyes and
through the glazed lattice of her lust she looked up at Lily, then
twirled the kewpie doll on one finger, like a trophy.

D
on’t stare at me like
that,” Sophie said in the kitchen an hour or so later. “I ain’t
pissed in the Holy Grail, you know.”

“
It’s not
that, really,” Lily said. “It’s just, I thought all them things you
said about Stoke, you know, whenever he –”

“
I meant ’em,
every word. Stoker’s damn good to me, we been good together for as
long as I can remember. But how often is he here, eh? How many
times does he leave me high an’ dry an’ hangin’ out there like a
wash in the wind? You think the bugger keeps it in his pants all
those weeks in the bush, or up in Fort William overflowin’ with
squaws an’ hooers?” She was slowed by a new look of amazement in
Lily’s face.

“
Then the
carnyman...”

“
Of course he
wasn’t the first, don’t you listen to what a body tells you? But I
ain’t no hooer like them floozies up at Hazel’s or them harlots of
Sarie McLeod’s. You ain’t thinkin’ that sort of thing?”

Lily touched her friend’s arm.
“I ain’t thinkin’ anythin’, Soph, you know that. If you want to
tell me, fine. It don’t matter, really.”

“
I can’t help
myself,” Sophie said. “I try real hard, but then some night a young
sailor boy comes totterin’ down from Hazel’s lookin’ sad an’
lonesome, and I call over to him and ask him if he’d like a good
cup of tea, an’ sometimes he comes in, an’ usually he’s been
disgusted by what he’s seen up the hill or he got to the porch an’
turned back while his buddies made fun of him, and I just settle
him down an’ we talk in the dark, real quiet like, an’ once in a
while I just take him into my bed, and it’s as warm an’ toasty an’
nice as you could dream of.”