Lily's Story (71 page)

Before the
crowd could confer its ultimate accolade on Sophie’s daring,
however, two more unexpected things happened. First, Cap Whittle,
athwart an alder branch, cried out, “
Man ahoy
,” and John
the Baptist was spotted tearing across the flats towards the
mêlée
. Second, the combined plentitude of sow, boar and human
attendants caused the ground to give way under them. Not all at
once but steadily, like quicksand, and accelerating with each
floundering second. Straw, dirt, pigshit, rotting timbers,
splintered floorboards – all caved inward and down and swept a
cargo of flesh into the vortex. Moments later, through a maze of
squeals, whimpers, gasps and settling dust – first Lily, then
Duchess, then Aquinas, then Sophie clambered up and rolled onto
firm ground. And just in time.

As the throng parted and drew
back to allow for the entrance of the aggrieved party whose French
oaths and howl of desolation preceded him by two hundred yards,
they gasped as one when the earth under them rumbled and exploded,
and a geyser of smoke-and-steam shot up no more than a handspan
behind Sophie’s rump. The shock of it bowled her over against Lily,
and, arms enlinked, they followed the goose-white plume as it
hissed skyward from its underground eruption. Moments later Cap
Whittle caught the first whiff of raw whiskey.

A
few weeks later Sophie stopped Lily
on the lane and said, “Hey, I got news. Duchess is up the stump.”
She grinned her most wicked grin: “Must’ve been the holy
water!”

28

S
toker had left for
the boat. Lily watched twelve-year-old Bricky trail after him
across the ragweed fields towards the docks. She waited a full day,
then slipped across to Sophie’s.

Lily found her in the
back shed sprawled on a pile of sheets and scraps of clothing, half
of which was dirty and half in one or more stages of being washed.
She was absent-mindedly sipping homemade beer from one of the brown
pint bottles once used for some medicinal end. She made no sign to
acknowledge or sanction Lily’s presence. Lily came gently up beside
her and eased down onto a stack of overalls. Sophie was staring at
one of the cracks in the siding where the morning sun pounced. Lily
reached over, detached the bottle from Sophie’s hands, and took a
large gulp. The beer was warm and fizzy.

“
Needs to
settle a bit,” Sophie said. “Stoke made a batch special for me. He
made me promise I’d wait till it settled for a week.”

“
How long’s he
gone for?”

“
The
usual.”

“
Where’s
Bricky?”

“
Who gives a
shit. Quiet around here, ain’t it?”

“
It’s not bad,
for not bein’ settled.”

“
Since when
did you start likin’
any
kind of
beer?”

Lily swallowed an ostentatious
mouthful.

“
Christ’s
sake, gimme that before you waste it all!”

Lily rolled away, holding the
bottle aloof and foaming.

“
Shit, woman,
you’re drippin’ it all over my laundry!” Sophie heaved the flotsam
of her flesh forward in an effort to sit up, almost made it, but
teetered backwards, wobbling towards gravity.

“
Come on, Lil,
I ain’t kiddin’. That’s the last goddam bottle. Stoke’s puttin’ me
on a diet.” As Lily danced close to her, Sophie lashed out with her
right hand and cuffed a pair of men’s underwear.

“
You skinny
bitch! You bag o’ bones! You fly-titted little Jezebel!
Gimme that booze!
”she snorted. “That’s a present from my husband.
That’s sacred stuff.
Put it
down!
”

Lily set the bottle down,
and while Sophie floundered through heavy seas towards it – her
shark’s eye on its last trickle – Lily scurried about reorganizing
the laundry and restarting the fire in the kitchen stove to heat
more water. Later, when she came back into the shed, she brought
two brown bottles of beer with her, pulled the corks out with her
teeth and squatting beside Sophie once again, handed her one of
Stoker’s precious gifts.

Sophie sighed: “What on earth
would I do without you, eh?”

I
t turned out that
Sophie was in one of her periodic states of false inebriation,
where the alcohol merely puts a glaze on the lethargy or
despondency or glee already present in its own right. For no sooner
had Lily finished up the wash and begun to gather it together to
hang outside when the comatose Sophie revived on the instant,
climbed onto both feet, and flashed a mischievous grin.

“
Come on,” she
whispered. “It’s time I showed you something’.”

They took a bit of the medicine
with them.

T
he windowless old
relic of a shed had always been locked. Its rusty tin roof sagged
preposterously, its vertical barn boards split apart like a sprung
barrel. The sun riddled its secret interior unopposed, yet not once
did Lily or anyone else in the Alley remember seeing anyone put a
key to the seized padlock or in any way disturb the sanctum behind
it. At least not for years. Several of the oldtimers did recall
that back in the ’sixties Sophie was seen entering the premises
with a lantern and several twelve-quart baskets.

Lily followed Sophie up the
shaggy path towards the shed. Sophie was navigating with some
difficulty, using her arms for balance.

“
I reckon
you’re old enough to see certain sights,” she said confidentially
as they reached the padlocked door and set the empty bottles down.
“Damn lock’s gone an’ seized up,” she said. She grabbed the hasp
and jerked it backwards. Screws popped everywhere. Sophie let the
whole door fall out of her grasp. “Son-of-a-bitch,” she muttered
and disappeared into the darkness ahead.

Lily followed. The odours
of the dank interior wafted over her and rolled on out into the
August sunshine: must, mildew, the mouldy cob-webbing of neglect,
the tuberous pungency of root rot and festering, imploded bulbs.
But something else as well: an emanation only; an afterscent of
something not quite sweet nor tart – herbal perhaps; something that
had been lovingly dessicated till only its quintessence remained to
impress the believer. Lily was trying to adjust her eyes to the
gloom when Sophie pulled up a hinged shutter and the sun shot in
from the south with the force and clarity of a lightning flash. The
room, unillumined for a dozen years, leapt immediately into view,
garish and eerie.

What caught Lily’s eye first
were the brown leaf-like rags draped over several clotheslines that
crisscrossed just above her. Some looked as large as tobacco
fronds, others as tiny as mint or thyme. Still others, she now saw,
were whole plants – roots, stems, leaves, stunted flowers –
dangling from clothes pegs like the shrivelled corpses of aborted,
unnamed creatures of mythology. Sophie reached up and flicked her
finger against a spade-shaped leaf so thin the sun lit up its
bloodless veins. There was a gasp of dust as fine as powdered
gold.

“
Ground that
stuff up in my cough medicine,” she laughed. “Over here,” she
said.

Lily saw the workbench
and thought of the chemist’s lab in Sarnia – with apothecary jars,
mortar-and-pestle, burettes, filter screen, gas-burner and bottles
of every contortion and hue imaginable, some still winking. Sophie
slapped her hand down on the top of the bench and two shallow
dishes coughed their bluish powder effortlessly into the
air.

“
Didn’t know
your dear Soph was a witch, did ya?”

In a butter box at the end of
the bench Lily noticed three neat rows of dried roots stacked four
or five deep and looking quite forlorn. They’re like the wizened
penises of capons, she thought, as a giggle tickled the back of her
throat.

“
Not funny,
Lil. Not funny at all. That’s what all the decent folk thought, and
even some of the loonies ’round here. Why d’you think I had to
build this here shanty an’ put a burglar’s lock on the door,
eh?”

“
What did you
do in here?”

“
Mixed up
potions,” she said. She held a fruit jar up to the slanting light
where its contents glowed like honey. “Pure linseed oil,” she said.
“Made it myself. Used it on some of the poultices. Now
this
,” she said, displaying a jar in which some purplish
precipitate quivered ominously, “is a gen-u-ine witch’s brew. Kill
a Tomcat in heat at twenty rods.”

“
These are
Indian medicines,” Lily said, suddenly serious.

Sophie ignored the remark and
went rummaging among some boxwood cases in a shadowy corner still
unopened by the sun. She caught her sleeve on an offending nail.
“Jumpin’ be-Jesus,” she hissed, “that’s the last of my party
dresses.” She peered blearily at the slight tear, grabbed the
sleeve with her other hand and extended the fracture all the way to
the armpit. “That’ll teach ya’ to trip on a nail,” she said. “Now
where in Christ’s Calvary are those little buggers?” There was a
clatter of shaken glass and some further profane encouragement.

“
Them
medicines you gave me for Robbie an’ Brad, you made them
yourself?”

“
I know
they’re back here somewhere. Jesus-be-jumpin’!”

Lily heard the other sleeve go.
“Where did you learn all this?”

“
Here they
are, right where I left them.”

“
Why did you
go an’ give it up?”

Sophie had a crate of
wobbly medicine bottles flush against the folds of her bosom and
was struggling to find her way into the light with her treasure.
“Goddam quacks, that’s why. Just too many of ’em, dearie. I got
sick an’ tired of fightin’. Besides, people get money an’ they want
real doctors, don’t they? I quit before I wasn’t wanted any more.
Just like that.”

The crate of bottles clattered
down onto the bench. For a moment Sophie pretended they weren’t
there and turned to face Lily for the first time since they had
come into the arcanum. “You’d never guess by lookin’ at this
baby-pink complexion of mine that I got Indian blood pumpin’ in
these veins.”

Lily showed her surprise.

“
Told ya’ so.
Though I reckon Stoke suspected right from the start, if you know
what I mean. My Mama’s mama was full-blood Ojibwa, from Kettle
Point. She was the daughter of a medicine man from Manitoulin. She
passed the lore along to me.”

“
Where’d you
grow all these things?”

Sophie guffawed and the manic
gleam was suddenly back in her eye, as if all the alcohol from
Stoker’s store had been holding its potency in check till now, as
he himself sometimes tried to do – wondering if, unleashed, it
would stretch and burst inside them both in a paroxysm of pleasure
and fiery demise. “Not on this singed arsehole of land, that’s for
sure. And even if I did manage to coax anything’ up out there, some
brat would piss all over it for a penny.” Her chuckle, rumbling up
through her, toppled her against the bench where her elbow struck
the crate. “No, my cousin used to bring me the supplies down from
the Reserve every couple of months. But I made up the potions and
poultices right here, right on this bench, early in the mornin’
when the sun would shoot right through that window, when nobody was
around to unsettle me except the babe kickin’ at me from indoors.”
She patted her belly reminiscently. “They were good medicines, Lil,
an’ don’t you ever forget that.”

“
What are
those, then?” Lily said.

“
Hey! That’s
what I wanted to show you. To show you how good I really was. You
wouldn’t believe it, Lil, but Stoker, he was proud as punch of me
in them days. People couldn’t pay much, of course, but they’d bring
the kids little presents an’ do favours for Stoker around here when
he was off on the boats. An’ when he’d come home, he’d give out an
Indian whoop an’ say, ‘C’mere little squaw-lady, give big chief
some of that wampum.’ An’ he didn’t mean a cup of rose-hip tea!”
She stared at the dusty bottles as if waiting for them to speak for
themselves.

“
But these’re
drugstore medicines,” Lily said after a bit, picking up one of the
bottles. “Real old ones.”

“
Yup. Every
one of ’em. I got each of these from a person I helped in my
rounds. Whenever my medicine worked for them, they always said,
‘Here, Sophie dear, take this quack stuff an’ throw it in the
River.’ But I always brung it straight back here an’ put in my
trophy case. That’s what Stoke used to call it.”

Lily started
to read one of the labels, a syllable at a time:
“
Doc-tor Maur-ice’s
Cel-e-brated Worm Can-dy.
”

Sophie
chortled and hiccoughed at the same time; her eyes bulged and
narrowed raffishly. “That ain’t as funny as
Sir Astley Cooper’s Worm Tea!
” she said, dumping the bottles onto the bench
and then lifting them one at a time to the naked light. “Or how
about
Ayer’s
Sasarsparilla
: ‘cures
scrofula, ulcers, pimples, salt rheum, scald head, syphilis,
dropsy, neuralgia, tic dolour-eux, debility, dyspepsia, eruptions,
erysipals an’ St. Anthony’s Fire.” She snorted: “Want your fire put
out, luv?”