Lily's Story (72 page)

“
They left out
St. Vitus’ Dance,” Lily tittered.

“
How
about
this
one.
Holloway’s Pills For Sickly Females!
‘Can be taken with safety in all periodical and
feminine disorganizations. Its effect is all but miraculous’,” she
read with a barker’s zest. “Now what in Sam Shit is a ‘feminine
disorganization’? A busted hen party?”

Lily started to giggle in
earnest, the flume from three of stoker’s brown ones taking belated
effect perhaps.

“
Here’s a
dandy!” Sophie said. “
Bryan’s
Pulmonic Wafers
: ‘a blessing
to all classes and constitutions’. You an’ me now, we got the
constitution of a lady ox but no more class than a
squirrel-nut.”

She had got
herself fully launched. She belched, took a lungful of air and
carried on. “
Judson’s
Mountain Herb Pills
: ‘they
purify the blood, remove obstructions of all kinds, cleanse the
skin of all pimples and blotches, and bring the rich odour of
health to the pale cheek’. Ain’t that enough to make you puke
pennies? The only rich odour we got here in Mushroom Alley is
the
per
fumery of pigshit!”

Lily, her
giggle askew, handed her another one. Sophie’s eyes glinted.
“
Dr. Chessman’s Female
Regulating Pills
: ‘the oldest
regulator for females’.” The backwash of her guffaw pitched her
forward and she tottered helplessly against Lily’s shoulder and
they staggered in loose tandem through the door and outside, where
they collapsed into the bent grass – debilitated by laughter and
the sudden zaniness of the ordered universe.

“
And all this
time,” Sophie said, trying in vain to keep the punch-line primly
swallowed, “all this time, I thought the oldest female regulator in
the world was that little pulmonic wafer between Stoker’s
legs.”

“
You mean the
one that cures all classes an’ constitutions,” Lily said, and they
rolled onto their backs, side by side, letting the excitement of
the alcohol, the sun-drenched sky, the woozy delight of their own
improvisation flow through them and across the maddening divide
that kept their beings temporarily separate. The grass and the heat
and the afternoon enfolded them.

Lily drifted in and out of
sleep. Hours later the shadow of the shed fell upon her exposed
face like a bat’s wing.

She sat up. Sophie was sitting
up beside her. Lily reached out to touch her sleeveless arm. Sophie
looked down at her.

“
Every night I
pray to God he’ll sail away on one of them goddam boats an’ never
come back. Sometimes I even wish the bugger’d fall overboard an’
drown, or trip an’ go headfirst into the fuckin’
furnace.”

Desperately she tried to read
the response in Lily’s face. “I’m wicked, ain’t I, Lil?”

29

1

I
n September of 1878,
after flinging their slogans and exordia fruitlessly into the
machinery of the universe, the Liberals lay down and let the Tories
take up the torch with their cries of ‘National Policy’ and
‘Reciprocity of Tariffs’ that must have sent a shudder rippling
through the outer galaxies. Hopes were raised much faster than the
fallen economy: The North-West Mounted Police cantered onto the
plains to save them from whiskey and Indians. The Métis retreated
even farther up the North Saskatchewan to obscure enclaves with
immemorable names like Duck Lake and Batoche. With Sir John A. –
resuscitated and breathing fire – at the throttle, the Canadian
Pacific Railway took lethal aim at the Rockies, and the shockwaves
of its revived thunder rolled into the Ontario boardrooms of the
Great Western and the Grand Trunk. Talk of amalgamation was in the
air that autumn. Retrenchment and consolidation were dusted off and
re-presented as bywords of conventional wisdom. At any rate –
whatever the reason – the Grand Trunk did decide that it was no
longer expedient to supervise the daily comings and doings of its
foster-child, Point Edward. Incorporation was hastily added to its
list of bywords. After all, the company had more reserve land than
it would ever need for future development, had already sold off the
choice commercial lots it could not use, and even had a fine
locally-situated candidate in mind to act as reeve and avuncular
guide. Accordingly, the necessary legal trivia were arranged in the
summer of 1878, elections for the first council announced for early
October, and a proclamation date set for the transfer of power:
January 1, 1879.

2

I
t was probably Hazel
who first raised the question, but it soon became general up and
down the Alley: what would be the fate of squatters and outcasts in
a village controlled by its own elders and
grandees
? This
question took on more biting import when it was learned that the
Railway was ceding – gratis and as a gesture of its good-will – all
such marginal territories to the corporation for ‘future
recreational or industrial development’. The town council would own
the Alley – outright. When the elections in October returned two
clergymen, a shop foreman and a druggist as councillors, and
acclaimed Stanley R. ‘Cap’ Dowling as reeve-elect – no doubt was
left about the precariousness of the Alley community. So when they
gathered at Hazel’s on the Saturday following the municipal
election – more than two dozen of them, including even old Angus
Shawyer sobered up for the day – they were not unaware of the irony
of the situation: a town meeting of people who had settled here so
they wouldn’t ever have to worry about politics and who had never
been called upon to publicly confess that they were a community
of
any
kind, even renegades.

Stump Starkey, Bible clamped akimbo,
ascended the dais and accepted the burden of explaining the legal
details as far as they were known, and when each of these had been
thoroughly depreciated by argument and imprecation, he went on to
recite the actual words of the Reverend Clough, councillor-elect,
who had declared from the sanctity of his altar that the new
village would be ‘purged of that empustulated rot by spring’. A
number of suggestions were made for remediation, all of them
indictable, and then the mood of anger changed to frustration and
finally to sullen resignation. At the point where the meeting was
about to break up, Sophie Potts was helped up onto the makeshift
platform (Shadrack Lincoln’s steamer-trunk). The silence turned
from sulky to expectant. Braced on either arm by Stumpy and
Spartacus, she began to speak.

Sophie was now a truly gargantuan figure.
The hummocks and drumlins and foothills of her flesh were housed in
a cerise-and-violet-striped awning which Spartacus had filched from
a Sarnia squire and Lily had fashioned into some sort of
presentable container. Her cheeks, unbusked by sun, were
nonetheless puffed with scarlet striations merely from the effort
of breathing. The spoor of her sweat knocked dogs to their knees.
Her chickory-dark hair sprouted up anywhere in thicket and thew.
When she spoke, her voice, though unmistakably female, reminded her
listeners of hickory smoke, licorice and deep-ground
peppercorn.

“
First of all, I’m sick an’
tired of this whinin’ an’ gabble-gruntin’. Won’t do us no more good
than a tinker’s fart, an’ it’s not worthy of any one of you. I know
you all. I met you one at a time. I liked an’ I hated you as I saw
fit an’ you deserved. We all came here for our own special purpose,
an’ we don’t have to tell one another why, now or ever. We like it
here for our own peculiar reasons, an’ most of us wanna keep it
that way. Most of us won’t do too good out there in the other
world: we know too damn much about livin’ to last long out there.
The question for us is not ‘do we want to stay?’ but ‘how can we
swing it?’ Well, I’m gonna tell you how, right now.”

Stumpy and Spartacus got a firm double-grip
and eased Sophie forward till she caught her breath – huffing in
the most frightening manner. She continued.

“
You’re all tryin’ to dream
up ways of defendin’ your rights or gettin’ back at the respectable
folk or cuttin’ your losses before you hightail it outta here like
a jarful of spooked jackrabbits. Well you don’t need to. This town
ain’t gonna toss us out on our noses no matter how much hot air the
Reverend One-Ball Clough bellows out his belfry. This town needs
us, an’ they know it. All we got to do is remind them a little
bit.”

No one present had ever heard Sophie Potts
talk like this before. Her gossipy tales and deadly retorts, her
mustard tongue and nettling glance, her Olympian profanity – these
were legend on the lane, but not this. The Alleyfolk listened, not
quite believing what they heard.

“
Think about it. Them
people out there may look on us as a cartful of cripples, ninnies,
hooers and downright heathen, but they get a lot of pleasure out of
thinkin’ such things an’ feelin’ a tad better about themselves for
thinkin’ them. And all the time they know they can’t really do
without us. If Honeyman left, who would clean the shithouses an’
septic tanks? If they lost Spartacus, who would keep their
boulevards clean an’ give ’em a pile of cheap furniture from Sarnia
to choose from? Who’d keep the tramps safe an’ warm outta harm’s
way if Stumpy up an’ left? And if Hazel were shut down, where would
all them rutting sailors end up, eh? In the chaste beds of their
precious little daughters! They may curse old Baptiste every
mornin’ before prayers, but half the town buys its hooch from that
fine, unlicensed establishment. And if they dump the Shawyers an’
McLeods an’ McCourts onto the streets, what maids will there be to
change the sheets on their beds or wipe the snot off their kids’
faces? An’ think of the mountain of dirty laundry chokin’ the
closets an’ hallways of the town’s best houses if our dear Lily was
given her walkin’ papers?”

Sophie had struck the chord she had
intended, and now she merely played the instrument – with intervals
for deep breathing. “Now, here’s the plan,” she said when the
cheering had almost ceased.

She had worked it out carefully in her own
mind, trying it out first on Lily, and together they shaped it for
presentation. The Alleyfolk, each in the course of his
self-appointed duties, would take a petition out among the
populace. The gist of the petition, written out in legal fashion
for them by Shadrack Lincoln, was this: for a fee to be negotiated
the squatters on the lane known as Mushroom Alley would have their
properties surveyed, after which they would be given outright
title. The lane itself would be formally attached to Prince Street
at the south side of the tracks. With the addition by Shadrack of
several ‘whereas’ and ‘we the undersigned’, the finished product
looked impressive. Five copies were made. The strategy, as evolved
by Sophie and Lily, was first to talk, in the natural course of
business or social interchange, individually with a storekeeping, a
lady-of-the-house, a day-labourer resting at Baptiste’s or
exercising at Hazel’s, a satisfied customer, a charitable heart –
and when that individual seemed convinced by the justice or
necessity of the cause, then and only then would the petition be
proffered for a confirming signature. Moreover, only the petition
for that designated interest-group would be shown; that is, there
were separate duplicate petitions for housewives, shopkeepers,
Grand Trunk employees and other workers, tradesmen, and various
self-appointed burghers of high standing. Discreetness, subterfuge,
a touch of flim-flam – traits revered and practiced in the Alley –
were thus to be used to telling effect.

The stratagem worked. On the five documents
they amassed three hundred and fifty signatures, more than half of
the adult population of the village – though strictly speaking not
all by any means were eligible voters. But the moral impetus of the
suit was considerable; after all, few of the resident landowners
could deny having a father or grandfather who had begun life in
British North America as a squatter. Nor was the instinct to poach
completely extinguished by the advance of civility.

A delegation was appointed to take the
petition to Reeve-elect Dowling. Stumpy was chosen to present the
suit and do all the talking, his chief qualification for the task
being his gender. Dowling lived in a two-storey brick house on
Victoria Street in a style appropriate to a factory-owner, retired
railway executive and budding politician. A maid, Carrie McCourt,
answered the door and curtseyed before she recognized her
neighbours and lapsed into an incurable titter. Before she
recovered, they were inside, past the vestibule and fully into the
drawing room – Stumpy, Sophie, Maggie Shawyer, Hazel and, well in
the background, Lily Marshall. Dowling, his tie askew and his shirt
in a rumpus, was caught off-guard and never regained his balance.
He read through the papers at a muttering clip – glancing up from
time to time at the odd components of the delegation, none of whom
he recognized with any certainty. He said nothing for fully five
minutes. Then he looked up at Stumpy. “Well, I am the Reeve of all
the people here; I’ll present this to the council in January.
Carrie will show you out.”

Sophie brushed Stumpy back with a gentle
flipper and rolled her bulk till it was planted solidly in front of
the reeve-elect, now trapped between his fireplace and divan. “Take
it to them right now. We got to know your feelings on this right
away. We don’t propose to hang around an’ wait for your mercy or
neglect. We mean what we say here. All the services we provide are
gonna vanish quicker than you can count your money. The people who
signed there are tellin’ you they want them services an’ that they
agree we got the same squatters’ rights as was given to their
parents an’ to the lowliest of Negro slaves brung over the border
from the States. We want an answer in a week, one way or
another.”