Lily's Story (81 page)

“
Don’t look so
sceptical,” the Reeve smiled knowingly. “It
is
good
news of a sort.”

I told you so.

“
You’ve heard
that up-and-comin’ types like Harold Hitchcock are keen to get this
property back. Yes, I know he’s a phoney, but he’s also cunning.
He’s playin’ to certain prejudices an’ sentiments in town, as you
know so well. I was hopin’, and I still am, that the spirit of
cooperation brought on by the War and the epidemic would carry on.
I think it can, Cora, really, I do.” Her stare had almost stopped
him.

“
We’re goin’
to need that spirit, as I’ve told you before. This town’s in rough
shape. No one knows better than you what the village went through
during the railroad years an’ the tunnel scandal and the wholesale
depopulation.” Did he know what had happened? The details? Were
they written down somewhere? She hadn’t considered that
possibility.

“
When I came
here, there were fifty vacant lots and a dozen houses rottin’ where
they sat. The Anglican Church was boarded up. Even the Lane was
half-empty.”

I left it, too. A deserter,
like the rest.

“
You stuck it
out as long as you could. Don’t deny it now.”

She did, emphatically.

“
Anyway, you
know how hard we struggled to get the stone works and the Foundry
in here. Then the War and all those men, our neighbours,
gone,
like
that
. An’ the fever attackin’
the young an’ the helpless.” He paused, seeing the pain in her
face, but she urged him on.

I need to cry she said to him,
I need to feel.

“
Well, times
are boomin’ again. But just stand at the car-stop any mornin’ at
seven an’ watch three-quarters of our men leavin’ town to work at
the Refinery or the railroad shops. How long can that go on before
they start feelin’ like City people? An’ how long before Sarnia
decides to make another move to take over and fulfil the dream
they’ve had for forty years? The War come close to breakin’ us.
Unless we get back our sense of bein’ a community, we’ll go
under.”

Granny nodded her
agreement.

“
That’s why
the monument means so much to us. It’s goin’ to be bigger an’
nobler an’ more lastin’ than the one in the City. To get the job
done, I need to keep the council together. This business of your
property has to be settled. Oh, don’t be alarmed. You know where I
stand. I told them last week that our lawyer said you have the
right to buy the lot before any other kind of move can be
made.”

Granny’s eyes filled with
tears. Oh damn, she thought, there you go, acting like a
half-senile old woman, snivelling at every turn of emotion in the
conversation. But as usual the tears just fell.

“
I’ve had the
property assessed, without the council’s knowledge. What I have to
know is, do you have any money? Did Arthur provide for
you?”

She nodded, yes.

“
Three hundred
dollars?” he said with great hesitation.

She was comforted by the
concern in his voice. Her smile was all he needed.

“
In the
bank?”

No. In a much safer place.

“
Don’t tell
me,” he laughed, much relieved. “I’ll make all the arrangements.
The council meets again next week. I’ll have the deed, if we can
find one, in your hands by then. That is, if you
want
to stay here.”

There was little doubt
about that. Suddenly Granny got up and went over to the
steamer-trunk next to the locked door of Arthur’s room. She pulled
out a small slate, the one Eddie used before she got him into
school. A piece of used chalk lay on the ledge at the bottom. The
Reeve was watching her with intense curiosity.

She came back and sat beside
him again. She lay the slate on her knees and took the chalk up in
her left hand. The Reeve saw the concentration in the furrows of
her brow. He saw the tendons mount on her wrist, the skin draped
and useless. Then the hand flexed and began to write in shaking,
tentative curls across the slate. When she finished she smiled
grimly at him and gave him the board. He could just make out the
message there: “Tell the council I wish to die in this house.”

3

S
he was thinking back
to New Years. Outside, the snow was falling as gentle as confetti
on a bride’s veil, as it had on that night. She had perched herself
on the arm of the Morris chair – Arthur’s own – to survey the
couples entering the Oddfellows’ Hall next door, two by two into
the ark. The electric lights inside stretched every quadrangle of
glass to the limit (she still preferred the hominess of coal-oil or
the dazzle of gas), and soon the orchestra struck up the welcoming
number, the horns dominating the strings in the modern style. She
closed her eyes and pictured them dancing – a whole village in
cadenced, concentric motion in the arms of the music, palpable and
reassuring. Through the transmuting snow she detected variations of
fox trot and waltz, and somewhat later, as a gift to the elders,
the polka and a solitary, fiddle-driven reel. No jig, no fling, no
hornpipe. Certainly no galop or lancers. Then something strange,
something novel: horns and drums only, the beat fevered, truant,
edging towards chaos, held fast by some primitive fulcrum between
beat and cadence, sound and melody. She could not imagine what sort
of dance they would be doing to such rhythms, such raw choristry,
but she sensed it would go well before a fire in the dark under
starlight. The snow sizzled and she was asleep.

4

C
ould it be that after
all these years of searching and effort she would have a home of
her own? I’ll believe it when I’ve got the deed in my hands – in
triplicate with the king’s spit on it, Sophie would have added. Not
that she hadn’t lived in places where she had felt at home. That
was a different matter. A home is something no one can take away
from you. Ever. That’s the reason her forebears and thousands after
them had come here: to find a place, build a house, and be at home.
This shack, as the villagers called it, with is leaking roof,
tarpaper skin, sloping porch and rambunctious gardens was Arthur’s
gift to her. Thirty-six years ago – installed in the honeymoon
suite of the St. Clair Inn – she would not have dreamt such a
finale as this. “Life is mainly what happens to you,” she had said
to Cap, sure that he would agree to such an unexpected admission.
“Nonsense,” he had replied, rather quickly. “I built my own chamber
in Hell. And so did you.”

A
t first she thought
the man clearing a path through the yard with his golashes was
Sunny Denfield come to tell her about the meeting. Then she
remembered dimly that it was far too soon for that. The fire was
out and she sat wrapped in shawls by the front window. Too
tentative a step for the Reeve. She leaned forward for a better
look. The young Reverend Buchan, fresh out of preacher’s college.
Granny sighed indulgently. How many times had such a scene
as-was-about-to-follow been enacted over the years? She knew every
line, every cue, even the sub-texts. Has this one come on his own
or been put up to it by his betters? From the tiny rap on the door
she knew the answer. His baptism, she thought, feeling the whole
range of ironies.

“
Good
afternoon, Mrs. Coote,” he said, his voice barely penetrating the
puffs of vapour it generated.

Granny dipped her head as she
always did in greeting. Reverend Buchan followed her gaze to his
feet where he checked to see if he had put his galoshes on the
wrong side, again. Granny pulled the inside door further open.

“
I’m sorry to
disturb you on such a beautiful winter’s day,” he said, still
standing on the porch, “but I’m here on an official
mission.”

God’s or your own, said her
silent voice. She stepped purposefully back into the kitchen
area.

“
May I come
in?”

She nodded. Not vigourously
enough apparently. She grasped his startled arm and hauled him into
the rapidly freezing room.

“
Ah, yes. Yes,
I’m terribly sorry. I forgot. Unforgivable of me. Will you forgive
my stupidity?”

Only if it
will help, which I doubt
. She
indicated Arthur’s chair, but either his aim or his eyesight was
off because he landed at one end of the chesterfield. Granny placed
his galoshes on a mat by the door. She held the tea-kettle up, and
he shook his head up and down. She took that for assent and stirred
the firebox. Realizing there was no heat in the room, she shook the
grates. The gasping of the flame brought the Reverend to his feet,
and when she came over with the tea-service, the one Lucien had
given her as a wedding gift, he was still erect, as if wondering
how he had got into such a posture.

“
May I take my
coat off?” he said foolishly.

If you prefer
to freeze, yes
.

He did remove it – with a
little last-second boost from Granny – recognized his folly in an
icy instant, and sat down with the coat draped around him like a
shroud.

She looked at him not unkindly,
waiting as she must.

He seemed genuinely overwhelmed
by her silence or by the possibility that some exotic and profane
speech might at any moment break out of it and anathematize them
both.

“
I’ve been
asked by the council, by the Reverend Stokes to be precise,
representing the council, that is, they wished me as the minister
of the church where your late dear husband played the organ, they
thought I would be best suited to come and explain the position of
the council to you. Do you understand?” He was now shouting as one
does when talking at the deaf.

Granny handed him his cup of
tea, steaming heartily in the chill air. The heat from the kitchen
stove went straight through the old roof.

Reverend Buchan had just found
the phrases he had committed to a perilous memory when he spilled
his tea on his trousers, and emitted an entirely unrehearsed
sequence of expletives.

“
Oh, can you
ever forgive me,” he blustered, wincing and whisking at his soiled
pantleg and managing only to overturn the rest of his tea onto the
carpet, necessitating a further string of apologies.

Granny did her best to comfort
him, but every time her hand touched him, he flinched, and when she
fixed him with her eye and appeared about to say something out
loud, he panicked and fell sideways onto the floor, the tea-stain
stiffening below his crotch.

Granny went over to the table
and returned with her slate. Once he had determined that she was
not about to hit him with it, he sat back trembling and profoundly
curious. Granny wrote on the slate with a stuttering left hand,
then let him read the words: “The Reeve has given me the news. You
are forgiven.”

He stared up at her as if she
might be the Virgin Mary reincarnate. Then he burst into tears.

Granny, her own heart
relenting, mothered him back into his clothes, got his galoshes on
in orthodox fashion, and watched him cut a fresh path through the
snow towards his ministry.

“
If there’s a
special spot in Heaven for preachers,” Sophie said many times,
drunk and sober, “I’ll take the other place, and a bed-warmer to
boot.”

Amen.

35

1

I
t was snowing again,
like ack-ack in a dream, like slow-motion shrapnel. And thick
enough to asphyxiate the streetlamps in front of the library, whose
eerie rectangle interrupted the blank landscape like a redoubt
along the smoky Somme. No wind ruffled this February evening. The
snow fell with the absolute illusion of innocence upon the sills,
upon the eaves, upon the nervous domesticity of a post-war winter
village.

“
An’ so to
wrap it all up,” the Reeve was saying to the assembled councillors,
“she’s an old, old lady who’s lived here for three generations;
she’s got legal entitlement to the property if she’s willin’ to pay
fair market-value; an’ she definitely wants to live out her days in
peace in that rag-taggle shanty, whatever we think of it. I already
asked our lawyers to find out a proper price. Any questions on item
one?”

The worshipping hand of
the junior Miss Robertson came to a breathless halt at the end of
the Reeve’s remarks, certain there could be no further question to
record. She took advantage of the pause in her note-taking to tilt
her calf’s-eye upward in hopeless adoration. Hence she did not, as
the Reeve himself did, notice that although there were no questions
on the issue, the room was electric with anticipation, with secret
understandings on the brink of disclosure. Neither the heat
undulating from the floor-register (inconsiderately located beneath
the table) nor the imperturbable silence of the snowfall against
the night could distract the council from the matters of state
before it. So palpable was the undercurrent that Half-Hitch
inadvertently crushed a tailor-made in the trigger of his
artificial thumb. Stubby Fielding’s rubber jaw sagged grotesquely.
Sandy Redmond felt the Boer’s bayonet strike his thigh like a
fish-knife. An improbably icy wind burred along Sunny Denfield’s
cheek. Young MacIntosh’s flat feet ached with humiliation and
regret. Canon Stokes struggled valiantly with the insurgency of his
wife’s roast-beef supper.