Lily's Story (82 page)

“
Then I’ll ask
Sandy to speak to item two.”

The village grocer, whose
own father had come to the Point with the railroad in 1862 and
stayed to found a dynasty of shopkeepers (Sandy’s son, Red, now
returned a hero from the War, was already a fixture in the
business), rose and presented the report of the subcommittee for
selecting a designer and builder for the proposed war memorial. As
luck would have it – or Providence in the case of the Presbyterian
Redmonds – they had been able to locate a man who could both design
and build a monument to meet any specifications they wished. It
turned out that he had done just that for three villages in Grey,
two in Huron and one each in Middlesex and Kent Counties. His
specialty, verified by references, was erecting impressive
monuments – but simple and noble in design – in small towns at
reasonable rates. If the stories told were true, it seems he had a
grudge against big cities and ‘government’ types, and had devoted
the last three years exclusively to building cenotaphs in
underfunded villages that would outshine those overpriced
calamities indulged in by the senior municipalities. The man’s name
was Sam Stradler. He hailed from a hamlet near London. He had been
a stonemason and tombstone carver before serving overseas. Once a
site was chosen and the ice broke up, he would begin work – about
mid-March or early April – and finish in six to eight
weeks.

Approval was
audible and unanimous. Miss Robert
son recorded the verdict with a proud flourish. Sandy
Redmond sat down. A feeling that something significant and abiding
had been done suffused the meeting place. The snow emptied itself
into the darkness outside.

Half-Hitch clicked his
hickory thumb-and-forefinger and rose to speak to item three.
Stubby Fielding and young MacIntosh, who had fidgeted and looked
embarrassed during the earlier presentation by the Reeve, resumed
their fidgeting. Stubby preferred the direct statement of an
artillery barrage to all this oblique conniving, but he had been
convinced by the devious Hitchcock of the necessity for secrecy.
There were times , he allowed, when battle-plans had to be kept
under wraps if the strategy itself was not to be jeopardized and
the humane goals themselves forever compromised. Stubby had grunted
assent and shut up. Horrie MacIntosh, on the other hand, was in no
position to argue any side of the matter: he was the recruit, the
cadet untested by battle and not yet sanctified by its
scarring.

“
Our
committee’s reached a unanimous decision,” Hitchcock said rigidly
from memory. “We explored every angle of the…the issue-at-hand, and
we found only one spot – site – that meets all the requirements.”
He fished the requirements out of the recall-box: “(1) central
location, (2) flat land of at least one-quarter acre in size, (3)
property owned by the village or available at nominal cost, and (4)
ah –” He flipped the stuck card in his head. “Presence of shade
trees.”

“
Get on with
it, Hitch!” barked the Boer veteran. “This ain’t church! No
offense, Mort.”

The Reverend Mort, unaware that
high drama was ravelling its sinuous subplots around him, took
neither offense nor heed.

Half-Hitch had now
irreparably lost his place. He plunged ahead recklessly. “We all
agreed, all three of us, there was only one spot to fit the needs
we set out here last meetin’. The spot we chose is in the
dead-centre of town. It’s on a main street where the city-trolley
passes every hour. It’s got a marvellous big shade tree, an’ shrubs
an’ hedges to boot. You can see across the marsh to the docks an’
up to the dunes by the Lake from the back-end. An’ best of all,
it’s almost owned by the village.”

The Reeve leaned forward
in his chair. He now understood the edgy quiet during his earlier
speech. His anger, alas, was tempered by the force of the logic in
Hitchcock’s report. The only other vacant lot in the middle of town
was the one right beside them; but it was the last of the railroad
properties: a memorial on its ground would be the ultimate
betrayal. Foolishly he had assumed they would choose the original
site of the old Anglican Church where the cubscouts pitched their
tents. He’d underestimated the opposition.

“
I move,”
Half-Hitch was saying through his smug smile, “we agree on the
Coote property as a site for the monument, an’ begin legal
proceedin’s to take back title.”

The motion passed.

2

G
ranny liked the snow
the way it was tonight. Once, with Eddie on her knee and nothing
but dark days ahead and only two small presents under the tree, she
had watched the Christmas Eve snowfall through the child’s eye, and
called it the snow of remembrance. Back then she had thought
‘someday I’ll be sitting in another place with times as bad as
these and I’ll remember the wonderful gentleness of this falling
without motive or design’. And here I am.

In the Carpenter’s yard
she could see the outline of the spruce windbreak, shawled and
scarved by the snow – white on green, shape lending shape, all
voices hushed inward. This could be any of the snowfalls upon any
of the spruces she had lived beside or under in the many seasons of
her childhood, girlhood, womanhood, dotage, deathwatch. “Who wants
to live to be old?” Cap said to her many times, his flesh wan and
shivering after a bad bout. “What would you do with a useless body
and all that time on your hands? Sit and remember when your
elements used to work and your brain could count to three? How many
good times can you re-live anyway before they’re worn out and you
come to despise them and despise yourself for staying
alive?”

She had no
answer, then; neither of them had been old enough to speak from
experience. We
ll, I’ll tell
you now, she thought. It’s not the way you imagined. Yes, I live on
my memories – what else is there? – but they are not summoned up
like individual pearl buttons, like heirlooms, to be turned over in
the hand and admired till the eyes water. It doesn’t work that way,
Cap. Not for me. Some moments do come back almost whole, like Eddie
and me watching the Christmas snow of 1897 with different versions
of hope in our hearts. Like the snowy night of 1886 that was like
this one except for the wind that blew through it like an invisible
beam when Lucien and I rode out to find heaven on a one-horse sled.
Or any of a dozen more – from parts of my life you never surmised –
full of sweetness and pain of course, but more often marked by the
exquisite surge of innocence against experience, by the raw edge of
questions which remain more beautiful and durable than the answers
we invent merely to stay alive. You would be astonished, Cap, to
hear me talk – think – like this, use words in such a way. Then
again perhaps you wouldn’t. In any case, you must take the blame
for some of it. You maintained, didn’t you, that the world wouldn’t
be a safe or sane place to live in if ever women were taught to
read and write. But then you didn’t know Eddie, or his father. They
taught me that poetry can be gossip made glorious by language. That
would shock you. But Sophie knew so, she lived it and died for it.
You saw in her only what your prejudices allowed.

And you’ve got no prejudices of
course, you silly old coot, she said sharply to herself. Then
laughed. You see, old darling, that is how the memory works, that
is how I fill these hours before I am overtaken by exhaustion and
the dread of the Night-Dream, the one I fear must have shaken you
each day of those last years. Forgive me if I failed to acknowledge
your anguish. Anyway, you see how the mind refuses to accept the
denial of a present or future. I think of Eddie, of snow, of you,
of Lucien Burgher, of Sophie’s battered face, of sweet Arthur –
separately or together. They have voices, you know, like you; they
can be talked to. They can speak with one another in the special
existence I lend them, here on a February evening in 1922 with a
snow falling that thinks it’s special too but is really the same
one whose breathlessness drew a little girl’s wonder to her cabin
window miles from this spot more than seventy years ago. You gave
it all up too soon, old pessimist. I am alone. I am ready for
death’s surprises, if he has any. But I am not lonely. I am still,
after all these years, waiting for something to happen.

Like the stove going out,
you day-dreaming old fart, she thought, shivering and shuffling
over to the Quebec heater. It stared at her, one-eyed and glum.
Against the protest of her rheumatism she shook the grates as
vigorously as she could manage, but several intractable clinkers
had lodged between the flanges. She’d have to get Sunny to clean
out the firebox when he came over to tell her about the meeting. He
had left her a fine white notepad on which to write out requests
and things she needed. She was grateful, though it was very
difficult at first to scrawl anything legible there. It wasn’t just
the arthritis, she knew. Whatever had afflicted her throat had
spread to her writing hand. But it was easier now to list the few
supplies she needed for either Sunny or Wilf Underhill to take to
Redmond’s or Turnbull’s. It made her feel better about possessing
Arthur’s house, at last. They won’t think I’m completely batty.
Just old. Maybe I’ll be allowed to die with a little dignity, she
mused, trying to recall anyone she loved who had.

Now the
g
ood burghers and pewsters of
the town would be able to pity her with a clear conscience.
However, if they’d been able to observe her wrestling with the
paper and kindling in a plugged stove with smoke polluting the
chill of her front room, they’d have cried gleefully: “Poor old
soul, used to be strong as an ox, you know, scrubbed floors in The
Queen’s for years, but then age and arthritis gets the best of us
all, don’t it. And of course she never did take care of herself,
you know, livin’ in that drafty shack in the Lane all those years,
an’ never settin’ foot in a church or a decent body’s house.” I
prefer the children, she thought. They only think I’m a witch, an
outcast – with status.

She felt pain firing
through both her knees. She was on the floor among the spilled
cinders and ash. The kindling had burned itself out, the smoke had
escaped with the brief heat through the cracks in the walls. Had
she blacked out? A tumour? Tiny strokes? She winced at the bruising
in her knees and the scalding of tears. Get up. Get up. The room
spun on the axis of a single candleflame in the front window. Lie
down. Let it be.

T
he temporary blaze
was taking the chill off quite nicely, and the hot tea warmed
wherever it went. Granny pulled the kimono more snugly around her
throat and continued her vigil at the snowy window overseeing the
street. Arthur was such a sweet man, so different from the others.
He loved to walk, as she did, with no aim or purpose other than the
pleasures of being in motion in the woods or along the beaches or
among the cattails or under the parliament of stars that had
supervised conception and birth and all the rest. Often they would
pull Eddie on his sled through snows like this over to the dunes,
where he would fling himself into semi-flight down their slick
slopes to the borderless prairie of the beach below. When they got
home, after a brisk fire and some mulled wine – with Eddie snug in
his cocoon – she would make slow mutinous love to Arthur. Always he
was too shy, too untrusting of the tender impulses that throve in
him, to initiate lovemaking. She would think of him, though she
never told him so, as an instrument – say a curling rosewood
mandolin – that she would rub and thrum till its music wakened and
overwhelmed. “We shouldn’t, love, we’re too old, too ridiculous,”
he’d murmur unconvincingly, and she’d say, “Keep your eyes closed,
sweet; it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful in here.”

So rare in a man was that
refined reticence, that rare combination of resignation and
engagement, gentility and passion, music and masculinity that she –
Cora Burgher – would have scoffed at the very notion; certainly Cap
would have laughed out loud, and Sophie no doubt would have smiled
indulgently and offered some devastating quip: “I know he’s sweet
and kind and does the dishes, dearie, but has he got a dick or a
doily down there?”

In a letter she wrote but never
sent to Eddie, she said about Arthur: ‘He was the kind of man every
woman should marry. As lovers only should we take the adventurers,
the wanderers, the plunderers; and when we’ve taken our pleasure on
them, we’ll turn them loose again to waste themselves upon the
world’.

I’ve had my share of the other
kind, she thought. And their children. They’re dead and gone, all
of them: willing victims of whatever demons drive the male flesh to
annihilation. And the innocents along with them. Eddie. Eddie, I
can’t even say your name out loud. The gods that could have helped
us are still in hiding. When Arthur left he took some of the
earth’s music with him, but you were my last cause for hope. What
am I doing here now? The gods won’t answer from their
skulking-places. Even death has passed me by. Cap was right:
waiting is not living.

You’re waiting for something to
happen. Yes, of course. That’s it. I almost forgot.

She heard a commotion in her
front yard and turned in time to see the blurred outline of Sunny
Denfield, the puffing portliness of Mortimer Stokes and the loping
strut of Harry Hitchcock. From the gait and bearing of these
harbingers she recognized, from long and repeated experience, the
peculiar footfall of officialdom. And the news it bore, she knew,
was never good.