Lily's Story (83 page)

3

A
nd Granny again
dreaming Lily, dreaming the longago as if it were real or had
actually happened or could happen again only differently so
everything would be changed in the wake-up world, she was eight and
she was alone under the moon and the shadows around her blurred
into smoke when she touched them and the night-air was jarred and
riven by a music that had no sound to it, no melody in it, only
cadence and verberation and blood-thrumming titillation, she was
wild with it and as her body’s bird-bones sang and sailed in their
weightless jubilance, she was aware that the smoke-wreaths and
shadow-substances about her were other souls twisting in the same
silence, driven by the same yearnings towards the bliss of
oblivion, and they shared a simultaneous cry of release and
not-a-single-regret as the dark struck back, as the shadow
reclaimed its dominion in the fallible flesh of all dancers young
and old, native and alien and she awoke to find herself sleeping
the sleep of the exhausted upon the shoulder of the Southener, the
last of the Shawnees from the legendary battles of the
war-with-the-States, his eyes half-lidded and undreaming and his
arm around her more fatherly than she had ever known and in the
clearing among the Pottawatomie wigwams around them they watched
with their separate intensities and under the moon’s clairvoyance
the midnight ceremony repeating itself before them as for the
first-and-only time the virgin among the priests of her family and
the ghosts of her ancestors and the wraiths of the children she
would bequeath to the future, the shivering Pottawatomie girl-child
with woman-needs bone-deep and thriving in her to be blossom and
spur, and when all the chanting was done and all the fleshly
transformations had taken place within their spheres, she was able
to smile into the moon-varnished dark with the face of her new
name, no longer White Blossom was she but Seed-of-the-Snow-Apple
and all that was promised therein if summer should ever come or the
darkness imbedded above the moon ever lifted itself from the
dreamer’s eye…

36

1

O
n such a night as
this – with the stars frozen in place, the quarter-moon windless
with wonder, the inheld breath of all snow – did Lucien the
locomotive man, thirty-six years ago to the month, baptize his
bride “Mrs. Cora Burgher”. To the astonishment of the other
burghers and burgesses of the village, no doubt. On the other hand,
nothing fazed them concerning the behaviour of any former inmate of
Mushroom Alley. In fact, being one of its superannuated denizens,
Granny thought, granted one a comforting sense of immunity, a
licence to commit extravagant social irreverencies. Not that being
made an honest woman by Lucien Burgher was all that irreverent.
Lucien: with the great grappling hands; with a laugh titanic enough
to be recognized over the competition of steam-whistle, grinding
iron and the wail of wind through the open windows of the cab. With
a heart as hot and propulsive as the firebox he fed lovingly each
night with lozenges of beach and elm. You were the only one willing
to take me away, take me out of myself, take me sailing on the
white wave that sweeps us clear of our body’s weight. We made our
secret pact and we kept it without compromise. Less than three
months. But I remember still, for both of us. And, Lucien my love,
the gods of either hue were watching – in trepidation and cowardly
delight. Yes, all that really
did
happen.

Even when you left, I
thought to keep your name. I braved the taunting and snobbery to
make them say it long enough to forget I’d ever had another. With
you gone, I had to grow into it alone. You’d have been proud of me,
but pride, as we both knew, was never a substitute for the
wonderful meshing of our brief nights together. You would have
roared with laughter, or cried, to overhear – as I did many times
at The Queen’s scrubbing out a room at eight in the morning – the
wheezing and whimpering next door, the off-key giggle, the
under-rehearsed moans and yelps, the slap of dead flesh, sadness
like an aftersmell in the room hours later no scouring could
efface. Only the memory of our love and your courage not-to-be kept
me going in that black year after your leaving.

I kept your
name; it grew around me in the Lane and in the village. The graft
took. When Eddie came, he needed something to call me. Granny. I
resisted, gently. The child needed a surname. I gave him yours, and
mine. When sweet Arthur carried us off together, I surrendered it
with reluctance. You know that. We talked it over at the time,
remember? I told you what a sacrifice Arthur Coote was making,
offering his widower’s hand to a woman thrice fallen, risking all
for love as
one of his
theatrical publicists might have put it. Don’t laugh. Driving down
to the Sarnia Court House in a borrowed butcher’s cart to be
“hitched” by a judge was one of the most courageous acts I’ve seen
any man ever perform. Of course, I told him to pretend he was on
stage and he did, and I gave him rave reviews for a week. You would
have come to like the Arthur I was privileged to see. Don’t forget,
he was an actor, an entertainer. He played The Royal in Victoria
and the Lyceum in San Francisco. Being organist and choir director
at the Methodist Church was his greatest role, though you wouldn’t
like me saying that, would you, Arthur?

She was
thinking now – in this stasis of starlight and snow, with the
gentle foraging of Sunny Denfield back in the woodshed – of that
night a few weeks after the ceremony when Arthur sat over there at
his piano and began to play, in slow time, the opening bars of “I
am a model of a modern major-general” and young Eddie, barely ten
and wide-eyed with wonder and fright, picked up Arthur’s baton,
tucked it under his chin like a swagger stick and started marching
up and down to the music. As Arthur, his own shyness finally
easing, began to speed up towards the song
’s regular triphammer gallop, little Eddie’s legs
hopped in rapid synchronization, his arm jerking up and down in
perfect parody, his eyes dancing in accelerating cadence till at
last they left the safety of his granny’s and garnered their own
delight. She herself had grabbed a saucepan and began beating it
with a spoon, unable to catch the presto-con-brio of the ditty as
it soared to an apex of divine stillness. When the cups on the
shelf ceased to rattle from the final chord, Eddie scooted past her
waiting arms and flung himself at Arthur, who recovered in time to
hug the child so tightly he could feel the diminuendo of music
still humming in the tiny bones.

2

T
he front room was as
warm and cozy as it had ever been. Sunny Denfield had removed the
clinkers and cinders, and then built a fast, hot maplewood fire to
take off the chill. As it died down, he put a chunk of Wilf
Underhill’s coke on the ash, where it simmered contentedly. Sunny
stayed for his tea even though he knew Prudie would get that hurt,
puzzled look in her eye again, certain that there was some sinister
explanation for his unconscionably long visits with such a strange
soul who sat without speech winter after winter cheating death.
Charity had its limits. God would not credit such
excess.

“
I didn’t tell
you, did I,” he was saying, “that I got another letter from my
cousin Ruth-Anne in Toronto. Yes, it’s true. Seems like the
hoity-toity side of the family has decided to acknowledge its black
sheep.” He was fully aware of her own acknowledgement, reflected in
her face which he always observed, as he spoke, at a three-quarter
angle, reading the slightest quiver of her lip or brow, assessing
each shift of labyrinthine light in eyes that had not, he sense,
changed their essence since they dawned upon the world.

“
You remember,
of course, the callow bachelor who set up shop in The Queen’s back
in the fall of ’nineteen-one. I was only eighteen, would you
believe? I didn’t tell my parents where I was till after I got
settled in the job at the sheds and was pretty certain Prudie McKay
would say yes. What few people know even today is that I ran away
from private school. My family was, an’ still is, high
mucky-muck.”

Granny acknowledged the
accuracy of the term.

“
My
grandfather was a minister in the old Union government of
Baldwin-Lafontaine. My father was a fancy city solicitor in
Toronto. He died during the War. Lucky for me, I stopped to see him
on my way overseas in ’fifteen. He knew he was dying, I think,
because he made a great show of forgivin’ me. I was sure I’d die
before him, an’ maybe he thought so too.”

Granny pushed another of Mrs.
Savage’s cookies in his direction.

“
Anyway, it
seems my Aunt Grace, my mother’s sister, who died just a year or so
ago, got interested in her family tree. She’d married Bramwell
Beattie, a sort of junior tycoon, a guy I hated all my life. But
Aunt Grace was a pet, the sweetest, kindest soul there was. Since
my own mother died havin’ me, Aunt Grace was the closest thing to a
mother I ever had. I wrote to her all along. I’m sure she
understood my rebellion. At any rate, she kept my secret. I wrote
to her a lot during the War.”

Granny’s eyes narrowed
slightly.

“
Well, anyway,
accordin’ to my cousin Ruth-Anne MacEnroe – that’s her married name
– who was
Aunt Grace’s only
child, we’ve got some distant relatives on my Aunt’s side of the
family who lived in Lambton County at one time. Trouble is, they
seem to have moved away an’ nobody can now locate them. Since her
mother died, Ruth-Anne’s been like a fanatic about tracing her
roots. You’d think with cabinet ministers an’ lawyers an’ tycoons
on your family tree, you’d be satisfied an’ leave well enough
alone.”

Granny underlined the irony in
the remark and Sunny smiled broadly. Reluctantly draining the cold
tea from his cup, he rose to go.

“
That stove
should behave till spring,” he said, pulling on his mackinaw.
Granny watched every move he made. He reached sort of nonchalantly
into his tool kit and pulled out a notepad, the brown wrapper still
on it. He placed it over on the kitchen table, then looked across
the room at her.

“
The mass
meetin’s tomorrow night,” he said quietly. “Right next door. I want
you to write out on this paper whatever you want to say to the
people of the Point. I’ll read it aloud to them. You have some
rights in all of this, you know.”

Her eyes said neither yes nor
no.

At the door, with his scarf
tucked in, he said, “I think you should be there. “I’ll come for
you around eight.”

An icy draft from the open door
struck her a sideways blow before the heat of the cleansed stove
replenished itself.

37

B
y seven-forty-five
the Oddfellows’ Hall was almost full. More than half the town’s six
hundred adults were gathered to hear confirmation of the facts
which were already public knowledge and spice for the rumour mill.
The infirm, of whom there were more than the usual number, sat on
wooden benches arranged especially for the occasion. Everyone else
stood in clusters, buzzing, or leaned elbows on sills and
wainscoting, happy to observe and judge. On the dais at the north
end, the councillors peered down at their constituents, secure
behind the trestle-table now littered with official-looking papers
that were being shuffled more than necessary. The Reeve’s chair
remained unoccupied.

Just before eight o’clock
the door opened and Reeve Denfield entered. Granny Coote was beside
him. A stunned hush gripped the assembled: no rumour of this sort
had tested the village breeze. What they saw, through their
surprise, was a tiny old woman, barely five-feet tall with mottled
gray hair pulled back into an uncustomary bun and tamed with a
frayed blue ribbon. The Irish-white skin was blotched with
liver-spots and yellowed from too much indoor light, but the eyes
incandesced in their shrinking flesh, like two jets set in a
shaman’s mask. Although she allowed herself to be guided by the
Reeve’s arm, it was plain she wasn’t feeble. Indeed, after the
flaring of the eyes, it was her bearing that arrested the viewers’
attention: she walked with an autonomous, erect grace that reminded
the hunters in the hall of the way a white-tail lopes through a
maze of brushwood, never once condescending to take a sideways
glance; the women thought wistfully of queens at ease in crowded
drawing rooms.

To the further surprise of the
gathering and to the councillors themselves, Sunny Denfield
escorted ‘mad Granny’ to a place beside him at the table. There
they nonchalantly removed their coats and sat: downstage centre.
Needless-to-say, the subsequent proceedings were scrutinized with
more than usual interest.

F
irst of all the Reeve
announced that for reasons which would become clear later on he was
turning the chair over to the Reverend Stokes, and then he and
Granny Coote moved down to a less ostentatious position at the west
end of the table. The old woman did not flinch under the obsessive
watch of the assembly. She didn’t even take the Reeve’s arm, though
the impression she left was one of determined fragility. Throughout
the speeches that followed, she sat straight up in the wooden chair
and looked out at the townspeople she had lived amongst for
decades. Her eyes shone with a sanity that shamed them.