Lily's Story (87 page)

In the meantime, please don’t
try to find me. Take good care of her, Rob.

Bradley

3

L
ily waited only a few
weeks before she walked down to Hap Withers’ cottage and told him
he could have her house as well as the property. He moved the last
of his numerous brood into the place and, being a widower and now
alone, asked Lily if she would like the use of his two front rooms
in return for a few housekeeping duties. Since they were already
furnished, Lily brought nothing with her but a laundry bag full of
clothes, a bookcase, a few trinkets and keepsakes the boys had
given her as gifts over the years, and Sounder’s pouch with Papa’s
Testament, the talisman, and the cameo pendant with her
grandmother’s face on it. She put the pouch under her bed and left
it there.

Rob was very good to her.
He stopped by often for tea or supper with her and Hap Withers. He
took her down to Sarnia on the trolley for supper at a fancy
English tearoom on Christina Street. He urged her to come over and
help out with his garden. He was full of plans for expanding the
operation. He had fixed up the little barn so that it was
comfortable in a rustic way, shingled and shuttered, with
white-pine floorboards and a split-log table he built himself.
Nearby he had constructed a pigeon-cote full of homers and
tumblers, each with a name and pedigree. Below it, his pet angoras
lived in luxurious innocence. He’d adopted a stray dog, who slept
with him at night and guarded the premises by day. He seemed
content most of the time, but still she knew there was a
restlessness in him, inarticulate but deep. Only when he got a
letter from his only friend, Fred Potts (who had run away with the
circus and was now in charge of all the animals and had just
married one of the bareback riders in Texas) – did he let his
regret and helplessness show. She left him alone, with his pigeons
and his dog.

Lily went to
Duckface Malloney at The Queen’s, who readily agreed to let her do
the hotel’s wash in the new sheds he’d just added at the back. Her
other cus
tomers she let go,
though she decided that since she was now alone she ought to get
out and around more, and so she was often seen during the next
couple of years working in the households of Mrs. Durham, Mrs.
Saltman, Mrs. Blakely and others – washing, ironing and most of all
minding the children. Three mornings a week, then, she toiled at
The Queen’s where there was company if you wanted it and solitude
if you needed it.

She went out
to Rob’s place two or three times a week during the growing
seasons, working away in the garden with Rob at her side whenever
he could be. She heard at The Queen’s that he was seeing a young
lady at Camlachie up the lakeshore a bit, and so on many a summer
evening it would be almost dark when he got home, and he’d pitch in
beside her, chopping away like a fiend at the offending weeds.
Still, despite their joint efforts, the garden seemed always in a
state of imminent disorder. One day when
she came over in the afternoon while Rob was at the
freight-sheds, she was surprised to see a bedraggled young woman
and her three children pulling up beets and tearing off tomatoes,
trampling as much as they were retrieving. “Rob told us to come an’
help ourselves, mum. Sorry if we give you a scare.” When Lily
casually mentioned the event a few days later, Rob grunted and
said, “Yeah, I said they could take what they wanted. Her husband
died last winter up in Camlachie.” He got up. “I gotta go out for a
while. Don’t go fussin’ too much over the cabbage patch, eh.” Lily
didn’t. She sat on the bench beside the cooing pigeons and let some
of the realities of her life sweep over her, one of which was the
fact – now irrefutable – that Rob had kept this miserable patch
going for her sake alone. He had come to despise the sight of
it.

S
ince Lily never went
up to the Post Office for her mail, the postmaster decided it was
his duty to deliver the letter to her door. She thanked him and
then stared at the florid, feminine calligraphy on the envelope.
She could barely recognize her own name. She unwrapped the vellum
paper and read:

Toronto, October 10,
1884

Dear Mrs. Marshall:

You do not know me. My
name is Sarah Crawford. I am a good friend of Bradley, your son. I
met him last year here in Toronto, and we shared the same boarding
house. Before he went to Montreal, we belonged to the same literary
circle. He was the most promising poet among us. A few months ago
he wrote me from England, where he was staying with Paul Chambers,
who was there for the summer break. He told me he was on the verge
of something great and important in his life, and that he would
write again soon. He never did. But I did get a letter from Paul
Chambers. He too had decided to give up school and make his way in
England. He never mentioned Bradley until the letter that came
yesterday morning. Oh Mrs. Marshall, I cannot write this without
weeping. Paul told me that Bradley took his own life a short while
ago. He left a note begging Paul to tell no one, and just walked
into the Thames. Paul arrived in time to see him go under and
disappear forever. Paul does not know that I found your name and
address in Bradley’s room after he left for Montreal. I felt it my
sad duty to write you immediately. I loved your son, Mrs. Marshall.
I tried to save him. I hope that some day we shall meet.

Yours
respectfully,

Sarah Crawford

I tried too, Lily thought. And
I loved him.

4

T
he second Riel
Rebellion was in every way different from the first. Where it had
taken a ragtaggle, improvised militia almost three months to
traverse the northern wilderness by paddle and portage, the modern
Canadian army boarded trains all along the old Intercolonial line
and embarked on a three-day excursion to the Saskatchewan River
courtesy of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Militia or
regulars, this was, moreover, a pan-Canadian force of crack troops
under seasoned leadership. At the other end, the rebellious natives
and half-castes were also better organized and armed than their
forebears had been along the Red and Assiniboine. But muskets and
religious fanaticism were no match for rifles, the drill of
discipline and the spanking new Gatling gun on loan from the U.S.
Army, who were anxious to test the latest ‘improved feed’ model in
legitimate combat. It performed splendidly, spitting out a record
twelve hundred bullets per minute and scaring crows for miles
around. The major battle at Batoche was won in less than a day. The
hillsides where the Métis had dug themselves into the earth were
littered with their dead, the log cabins behind them where their
women and children crouched were razed by the efficiency of
six-pounders, and the mad secessionists were silenced for all time.
It was a clear victory for mechanized order in the service of
benevolent civility. The integrity of the fledgling nation had been
breeched, and that breech was not healed with blood. Only seven
citizen-soldiers died in the cause. And if this first great
national military action was not on the same scale as the American
Civil War – with its million dead and million maimed – it was
nonetheless a landmark victory for the universal cause of
nation-making. It was also, in miniature, a curtain raiser for the
horrors-to-come less than thirty years later.

Naturally there would
have to be a little political fence-mending in the squalid
aftermath of the shooting, but nothing Sir John could not
accomplish over time. Certainly few loyal citizens wished to see
the publication of those letters sent home by militiamen who, upon
seeing the pathetic condition in which their adversaries had been
forced to live, decided they had more in common with the Métis than
with Mr. Macdonald. Such naive emotional lapses are to be expected
under duress, and a generous victor can afford to be forgiving.
Louis Riel was hanged.

R
ob surprised her in
the pantry of The Queen’s where she was fetching a jar of marmalade
for the cook.

“
Hap Withers
said you’d be here,” he said.

Lily saw the blue of his
uniform, nothing else.

“
I got to go,
Ma.”

“
Yes”, she
said.

“
I’m not Brad.
I’ll be back. I swear.”

She had heard those very words
before.

T
he night before the
battle of Batoche Lily dreamt she was the angel of innocence,
floating over the battleground with the folds of her shift swept
upward into wings as warm as a swan’s throat. In the grassy shadows
below here, scythed here and there by a quartering moon, lay the
corpses of the seven who died. One by one she settled over them and
the winnowing of her angel-arms awoke in them some instinct sharper
than death, and each in his turn rolled over, as in sleep, yawned
and opened his eyes abruptly, like a doll’s. The seventh figure did
not respond to the angel’s wing-breath no matter how fervently it
was offered. Sadly, very sadly the kindly seraphim eased the body
over into the moonlight. The face was dead. It was
Robbie’s.

5

A
nd Granny, once
again or still, in the sea-warm, abdominal home of the Night-Dream
where all that was precious had to be remembered and re-remembered
with all its pristine pain intact and bright as foetal blood
against the pitch of almost-morning, had to be remembered fresh and
bruising or be forever claimed by the place of forgetting that lay
at the bottom of all sleep whose oblivion was absolute: she was in
the Lambton swamp once more, still-called Lil and only eleven and
very much alone, the River-of-Light pouring past her mere yards
away like some maddened tributary of the Styx through its
underground grottoes and moon-starved dark, she was chilled to the
marrow, the chill of abandonment that runs as deep as childhood
itself, the prodigal heart orphaned under the indifferent stars,
and drifting towards the sleep where death’s welcome seemed a kind
of comfort, and waking, surprised a second time, in the presence of
the stranger from the lost south, the Shawnee or Southener as he
was known, but when she reached to touch the warmth his kindness
had brought, the robes over his ancient flesh weakened and thinned
in the pre-dawn radiance around them, and when she tried to speak
to him in one of the ancient tongues she knew his gentle face
cringed and clenched, the lips crying no, no before they began to
fade and the face with them, the copper flesh first so only the
wrinkled outlines were preserved and the old, old eyes grew
correspondingly larger till they filled the smoky space around them
with their sad brilliance and promise of a thousand sagas curled in
the shadows behind them and it must have been the eyes that spoke
to her because there was no longer a mouth to utter its oracles,
crooked or straight, but the air was filled with its voice and
suddenly a hand, no bigger than a father’s lovingly in his
daughter’s, floating in the immeasurable distance between them and
on its upturned proffering palm there glowed the jasper talisman –
scarlet as a hummingbird’s throat in the sun’s full thrust, as
rooted as radium, and the voice shimmered in its carnal
incandescence and she remembered the words in their alien
consonance – intact – because all that was precious has to be
remembered bruising and fresh: “This will bring you luck all your
days, it will help you find a home here and in the hereafter; I
received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as such by
generation upon generation of tribes who have dwelt in these woods
and waters and passed on, as we all do; the days of its
guardianship are almost over, there is little magic left in the
forests and the streams, older now than our legends; the
locomotives of the white man’s soul are on their way, so when you
have no more use for the stone’s power, I ask that you return it to
the sacred grove whence it came; you will know when you are
standing on it because it resides beneath the protecting branches
of a giant hickory on a knoll just where the forest begins, and
when you look west and north you will be able to see, at the
commencement of summer, the joining of the Lake and the River set
perfectly on a line to the North Star, whom we call the eye of
Wendigo” and the words of the Southener echoed and re-echoed in her
long dream until daylight came to quench them...

40

1

I
t was bitterly cold
when Lily left the hotel after her shift. Normally the fresh
December wind, sweeping across the open water of the Lake and
slashing randomly at the village, would have blown her quickly
north-eastward towards the shacks along the Lane. Instead she
walked west towards the River. There was no hurry in her walking,
no evident purpose. The River was frozen tight, its rage arrested.
Locomotives languished on sidings, their armour-plate complaining
in the cold. One or two lamps glowed feebly in the dockside hotel
to her left. Nor was her walking quite aimless, even though she
soon left the road that wound its way to the freight-sheds, and
seemed to drift into the frozen verges of the marsh. It was as if
she were walking towards some end that lay about to reveal itself
yards or rods ahead of her, or that lay curled inside her near the
heart ready to declaim its desires only when this ritual walking
was somehow complete.