Lily's Story (95 page)

“
Her name was
Mary. I met her through her sister, who was married to a friend of
mine, a fireman like me on the Great Western. I was no longer young
but rich, as I thought, an’ footloose. I let her charm me, an’ she
did. But she said she knew from her sister’s experience how much
hell was in store for the wife of an engineer. I hadn’t had a
chance to ask, but she’d already said no. Of course, I kept seein’
her, an’ she was always unattached, so I begun to wonder; an’
besides, I was getting a bit tired of stokin’ an’ cattin’ around in
Detroit an’ them places. So I told her if she’d marry me I’d settle
down an’ become a respectable family man. When she doubted me, I
quit the Great Western an’ joined the Grand Trunk, breakin’ all my
old ties. For two years, though, I stayed on the road, but when
Mary became pregnant, I gave in. I hired on as a clerk in the Yard
Office. So that’s what I became at age thirty-five. I hated it as
much as I loved my wife. It was like workin’ in a rabbit’s den, you
couldn’t breathe, you sucked in the stink of everybody’s body, you
had no place to run or feel free in when you needed to. But I did
it, for five years I loved an’ hated. We had two beautiful
children, a girl first, then a boy. But my salary wasn’t a third of
what I made stokin’ on the road. We rented a house in the east and
down near the rivermouth by the lake. It was a shanty-town, really,
though we painted the place, an’ put a fence round it an’ planted
ourselves a garden. But it was swampy down there and in the winter
the snow piled up, thawed an’ froze, an’ the dampness went right
through the wood, you couldn’t keep enough paint or pine-tar on it
to stop it from rottin’ under you. In the daytime the bugs devoured
the vegetables in the heat, an’ the mosquitoes come out at night to
torment us. I begged Mary to let me go back on the road. She said
she would get a job as soon as the kids were older – she had a high
school certificate. So I went off one mornin’ an’ hopped on a
freight an’ never went back to that stinkin’ clerk’s den. I took
only short day-runs. I lied every day to my wife an’ kids. I hadn’t
been at this long, though, when my punishment was revealed to me in
all its horror. My little girl complained of a headache after
supper one day. It got worse by bedtime. By the middle of the night
she was screaming in agony an’ bewilderment. When the fever hit the
next day, we knew it was typhoid. We’d seen it in summers past. An’
shuddered, an’ prayed. Her little body was burnin’ an’ tremblin’ at
the same time. The diarrhea weakened her terribly. Like a thief, I
stole away, I took the money I’d secretly earned an’ went for a
doctor. Not many would come down to our slum for any sort of money.
But I found one who would; he told us it was typhoid fever, that
only one of us should stay in the house as nurse, that we should
boil our water, an’ so on. He gave us some laudanum for the pain
an’ suggested we pray. He wasn’t gone an hour when my boy, barely a
year old, was struck down with it. Mary and I did what we could. We
knew full well only the strongest survived. We needed more
medicine. Mary hadn’t slept in three nights but she said I must go
back to work to get some money for the kids, an’ to keep my job
which I could lose at any moment for being absent. So I did. I took
a way-freight to Jackson’s Point. When I got back that night I was
stopped about a block before my house by Mrs. Putnam, our
neighbour. ‘Don’t go there,’ she said. ‘Come to my place. It’s
best.’ But I tore away from her. I ran down that muddy street like
a madman. I saw the crowd gathered ’round the spot where my house
had been. There was nothin’ left but cinders an’ charred bits of
wood an’ bone – who could tell? ‘Just as the sun was settin’,’ Mrs.
Putnam said, ‘she come out the front door carryin’ a lantern an’
wavin’ it frantically all about.
They’re dead!
she
hollered.
They’re
gone!
An’ before we could stop
her, she ran back inside, an’ seconds later smoke poured out the
cracks in the sidin’ an’ then flames shot into the air, an’ we
never heard a single sound come from inside the house. Not one.’
She died alone, my Mary, without leavin’ me a word. Everythin’ was
gone, burned to ashes. Later I found out she’d loaned her sister
the books I’d bought her over the years. They’re all that’s left.
That was eight years ago. I been on the move ever
since.”

L
ucien’s hand was on
the throttle once more. Cora clung to him, to the terror in him,
the exhilaration, the risk. Every needle on every dial had peaked,
then snapped, the glass restraining them had shattered. The firebox
door throbbed like a fevered eye. The welding scars on the engine’s
joints stiffened, brittle as ice. One more revolution and the whole
contraption would fly apart in a welter of primal steam and lava.
We’ll die together, was Cora’s thought as she heard the shriek of
rending boiler-plate, the shudder of disconnecting wheels. She
waited out the silence that preceded the impact, holding her breath
and Lucien’s hand.

But there was no crash, no
clatter of wheels on pigiron, no surge of piston in its chamber. No
sound but the rushing of the wind behind the snow. They had left
the track, the invisible meridian, the groove of all gravity. They
were flying weightless and triumphant through the spaces between
the snow that rose with them, lifting and blessing, till it turned
itself into a constellation of planets, and they soared through its
black immaculacy towards the Polar Star whose belly was the Milky
Way, whose jasper eye would draw them safely beyond Newton or
Darwin or any other calculus of the frozen heart.

M
ost of the population
of the hamlet of Woodston heard the ghost train of ’eighty-six as
its shadow hummed past the Grand Trunk passenger station. They
heard the muted screech of its futile braking. They flinched as one
at the abrupt, epimethean thud of cast-iron on drifted snow. In
fact, despite the blizzard and dire storm warnings the good people
of Woodston had come out in force to christen their brand-new
depot, just completed mere days ago and ready to receive its first
passengers on the morrow. The unscheduled arrival of the ceremonial
train was more than a shock. Woodston’s reeve was in the midst of a
passionate toast to the eternal glory of railways in general and
the Grand Trunk in particular. The wine-goblets glistened beneath
the gas-lamps. The room burbled with the good cheer that comes from
unearned contentment and free booze. So concentrated was the
assembly’s attention on the latter exigency that no one noticed,
shortly after the meal began about six-thirty, the rumble and roar
of a nearby avalanche. Not more than fifty yards from the station
where the spur-line itself came to an end, there stood on one side
of the tracks a mountain of stored coal, ready to be used as soon
as the connecting spur to the northern trunk-line was completed in
the spring. Opposite it was another mountain, this one of crushed
stone to be likewise deployed in the expansion project. Over the
preceding two days local squalls off the Lake had dumped acres of
fresh snow onto these man-made peaks. Somewhere between the roast
beef and the baked apple, a huge ledge of packed snow gave way and
rolled unimpeded into the valley below. This fracture awakened the
trolls in the mountain opposite and it too sent an avalanche
bevelling down upon the first. The result was that the end-of-line
was now defined by a trapezoid of snow thirty-feet high,
twenty-feet across and a hundred-yards in length.

Into this welcome –
decelerating at sixty-miles-per-hour – the purloined locomotive
irrupted.

W
hat the reeve and the
anxious press in the doorway behind him saw as they peered
speechless into the haze was this: the rear end of a caboose
otherwise burrowed utterly in what appeared to be an improvised
dune of snow –where the tracks used to be. The caboose door had
been knocked silly by the plundering impact, and was giggling on
one hinge. Nothing else moved. Nothing else was visible. The snow,
between flurries, fluttered and hung. Further along, a thread of
steam or frost began to uncoil from the mountain ridge. Something
under there was breathing. Then like a blue whale blowing in some
fairy-tale sea, a spume of spittle and geysering breath stunned the
onlookers. In terror they heard the hiss of overheated,
subterranean flesh.

Which noise seemed also to
rouse whatever life lay cowering within the caboose, for on the
same instant the reeve detected several shadows emerging from the
ruptured doorway. Through a scrim of snow he could distinguish them
only in silhouette, but it was clear that they were three men and
that they occupied various stations of suffering. The forward
shadow was taller, or more erect, striding so as to disguise a
twisted knee and wrestling manfully with the impossible task of
repositioning his crushed bowler. A yard behind him a second shadow
essayed to keep pace with abrupt, paralytic steps. Further back: a
hunched, crabbed figure was advancing with painful slowness, as if
its thighs were glued together. On the platform, no one moved or
spoke. The figures came silently towards them, close enough at last
so that they were seen, despite the snow, to have human faces – but
dazed, tentative, and slackened by incredulity as if they had just
stepped onto the dark side of Pluto’s moon.

“
Mr.
Dilworth!” gasped the reeve.

“
Where in
hell’s
this
!”

“
Woodston,
sir. But what are you doin’ here this time of day?”

“
Never mind
that,” boomed the voice that made boardrooms tremble and second
vice-presidents quake in their sweat. He swivelled and pointed at
the crippled creature behind them. “Get the deputy-premier to a
toilet.” The reeve leaped forward. “He’s shit his pants.” And
leaped back.

“
Then, round
up your strongest men and dig that son-of-a-bitch out of there!” He
aimed a gloved finger at the far end of the avalanche where the
smoke-stack of a locomotive was materializing fantastically out of
snow, steam and the night-air. “I want that renegade’s balls
broiled for breakfast!”

3

W
hile there are many
ways in which a conspiracy may be accidentally disclosed, no more
public or more indecent exposure could be imagined than that which
occurred when the railway executive, the privy councillor and the
ambitious reeve staggered into the Woodston station under the
scrutiny of two hundred well-dressed guests of every political
stripe – dazed, enraged, malodorous, trembling with the aftershock
of an hour’s journey into terror. Nor was it convenient to keep
from popular view the speculation the presence of a runaway train
embedded spectacularly in an impromptu ski-slope. Indeed, the
celebratory dinner had attracted several gentlemen of the press and
one keen photographer, who between them managed to immortalize the
train of events on bold-face and daguerreotype. Nonetheless, both
governments and railroads are wont to survive such momentary
embarrassments, as they did in this instance. The tunnel was
eventually built where God had ordained it, and the ruling clique
clung to power for still one more term, though the railway lost a
faithful servant and the federal Senate was fleshed out with yet
another retiring member of cabinet. The most evident victim of
these unfortunate and unpredicted violations of the natural order,
however, was Stanley R. Dowling. Two weeks after the catastrophe,
with eighteen months left in his term, he resigned as reeve of
Point Edward, a position he had held by acclamation since the birth
of the village itself. In total disgrace, he faded from the printed
page of local history.

C
ora remembered the
soft surreality of the crash, the sensation of falling into a
cushion of cloud, then being pitched forward. That was all. When
she woke up, she was in the infirmary of the Woodston doctor. It
was noon. The sun shone in a blue sky. Where was Lucien? she asked.
The railroad police had already taken him away to London, to jail.
It was assumed, since she was a woman, that she had been abducted
and was therefore as much a victim as the wretched trio who had
bounced about in the lampless caboose. Much solicitude was thus
shown her. She said as little as possible, mostly because she could
do nothing but think of Lucien. She wanted to go immediately to
London, but two days later, when her head stopped spinning, she was
taken to the train (the inaugural one having arrived a bit late)
and accompanied by an official back to Sarnia. She was left, alone
at last, in Lucien’s rooms.

The next train for London left
at five-thirty. She started to pack, her hands shaking
uncontrollably. One image above all others floated in front of her:
a badger in a wire cage swallowing its own fury.

When the knock came at
the door, she jumped straight up. It was young O’Boyle, his face
ashen. He had a telegram in his hand.

“
I’m sorry,
Mrs. Burgher,” he said.

“
He’s dead,”
she said, as if telling him the news he already knew.

“
Yes, ma’am.
Word come along the railroad ‘vine’ about noon. It’s all over
town.”

“
How?”

“
Hung himself,
ma’am. In his cell.”

T
en minutes later Mr.
Mulligan opened the door a notch, paused, then came in. Cora was
seated on the chesterfield, holding a book bigger than a Bible.
When she finally looked up, at his third cough, he said: “I want
you outta this place by noon tomorrow, bag an’ baggage.”