Lily's Story (96 page)

There was little commiseration
in his Irish grin.

45

T
he arrangements were
now complete. In the morning they would come and move her things
across the street into the cottage they had built for her. Sunny
had asked her to come and have a gander at it before the trauma of
moving day, but she had refused. I’ll see it when I get there, she
thought. At my age I may not wake up in the morning, and then I
won’t get there anyway, so what’s the point of seeing something
first and getting all stirred up for nothing? I fussed about the
future many times, in the nine lives I’ve had before this one, and
where did it get me? All the way to Grief Street, that’s where. For
Sunny’s sake she had feigned some interest in choosing wallpaper
from the assorted bundles he lugged over, though none of the
ghostly roses, dumpling flags or haplessly cheerful urchins he
unrolled for her held any appeal. In the end she selected the
plainest and least offensive. What did it matter? She was not
really interested in a house which she herself had been tempted to
help confect. Houses ought to grow, she had always thought. They
should express the lives lived there. They should be surprised,
dreamed, mercurial, beautiful to the beholder. I guess that’s why I
loved the Lane, and why I never could explain it, certainly not to
Cap and not even to Arthur, who tried very hard and whose own
handiwork was, despite his good-natured disclaimers, done in the
same spirit. ‘Only the temptations of the church saved you from
bein’ a Laner,’ she used to tease him. ‘And only
you
saved
me
from the church,’ he’d laugh
back.

I’ll ask them to move
your trunk last, Arthur, she promised. I’ll walk beside it. That
way we’ll keep the ghosties inside. You realize they aren’t going
to be too happy with the sudden transfer. Being theatrical ghosts,
though, they ought to be used to being on the move. They told me
you were almost fifty before you settled in one pew. She wished now
that she could have seen Arthur in his prime, treading the boards
of the great stages of the West, warbling away like his own
favourite – the bluebird – with not a touch of winter in his song,
with no thought of wings wearied with migration or the unalterable
swing of the seasons.

It was May now and
unseasonably warm. Her crocuses had bloomed in their usual
profusion. The tulips along the house bulged in the trapped
sunlight. The vegetable beds lay spaded and expectant. “We’ll leave
the border flowers an’ shrubs, for a while,” Sunny had assured her.
“But the garden’ll be turned into grass. Eventually, the whole area
will be landscaped in some manner suited to a cenotaph. It’ll be a
kind of special ground. There’s a bit of land behind your new
place. We may have to clear some trees, though, to get enough sun
in there.”

Granny felt the need to get out
for a while, out of Arthur’s house, out of the gardens they had
planted together, out of the vegetable patch she would never tend
again. As far as she could recall, she had not been off her own
property since the terrible autumn of 1918. It was high time. I’m
going out there and have a look at this town, all of it, one more
time before I settle in somewhere to die. If these wobbly old legs
will carry me. And if I happen to topple into the River, well, I’ll
save the council the price of a ceremony.

She felt surprisingly
sturdy. She walked north along her own street towards Michigan Ave.
She recognized every house she passed, found perfectly familiar
every gable, stoop, gate, half-finished dormer, or coppery window
with one blank eye unpatched since the War. Each house sent its
voices wafting out to her – shredded, grown faint with the years
but still unappeased, still desperate for attention, the need for a
story to be told in full, an ending to be got right at long last,
and a hidden side to be revealed and understood. Too late, too
late, she whispered as she hurried slowly past, too late for all
that, now.

She passed the
houses of the respectable, some fallen since to disrepute, and
heard no apologies for the treatment received there by Cora the
cleaning woman, or before that, ‘that washerwoman Lily from the
Lane’; houses where she had been good enough to wash clothes, scrub
floors, cook a meal, wipe up the children’s snot and shit but not
to share a meal, carry a confidence, love them without
premeditation. ‘But did you ever try to
talk
to them? See
life from their point of view?’ Cap had asked her many times. ‘You
kept yourself aloof. You expected the world to come to you. You
were a loner by choice. It was your chosen philosophy.’ Perhaps
there was more to Cap’s accusations than she had ever acknowledged
during their long hours of reciprocal interrogation. But what did
it matter now? They were all dead. Several of them she had walked
with to the very edge, helping them across when the props of their
respectability cracked asunder, when death dared them to enter his
chamber unattended, and they couldn’t. ‘But you’ll be glad to
know,’ she said to Cap now, ‘I felt no satisfaction.’

Some, of course, like Eliza
Sanders, had been furtively kind, slipping her an extra dollar when
a husband wasn’t looking, giving hand-me-downs she was too proud to
take home to her boys but others along the Lane were happy to
receive.

She passed Redmond’s
Grocery, the Post Office, the new hotel, the Pool Room – feeling
heads turn in shop windows – and crossed the street to the Lane
where The Queen’s had stood for fifty years. It was a rooming house
now, she had heard, but the spirits that poured out of its bowers,
anterooms, closets, pantries and wine-cellars stopped her in her
tracks, overwhelmed her with their babble. She felt dizzy. Don’t
faint, you stupid old fool, she thought, not right here on the main
street with the sun shining.

She didn’t, thought she
couldn’t be certain because when she opened her eyes she was not in
front of The Queen’s or any other building, nor was she on any of
the village sidewalks. She was in some sort of field. In the summer
it would be covered with sawgrass and sandburs, but at the moment
it was soft and fern-like, and her legs were carrying her, not
willy-nilly through it, but along a wide path that was, for a short
time in this young half of spring, plainly visible. This had been a
road once, a winding, sauntering one. On either side of her, she
noticed clumps of concrete or the shell of what had been a porch or
chicken-run, some of its wire rusted as thin as fish-nets in the
drying sun. to her left a window, all of its glass intact, stood
rooted to the ground where it had slumped and stuck while all else
around it had inexplicably rotted away. She almost tripped over the
frail skeleton of a child’s sled. An icy breeze from the Lake
reminded her of more than she was prepared to remember.

The Alley. The Lane. She
looked unbelieving to the north-east. She saw the back-yards,
sheds, coops and rambling pitches of the houses built along the
‘official’ Lane, straightened by statute. I helped to do this, she
thought, long ago, in another name. Now the air was filled with
human sounds, voices skewed and thinned by the breeze. Her body was
propelling itself towards them. She saw the crazed outline of
chicken-wire, caught the thick stink of swine too long in their
styes, heard the domestic sing-song of women’s conversation as they
laboured. Her eyes strained ahead to see them, to know who these
inheritors were, whether they knew what ground, what tradition,
what spritely demons they had foolishly promised to possess. No one
was in sight. She stumbled. The voices arrived, loud and clear: a
foreign tongue. She listened, ignoring the burn in her knees: it
was no language she knew, or had ever heard. Suddenly the syllables
stabbed at her eyes, raced unconnected through her head like bat’s
echoes in a belfry, spinning her around, deafening, she couldn’t
hear the last beats of her heart nor the bounce of her kneecaps on
the stiff earth.

W
hen the sounds
stopped ringing in her head, miraculously she was still walking. It
was getting dark or misty, or both. She was in a sort of hollow,
for though she could hear the lake-breeze high in the distant
trees, she felt no wind at all on her face. The ground beneath her
walking was resilient, kindly, sown with the tender grass found
only on the graves of children. She was lost, her legs had gone
numb, but she was not in the least afraid. She felt serenely at
ease. At any moment of her choosing, she could lie down on one of
those sandy mounds, close her eyes and sleep the longest, deepest,
sunniest sleep of her life. The air around her trembled with
invitation. There were voices in it but they spoke directly to the
weariness of her bones; they carried the news of consolation. It’s
time to lie down, she thought.

A shadow flicked, off to her
right. A bird, returned from its journey? A mourning dove?
Something bright and shifting caught the last of the daylight and
transformed it. It’s alive, she thought. Am I?

Then a sound, the last quarter
of a whimper. She forced her legs towards it, gritting with the
pain. Don’t worry, she cried, I’m coming.

The voice reassembled. The sun
froze in the entanglement of a child’s hair: glinting and going out
as it twisted in the grip of something perilous. It was a cry. A
child’s cry. A little girl’s cry. The sun went blood-red. It jerked
the blond tresses of the little, lost girl upward into a scarlet,
lungless scream.

“
Mom-mee!
Mom-mee! Mom-mee!”

The child’s face caught fire.
The features blurred and congealed. The hair flared like a halo and
cindered. The lips alone remained to surround their one word,
emptying it again and again into the empty air.

Granny felt her heart burst.
Her knees hit the sidewalk, then her elbows, then her chin. She was
looking up. The sun grinned down at her. She read the faded letters
of the Queen’s Hotel on a yellow brick wall. This is not Heaven,
she thought, just before the pain blinded her.

46

1

G
ranny Coote lay in
her new house and listened to the warm wind stirring against the
unexpected gables. She heard every errant sound that the house
contrived to interrupt her sleep: the complaint of green lumber
along the eaves, the slap of an ill-fitted shutter, the rattle of
windows not yet settled into their glaze, the fluting of air across
the chimney-pot, the exotic tick of the pendulum clock in this
strange space. I must not be ungrateful, she told herself a dozen
times a day. There was a time when this is what I wanted most,
foolish as that notion might seem now. We all want a moorage of
some kind; though the space it takes to launch us out of this world
is not nearly so large nor so anchored as we would suppose. The day
after Wilf Underhill, Sam Brighton, Limpy Jenkinson and the others
had moved her furniture and belongings – the baggage of many
decades – across the street to this house, she had begun to undo
their patient work. They had put the table and chairs in the
kitchen at the back with the queer gas-stove and ice-box; the
chesterfield and piano went into the front room, Arthur’s bed and
her cot into the bedroom at the back left, and then they carefully
set up her Quebec heater near the tiny vestibule and next to the
bay window overlooking the street. Arthur’s theatre trunk went into
the bedroom. Out back was a neat woodshed with a privy off it so
she would never have to brave the elements again. She regarded the
electric lamps – donated by the Methodist Auxiliary – with a
mixture of suspicion and wonder. But none of this could be. As soon
as they were gone, she dragged the cot into the front room,
marvelling at her frailty as she struggled to move it a few inches
at a time. She set it up across from the heater. She managed to get
the table and one chair out of the kitchen and into a spot near the
cot. Perhaps when she had a chance to get a garden in, she would
eat in the strange, closed kitchen and look out the window at the
dense greenery. For now she felt she needed only this solitary
room, surrounded by these few necessities and comforted by them.
From here she could gaze westward, at a moment’s notice, through
the bay-window where the empty rectangle stared blankly back at her
from across the street, where the familiar side-hedges yet
flourished, where the stems of tulips combed the rim of the sky at
the edge of the marsh, where the arching hickory allowed its
thick-gnarled limbs once again to fringe the breeze with its
maidenhair green. “They’ll take the front hedges out but not the
side ones, and of course they’ll leave the flowers as is for this
year,” Sunny assured her. “The builder an’ his helpers’ll be comin’
in next week. You got a front-row seat.”

She tried to get Arthur’s trunk
into its proper place – she wished she’d just had the courage to
tell them she wanted everything in this room, but she didn’t want
to hurt their feelings. Besides, she thought, they think I’m queer
enough as it is. By sitting on it and pushing off with her feet she
managed to get the trunk as far as the doorway, where it wedged
itself in quite permanently. Sunny arrived just as she was trying
to lever it up with a stick of kindling.

“
I’ll do that
for you,” he said. And did. After a cup of tea and a scone
(Anglican Auxiliary), he said: “And if you want to go walkin’
again, you just let me or Purdie know. No need to go off by
yourself.”

And fall on your face, she
added, in front of The Queen’s and suffer the double mortification
of a bloody nose and having been rescued by Half-Hitch Hitchcock,
who promptly assured the whole town that he had told her so but
what can you do with doddering old ladies who don’t know enough to
die when they have the chance.