Reading by Lightning (37 page)

There were only three ports open in all of England, but Liverpool was one of them. Uncle Stanley managed to arrange her fare for the end of the week. Normally this would have been impossible, but after the sinking of the
Arandora Star
in July, passengers cancelled by the hundreds. Outgoing passage was still considered safer than incoming, although what with the nightly air strikes in Liverpool and London and with George and Archie shipping out, no one dwelt much on fear for her safety. Stanley would have driven Lily to Liverpool, but they couldn't get petrol. So in the end she said goodbye to her aunt and uncle in Oldham and Lois and Madeleine went down to Liverpool with her on the train. Sitting beside Madeleine, with Lois across the aisle, she took the telegram out of her handbag and read it over. Her mind snagged on phrases like
AWAY SEPTEMBER and STOP MOTHER
and she still couldn't put aside the thought that they'd misinterpreted this message, that really it said something else. She passed it to Madeleine and asked her to read it again. Madeleine read it and looked at Lily with her smooth face full of sympathy, and then she leaned closer and sat with one hand dangling over Lily's shoulder, patting her from time to time all the way there.

There was Liverpool, the big stone buildings at the waterfront she'd marvelled at when she arrived four years before, and the two ungainly birds like wild turkeys perched on the top of one of them, one facing the water and the other facing the land. But barrage balloons floated above them, silver against a sky black with smoke. The Mersey was as full of traffic as a
motorway, ships back from Dunkirk pockmarked with patches of red lead. All over the head of the river, the burnt-out hulls of ships stuck up out of the water — left like skeletons guarding a cemetery at the very spot where they'd been torpedoed, left to foil U-boats stealing up the Mersey to plant more mines. Her ship, the
Manchester Division,
was already at dock and boarding. It had been painted grey all over and had had two gun turrets mounted to its foredeck for this voyage. Uncle Stanley had come back from the shipping office proud of having arranged Lily's passage on this particular vessel, as on its maiden voyage in 1918 it had rammed and sunk a submarine off Flamborough Head. He made much of how safe it was, but Lily knew that in spite of her ship's historic prowess there were numerous ways she could come to a bad end during the voyage. George might think her ignorant, but she knew there were still mines in the Mersey, she followed the news enough to know that. And once in open water the
Manchester Division
might be torpedoed by a submarine, as the
Athenia
or the
Arandora Star
had been. Or a cordon of Messerschmitts might come droning over the horizon and drop a bomb on its deck. But Uncle Stanley told her there was safe passage across the Atlantic every week: those were the ships you never read about in the news. Mr. Shillingford had seen an aerial photograph of a naval convoy and he sketched it for Lily, the ships laid out in a diamond pattern the way a boy playing war might arrange them on the rug. He was very kind about it, drawing a tiny figure labelled
LILY
on the deck of a ship safely in the middle of the pack.

She had not said a proper goodbye to George and she knew she would never see him again. While Lois dragged the trunk over to the baggage area, Lily said to Madeleine, I'll never see him again, I know it, and Madeleine misunderstood and
thought she meant her father, and said, He's safe, in a better place. Madeleine held her and patted her the way Aunt Lucy would have. There, love, she said. It's not so far. The war will be over and once you've put your mother to rights you'll come back to us. Or maybe we'll come to see you. Wouldn't that be a laugh, if we all came to Canada? When Lily started sobbing again she said, You're upset because of your dad, and who can blame you. Then Lois was back and gave her a kiss and it was time to board. At the top of the ramp, she looked down at the faces turned up to the ship, she scanned them for a spot of colour, and there was Madeleine's red scarf. But she saw it for only a second, and then it was lost in a sea of khaki.

Up in cabin class the Barr Colonists would spend their days playing chess and bridge and musical instruments. On Sundays they'd sing,
And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green?
but during the week it was other questions they mused over —
Where have you been walking, shepherdess?
or
Why do you weep, dear willow?
Below in steerage my dad and Joe slept in the smell of horse manure (the ship had been a troop ship in the Boer War), and when they weren't sleeping they played cribbage and poker with Bantam Bradshaw, a handsome, well-proportioned miniature of a man who took every step as though he were bobbing in a ring. He'd been to the Boer with the Bantam Regiment, and the song they sang over and over every night was one that he taught them:

In the fight for England's glory, lads
Of its world-wide glory let us sing!
And when we say we've always won,
And when they ask us how it's done,
We proudly point to every one
of England's soldiers of the King!

Even after they arrived in Saskatchewan they did their best to maintain the lines, pegging a section off for cabin class. But they were all in the same sort of tent, ridiculous bell tents the Dominion Immigration Department put up for them, and there they squatted for days, torn between a desire to get to their land (which the homestead office assured them did exist, although Isaac Barr had never laid eyes on it) and a fear of being two hundred miles from a rail line. They were waiting for the luggage train, which never came. Scarlet fever broke out. The government agent was doing his best to get them moving, but they resisted. They resisted entering into any relations with the government. Those who had Union Jacks flew them, those of both classes.

Here Joe Pye becomes the modest hero of his own story for a bit. He compared section, township and range numbers with everyone he talked to and finally he found his neighbour, a man whose paper read 36SE-49-2. Playfair, his name was, a cigar importer from London who was rapidly going through his best collateral, a case of wonderful Cuban cigars. I picture Playfair as a soft-fingered, talkative man. He asked Joe into the beer parlour and over a small glass of whisky they agreed to team up. The next day he came by the single men's tent wearing jodhpurs and took Joe to see a team of chestnut geldings he'd set his heart on. The team cost four hundred and fifty dollars. While they were leaning against the stall, Playfair's wife appeared in the doorway of the stable holding her baby. When he asked her what she thought, she just looked at him and said,
Oats?
Her first name Joe Pye did use: it was Amelia. Joe could not imagine how Amelia and Playfair had ended up together, from either point of view — the last person a braggart wants to be with night and day is a woman who can break a situation open with a word.

Finally Joe Pye walked out of town, where there was less speculating, and bought an ox team and cart from a Doukhobor
farmer. The oxen cost a hundred and eighty dollars and could live on grass. With their cart piled high with gear and the six Playfair children, Joe and the Playfairs set out for the west a few days before most. The oxen were young and tenaciously drawn to sloughs — apparently they understood only Russian. The whole area was as level as a lake on a calm day, and covered with light scrub and waving grasses. You can see ten miles ahead of you on the prairies — a long day's journey on an ox cart. The sky must have seemed twice as big as an English sky and bluer than heaven, the same white cloud painted over and over all along its lower edge, as though a painter had been cleaning his brush on the side of a bowl. Sloughs fringed with blonde grasses dotted the landscape, navy blue sloughs where the sky had been boiled down to ink. Joe said that they walked most of the day because the pace of the cart made them frantic. They walked and they camped on their own, avoiding the government camps along the way, where colonists caught scarlet fever and dysentery.

The
colonists
, Joe said, as though he were never one of them, one of the pretend farmers leaving Saskatoon in the spring runoff, in a cart top-heavy with rolled-up Persian rugs, crates of china, English saddles, cages of pigeons. (Didn't they lose all their luggage? I asked. That were the pianos, Joe said. The bathtubs and feather beds. They was on the train that were lost.) Criminally ignorant of domestic animals, tethering their horses to bushes the size of a cabbage and spending days wandering the prairies looking for them through opera glasses. Tying the halter to a wrist and being dragged to their death when the horse bolted. Leaving a team in harness for the whole trip because they wouldn't know how to put the tack back on if they took it off. Leaving dead horses to rot on the trail, their flesh torn open by scavengers. Falling into sloughs and alkaline flats (four wagons stuck at once in the same bog), and watching Isaac Barr gallop past while they struggled up
to their waists in mud (or so they claimed). Plunging into the slough again when a grass fire roared by, standing up to their necks in water while the whole triangle between the Battle and the North Saskatchewan burnt up. Floundering on with no more small game for their suppers, no more forage for the oxen, convinced that the fire had been started by a spark from Isaac Barr's roaring campfire.

All these stories were about other people. Joe and the Playfairs did better than most: they had left early while the trail was still reasonably firm, and they got there ahead of the pack. Joe borrowed a compass and they set out to find their claims. The night they arrived was a soft evening — they must have felt like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. His estate would be named Matilda Court, Playfair told Joe, in memory of his mother. While Playfair was showing Joe Pye where he'd put the cricket pitch, Amelia strung their canvas from the cart to a single tree and put the little kids to bed under it. And then someone rode by and told them they were two miles off. They set up camp three times before they got it right. Who would have guessed you need to calibrate a compass differently in Canada?

I linger over the rest of it, a love story, Joe Pye building a house for the forthright Amelia, while her husband found every excuse to spend the day at the colony headquarters (it appeared he was what Reverend Lloyd called a
liquorite)
. Sod was for peasants, as oxen were, but what else could Joe use? They built the house by trial and error and with the advice of equally ignorant neighbours, and they hired two Cree men to thatch the roof. Joe liked working with sod, nestling each brick grassside down into the wall, strong and limp and tractable like the pelt of a small animal. All they had to buy was the door latch
and hinges. For light they worked three pickle jars into the wall, like portholes in a ship.

When winter came Joe slept on a palliasse on the Playfairs' earthen floor, amazed at the feeling of living in a burrow. The cold settled in, the colonists lost toes and earlobes, and an orphan brought to the colony by a missionary froze to death. It was Joe who ventured outside to hunt — they lived on jackrabbit stew. As the sod shrank with the cold it was Joe who dug up frozen earth and thawed it on the stove to fill cracks in the walls. Joe taught the kids to play cribbage, which Amelia liked because it was all arithmetic. He bought them a dog. He worked at being unobtrusive, a skill that came in useful all his life.

What was Joe's one indulgence? It was the mornings, when he could have got up first to make the fire and instead lay on his palliasse with the dog curled beside him and waited for Amelia to slip around him in her long flannel nightdress and shawl, waiting for the moment the kindling would flare and light up her pure profile bent over the stove in the dark shanty. Of course he didn't tell me this. I put the whole thing together from the way he said
Amelia.

Joe was finished with the Barr Colony in less than two years. The weather was fine the second summer and the Play-fairs bought two cows. And then one spring morning, with no fanfare, Playfair himself died on the path to the outhouse. Joe was on his own quarter-section by then, sleeping in a tent. The oldest boy came over to tell him. The boy had his mother's steadiness and he didn't cry. With all the gruesome things that could have taken Playfair in this wilderness, it appeared he'd died the way he might have on a London street: he'd had a heart attack. Amelia was friendly with the neighbours on the other side, and everyone helped with the burial and pitched in to seed the twenty acres they'd broken the year before. Joe thought she'd go home, but she didn't seem to want to, so he
just turned up morning and night to do her milking. Then one night I picture her stopping him at the door with one of her looks.
You think you've found yourself a ready-made family,
she'll say. She won't say the second part
(Well, I'm not having it)
, but he walks home almost blind with shame. He had no idea that's what he was after, but as soon as she says it he knows it is true.