Lily's Story (115 page)

...Eddie was alone. In
the din and pall he recognized no one. There were no units, no
officers, no direction. Twice out of the mist of smoke and steam of
opened flesh, greenish limbs had blundered into the rage of light
around him, and he had fired or stabbed, stepped over the crumpled
baggage and tried to find a place to run towards. Once, he had
stood up stock-still and tried to squeeze his eyes shut against his
own death, but the cordite tears in them flushed them wide and
searing with absolute sight. Everywhere he put his foot down, it
skidded on blood, rubbed against bone, slithered on living
intestine.

Through a fissure in the
maelstrom, his glance caught the blank bulls-eye of a machine-gun.
He felt himself launched towards it. It stuttered, and jammed. His
rifle jumped and the youth behind the gun gasped as the bullet
sliced through his throat and cut off his cry. Eddie turned in time
to see the wayward shell – it could have been from either side –
complete its mile-long random arc no more than a handspan from his
next step.

Eddie was
flung sunward with the slow-motion ease of a levitation dream,
blood stretched to the fingertips, toes, the whites of the eyes.
The joints unhinged. The bones disengaged – legs, arms, scapula,
skull spun out of the disintegrated skin towards the compass-points
of some unimagined gravity. The centrifuge of the heart at last
gives way and releases with it from time’s cradle these fragments:
snatches of a Celtic
lullaby;
a telltale bubble of healing laughter; the perfect stanza of an
unfinished poem; phrases of affection shaped but not uttered; three
flawless lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’; cherished moments of
child-bravery, fright, longing, devotion, steadfastness, the
courage-to-be; memories as green as the hours that nurtured them
one by one in all the afternoons and evenings and mornings it takes
to bring the man out of the boy; dreams of generation wherein the
future is scanned with the past’s prophecy; and dreams that run
deeper than memory, that feed in the shrubbery of our chromosomes
and sip the cryptic ink of that gene where the myths of the species
itself are made memorial.

T
he Battle of the
Somme began on July 1, 1916 and ended on November 28 of that year.
The Germans lost 582,919 men. The Allied Forces counted 623,907
casualties. Of these, Canadian losses were 24,029 killed, wounded,
and maimed.

Every one of them was
Eddie.

2

G
ranny came out of the
house into the austere light of the September morning. She might
have been on her way to tend the chrysanthemums or the cucumber
beds or the tomatoes that had survived the first frost. She carried
her trowel but no hamper. Her left hand was tightened into a fist,
and her walk a little less spontaneous than usual. She moved slowly
but without hesitation towards the big tree at the end of the
property. The wind which had risen with the sun filled the
yellowing leaves with sibilant motion. She stood under its shade,
the breeze from the Lake on her face, and tried to imagine what
this place – the knoll east of the marshes below and the great
hickory above – was like when Southener’s forefathers had first
come upon it, seeing it surely – as Lily had so long ago – from the
water’s edge staring eastward into the rising sun. Were they drawn
to its sibylline whispers? Its promise of shade and renewal? Its
bounteous strength bridging four seasons? The sweet nub of its
fruit under Carcajou’s tongue in the long hallucinatory nights?
Even now with the magic of the talisman gone, she recalled the
words Southener had spoken to her, in trust, more than sixty-five
years before: “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. So
when you have no more use for the stone’s powers, I ask that you
return it to the sacred grove whence it came, to the gods of that
place who lent their spirit to it.”

She opened her
left hand. The jasper amulet lay in the palm as cold as when she
had removed it a minute ago from the leather sachet she had carried
out of the bush in another century. Only two of the treasures now
remained there: the Testament with Papa’s inscription inside the
cover and the cameo pendant bearing the face of the woman who may
have been her grandmother. Transferring the stone to her right
hand, she dug a small hole in the ground between the two largest
roots of the tree. She placed the jasper in the hole and for
several minutes watched it carefully; then she brushed the soil
over it. Under that seal of earth lay the dead amulet, Lil
Corcoran, Lady Fairchild, Lily Ramsbot
tom, Lily Marshall, Cora Burgher, Granny Coote and what
remained of whoever she was now.

M
rs. Carpenter, who
had just heard the terrible news, came through the hedge and
spotted Granny coming towards her from the garden.

“
Oh Cora, we
just heard. It’s all over town. You poor, dear thing.” She was
wringing her apron and putting on the bravest face she could
muster. “What
can
we do to help?”

Granny opened her mouth
to reply but nothing came out – not a vowel, not a spent breath.
From that day forward not a single intelligible word passed her
lips.

The Return

56

1

The work of the monument proceeded apace.
Sam Stadler brought his sons along only on those days when there
was lifting or manoeuvring to be done. Otherwise he laboured alone
under the vigilant supervision of the old man now rumoured to be
his uncle. When the grand-nephews were about, the old fellow
gambolled and chided and gabbled and offered copious instruction.
When they were not, he sat on one of the unprepared stone slabs and
rarely took his eyes off the movements of the artisan’s hands.
Neither did Granny from her own watchtower across the street.

The monument was to consist of a
double-pedastalled base of polished alabaster sandstone guarded by
eight newel-posts linked with black iron chain. Surmounting this
elegant base was a cube of rough-cut limestone with projecting
cornice. On each facet of this cube was set a smooth tablet in
which Sam Stadler had patiently inscribed the scroll of the dead.
Normally these tablets would have been prepared in a workshop and
transported to the site for installation, but Sam Stadler was no
ordinary builder of memorials-in-stone. Every cut and gesture of
his craft was executed on the grounds in the open air. When it
rained, as it did often that April and May of 1922, he drew a
tarpaulin over the unfinished pieces and sat in his truck smoking
and smiling at respectable intervals as the old fellow chattered
beside him. Sometimes if the rain were warm and misty, they sat
silently in its midst, the droplets beading on the brims of their
crumpled fedoras, cigarettes cupped lovingly in hand. Often several
hours would pass before they moved – to return to the task or climb
contentedly into the battered truck to go home, wherever that
was.

On sunny days Sam Stadler sat on a stool and
chipped into stone the strangers’ names written on the sheet of
paper spread out before him on the ground. Though hammer and chisel
and file were his instruments, the play of his fingers across the
grooved tablet reminded Granny of a pianist’s fingers, Arthur’s
fingers – with their supple strength, their gentle probing, their
easy precision, their effortless acceptance of art’s tyranny.
Letter by letter she watched him chisel into continuance the names
of the children of the village, and something in the tenderness of
his gestures and in the deep resignation behind the quick smile he
gave to the curious attending silently from the sidewalk, told her
that to him these were more than yet another set of sad anonyms. He
was, she thought, a calligrapher spelling out the letters of his
first born in the reverence and awe and regret we feel for all
things cherished and mortal.

On top of the pedestal and memorial facets
was to be erected a twenty-foot obelisk of cut limestone
interspersed with inscribed tablets to record the names of the
battles wherein the sons and fathers had fallen or whatever cause
had driven them hence: Ypres, St. Eloi, Vimy, Passchendaele, Hill
Seventy – names that would enter the village vernacular like the
names of those diseases which had struck and departed without cause
or care: diphtheria, typhus, small pox, Spanish influenza. They
would be forever the whispered words of quarantine, of taboos only
partially exorcized, of cold subcutaneous fear. The obelisk was
constructed in five-foot sections to be fitted in place at the end
of the work. On top of the last section a stone bust of the unknown
soldier was to be erected. It was uncrated from a box delivered
from the freight-sheds. Somewhere, Granny thought, there was a
factory that turned these out from a single mold and shipped them
to the hinterland. Against the wishes of Sam Stadler and of Reeve
Denfield, the council had insisted on this necessary fillip,
perhaps to offset the uncompromising idiosyncrasy of the rest of
the piece, perhaps to ensure, for some, the military character of
the memorial which the words alone, in their ambiguous solitude,
could not do. “It’s ugly and says nothing,” was all Sunny said to
her about the figure, and she nodded in agreement.

What was especially charming during the
construction was the way in which people came to observe, almost
always alone (even the children), posted in silence on the nearby
walk, watching for long moments when you were certain they had not
breathed and waiting as a faithful terrier does for recognition –
usually just a tip of the mason’s hat or a wink (for the kids) or a
cornerwise smile for the regulars. Granny observed many of these
brief exchanges, no two of them quite the same though generated
from similar sources and needs, and she marvelled once again how
much could be conveyed without the sweet contamination of language.
One day just after the base was completed, Granny walked across the
street with a thermos of tea. She stood and watched the three men
sweating in the smooth sun, aware of the old fellow’s stare. When
the men had finished the task they were engrossed in, Sam Stadler
acknowledged her presence with a grin.

“
You been keepin’ a good
eye on us for some time now,” he said pleasantly. “Denfield tells
me it was your house they took down to make room for
this.”

Granny nodded and pointed to her lips.

“
It’s okay,” Sam Stadler
said. “I know.” He turned to his sons. “I’m Sam and this here’s
Harry and Pat, my boys. The old wood-grouse there in the corner is
my Uncle Jack but everybody calls him Old Jack for
short.”

Old Jack murmured an indistinct but not
unfriendly greeting and kept his owl’s eye fixed upon her in happy
puzzlement. “He don’t talk neither,” Sam said and laughed
good-naturedly as his sons and uncle joined in. “But that’s never
stopped him from gettin’ his point across.”

“
If that’s hot tea you got
in there,” Old Jack said with a superfluous wink in the direction
of the boys, “we’d sure like some.”

Sam Stadler spread the tea-towel in which he
had wrapped their lunch over one of the slabs of stone.”If you’d
like to sit for a while, please do,” he said. Granny sat down in
the sun.

A little while later the boys drove off in
the truck, and Old Jack, after some strenuous bantering over lunch,
ambled to the back of the lot and fell asleep under the hickory
tree. Sam Stadler picked up several chisels and awls, sat on his
stool before one of the partly finished memorial tablets, and began
chipping out the letters of a name. The sun warmed his fingers and
mellowed the stone that gave way smoothly under their insistence.
The shadow of his face fell over the name. When he sat back to roll
himself a smoke, Granny read the letters he had just etched there:
EDWARD ARTHUR BURGHER. Sam Stadler lit his cigarette, turned
towards her, caught his smile in time, and said quietly, “You knew
him.”

After a deep draught of smoke he went on. “I
didn’t know him, of course, or any of these others. But four of my
sons were there, and only two come home.” She reached out and
placed a hand over his. He didn’t move. Not an eyelash.

Old Jack was holding forth over the lunch
hour, ostensibly for the benefit of his grand-nephews slouched in
the grass but more likely for the edification of his favourite
nephew and anyone else near enough to be moved by his sad tale.
Granny picked at one of the muffins she had brought over an
listened politely.

“
The younger generation’s
got no idea, not an inkling, of what life was like fifty or sixty
years back. No sense of tradition, no respect for their elders.
It’s the cities and the wars and the ruination of Mother Earth
herself. When I was a boy we lived in huts and we moved from place
to place in the woods, following the deer and small game even we
children were taught to trap and shoot. In them days we treasured
every word that dropped from the lips of our elders. My father was
a giant, a king, a great hunter, he was permitted to talk with the
gods.” He glanced towards Harry and discovered him in the midst of
a yawn, which he chose to ignore. “Our history was passed down to
us through the lips of our grandfathers. The lore of our people was
passed along from hand to hand, and Mother Nature was the consort
of our gods. We would’ve been ashamed to wear clothes not made from
the skin of our brothers in the forest.” Pat was dusting off his
overalls in a badly timed gesture. Old Jack ventured a quick glower
and then resumed his monologue.