Lily's Story (25 page)

From the hut came the
unmistakable sound of Bachelor Bill’s harmonica: thin strains of an
old-country air, reedy and elegiac. The women went home.

L
ily decided to have a
look at this railroad in which Auntie had placed so much of her
faith. For a year she had listened to its saws, axes, hammers and
curses of work-in-progress, but she had no desire to see the
results. Towards November of ’fifty-nine, Auntie would walk over
there every day she could and watch the ties straighten the
landscape, foot by foot, amazed that such delicate calligraphy had
printed its message from here to London and beyond, they were told,
to the edge of the ocean itself. During the search for Violet, Lily
had glimpsed in the dark the havoc wrought here, and felt an
irresistible urge to return in the daylight.

Nothing could have
prepared her for such a sight. A few hundred yards north of their
woodlot the destruction began. Lily had imagined a neat swath cut
through the bush; there was no bush left. Every pine within a
mile’s radius of the wharf-site, on the River just below the Lake,
had been hacked down haphazardly as if some deranged troglodyte had
avenged himself for some fancied slight. The areas near the
right-of-way were efficiently trim, but the so-called townsite was
a wasteland of split trunks, charred branches and smouldering
needles. After a fashion Lily could see all the way to the River’s
edge; she could see how the main-line curled in from the north-east
across the ballasted swamps and aligned itself with boundaries
formed by the water. The sprawling, unpainted wharfs and
freight-sheds were three-quarters completed, and to the south at
the periphery of the remaining stand of trees Lily spied the brick
station-and-hotel towering three stories above the shoreline, the
roof slates reflecting the sun and the several dozen glazed windows
beaming ‘progress’ across a clearing that, it seemed, must
inevitably yield houses and people to inhabit them. But why would
they come here? Why would they want to? For now, only a handful of
workers’ shanties, which had served the fisherman before them, gave
any promise of domesticity. Below her Lily watched the ripple of
muscle and sweat as the navvies raised their hammers and drove
their spikes into wood like nails into the cross-struts of a
coffin.

Though she was
curious, Lily didn’t approach the station-hotel. Something told her
she would see the inside of it soon enough. Instead she walked down
across the tracks to the point where the Lake and River joined, and
stared out at the self-sustaining, generous beauty of the blue
waters flowing out of the north-
sky itself and condescending to the south. She glanced
anxiously over at the scrub bush and dunes along the lakeshore,
noting with relief that progress had by-passed the sleeping graves
of the lost. You are safe, Southener, she thought. Satisfied, Lily
turned to go and as she did she found herself looking back across
the mangled plain for the first time. Smoke from the foundries was
visible to the south, but her eye caught something more impending.
About half-way across the curving rim of the tree-line she saw
rising above the pines, a towering hardwood – its branches
unfolding, outreaching – magnificent in is solitary grandeur. The
troglodyte’s mad slashing had stopped less than twenty feet from
its aboriginal root.

As Lily picked her way through
the wreckage towards home, the immense depression settling over her
was partially relieved by the thought of this lone survivor, by the
belief that not all the magic in the world had flown.

“
She’s gone
again,” said Aunt Bridie sternly when Lily entered the
garden.

T
his time they did not
find her. Not that evening nor the next morning. At noon several
men on horseback rode up the lane and stopped in front of the
shanty. Bachelor Bill was with them. Lily and Auntie hurried over,
leaving Uncle Chester to fend for himself. When they arrived,
Bachelor Bill, distraught, said to them: “They say she’s crazy an’
they have to take her away, an’ they just picks her up an’ she’s
bleedin’ and squallin’ an’ her eyes is beggin’ me, an’ they just up
an’ cart her off to London, they’re gonna lock her up, Bridie,
they’re gonna lock her up somewheres.”

Aunt Bridie took control, and
got the whole story. But nothing could be done, they said. Three or
four of the railway workmen had pulled Violet into a field where
they raped her repeatedly, and then left her there bleeding and
babbling in her alien speech. The incident had been witnessed by a
minor official of the Grand Trunk who was inspecting one of the
fancy new rooms on the third floor of the hotel. He couldn’t
exactly see who the men were from such a distance, and didn’t
report the incident till the next morning because he saw the girl
get up on her own and wander towards Sarnia, and naturally he
reckoned that it wasn’t really rape after all. As it turned out, no
one was ever charged with the crime. No reliable witnesses could be
found. Violet, her terror and pain locked forever inside her, “went
crazy”, and the constable and the magistrate decided she would be
better off “getting proper treatment”. Bachelor Bill was
inconsolable. Aunt Bridie ranted against all officialdom and
seethed and grew grim. Lily felt quite alone, bereft of something
of immense and irreplaceable value. She got a taste of what despair
would be like.

3

S
ome time towards dawn
Lily was awakened by a blaze of lightning, followed soon by a crack
of thunder that sounded as if Adam had pulled his own ribs apart.
Then the rain came, slashing at the dry woods and vulnerable
gardens. Soon it relented, easing off to a steady, sustaining
downpour. When she arose with the sun, the air would be sweet with
growth, the leafage radiant, the earth slaked and grateful. She
turned back towards sleep, towards the hurting dream – anything to
avoid such a day.

When she did
get up, hearing Auntie stir restlessly in her room, she sat on the
cot for a long while letting the infant light brush over her,
quicksilvering her skin. She reached into the applewood box below
the cot and drew out the leather pouch. The jasper talisman felt
cold in her cupped palms. She pressed it tightly, squeezing her
eyes shut, and begging the wordless, driven thoughts in her mind to
seek some shape, some release, some reconciliation. It occurred to
her that she might be praying. The talisman grew warm, incarnadine,
then pulsed – li
ke the first
flexing thrum of an embryo’s ventricle.

“
Are you up,
dear?”

“
Yes, Auntie.
You stay put a while. It’s a bit wet for weedin’ right
off.”

She heard the creak and
shuffle of her Aunt rigging her body for the day ahead.

L
ily glanced up from
her hoeing. Aunt Bridie was waving from the yard, something white
and fluttering in her hand. When Lily came up to her, she saw that
the stranger was only Silas, the butcher’s idiot son.

“
He’s brung a
note from Alice Templeton,” said Aunt Bridie evenly. “Do you want
me to read it?”

“
Please.”

In a somewhat overly formal and
halting manner, Bridie read: “Dear Lily: You are cordially invited
to attend the official luncheon for His Royal Highness, Albert
Edward, Prince of Wales, to be held at the Grand Trunk Hotel at
twelve noon, September 13, 1860. Please say you’ll come.
Affectionately, Alice Templeton.”

Aunt Bridie looked at
Lily expectantly. “The writin’s funny,” she said to fill the
silence. Silas nodded.

“
Tell her,
thanks. But no.”

“
You want me
to write that?”

“
Yes.”

“
Lily, love, I
think you oughta go.”

Silas agreed.

“
What
else
is
there?” Aunt Bridie said with feeling.

“
We got
weedin’ to do,” Lily said, and started for the potato
patch.

S
ilas came back two
hours later, having missed the turn-off and gone part-way to Errol
before beating a meandering retreat. Again Aunt Bridie read the
note aloud. Uncle Chester, who despite his ‘sprained’ wrist was
walking now with two canes, came out to listen.

“
This is even
queerer than the last one,” Aunt Bridie said. “It says: ‘Lily
dearest: there will be a military escort from London.’ Now what’s
that supposed to mean?”

“
It means he’s
the Prince of Wales,” Chester said. “The heir to the
throne.”

“
The
English
throne,” Bridie snapped. Silas sided with
her.

“
Now don’t
start again, woman, with them radical ideas. I got a bum ticker,
you know.”

“
An’ how could
the world ever forget it?”

“
Tell
her
yes
,” Lily said to the startled trio.

9

1

T
he visit of Queen
Victoria’s firstborn son to Her Majesty’s dominions in August and
September of 1860 was the biggest public event of that year and
until confederation seven years later the most ‘historic’ occasion
in the fledgling existence of British North America. The Yankees,
busily preparing to dissolve their shotgun marriage with the South,
had to be shown what it was like for a people to freely love a
monarch and to accept with grace the authority of the ties that
bind, etc. No fewer than four books were published to consecrate
the events of the pretender’s ‘progress’ (one of them in Boston, no
less) and newspapers everywhere devoted their column-inches to
tracking each royal manoeuvre and recording the public’s response.
Even the Prince’s dance cards were faithfully reproduced as if they
were imperishable poems.

Hence it is that the
hour-by-hour sweep of H.R.H. through the County of Lambton on 13
September 1860 has been exhaustively delineated and willed to
posterity. The Royal Party and a regiment of well-wishers and
hopefuls boarded the Great Western in London at 9:00 a.m. (the
Prince’s special car, however, belonged to the Grand Trunk: the
rival railways had declared a truce to demonstrate their
unshakeable faith in the Empire). At 11:00 a.m. they touched down
in Sarnia where H.R.H. stepped from his mobile drawing room –
flanked by railway moguls, hastily promoted lieutenant-colonels,
and the young scion’s guardian, the unflappable Duke of Newcastle –
onto a scarlet carpet variously reported to be either one hundred
or three hundred yards in length (the latter being a local
estimate). More than five thousand were said to be gathered around
the Great Western depot and wharf – almost the County’s total
population. The succession of toasts and responses which followed –
in their quest for eloquence – managed to put out the schedule by
almost an hour. The only speech worth the space given to it was
that of Chief Kan-was-ga-shi (Great Bear of the North), one of the
several hundred Ojibwas who had come down from the wilds of
Manitoulin for the occasion:

Brother, Great Brother – the
sky is beautiful. It was the wish of the Great Spirit that we
should meet in this place. I hope the sky will continue to look
fine, to give happiness to both the whites and to the Indians. You
see the Indians who are around you. It is their earnest desire that
you will always remember them.

It is not recorded whether any
of those assembled caught the ironies either in the words
themselves or the situation in which they were delivered.

After presenting the chiefs
with silver medallions, the Prince led a cavalcade of carriages,
mounted citizenry and rearguard foot-soldiers from the less opulent
parts of town to the magnificent station-hotel of the Grand Trunk
near the wharf of the new townsite already being referred to as
Point Edward. Therein, an hour late, the pooh-bahs received their
luncheon and basked in the reflected glory and unabashed good
humour of the young and future king. With no coaching whatsoever
the Prince proposed a toast to the “Prosperity of the Grand Trunk
Railway.” Its regional vice-president, Dunbar Cruickshank, seated
beside Mad-Cap Dowling (now called somewhat ambiguously ‘Cap’
Dowling), responded with unforced enthusiasm.

After the meal
H.R.H. and a very select group of dignitaries boarded the Grand
Truck steamer the
Michigan
and sailed up
the River and onto the Lake. By 3:30 p.m. the Royal Cortege was
back at the Great Western depot and entrained for London where the
Prince gave a levee that same evening which outshone even the
shameless extravagance of the one given at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall
two nights earlier. The entire episode – emblazoned forever in
local annals – had lasted a mere four-and-a-half hours.

2

Wh
en the royal train
pulled into the station, Lily was standing beside Mrs. Templeton
just behind the Mayor and his officials. She had a clear view of
the Prince as he approached them gingerly across the red carpet,
his chaperone at his elbow, both of them aglitter in military
regalia. The next rank brought the railroad bosses – the one who
had replaced Sir Oliver (dead of a mysterious stroke) and the
fiercely ambitious Dunbar Cruickshank looking not a day over
thirty-five. Next came a wider and less orderly phalanx of minor
factoti and politicians, including one of the newest
vice-presidents of the Grand Trunk, Cap Dowling, at whose elbow,
Lily was not perturbed to see, ambled the dark lady out of her
widow’s weeds just for the occasion. Fanned out behind were several
scarlet-coated regular officers and blue-clad militiamen, including
the young man Lily had waltzed with. Tom was not among
them.