Lily's Story (33 page)

P
ig-Eye’s steady
chatter ceased by the time they left Exmouth Street and headed
north-east up the Errol Road. He sensed the tension in Lily’s
laconic replies, and respected her need for silence. At the gate
she paid him twenty cents from the silver coins Mrs. Edgeworth had
pressed on her “for emergencies, dear-heart”. It was late afternoon
and the August sun still burned hazily over the western sky. Lily
looked at her home.

The fields had been planted,
but instead of the neat rows of beans and potatoes Lily saw ragweed
and wild mustard and Scotch thistle choking in their own glut. The
little barn and south coop struck her with their old familiarity,
but not a sound came from them. Only the flap of a stunted
corn-leaf in the wind reached across the waste of Aunt Bridie’s
prized garden. On the pond near the house, Booster the gander swam
alone in a single circle. No smoke in the chimney. Well, it was
afternoon and very hot. As she approached she saw that the door was
shut tight, and the windows pressed against the sashes. She
listened. Behind the woodshed a groundhog rubbed its back against
the rim of its burrow; a garter snake sawed through the grass; a
mouse sneezed.

“
They ain’t
there!
”

Old Bill had emerged from his
hut and was calling to her as he hobbled across the cucumber patch.
She waited for him to come up to her before she said, “Are they in
town?”

“
Then
you
ain’t
heard,” Old Bill said, suddenly looking at the
ground and smacking his gums together nervously.

Lily waited.

“
Bridie wrote
you a letter about it,” Old Bill said.

“
Where’ve they
gone?”

“
Packed up an’
went off to the oil fields,” Old Bill said. “Down there Petrolia
way,” he added, seeing her puzzlement.

“
Left the
farm?”

“
Yup. After
fifteen years they just up an’ left. God-dammedest thing I ever
seen,” he said, “if you’ll pardon my French.”

“
For
good?”

“
Yup. Had
their bags packed by noon an’ just left the house an’ the doo-dads
and all standin’ pat, an’ hitched up Benjamin an’ headed for the
oil. Dammedest thing I ever seen.”

Gradually Lily got the whole
story from him. She took him inside where she found everything
still in place: the breakfast dishes on the table infested with
flies; the kettle on the stove, half-full and waiting. The beds
were unmade, as if they had discarded their occupants only moments
before. Lily started a small fire, made some tea, and tried to keep
Old Bill settled long enough to achieve some kind of coherence.

Aunt Bridie and Uncle
Chester had gone to the Petrolia area about the time the baby was
born. Bridie had put all the details in a letter which, of course,
never reached Lily. The Grand Trunk had served the expropriation
papers on them in early June. Old Bill’s hut and yard were
exempted, as were the house, barn, coop, shed, pond and kitchen
garden of the Ramsbottom property – about an acre and a half in
total. The rest – the fields, woodlot, cleared fallow, planted
gardens – were needed, they said, for the sprawling company town
already starting to unfold on the ordnance grounds of Point Edward.
Naturally since the GTR was a humane, Canadian-directed enterprise,
the Ramsbottoms would be permitted to harvest this year’s crop or
take a small sum in lieu thereof. A reasonable – even generous –
offer was made for the seized acreage and pinery. That such money
was of little value to a couple who had depended on developed land
for their continuing livelihood was an argument considered by the
directorate to be seditiously Luddite in nature and
intent.

Uncle Chester had mentioned the
business proposal of his friend from London, who had written during
the winter to say that he had put capital into an oil-drilling
company under the command of a fast-talking, knowledgeable New
Yorker, and that they were looking for another partner. Aunt Bridie
suddenly began quizzing Uncle Chester closely on the matter, and
within a day the decision had been made. Old Bill was to sell off
the Guernsey and the remaining chickens and take what he could use
or sell from the garden, They left him some money, but he had
hidden it so well he could no longer find it. As he talked, he
dunked chunks of mildewed bread into his tea and slurped them
through the sieve of his gums.

“
Why?” Lily
said.

“
Dunno, little
one. Never seen the like of it. Woman like that farmin’ all her
days, then just up an’ leaves it all. I saw her walk out to them
cabbages that mornin’, an’ she mumbled somethin’ at them, an’ then
kicked one of ’em square in the head.”

“
She hated
it,” Lily said.

“
All she said
to me was: ‘I can’t let Lily an’ the babe come back to a patch of
ground. You take care of them front teeth now Bill,’ she says to
me.”

“
The babe
died,” Lily said. “She knows that.”

After a while Old Bill said,
“They sent a fella here a while back to tell me everythin’ was
goin’ good down there. They’re stayin’ in a fancy hotel somewhere –
it’s wrote down for you – an’ you’re to go there soon’s you get
back. They’ll send a buggy to Wyomin’ to take you an’ the babe
down. You’re to live with them there.”

“
The babe
died.”

Old Bill went to the cupboard
and pulled out some rumpled papers. “Here’s where it’s wrote down,”
he said. “You’re to send a telegram the minute you arrive.”

Lily looked around at all that
was familiar, at nine years of her life spent in this kitchen with
its own seasons of disappointment and delight, of love and its
absence.

“
This here
paper’s specially for you,” Old Bill said, flogging his memory for
some gist of significance.

Lily took it. She recognized
her name in print and her Aunt’s signature, and a bit of the
date.

“
What does it
say?” she asked.

“
It’s a deed,”
Old Bill said, showing the purple of his gums as he stuttered over
the legal script: “It gives you – Lily Ramsbottom – what’s left of
the farm when the railroad is done.”

Lily stared in awe at the
official stamp.

“
Your Aunt
says to me, Bill, she says, you tell her the patch is hers, so’s
she’ll always have a home to come back to no matter what happens to
us down there.”

Old Bill munched the last of
his soggy tea. The kettle was humming again, but Lily made no move
to tend it.

“
I can go to
the telegraph first thing in the mornin’,” Old Bill said at the
door.

“
Not yet,
Bill. I want to wait a bit. To think.”

“
Okay.” He was
about to leave when he pretended to remember something.
“By-the-by,” he said, “when you was down to London way, did ya
happen to see anythin’ of my Violet?”

4

T
he hoe in her hands
felt good again: astringent, righteous. She worked without rest in
the steaming humidity. Blisters formed on her palms; her back ached
like a loosened tooth; at night her muscles buckled. Her hair was a
frazzled rope. Still, the weeds died and the vegetables –
chastened, attenuated – took shape and then heart. She herself ate
whatever had been left, scraping off the mould with a jack-knife
and splashing pump-water over her bone-weariness at day’s end. By
the third morning she smelled worse than Old Bill. She couldn’t get
out of bed. Her back had jammed at right angles to her hips. She
shuffled through the shed to the back door where she eased herself
down on the bench so that the morning sun would catch and soften
the seizure in her back. She pulled up her nightshirt and moaned
softly as the heat soaked in. If anyone saw me like this, she
thought, they’d think I was a crone tuning up for
flight.

She heard Old Bill coming
faithfully up the path to the front door, as he had each morning
only to see in her face the answer to his question about the
telegram. She poked her head around the shed corner to intercept
him. The sunlight rolled in a horizontal wave across the frayed
garden and struck the approaching figure with indelible
illumination.

Lily saw the carpenter’s
tool-kit first, then the overalls, bib, and navvy’s cap.

“
Good mornin’,
ma’am,” Tom said. “I’m lookin’ for work.”

Tom

13

1

Besides the wedding of
Thomas Marshall and Lily Ramsbottom,
née
Corcoran
cum
Fairchild, the autumn of 1861
produced several other events of moment in what was known
throughout the province as ‘the Lambton swamps’. Alexander
Mackenzie – who was later to prove that stonemasonry and Haldane
Baptism were no obstacles to the highest political office in a
country that was still a pipe-dream in George Brown’s head – had
succeeded in overthrowing the old reformer, “Coon” Cameron, and
delivering the counties of the West into the political jaws of the
Clear Grits. The gum-beds of Enniskillen ceased harassing wayward
oxen and began oozing oil, in commercial quantities plump enough to
be noticed in Chicago and New York. Twenty thousand barrels – each
one constructed on-the-spot of the finest, most perishable oak –
were hauled through bogs and sloughs up to Wyoming Station, in
spite of every attempt by the County to provide a road for such
traffic. Within a year the town of Oil Springs was confected to
match the expectations of the drillers, dreamers, and exploiters of
the human condition.

Less ostentatious but no
less bumptious was the rise of the village around the railway
terminus on the old ordnance grounds. What boundless optimism it
was – in the face of Darwin’s grim gospel and the resuscitated
silliness of Bishop Ussher and the mute unglory of Balaclava – to
lay out a town site crammed with streets without the ghost of a
house to grace them, and each one meridian-straight, square to the
intangible North, and festooned with a denomination derived from
the Royal Egg itself: Emma, Maud, Alice, Alexandra, Albert, Alfred
and, of course, Victoria –
regina and
imperatrix
. By the summer of 1861, besides
the makeshift workers’ shanties sprawled around the sheds and
yards, several clapboard houses and one less doubting brick
establishment had aligned themselves with the future forecast by
the unpeopled street. Some attempt was made by outsiders to call
the new municipality Huron Village, but the Point it had been, was,
and is.

2

The nuptial ceremony did not take place
until early September. Lily herself didn’t know why but she set up
a room for Tom in Benjamin’s barn, where Chester had so often
hibernated, and to the amazement of Old Bill who watched till his
eyes glazed and he fell asleep propped up on the sill each night,
the lovers parted half-way down the garden path just before dark,
each to a cold bed. If anyone had asked Old Bill for an opinion, he
would have said, “Looks to me like a marriage made in
purgatory.”

Tom had proposed on the day
of his arrival, and Lily had said “yes”. “Tomorrow?” “Soon.” The
groom-to-be then bedded down in the straw, grateful that the pony
had been gracious enough to move his quarters to town a month
before. In the weeks before Lily announced that she was ready to
set a date, a daily routine was established. In the morning they
worked side by side to save what they could of the garden and to
prepare for a more productive season of their own next spring. Lily
tried not to laugh at Tom’s ungainliness in the field, where he
would attack in a frenzy – his sickle stabling like a bayonet,
decapitating as many allies as enemies – then retreat
sans
dignity with his
hands blistered and rebellious. Working at the steady pace she had
learned so long ago – with her body low to the earth, her legs
apart in an unmaidenly but resilient squat – Lily would pass her
sweating lover, only to hear him wheeze and rally his forces behind
her for yet another volley-and-retreat. As they rested in the shade
periodically, she would kiss the blisters on his palms, but he
tensed like a trigger before her soft insistence triumphed and he
eased himself into the grass where she could stretch alongside him
and let his hands find solace where they would. In the afternoon
Tom would take up his tool-kit, fling it like a haversack over his
shoulder and, whistling a grenadier’s march, tramp through the
parapet of pines separating them from the townsite, and head for
the rail-yards through the grassy streets. Lily watched him till
his sandy hair was no longer distinguishable from the goldenrod in
full bloom. Most days he came back at dusk, whistling and
telegraphing his coins in his pocket: the Grand Trunk in its
benevolence had found some occasional task for his limited
skills.

“
Almost got enough to pay
the preacher,” he’d say each time, going through a mock
counting-ceremony till she laughed and made a grab for the
half-dollars, whereupon he would seize her wrists, pull her to him
and give Old Bill a quick seizure by kissing her full on the lips.
“What do you charge, mam’selle?” “More ’n you earn in a year,
laddie.” “Then I’m off to seek my fortune in the big, bad world!”
“I’ll be waitin’, if you ain’t too long.” Always Lily would turn
away first and head for the house. Once, she heard his footsteps
right behind her; she stopped. The crickets all leaned one way. He
said nothing but she recognized the sharp breathing that signaled
suppressed anger. She longed for Aunt Bridie’s voice to give her
some warning or assurance, but none came. That night she lay awake
in a silence of her own composition.