Lily's Story (35 page)

Lily looked up, and guessed from what she
saw printed above the upper verandah that this was the Lucky
Derrick Hotel. It was the second-to-last building on the broadway.
Next to it at a little distance lay the livery stable, bustling
with activity. Beyond that, bush reasserted its hegemony.

Now that they were stopped Lily could see
that the town was awash with people. Ladies with long dresses and
parasols strolled along the walkways, gathered at corners, or sat
happily on benches surrounded by flowerboxes and pink paint. Men in
formal coats buzzed in front of the taverns, tradesmen rushed here
and there with purpose, and the twilight air shook with the cries
of draymen, the muted roar from the gambling dens and the barbed
hilarity of loose-tongued women.

“
Well now, here’s the
honeymooners!” boomed a voice with a twang as clear as a Liberty
Bell. “You must be young Tom,” it carolled, and Lily saw the puffy
flesh of an outflung hand. “Welcome to the oil capital of the
world.” Tom was pulled heartily onto the boardwalk. “And by golly
this has to be the blushing bride. We’ve been waiting for you,
sweetheart. Now don’t you look a beauty.” Lily felt the pulp of his
grip on her fingers and hopped down, as gracefully as she could
manage, beside Tom.

“
I’m Melville Armbruster,”
said the man with the florid face. “Just call me Mel.” His grin was
as brisk as a shoeshine.

Standing under the shadow of the porch roof
of the hotel were Uncle Chester and Aunt Bridie. Lily went to them,
the four months away feeling like four years. Uncle Chester stepped
forward and without a glance at her despoiled dress or the mud
caked around her left brow, hugged her with arms that said: ‘this
is it, we’re not letting you get away again.’

Lily turned to Aunt Bridie, who met her
extended hands, and they held one another at elbow’s length,
letting their eyes do the greeting, probing, forgiving. Too soon
Lily had to disengage, not fully satisfied with the brief
tenderness she glimpsed at last beneath the new layers of
toughening brought on by the latest calamities. More-than-that,
though, Lily was puzzled by the presence of some eccentric note of
hope, barely disguised as most of Bridie’s feelings had been out of
long habit. Does she really believe in all this? Lily could not
help asking herself. Had Auntie let her guard down after so much
straightening experience? Had she given up? Surrendered to some
final, lethal euphoric?

Aunt Bridie cast a speculative eye across
the handsome form of Tom Marshall. She took in Lily as she stood
beside him.

“
I’m afraid we’re a bit of
a mess, Mrs. Ramsbottom,” Tom said, releasing her hand.

“
Aunt Bridie will do,” she
said firmly.

“
Now don’t fuss about the
mud, folks,” said Melville Armbruster. “We got rooms and a bath and
as soon as you’re changed we’re all going to sit down and have us a
king-size family dinner.”

Lily saw his gold tooth flash – like a
fang.

5

During the dinner, between the polite
conversation and explanatory narratives, Lily kept one eye on her
beloved and the other on Aunt Bridie. Armbruster’s boasting about
their ‘suite of rooms’ was not much exaggerated. The company formed
by the unlikely trio, New York and Upper Canadian Oil Explorations
Ltd., had leased the back quarter of the Lucky Derrick – two floors
that included a living room and dining area and huge bathroom
downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs with a water-closet at the
end of the hall. They had their own entrance. “Twenty dollars a
day,” the New York half of the company informed them before they
could ask. Auntie had smiled ever so slightly at that, with a quick
lilt of the brow, and Lily had picked up the message though she
could not decipher it. What was even more curious – perhaps
distressing – was the way in which she sat so close to Uncle
Chester, spooning sugar into his coffee, turning to him for
confirmation of a point not in dispute, and once even patting him
on the hand affectionately when he described for Lily’s benefit the
especially efficient method he had devised out at ‘the works’ for
making barrels on the spot. “Your Uncle’s workin’ on a new kind of
jerker-line,” she said. “He’s the king-pin in this operation,” said
Armbruster, jiggling the champagne glasses. Uncle Chester blushed,
then beamed. Lily felt the stanchions give way under some part of
the world she had deemed substantial. I’m being foolish, she
thought as she poured cream into Tom’s coffee; I want my own
happiness to be so perfect I can’t rejoice in theirs. But I want
the whole world to be happy, she said almost aloud. I do.

“
We’re not exactly
rich
yet
,”
Armbruster was saying, steak sauce a-drool on his woman’s chin,
“but as you can see, we ain’t precisely starving either. We’re
scooping up the surface slop quite regular and shipping it out to
London and even to Boston, thanks to the railways. Greatest
invention since the Lord pulled the rib out of Adam and gave us the
fair sex.” He included Bridie and Lily in his generous assessment
and no doubt the ample serving-girl who brought in from time to
time silver tureens and bulging platters of food for their
conspicuous consumption.

“
To the railways!” Uncle
Chester blurted out, glass raised foolishly before he realized his
blunder.

“
To the Great Western for
bringing us together,” Tom said quickly into the embarrassed
silence. Aunt Bridie gave him a look bordering on
approval.

The company president insisted that they all
take the world-famous taxi-ride up and down the King Street mall.
When they stepped into the handsome buggy awaiting them outside the
hotel, it was nightfall and the landscape was transformed yet
again.

There may have been starlight generated in
the heavens that evening but its sheen was annihilated by the blaze
of manufactured incandescence along the entire broadway of Oil
Springs. The southern arch, from which the wedding party sallied
forth on their grand tour, was set aglow by two fiercely beautiful
gaseliers, their dragon-tongues decimating dark at the menacing
edge. Along each side of the street the largest kerosene lamps in
the known world flickered bravely against the canopy enclosing
them. Every window of every shop, every tavern, every den of
iniquity flung out its own ersatz luminosity so that the whole city
seemed to shimmer and reverberate in the vast blackness around it,
like the rings of Saturn. Lily snuggled against Tom and watched in
disbelief as the boardwalks, verandahs and alcoves – shadows in the
omnipresent light – hummed with the motions of human intercourse.
Never had she seen such colour, warped and fantastic in the weird
moon-glow – scarves, bonnets, bustles, coifs, bosoms, top-hats,
canes, waistcoats. Flesh was flamingo, falsetto, iridescent. At the
northern arch under the braggadoccio of ‘Oil Capital of the World’,
they wheeled and started back. Lily closed her eyes and clung to
Tom as if he were the last capstan on a dissolving wharf. Around
her she heard voices unhook and drift towards disconnection,
towards the far harbours of loneliness. Beneath her the wheels
seemed now to be turning faster, the horses’ canter transgress to a
gallop, the night-wind wail past the vacuum of her eyes till she
could no longer hear the drumming of hoofbeats or the rolling of
iron on wood – only the breathless rush of starlight through sudden
wings.

After an interminable day that had been
given over to others – the Templetons, Aunt Bridie and Uncle
Chester, condescending clergymen, foul-mouthed stage-drivers and
would-be tycoons – the bride and groom at last found themselves
alone and unencumbered in a room they could make their own. For a
moment – drained by the shock of departure, the travails of the
journey, the hut and puzzlement of abrupt reunion – Lily wondered
if she could recover that special part of her she had conserved for
her lover and husband. As Tom slipped in beside her – naked under
the linen sheets, the feather mattress offering no resistance to
whatever shapes they might wish to compose – all doubts vanished.
Even the thought that this whole episode might be a charade, a
little girl’s doll-house dream with a fairy princess and her toy
soldier and a bloodless conjugation. Tom, too, might well have been
wondering what he was doing here miles from the nearest parade
ground, pledged to a future he had not even the pleasure of
imagining, unbuckled and vulnerable beside a stranger (whose past
he dare not mention) in a room overwhelmed by Persian carpets,
rococo wainscoting, and Venetian wallpaper replete with
ambidextrous angels in comprised configurations.

So, like many others before and after them,
emprisoned by the past and fearing for the future, Lily and Tom
gave themselves up to love. They let their bodies be ambassadors
for what they felt, hoped, craved, had no words to say. They
foraged in the other’s flesh to take the pulse of their own. In the
aftermath they clung together, even in sleep, like sole
survivors.

6

After breakfast the next morning, during
which Melville Armbruster managed to wink and drop his voice an
embarrassing number of times, they all drove out to Black Creek to
examine the oil-drilling operations of the new company. “There’s a
bit of walking to do out there; hope the kids’ve got some energy
left!” Wink. Wink.

But it was Uncle Chester who had to stop
every hundred yards or so as they hiked from the edge of the
bush-trail towards the drilling site. “You go ahead, I’ll be okay,”
he gasped, but Aunt Bridie said with genuine warmth, “Don’t be
silly, Chester, we’re in no hurry. That oil’s been there a long
time before we come lookin’ for it.” “Yessiree,” Armbruster chimed
in on cue, and began explaining to Tom all about the geologic
formations and glacial events that had miraculously convened to
produce the very petroleum they could smell seeping out of the
earth around them. Uncle Chester caught his breath, took his wife’s
hand and strode forward. Aunt Bridie, Lily noted, turned briefly to
Armbruster as if to say “Thanks”.

A half-mile or so into the dense bush
brought them to a ten-acre clearing, the home of New York and Upper
Canadian Oil Explorations. Here Armbruster took full control of
matters, guiding Tom firmly away from Lily and leading him from one
piece of machinery to another, certain that his exposition was both
fascinating and necessary. To Lily’s surprise, Aunt Bridie followed
them, listening intently to the details, turning from one to the
other as the monologue broke down occasionally, and even offering
one or two comments herself – which seemed to please Armbruster. If
Tom were bored he gave no sign of it, relying upon the engrained
courtesies of a proper upbringing, Lily felt a twinge of something
close to envy. “Show me your woodworkin’ place, Uncle,” she said
more loudly than necessary.

Having got his second (or third) wind, Uncle
Chester smiled freely at her. “Lily,” he said, “you’re still a
wonder to me. I want to tell you, while I got the chance, that I’m
very, very happy for you. An’ no one in this world deserves
happiness more than you.”

“
What’s this?” Lily said,
pointing to some metal contraption off to the north.

“
That, my girl, is a little
invention I’m workin’ on. To speed up the barrel makin’. Come on
over and I’ll tell you more about it than you’ll ever wanna hear.”
He offered her his arm.

They crossed the litter of broken trees,
gouged roots and scorched pits towards a series of shacks and
wooden benches that formed the cooperage section of the operations.
To the south, where the others had gone, lay the three jerker-lines
perpetually pumping the thick oil from shallow wells that had been
dug out several months before. A single steam-engine, shrouded
somewhat by the nearby trees, provided power for the pumps and for
Uncle Chester’s carpentry works. Lily could see several men in the
bush, cutting and preparing firewood.

“
We got five young men
workin’ for us,” Uncle Chester explained. “Two of them help me with
the barrels an’ shippin’. Nice lads, they are, from over Moore
township way.” Lily could see the pleasure, so long absent, now in
her Uncle’s face, some sense that the world was not only still
evolving but that it held some place for him in it. But she knew
him too well to be totally taken in. As he hopped about the area
showing off, as modestly as he dare, the intricacies of his efforts
and his plans for the coming winter, Lily was faintly aware that
his eyes more and more reflected the hysterical hope of an orphaned
child who’s found a home as perfect as it is temporary.

“
You gonna stay on that
land, with Tom?” he asked in a sudden shift of tone.

“
Maybe,” Lily said. “It’s
not
that
far
away.”

“
Oh,” Uncle Chester said,
“I didn’t mean it that way at all. It’s just that your young man,
well, he –”

“–
don’t look like a
farmer.”

“
I wouldn’t’ve said it
quite like that,” he said, smiling as she did.

“
He was a lawyer’s clerk
and a militia man,” said Lily with as much pride as regret. “He can
be whatever he sets out to be.”

Uncle Chester was a bit puzzled by the
latter remark but said cheerfully, “I don’t doubt that for a
minute. Not a minute.”

Just then the door to one of the shacks
opened and a young man about Lily’s age emerged, blinking and then
blushing.

“
Don’t be shy now, Jimmy,”
Uncle Chester said to him. “This here’s just my favourite niece
come to see whether we’re doin’ a decent job.”