Lily's Story (37 page)

However, for
much of the time
Tom continued
to do a lot of the talking, and Lily found herself somewhat envious
at the ease of his delivery and his confidence. Even now she had an
intimation of the difficulty she would later have in this community
– particularly a community of women where gossip, reminiscence,
familial history and chronicles of daily life, and the comforting
reciprocity of small-talk were the principal means of social
intercourse and of dealing with the world at large. Here at home,
though, during the honeymoon of their love, Lily discovered that
while their talk for much of the time was being reduced, it was
also being transformed into a much richer kind of communication,
one at which she herself had always excelled. Over breakfast, for
instance, Tom would raise his left eyebrow and Lily would fill his
cup with tea. When he left for work they no longer exchanged
‘Goodbyes’; Tom would embrace her with one arm (his lunch-box in
the other) as if to say “It’s all right, I’ll be back soon”, and
she would briefly detain his outstretched hand and give it a single
pat, intimating “I know you work hard, but I’ll be here when you
get back.” So subtle had this range of gestures and
subvocalizations become – even in a month or so – that one
variation from the norm could be devastating. One day Tom seemed
particularly grumpy over breakfast, and later when he put his arm
around her on the stoop, she sensed the tentativeness, and as he
withdrew it for her to bless, he pulled it back too quickly. Her
caress ended in mid-air. It was like a slap in the face. But when
he returned at dusk, he hugged her till he felt her forgiveness.
The periodical evenings, then, when they exchanged narratives or
speculated on the months to come were, like their carnal
interludes, events of a discrete kind with their own indices of
joy.

Being a man of
easy words, Tom was also more easily stung by them than she was.
“You’ve got a midget’s tongue in your noggin’,” Aunt Bridie would
say to her, “but it’s as tart as a bee-sting.” To Uncle Chester she
said one night: “She may not talk a lot, but when she opens her
mouth it’s trouble with two
t’s
. She’ll rue that
sharp tongue of hers one day, mark my words.” Lily on the other
hand was more hurt by an unthinking shrug of the shoulder than by
any direct complaint Tom might make about his food or her not
dressing up enough when Aunt Elspeth was “good enough to give you
that trousseau of beautiful things” –
salvaged from the outcasts of the daughters or
Shakespeare
she might have
replied but bit her tongue, or more tartly still and more to the
point:
I thought you
preferred me dressed down
. I
guess I’ve spent my life not reacting to words, she thought; I seem
to prefer to observe them, absorb them, or find out what lies under
them. But then women are better at absorbing things. And better,
too, at waiting.

For Lily, much
of that first autumn was spent in waiting of one kind or
another.
Tom would trudge in
to the early dawn, and she would stand in the partly redeemed
garden and watch him till he disappeared through the trees. There
was lots of work for her during the day – cleaning the house,
tending the last of their meagre harvest, ‘doing down’ some of the
wizened cucumbers, baking bread, and then – in the afternoon hours
– chopping wood, mending, sewing, and planning the robust suppers
Tom required. Several times a week she went over to see that Old
Bill was all right – taking him baked goods and vegetables, and
seeing that his cupboard was stocked with staples. Old Bill was
growing worse, it appeared. More and more he seemed distracted and
forgetful. Lily often had to remind him that he had promised
so-and-so up the line a day’s chopping, or even point him in the
right direction.

Nonetheless,
it was a day of waiting.
Tom
was everywhere: in the sock she was darning, a sweater she was
knitting him for winter, the food she prepared sweating over the
stove in the warm Indian Summer, his smell in the sheets as she
changed them. The memory of his lovemaking, his stark worship of
her flesh and its unpredictable surrendering, rippled through her
all morning long or ambushed her at odd moments. Or some imagined,
interrupted slight would fester during the interminable hour when
she would expect his figure to rise in front of the setting sun and
bring with it the kind of healing possible only at the end of day.
At least the waiting-out of his absence was over. But there were
the other, more minute types of waiting – visible only perhaps to
women. Waiting to see what sort of toll the labour-of-the-day had
taken upon his body – sore back, bruised arms, crushed finger – and
upon his spirit – fatigue, anger, rebellion – and for her the
myriad adjustments to be made and tolerated and woven into the
harmony of home. And waiting to see what response, if any, he might
make to the signals she gave of her own needs – to be touched, to
be soothed with stories, to be his accomplice in lust. If Tom were
watching her in the same way, she could not detect it, nor, she
guessed, would he ever know how much giving – beyond the visible –
she was offering him each day. When Tom was late, compelled to work
overtime as the ice threatened to close down the shipping lanes for
the season, the waiting was unendurable. I have made him my life,
she thought, and even though I ought to, I seem to have no
regrets.

2

O
ne day late in
November, a week before the ice froze over the River and long after
Tom had begun his nightly trudges homeward in the oppressive,
autumnal dark, Lily sat beside her lamp and waited for her husband.
Overtime again, she thought resentfully. For two nights in a row he
had come home at eight o’clock too exhausted by a twelve-hour shift
to eat his supper or do anything else but fall comatose on the bed.
On the first occasion he woke her up and made perfunctory, routine
love to her out of some misguided sense of pride or perhaps some
ordinary sensitivity to her needs – she knew not which, though the
result was a surge of depression she had not had since waving
goodbye to her Aunt and Uncle in Oil Springs. The next night when
she again felt his weary gesture, she murmured that her period was
starting, and he slumped gratefully to sleep.

It was past eight
o’clock. The fire was almost out below the congealing stew. Never
had Tom worked this late. Even the Grand Trunk admitted the limits
of exhaustion. Her only comfort was that one more week of this and
Tom would be transferred to the new car-shops beside the
round-house. Here he would ply his carpenter’s trade, fixing broken
boards in box-cars and other rolling stock. Lily had seen the glaze
of defeat in his eyes these past few weeks, and she had done what
she could. The labouring job, she recalled, had been all along a
mixed blessing. Early on, it had put muscle on his fine frame and
added a masculine air to his stride and his proud smile as he
counted out the dollars on the table every pay day. Sometimes as he
dressed in the mornings, Lily would effect a trip to the woodshed
so that she could pause and watch him unobserved through the open
door. Always he slept naked, and she would gaze – fascinated and
ashamed – as he stepped into the chill air: clapping his arms
across his chest like some haughty gorilla in a Congolese dawn,
then pressing his palms between his legs like a little boy, and
finally stretching for his undershirt so that for a second his body
froze in a singular tableau of muscle and unreleased sexuality. She
thought: he could crush me with one flex of a forearm. His man’s
instrument, driving towards its own pleasure, could sunder her like
a peach, those tiger-teeth on her breasts could mangle without a
flick of remorse. Then, his sandy curls just emerging from the
undershirt, he would spot her and grin innocently, and be her Tom
again.

But that body
and that power had their own forms of vulnerability, she soon found
out. Many an evening during late October she had repaired the
damage of the day – rubbing
liniment into his aches, putting plasters on his cuts and
scrapes, and when those remedies failed, helping him forget in the
yielding opiate of her flesh. But tonight he was not here to
choose. It was at least ten o’clock by the moon’s position in the
southern sky. Perhaps he had been seriously hurt; barrels and
cartons were forever toppling and injuring the men. Already two
workers had had arms broken, and disappeared – without recompense,
of course: an incapacitated man was a threat to the health of the
company. My word, Lily thought, what will we do if Tom can’t work?
What we’ve always done:
get
by
. I’m as strong as any man
in my own way. He wonders why I don’t wear those London ladies’
dresses, but
I
don’t. I don’t have any flesh to fill
them out. I’ve got no need for corselets, my backside is muscled,
my hips are as lean as a boy’s, my breasts small and unwomanly. My
skin is sun-burned, my hair blotched. I felt a fool in that wedding
dress even though it was made for me. I don’t know for the life of
me why a man as handsome as Tom would feel so passionate about me.
But, then, I don’t intend to ask him. I only want him to come home
safely, now, in one piece.

During this reverie Tom
came noisily up the path and flung open the door.

“
Hullo, Lily
love,” he grinned loudly. “Think I might be a wee bit
late.”

Lily could smell the whiskey
before she could rise to face him. She brushed by him to the stove,
where she began poking aimlessly at the corpse of the fire.

“
Ah, the
little woman’s saved supper for me. Thank you, darling. Thank you
very much,” he slurred. He stumbled, caught a wary table, righted
himself, and managed to land one buttock on a chair. “If that’s
Irish stew, love, I can’t smell it from here.”

“
The fire’s
out,” Lily said, blowing on some paper in a pathetic attempt to
rouse it.

“
We worked
some overtime,” he said, “then Gimpy and Bruce and me went down to
the bunk house to toast our good future at being dray-horses for
the Grand Trunk Railway.”

The kindling had caught,
smokily, and Lily shook the flaccid stew across the stove-lids.

“
Stop that
infernal racket, woman!
” Tom
yelled. “I don’t need anything to eat, can’t you see that? Are you
deaf and dumb? I’m
drunk
. Glorious and
stupid falling-down
drunk
!”

Lily headed for the bedroom.

“
Where in hell are you
going now?”

“
To get the bed-warmer,”
Lily said in a shriveling voice. “An’ the liniment.”

“
Come over
here!
”

Lily stood her ground.

“
For Christ’s sake, woman,
come over here before I puke in your stewpot!”

Lily edged over towards Tom. He was sitting
with his head between his hands, shivering no doubt from the cold
and false embrace of the alcohol. Lily stopped about four-feet
away, near the stove, but she made no move towards the simmering
stew. Tom coughed in a series of ghastly spasms, but when she
started to assist, he raised a warning hand. Finally, taking a deep
breath, he looked up at his wife, the one soul on this earth he
would give his life for, and said through the press of tears: “For
God’s sake, Lily, why can’t you get made or scream or sulk or curse
me or hit me with a frying pan. I’m no damn saint, you know. I’m a
human being.” And to prove it, he sobbed into his hands and could
not be consoled.

3

For a while Tom seemed pleased with his
winter job. Since all the rolling stock in those days was made of
wood and the climate of those times no less inclement than now, the
repair business was secure and lucrative. In fact, the ‘car-shops’,
as they were called, were to be a stable source of employment for
the inhabitants of the Point for decades to come and eventually the
centre-piece in the Great Betrayal of the ’nineties. But in the
cold winter of 1861-62 there was no tunnel under the River St.
Clair or bridge over it; the great highballs from the American
mid-west thundered up from Chicago laden with corn and wheat and
roared back with over-priced implements and calico from the
factories of the eastern seaboard and now – thanks to the Grand
Trunk – from the fledgling foundries of Montreal, Toronto and
London. Situated on the narrowest neck of the mighty St. Clair,
Point Edward had had its destiny already appointed: it was to be
the gateway to a westering continent. However, by mid-December the
River was jammed with ice, its own and that crushing down from the
vast lakes above it. The same ice that silenced the freight-sheds –
with steamers, paddle-wheelers, sloops and yawls alike out for the
season – stilled the huge barges and ferries that wheeled up to a
hundred box-cars a day back and forth between the two nations.
Occasionally, during a January thaw or a freak contortion of the
ice-pack, the fierce current would surge in the sunlight and a wild
dash would be made across the divide – box-cars, deck hands and
ferry-boat tilting, skidding and slewing in the northerly gales. On
these occasions all the company hands were pressed into service,
including the carpenters and joiners. The box-cars, many of them
fully loaded, had to be pinioned to the ferry’s deck with ropes and
blocks. Often several of them pulled loose in the lurching swells,
and the desperate crew would try to jerk the lines back into place,
sometimes improvising an ingenious brace but mostly using the brute
strength of their backs, while icy spray broke over them and jagged
floes flashed by at every turn. That winter they didn’t lose a
single box-car. Three men were crippled, and dismissed.