Lily's Story (38 page)

Tom insisted that Lily “get out of the
house” and come down to watch one of these adventures. Finally, she
agreed. As it turned out, the crossing was relatively uneventful
except for one stock-car full of chilled cattle (on their way to
Flint, Michigan) that tore loose from its moorings and slid
part-way into the water before it could be winched back into place.
Lily could see the commotion and hear the vivid cries of the
terrified beasts, but she lost sight of Tom, and when one of the
men flipped into the water, her heart stopped. Seconds later the
fellow was hauled back in on a safety rope, striking the deck with
the thud of a frozen seal. In a minute he was up, and Lily was sure
she could hear laughter; then the man who had engineered the rescue
peered towards the wharf, towards Lily, and, she was certain, waved
at her.

To
m escorted her up to the little
tea-room in the grand concourse of the station. Lily made no
mention of the luncheon she had shared with royalty in the
adjoining ballroom, and certainly no one present on that occasion
would have recognized her as the object of a Prince’s attention.
Lily was not thinking at all of such things. She was trying to
understand the gleam in her husband’s eye, the sureness of his
stride beside her, the jauntiness in his voice. He paid no heed to
the rope-burns on his hands as he sat across from her, with his tea
cooling, and recounted every detail of the crossing and the
rescue.

“
We did it again,” he said.
“You see why I wanted you to come down and watch. I only wish I
could bring you on board. You can’t imagine what it feels like out
there with the wind howling in your ears and the ice bouncing all
around you like big boulders and the ropes stretching and everybody
holding their breath waiting for something to break loose and
knowing that one slip and you’ll either be crushed to death or
dumped into the drink and froze like a brick. Did you see me yank
ol’ Mason out of the pond? He’s not thawed out yet!”

Lily said something she instantly
regretted.

“
How many of them cows
died?”

4

By mid-January winter had settled in for a
long stay. No ferries challenged the ice. The snow bloomed and
foliated in the hardwoods behind the house and plumped the pines
along the lane towards the Errol Road. It was a soft, blanched,
filigree world that threw into sharp relief those few surviving
angularities of landscape.

Lily found Aunt Bridie’s
quilting frame in the shed and, near it, a bundle of scrap cloth
collected from the cast-offs of Sarnia’s
petite-bourgeoisie
.

“
What’s that contraption?”
Tom said that Sunday afternoon, glancing up from his labours over
the broken chair.

“
It’s Aunt Bridie’s,” Lily
said. “I’m gonna make quilts.”

“
Oh.”

“
An’ sell them,” she
added.

Tom went back to his repairs, but soon he
was seated behind Lily as her hands played with the myriad shapes
and hues of cloth scattered on the floor, out of which she was
improvising patterns later to be meticulously duplicated and sewn
into their own interim kind of landscape.

“
How do you know what goes
where?” Tom asked quietly. Lily shook her head and continued. These
were not like any designs he had seen at his Aunt’s or the bazaars
she sponsored. Lily herself didn’t know what prompted her to select
one piece and place it a certain way over another. She fiddled and
nudged and tested – barely aware that some triangular, kendall
swatch might have called to mind the corner of an elm once visible
at a window’s edge, a maple leaf quartered by shadow, or a slice of
fern thirsty for light. Under her fingers’ urging, bits of colour
and cotton became half-cast suns, ovular moons, any-tree’s boughs
arched, corniced, magically magenta in the blue, blue
shade.

The afternoon was gone. Tom was still
there.

That night he slowed his love to the most
forgiving of rhythms, and Lily – released into gratitude
unencumbered by guilt or diminution of self – sailed at her lover’s
pleasure into the ecstatic and unconditionally sensate realm shared
by fool-saints and mad-men.

“
You are a marvel,” Tom
whispered as if in church, his forefinger caressing the sweat from
her brow. “You’re so much more than I deserve.”

“
Don’t say such a thing,”
Lily said when she was able to speak. “Ever.”

Christmas had been one of
those serene familial interludes appreciated in retrospect more for
its happy interposition between events of more boisterous moment
than for its own special ambience. A few days before the holiday
two train-tickets arrived from Aunt Elspeth along with a touching
invitation and word that Bridie and Chester were in London on
business. Thus, Christmas day – its religious significance noted
only, it seemed, by Mrs. Edgeworth and that “fine American
gentleman” Melville Armbruster – was spent in feasting, toasting
and voluable good cheer. Lily found herself tingling with a queer
sort of pride at the sight of Aunt Bridie holding her own in such a
household – her new clothes, serviceable yet always carrying one
hint of extravagance (a bow at the waist, a tiny yellow hanky at
the sleeve, a violet hidden among the folds); her upright bearing;
her country speech undercut with wit and calculated humour; the
ease with which the topics of the day were discussed and dissected.
Mrs. Edgeworth was in awe; Armbruster was enthralled, kissing
Bridie’s hand with Yankee hyperbole, sliding her chair in at the
strategic moment. Lily reminded herself that, after all, her Aunt
had once been an urban woman waiting on table and attending
toilette
in the
bed-chambers and anterooms of what passed for high society in the
provinces. Notwithstanding, Lily was puzzled by the nameless
resentment that welled up at such thoughts. Aunt Bridie, in turn,
waited for news that Lily could not deliver.

Uncle Chester looked pale but happy and full
of enthusiasm for his projects, as their drilling was to continue
even through these winter months. Tom seemed in his element also,
and after Christmas dinner he went up to his room and came down in
uniform to entertain the guests with funny stories about the Battle
of Montgomery’s Tavern and other escapades of the Province’s
military past. Lily was seen not to be laughing.

When it became obvious that winter had
closed the river traffic for some time to come, Tom was unable to
disguise his frustration. Lily had picked up every tic of
irritation, careful now not to overcompensate with excess
cheeriness or solicitude, though she did kill one of the hens for
Sunday dinner and stuff it with Tom’s favourite dressing. He seemed
pleased, and asked her to show him how the quilt was coming. Lily
felt that she herself might have been the cause for Tom’s
irritableness because she had been having bad dreams for the past
while, which left her tired and shaken. One scene in particular was
powerful and recurrent enough to obtrude into her daylight
existence. Try as she might, she could not erase it. She saw a
clearing at night, engulfed by moon-shadow, and yet in the centre
of it a sort of tower made of some ghastly, luminous metal reared
upward on its own – stark and imperious; and then without warning
the entire landscape quivered epileptically, and the top of the
tower burst apart in a cloud of spouting emulsive that might have
been smoke or steam or some rabid foaming of the mouth; then all
went black, the clearing empty and silent except for two objects
that glistened in the grass like discarded wall-eyes.

One day in early February Tom came home
late, and slightly drunk. He seemed cheerful enough, however, and
beyond banging a pot or two for effect and serving supper in its
lukewarm state, Lily did nothing out of the ordinary. Tom seemed
amused by her performance, and later his love-making was as playful
as it was prolonged. For two days thereafter he arrived home on
time in spite of the near-blizzard that buried the hen-house and
erased the international border.

“
The men are organizing a
sleigh-ride for the families and girl-friends,” he announced. “Next
week. Be a good chance for you to meet some people.”

Lily feigned interest, watching for
signs.

The following evening he was drunk again and
decidedly uncheerful. He uttered nothing decipherable, fumbled with
his supper, and finally vomited all over the freshly-scrubbed
floor. By the time she got it cleaned up and dampened down the two
fires and freshened the chamber pots, Tom was snoring,
fully-clothed and stinking on the bed. Lily slipped into her old
room. The dreams were not happy ones.

At breakfast she said, “I’d like to go on
that sleigh-ride.”

The weather would be perfect for the
‘tallyho’, as the locals called it. The blizzard had been followed
by five days of clear, below-zero skies; the snows had settled in
the bush, been tramped smooth on the village paths, and deceived
the eye into accepting the altered horizons. The night before the
planned festivities was immensely beautiful. The stars shone with
such clarity even prophecy seemed possible; the completed moon
sailed alone, serene and sibylline. Seated on a stool near the west
window, putting the last stitches into a quilt pattern, and gazing
for long moments at the universe expanding beyond her, Lily was
hardly aware that the evening had passed her by and her husband was
not yet home.

It might have been midnight for all she knew
when she saw two figures staggering through the drifts of the
garden towards the house. The moon sketched their antic in cutting
silhouette. They were singing a bawdy shanty of some sort, and
laughing heartily as they pitched and yawed through the yard. The
stranger, she guessed, would have to be Gimpy Fitchett: there was
an extra stammer in his swagger. As they navigated in the general
direction of the door – arms interlinked, voices joined in the hunt
for harmony – Tom changed the tune, bellowing moonward in a
mock-heroic Irishman’s lilt:

In Dublin’s fair city

Lived a maiden so pretty

Her name was sweet

Lil-lee my love!

At least they’re happy, Lily thought, poking
the fire into life and hoping for the best.

“Come on, duckling, come over here and say
hello to Gimpy,” Tom said as he tipped another dollop of whiskey
into the coffee Lily had prepared.

“
I said hello to Gimpy,”
Lily said. “Five times.”

“
I mean say
hello
, not just say
hello,” Tom said.

“
It’s okay, Tommy. Just
take it easy, eh.” Gimpy, more sober than when he’d first arrived,
put a soothing hand on his buddy’s shoulder.

“
Don’t tell me what to do,”
Tom said. “I get enough of that horse-shit at the shop all day
long.”

“
Maybe some more coffee,
missus,” Gimpy said with exaggerated politeness.

“
Are you gonna come over
and say a nice proper hello to ol’ Gimp or aren’t you?”

“
You oughta have some
supper,” Lily said. She stared at the lukewarm pots on the
stove.

“
Ain’t that sweet now, Gimp
ol’ boy, the little lady wants me to have some supper. I think
maybe she don’t like me drinking coffee, eh.” He winked with the
wrong eye.

You go ahead, Tommy. But if it ain’t too
much trouble, I’d like a bit of that grub, ma’am. Smells real
nice.” He grinned, exposing his rotting teeth, and adjusted his
stiffened leg, the result of an accident during his glory days as a
trainman.

“
If you like horseshit,”
Tom said, and started in with a barrack’s version of Molly
Malone:

Oh her blooms were so ample

The lads love to sample

The sweetmeats of –

The grub which Gimpy alluded to had abruptly
left the stove and was already on its way to an unexpected target.
The potato-and-roast-beef hash struck the Irish balladeer flush on
the tonsils. Tom blinked in disbelief as the sludge oozed onto his
workshirt. Still dazed, he looked up just in time to receive the
full venom of the vegetable soup. Before he could recover to mount
any response, Lily had her boots and her coat on and was slamming
the door with resolute finality. She heard the scuffling behind
her, and as she marched towards the north-east woods, she heard
their voices rise and then wane.

“
Goddammit, you come back
here, woman! You hear me? You goddam well come back
here!”

“
Now Tommy, Tommy. It don’t
matter none.”

“
You get your carcass back
here or I’ll –”

“
Let it go, eh. Come on
now.”

“
Lil-eee!”

“
I think I better be
goin’.”

“
You stay right here. Don’t
you move. I’m gonna fix her wagon good.
Lil-eeee!
”

Lily let a deer-trail lead her into the
woods, into the silk oblivion of silence and deep snow. Here,
thought was obliterated. She gathered the rhythm of her breathing
from anonymity, she felt her heart pump with every stride, she let
the wind-chill anesthetize the blood under her skin, she walked and
walked till she found again some part of her being she could
inhabit with impunity.

She found herself sitting in a tiny cove of
snow along the frozen creek. Underneath the camouflage she was sure
she could hear the water still moving, its voice faint, tinsel,
palimsest – like a dolphin’s song from a distant sea. She heard the
weasel’s ermine belly dragging at the burrow’s edge, felt his
ferret’s glare on her heart. Then he was gone, scrambling
underground, his ears picking up the same sound that made Lily leap
straight up and freeze.