Lily's Story (39 page)

It was the crashing of masculine boots
against the snow, punctuated by the snap of brittle twigs. Lily
swung round in time to see a black figure staggering through the
stark trees, its exaggerated shadow slashing and dissolving into
the chiaroscuro of the moon-lit forest.

Quickly Lily picked up the deer-trail to her
right and fled as quietly as she dare. Against the hammering of her
heart she heard the attacking footfalls fade, and when she stopped
– it seemed like miles later and after a dozen curves and
backtrackings – the silence of the bush had reasserted itself. Who
could it have been? A drunken railroader? Not Tom, that was
certain. What did he want? She let the aftershocks shiver their way
out of her system, and then took her bearings. To her relief, she
concluded that she had ended up less than a quarter-of-a-mile from
the house. What time it was she could only guess. She headed
south-west towards the remains of the pinery.

A few minutes later she could see the
opening in the trees ahead. She was almost home. The figure
surprised her completely when it leaped out of the shadows to her
left, flung its arms overhead like uncoordinated wings and stumbled
forward, its eyes – if it had any in the black blur where its face
lay – aimed at Lily. As she stood mesmerized, the creature seemed
to half-fly, half-stalk towards her, the way a rabid crow might
seize upon some fatally silver trinket. The cry that came from its
torture was not a caw. It was a lament, a plea, a wail – and
utterly human. The force of it stunned Lily so much that it was
several seconds before the words were decipherable. By that time
the creature was upon her, and she slipped to one side, grasped one
of its wing-cloaks as it sank past her and tipped it into the snow,
where it lay crumpled, as if dead.

Gently, Lily drew back the fur flap of the
Russian helmet.

“
I been lookin’ everywhere
for Violet. She’s run off again. I been lookin’ all over and I
can’t find her no place. You seen my Violet?”

“
Violet’s safe in London,”
Lily said, trying to get Old Bill to his feet. “Let’s go home
now.”

“
You ain’t Violet? I can’t
go home without my Violet.”

Lily ignored his desperate questions. She
dragged him to his feet, and once up he seemed a bit more oriented.
“I know you,” he said. “You’re Lily, Bridie’s little orphan
girl.”

Lily forced his arm over her shoulder. He
was not much taller than she but he was still muscled and a
dead-weight. She gasped as the stench of his breath struck her:
something besides his teeth had died in there. One step at a time,
through drifts and over felled trunks with the zero-chill icing up
sweat and saliva and stiffening muscle against bone, Lily carried
Old Bill the four hundred yards to the edge of the expropriated
property. It took close to an hour because every few steps Old Bill
would sag, then suddenly straighten, like a corpse sitting up in
its coffin, and howl into the muffling night his one-word
lamentation.

The sudden illumination of moonlight-on-snow
in the clearing seemed to jar something in Old Bill’s brain, and he
said softly to Lily, standing on both feet, “You’re Lily. Are we
home now?” And they tramped together towards his darkened hut. Lily
saw a dim glow in the window of her own house as they passed it,
but no sound carried outward. The chimney was smokeless.

In the candlelight, Old Bill’s kitchen was
dank, cold and stinking of rotted food, mould, urine, sweat. Her
teeth chattering and her fingers numb, Lily found some bits of wood
and paper, enough to get a smudged fire going in the ancient stove.
She removed Old Bill’s outer clothing, shielding herself from his
asthmatic breathing with one forearm. From a pile in a corner she
retrieved a wool sweater and pulled it around him like a shawl. He
leaned towards the fresh heat as Lily rubbed his stiff hands in her
own. The flesh on his face drooped, sallow and cadaverous.

“
Ya’ see, Violet ain’t
here. She run off again.”

“
When did you last eat
anythin’?” Lily said, casting about for any signs of recent
cooking. “Didn’t you cook up that bacon I brung you Tuesday? You
like bacon a lot.”

“
Violet always cooks the
bacon,” he said warily, his head slumping onto one
shoulder.

Lily managed to get enough of a fire going
to warm the pathetic little room and start a kettle boiling. She
made some tea and then threw into a pot some of the oatmeal she’d
brought over for him. But Old Bill was asleep, breathing in
double-time. Lily put an arm around his neck, held his bead back,
nudged his lips apart with the tin cup, and gently poured hot tea
into the sump of his mouth. His eyes opened part-way, and lolled
expressionless. When the oatmeal porridge was ready, Lily tried to
set the spoon in his hand but it fell away. He was helpless.

Very patiently she filled the wooden
stirring-spoon with porridge and brought it to his lips. Old Bill’s
tongue circled it, then he spit violently, sending the stuff all
over Lily. Again she brought a fresh spoonful to his lips, this
time holding his jaws open and slipping the food in, then clamping
them together until he gulped and swallowed. She felt him shiver,
and knew it wasn’t from the cold. Time and again she raised the
spoon to his lips, struggled to establish a comforting – a
pacifying rhythm. When or why she began to hum she didn’t know, but
she felt Old Bill’s neck muscles relax under her grip, and then
heard her own voice, deep and instinctive. At first there were no
words, no need for them, but they surfaced on their own and bore no
meaning beyond the memories of the time and place they evoked.

Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o

Hi diddly idly, hi diddle air-o

Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um

Old Bill settled into a profound,
restorative sleep – snoring like an exhausted horse – his fingers,
softened by the heat, curled in his lap like a baby’s.

Lily didn’t leave. She sat in that befouled
and moribund room and thought of Maman LaRouche baking bread in the
open-air oven; of Mama’s hair unfolding in its last sunlight; of
Old Samuel’s flow of words as smooth as hickory smoke; of
Southener’s face as the sea-sands over it erased the sky; of Papa’s
grief as he stood fixed behind some tree watching his child
dissolve.

When Lily came in, Tom was sitting in the
glow of a single coal-oil lamp. He had heard her step in the yard
and was fully awake to face her. He had plotted both an offense and
a defense, but when her eyes came into the light, all premeditation
was swept away. He wrapped her in his arms, even as he knew that
forgiveness would never be enough.

Lying with her lover before
their mutual fire, half-way between midnight and dawn, Lily
Marshall told of the things she had dreamed, then remembered, then
realized – the words uttered as easy as spider’s silk towards a
web. But even as the pain mellowed with each successive sentence
holding out the possibility of accommodation, she sensed that she
was passing the private burden of her own past to the public and
unpredictable mercies of her husband. From this moment onward,
these events of her history with their attendant joys and griefs
would become part of the
materiel
of their relationship, unimmune to interpretation,
retraction, emendation. By the time she’d finished talking, the
fire was a low smouldering, the light in the room
radiant.

Tom rose beside her, the quilt slipping off
the bare flesh of his torso, bronzed and promethean in the
demi-dark. His voice bore the cut of a scimitar. It hacked at the
air.

“
God damn me to hell, but
if I ever get these hands on any one of the bastards that hurt a
single hair on your head, I’ll squeeze the living shit right out of
them."

When he stopped shaking, Tom took Lily’s
hand in his sword-grip till it softened inevitable in hers.

The daylight brought them news of Uncle
Chester’s death.

5

On February 19, 1862 Hugh
Nixon Shaw’s drilling crew struck oil hundreds of feet below the
gumbo surface of Enniskillen Township. It was to be the world’s
first recorded gusher. It was also the world’s first uncapped
wildcat. History does not record what the
enfant terrible
of Black Creek
expected, but it was certainly not the gas-propelled blowout that
shook the early-morning chill and began founting a hot, black syrup
onto the snowscape around it. For three weeks the locals came and
watched it spume, as the ground for miles around darkened and
sagged. Oil was seen oozing in sticky rivulets towards Black Creek,
where it slithered a ways in the ice and congealed. At last someone
from Pennsylvania arrived who was able to improvise a method of
staunching the wound. Meanwhile, thirty thousand gallons of oil
were estimated to have been lost. Only temporarily, though, for in
the spring an exotic sheen was observed on Black Creek and on the
Sydenham River, and by early summer vast surfaces of Lake St. Clair
and Erie glistened eerily. The world’s first oil slick had been
achieved.

The echo of that February blast reverberated
far and wide, and the oil boom took on the intensity and surreality
of a California gold rush. The town of Oil Springs would boast two
thousand greedy souls by the year 1864 – before all boasting became
bravado, the wells died of superfluity, and the rich and the broken
departed on the same trains; already the steady, stable,
Presbyterian good-sense of the burghers of Petrolia (five miles
north) was reasserting itself. Ten years after the Oil Springs’
boom, the last board of the last saloon was consumed in some
anonymous hobo’s bonfire among the twitch-grass and scrub hawthorn.
Mr. Shaw was asphyxiated in his own well on February 11, 1863.

On the morning of February 20, 1862, Chester
Ramsbottom shook the sleep out of his eyes and stepped out of his
warm shanty into the winter air. He liked staying out here alone
even though Bridie worried about his occasional blackouts and his
desultory eating habits. Here he could think and dream and conjure
his little plans for the days and weeks ahead – as he had done so
many years ago before the fire had destroyed his shop and that part
of his life.

The boys had already arrived; he could hear
the steam-engine starting up in the drilling area, a cacophony he
could never quite get accustomed to. Bridie and the Yankee fellow
had gone over to the Shaw site yesterday afternoon and not
returned. A loud blast had been heard from that direction and
already rumours were flying. He could hear the excited buzz of the
drillers under the relentless slamming of the bit into the rock
fathoms below.

Chester decided to take it easy. He was a
bit short of breath this morning and, besides, he was well ahead of
schedule: they would have more barrels than oil by spring. The
Millar brothers had been sent home to attend the funeral of their
youngest sister, felled suddenly by diphtheria. He thought of
Lily.

Near the lean-to which he had rigged up with
boughs and furs, Chester built a slow fire, fried some bacon, found
he couldn’t eat it, and lay down with his head against the
supporting tree with a buffalo robe across his knees. Despite the
nipping air and the thudding monotony of the drill, he drifted into
sleep.

Sometime about noon on that day, New York
and Upper Canadian Oil Explorations also struck oil, at a hundred
and fifty-two feet, a well only half the size of the Shaw strike,
but a bonanza nonetheless. It too came with mere seconds’ warning,
the crew scattering at the hoarse roar of underground breath
released after eons of capture, and falling stunned into the brush
as the top blew off with a volcanic crack and thunderous
remonstration.

Uncle Chester popped upright as if he had
been struck by a dinner-gong – his eyes sprung from their dream, as
wide and as vacant as a doll’s, and blue as ball-bearings.

The funeral was held quite sensibly in the
village of Petrolia where the Wesleyan Methodists has already
erected a six-hundred-seat edifice to the glory of their version of
the Divine Creator. Uncle Chester’s mother had been converted,
once, to this church. The good Reverend Kilreath reminded the tiny,
shivering band of mourners of that fact, though he could think of
few others to include in a necessarily abbreviated eulogy. The wind
was cold enough to make a trespasser confess.

Lily stood beside Aunt
Bridie and gazed at the casket (“Shipped straight from London by
express,” Armbruster said in the hushed shout he had concocted for
these solemn moments) set over a pit gouged out of the frozen
earth. Tom was a step behind her, ready to take her arm. Nearby she
could feel the bewildered, estranged presence of the Millar lads,
three members of the crew, and the owner-operator of the Lucky
Derrick. Who else
was
there? Old Bill had sobbed like a baby when Tom told him the
news, but an hour later he said, “When did you say young Chester
was comin’ back?” Lily had a feeling she was watching her own
interment or that of someone who would become close to her far away
in a future which seemed at this moment improbable.

Aunt Bridie as usual contained her grief.
She did not weep. Lily saw pain in her Aunt’s eyes only when she
looked at her niece, her lips opening to say something (that might
have – just a while ago – offered some solace, explanation,
consolation even) but then closing again in reluctant resignation.
But as the minister drew the cross of sand over the coffin-lid and
murmured the final words ‘dust to dust’, Aunt Bridie went faint,
slumping against Lily’s grip. Melville Armbruster stepped forward
and steadied her, and Bridie let her head fall gratefully against
his shoulder. Lily scarcely noticed. She was staring at the only
other gravestones in the newly consecrated grounds: three white
tablets in a neat little row, each bearing the same name: “Morton:
Elijah, age 6; Sarah, age 3; Joshua, age 1; taken into the bosom of
Our Lord in September of the year 1861.” Last fall’s scarlet fever
epidemic.