Lily's Story (40 page)

Behind her, Jimmy Millar sobbed without
shame.

After the others had walked down to the
carriages, Lily remained for a moment over her Uncle’s grave. Here,
alone with whatever remained of his spirit, she was able to find
thoughts of her own to give some meaning to these windfall
happenings. Something Old Samuels said came back to her – about how
the soul leaves its earthly housing only to seek some finer refuge
out there in those spaces and seasons and harmonies that all along
gave it nurture and definition. What spaces, old man? What seasons
for Uncle Chester? What sense did his flesh make entering this
ground? Earth that was forest only a year before? Oil spouting from
its slaughtered heart? Your hands, she thought, were a shopkeeper’s
hands, a woodcarver’s at home with a doll’s cradle or a toy gismo.
What sort of place has been reserved for you, here?

Suddenly the incongruity of it all struck
her so forcefully that Lily wanted to laugh, and she wanted Uncle
Chester to join in and share the joke as he used to when Auntie
wasn’t looking. Finally, she was able to weep, but not before she
heard herself say – to Old Samuels or to the benign divinities
wherever they were skulking on such a macabre afternoon – “Does all
loving end like this?”

“Are you all right?” Tom said, cradling
her.

“We missed the tallyho,” Lily said.

6

It was the kind of spring that made
prolonged grieving seem an unwarranted indulgence. Crocuses and
trilliums festooned the walkways in the woods and the more timid
recesses beyond them. Winter wheat tossed its maiden-fuzz in the
fields along the Errol Road. The earth turned easily under the
spade. The air smelled of lilacs and orange blossom and wild crab.
Along the creek banks, jack-in-the-pulpit promenaded his stationary
lusts. The sun feigned perpetuance.

Lily found she did not have
to seek out private moments or places – dust settling on the
workbench, the tools untouched,
Last of
the Mohicans
under the washstand with its
marker still there – in which to remember and work out her grief.
The natural rhythms of her day were conducive to the kind of
semi-reflection best suited to recalling the aura of loss, shorn of
all cutting detail. Moreover, in the evenings with Tom she was able
to share some of these feelings, not always by direct discussion –
though she noted how Tom contrived to raise Uncle Chester’s name as
often as he thought appropriate – but mostly by just having him in
the room, breathing and caring somewhere beside her. It was a
comfort she could not recall ever having had before in her life,
and even as she allowed herself to soften into its consolation, she
was only too aware of the evanescence of all things
cherished-too-much.

On one of their long Sunday walks, Tom
steered her gently through the windbreak and across the wide meadow
towards the townsite. Though the only sounds were the cries of
killdeer over the grass and the clarinet rasp of redwing blackbirds
among the reeds of the marsh, Lily could see from the skeletons of
half-built houses that dotted the horizon ahead, that on weekdays
the air must have clanged with the sounds of progress. The
prevailing wind no doubt had carried them away from her to the Lake
beyond: she had not known. The transformation of the ordnance
grounds was well under way, and it was awesome. Almost four blocks
of dwellings were completed or under construction, mostly
single-storey frame cottages set in civilized rows along the
premeditated streets named for Queen and Empire. Along Michigan
Ave., the only anomalous face among the royal suite, several brick
buildings announced the arrival of commerce: a post office,
Redmond’s grocery, the Black Bass Inn and Tavern. Along Prince
Street, facing the fields below the River, the first of the Grand
Trunk hotels was rising brick by yellow brick.

“
Three stories and thirty
rooms,” Tom said as they strolled by it. “The bigwigs will stay
here, not overnight like they do in the Grand Station, but when
they’re assigned here for a sizable stint – also, I expect the
boosters and carpetbaggers we see getting off the trains more and
more.” He grasped her hand tightly. “Come on over this way, I’ve
got something to show you.”

They walked east along Victoria where a
block of cottages had been completed late last fall. Already the
window boxes sprouted petunias and several families sat on shaded
verandahs or under a leafy tree, digesting Sunday dinner and
perhaps the sermon gathered in at one of the services in Sarnia.
Tom stopped beside a cottage lovingly painted white, with a
well-dug garden in back and a brand-new rose arbour in front.

“
My boss’s house,” said
Tom. “He rents it from the Company.”

“
Are all these Company
houses?”

“
More or less. It owns all
the land, but it’s selling lots to the business guys, and if and
when you can afford it, you can buy your house and property back
from them. They don’t care as long as they make money.”

“
Oh.”

“
Well,” Tom said, “do you
like it?”

From somewhere inside they heard a baby
squall and subside.

From the foot of Michigan Ave., these or any
other lovers could look north to the dunes and the Lake beyond
them, west to the River and Fort Gratiot on the American side, and
south to the vast railway yards and the great wharf. What had, only
two years before, been merely fields, swamps and a pinery awaiting
the arrival of soldiers, was now an octopus of energy and purpose.
The Grand Trunk station-hotel loomed highest against the horizon
and around it sprawled the freight-sheds, bunk-houses, round-house,
repair-or-car-shops, and seventeen sidings each with its own
shunting locomotive. Along the wharf and further on around the bay,
the masts, rigging and funnels of dozens of ships could be seen –
schooners and sloops and steamers and mail packets and fishing
trawlers. The flow of goods and people was phenomenal. No one but
the workers, of course, stayed put; all else was in flux. Here,
motion was money. Those who must pause – to rest or reflect or
indulge illicitly – found their wants, however eccentric, amply
provisioned.

As Lily and Tom walked towards the dunes,
they noticed, where Prince Street ended in scrub-alder and
sandburs, several makeshift shacks – like pencil smudges in the
backdrop o a Sunday sketch. “Squatters,” said Tom. Lily
flinched.

Though no pact was formally signed, the
accumulation of cash for an eventual move to the new village became
a mutual endeavour for Tom and Lily. Tom worked as much overtime as
he could get. Lily sold her quilts at the Baptist bazaar with the
aid of Mrs. Salter. She extended the garden as far as their
shrunken acre would go, and set up a stand at the end of the lane
on Errol Road, now busy with traffic to the northern counties. She
arranged for two township farmers to take some of the produce to
Saturday market, though the profit was miniscule. They just could
not afford to buy or keep a pony. Through the Misses Baines-Powell
Lily got orders for quilts to keep her busy throughout the winter,
as well as occasional requests for mind-numbing seamstress’ work.
Their lovemaking suffered somewhat as their enthusiasm became
tempered by common fatigue (or worse: one weary, one not); by the
counter-romance of sweat and pickling juice; by periodic
martyr-philia; and the sheer exhaustion of possibility.
Nevertheless Lily felt their love itself was prospering. All around
them things were greening, lives were changing, and civilities
multiplied. It seemed improbable that they too should not be swept
along on such an irresistible tide of progressive evolution.

At night they continued to probe in one
another the limits of trust, vulnerability and commitment – dimly
aware that the flesh has its own disguises and dissemblings. Time
after time Lily let Tom’s seed wash over her blood-lit gill where
she kept in escrow some tiny variant of herself awaiting rescue.
And though Tom sat one August evening at the kitchen table and
wrote out a letter to Bridie in Lily’s words, then helped her read
it back and watched her append her own name, shakily, to the bottom
of the page – Lily had no news of the kind that might bring solace
to a new widow. For weeks Lily waited in vain for a reply.

One evening early in September Tom did not
come home for supper. He had assured her that there was no overtime
work to be had for several weeks to come. At first Lily was
worried, then annoyed, then scared. There was still a little
daylight when she saw Gimpy’s unmistakable silhouette crossing the
fields towards the windbreak. She met him just as he was coming
through the opening in the pines. She had known by the pace and
tilt of his stride that something was wrong. His expression
confirmed it.

“
He’s been hurt?” she said,
trying to remember if the stove were okay to abandon as
is.

Gimpy shook his head, out of breath, his
eyes casting about for some place safe to rest.

“
How bad?”

“
Real bad, ma’am. We can’t
wake him up.”

“
Please take me to him,”
Lily said, tightening her shawl.

“
You got a Bible?” Gimpy
rasped, trying to be helpful.

Tom was lying on the dock in the open where
a barrel of nails had struck him on the head and felled him more
than two hours before. Someone had covered him with several dusty
sacks. His eyes were seized shut, a dried trickle of blood in his
hair and over his left eye. His breathing shallow but regular.

“
We tried, tried
everythin’,” Bags Starkey, the foreman, said to Lily as she bent
over her husband. “Cold cloths, ice from the barn, slappin’ his
face, pinchin’ his cheeks, everythin’. He’s been lyin’ just like
that ever since it happened.”

“
Where’s the doctor?” Lily
said.

“
The one on Front Street,
he’s drunk an’ can’t be rolled over. The other one’s out in the
township somewhere on a call.” He turned to the others for
confirmation and consolation.

Lily leaned over the death-mask of Tom’s
face and spoke softly but clearly into his ear. “It’s me, Tom. It’s
Lily. I need to talk to you.”

The onlookers were startled, even moreso
when Lily put her arms around her husband and pulled him into her
embrace, sitting beside him and holding his dead-weight with her
own litheness – her knees and thighs inadvertently exposed to the
stevedores. Several looked away. Lily continued to talk. Lily
continued to murmur sharply into Tom’s ear until all of the men had
averted their gaze, not knowing what to do or where to direct their
pity.

Moments later, Tom’s eyelids fluttered. He
let out a huge, purging breath that sent chills up the spines of
the men. Then a low groan as some particular pain was
identified.

“
Tom, I need to talk to
you. I got somethin’ important to tell you.” She pulled his limp
hand across her belly. “I got your baby in here,” she said as shyly
as she dare.

A month later, when a scar on his temple and
a crackling good yarn were all that remained of Tom’s brush with
death, Lily was no longer lying.

Tom took the letter to Aunt Bridie – jointly
composed – down to the Post Office in Sarnia so it would reach her
more quickly. When he came home from work that same evening, he had
a different letter in his hand. “It’s from Aunt Bridie,” he said.
“I picked it up at our own Post Office a few minutes ago.”

He began to open it.
Bridie’s familiar script graced the
envelope. “What are you shaking for?” Tom said teasingly. “It’s
your
Aunt’s
writing.”

London, C.W.

October 20,
1862

Dear Tom and
Lily:

Just a short note to let you
know that Melville and I were married today at the Middlesex Court
House. We leave tonight for New York. We’ve sold everything at Oil
Springs. I’ll send details from the City when we get there. Take
care, Lily.

Love,

Bridie Armbruster

15

1

B
y the winter of
1862-63 the world, or that part of it that was interested to know,
realized that both the Great Western and the Grand Trunk railways
had come to stay in Lambton County. Each, moreover, despite other
more commercial intentions or manifest destinies, was foreordained
to establish in its feverish wake a settled and hopeful community.
Port Sarnia, later Sarnia, had begun corporate life as a deep-water
harbour on the Great Lakes system, but the welcome arrival of the
Great Western had opened it up to the hinterlands behind it and
sealed its fate as county town. Point Edward, on the other hand,
was an afterthought of the Grand Trunk, a place where the workers
and their burdensome families might live while temporarily serving
the noble cause of British mercantilist expansion. Where houses
were necessary, so were streets – of a sort – and these must have
names. Of more importance certainly were the station-hotel itself,
the construction of a chain of subsidiary inns of lesser comfort
and repute along Michigan Ave. and Prince Street nearest the
rail-yards, and the erection – in the spirit of free enterprise –
of several capacious, rambling three-storey clapboard houses to
serve as warrens for the dozens of often itinerant and
less-than-trustworthy navvies and stevedores. By the spring of 1863
such facilities were well in place, along with several stores, two
taverns, a post office and a barber shop. It was a motley,
uncoordinated, boyish hamlet – mere appendage to a grinding dynamo
– and unlike its ambitious neighbour, puffed with Scots’ bravado
and cunning, it had no sense at all of itself, of what it might
become, of the pain it would eventually suffer merely to be
born.