Lily's Story (43 page)

“
Violet’s
gone,” Tom said. “It says here she ran off three days ago and they
haven’t found a trace of her anywhere.”

3

T
om informed Lily that
Aunt Elspeth was well enough to travel to Toronto to make an
extended visit to the Colonel’s sister-in-law, long a widow and
now, it seemed, quite frail and in need of companionship. “I
haven’t laid an eye on her for ten years, since the funeral, but
the dear old soul isn’t strong, you see, so I really can’t say no.”
Hence, Lucille was to be despatched, at great personal sacrifice,
to oversee the baby’s entry into the world, after which she was to
come to Toronto and escort Aunt Elspeth back to Lambton to inspect
and approve.

Lucille was a
joy and a wonder. Freed from the supervisory affection of Mrs.
Edgeworth, she became a volatile blend of wood-nymph and
street-urchin. She never walked where she could flit, saunter,
glide or dart. She assaulted the objects in a room with her flung
glances: “Oh, Lily, what a
beautiful
quilt!”
“What a sweet little tea-pot!” “Where on
earth
did you get
calico with them colours!” She filled the kitchen and big room with
a quarter-acre of lilacs stripped from every lane within a mile’s
radius. They strolled and they tumbled (one of them) through the
May woods searching out the red-tongued trilliums hidden amongst
the ivory millions carpeting the forest floor. Lucille picked up a
dazed garter snake, made as if to fling it at a giggling Lily, then
abruptly dropped it down the front of her own dress, after which
she engaged in an hysterical jig of exorcism and mock sexuality.
When she was excited, which was a good deal of the time, she lapsed
into a headlong patter where French and English vied for supremacy,
to the detriment of sense but the sheer delight of any listener. In
the midst of such paroxysms, Lily would suddenly put two fingers
across Lucille’s lips and the girl would stop in mid-syllable, her
eyes bulging and an enormous giggle burbling in her
throat.

“
My turn,”
Lily would say, and begin to talk. They told each other the stories
they had rehearsed back in London, but now with more flair, more
dazzle of detail, and a lot less crippling veracity.

“
My
Maman
had a lot of kids, you know. She swell out like a pumpkin
every spring and
woosh
, down she go
every September. But Maman always wear a big dress, like a tent,
an’ so we never got to see what shape the pumpkin take under all
that. Always I wonder, eh?”

Lucille and Lily lay at ease in
a grassy hollow in the hardwood forest not far from the brook. The
sun was morning-mellow. Both girls had their skirts thrown back far
enough for it to bless the skin all the way to the thigh.
Languidly, with no particular forethought, Lily unbuttoned her
skirt and pulled the cloth back to expose a bevelled expanse of
skin.

“
You gonna
warm him up a little?” Lucille said.

“
It’s
my
turn today,” Lily said, widening the breach.

“
You gonna
toast that bun-in-the-oven!”

Lily closed her eyes, trapping
the sun under the lids.

“
I never did
get to see one of them kids in there,” Lucille murmured, her
fingers already treading across the rippled drum of flesh. “Hey, I
can feel its head. I can!”

Lily shifted slightly to one
side.

“
Hey, he
kicked me! I felt him! The little bugger!” Lucille’s fingers
softened, they lathered and soothed. “You like that, little fella?
You like this? Eh?”

A voice murmured sleepy
assent.

Lily eased herself up, her
clothes falling back into place. She took Lucille’s hand in hers
and moved them both up to the girl’s cheek. The tiniest pressure
tipped her back onto the grass. Lily brushed Lucille’s hair from
her forehead, then with utmost tenderness stroked the sunlight
across her brow, along the edges of her smile, in the furrows of
her throat. Then she watched her own shadow fold across the girl’s
face as she leaned over and kissed her as lightly as a butterfly
touching milkweed.

“
I ain’t never
had a man yet,” Lucille said.

S
ince the baby was
late – it was already the first week in June – and Lily seemed to
spend much of her day with Lucille, Tom took more and more time
away from home. He hounded the numerous small factories in Sarnia
but got precious little work for the hours he put in to the search.
Though he refused to admit it openly to her, Lily knew that somehow
the word had been passed along from above and was being routinely
obeyed. Even the Great Western, avowed enemy of the Grand Trunk,
could find no spot for an experienced hand. When Tom took up the
spade and headed into their garden, she knew for certain that he
too had given up.

But he was still her Tom,
a man of spirit, and she loved him till her heart ached whenever he
came into the kitchen smiling and teasing ‘his girls’: “Gimpy and
the fellas think I got a harem up here!” he’d say, leering at
Lucille. “Well, ain’t ya’?” she’d say right back. Or he’d come
across to Lily at the stove, wheel her about for a kiss, give her
belly a lustful bunt and say, “You’ll have to lean forward, missus,
there’s somebody standing between us,” and Lucille would pretend
she’d heard the line for the first time and topple back into Uncle
Chester’s chair as if she’d been felled by an axe. Later, in the
gloom of dusk Lily would watch him hacking at the clods in the
garden, harrowing his hands twice as badly as the tough heart,
trying as always to overwhelm it, or cow it with a quixotic show of
force. Come on, you little urchin, she’d say to her full-time
lodger, we can’t wait much longer. On the fifteenth of June he
walked up the Errol Road and hired on with the first farmer he saw
behind a team of plough-horses. Two days later she saw him sneak
into Benjamin’s stall where he kept a jug of soul-restorer poorly
hidden. When he came to bed in the middle of the night, he curled
his body behind hers as close as he could fit it, slid his scarred
hands around her breasts, then let them drift down to assume some
other shape more promising than their own. “I do love you,” he
whispered.

A
fter breakfast that
Sunday – while Lucille was helping Lily with the dishes and
mimicking her Maman’s defense of the ‘lumpy’ suitor who owned a
whole township next to them and who had heroically offered to
readjust his ‘sights’ in order to secure the services of a
‘well-brought-up’ farm girl – Tom poked his head into the room and
said, “There’s horses in the lane.” Still wiping their hands on
their aprons, they got outside in time to see a matched team of
Belgians hauling behind them an over-size and vacant buckboard very
like the one used to deliver beer barrels from the new brewery.
Only a driver, swatting occasionally at the reins, and his
assistant, with both hands grappling the bench beneath them,
managed to steer the vehicle anywhere close to a single
direction.

“
Whoa! Gee!
Haw! Whoa!” yelled Gimpy Fitchett with a slap of leather on
leather.

“
Ya-hooo!”
yelled his partner, sparking the horses to greater
effort.

“
Whoa back!
Whoa back!”

Fortunately the veteran team
had had enough brisk exercise for a Sunday morning and drew
themselves sedately up before the gate of the Marshall place.

“
Where in sam
hell did you learn to drive horses?” Tom hollered as he dashed
across to the visitors.

“
I worked for
a week in an abattoir,” Gimpy said. “Good mornin’, ladies. I hope
you’ll pardon the intrudin’, but me gentleman friend here felt the
need of a little airin’.”

The gentleman was Bags Starkey.
Thin, wan, shivering in the gathering heat of the day – he unhooked
his hands and flashed a huge smile at Lucille and Lily as they came
over to the buckboard.

“
Mornin’, Mrs.
Marshall, Tom. I don’t believe I’ve had the honour of –”

“
Lucille
Verchères,”
Tom
said.

“
Ah,
ça va bien,
ma’amselle? 
”

While Lucille
blushed and attempted to find a dry hand for him to kiss with a
flourish, Lily and
Tom tried
not to look at his feet, or rather the white blobs of bandage that
had been wrapped around them and that, except for the stipple of
dried blood, might have been mistaken for giant baby
booties.

“
This here’s
Bob Starkey,” Gimpy said. “He speaks English, too.”

“
Just call me
Bags, everybody does except my mother,” Bags said. “Could we
interest anyone in a drive through the countryside? Best of
accommodations.”

“
We got Barney
and Sue here for the whole day,” Gimpy said, never taking his eyes
off Lucille. “We’re tryin’ to dry ’em out.”

“
Might even
rouse the interest of someone we’re all waitin’ to meet,” Bags
said, gripping the bench with his left hand so he could teeter over
to wink in the general direction of the yet-to-be-born.

“
Why don’t we
take
you
for a ride,” Lily said.

Tom
was staring uncomprehendingly at
Bags’ crushed feet.

B
ags fitted very
nicely into Uncle Chester’s wicker wheelchair, retrieved from the
woodshed, dusted off and padded out with several pillows, at least
one for each of the blobs to rest upon. With Gimpy pushing and Tom
stationed at the vehicle’s left wheel, Bags, his lady companion and
her duenna promenaded past the garden, where they admired the fine
froth of early radish and the flutter of escaping crow and
starling, while the veery in the bush offered his see-saw siren in
lieu of a melody. They whirled at the barn and headed back by an
even more circuitous route. “Quite splendid! Simply charming!” Bags
shouted, “And only the servants live there, you say!”

“
Oui,
capitaine-le
” Lucille giggled,
skipping to keep up with the postilion’s pace.

“
Wee,
wee!
” Gimpy yodelled,
accelerating to break Tom’s grip.

“
Wheee!”
called the lone rider.

B
ags pulled a
mouth-organ from his back pocket, wincing a bit as one of his legs
hit bottom, and began to play a jig, sprightly and yet ever so
delicate, as if the notes had hopped and glided to their
independence only after being pummelled through silk. As Bags’ eyes
dances and pursued them, Lily and Lucille joined hands and
performed on the lawn of their dooryard a somewhat gallic and
oblong version of the Irish national ditty. Suddenly the music got
louder and faster, the notes ripped at the air, the girls’ feet
began whirling and pointing, bruising the blank spaces around them,
maddened by grooves just beyond gravity – till Lucille let go and
Lily went sailing backwards to make an ungainly two-point landing
in the long grass by the stoop.

Lily popped up, laughing
and panting, and brushed Tom’s hand aside. She and Lucille fell
giggling into one another’s arms. Gimpy blushed to his Adam’s
apple, with his lame leg still pumping to the echo of the beat.
Then everyone stopped.

Bags had begun to play again: a
soft, melodious air that sang wordlessly of something lost and
green and never-again-to-be-possessed. Part-way through – no one
really noticed when melody and lyric were as seamless as bunting –
a tiny voice joined in and made the morning complete:

Un Canadien errant

Banni des foyers

Un Canadien errant

Banni des foyers

Parcourait en pleurant

Des pays
étrangers

B
ags Starkey smiled
again at the ladies, winked at Tom, and then waved one brave hand
from his perch on the buckboard. Gimpy whipped the horses to life,
Lucille’s kiss still burning on his cheek. The rig clattered down
the lane and muffled all farewells. Just before it disappeared into
the trees at the big bend, Bags hunched over, as if he’d taken a
cramp, and let his head hang helplessly between his
knees.

Lily squeezed
Lucille’s hand. Then she looked for
Tom. He was stomping away from them – in the direction of
the barn.

“Y
ou better fetch
Tom,” Lily said.

Lucille went
white. “
Le
bébé?
”

“
Uh huh. Tell
Tom to get the midwife. It’s not gonna be long.”

“
He’s gone,
Lil. I don’t want to wake you up for supper, you look so peaceful
–”

“
Where’d he
go?”

“
Off to the
town, I think. Oh, Lily he was –”

“
Don’t start
cryin’ on me,” Lily said. “Please listen. Stoke up that stove real
good. Fill the water tank all the way up. Get out that supply of
clean flannels I put in the hamper. Then go into the village. Ask
around for Tom. If you can’t find him, see if you can find the
midwife.”

Lily let out a
wrenching cry that caused the saucepan to leap right out of
Lucille’s hands. “What the matter?
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!
”