Lily's Story (46 page)

Gim-pee Fit-chett!

Gim-pee Fit-chett!

Give your all,

Limpy, Limpy

Ain’t no ball!

Clar-ra Fit-chett!

Clar-ra Fit-chett!

Give him some

Limpy Gimpy

Ain’t any fun!

Clara’s ghost appeared beside
her husband, and a further cheer went up from the troupe who
speeded up their continuous circling movement and began a new
chant:

Come down! Come down!

Or we’ll wind you up

And blow your house down!

This encouragement was assisted
by a tumultuous fanfare from all sections of the band and much
lurid waving of props and appendages. Clara’s blush turned the snow
on the sills pink.

At last the
wretched couple, hastily clothed, opened the front door and the
troubadours entered en masse. Some untapped champagne was produced,
toasts and cheers rained down upon Gimpy and Clara, who responded
with the remnants of their dignity and good will. Following
traditions as old as the
habitant’s
arrival
itself, the well-wishers departed meekly, sat motionless in the
woods for twenty minutes, and then when the time seemed propitious,
sent up a final, deflating barrage of congratulation.

T
om leaned over in bed
and put his hand on her stomach. “You all right?”

Her eyes shone past him in the
dark. “We’re fine,” she said sleepily.

2

A
t Robbie’s nativity
the father was drunk and the attending physician sober; at
Bradley’s birth it was the reverse. Which was, when you looked at
it from the long view, only appropriate. After all, nothing about
the pregnancy had seemed normal, and certainly the birth itself was
spectacularly unordinary. Bradley would not kick, as the other two
did. Even by the seventh month – the middle of March – Lily had to
lie on her side and press her fingers firmly into her abdomen at a
point where she figured his forehead ought to be and then repeat
her invitation before she got a faint ‘tunk’ returned to her from
within, like a single tap on a toy drum. At least it’s alive, she
thought, though it doesn’t seem anxious to come into the world.
“It’s probably a girl,” Tom would soothe, “as shy as her mother.”
“It don’t feel like a girl.” “And remember, you get to name her.”
If by chance it should turn out to be a boy, Tom had already got
Lil’s approval to call him Bradley, Aunt Elspeth’s family
name.
I’ve already named my
little girl
she wanted to say
aloud.

Lily suffered
from cramps and from nausea, which struck her down at odd and
inconvenient moments. She had missed two of the Wednesday teas
because of it, even though Clara Fitchett had offered to give her a
ride on her way past (she and Gimpy were living with her parents on
the Errol Road until their new house in Sarnia was completed, after
which Gimpy was planning to take a foreman’s job at the Great
Western). She was beginning to feel quite isolated, but with Robbie
now crawling about like a rambunctious baby-coon she was kept busy
and alert and often laughing at his antics. He’s a show-off, she
concluded, and we’re spoiling him rotten with attention. What else
would I do? Her heart would skip a beat and stall while she watched
him climb Uncle Chester’s chair, test the limits of his agility
against the vindictiveness of gravity, then having breathlessly
escaped, look up and laugh as if he had just played a joke on the
universe and won. When he toppled, which wasn’t often, he would lie
stunned, waiting for the pain and trying out his arms and the air
tentatively – like a chrysalid with its limp wings – and then,
reassured that the world’s kick was not lethal, snap his head
across to glare at his mother: sometimes crying (more often not)
but always letting her know that this humiliation was,
deep-down,
her
doing,
her
failure to govern
the forces aligned against him. Only in the most extreme instances
– when the terror inside was wild and formless – would he consent
to collapse in her arms for consolation. If Tom were watching, he
never cried.

Despite these
daily joys and minor catastrophes, Lily found herself missing the
company of Maudie Bacon, Clara Fitchett, Alice Bowls and the other
regular workers
’ wives who
visited one another, chatted on Michigan Ave. between shops,
exchanged recipes and gossip, and admired one another’s children –
to provide some relief from the never-ending labour of days and
weeks. Like Lily these women were young and were new to town-life,
just as the towns themselves had had to be improvised to
circumstance. On their farms they had shared the labour with
siblings and cousins and spinster aunts. Here they had increasingly
to rely on one another. Little wonder, then, that the churches
easily became the focus for social activity, and much more. As the
wife of a fellow-worker Lily was accepted into their company
cheerfully, but she found that most of the organized social events
revolved around the church – its physical facility and the natural
calendar it provided for the seasonal flow of Canadian life:
Christenings, weddings, confirmation, baptism, concerts, temperance
meetings, strawberry socials, bazaars and bees – each with its own
sectarian colour and sanction. “Oh, just come along, Lily,” Maudie
said again and again. “We love you. And I don’t believe
half
of what that old fart up there goes on about, nor do most
of the girls.” “I can’t,” Lily told them, and she knew that after a
while, when the village built its own churches and she kept on
saying no, it would begin to matter more and more. “You
do
believe in God?” Clara once asked, shocked at her own
question. Lily could find no words to answer her, and was immensely
relieved that whatever look she was giving Clara was sufficient.
“Well, then, come along, for Christ’s sake!”

For the time being,
though, she felt only that she missed their company and their
curious kind of affection – given so freely, unencumbered by any
expectation beyond the pleasure of her presence. But then she would
gaze at Robbie asleep in his rocker-bed, feel the weightless burden
of the baby at the centre of her, think about Tom’s coming through
the kitchen door, and wonder how she could ever again feel sorry
for herself. At such moments she was able to say: I have changed,
my life is becoming what it is to be, I am Lily
Marshall.

T
he day before All
Fool’s Day Tom came in for supper looking grim. He waited
impatiently until young Mary Bacon, who had been helping with the
housework and minding Robbie while she napped, left for the
village. Then he spoke at length as if he were delivering a
rehearsed speech whose import could not be changed no matter how it
was presented. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” he said, “but
before Christmas I wrote to the lawyers I used to work for in
Toronto and asked them, as a favour to me, if they would check into
the existence of an oil company controlled by Melville Armbruster
in or around New York. I got a letter back the saft.”

Lily flinched, one hand
absently on her abdomen.

“
Maybe I
should save this for –”

“
Go on,” Lily
said. “It’s just the usual.”

“
They did find
a company, a real estate company, registered in New York City, with
Armbruster as president and chief owner. But it was sold – very
suddenly and very mysteriously – in the spring of last year. After
that, there is no trace of him anywhere in the business world of
that area, as far as they can tell. They also wrote to his
solicitors, Van Diemen and Cruickshank, and they said that he had
gotten out of big business altogether, and if he had a forwarding
address, they were not free to give it out.”

Lily began clearing away the
dishes.

“
I’d like to
go down there and thrash it out of them!” Tom said.

She’s alive,
I know it. I hear the underwater voice, pleading
.

“
Was that
all?”

“
Uh huh. That
was it.” And a dunner for twelve dollars.

Lily flinched again, bent
double by the pain.

“
Oh God, I
knew I should’ve kept this till after,” Tom said, hurrying over to
her. He got as far as one of the kitchen chairs.

She was smiling through her
grimace. “In a few minutes it’s gonna be after,” she warned
him.

“
It can’t be!
You’re only seven months –”

“
Started
earlier this afternoon. An’ this ain’t false labour,” she said, and
squeezed a scream shut to emphasize her point. “Feels funny, but
it’s real.”

“
Damn, we
should’ve kept Mary here. Never mind. I’ll get you set up in the
bedroom. If Robbie wakes up, just let him cry. I’ll be back in
forty minutes flat. With Sophie.”

A
bout two hours later,
well after the sun had set and the night-chill was settling in over
the trees, Lily heard the sound of multiple footsteps along the
back-garden path. Nubbins was awake at her side, but restless and
irritable. She felt numbed and disoriented by the pain. Blood had
oozed and stiffened on her lower lip. The sheets were soaked twice
through with her sweat. She was terrified the boy would tumble off
the bed, strike his head on the floor, and lie helplessly dying
while she lay equally helpless above him. However, he seemed to
sense that something was very wrong, clinging to her damp fingers
and complaining only fitfully. All this pain, Lily was thinking,
and nothing is happening. The contractions seized, rolled downward
in fierce, expulsive knots, sighed and hovered menacing until the
next nerve trigged them again. But the foetus gave no sign of its
willingness to be so crudely dislodged; it seemed to be fighting
back, to be pounding the little battering ram of its brow against
her stomach, her lungs, her heart, some place more secure and
secret than whatever lay at the other end. But the expunging muscle
was not to be denied. It was a sledge with breath and will, needing
no name to intimidate or be moved, it was autonymous, life-lending,
suicidal. It was driving the baby backwards into her heart like a
tomahawk of raw flesh. She screamed as loud as she could but no
sound reached her ears. She heard a distant thump. Robbie, fallen
away, skull punctured...dead. The cramp eased and her mind let the
room back in. Robbie was crying.

“
Cut that
snivellin’, Marlene, an’ get the little tyke outta here! Hurry up
or I’ll give you another cuff.” It was Sophie’s voice. Lily began
to weep quietly with relief.

“
You go right
ahead an’ cry, sweetie, Sophie’s here an’ everything’s gonna be all
right.” She had gotten the lamp lit and was leaning over Lily, a
plump, certain hand on her fevered head. Through her tears Lily saw
the familiar but somewhat distorted face of the
sage femme
,
swollen and lopsided, the colour of a fresh bruise.

“
Get that
stove goin’ out there an’ set up my things, girl,” she shouted back
to the other room. “I brung Marlene with me to help out,” she
whispered to Lily with all the tenderness of a rasp on wood. Then
she snickered gigantically in stinted bursts, as if part of her
lungs were popping at will. Her large frame, which, through Lily’s
blurred vision, seemed pudgier than ever, wobbled backwards towards
the stool, landed one buttock unsuspectingly on it, and slid with
it at an acute angle – clattering – to the floor. Her eyes bounced
once, like a sturgeon’s hitting bottom, and stuck open in permanent
surprise. There was a slithering sound as her fat, hydrocephalic
flesh caught up with the escaping bones, and for a long second she
sat beached on the floorboards.

“
Jesus-Murphy-and-a-pig’s-fart!
” she hollered through her bull-horn. “Marlene, get your
arse in here.”

Marlene was already at the
door, quailing. She inched towards the embayed whale – wedged
between terror and fear – held out a quivering hand, and when it
became attached, heaved back with all her fifteen-year-old might.
Sophie came upright, wheezing and not overly grateful. Marlene
scooted off to her duties. Lily could smell the alcohol breath that
Sophie was spraying like weed-killer into the room.

“
Don’t worry
none, Lily dear,” Sophie said, trying to blink. “I’ve had a bit to
drink today. Hubby left me for the boats. Kind of a sad affair, eh?
Gone for the whole month, he has. Don’t you worry none, ’cause I
brung Marlene with me, an’ she’s got the coffee goin’ an’ I’m the
best damn midwife in this county.” To prove it she belched and sat
back on the stool without calamity.

“
Where’s Tom?”
was all Lily could find the strength to say.

Sophie
snorted. “
Ha!
He’s gone after that quack, Dollard.
That makes
two
aresholes I gotta deal
with.”

Marlene appeared several times
with mugs of coffee which Sophie swallowed at a gulp. Robbie’s
giggle bubbled above the girl’s soothing lilt. The wick on the
oil-lamp singed and threw blotched light onto the wall. From the
swamp, frogs sang as if they were the first and only spring. Lily
remembered these things long afterward, as if, coming between the
self-destructing spasms of pain, they were held to be precious
beyond all normal possibility.