Lily's Story (50 page)

Only the news that Peacock’s
army was coming full-force saved the Canadians from being
slaughtered. The Fenians pulled back to Fort Erie where an even
more inept confrontation took place.

The Fenians,
again by misadventure, barged into a platoon of militia who were
guarding enemy prisoners aboard a tug called the
Robb
. The Canadian commander here, Colonel Dennison, who it
must be said was exonerated later on at his judicial hearing,
ordered his fifty guardsmen to attack the six hundred approaching
Fenians. Naturally they had some reservations about the order but
gallantly followed it, sustaining seven wounded before capturing
twenty of the invaders and abandoning the effort. They tried to
retreat with some composure to the tugboat, but it had pulled out
in a panic and left them on the dock to fend for themselves. They
broke and ran for the houses nearby. Their Colonel scuttled into a
farm-cabin, donned the garb of a hired hand and slipped away to
take up the fight another day. News arrived at Fort Erie that the
American government had decided Canada was not worth the risk and
was cutting off all the aid it had denied giving to the Fenian
Brotherhood. The war was over. Both sides claimed victory. As they
usually do.

“T
hey’re keeping up an
alert till the end of the summer,” Tom said. “We drill three times
a week. The Company is giving us a day-a-week off to go on sentry
duty. With half-pay,” he added with great emphasis.

Robbie was fiddling with the
bolt on his father’s rifle.

“
Stop that,
Robbie,” Lily said.

Robbie looked at Tom, and
continued. He was stunned by his mother’s stinging slap across his
fingers.

“
For Christ’s
sake, woman, you’re impossible!” Tom shouted. He cradled Robbie in
his trigger hand. “What in hell do you
want
from me
anyway? What in hell do you expect me to
do
?”

“
You do what I
say,” Lily said to Robbie, but all the strength had gone out of her
voice.

Robbie’s lips quivered but he
didn’t cry.

From the other room Brad
whimpered in his sleep. Lily started towards him, then froze.

“
Go ahead,”
Tom said, more in exasperation than anger.

“
I hate her! I
hate her!” she heard Robbie say as she entered the room where Brad
was thrashing in his bed, his jaws swollen shut by the
mumps.

“
You say that
again,” Tom said, “and I’ll stuff your mouth with soap.” Robbie
wailed as loud as Ariadne on her island: I know how you feel, Lily
thought.

That night in bed Tom
reached over, uncoiled her arms, softened her neck with his
stroking, lay his head on her breasts, and when she was ready eased
her thighs open and entered with only ecstasy he was still certain
they could share. He wasn’t wrong. His timing was off, but he
gasped to a climax, then held on as she hurried to join him. His
ribbed strength ebbed into her; she translated it into something of
her own, the alien wonder of her high cry never failing to leave
her lover transfixed and triumphant. They stayed together. He tried
to ease her burden by shifting onto his hands, but she pulled them
away and down towards her breasts until his whole weight fell
lengthwise along her and she pinioned him with her ankles. Without
seeming to have moved, hours onward he climaxed again. She brushed
his eyelids with her tongue, implanting there secret words that
would blossom only later under light and speak goldenly of love.
Her legs dropped away; he drifted onto his side.

A long while after, he said:
“They’re beautiful children. I love them both. Almost as much as I
love their mother.”

He expected no reply. Her
fingers, as naive as if they had just been released from their
cocoon, roamed the reaches and most delicate places of his
body.

The sun was just signalling the
false-dawn when she said with no particular emotion, as if the
thought had just occurred to her: “Why does there have to be a
world out there?”

W
hen they awoke well
after sunrise, Tom said, “The Company’s giving a special dance on
Saturday. We should go.”

“
We must,”
Lily said.

E
arly in September two
survivors of the Battle of Ridgeway were brought to Point Edward,
courtesy of the Grand Trunk, to tell their stories to the local
troops and invited guests. Following setbacks in Quebec and New
Brunswick, the Fenian threat had subsided, but the Government was
eager to keep patriotic fervour on high beam. After all, the Quebec
Conference on Confederation was due to open in October and it never
hurt to keep one’s citizens emotionally primed and not a little
frightened of the bogeyman. The Grand Trunk felt much the same as
the Government itself did.

When Tom got home from
the gathering well after midnight, he roused Lily from bed (but not
sleep): “I need a cup of coffee,” he announced with understatement,
dropping his watch and stumbling after it in the gloom.

When Lily shook up the
fire and boiled some water, Tom told her the whole story of the
Canadian triumph over the cousins of Antichrist. What had begun at
the start of the evening – before the booze was decanted – as mere
fiction or harmless soldierly boasting graduated precipitately to
fable and then soared blissfully towards fairy tale. Tom had an
alcoholic grin on his face that wouldn’t be erased till morning. He
kept pulling playfully at Lily’s nightshirt to make her look at
him, at his happiness and at the pleasure he was having being
himself in a world that once-in-a-blue-moon went right instead of
wrong. She ignored the clumsy promise his fingers made against her
breasts as she poured his coffee, and spilled some.

“
Hey, watch
the equipment!” he laughed. “Ain’t got spare parts for
that
piece.”

When she could no longer avoid
it, she looked him in the eye, and through the whiskey-sheen she
saw a far more compacted, more flammable brand of excitement.

Later, as he thumped and
wheezed against her body, she was grateful for the dark. When he
sighed and salivated his pathetic little drool of semen into her,
she gave a correspondent moan which he mistook for joy. He skidded
sideways into a slug’s sleep. I love him, even now, like this, she
thought, fighting her drowsiness. I love him even more. How can
that be? Did love need an edge of panic, the wallow of sentiment?
She envied his dreamless slumber, his lying there as if the peace
that had seized his boy’s body had been deserved or sanctioned by
some force beyond the muscle pumping plasma into his
imagination.

When she fell asleep she
dreamed, as she feared she would, about the soldiers of Tom’s story
– floundering in Smuggler’s Hole, their lungs boiling with blood
they coughed onto lily pads, their hands spreading out like
flippers in prayer as they sank oceanward, the sudden preponderance
of their bones heavier than brine, they slipped under and down till
the tip of their heads touched the earth’s eldest crust, and as the
tadpoles and pollywogs and fingerlings adjusted their nether-dance
above them, the soldiers’ eyes rolled up and cursed the sun with
their death-gaze. Moments later a soldier in a different uniform,
beardless and panicked, slipped to the edge of the pond, darted his
eyes here and there like a spooked fawn, then pulled out his penis
and, holding it as if it were a piece of slack rope, urinated into
the murk.

18

1

I
t was spring again.
Because it was unlikely they would be able to afford the move into
the village for at least another year, Lily decided to spruce up
the homestead. She had planted bulbs in the fall and they were now
green spires aimed at the sky. Tom had built a trellis beside the
kitchen window and helped her transplant a rosebush from Maudie
Bacon’s garden. Traces of pink were nudging through the bud-tips.
Tom had made her a white flowerbox and set it under the front
window in the south sun, and soon she would try her geranium
cuttings nursed indoors throughout the winter. She and Brad made up
a song about flowers. “Tu-lips, two-lips, do-lips” Brad sang, then
rubbed his forefinger through his own lips, amazed at the world’s
happy coincidents. Another year here, Lily thought, and neither of
us will want to move. Tom was taking Robbie on his shoulders down
to the creek to fish every Sunday afternoon. Brad routinely trailed
after her as she spaded and harrowed the garden (though he didn’t
much like getting dirty), distracting her with his banter and shy
teasing.

On a bright windless Sunday in
May, Lily was sitting on the stoop cutting the roots out of the
last of the winter potatoes when she heard Brad say with a sinking
whine, “Some people comin’, Ma.”

She looked towards the lane.
Trouble. She could tell from the way the two figures held
themselves sturdy in the black carriage, as if they were brunting a
stiff Northerly. She could sniff rectitude at fifty paces. The
horses, frothing against a strict rein, wheeled through the gateway
and into the yard, where they stopped – much relieved.

“
Good morning,
missus,” hallooed the large parson down the long nave of the lane.
He wrapped the reins firmly in place and proceeded to dismount. He
waddled around in front of the horses, giving their baleful stare a
wide berth, and stretched out a pudgy hand to his companion. She
took it automatically, as if lifting a latch-key, and stepped onto
the grass with a practiced swirl. Hand-in-glove, they trundelled
towards Lily.

“
I am the
Reverend Dougall Hardman,” the parson announced, “of the Wesleyan
Methodist Church of Port Sarnia. And this is my good wife, Mrs.
Hardman.”

“
Charity,”
said the good wife without defacing her smile.

“
Yes, and you
must be the young Mrs. Marshall we’ve heard so much about,” the
preacher said, reaching unsuccessfully for her hand and glancing
past her towards the house.

Clara
, thought
Lily.

“
Lily, isn’t
it?”

“
Yes, how do
you do?”

“
And who’s
this darling little creature?”

Brad ducked behind Lily’s
skirt.

The Reverend Hardman cleared
his throat with pre-sermon vigour. “Ah, we’ve come on official
business.”

“
I can make
some tea, if you can wait a minute. Would you like to come
in?”

“
Is your
husband at home, missus?”

“
No, he
ain’t.” She hesitated, then said, “Him an’ Robbie are off
fishin’.”

The parson swallowed his
astonishment long enough to say, “We’ll come in and wait, if it
isn’t too much trouble.”

“
What a pretty
little cottage,” Mrs. Hardman said.

T
he Reverend Hardman
was obese: his jowls jigged contrapuntally with the jawbone
somewhere inside driving the bellows of his windy sentences. His
cleric’s collar lay buried in his neck-flesh so profoundly that
only a thin ring of it showed through, like a band on a turkey.
When he sat at his ease in Uncle Chester’s chair, his great belly
dozed on two bony knees; his plump fingers fed on the macaroons and
tea-cakes like loose grubs. Notwithstanding, there was something
different here from the usual parson fattened up by too many teas,
bake-sales, middle-age, and ecclesiastical doubt. From the slim
leg, the curse of the shoulder and the quick feet came the hint of
a once-muscular frame, leathered skin, and agility. A
circuit-rider, Lily thought, the memory striking deep.

Mrs. Charity Hardman was a
bosomy but well-proportioned woman, trussed, corsetted and
handsomely turned out in a mauve dress whose flounces, cuffs, and
lacy appendages might have been described by some as bounteous. She
sipped her tea with white gloves intact; she resisted all
temptation to indulge further. From the edge of her chair she kept
her wifely eye on a point just below her husband’s lower jaw where
his chins converged, and nodded ritually on some cue from him which
Lily was unable to detect.

Working from the general
principle that anything he had to say was of rivetting significance
to any bystander, Reverend Hardman proceeded to orate – with pauses
to detassel a cup-cake or disfigure the odd macaroon – the long
history of his Church in the country, winding his way eventually
towards the good news that next autumn the Wesleyan Methodists were
going to build a church in Point Edward that would rival the
Anglican once now there in size, expense and depth of devotion. And
in the true spirit of ecumenical Christianity, the edifice would be
open to use by such demi-infidels as Congregationalists and
Presbyterians (no Baptists, please) until such times as they could
afford their own houses of worship.

“
You will
agree that this is a signal achievement, indeed an honour for such
a small and as yet unincorporated village?”

Mrs. Reverend nodded.

“
Of course, I
was quick to volunteer my services. As Mrs. Hardman can confirm, I
have always been a man to take on a fresh challenge for the sake of
Our Lord.”

Mrs. Reverend tilted her
petalled hat in Lily’s direction.

“
As minister
to a new flock my duties are manifold,” he said, crushing a
macaroon on the downbeat. “First, we shall need commitment, real
commitment from our doughty band of believers.”