Lily's Story (51 page)

“
Money,”
murmured Missus, delicately.

“
True,
true.
We are looking for
pledges, for tithing in the old-fashioned sense.”

Lily brought out the last
of the macaroons made especially for Robbie and Tom.

“
Secondly,
we’ll need the use of all the talents, the combined gifts, as it
were, of our supporters.” He stared wistfully at his tea, dotted
with crumbs.

“
Men to assist
with the stone-work and the roof,” offered his
help-mate.

“
Precisely.
And finally we shall need the love and spiritual wishes of the
whole Christian community, we need their prayers for our success as
we seek most humbly to establish a fellowship of adherents among
the workers of the Grand Trunk and their loving
families.”

Mrs. Hardman started to nod but
was ambushed by a yawn. It went unnoticed.

“
As you can
tell, missus, I am a blunt, straightforward man. Always have been,
always will.” For the first time Lily felt his gaze encompass her,
even though he had been more or less pointed in her direction
throughout the service. “We would like you and your husband to
think seriously about how much you can afford to give us in support
of God’s work. More important even, we are hoping to open a Sabbath
school in September. It is our understanding that your eldest – the
one now, ah, fishing with his father – will soon be four-years
old.”

So it
was
Clara, Lily thought.

“
Mrs. Hardman
has agreed, on top of all her other onerous duties, to take on the
little ones, suffering them to come unto her, as it
were.”

Mrs. Hardman lengthened her
smile a notch.

“
He ain’t been
baptized,” Lily said.

The parson showed no
surprise. “Don’t be ashamed, my dear girl,” he said, glancing
sideways at the vacant plate. “Remember, I’ve been a circuit rider,
I know the country ways and country feelings. Things get put off.
Spiritual matters are often suspended by more pressing demands of
the moment. We shall make arrangements for both your children to be
baptized. Why, we could inaugurate the Church with such a happy
ceremony!” He smiled as if he’d just thought of the
notion.

“
Such a
beautiful child,” Mrs. Hardman said, looking about for
Brad.

Lily stood up. “When Tom
gets home, we’ll talk over what you just said. It’s been nice
meetin’ you.”

C
harity Hardman came
back for her parasol. Lily met her at the door. The smile on her
face had crumbled. Nothing remained but the pain of a frightened
eye. She seized Lily by the wrist and whispered fiercely: “Clara’s
told me all about you, Lily. Won’t you think hard about comin’ to
the new church? It gets awful lonesome out here in the country.
Besides, we got to stick together, you know. I mean us
women.”

“
Mrs.
Hardman!”

“
Coming!
” she shouted
back. With a desperate sort of malice she said to Lily, “An’ you
don’t have to swallow all the malarkey you hear from
that
source!”

As the carriage disappeared,
Lily heard the crack of the whip over the horses’ heads.

2

T
he Fathers of
Confederation set aside July the first as the day when the citizens
of the new Dominion of Canada were to celebrate this historic act
of collective paternity. That there may have been more cause for
excitement in the boardrooms and on the front benches of the nation
did not in any way diminish the general enthusiasm of the magic
hour. Even before the ink was dry on the British North America Act,
the yearning for a united land from sea to sea was already being
translated into affirmative action. On June 28, 1867,
The Sarnia Observer
noted that a complaint had been
received from the German emigrants heading west for Manitoba via
rail, ship and cart-trek; to wit: the cattle cars that had been
rigged out for their comfort contained (they said) only one bucket
of water to last five-dozen souls from Toronto to the Point Edward
wharf; naturally such ingratitude was dealt with curtly and
correctly in the Grand Trunk’s statement of denial. Thirsty or not,
the movement westward had begun, and was inevitable: a new destiny
was becoming manifest.

No town
celebrated the nativity more avidly than Sarnia. The local press
accounts tell the whole story. ‘During the morning a large number
of loyal yeoman from the neighbouring townships, accompanied in
most cases by the members of their families, came into town by all
the leading roads, until ultimately there was a larger influx of
strangers than was ever before present, except on the occasion of
the visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.’ Two infantry
companies from Moore and Sarnia marched to the parade-grounds led
by the Sarnia Cornet Band, bugles ablaze in the sun. Here they were
joined by the Grand Trunk Rifle Companies from Point Edward under
Major Riley. ‘After going through a variety of evolutions, the
Companies were formed into line, and fired the
feu-de-joie
at noon.’ A grand procession then took place back through
the town’s thoroughfares, bedecked with bunting and spruce-boughs
and lined with crowds cheering and waving Union Jacks, as if
Wellington himself were marching home from Waterloo. Right behind
the band came the volunteers – their combat dreams still warm – and
then the town clerk with Queen Victoria’s Proclamation and, wonder
of wonders, ‘four young virgins in white, in a carriage and four,
as representatives of the four Provinces’. Following on the heels
of the Fire Brigades of Port Huron and Sarnia were the Sabbath
school children – skipping, hitching, sidling, scooting and
tumbling in egregious disarray. ‘On the whole, the Procession was
the largest and most imposing ever found in the Town with the
exception of that which proceeded from the Town to Point Edward on
the Prince of Wales’ visit.’ Particularly impressive were the
volunteer companies of the St. Clair Borderers, all in green,
rifles erect, bayonets glinting, their synchromeshed strut
signalling their martial pride, warning of borders to be defended
to the death, and boasting of heroics certain to come.

W
hen the soldiers
fired their rifles at noon, Brad screamed and jumped into Lily’s
arms. Robbie hopped up and down, searching for a face among the
uniforms. She had just got Brad settled down – standing with the
boys at the corner of Christina and George – when the bugles struck
up a battle hymn right in front of them. She could feel Robbie’s
body – through his hand – keeping time to the quick-step. The green
tunics of the Borderers swept into view around the corner. They
seemed to be striding into the vacuum left by the imperial alarums
of the trumpeters, a capsule of silence designed to exaggerate the
thud of every jack-boot, the clink of tunic metal, the rasp of
martial cloth against pink flesh. But if you swung your head
rapidly past the moving ranks, the silver bayonets might have been
mistaken for the quills of a chieftain’s headdress.

Brad started
to whimper; he buried his face in Lily’s skirt and trembled. Softly
into his ear she hummed something gentle, but the crowd noise rose
around her like an ambuscade as the Proclamation coach was spotted,
and deafened them both, so that they almost didn’t notice Robbie
leap up with a body-length salute and cry out, “Look,
there’s
Da
!”

3

T
om came in from work.
Since his promotion to assistant foreman (Warden Hargreaves had
been transferred temporarily to Ottawa for strategic purposes), he
was invariably all smiles.

“
What’s
wrong?” Lily said.

“
We got a
letter, from New York.”

Lily stood beside him and
watched him read it, seeing the words and hearing the strange voice
of Melville Armbruster ricochet inside them, and hearing under them
– like the echo of a sea-conch under oceans – a tiny, compressed
cry that might have been her own.

Long Island, N.Y.

August 5, 1867.

Dear Lily:

I am writing to tell you
that your Aunt Bridie passed away yesterday. She died peacefully in
her sleep, and now rests in the arms of her Maker. Let me tell you
what has happened since those happy days when we last say you. I
hope and pray that you will understand.

When Bridie
and I got to New York after the wedding in London, we stayed only
long enough to meet my family here on our estate, and then we were
off on a honeymoon and business trip that lasted three glorious
months. We travelled first-class by train to Baltimore, Washington,
St. Louis, Chicago and as far west as St. Cloud, Minnesota. We
stayed at the best hotels, several of which we invested in, and I
showed your Aunt the heart and soul of democratic America. She said
it was the happiest time of her life. Certainly it was that, and
more, for me. Let me say also that Bridie never forgot your Uncle
Chester or you and
Tom.
Whenever we’d tour a lumber mill or carriage maker’s, she’d say,
‘now wouldn’t Chester just love a set-up like this’ or ‘I wish
young Tom could see all this, all the opportunities for a man with
his talent and education’. Of course she never stopped talking
about her Lily, and praying she’d hear news when we got back about
a baby-on-the-way.

She never got
back, though – at least not the Bridie we all knew and loved. In
Buffalo, on our return trip, she caught some kind of influenza and
by the time we got home to New York, she was gravely ill in a coma.
I was about to send a telegram to you when she suddenly awakened
and seemed miraculously to recover. A day later, however, she
suffered what the doctors called a stroke. It left her paralyzed
all down the left side. But ill as she was, she could still talk in
a slurred sort of voice only I could understand, and when I
suggested I ought to telegraph you people and send money for train
tickets to New York, she said
no
. At first I refused
to believe her, but I could see in her eyes and in the tortured
twisting of her body every time she spoke that she really meant it.
She did not want her Lily to see her like this, though she would
never tell me why. I honoured her wish, though I’ve been wracked by
guilt and unease every day and night since.

For almost
five years now we have been living on my family’s estate, Bridie
and me. I’ve been taking care of her every need, and she has been
as brave and wonderful in her dying as she was in her living. I
have no regrets, save the fact that caring for her meant cutting us
off from you. But her eyes never once said
yes
, not in all
these months of pain and even in the last serene moments when we
both knew the end was near. She is gone now, and I can tell the
whole story. She was a remarkable woman.

She will be buried in the
Armbruster mausoleum tomorrow. I sincerely hope you can come to
visit the gravesite and I trust that I’ll have the opportunity to
learn from you more about this great woman I only got to know a
little, so late in my life.

All my love,

Melville Armbruster

Something fell out of the
envelope. Lily picked it up. It was an American one-hundred-dollar
bill.

T
om held Lily in his
foreman’s arms all that night. At breakfast she said to him, “I
think it’s time we moved.”

“
Soon,” he
said. “That’s a promise.”

4

B
y May of 1870 when
the troubles began which would be unresolved even a hundred years
later, the Confederatory experiment was not yet three years old.
Older by far, indeed celebrating its tenth year of existence, was
the company town at the nexus of the River and the Lake. From the
outset Point Edward was no ordinary or typical small community of
Canada West (or Ontario as it was now nominated in official circles
and on the fresh maps of the new Dominion already intimating the
imminent annexation of Prince Edward Island, Rupert’s Land and
British Columbia). It was not of village size, some seven hundred
souls, and growing weekly. But it would be some years yet before
any move were made to incorporate it as a self-governing village.
The paterfamiliality of the Grand Trunk lay heavily upon it. Though
many of the properties and businesses had been purchased outright
from the Company, it still owned five boarding-houses on St. Clair
Street and most of the undeveloped land to the east and south-east
which rested in fallow, and appreciated. Eighty-per-cent of the men
in the village worked for the Grand Trunk, the others ran
businesses or supplied services directly dependent upon the
railway. Because the Company’s facilities were concentrated along
the waterfront, the town grew around it in a horse-shoe shape.
Here, then, there could be no village green flanked by churches,
library and town hall with quaint cottages idling among the grasses
and flowers in trim ranks all the way to the outskirts where a
tannery or mill or furniture factory might pull their pastoral
smoke into the serene evenings of Middletown, Ontario. There was
nothing sleepy about Point Edward. Night and day three-dozen
locomotives ran their own version of the anvil chorus. Screw-prop
freighters churned into the berths along the Grand Trunk wharf and
hooted for attention. Twice a day, passenger trains – local and
express – roared to a stop before the gothic grandeur of the
station-hotel, discharging political hacks, carpetbaggers and
commercial bashaws of every breed into the luxury and corruption
that only a first-class colonial hotel can guarantee. Occasionally
there arrived a cattle-train with Icelandic immigrants heading for
the about-to-be-annexed New West, but temporarily herded into one
of the engine-barns to wait for a refitted grain-scow to ferry them
Huronward. The noise of their appreciation was often enough to keep
a Christian awake at his prayers. Surrounding the din and hubbub of
the rail-yards were a dozen thriving but obstreperous enterprises
linked to prosperity by rail and sail – smithies hammering out
plates and spikes, welders scorching metal into submission, even a
manufacturer of barrel-staves who preferred to labour at night. So
it was that the town proper did not begin for half-a-mile from its
commercial heart – on Prince Street in fact, which ran parallel to
the River and was unique among small-village boulevards in having
buildings only on its east side and each one of them a hotel or
something with pretentions in that direction. While the Grand Trunk
station-hotel accommodated those worthies staying overnight on
business or waiting for water transportation, smaller hostels like
The Queen’s served the drummers, gamblers, mountebanks, beached
sailors and low-brimmed capitalists seeking illicit pleasures of
sundry kind. When the beverage rooms closed, one could drink one’s
way into a whiskey stupor in the sanctity of an upstairs boudoir
complete with country courtesan and douche. If more daring (or
desperate), one could slip over the tracks into Mushroom Alley
where the gormandizing was as licorous as it was revulsive. At
night all the decent burghers of the village clamped shut their
shutters and their curiosity. On Sundays the harbingers of virtue
inveighed thunderously from three pulpits but did not extend their
pastorates quite as far as Prince Street itself.