Lily's Story (61 page)

“
We all need
God, Lily. I do hope you’ve found Him. Is there anythin’ I can do
to help you? If so, you just holler an’ Stump’ll be
there.”

Lily touched the back of his
hand, felt how benevolent the sun was, recalled the cool clasp of
the waves on her legs, the soaring delight of her boys at play.
“I’d like a little music,” she whispered.

2

A
bout a week before
school was to open, Robbie came panting up behind her in the
workroom and said, “Come quick, Mama, there’s a naked lady gettin’
beat up over in the dunes! She’s cryin’ an’ blubberin’, we heard
her, didn’t we, Brad?” Lily looked at Brad who’d come running in
just after his brother. “A big black man’s beatin’ her up,” he
said. “Beatin’ her to death!” Robbie added, and Lily knew she must
go.

The two boys dragged her along
through the scrub to the edge of the dunes just behind Hazel’s
place. Robbie was about to point triumphantly to the exact spot of
the murder when Brad yelled, “Up there!” and they all turned and
looked towards Hazel’s just in time to see a flash of leg, buttock
and arm – bald as the sun, black and white blurred together as they
disappeared hastily beyond the flapping bedsheets.

“
She looks
quite alive to me,” Lily said, pulling her hand free of
Robbie’s.

“
He took all
her clothes away,” Robbie said, “an’ I heard her
cryin’.”

Lily was about to drag her boys
home and find some way to explain what they had probably seen, when
she was stopped in her shoes by a rasping female voice.

“
Goddam you,
Shad, I told you to keep that black pecker in your pants and I
meant it. Betsy Riley, I’m ashamed of you, runnin’ around starkers
where anybody from the town could see you plain as porridge, I’m
ashamed to know you, girl. Now get in there, both of you, before I
take the rug-beater to your butts.” A door slammed amid some
less-than-contrite giggling, and the woman with a voice like a
claw-hammer emerged at the top of the rise and began jerking pegs
out of the sheets as if they were hairs on the head of her victims.
Her quick eye spotted the strangers below. Lily saw the sun
ricochet from a gold tooth. The woman’s arm was waving them a
welcome.

“
You boys go
on ahead to Sophie’s, don’t forget the carnival’s on the saft,” she
said.

But the boys slipped into the
bushes and watched from below as long as they dare. When Lily came
up to the woman, they both stood stock still for a second, then
spoke almost simultaneously.

“
Lily
Ramsbottom!”

“
Char?”

Char
Hazelberry, now known as Hazel, reached out with her scullion’s
grip and pulled Lily to her bosom. “It
is
you, I can’t
believe it, you ain’t changed a bit, Winnie said she was sure it
was you but I didn’t believe her, now I got to believe my own eyes,
don’t I? Come on in an’ meet the girls.”

H
azel added a dollop
of whiskey to her coffee, sighed across her bosom and said, “We was
all doin’ just fine, thank you, Winnie’s sister took the babe –
real cute little fella, wasn’t he, Win – and our business was goin’
great guns. Then I decided to accept the job at the St. Clair Inn
when the new owner took over. I was chief cook with my own staff –
naturally I carted Winnie an’ Betsy along with me, an’ for a time
we run the best cookery in town. We heard that from the drummers
an’ regulars, didn’t we Bet, all the time. But that owner an’ his
snooty lady was somethin’ else! Remember that wart on his nose?”
She glanced at Winnie and Betsy and was rewarded with reminiscent
snickers. “Well, to make a long story longer, the old geezer – he
must’ve been
sixty
– corners me in the pantry on St.
Patrick’s day an’ tries to lift my skirt, pretty as you please.
Naturally I resisted an’ even threatened to tell his Bible-thumpin’
wife. That backed him up real quick. But not for long. I discover
he’s been pesterin’ both Win an’ Bet, poor dears, an’ them not
havin’ the wherewithal to resist, an’ so I goes straight to his
office to have it out, an’ the very mention of his sin must’ve set
his gong a-clappin’, ’cause he reaches over an’ flips both my
bosoms right outta their harness. Well, I let out a screech that
would’ve shook grandpa outta eternity, and in rushes the wife.
Naturally I appeal to her as a woman and a believer, but you’ll
never in a hundred years guess what happened. She sided with the
old goat! She called me a slut and a hoor and a panderer, an’ she
told me to take my girls an’ depart on the instant. An’ the last I
see of them hypocrites, she’s soothin’ and’ cooin’ up to him an’
we’re out on the street without a pot to pee in. And, can you beat
this, she blabs it all over Sarnia that we’re bawds an’ harlots,
an’ we have no hope ever again of gettin’ work in a respectable
place.”

“
So we come
here,” Winn
ie said with the
bubbling natural giggle she’d had since she turned fifteen and that
now seemed, in the tired and creased flesh of her forties,
eccentric – as if she had just adopted such a youthful mannerism
for effect. “What’s
your
excuse!” she
laughed.

It took almost two hours
for histories to be exchanged, but in this strange, enclosed space
time seemed even of less importance than it did on the lane
outside. The parlour where they sat might have graced the seraglio
of a second-rate sultan – with its faded Armenian carpets piled and
overlapping on the floor; damask curtains with gold tassels to
repudiate the prying sun; sofas that were all curve and cushion and
invitation; a myriad of tiny lamps with Oriental shades, the
afterburn of incense still in the air; a black-skinned,
white-shirted Dahomey cross-legged, with hookah, on the albino
bearskin spread before the portico which led to purdah and its
languorous, mediterranean pleasures.

“
This here’s
Mr. Lincoln – I understand you met briefly out back – Mr. Shadrack
Lincoln. We call him Shad.”

“
And a few
other things,” said Betsy, unable to take her eyes off Lily, whom
she found to be so much the same and yet so much different and
wondering if Lily were thinking the same thing about
her.

“
Shad might
look dumb, but he’s quite smart, ain’t you, Shad?” Shad smiled
dreamily, but Lily felt his eyes scan and appraise her. “He don’t
talk, so folks around here think he’s stupid. But back in
Philadelphia he used to be a lawyer’s clerk, readin’ law books an’
writin’ out lawyer’s briefs. He was a regular black gentleman. He’s
still got some of his master’s suits given to him when he was set
free.”

“
What happened
to him?” Lily asked, looking his way and letting their glances lock
for a second, then peering through the opium daze, the comic’s
costume, the mute pose of the face, and knowing full well what she
might find in the dark history unreleased behind those
eyes.

“
After the
kafuffle at Harper’s Ferry back in ’fifty-nine, you know when the
niggers took a run at the federal army an’ got butchered, there was
hell to pay among the slaves everywhere. Some vigilantes come in
the night an’ drug poor Shad outta his bed an’ hauled him kickin’
an’ screamin’ off to the nearest woods.” She paused and checked out
the victim. He now lay on his back upon the rug, the pipe beside
him, breathing deeply.

“
I think he’s
left us,” Winnie whispered.

“
Well, Lily
dear, shame-to-say but them vigilantes went an’ cut his tongue out
an’ they smashed all the fingers on his right hand so’s he couldn’t
write no more an’ left him on his master’s doorstep, bleedin’ an’
sobbin’ his heart out.”

“
But they
didn’t know Shad was left-handed –”

“
I’ll tell it,
if you don’t mind,” Hazel said sharply, not quite ready to forget
the recent transgression on the dunes. “Anyways, Shad recovered an’
was able to write but he couldn’t talk no more an’ from time to
time, as he do now, he went a bit crazy in the head. So his master
set him free an’ sent him up to Canada to work on the farm of a
friend. We’re glad to have him. He’s a dear man, smart as a whip,
an’ when them sailors get rambunctious in here on a Saturday night,
all he has to do is roll them eyes, froth a bit at the mouth and
start gargling out his dumb-language an’ they head outta here in a
hurry. He does all our shoppin’ in town, too.” She sighed. “Poor
Shad; he’s got to listen to Win an’ Bet chatter all day an’ night
an’ he don’t get to say a word!”

When Lily got up to go, Hazel
hugged her again and said, “We have tea up here every Monday – our
day off – so why don’t you come? Sophie usually does. You can meet
the other three girls – they’re still young an’ need their sleep –
and of course our housekeeper an’ chief pot-scrubber.”

“
That’s Vi,”
Betsy said.

“
She’s down at
the beach for a swim,” Winnie said.

“
Always
down there, it
seems to me,” Hazel added.

“
Talkin’ to
the waves.”

“
They
can understand her,” Winnie
tittered.

“
Hush up,”
Hazel said to her. “Vi’s a sweet thing an’ you know it. You’ll come
an’ see us, then, Lily?”

Lily nodded and waved goodbye
several times before she came down to the path behind the brothel.
Something urged her to turn towards the Lake, so she did.

T
he beach was
deserted. Though it was a sweltering August afternoon, all the
children were off to a travelling carnival and freak show down in
Bayview Park. The immaculate sand, cleansed in the endless sieve of
soft wavelets against the shore, glittered under a Grecian sun.
Lily took off her shoes and stood wriggling her toes until they
touched the cool damp granules below the surface. For a few moments
she stood perfectly still and listened to the waves, scarcely
nudged by a westerly breeze as they broke idly on the shale of
pebbles and seashell that ringed the water’s edge as far as the eye
could follow the miles into the northern haze. Farther out the Lake
was calm, without current or direction, indifferent to the winds,
an abiding and lucid blue beyond the reach of any sun or season.
It
was
, and it shone for any eyes to see. Lily closed hers,
and it was still there.

When she
opened them she saw something move across the plane of the water’s
dominion, about twenty yards out just where the
bot
tom sailed from under your
feet and you were adrift on your own weight. A swimmer – made
elegant by buoyancy, the arms lifting in slowed sequence closer to
the blood’s own beat, with a leg-kick like the silver spray of a
mermaid’s fin, hair fanned out behind in winged ebony, the body
aimed through some vital dimension with the grace of a dolphin’s
dance. For a second Lily herself felt that wondrous free-fall
moment between stroking and surrender. The swimmer touched down
reluctantly – and only when the knees scraped bottom and the bones’
angles re-emerged – then stood upright among the taffeta froth of
the rollers near shore.

It was a
plain, female body clearly visible below the homemade bathing
costume pressed wetly against the outlines underneath: lumpish
curves, knob knees, a slack belly, masculine feet. Thick black hair
was matted against the face, browned unevenly by the sun, the large
eyes darkly innocent, the right side of the jaw crooked where it
had grown accus
tomed to the
hare-lip above it.

“
Hello, Lily.
They said it was you livin’ down there in the Icelanders’ shack,
but I didn’t believe ’em. I ain’t allowed to go down that
way.”

The words, distorted only
by the narrow wheeze of the cleft palate, came out as clear and as
natural as a gossip’s whisper. As Lily walked towards Violet she
shed her outer clothing – skirt and blouse – and covered only by
her shift she took the swimmer’s hand and together they turned back
into the waves. When the first breaker foamed against her thighs
and flattened the shift to their shape, Lily jumped and giggled and
Violet let go of her hand and laughed and then began to run across
the Lake lifting one foot out of the water and splashing it
emphatically down just as the other one broke the surface. Lily
came skitter-splashing behind her, laughter bubbling and
evaporating from her throat, and moments later it was too deep to
run, the Lake had them and they capitulated with a wild,
surrendering dive into the green looking-glass dream of its depths,
oh the cold total possession of its grip on the nippled breast, the
silenced ear-drum, the pinioned arms, on the knees and the thighs
and, ah, upon the paradisal vee at the soul of sensation. They rose
again to the icy-hot surface, they were amphibian, they swam in
unison as whale and dolphin do, they rolled dorsally, they lolled
weightless on their backs facing the firmament, they turned in
their own time and swam with slow synchronous ease back to the dry
island of the beach. Linking hands again they walked up onto the
white sand and lay down to contemplate the sky and bask in the
body’s long thaw.

Why here, why
now? Lily thought. What is it we do to deserve or not deserve such
fitful collisions of joy? What is the sun seeing now, gazing down
at us? Can it care the way we do? Do we make
anything
happen? She reached over and touched Violet’s hand. “I love
you, Lily,” Violet whispered. “I always did.”