Lily's Story (63 page)

On his own or occasionally with
Brad, Robbie continued to pick up and deliver the laundry,
collecting the money and presenting it to his mother. He now
chopped all of the wood. Some of his cronies began to tease him
about being a ‘washerwoman’s suck’, and so he often returned in a
black pout. But whatever standing he might have lost during the
week, he made up for on Saturday when he used the nickel Lily gave
him to buy it back. He needs a friend, Lily thought, not
companions.

In June Robbie was
promoted to Book One and Brad all the way to Senior Book Two. With
her winter cough completely gone, Lily put up fresh gingham
curtains and wondered who she might offend by trying a little paint
on the outside of her house. Already bored by the forced vacation,
Brad looked up from his reading one July day and said, as if he had
thought the question out carefully, “Mama, are we really
Alleyfolk?”

24

1

I
n the early hours of
Wednesday, August 23, 1872 the gunboat
Prince Alfred
slipped unnoticed from its berth in Goderich Harbour and
steamed southward through the soft summer darkness. Just as the sun
rose over east Lambton, the ship and its precious cargo eased into
the first down-currents of the St. Clair River and docked at the
Point Edward wharf. The sun lifted fully into the sky, sizzling and
solitary. Nothing stirred on the
Prince Alfred
until
about nine o’clock when stewards in white suits were seen
fluttering from cabin to galley and back. As the morning advanced,
the movements aboard seemed to take on a greater urgency: dark
marine uniforms were noticed trailing or leading the stewards, and
always at double match. Several doors were slammed in undisguised
anger. The stevedores on the dayshift stopped to watch. Something
momentous was at hand.

This latter
suspicion was confirmed around eleven o’clock when a private
coach-and-four were spotted coming down Mich
igan Ave. with as much haste as was compatible with
the decorum of its occupants and the occasion. The vehicle wheeled
onto the wharf, clattered woodenly to a standstill before the
gangplank (just lowered), and debouched two distinguished gentlemen
already sweating in their morning-coats and stiff collars. They
brushed past the paid help with the unmistakable briskness of the
provincial politician. They were observed entering the captain’s
quarters on the rear-deck. Fifteen minutes later they re-emerged,
blinking straight into the sun and sweating more profoundly than
before. A crowd of thirty people had gathered on the wharf as
rumour continued to sweep through the village. The local hosts were
now seen to be moving along the deck in a decidedly deferential
manner, Uriah-Heaping their way towards the gangplank in the van of
the very-important-person, who upon espying an audience tipped his
hat and uttered an automatic smile. Several persons below cheered
mightily as Sir John A. Macdonald, the Prime Minister of the
five-year-old Dominion and the first Father of Confederation,
stepped shakily towards their approbation.

A
ugust twenty-first
had been designated as nomination day for Lambton County in the
federal elections of 1872. Candidates for both parties, the
Conservatives and the Reformers, would take the stand, make their
pitch and be judged by the members of their own group. The hustings
had been erected only the day before in the middle of Market Square
in Sarnia, and in the gathering heat of mid-day, sawdust and
pine-tar perfumed the air. The rumour that Sir John A. himself
would attend to speak on behalf of Mr. Vidal and directly confront,
in his own riding, the man he feared and disliked the most had been
actively disseminated by the local Conservatives even though they
themselves had learned of its legitimacy only moments before
the
Prince Alfred
had departed Goderich. After all, Sir
John A. was not well, the weather was semi-tropical, the County was
a bastion of Brownite Reformism anyway, and not much could be
gained by contending with Alex Mackenzie, Sarnia stonemason and
Leader of the Opposition, on his home ground. But then, the story
went, Sir John A. had never been a conventional politician, so even
Mr. Vidal and his Tory colleagues did their best to swallow their
astonishment when the great man himself stepped out of the coach
onto the soil of Market Square for the first time and glared at the
raw hustings in the way an exhausted tragedian might glower at the
bare, unlit stage before him.

Sir John A.
was not well. Although recovered from the kidney stone that had
almost killed him two years before, he had been drinking and
travelling and speaking and drinking for nearly six weeks as the
election dragged on – according to the sequence he himself had
arranged – for that whole wretchedly hot summer. At fifty-nine, he
was already old, a grizzled veteran with a long record of victories
and defeats behind him. But, he said to himself in the
nightly coma he had substituted for
sleep, he had one last mission: to get the railway built to the
Pacific and thus consolidate the nation’s grip on the continent and
its vast resources. Re-election was necessary if the country were
to survive. No means to that glorious end was to be excluded. Sir
Hugh Allen’s support – bribe money it would later be called by the
impious – was not to be eschewed whatever its colour. But the
revelation that the Montreal financier’s consortium for
constructing the C.P.R. was two-thirds American; the presence of
one of those Yankees in the Premier’s own office at three in the
morning to bully and condescend; and the telegram from Sir Hugh
which had reached him
en
train
between London and
Goderich on Tuesday morning, threatening to expose the whole sordid
mess – all these were the burdens upon his conscience that made
sleep impossible. Now here was his eldest enemy seated across from
him – composed, plebian in his open shirt, unsweating as befits a
man accustomed to the sun, his probity as rigid and unyielding as
the stonemason’s trowel he flashed like a patriot’s badge wherever
he went. When the several hundred participants and onlookers had
gathered by one o’clock, Sir John was already in need of a drink.
Mr. Vidal passed him a crystal goblet brimming with
ice-water.

M
r. Gemmil of
The Sarnia Observer
has recorded the details of the
political square-dance which ensued. Sir John with obsequious
humility and a clear sense of occasion deferred to his rival,
begging that he of local prominence should speak first and
foremost, etc. Beginning to feel the heat a bit himself, the
stonemason conceded and the proceedings got underway. Alex
Mackenzie was duly nominated by a regional worthy, Peter Graham
Esq. of Warwick, who pointed out, not for the first time, the
unique virtues of the candidate: he was a genuine, not a
self-dubbed member of the working class who required no
well-stocked purse to win elections nor did he need, as Mr. Vidal
apparently did, the support of outsiders like the Knight of
Kingston and his posse of political hacks. Mr. Vidal himself was
then nominated in yet another lengthy, uninformative speech. More
interest was shown when Sir. John A. himself was nominated (a ploy
to allow him to speak later) along with half-a-dozen other nominal
candidates with a thirst for rudimentary oratory. Thus it was
almost three o’clock when Alex Mackenzie himself rose to accept the
nomination of his enthusiasts still able to cheer in spite of the
heat, the absence of shade and the petrifying boredom of the
speeches to date.

The stonecutter stood up
to thunderous applause. His angular features forewarned the
weak-at-heart that here was a man of little compromise when truth
and honesty were at risk. His eyes were as sharp as a jeweller’s
chisel. First of all, he said that he was flattered to have the
Premier of the Dominion, who had so often supped with the gods,
among them. He, as a common mortal, might indeed feel abashed in
his presence. His tone now darkened, cumulonimbic and foreboding.
He attacked Sir John’s pretense of a coalition government,
ridiculed the Tories’ attempts to pass themselves off as
‘progressive’, and excoriated the Government’s ruinously generous
terms for British Columbia’s entry into Confederation especially in
light of the fact that Ontarians had had to give their own land
gratis to the railroads and feed them besides a million dollars a
year from the public trencher forever after. It was quarter to four
when he sat down to prolonged cheers. In the eaves of the Town Hall
behind them even the pigeons had wilted, dreaming of cool breezes
and evening dews.

No one left
the square. A number of marketeers and strays who had entered the
drama stayed to see the outcome. All eyes were on the Prime
Minister, who, if his supporters had not known better, might have
been thought dozing through some of the lesser encomiums. However,
the fireworks that erupted at this point brought everyone out of
his stupor as the arch-tory Mr. Vidal popped up to read a damning
letter which clearly discredited Alex Mackenzie on a local drainage
issue. The crowd, ninety per cent of them Reformers, roared their
disapproval and just as fisticuffs were about to be deployed in
settlement of the question, Mr. Vidal – realizing that he was not
destined to be the butt of the afternoon’s entertainment – finished
reading the last half of the letter, which – coincidentally –
happened to exonerate his opponent.
The Observer
reported
that ‘a scene of uproar and confusion ensued that beggars
description’.

It was only the figure of Sir
John rising and assuming the podium that instantly calmed both the
outraged and the outrageous. At four o’clock the heat had reached
its zenith; in the far south-west, convection clouds were building.
Sweat, unthinned by alcohol, thickened on the statesman’s upper
lip, dribbled down his pale, beardless face and hung in parchment
nodules from his chin like cast-off syllables from old speeches. He
tucked his left hand in his waistband to keep it from quivering and
with his right he sawed the air erratically as a conductor will
when he has lost his place and must read the score from memory. In
front of him, where his eyes refused to focus, he heard in his mind
a cacophony of rejoinders, putdowns, exordia, crippling witticisms,
perorations, bombast, retorts, sentences in the old clean high
style: a phrase (a word even) with some touch of the truth still
unuttered in it. The shallow applause from a thousand previous
masterful efforts hissed on the whiskey-drum of his skull. He
needed a drink. The sun’s heat congealed in his gut, malarial and
maggoty. He would open his mouth and he would vomit all over Mr.
Vidal’s handshake. From the left side of the platform Mr. Mackenzie
skewered him with his presbyterian eye. He blinked, and began – one
more time.

The
Observer
comments on the
speech thus: ‘We regret that our limited space will not permit our
giving a detailed report of Sir John’s speech in this issue. We
will merely say that for a gentleman of his fame, it was one of the
most miserable attempts at public speaking we ever heard; while it
was at the same time so full of misrepresentations and
misstatements...that it has led to the conclusion that he was
either so much
indisposed
as not to
know what he was saying, or that he purposely occupied his position
in the hustings in order that he might wickedly and maliciously
traduce and slander a man infinitely his superior. Such reckless,
unfounded and abominable charges...coming from the lips of the
Crown in the Dominion of Canada is sufficient to cast a stigma on
the whole population, in the eyes of every civilized
people’.

When the token candidates
had withdrawn, the preordained nominees were confirmed and the
meeting disbanded. Partisans kicked their dogs and horses awake and
set out to slake their thirst. Some stayed to watch the demi-royal
party disappear into the Town Hall for a formal dinner and
self-congratulatory toasts. There was some spirited wagering as to
whether His Highness would make it past the soup course, but he was
definitely seen boarding a carriage under his own impetus about
nine o’clock that evening, just after the equatorial fury of the
summer storm had subsided. By the time he reached the safety of his
gunboat at the Point Edward wharf, the master builder could look
up, if he so wished, and remark upon the orderly revolution of the
starts along their appointed orbits.

2

I
t was one of those
flash-floods that cuts through the brooding heat, cleanses and
revivifies the air for a precious hour or two, and leaves the
browning grass superficially refreshed. Along the lanes and alleys
of the Point it also left vast pools of murky water, child-size
puddles, dizzying rivulets and thick patches of gumbo. The
Alleykids filled the twilight with the dissonant song of their
happiness. As darkness descended, more steeply now as September
nighed, their voices dwindled and thinned. By ten-thirty the Alley
was silent except for the occasional hushed exchange of sailors
approaching Hazel’s Heaven in twos and threes. The moon rose
unobserved.

Around midnight a pair of
sailors, having satisfied their thirst at John the Baptist’s and
their lust at Hazel’s ersatz Eden, sloshed noisily down towards
Michigan Ave. One of them apparently slid into a slough, cursing
and coughing up slime while his buddy sniggered in sympathy.
Pressing a damp cloth against Brad’s fevered brow, Lily heard them
clearly somewhere below her front path, but Brad just moaned a
little and turned over. In a while his breathing became steady.
Lily slipped back to her own bed. She was very tired, having washed
and ironed the hotel’s weekly quota of sheets in the intense heat
of the day. Even the flies had capitulated. She peered out the side
window and in the moonlight she could see the puddles and sudden
bogs glistening all the way along the lane. The two sailors had
recovered and disappeared. Lily lay her head on the sash and sucked
in the damp-cool air.