Lily's Story (78 page)

She remembered the clatter of stones that
had just roused her. She went to the only door, on the south side
near the sink, and pushed on the sagging screen. On the plank stoop
sat a glass bowl covered by a dish-cloth. Granny reached down and
lifted it up. Inside the kitchen again, she removed the cover and
saw half-a-dozen sweetcakes and a small loaf of raisin-bread, the
signature of the handiwork of Leila Savage across the street. She
went to the front window and peered about for any sign of the
Savage twins or the McCourt bullies who often led them by the nose.
The roadway was deserted: the men were all off to work in the City,
the wives toiling in the back kitchens or leftover victory gardens,
the liberated children at the beach or roaming the dunes and
bushland with the eyes of aborigines. Over on the main street, she
knew, the post office and market provided a hub of activity for the
women to shop, gossip and exchange complaints – for those who could
still talk.

There you go again, old woman, she thought,
feeling sorry for yourself. It does you no good and you know it.
Believe me, nobody’s listening.

The McCourt cousins – five of them from
three strands of the same freckled stock – spent much of their
time, it seemed, mimicking their elders by plotting ambushes
against the offspring of the village’s half-dozen Catholic
families, picking fights at random or on principle to keep their
prejudices tuned, and generally misleading the susceptible youth of
the Point. When things were particularly quiet or unpromising on a
summer’s night, they would skulk into Granny’s garden from the
marsh and, under cover of the shrubs and a beclouded moon, would
begin their low, repeated, increasingly cantatory verses:

Granny Coote
is
a witch

Granny Coote
is
a bitch

Granny Coote hitched a

Ride on a broomstick…

(pause, then chorically:)

and the broom bit back!

This latter retort was unfailingly followed
by disintegrating laughter before the charm was again wound up in
the moon-filtered dark. What they were hoping for, naturally, was
that the witch herself should materialize, shaking with righteous
anger to the point where she would start to rail at them and they
would hear – as they had only once before – the unalloyed,
chilling, magic-babble of wizardry itself. Then could they scatter
in gleeful terror to the four winds awaiting them. Once last
summer, from her gladioli beds in the front yard, she had heard two
little girls a block away skipping rope and chanting as if the
words had no meaning beyond the dance of innocence they
accompanied:

Granny Coote has no teeth

Granny Coote eats roast beef

with her

gum gums!

Granny Coote has no toes

Granny Coote counts by twos

on her

bum bum!

She heard the rope accelerate at the end,
and pictured the wild fandango of the elfin feet. She too had
danced to that irreverent beat, once, when the lily of her name had
hung like a bell in her child’s heart.

Lately the McCourts and occasional
camp-followers like the Savage twins had become bolder. They would
appear behind the house at dusk – taunting, daring the village with
the sounds of their illicit boy-bravery. Still, the victim did not
appear. But one evening last week after a particularly callous
variation of their rhyme, the side-door swung open and into the
twilight floated a caped figure, its legless silhouette seemingly
welded to a large whisker-broom, its arms extended more like wings
set to try the wind over the hushed garden. The shadows seemed to
hide all trace of human visage except for the yellow pricks of eyes
and the toothless hollow of a mouth – beef-blooded in hue and
emitting a shrill thread of sound like a scream being squeezed to
death. The Savage twins were trampled by the precipitate retreat of
the Ulster vigilantes.

Back inside the house Granny Coote shook
with laughter and after-shock, amazed that she had once again taken
up the cudgel, so to speak, having hauled the cape, mask and
whistle out of Arthur’s ancient theatrical trunk in order to lie in
wait for the pranksters as she had so many times in her eighty-odd
years of being on the wrong side of respectability and suffering
the consequences, or abetting them. “You chose to be an outsider,”
Cap had said to her accusingly, and she had shot back: “None of us
chooses anything except the form of our reprisals.” How she could
talk then. As the thumping of the routed platoon through the bushes
near the march reached her ears, Granny removed the mask and smiled
to herself: this one is for you, Arthur, who showed me the gentle
half of men’s dominion, who gave me a name and a house to carry me
through these final years more to be endured than understood. But
then, when had she understood anything even in the midst of love,
of commitment to those whose youth or vulnerability bound her to a
future she never really believed in. Anyway, sweet Arthur, I shall
wear your name, surrogate though it may be, till they chisel it on
the granite beside yours.

2

After nibbling at one of Leila Savage’s
cakes – a touch too much vanilla in the overbeaten batter – Granny
Coote went into her garden as she had done for seventy-odd summers
without fail. It was, as she herself termed it, a little-old-lady’s
vanity patch. Showy English-style perennials on the perimeter, a
neat elevated vegetable section in the middle, divided off by Grand
Trunk ties Arthur had brought here when the railway left and the
town went bust. Arthur’s wife’s hands had been bred to coddle a
bassoon not a hoe-handle, so it was with some relish that Granny
had undertaken the familiar task of resurrecting a moribund garden.
Arthur had been pleased, amazed even as cityfolk often are before
the vigour and dexterity of country labours. Of course, it was
vanity now, pure and simple. She could not eat a quarter of what
bulged and fletched here in the summer heat, nor could she give
much away to the thrifty, war-wary householders with well-stocked
victory gardens of their own. Once a week or so, young Wilf
Underhill would stop by to collect several packets of peppers or
carrots to take down to the destitute beyond Potts’ Lane. He had
not forgotten her ‘service’ during the terrible fall of ’eighteen,
and shy though he was, he often sat and had a cup of tea with her,
content to let the silence ferry its own meaning back and forth
between them, occasionally telling her a bit about his life in the
Old Country because he could see from the shifting light in her
eyes that she enjoyed his company. And now that their baby boy had
arrived, there was more joy to share. At times like that she was
not unhappy about what had happened to her throat because she would
not have to tell him what anguish the world might yet bring to
those who dared poach on its prerogatives.

Still, the flowers and shrubs were
beautiful; they gave pleasure to the eye and to the village heart
shaken by doubt. With every root that delved thumbs-down into this
patch of ground and with every corona of colour that took majestic
possession of this air, Granny felt she was establishing her right
to belong. The council wanted this land back as vacant as the lot
they had conceded in their haste to Arthur and his bride. They
would not get it. It was never theirs, she thought. It is only mine
in trust.

She was hoeing the cauliflower, the
instrument perfectly tuned to her intricate gymnastic – learned and
repeated and refined and remembered deeply. No thought was
required. She could close her eyes after ‘sighting’ down a row and
carry on blindly without missing a plantain or chokeweed. These
motions evoked neither pleasure nor pain, satisfaction nor ennui.
They were as effortless as breathing, and as necessary.

Granny stopped to enjoy the shade of the
only tree left on her lot by the Grand Trunk choppers seventy years
ago. It soared defiantly above the marsh below it and the
neighbouring houses with their pathetic, prearranged maples. Don’t
boast, Granny whispered to it, you’re here because you’re lucky not
invincible. She waved to Ethel Carpenter working in her tomatoes,
recalling their former intimacies, their shared tragedies and the
desperate confusion on that good woman’s face when Granny’s mouth
contorted helplessly and the air was chilled by its alien vowel.
Now she just waved, exchanging remembrances.

Granny heard the child’s step in the hedge
before she saw Flora, Ethel’s six-year-old, emerge – tiptoed, head
tilted to dart away – into the dazzling light. Elfin, blond, the
blue eyes star-fed, she edged into the yard, then stopped. One eye
was on the old, old woman rigid under the hickory tree, the other
on the harlequinade of iceland poppies at her feet.

Granny felt a rush of emotion, a surge of
recognition, but she made not the slightest move. Slowly without
stepping towards the child, she indicated in pantomime that Flora
should go ahead and pick the flowers her fancy had claimed. The
meaning was instantly comprehended. The girl’s quick fingers
one-by-one gathered in a fragile bouquet. She took one step towards
the old woman, hesitated, saw what she hoped for, and came right up
to her with a sidling skip-and-shuffle. The shade encompassed them.
A breeze tufted the girl’s hair, the poppies a-flutter, swept the
aged hand upward to accept the gift offered.

Bless you, she said with her eyes, and the
girl smiled a shy acknowledgement.

“
Can I bring you some
cheese, Granny? My uncle brung some in from the farm.”

Granny Coote felt the words of response
shape themselves in her lower throat, the consonants coil and
stretch across the rampant vowels, the inchoate syllables
contenting towards articulation rise noisily up the hollow nave to
the threshing, trapped tongue gonging madly in its belfry. The
consonants froze in their chambers while the vowels twisted and
howled in anguished release. The shock of them against the open air
stunned even her own ears. She reeled backwards and fell. The
child’s cry was soundless but complete. Her fleeing form was
swallowed by the hedge. In Granny’s fist the poppies shed a garish
blood.

Bless you anyway, child, she was thinking.
Bless you for being. I held you in my arms days after your birth, I
held the wasted body of your dying brother in these hands and tried
to invent some comfort for his mother. These hands that have pulled
many a ruby-skinned pollywog kicking and squalling into this world,
such as it is. And to what end? In hopes that one or two of my own
would live to soften my dying? Well, where are they? Only a
neighbour’s child to bring me in her innocence a bouquet of
flowers, a nosegay for the old girl – may she soon pop off and
leave us in peace.

Granny opened her eyes. The sun had burned
her arm right through its leathery tan. When she rolled sideways to
see how far the sun had moved, she was jolted by a pain in her
right leg. A scab was already congealing on her elbow. How long
have I been here? Panic stabbed at her more sharply than her
bruised thigh. She touched the dried tears on her cheek. My lord,
have I been bawling and jabbering out here all afternoon? They’ll
be coming to get me, just like they tried that time with old
Malloney. She started to get up but the grass swayed and she hung
on, closing her eyes to let her breath catch up with her heart.

When she opened them – feeling once again
the regular, sturdy beat of her pulse – it was almost dark. She was
very cold, but the ache in her leg was gone and she was able to
totter to her feet. No broken bones anyway, she thought, you stupid
old woman, letting yourself forget that thing in your throat,
scaring little Flora half to death, then falling down and
snivelling your way through the afternoon, almost breaking a hip
and an arm in the process. “Get your arse in harness and giddyup!”
Sophie always said when things looked bleakest.

Monitoring each step, Granny walked through
the hazy twilight towards Arthur’s house. At the corner of the
front hedge she spotted Flora, her nimbus of golden hair still
ablaze in the fading light. A pale face like a moon’s satellite
peered out of the shadowed honeysuckle, aiming its amber invitation
unequivocally in her direction. She stopped breathing. The figure
was fully into view now; it was not Flora. The hair was too native,
too radiant; the dress simple and unadorned; the posture
questioning, braced against something only half-comprehended.

It was
her
. There was no doubt. She had seen
the face, the stance, the elemental flame of the hair too many
times not to know it. She had dreamt this very scene, this tableau
of Madonna and lost child, many times over.

Suddenly the child’s eyes
materialized in the otherwise blank face:
save me, save me
they cried for the
village, the county, the country to hear. Granny heard her own feet
hitting the earth, her heart ricocheting in its prison, her breath
catch against her gums. She was running towards the little lost
girl, the figure that had beckoned to her just so in a dream they
had shared for decades. The name of the child fought at the torque
of her tongue, gained her lips, the night-air, the ears of the
mother uttering it aloud to make it real.

Granny hit the crushed stone with both knees
– snapping her body forward onto her splayed palms and whiplashing
forehead, and silencing for the moment the tremor of her hyena-howl
which those who heard it afterwards declared to be as much the
laughter of the mad as the grief of the inconsolable.