Lily's Story (80 page)

The Reeve resumed the floor. He
pointed out that new committees could now be struck to search for a
designer-builder and to select a suitable site. The former
committee was to be composed of the Reeve, the Reverend Stokes and
Sandy Redmond. The latter, less onerous, one of Choppy Fielding,
Harold Hitchcock and young MacIntosh.

On a wave of optimism and
good cheer they swept out into the snowy night and managed to see
the hometown Flyers wallop the hapless Wanderers of Landsend 9-2.
The auguries were in place, and they were smiling.

34

1

I
t had snowed again in
the night – in her dream and in the world out there. It must be
almost February, Granny thought, lifting the kettle from the stove
and staring across the unblemished tundra that fell away to the
frozen River and the ice-edge of the Lake as far as the eye could
travel to the north-west. She had no calendar except the one over
the sink with the bleached buffoon’s visage of King George grinning
possessively down at his faceless subjects – the one she had left
unchanged since that terrible September day. But more than eighty
years of superintending the passage of the seasons had left her
with a clock more subtle than almanacs or Swiss watches. She had
heard the special shout of school children passing by and knew the
Christmas holiday had begun. The church bells rang from the trinity
of God’s Houses in the village, and so she counted the Sundays as
they held fast in spite of sleet, thaw and squall. The silence of
Christmas Day was as awe-inspiring and as puzzling as it had always
been. No one came; the snow lay uncreased over her yard and dormant
gardens. Next day, though, Sunny Denfield and his boy, Boots, came
around with a dish of turkey and dressing and fruitcake. She nodded
her gratitude at the door, and they seemed thankful that she didn’t
motion them inside. Obviously forewarned, Boots tried hard to smile
and not stare at her too long but managed only the latter.
Nonetheless, the boy had the inerasable kindness of his father’s
eyes. He will be another one who will suffer, she thought, watching
them leave their eccentric prints in Saturday’s drift.

From time to
time parcels of food – clothing even – would appear mysteriously on
her porch, the tiny trails in the snow betraying the identity of
the secret heralds. Bless the children, she thought; they’re afraid
but they don’t hate easily. To some of them Granny Coote’s a witch
from the Lane, but at least they think of me as somebody, as a
creature with her own peculiar power, magic, and brand of terror.
What am I to the others? Something that
was
, and got left
over.

The snow was comforting.
Without it she knew she wouldn’t survive another winter intact. Not
die, of course. That was out of the question given this body of
sinew, gristle, bones of oak. Once the arthritis unstiffened in the
morning and the blood honeyed the desiccated veins one more time,
her body – with its muscle-memory, its own receding legends, and
its mindless optimism – went about its daily exercises and
evacuations. Pain she was accustomed to; it was relegated to some
lower order of response, and forgotten. You don’t die of pain, she
thought, or we’d all be soon dead. Nor loneliness.

The snow,
re-estabilishing its beauty every fortnight or so like a goose
ruffling its plumage after a roll in the dust, created spaces
between the trees, houses and hedges. Into these blank meadows she
was able to pour her thoughts – half-memory and half-feeling –
filling them until they rebelled and she had to pass her eye along
to the next one. Thus she could spend a morning or afternoon,
starting with the Carpenter’s yard and moving at the pace of her
own musing across the windowed landscape section by section till it
ended at the high point where the dunes began – cutting off from
her vision the vast shore of the Lake. Memories she would never run
out of. They returned as whole sequences of events – tragedies,
comedies, farce, melodrama – or as a single moment of action
radiating endless wavelets of feeling, some of it fresh and
uncorrupted, some of it coloured by intruding events that enriched
or mitigated, some of it redeemed or crushed by the perspective of
eighty years of remembering and pretending to remember. But I can
still think , she reminded herself emphatically; my tongue may be
as thick as a gelding’s fetlock, but these memories don’t come
sliding by on their sentimental honey without comment or appraisal.
I still know a foolish sentiment when I feel one even if the damn
tear-ducts don’t. I remember so I can stay alive, so I can be
myself, whoever that is. But then you don’t really want to stay
alive, do you, old woman with the sagging breasts and brindled
hair? Be honest. You close your eyes every night and hope they
won’t open again, that something will stop the nightmare machine.
Yes. Yes. But I won’t go before my body does. I am not my body,
though enough people have thought so over the years.

The nights –
these winter nights – were eternal and terrifying. Dream was not
memory, though it brewed its maelstrom from the remnants thereof.
Nor was dream prophecy, though its phantasmic imagery sometimes
stunned the future, sometimes held out the illusion of augury.
There had been magic in the world, that much she knew, and she
herself had had those very dreams which touch upon its tenderest
mystery, whose tremors brought the body – awakening – to the brink
of belief. No more. In these present nightmares the same tale was
told and retold, a masquerade of her own life parading as the
truth, calling out to her for acceptance and validation, begging
her to accept its mutant reconstruction of reality, whispering to
its apostles the soft promise of annihilation. In the daylight she
could dream or doze or resurrect; she could defend herself against
such depredations. In February the nights were longest. And if the
night-dreams ever began to eclipse those of the day, it would be
all over. Then I’ll be as batty as people think I am, she thought.
They’ll cart me off to London in a cattle car, and I won’t even
care. You can’t have a nightmare, if you’re
in one
.

Even if she should ever
talk again and people around here didn’t think she was loony, it
wouldn’t make too much difference. Who would she talk to? There was
nobody left from her generation. Not one. Old Duckface Malloney’s
still alive, she recalled, innkeeping at the Sunset Glades, though
he’d had four strokes, none kind enough to do him in. Half the
people she had known left after the tunnel fiasco of 1890; the Boer
War got a few more. Several had died from the pressures of the
Great War – losing sons and grandsons and staring at the gray
months stretching forever ahead, and just giving up. As she should
have.

All the original
Alleyfolk older than she were long dead. She had watched them enter
the earth one by one, mostly in sorrow, occasionally in envy. The
Potts’ Lane crew began to move away and drift off – as she had done
– because no one arrived to renew their own naïve faith in that
perverse community; even the kids found jobs, respectability and
excuses not to visit. After the War and the epidemic had wiped out
the last of the Laners along with just about everybody else over
seventy-five, the European refugees had begun to discover the
shacks and improvised abodes. And Granny knew why. I wish I could
go there, she thought. I want to hear their stories. I’ve heard
them since I was six. I would know what comfort, if any, to give
them. You don’t need a war to make you an outcast, though I’ve seen
four of them if they care to swap miseries.

Not only was there no one of
her generation left here, very few of the second and third
generation knew her or anything about her. She had lived in and
around this very spot for seven decades; she knew every family
who’d ever put down roots here. She knew their relatives,
connections, feudal histories, pretensions and genial follies. They
did not know her. “You’ve made yourself an outsider,” Cap used to
say with that arching smirk, “because you enjoy watching and
judging, and because you are afraid deep-down to take part in the
rituals that sustain their daily lives for fear they will swallow
you up. You’ve judged these values before you’ve had the courage to
try them. I tried them and then, with a little help from Dame
Misfortune, gave them up. I may be a bum, but I know who I was, and
what I am.”

Not true, not so, she found
herself arguing with him again – between the hedge and shriven
hickory tree. You don’t know what I’ve lived through before I was
even an adolescent, what horrors were inlaid already for these
old-woman’s nightmares you couldn’t have survived for one night
without a quart of brandy. What-is-more-to-the-point, you were not
a woman. To be woman – here, then – is to be consumed by ritual. If
I forget, my nightmares remind me.

Many of the basic stock
of the village – Brightons, Barbers, McCourts, Carpenters, Savages
– had been here since the beginning, but the children of these
pioneers would know her only through the stories told of her by
their church-going, upright parents. And she had heard them all in
their variously embroidered forms; that was the price – one of many
– she had paid for living on the fringe. So be it. She had never
complained then and wasn’t about to start now. Certainly Sophie’s
yarns and epic jokes about the citizens-in-good-standing gave back
more than they’d received. “That old mister Redmond, if you stuck a
turnip up his arse, he’d ask you the price-per-pound!” Or, after an
Easter Sunday promenade: “By the Judas, did ya see the riggin’ on
the Reverend Missus? Four corsets wrapped in a mainsail. One fart
an’ she’d’ve blown us all to Kingdom Come!” To the children she was
just Granny Coote, or worse. To their elders she was
queer-old-Arthur’s second folly. To others still older she was Cora
Burgher, the cleaning woman. Before that there was no one to
remember that she had once been Lily. Or care.

2

The Reeve cared. After
Limpy Jenkinson (shrapnel at St. Eloi) and his retarded son Wally
(Walleye to the kids) delivered a cord of wood in November and
again in February, Sunny Denfield would come over after work at the
Foundry and split enough kindling to last her through. When it got
real cold he would lug a scuttle of soft coal over for the Quebec
heater. Granny would smile her thanks, but shake her head when he
left: after all, like so many others her age she had been raised in
drafty cabins and shacks. She knew how to keep warm, if she wanted
to.

Last week following
Limpy’s delivery, the Reeve arrived promptly and began splitting
wood in the tiny shed off the kitchen area. Granny lay on the
chesterfield where she often slept since Arthur died and listened
to the two-step cadence of the axe on wood – one of the earliest,
abiding sounds of her long life. There was comfort in it, and
reassurance. She must have dozed a bit, half-dreaming of someone of
whom Sunny Denfield reminded her – the questing eyes, the softness
unclothed by false masculinity.

“
That should
carry you through to the spring, Cora,” he said, a vee of sweat on
his shirt-front. “Goin’ to be an early one, they say.”

He always called her Cora
because she had been that when he had arrived in Sarnia to take
advantage of the boom created by the tunnel under the River.
Something, lord knows what, prompted him to take up residence in
the Point where Prudie KcKay espied him and persuaded him to make
the move permanent. “Good mornin’, Mrs. Burgher,” he would say to
her – dropping imperceptibly into the local accent – as he met her
each day outside the Queen’s Hotel in his brief bachelor period: he
heading for the streetcar stop at the end of Potts’ Lane and she
trudging up the steps towards another day of housecleaning. Even
then his reputed good breeding (“black sheep of a fine Toronto
family, they say”) shone through: a tip of the workman’s cap and
the impeccable “Missus”. Her first thought had been: I’ve seen
those eyes.

Instead of saying good night
and returning to his family, the Reeve went over to the stove and
put the kettle on.

“
Don’t budge,
Cora. I know where everything is. I’m goin’ to make us a cup of
tea, an’ then I’ve got somethin’ very important to tell
you.”

Granny was fully awake now.

“
It’s good
news,” he said immediately.

I’ll believe it when I taste
it, she thought.

W
hen he had poured the
tea, Reeve Denfield sat beside her on the chesterfield and began
talking. For some reason he was the only person besides Wilf
Underhill who did not stiffen before her apparent silence – perhaps
because he realized that she was not at all silent, that her nods,
looks, minute shades of gesture and quick touches of the hand
represented a fierce desire to communicate. Somehow she always felt
he was talking
with
her
. Over the years since he had been visiting her, he had
come to know by patient trial and error not only every nuance of
her response to his questions or proposals but also what subjects
she liked him to talk about, what village tales she wished to be
told and retold. He was her lifeline to that part of the world out
there – small as it was – which she had marked out for her own. It
wasn’t a matter of keeping up with the gossip – she’d lost the
passion for that when Sophie had died so horribly – but as the
Reeve himself soon discovered and approved, a question of
maintaining the continuity of one’s being, of keeping operational
the connective tissue and the nerve-beds of a lifelong existence in
one place over time. Lucien’s bride, Cora the cleaning-woman,
Eddie’s granny, Mrs. Arthur Coote, Granny Coote – these lives and
the others she had temporarily inhabited were kept coherent and
drew their meaning only if the person she now was, was also moving
in time – touching, colliding, being broken and revived, fully
sentient. If not, then the web of these memories sustaining her
would be loosened from all anchorage, and set adrift to be engulfed
by the alien Night-Dream itself.