Lily's Story (122 page)

Then only
three days before the memorial ceremony, Granny had given Sunny
Denfield a gift, a Testament with an inscription made by her
father: ‘To my dearest princess, the Lady Fairchild’. Excited but
hardly knowing what to make of the discovery, Sunny tried to think
of someone still alive who might
have known Granny Coote or Cora Burgher in the distant
past. Prudie suggested Duckface Malloney down at the Sunset Glades
in Sarnia. Sunny went to see him and after several hours of
frustrating interrogation, he learned conclusively that Cora had
once been Mrs. Lily Marshall and before that Miss Lily Ramsbottom,
and what-is-more she had lived on a farm near Sarnia about the time
of the strange events of 1861. He didn’t know why or how yet, but
he knew. When Ruth-Anne arrived and he took a good long look at his
‘niece’, he had no more doubt. After all, blood was
blood.

4

R
eeve Denfield was
about to speak. Moments before, the MLA for Lambton West, awed by
the monumental stillness and the hushed crowd, had spoken briefly
and from the heart, his prepared speech untouched in his pocket.
Granny stood with the wreath in her hand, haloed by the perfume of
uprooted flowers, and listened.

The Reeve spoke quietly
with a gentle earnestness, the way people do in the sunshine after
Sunday service. He reminded them of the things that had gone
before: the days when the Attawandarons had roamed freely over
territory still unmapped, when the land they were now standing on
had been some sort of sacred grave or shaman’s ground where prayers
and incantations and holy relics had been offered in a language now
lost to time and history. He recalled the days when the village
site was a mere ordnance ground before the great railroad adventure
began. He talked of the coming of the Grand Trunk and the first
labourers who hacked a right-of-way through the bush, laid their
cross-ties, slept in shacks and stayed on to found a community. He
spoke of high hopes, the building of churches and schools, the
passion for politics and nation-making, the movement towards
villagehood. His tone darkened as he recalled the treacheries of
railroad amalgamation, tunnel-construction, the removal of the
car-shops. Many in the audience would remember the wagons with
their human cargo moving sadly through the secretive mists of early
morning, and the vacant neighbourhoods and boarded-up churches. The
Reeve went on to talk about the long recovery, the heroic
contributions of specific citizens, the struggles against
annexation, the new pride of place at last gathering momentum as
they faced the second decade of a new century. Sunny’s voice
continued on as she had heard it so many times over the years and
he spoke those sentiments about the War and what it meant in the
way he had inadvertently rehearsed them for her.

She too would remember all of
these things. But what she would remember most, in whatever years
remained to her, was placing around the neck of the little girl now
clutching her hand the silver pendant and its cameo sketch of one
said to have been a grandmother of her own blood in a far country.
Something squeezed her hand. She glanced down. The cameo was
turning tenderly on the child’s tiny fingers, and as the sunlight
struck the ivory profile there from a momentary quartering angle,
you might have taken it for a replica of her own. The child’s touch
then trembled on the silhouette, circled some memory hidden there,
and took possession.

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