Lily's Story (54 page)

“
Not
now.”

“
Tell me a
story, Mama, the one about Sir Galahad. Please.”

And somehow, she did.

Sophie

19

1

I
n the middle of
October 1870 Maudie Bacon’s husband, Garth, returned home from the
wars to a hero’s welcome. Riel and his Métis hooligans had been
routed without a shot being fired; Manitoba was salvaged for the
Confederation and the federalist cause materially advanced. The
Grand Trunk – already rumoured to be vying with some upstart
pomposity calling itself the Canadian Pacific for the rights to
extend their brand of evolutionary capitalism all the way to the
salmon-basins of British Columbia – honoured Corporal Bacon and
four other local boys at a banquet held in the concourse of the
station on the Point Edward wharf. Major Bolton, representing
Colonel Wolseley, toasted the valiant and spoke reverently of Tom
Marshall, the fallen comrade no one more than he, his commanding
officer, could have wished to have been present here amongst them.
His sentiments were echoed all round. The hero’s widow – alas – was
not there to acknowledge them.

J
ust as Lily feared,
Robbie took Tom’s death very hard. For a little while he seemed
almost pleased with the notion that his father had died in uniform
while leading his men valiantly through impenetrable bush and over
raging torrents and across waste marshes – every thicket
treacherous with Indians who could twist their shadows at will into
the shapes of monsters and trolls. From her place at the window
Lily watched him slash his way into the underbrush, heard his
bullying ululations rise and startle and scatter, then waited,
heart-in-mouth, for her brave warrior to tramp out of the woodlot,
his weapon trailing in the dirt like a sad plough, all the buoyancy
vanished from the large eyes that periodically rolled from side to
side in a vain attempt to identify the enemy who would not show
himself. Carefully she had explained to him that his father’s body
had stopped being – like the stilled rabbit’s or the frozen
sparrows on the window-ledge, like Bachelor Bill under the earth a
mile away – and that his spirit, his soul – the things they loved
most about him, the way he smiled and listened and spoke – had
flown back into the air and even now, if you closed your eyes
quick, you could see them and hear them and almost touch them. But
five minutes later he would scowl over at her and say with innocent
ferocity, “When’s Da comin’ home?” When Lily suggested that he was
seven-going-on-eight and that his Da would be proud of him if he
would walk into town each morning and go to the big school to learn
to read and write and start to become a man – he said shortly, “I
want Da to take me.” That was that. When Lily propped him up on the
chair-arm and began to read the story of Ali Baba to him (she’d
memorized it word for word, though strangely enough she actually
felt the letters crystallizing on the page, having their full
miraculous say), he kicked the book out of her hands and stomped
off. Later he allowed himself to be held while he cried, and cried
out at the trolls and ogres whose deaths he had marked in black on
his avenging scroll. Even then Lily knew these compulsory tears
were but a tiny portion of the huge rage shaking him in her arms.
That this would become for him the unanswerable anger of his life.
When she wept – for herself, for Tom, for the deep absence no
accumulation of days or other joys would ever fill – most of her
tears were for her son, for the life he had dreamed that would not
be, for the consolation she would be forever called upon to give
and be rebuked for. Perhaps I am better off, she thought, because I
never learned to dream too far ahead; Old Samuels taught us how to
dream backwards and be content. Teach me to be lucky, she begged
him one terrible November night as she sat in the dark swaddling
her son’s fury

Brad was
different. He seemed to accept her account of body and spirit,
though she could tell it had no more reality for him than the
rhymes bouncing in his head at night or as he lay among the spent
clover of the meadowlands above the village – flat on his back,
extinguishing the sun with an Ali Baba command. Avid for company
the boys often played side by side, but only rarely now did their
discrete fantasies intersect, and when they did, the outcome was
usually swift and violent. Brad accepted Robbie’s sudden unprovoked
fists as part of his lot in the scheme of things, even his due –
but when the latter added, if he remember to, “I hate you”, Brad
would stop crying at once and grow very still. This seemed to
please Robbie almost as much as the tears, for he could then carry
on his own game without even the background annoyance of his
brother’s silliness. As a result Brad drew even closer to her. He
ventured out less. He begged her to read to him, and as soon as she
had got beyond her repertoire of
memorized pieces and slowed to a near-halt at the balking
print, he would then throw a tantrum, sometimes yelling out with
impudent mockery the meaning of a word that would not come off her
tongue. Later, in bed, he would nuzzle against her and start to
sing “A froggie came a-wooing” till she relented and joined him
part-way through and they finished up with a harmonious roar. I’m
spoiling him, she thought, but she couldn’t think how else she
could love him. Once when he called out to her from his sleep, she
came across to the boys’ room in time to hear him say, “I saw Da,
in my dream. He talked to me.” Robbie awakened too, said, “Da’s
dead.” She held them both. When she woke up in the morning, they
were still there.

“
Ah, there
goes Lily and her boys,” grocer Redmond remarked to a
cus
tomer during one of Lily’s
infrequent visits to town. Lily and her boys. That would be it –
her life – at least as far as she could see.

T
here was so little
time, it seemed, to think about the pregnancy, now in its eighth
month. Fortunately it felt like the first one, lively and
healthful. She had no discomfort except for the weight of the girl
herself – she knew it would be a girl and addressed it always as
‘she’. This one will be mine, my private treasure, she thought,
tasting the bitter sweetness of the notion, there’s no helping it.
I shall try to give her father to her – when she’s ready – but by
then she’ll be bonded to me. You have your Papa’s smile, I’ll say
to her, and we’ll hug one another, feeling your absence, Tom, in
our separate ways. Stop it, stop this, remember Old Samuels – dream
backwards, dream of your lover blessing your flesh with the fire
you stirred and vanquished with your own desire, his seed tucked
away already bequeathed.

November of 1870 turned
out to be a cold and nasty month. Sleet storms roared in off the
Lake freezing the last leaves to their branches while gusting
after-winds snapped them free again. Every morning Lily had to get
a fire going early in order to boil gallons of water to unlock the
ice choking the well-line under the sink and the one in the yard as
well. Robbie and Brad carted wood in from the shed – several of
Garth Bacons pals had come out in September and cut four cords –
but already she had used too much kindling trying to get fast, hot
fires going, and Robbie was coming closer each morning to cutting
off his foot as he wielded his father’s hatchet uncertainly. Young
Mary Bacon was sent out by Maudie every Saturday, but had to return
weekdays to go to school – “A whim she’ll get over soon enough,”
Maudie promised. Mary helped to clean and prepare food ahead, but
she was less proficient with an axe than Robbie. One day she walked
Robbie in and out of the village several times – once in the dark –
to make sure he could find his way to Maudie’s house at any hour,
should the baby decide to make an impromptu entrance. From Bacon’s
a buggy would be despatched to pick up Dr. Dollard in Sarnia.
“Sophie’s out of business,” Maudie said through Mary, “too drunk to
deliver.” Robbie was delighted with his role as scout and
forerunner. Lily was sure he rehearsed it secretly during the
afternoons when she had to lie down to rest and he was ordered not
to leave the yard. Brad ‘never told’, though he was treated as if
he did – daily.

At any rate,
Lily could see that life was going to be no easier after the baby
came. She would need help. Help would cost money, even if one of
Clara’s sisters could be persuaded to give up school for a while
and come. And money there was little of. They ha
d saved almost a hundred dollars towards the
cottage in town, and the Government had promised some compensation
whenever they could find time to pass the necessary legislation.
She could live for a year or more on that. Perhaps longer if the
boys didn’t go to school, an option she had never seriously
considered. What then? The whole acreage could be turned over and
made productive, provided she was strong enough in the spring. But
prices were uncertain as the new Confederation sorted out its
priorities, the weather was fickle and the competition fierce. As
Maudie would say not ungenerously, “You see now, Lil, why so many
of us cling to the church; what else’ve we got to protect us when
we’re down, when our men desert us?” Late one afternoon when she
was out in the garden area looking for Robbie, she saw his tiny
figure zigzagging through the withered bull-thistle of the meadow,
and her eye caught the pines on either side of the opening she
stood in. The windbreak. Uncle Chester’s barrier against the
encroaching world, Aunt Bridie’s signal to the Grand Trunk of
defiance and separateness, Lily’s beloved evergreens that sang
softly in the summer and held the stars aloft in black winter
skies. The last of the ancient horizons, old sagamore, she
whispered to his presence somewhere beside her. Say yes. Robbie’s
death-shriek shook her awake. A bull-thistle toppled. Another. He
waved to the sentry.

They must go. This winter,
white-pine would still be fetching a good price, before the
peninsula was opened up for systematic slaughter. Also, she
realized, it was time. The smoke from the cottages was less than
half-a-mile away. Some of the timber she could take back as sawn
boards; she’d get someone, perhaps the timber-cutter, to put up two
chicken coops. Chickens she knew. Eggs were a sure living. She’d
trade vegetables for grain. Her thoughts raced, full of figures,
schemes, possibilities. She barely felt Robbie’s petulant tug on
her sleeve.

When Mary Bacon came that
Saturday – the last in November – Lily was still excited, and some
of her enthusiasm had rubbed off on the boys. “I’m gonna help cut
the trees down!” Robbie announced, “an’ Brad an’ me’s gonna collect
the eggs every mornin’, ain’t we, Brad?” and he demonstrated his
technique for terrorizing any hen who harboured thoughts of saving
an egg for her own pleasure. Lily came out with Tom’s writing pad,
his quill pen and a bottle of thickened ink. “I’d like a message to
be put up in the post office,” she said, and Mary, wide-eyed,
picked up the pen, eager to display her newly-achieved skills. She
left, skipping through the wet snow.

“
When the hens
get too old to give eggs,” Brad said, “what’ll we do with
them?”

“
Chop off
their heads an’ eat ’em!” Robbie said. “Eh, Mama?”

Lily didn’t hear. She was
clutching her abdomen with both hands.

“
The baby kick
you?” Brad said, open-mouthed.

“
You okay,
Mama?” Robbie clasped her arm and steadied her.

“
Yes,” she
hissed, sitting down, dredging up a thin smile.

That was no contraction, she
thought.

2

W
hatever fears pursued
him, Robbie Marshall acted with a courage and sense of purpose that
would have made his father whistle with pride. Despite the galling
pain that stabbed incoherently – spitefully – at her body, Lily
found time to worry about her seven-year-old melting into the snowy
dark, lamp in hand, the map of his voyage floating a foot beyond
its shivelled glow, her life in his care, his life suddenly lost to
hers. As each scream jolted through her clenched teeth, Brad jumped
in the invisible ring that pinned him to one spot on the earth.
Between jolts she was at last able to ask him to bring her some
water and another blanket. A long time later, hours it seemed, he
meandered back in, humming to himself. He put the blanket on and
began tucking her in, one tiny fold at a time. There was no water.
Her throat burned. The pain no longer sliced into her in slender
arcs, it scoured at the entire abdominal cavity, as if some drunken
ploughman were dragging a harrow-disc cornerwise across it. Then
the air around her went numb. She dreamt of Maman LaRouche in her
ice-house, the soothing cool of ice on the skin, a sunny room shorn
of flies.

Dr. Dollard arrived with
a rush and a clatter that woke Brad out of his dazed sleep. He
started to cry as if he would die were he to stop. Mary went
straight to him, forgetting that Robbie was still in her arms
dreaming he was awake and strong and not really lost. Maudie and
the doctor headed for the bedroom. Garth Bacon tethered the horse
and sat in the democrat shivering between ‘belts’ from his flask.
He was only thirty but looked fifty – already he’d seen too much of
this. Nothing could ever brace him against the kind of screams that
came, undeflected by wood or grass or muffling snow or alcohol,
straight into this brain. He thought of a pig being gutted alive by
a deaf-and-dumb butcher. She’ll die, he thought. We’ll all
die.