Lily's Story

Although they lived on the far edge of the new village, shielded from it by the last rows of aboriginal forest, Lily and Tom felt their lives growing in parallel with it.

Very soon after their return from a week with Mrs. Edgeworth, now Aunt Elspeth, Tom took up his job with the Grand Trunk and settled into a daily routine that Lily wished to go on forever. Each morning just as the sun reached the tree-line and their cockerel reannounced his lustiness, Lily detached herself carefully and reluctantly from the cocoon of warmth she helped create with her lover’s body, and got a brisk fire going in the stove. The kindling she had chopped the previous afternoon snapped and thirsted after air. She would then pump the kettle full – the autumn dews cool against her bare skin, the hushed morning wordless with expectation – and having placed it over the open flame, would slip into the bedroom again and watch her husband’s face in its sleep. How pleasant it must be, she mused (noting his limbs fret and unwind beneath the comforter) to be wakened every morning by the crack of kindling, your home filling with heat to welcome your rising, your wife with her kettle on and bending down to bless your lips. She had to be quick, of course, or the day’s natural timing would be set ajar; Tom, pawing his way out of some dream or other, might ring her with his powerful arms – now thickened by the hauling of hundred-pound kegs and sacks – and pull her back into his lustful reverie. Beyond an initial cry of surprise and protest, she made on these occasions no resistance, for Tom’s loving would be slow and dream-like, drawing her down into her own fantasia, and she was glad she’d had no one to tell her exactly what love could or shouldn’t be. If Tom were somewhat taken aback by her aggressiveness at night, he very soon adjusted to it, and here in these improvised and illicit mornings they found a mutual pace that left them both adrift, dreamful, awash in desire without appetite. It was during one of these sessions late in September on a misty Sunday morning that Lily unexpectedly broke the spell and thrashed her way to a first, shuddering, eye-popping climax.

“Good morning,” Tom said when he’d caught his breath and some of his dignity.

Lily shut her eyes and clung to his shoulders, letting the last wavelets of shame and ecstasy fend for themselves. “Nobody told me about this,” she breathed against him.

“Me neither,” Tom said. “And on a Sunday at that.”

She felt the laughter rumble through his chest, and she hugged him, and marvelled at the whimsicality of the world’s working.

Except for Sundays, she had learned to discipline herself to the point where Tom would have to dissemble sleep as she started breakfast and then spring like a lynx at her when she bent to watch him wake. She soon learned, also, that a sudden giggle or a quick tickle under the arms deflated his desires or the fancies that fed them, after which they would tussle and cavort like a couple of cubs until one of them toppled onto the cold floor and breakfast-and-work reasserted their sober priorities.

Tom liked a heavy breakfast, so Lily cooked him back-bacon and eggs (provided by their own hens now), then joined him for toast, jam and tea. She didn’t mind in the least that he was often grumpy in the morning, as she was accustomed to rising at dawn and found herself unable to contain her humming and good cheer. Besides, she wasn’t eager to talk too much over breakfast since one of her recurring fears was that they would soon run out of things to say to one another, and barely a month had passed since the wedding. Once, walking through the oak-and-maple bush east of the house with the leaves crackling underfoot, Tom had turned to her and said: “Lily darling, if you and another just like you inherited the earth, there’d soon be no talking left at all.” Aunt Bridie had been more blunt: “Child, you’re about as gabby as a rabbit in shock.” But she was sure Tom loved her precisely because she was such a good listener. After supper or after a stroll through the woods on Sundays, he loved to tell stories about his wild school-days, his escapades with Mad-Cap Dowling and his ‘bunch’, or the absurdities of the characters he’d encountered in the practice of law in Toronto. Not that he wouldn’t try to prompt Lily herself to open up: “Why don’t you ever talk about yourself? You don’t have to tell me all,” he would laugh. “I just want to get to know as much of you as I can. Love is sharing, isn’t it?” So, on neatly spaced occasions Lily would take up the burden of story-telling, for that is how she conceived of these exchanges before a blazing fire or sometimes after early-evening love-making, with Tom puffing away at the clay pipe Aunt Elspeth had given him. As she cast back for suitable material she found herself selecting the happy, nostalgic events – her trips to Port Sarnia to peddle her fruits and vegetables, the eccentric Misses Baines-Powell, the boozy warmth of Char Hazelberry and her girls Betsy and Winnie, Mrs. Templeton’s kindness, Bachelor Bill’s antics. Moreover, she discovered that as she gathered momentum in the wake of Tom’s encouragement, she was using voices and phrasings – even cadence and intonation – that belonged more to others than herself: Aunt Bridie, Bachelor Bill, Mrs. Templeton, Maman LaRouche. Finally she realized that she was reliving these simple events through a variety of lenses, so that they came out fresh, droll and unscathed by repetition.

However, for much of the time Tom continued to do a lot of the talking, and Lily found herself somewhat envious at the ease of his delivery and his confidence. Even now she had an intimation of the difficulty she would later have in this community – particularly a community of women where gossip, reminiscence, familial history and chronicles of daily life, and the comforting reciprocity of small-talk were the principal means of social intercourse and of dealing with the world at large. Here at home, though, during the honeymoon of their love, Lily discovered that while their talk for much of the time was being reduced, it was also being transformed into a much richer kind of communication, one at which she herself had always excelled. Over breakfast, for instance, Tom would raise his left eyebrow and Lily would fill his cup with tea. When he left for work they no longer exchanged ‘Goodbyes’; Tom would embrace her with one arm (his lunch-box in the other) as if to say “It’s all right, I’ll be back soon”, and she would briefly detain his outstretched hand and give it a single pat, intimating “I know you work hard, but I’ll be here when you get back.” So subtle had this range of gestures and subvocalizations become – even in a month or so – that one variation from the norm could be devastating. One day Tom seemed particularly grumpy over breakfast, and later when he put his arm around her on the stoop, she sensed the tentativeness, and as he withdrew it for her to bless, he pulled it back too quickly. Her caress ended in mid-air. It was like a slap in the face. But when he returned at dusk, he hugged her till he felt her forgiveness. The periodical evenings, then, when they exchanged narratives or speculated on the months to come were, like their carnal interludes, events of a discrete kind with their own indices of joy.

Being a man of easy words, Tom was also more easily stung by them than she was. “You’ve got a midget’s tongue in your noggin’,” Aunt Bridie would say to her, “but it’s as tart as a bee-sting.” To Uncle Chester she said one night: “She may not talk a lot, but when she opens her mouth it’s trouble with two t’s. She’ll rue that sharp tongue of hers one day, mark my words.” Lily on the other hand was more hurt by an unthinking shrug of the shoulder than by any direct complaint Tom might make about his food or her not dressing up enough when Aunt Elspeth was “good enough to give you that trousseau of beautiful things” – salvaged from the outcasts of the daughters or Shakespeare she might have replied but bit her tongue, or more tartly still and more to the point: I thought you preferred me dressed down. I guess I’ve spent my life not reacting to words, she thought; I seem to prefer to observe them, absorb them, or find out what lies under them. But then women are better at absorbing things. And better, too, at waiting.

For Lily, much of that first autumn was spent in waiting of one kind or another. Tom would trudge in to the early dawn, and she would stand in the partly redeemed garden and watch him till he disappeared through the trees. There was lots of work for her during the day – cleaning the house, tending the last of their meagre harvest, ‘doing down’ some of the wizened cucumbers, baking bread, and then – in the afternoon hours – chopping wood, mending, sewing, and planning the robust suppers Tom required. Several times a week she went over to see that Old Bill was all right – taking him baked goods and vegetables, and seeing that his cupboard was stocked with staples. Old Bill was growing worse, it appeared. More and more he seemed distracted and forgetful. Lily often had to remind him that he had promised so-and-so up the line a day’s chopping, or even point him in the right direction.

Nonetheless, it was a day of waiting. Tom was everywhere: in the sock she was darning, a sweater she was knitting him for winter, the food she prepared sweating over the stove in the warm Indian Summer, his smell in the sheets as she changed them. The memory of his lovemaking, his stark worship of her flesh and its unpredictable surrendering, rippled through her all morning long or ambushed her at odd moments. Or some imagined, interrupted slight would fester during the interminable hour when she would expect his figure to rise in front of the setting sun and bring with it the kind of healing possible only at the end of day. At least the waiting-out of his absence was over. But there were the other, more minute types of waiting – visible only perhaps to women. Waiting to see what sort of toll the labour-of-the-day had taken upon his body – sore back, bruised arms, crushed finger – and upon his spirit – fatigue, anger, rebellion – and for her the myriad adjustments to be made and tolerated and woven into the harmony of home. And waiting to see what response, if any, he might make to the signals she gave of her own needs – to be touched, to be soothed with stories, to be his accomplice in lust. If Tom were watching her in the same way, she could not detect it, nor, she guessed, would he ever know how much giving – beyond the visible – she was offering him each day. When Tom was late, compelled to work overtime as the ice threatened to close down the shipping lanes for the season, the waiting was unendurable. I have made him my life, she thought, and even though I ought to, I seem to have no regrets.

One day late in November, a week before the ice froze over the River and long after Tom had begun his nightly trudges homeward in the oppressive, autumnal dark, Lily sat beside her lamp and waited for her husband. Overtime again, she thought resentfully. For two nights in a row he had come home at eight o’clock too exhausted by a twelve-hour shift to eat his supper or do anything else but fall comatose on the bed. On the first occasion he woke her up and made perfunctory, routine love to her out of some misguided sense of pride or perhaps some ordinary sensitivity to her needs – she knew not which, though the result was a surge of depression she had not had since waving goodbye to her Aunt and Uncle in Oil Springs. The next night when she again felt his weary gesture, she murmured that her period was starting, and he slumped gratefully to sleep.

It was past eight o’clock. The fire was almost out below the congealing stew. Never had Tom worked this late. Even the Grand Trunk admitted the limits of exhaustion. Her only comfort was that one more week of this and Tom would be transferred to the new car-shops beside the round-house. Here he would ply his carpenter’s trade, fixing broken boards in box-cars and other rolling stock. Lily had seen the glaze of defeat in his eyes these past few weeks, and she had done what she could. The labouring job, she recalled, had been all along a mixed blessing. Early on, it had put muscle on his fine frame and added a masculine air to his stride and his proud smile as he counted out the dollars on the table every pay day. Sometimes as he dressed in the mornings, Lily would effect a trip to the woodshed so that she could pause and watch him unobserved through the open door. Always he slept naked, and she would gaze – fascinated and ashamed – as he stepped into the chill air: clapping his arms across his chest like some haughty gorilla in a Congolese dawn, then pressing his palms between his legs like a little boy, and finally stretching for his undershirt so that for a second his body froze in a singular tableau of muscle and unreleased sexuality. She thought: he could crush me with one flex of a forearm. His man’s instrument, driving towards its own pleasure, could sunder her like a peach, those tiger-teeth on her breasts could mangle without a flick of remorse. Then, his sandy curls just emerging from the undershirt, he would spot her and grin innocently, and be her Tom again.

But that body and that power had their own forms of vulnerability, she soon found out. Many an evening during late October she had repaired the damage of the day – rubbing liniment into his aches, putting plasters on his cuts and scrapes, and when those remedies failed, helping him forget in the yielding opiate of her flesh. But tonight he was not here to choose. It was at least ten o’clock by the moon’s position in the southern sky. Perhaps he had been seriously hurt; barrels and cartons were forever toppling and injuring the men. Already two workers had had arms broken, and disappeared – without recompense, of course: an incapacitated man was a threat to the health of the company. My word, Lily thought, what will we do if Tom can’t work? What we’ve always done: get by. I’m as strong as any man in my own way. He wonders why I don’t wear those London ladies’ dresses, but I don’t. I don’t have any flesh to fill them out. I’ve got no need for corselets, my backside is muscled, my hips are as lean as a boy’s, my breasts small and unwomanly. My skin is sun-burned, my hair blotched. I felt a fool in that wedding dress even though it was made for me. I don’t know for the life of me why a man as handsome as Tom would feel so passionate about me. But, then, I don’t intend to ask him. I only want him to come home safely, now, in one piece.

During this reverie Tom came noisily up the path and flung open the door.

“Hullo, Lily love,” he grinned loudly. “Think I might be a wee bit late.”

Lily could smell the whiskey before she could rise to face him. She brushed by him to the stove, where she began poking aimlessly at the corpse of the fire.

“Ah, the little woman’s saved supper for me. Thank you, darling. Thank you very much,” he slurred. He stumbled, caught a wary table, righted himself, and managed to land one buttock on a chair. “If that’s Irish stew, love, I can’t smell it from here.”

“The fire’s out,” Lily said, blowing on some paper in a pathetic attempt to rouse it.

“We worked some overtime,” he said, “then Gimpy and Bruce and me went down to the bunk house to toast our good future at being dray-horses for the Grand Trunk Railway.”

The kindling had caught, smokily, and Lily shook the flaccid stew across the stove-lids.

“Stop that infernal racket, woman!” Tom yelled. “I don’t need anything to eat, can’t you see that? Are you deaf and dumb? I’m drunk. Glorious and stupid falling-down drunk!”

Lily headed for the bedroom.

“Where in hell are you going now?”

“To get the bed-warmer,” Lily said in a shriveling voice. “An’ the liniment.”

“Come over here!”

Lily stood her ground.

“For Christ’s sake, woman, come over here before I puke in your stewpot!”

Lily edged over towards Tom. He was sitting with his head between his hands, shivering no doubt from the cold and false embrace of the alcohol. Lily stopped about four-feet away, near the stove, but she made no move towards the simmering stew. Tom coughed in a series of ghastly spasms, but when she started to assist, he raised a warning hand. Finally, taking a deep breath, he looked up at his wife, the one soul on this earth he would give his life for, and said through the press of tears: “For God’s sake, Lily, why can’t you get made or scream or sulk or curse me or hit me with a frying pan. I’m no damn saint, you know. I’m a human being.” And to prove it, he sobbed into his hands and could not be consoled.

For a while Tom seemed pleased with his winter job. Since all the rolling stock in those days was made of wood and the climate of those times no less inclement than now, the repair business was secure and lucrative. In fact, the ‘car-shops’, as they were called, were to be a stable source of employment for the inhabitants of the Point for decades to come and eventually the centre-piece in the Great Betrayal of the ’nineties. But in the cold winter of 1861-62 there was no tunnel under the River St. Clair or bridge over it; the great highballs from the American mid-west thundered up from Chicago laden with corn and wheat and roared back with over-priced implements and calico from the factories of the eastern seaboard and now – thanks to the Grand Trunk – from the fledgling foundries of Montreal, Toronto and London. Situated on the narrowest neck of the mighty St. Clair, Point Edward had had its destiny already appointed: it was to be the gateway to a westering continent. However, by mid-December the River was jammed with ice, its own and that crushing down from the vast lakes above it. The same ice that silenced the freight-sheds – with steamers, paddle-wheelers, sloops and yawls alike out for the season – stilled the huge barges and ferries that wheeled up to a hundred box-cars a day back and forth between the two nations. Occasionally, during a January thaw or a freak contortion of the ice-pack, the fierce current would surge in the sunlight and a wild dash would be made across the divide – box-cars, deck hands and ferry-boat tilting, skidding and slewing in the northerly gales. On these occasions all the company hands were pressed into service, including the carpenters and joiners. The box-cars, many of them fully loaded, had to be pinioned to the ferry’s deck with ropes and blocks. Often several of them pulled loose in the lurching swells, and the desperate crew would try to jerk the lines back into place, sometimes improvising an ingenious brace but mostly using the brute strength of their backs, while icy spray broke over them and jagged floes flashed by at every turn. That winter they didn’t lose a single box-car. Three men were crippled, and dismissed.

Tom insisted that Lily “get out of the house” and come down to watch one of these adventures. Finally, she agreed. As it turned out, the crossing was relatively uneventful except for one stock-car full of chilled cattle (on their way to Flint, Michigan) that tore loose from its moorings and slid part-way into the water before it could be winched back into place. Lily could see the commotion and hear the vivid cries of the terrified beasts, but she lost sight of Tom, and when one of the men flipped into the water, her heart stopped. Seconds later the fellow was hauled back in on a safety rope, striking the deck with the thud of a frozen seal. In a minute he was up, and Lily was sure she could hear laughter; then the man who had engineered the rescue peered towards the wharf, towards Lily, and, she was certain, waved at her.

Tom escorted her up to the little tea-room in the grand concourse of the station. Lily made no mention of the luncheon she had shared with royalty in the adjoining ballroom, and certainly no one present on that occasion would have recognized her as the object of a Prince’s attention. Lily was not thinking at all of such things. She was trying to understand the gleam in her husband’s eye, the sureness of his stride beside her, the jauntiness in his voice. He paid no heed to the rope-burns on his hands as he sat across from her, with his tea cooling, and recounted every detail of the crossing and the rescue.

“We did it again,” he said. “You see why I wanted you to come down and watch. I only wish I could bring you on board. You can’t imagine what it feels like out there with the wind howling in your ears and the ice bouncing all around you like big boulders and the ropes stretching and everybody holding their breath waiting for something to break loose and knowing that one slip and you’ll either be crushed to death or dumped into the drink and froze like a brick. Did you see me yank ol’ Mason out of the pond? He’s not thawed out yet!”

Lily said something she instantly regretted.

“How many of them cows died?”

By mid-January winter had settled in for a long stay. No ferries challenged the ice. The snow bloomed and foliated in the hardwoods behind the house and plumped the pines along the lane towards the Errol Road. It was a soft, blanched, filigree world that threw into sharp relief those few surviving angularities of landscape.

Lily found Aunt Bridie’s quilting frame in the shed and, near it, a bundle of scrap cloth collected from the cast-offs of Sarnia’s petite-bourgeoisie.

“What’s that contraption?” Tom said that Sunday afternoon, glancing up from his labours over the broken chair.

“It’s Aunt Bridie’s,” Lily said. “I’m gonna make quilts.”

“Oh.”

“An’ sell them,” she added.

Tom went back to his repairs, but soon he was seated behind Lily as her hands played with the myriad shapes and hues of cloth scattered on the floor, out of which she was improvising patterns later to be meticulously duplicated and sewn into their own interim kind of landscape.

“How do you know what goes where?” Tom asked quietly. Lily shook her head and continued. These were not like any designs he had seen at his Aunt’s or the bazaars she sponsored. Lily herself didn’t know what prompted her to select one piece and place it a certain way over another. She fiddled and nudged and tested – barely aware that some triangular, kendall swatch might have called to mind the corner of an elm once visible at a window’s edge, a maple leaf quartered by shadow, or a slice of fern thirsty for light. Under her fingers’ urging, bits of colour and cotton became half-cast suns, ovular moons, any-tree’s boughs arched, corniced, magically magenta in the blue, blue shade.

The afternoon was gone. Tom was still there.

That night he slowed his love to the most forgiving of rhythms, and Lily – released into gratitude unencumbered by guilt or diminution of self – sailed at her lover’s pleasure into the ecstatic and unconditionally sensate realm shared by fool-saints and mad-men.

“You are a marvel,” Tom whispered as if in church, his forefinger caressing the sweat from her brow. “You’re so much more than I deserve.”

“Don’t say such a thing,” Lily said when she was able to speak. “Ever.”

Christmas had been one of those serene familial interludes appreciated in retrospect more for its happy interposition between events of more boisterous moment than for its own special ambience. A few days before the holiday two train-tickets arrived from Aunt Elspeth along with a touching invitation and word that Bridie and Chester were in London on business. Thus, Christmas day – its religious significance noted only, it seemed, by Mrs. Edgeworth and that “fine American gentleman” Melville Armbruster – was spent in feasting, toasting and voluable good cheer. Lily found herself tingling with a queer sort of pride at the sight of Aunt Bridie holding her own in such a household – her new clothes, serviceable yet always carrying one hint of extravagance (a bow at the waist, a tiny yellow hanky at the sleeve, a violet hidden among the folds); her upright bearing; her country speech undercut with wit and calculated humour; the ease with which the topics of the day were discussed and dissected. Mrs. Edgeworth was in awe; Armbruster was enthralled, kissing Bridie’s hand with Yankee hyperbole, sliding her chair in at the strategic moment. Lily reminded herself that, after all, her Aunt had once been an urban woman waiting on table and attending toilette in the bed-chambers and anterooms of what passed for high society in the provinces. Notwithstanding, Lily was puzzled by the nameless resentment that welled up at such thoughts. Aunt Bridie, in turn, waited for news that Lily could not deliver.

Uncle Chester looked pale but happy and full of enthusiasm for his projects, as their drilling was to continue even through these winter months. Tom seemed in his element also, and after Christmas dinner he went up to his room and came down in uniform to entertain the guests with funny stories about the Battle of Montgomery’s Tavern and other escapades of the Province’s military past. Lily was seen not to be laughing.

When it became obvious that winter had closed the river traffic for some time to come, Tom was unable to disguise his frustration. Lily had picked up every tic of irritation, careful now not to overcompensate with excess cheeriness or solicitude, though she did kill one of the hens for Sunday dinner and stuff it with Tom’s favourite dressing. He seemed pleased, and asked her to show him how the quilt was coming. Lily felt that she herself might have been the cause for Tom’s irritableness because she had been having bad dreams for the past while, which left her tired and shaken. One scene in particular was powerful and recurrent enough to obtrude into her daylight existence. Try as she might, she could not erase it. She saw a clearing at night, engulfed by moon-shadow, and yet in the centre of it a sort of tower made of some ghastly, luminous metal reared upward on its own – stark and imperious; and then without warning the entire landscape quivered epileptically, and the top of the tower burst apart in a cloud of spouting emulsive that might have been smoke or steam or some rabid foaming of the mouth; then all went black, the clearing empty and silent except for two objects that glistened in the grass like discarded wall-eyes.

One day in early February Tom came home late, and slightly drunk. He seemed cheerful enough, however, and beyond banging a pot or two for effect and serving supper in its lukewarm state, Lily did nothing out of the ordinary. Tom seemed amused by her performance, and later his love-making was as playful as it was prolonged. For two days thereafter he arrived home on time in spite of the near-blizzard that buried the hen-house and erased the international border.

“The men are organizing a sleigh-ride for the families and girl-friends,” he announced. “Next week. Be a good chance for you to meet some people.”

Lily feigned interest, watching for signs.

The following evening he was drunk again and decidedly uncheerful. He uttered nothing decipherable, fumbled with his supper, and finally vomited all over the freshly-scrubbed floor. By the time she got it cleaned up and dampened down the two fires and freshened the chamber pots, Tom was snoring, fully-clothed and stinking on the bed. Lily slipped into her old room. The dreams were not happy ones.

At breakfast she said, “I’d like to go on that sleigh-ride.”

The weather would be perfect for the ‘tallyho’, as the locals called it. The blizzard had been followed by five days of clear, below-zero skies; the snows had settled in the bush, been tramped smooth on the village paths, and deceived the eye into accepting the altered horizons. The night before the planned festivities was immensely beautiful. The stars shone with such clarity even prophecy seemed possible; the completed moon sailed alone, serene and sibylline. Seated on a stool near the west window, putting the last stitches into a quilt pattern, and gazing for long moments at the universe expanding beyond her, Lily was hardly aware that the evening had passed her by and her husband was not yet home.

It might have been midnight for all she knew when she saw two figures staggering through the drifts of the garden towards the house. The moon sketched their antic in cutting silhouette. They were singing a bawdy shanty of some sort, and laughing heartily as they pitched and yawed through the yard. The stranger, she guessed, would have to be Gimpy Fitchett: there was an extra stammer in his swagger. As they navigated in the general direction of the door – arms interlinked, voices joined in the hunt for harmony – Tom changed the tune, bellowing moonward in a mock-heroic Irishman’s lilt:

In Dublin’s fair city

Lived a maiden so pretty

Her name was sweet

Lil-lee my love!

At least they’re happy, Lily thought, poking the fire into life and hoping for the best.

“Come on, duckling, come over here and say hello to Gimpy,” Tom said as he tipped another dollop of whiskey into the coffee Lily had prepared.

“I said hello to Gimpy,” Lily said. “Five times.”

“I mean say hello, not just say hello,” Tom said.

“It’s okay, Tommy. Just take it easy, eh.” Gimpy, more sober than when he’d first arrived, put a soothing hand on his buddy’s shoulder.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Tom said. “I get enough of that horse-shit at the shop all day long.”

“Maybe some more coffee, missus,” Gimpy said with exaggerated politeness.

“Are you gonna come over and say a nice proper hello to ol’ Gimp or aren’t you?”

“You oughta have some supper,” Lily said. She stared at the lukewarm pots on the stove.

“Ain’t that sweet now, Gimp ol’ boy, the little lady wants me to have some supper. I think maybe she don’t like me drinking coffee, eh.” He winked with the wrong eye.

You go ahead, Tommy. But if it ain’t too much trouble, I’d like a bit of that grub, ma’am. Smells real nice.” He grinned, exposing his rotting teeth, and adjusted his stiffened leg, the result of an accident during his glory days as a trainman.

“If you like horseshit,” Tom said, and started in with a barrack’s version of Molly Malone:

Oh her blooms were so ample

The lads love to sample

The sweetmeats of –

The grub which Gimpy alluded to had abruptly left the stove and was already on its way to an unexpected target. The potato-and-roast-beef hash struck the Irish balladeer flush on the tonsils. Tom blinked in disbelief as the sludge oozed onto his workshirt. Still dazed, he looked up just in time to receive the full venom of the vegetable soup. Before he could recover to mount any response, Lily had her boots and her coat on and was slamming the door with resolute finality. She heard the scuffling behind her, and as she marched towards the north-east woods, she heard their voices rise and then wane.

“Goddammit, you come back here, woman! You hear me? You goddam well come back here!”

“Now Tommy, Tommy. It don’t matter none.”

“You get your carcass back here or I’ll –”

“Let it go, eh. Come on now.”

“Lil-eee!”

“I think I better be goin’.”

“You stay right here. Don’t you move. I’m gonna fix her wagon good. Lil-eeee!”

Lily let a deer-trail lead her into the woods, into the silk oblivion of silence and deep snow. Here, thought was obliterated. She gathered the rhythm of her breathing from anonymity, she felt her heart pump with every stride, she let the wind-chill anesthetize the blood under her skin, she walked and walked till she found again some part of her being she could inhabit with impunity.

She found herself sitting in a tiny cove of snow along the frozen creek. Underneath the camouflage she was sure she could hear the water still moving, its voice faint, tinsel, palimsest – like a dolphin’s song from a distant sea. She heard the weasel’s ermine belly dragging at the burrow’s edge, felt his ferret’s glare on her heart. Then he was gone, scrambling underground, his ears picking up the same sound that made Lily leap straight up and freeze.

It was the crashing of masculine boots against the snow, punctuated by the snap of brittle twigs. Lily swung round in time to see a black figure staggering through the stark trees, its exaggerated shadow slashing and dissolving into the chiaroscuro of the moon-lit forest.

Quickly Lily picked up the deer-trail to her right and fled as quietly as she dare. Against the hammering of her heart she heard the attacking footfalls fade, and when she stopped – it seemed like miles later and after a dozen curves and backtrackings – the silence of the bush had reasserted itself. Who could it have been? A drunken railroader? Not Tom, that was certain. What did he want? She let the aftershocks shiver their way out of her system, and then took her bearings. To her relief, she concluded that she had ended up less than a quarter-of-a-mile from the house. What time it was she could only guess. She headed south-west towards the remains of the pinery.

A few minutes later she could see the opening in the trees ahead. She was almost home. The figure surprised her completely when it leaped out of the shadows to her left, flung its arms overhead like uncoordinated wings and stumbled forward, its eyes – if it had any in the black blur where its face lay – aimed at Lily. As she stood mesmerized, the creature seemed to half-fly, half-stalk towards her, the way a rabid crow might seize upon some fatally silver trinket. The cry that came from its torture was not a caw. It was a lament, a plea, a wail – and utterly human. The force of it stunned Lily so much that it was several seconds before the words were decipherable. By that time the creature was upon her, and she slipped to one side, grasped one of its wing-cloaks as it sank past her and tipped it into the snow, where it lay crumpled, as if dead.

Gently, Lily drew back the fur flap of the Russian helmet.

“I been lookin’ everywhere for Violet. She’s run off again. I been lookin’ all over and I can’t find her no place. You seen my Violet?”

“Violet’s safe in London,” Lily said, trying to get Old Bill to his feet. “Let’s go home now.”

“You ain’t Violet? I can’t go home without my Violet.”

Lily ignored his desperate questions. She dragged him to his feet, and once up he seemed a bit more oriented. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Lily, Bridie’s little orphan girl.”

Lily forced his arm over her shoulder. He was not much taller than she but he was still muscled and a dead-weight. She gasped as the stench of his breath struck her: something besides his teeth had died in there. One step at a time, through drifts and over felled trunks with the zero-chill icing up sweat and saliva and stiffening muscle against bone, Lily carried Old Bill the four hundred yards to the edge of the expropriated property. It took close to an hour because every few steps Old Bill would sag, then suddenly straighten, like a corpse sitting up in its coffin, and howl into the muffling night his one-word lamentation.

The sudden illumination of moonlight-on-snow in the clearing seemed to jar something in Old Bill’s brain, and he said softly to Lily, standing on both feet, “You’re Lily. Are we home now?” And they tramped together towards his darkened hut. Lily saw a dim glow in the window of her own house as they passed it, but no sound carried outward. The chimney was smokeless.

In the candlelight, Old Bill’s kitchen was dank, cold and stinking of rotted food, mould, urine, sweat. Her teeth chattering and her fingers numb, Lily found some bits of wood and paper, enough to get a smudged fire going in the ancient stove. She removed Old Bill’s outer clothing, shielding herself from his asthmatic breathing with one forearm. From a pile in a corner she retrieved a wool sweater and pulled it around him like a shawl. He leaned towards the fresh heat as Lily rubbed his stiff hands in her own. The flesh on his face drooped, sallow and cadaverous.

“Ya’ see, Violet ain’t here. She run off again.”

“When did you last eat anythin’?” Lily said, casting about for any signs of recent cooking. “Didn’t you cook up that bacon I brung you Tuesday? You like bacon a lot.”

“Violet always cooks the bacon,” he said warily, his head slumping onto one shoulder.

Lily managed to get enough of a fire going to warm the pathetic little room and start a kettle boiling. She made some tea and then threw into a pot some of the oatmeal she’d brought over for him. But Old Bill was asleep, breathing in double-time. Lily put an arm around his neck, held his bead back, nudged his lips apart with the tin cup, and gently poured hot tea into the sump of his mouth. His eyes opened part-way, and lolled expressionless. When the oatmeal porridge was ready, Lily tried to set the spoon in his hand but it fell away. He was helpless.

Very patiently she filled the wooden stirring-spoon with porridge and brought it to his lips. Old Bill’s tongue circled it, then he spit violently, sending the stuff all over Lily. Again she brought a fresh spoonful to his lips, this time holding his jaws open and slipping the food in, then clamping them together until he gulped and swallowed. She felt him shiver, and knew it wasn’t from the cold. Time and again she raised the spoon to his lips, struggled to establish a comforting – a pacifying rhythm. When or why she began to hum she didn’t know, but she felt Old Bill’s neck muscles relax under her grip, and then heard her own voice, deep and instinctive. At first there were no words, no need for them, but they surfaced on their own and bore no meaning beyond the memories of the time and place they evoked.

Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o

Hi diddly idly, hi diddle air-o

Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um

Old Bill settled into a profound, restorative sleep – snoring like an exhausted horse – his fingers, softened by the heat, curled in his lap like a baby’s.

Lily didn’t leave. She sat in that befouled and moribund room and thought of Maman LaRouche baking bread in the open-air oven; of Mama’s hair unfolding in its last sunlight; of Old Samuel’s flow of words as smooth as hickory smoke; of Southener’s face as the sea-sands over it erased the sky; of Papa’s grief as he stood fixed behind some tree watching his child dissolve.

When Lily came in, Tom was sitting in the glow of a single coal-oil lamp. He had heard her step in the yard and was fully awake to face her. He had plotted both an offense and a defense, but when her eyes came into the light, all premeditation was swept away. He wrapped her in his arms, even as he knew that forgiveness would never be enough.

Lying with her lover before their mutual fire, half-way between midnight and dawn, Lily Marshall told of the things she had dreamed, then remembered, then realized – the words uttered as easy as spider’s silk towards a web. But even as the pain mellowed with each successive sentence holding out the possibility of accommodation, she sensed that she was passing the private burden of her own past to the public and unpredictable mercies of her husband. From this moment onward, these events of her history with their attendant joys and griefs would become part of the materiel of their relationship, unimmune to interpretation, retraction, emendation. By the time she’d finished talking, the fire was a low smouldering, the light in the room radiant.

Tom rose beside her, the quilt slipping off the bare flesh of his torso, bronzed and promethean in the demi-dark. His voice bore the cut of a scimitar. It hacked at the air.

“God damn me to hell, but if I ever get these hands on any one of the bastards that hurt a single hair on your head, I’ll squeeze the living shit right out of them."

When he stopped shaking, Tom took Lily’s hand in his sword-grip till it softened inevitable in hers.

The daylight brought them news of Uncle Chester’s death.

On February 19, 1862 Hugh Nixon Shaw’s drilling crew struck oil hundreds of feet below the gumbo surface of Enniskillen Township. It was to be the world’s first recorded gusher. It was also the world’s first uncapped wildcat. History does not record what the enfant terrible of Black Creek expected, but it was certainly not the gas-propelled blowout that shook the early-morning chill and began founting a hot, black syrup onto the snowscape around it. For three weeks the locals came and watched it spume, as the ground for miles around darkened and sagged. Oil was seen oozing in sticky rivulets towards Black Creek, where it slithered a ways in the ice and congealed. At last someone from Pennsylvania arrived who was able to improvise a method of staunching the wound. Meanwhile, thirty thousand gallons of oil were estimated to have been lost. Only temporarily, though, for in the spring an exotic sheen was observed on Black Creek and on the Sydenham River, and by early summer vast surfaces of Lake St. Clair and Erie glistened eerily. The world’s first oil slick had been achieved.

The echo of that February blast reverberated far and wide, and the oil boom took on the intensity and surreality of a California gold rush. The town of Oil Springs would boast two thousand greedy souls by the year 1864 – before all boasting became bravado, the wells died of superfluity, and the rich and the broken departed on the same trains; already the steady, stable, Presbyterian good-sense of the burghers of Petrolia (five miles north) was reasserting itself. Ten years after the Oil Springs’ boom, the last board of the last saloon was consumed in some anonymous hobo’s bonfire among the twitch-grass and scrub hawthorn. Mr. Shaw was asphyxiated in his own well on February 11, 1863.

On the morning of February 20, 1862, Chester Ramsbottom shook the sleep out of his eyes and stepped out of his warm shanty into the winter air. He liked staying out here alone even though Bridie worried about his occasional blackouts and his desultory eating habits. Here he could think and dream and conjure his little plans for the days and weeks ahead – as he had done so many years ago before the fire had destroyed his shop and that part of his life.

The boys had already arrived; he could hear the steam-engine starting up in the drilling area, a cacophony he could never quite get accustomed to. Bridie and the Yankee fellow had gone over to the Shaw site yesterday afternoon and not returned. A loud blast had been heard from that direction and already rumours were flying. He could hear the excited buzz of the drillers under the relentless slamming of the bit into the rock fathoms below.

Chester decided to take it easy. He was a bit short of breath this morning and, besides, he was well ahead of schedule: they would have more barrels than oil by spring. The Millar brothers had been sent home to attend the funeral of their youngest sister, felled suddenly by diphtheria. He thought of Lily.

Near the lean-to which he had rigged up with boughs and furs, Chester built a slow fire, fried some bacon, found he couldn’t eat it, and lay down with his head against the supporting tree with a buffalo robe across his knees. Despite the nipping air and the thudding monotony of the drill, he drifted into sleep.

Sometime about noon on that day, New York and Upper Canadian Oil Explorations also struck oil, at a hundred and fifty-two feet, a well only half the size of the Shaw strike, but a bonanza nonetheless. It too came with mere seconds’ warning, the crew scattering at the hoarse roar of underground breath released after eons of capture, and falling stunned into the brush as the top blew off with a volcanic crack and thunderous remonstration.

Uncle Chester popped upright as if he had been struck by a dinner-gong – his eyes sprung from their dream, as wide and as vacant as a doll’s, and blue as ball-bearings.

The funeral was held quite sensibly in the village of Petrolia where the Wesleyan Methodists has already erected a six-hundred-seat edifice to the glory of their version of the Divine Creator. Uncle Chester’s mother had been converted, once, to this church. The good Reverend Kilreath reminded the tiny, shivering band of mourners of that fact, though he could think of few others to include in a necessarily abbreviated eulogy. The wind was cold enough to make a trespasser confess.

Lily stood beside Aunt Bridie and gazed at the casket (“Shipped straight from London by express,” Armbruster said in the hushed shout he had concocted for these solemn moments) set over a pit gouged out of the frozen earth. Tom was a step behind her, ready to take her arm. Nearby she could feel the bewildered, estranged presence of the Millar lads, three members of the crew, and the owner-operator of the Lucky Derrick. Who else was there? Old Bill had sobbed like a baby when Tom told him the news, but an hour later he said, “When did you say young Chester was comin’ back?” Lily had a feeling she was watching her own interment or that of someone who would become close to her far away in a future which seemed at this moment improbable.

Aunt Bridie as usual contained her grief. She did not weep. Lily saw pain in her Aunt’s eyes only when she looked at her niece, her lips opening to say something (that might have – just a while ago – offered some solace, explanation, consolation even) but then closing again in reluctant resignation. But as the minister drew the cross of sand over the coffin-lid and murmured the final words ‘dust to dust’, Aunt Bridie went faint, slumping against Lily’s grip. Melville Armbruster stepped forward and steadied her, and Bridie let her head fall gratefully against his shoulder. Lily scarcely noticed. She was staring at the only other gravestones in the newly consecrated grounds: three white tablets in a neat little row, each bearing the same name: “Morton: Elijah, age 6; Sarah, age 3; Joshua, age 1; taken into the bosom of Our Lord in September of the year 1861.” Last fall’s scarlet fever epidemic.

Behind her, Jimmy Millar sobbed without shame.

After the others had walked down to the carriages, Lily remained for a moment over her Uncle’s grave. Here, alone with whatever remained of his spirit, she was able to find thoughts of her own to give some meaning to these windfall happenings. Something Old Samuels said came back to her – about how the soul leaves its earthly housing only to seek some finer refuge out there in those spaces and seasons and harmonies that all along gave it nurture and definition. What spaces, old man? What seasons for Uncle Chester? What sense did his flesh make entering this ground? Earth that was forest only a year before? Oil spouting from its slaughtered heart? Your hands, she thought, were a shopkeeper’s hands, a woodcarver’s at home with a doll’s cradle or a toy gismo. What sort of place has been reserved for you, here?

Suddenly the incongruity of it all struck her so forcefully that Lily wanted to laugh, and she wanted Uncle Chester to join in and share the joke as he used to when Auntie wasn’t looking. Finally, she was able to weep, but not before she heard herself say – to Old Samuels or to the benign divinities wherever they were skulking on such a macabre afternoon – “Does all loving end like this?”

“Are you all right?” Tom said, cradling her.

“We missed the tallyho,” Lily said.

It was the kind of spring that made prolonged grieving seem an unwarranted indulgence. Crocuses and trilliums festooned the walkways in the woods and the more timid recesses beyond them. Winter wheat tossed its maiden-fuzz in the fields along the Errol Road. The earth turned easily under the spade. The air smelled of lilacs and orange blossom and wild crab. Along the creek banks, jack-in-the-pulpit promenaded his stationary lusts. The sun feigned perpetuance.

Lily found she did not have to seek out private moments or places – dust settling on the workbench, the tools untouched, Last of the Mohicans under the washstand with its marker still there – in which to remember and work out her grief. The natural rhythms of her day were conducive to the kind of semi-reflection best suited to recalling the aura of loss, shorn of all cutting detail. Moreover, in the evenings with Tom she was able to share some of these feelings, not always by direct discussion – though she noted how Tom contrived to raise Uncle Chester’s name as often as he thought appropriate – but mostly by just having him in the room, breathing and caring somewhere beside her. It was a comfort she could not recall ever having had before in her life, and even as she allowed herself to soften into its consolation, she was only too aware of the evanescence of all things cherished-too-much.

On one of their long Sunday walks, Tom steered her gently through the windbreak and across the wide meadow towards the townsite. Though the only sounds were the cries of killdeer over the grass and the clarinet rasp of redwing blackbirds among the reeds of the marsh, Lily could see from the skeletons of half-built houses that dotted the horizon ahead, that on weekdays the air must have clanged with the sounds of progress. The prevailing wind no doubt had carried them away from her to the Lake beyond: she had not known. The transformation of the ordnance grounds was well under way, and it was awesome. Almost four blocks of dwellings were completed or under construction, mostly single-storey frame cottages set in civilized rows along the premeditated streets named for Queen and Empire. Along Michigan Ave., the only anomalous face among the royal suite, several brick buildings announced the arrival of commerce: a post office, Redmond’s grocery, the Black Bass Inn and Tavern. Along Prince Street, facing the fields below the River, the first of the Grand Trunk hotels was rising brick by yellow brick.

“Three stories and thirty rooms,” Tom said as they strolled by it. “The bigwigs will stay here, not overnight like they do in the Grand Station, but when they’re assigned here for a sizable stint – also, I expect the boosters and carpetbaggers we see getting off the trains more and more.” He grasped her hand tightly. “Come on over this way, I’ve got something to show you.”

They walked east along Victoria where a block of cottages had been completed late last fall. Already the window boxes sprouted petunias and several families sat on shaded verandahs or under a leafy tree, digesting Sunday dinner and perhaps the sermon gathered in at one of the services in Sarnia. Tom stopped beside a cottage lovingly painted white, with a well-dug garden in back and a brand-new rose arbour in front.

“My boss’s house,” said Tom. “He rents it from the Company.”

“Are all these Company houses?”

“More or less. It owns all the land, but it’s selling lots to the business guys, and if and when you can afford it, you can buy your house and property back from them. They don’t care as long as they make money.”

“Oh.”

“Well,” Tom said, “do you like it?”

From somewhere inside they heard a baby squall and subside.

From the foot of Michigan Ave., these or any other lovers could look north to the dunes and the Lake beyond them, west to the River and Fort Gratiot on the American side, and south to the vast railway yards and the great wharf. What had, only two years before, been merely fields, swamps and a pinery awaiting the arrival of soldiers, was now an octopus of energy and purpose. The Grand Trunk station-hotel loomed highest against the horizon and around it sprawled the freight-sheds, bunk-houses, round-house, repair-or-car-shops, and seventeen sidings each with its own shunting locomotive. Along the wharf and further on around the bay, the masts, rigging and funnels of dozens of ships could be seen – schooners and sloops and steamers and mail packets and fishing trawlers. The flow of goods and people was phenomenal. No one but the workers, of course, stayed put; all else was in flux. Here, motion was money. Those who must pause – to rest or reflect or indulge illicitly – found their wants, however eccentric, amply provisioned.

As Lily and Tom walked towards the dunes, they noticed, where Prince Street ended in scrub-alder and sandburs, several makeshift shacks – like pencil smudges in the backdrop o a Sunday sketch. “Squatters,” said Tom. Lily flinched.

Though no pact was formally signed, the accumulation of cash for an eventual move to the new village became a mutual endeavour for Tom and Lily. Tom worked as much overtime as he could get. Lily sold her quilts at the Baptist bazaar with the aid of Mrs. Salter. She extended the garden as far as their shrunken acre would go, and set up a stand at the end of the lane on Errol Road, now busy with traffic to the northern counties. She arranged for two township farmers to take some of the produce to Saturday market, though the profit was miniscule. They just could not afford to buy or keep a pony. Through the Misses Baines-Powell Lily got orders for quilts to keep her busy throughout the winter, as well as occasional requests for mind-numbing seamstress’ work. Their lovemaking suffered somewhat as their enthusiasm became tempered by common fatigue (or worse: one weary, one not); by the counter-romance of sweat and pickling juice; by periodic martyr-philia; and the sheer exhaustion of possibility. Nevertheless Lily felt their love itself was prospering. All around them things were greening, lives were changing, and civilities multiplied. It seemed improbable that they too should not be swept along on such an irresistible tide of progressive evolution.

At night they continued to probe in one another the limits of trust, vulnerability and commitment – dimly aware that the flesh has its own disguises and dissemblings. Time after time Lily let Tom’s seed wash over her blood-lit gill where she kept in escrow some tiny variant of herself awaiting rescue. And though Tom sat one August evening at the kitchen table and wrote out a letter to Bridie in Lily’s words, then helped her read it back and watched her append her own name, shakily, to the bottom of the page – Lily had no news of the kind that might bring solace to a new widow. For weeks Lily waited in vain for a reply.

One evening early in September Tom did not come home for supper. He had assured her that there was no overtime work to be had for several weeks to come. At first Lily was worried, then annoyed, then scared. There was still a little daylight when she saw Gimpy’s unmistakable silhouette crossing the fields towards the windbreak. She met him just as he was coming through the opening in the pines. She had known by the pace and tilt of his stride that something was wrong. His expression confirmed it.

“He’s been hurt?” she said, trying to remember if the stove were okay to abandon as is.

Gimpy shook his head, out of breath, his eyes casting about for some place safe to rest.

“How bad?”

“Real bad, ma’am. We can’t wake him up.”

“Please take me to him,” Lily said, tightening her shawl.

“You got a Bible?” Gimpy rasped, trying to be helpful.

Tom was lying on the dock in the open where a barrel of nails had struck him on the head and felled him more than two hours before. Someone had covered him with several dusty sacks. His eyes were seized shut, a dried trickle of blood in his hair and over his left eye. His breathing shallow but regular.

“We tried, tried everythin’,” Bags Starkey, the foreman, said to Lily as she bent over her husband. “Cold cloths, ice from the barn, slappin’ his face, pinchin’ his cheeks, everythin’. He’s been lyin’ just like that ever since it happened.”

“Where’s the doctor?” Lily said.

“The one on Front Street, he’s drunk an’ can’t be rolled over. The other one’s out in the township somewhere on a call.” He turned to the others for confirmation and consolation.

Lily leaned over the death-mask of Tom’s face and spoke softly but clearly into his ear. “It’s me, Tom. It’s Lily. I need to talk to you.”

The onlookers were startled, even moreso when Lily put her arms around her husband and pulled him into her embrace, sitting beside him and holding his dead-weight with her own litheness – her knees and thighs inadvertently exposed to the stevedores. Several looked away. Lily continued to talk. Lily continued to murmur sharply into Tom’s ear until all of the men had averted their gaze, not knowing what to do or where to direct their pity.

Moments later, Tom’s eyelids fluttered. He let out a huge, purging breath that sent chills up the spines of the men. Then a low groan as some particular pain was identified.

“Tom, I need to talk to you. I got somethin’ important to tell you.” She pulled his limp hand across her belly. “I got your baby in here,” she said as shyly as she dare.

A month later, when a scar on his temple and a crackling good yarn were all that remained of Tom’s brush with death, Lily was no longer lying.

Tom took the letter to Aunt Bridie – jointly composed – down to the Post Office in Sarnia so it would reach her more quickly. When he came home from work that same evening, he had a different letter in his hand. “It’s from Aunt Bridie,” he said. “I picked it up at our own Post Office a few minutes ago.”

He began to open it. Bridie’s familiar script graced the envelope. “What are you shaking for?” Tom said teasingly. “It’s your Aunt’s writing.”

London, C.W.

October 20, 1862

Dear Tom and Lily:

Just a short note to let you know that Melville and I were married today at the Middlesex Court House. We leave tonight for New York. We’ve sold everything at Oil Springs. I’ll send details from the City when we get there. Take care, Lily.

Love,

Bridie Armbruster