Lily's Story

It was spring again. Because it was unlikely they would be able to afford the move into the village for at least another year, Lily decided to spruce up the homestead. She had planted bulbs in the fall and they were now green spires aimed at the sky. Tom had built a trellis beside the kitchen window and helped her transplant a rosebush from Maudie Bacon’s garden. Traces of pink were nudging through the bud-tips. Tom had made her a white flowerbox and set it under the front window in the south sun, and soon she would try her geranium cuttings nursed indoors throughout the winter. She and Brad made up a song about flowers. “Tu-lips, two-lips, do-lips” Brad sang, then rubbed his forefinger through his own lips, amazed at the world’s happy coincidents. Another year here, Lily thought, and neither of us will want to move. Tom was taking Robbie on his shoulders down to the creek to fish every Sunday afternoon. Brad routinely trailed after her as she spaded and harrowed the garden (though he didn’t much like getting dirty), distracting her with his banter and shy teasing.

On a bright windless Sunday in May, Lily was sitting on the stoop cutting the roots out of the last of the winter potatoes when she heard Brad say with a sinking whine, “Some people comin’, Ma.”

She looked towards the lane. Trouble. She could tell from the way the two figures held themselves sturdy in the black carriage, as if they were brunting a stiff Northerly. She could sniff rectitude at fifty paces. The horses, frothing against a strict rein, wheeled through the gateway and into the yard, where they stopped – much relieved.

“Good morning, missus,” hallooed the large parson down the long nave of the lane. He wrapped the reins firmly in place and proceeded to dismount. He waddled around in front of the horses, giving their baleful stare a wide berth, and stretched out a pudgy hand to his companion. She took it automatically, as if lifting a latch-key, and stepped onto the grass with a practiced swirl. Hand-in-glove, they trundelled towards Lily.

“I am the Reverend Dougall Hardman,” the parson announced, “of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Port Sarnia. And this is my good wife, Mrs. Hardman.”

“Charity,” said the good wife without defacing her smile.

“Yes, and you must be the young Mrs. Marshall we’ve heard so much about,” the preacher said, reaching unsuccessfully for her hand and glancing past her towards the house.

Clara, thought Lily.

“Lily, isn’t it?”

“Yes, how do you do?”

“And who’s this darling little creature?”

Brad ducked behind Lily’s skirt.

The Reverend Hardman cleared his throat with pre-sermon vigour. “Ah, we’ve come on official business.”

“I can make some tea, if you can wait a minute. Would you like to come in?”

“Is your husband at home, missus?”

“No, he ain’t.” She hesitated, then said, “Him an’ Robbie are off fishin’.”

The parson swallowed his astonishment long enough to say, “We’ll come in and wait, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“What a pretty little cottage,” Mrs. Hardman said.

The Reverend Hardman was obese: his jowls jigged contrapuntally with the jawbone somewhere inside driving the bellows of his windy sentences. His cleric’s collar lay buried in his neck-flesh so profoundly that only a thin ring of it showed through, like a band on a turkey. When he sat at his ease in Uncle Chester’s chair, his great belly dozed on two bony knees; his plump fingers fed on the macaroons and tea-cakes like loose grubs. Notwithstanding, there was something different here from the usual parson fattened up by too many teas, bake-sales, middle-age, and ecclesiastical doubt. From the slim leg, the curse of the shoulder and the quick feet came the hint of a once-muscular frame, leathered skin, and agility. A circuit-rider, Lily thought, the memory striking deep.

Mrs. Charity Hardman was a bosomy but well-proportioned woman, trussed, corsetted and handsomely turned out in a mauve dress whose flounces, cuffs, and lacy appendages might have been described by some as bounteous. She sipped her tea with white gloves intact; she resisted all temptation to indulge further. From the edge of her chair she kept her wifely eye on a point just below her husband’s lower jaw where his chins converged, and nodded ritually on some cue from him which Lily was unable to detect.

Working from the general principle that anything he had to say was of rivetting significance to any bystander, Reverend Hardman proceeded to orate – with pauses to detassel a cup-cake or disfigure the odd macaroon – the long history of his Church in the country, winding his way eventually towards the good news that next autumn the Wesleyan Methodists were going to build a church in Point Edward that would rival the Anglican once now there in size, expense and depth of devotion. And in the true spirit of ecumenical Christianity, the edifice would be open to use by such demi-infidels as Congregationalists and Presbyterians (no Baptists, please) until such times as they could afford their own houses of worship.

“You will agree that this is a signal achievement, indeed an honour for such a small and as yet unincorporated village?”

Mrs. Reverend nodded.

“Of course, I was quick to volunteer my services. As Mrs. Hardman can confirm, I have always been a man to take on a fresh challenge for the sake of Our Lord.”

Mrs. Reverend tilted her petalled hat in Lily’s direction.

“As minister to a new flock my duties are manifold,” he said, crushing a macaroon on the downbeat. “First, we shall need commitment, real commitment from our doughty band of believers.”

“Money,” murmured Missus, delicately.

“True, true. We are looking for pledges, for tithing in the old-fashioned sense.”

Lily brought out the last of the macaroons made especially for Robbie and Tom.

“Secondly, we’ll need the use of all the talents, the combined gifts, as it were, of our supporters.” He stared wistfully at his tea, dotted with crumbs.

“Men to assist with the stone-work and the roof,” offered his help-mate.

“Precisely. And finally we shall need the love and spiritual wishes of the whole Christian community, we need their prayers for our success as we seek most humbly to establish a fellowship of adherents among the workers of the Grand Trunk and their loving families.”

Mrs. Hardman started to nod but was ambushed by a yawn. It went unnoticed.

“As you can tell, missus, I am a blunt, straightforward man. Always have been, always will.” For the first time Lily felt his gaze encompass her, even though he had been more or less pointed in her direction throughout the service. “We would like you and your husband to think seriously about how much you can afford to give us in support of God’s work. More important even, we are hoping to open a Sabbath school in September. It is our understanding that your eldest – the one now, ah, fishing with his father – will soon be four-years old.”

So it was Clara, Lily thought.

“Mrs. Hardman has agreed, on top of all her other onerous duties, to take on the little ones, suffering them to come unto her, as it were.”

Mrs. Hardman lengthened her smile a notch.

“He ain’t been baptized,” Lily said.

The parson showed no surprise. “Don’t be ashamed, my dear girl,” he said, glancing sideways at the vacant plate. “Remember, I’ve been a circuit rider, I know the country ways and country feelings. Things get put off. Spiritual matters are often suspended by more pressing demands of the moment. We shall make arrangements for both your children to be baptized. Why, we could inaugurate the Church with such a happy ceremony!” He smiled as if he’d just thought of the notion.

“Such a beautiful child,” Mrs. Hardman said, looking about for Brad.

Lily stood up. “When Tom gets home, we’ll talk over what you just said. It’s been nice meetin’ you.”

Charity Hardman came back for her parasol. Lily met her at the door. The smile on her face had crumbled. Nothing remained but the pain of a frightened eye. She seized Lily by the wrist and whispered fiercely: “Clara’s told me all about you, Lily. Won’t you think hard about comin’ to the new church? It gets awful lonesome out here in the country. Besides, we got to stick together, you know. I mean us women.”

“Mrs. Hardman!”

“Coming!” she shouted back. With a desperate sort of malice she said to Lily, “An’ you don’t have to swallow all the malarkey you hear from that source!”

As the carriage disappeared, Lily heard the crack of the whip over the horses’ heads.

The Fathers of Confederation set aside July the first as the day when the citizens of the new Dominion of Canada were to celebrate this historic act of collective paternity. That there may have been more cause for excitement in the boardrooms and on the front benches of the nation did not in any way diminish the general enthusiasm of the magic hour. Even before the ink was dry on the British North America Act, the yearning for a united land from sea to sea was already being translated into affirmative action. On June 28, 1867, The Sarnia Observer noted that a complaint had been received from the German emigrants heading west for Manitoba via rail, ship and cart-trek; to wit: the cattle cars that had been rigged out for their comfort contained (they said) only one bucket of water to last five-dozen souls from Toronto to the Point Edward wharf; naturally such ingratitude was dealt with curtly and correctly in the Grand Trunk’s statement of denial. Thirsty or not, the movement westward had begun, and was inevitable: a new destiny was becoming manifest.

No town celebrated the nativity more avidly than Sarnia. The local press accounts tell the whole story. ‘During the morning a large number of loyal yeoman from the neighbouring townships, accompanied in most cases by the members of their families, came into town by all the leading roads, until ultimately there was a larger influx of strangers than was ever before present, except on the occasion of the visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.’ Two infantry companies from Moore and Sarnia marched to the parade-grounds led by the Sarnia Cornet Band, bugles ablaze in the sun. Here they were joined by the Grand Trunk Rifle Companies from Point Edward under Major Riley. ‘After going through a variety of evolutions, the Companies were formed into line, and fired the feu-de-joie at noon.’ A grand procession then took place back through the town’s thoroughfares, bedecked with bunting and spruce-boughs and lined with crowds cheering and waving Union Jacks, as if Wellington himself were marching home from Waterloo. Right behind the band came the volunteers – their combat dreams still warm – and then the town clerk with Queen Victoria’s Proclamation and, wonder of wonders, ‘four young virgins in white, in a carriage and four, as representatives of the four Provinces’. Following on the heels of the Fire Brigades of Port Huron and Sarnia were the Sabbath school children – skipping, hitching, sidling, scooting and tumbling in egregious disarray. ‘On the whole, the Procession was the largest and most imposing ever found in the Town with the exception of that which proceeded from the Town to Point Edward on the Prince of Wales’ visit.’ Particularly impressive were the volunteer companies of the St. Clair Borderers, all in green, rifles erect, bayonets glinting, their synchromeshed strut signalling their martial pride, warning of borders to be defended to the death, and boasting of heroics certain to come.

When the soldiers fired their rifles at noon, Brad screamed and jumped into Lily’s arms. Robbie hopped up and down, searching for a face among the uniforms. She had just got Brad settled down – standing with the boys at the corner of Christina and George – when the bugles struck up a battle hymn right in front of them. She could feel Robbie’s body – through his hand – keeping time to the quick-step. The green tunics of the Borderers swept into view around the corner. They seemed to be striding into the vacuum left by the imperial alarums of the trumpeters, a capsule of silence designed to exaggerate the thud of every jack-boot, the clink of tunic metal, the rasp of martial cloth against pink flesh. But if you swung your head rapidly past the moving ranks, the silver bayonets might have been mistaken for the quills of a chieftain’s headdress.

Brad started to whimper; he buried his face in Lily’s skirt and trembled. Softly into his ear she hummed something gentle, but the crowd noise rose around her like an ambuscade as the Proclamation coach was spotted, and deafened them both, so that they almost didn’t notice Robbie leap up with a body-length salute and cry out, “Look, there’s Da!”

Tom came in from work. Since his promotion to assistant foreman (Warden Hargreaves had been transferred temporarily to Ottawa for strategic purposes), he was invariably all smiles.

“What’s wrong?” Lily said.

“We got a letter, from New York.”

Lily stood beside him and watched him read it, seeing the words and hearing the strange voice of Melville Armbruster ricochet inside them, and hearing under them – like the echo of a sea-conch under oceans – a tiny, compressed cry that might have been her own.

Long Island, N.Y.

August 5, 1867.

Dear Lily:

I am writing to tell you that your Aunt Bridie passed away yesterday. She died peacefully in her sleep, and now rests in the arms of her Maker. Let me tell you what has happened since those happy days when we last say you. I hope and pray that you will understand.

When Bridie and I got to New York after the wedding in London, we stayed only long enough to meet my family here on our estate, and then we were off on a honeymoon and business trip that lasted three glorious months. We travelled first-class by train to Baltimore, Washington, St. Louis, Chicago and as far west as St. Cloud, Minnesota. We stayed at the best hotels, several of which we invested in, and I showed your Aunt the heart and soul of democratic America. She said it was the happiest time of her life. Certainly it was that, and more, for me. Let me say also that Bridie never forgot your Uncle Chester or you and Tom. Whenever we’d tour a lumber mill or carriage maker’s, she’d say, ‘now wouldn’t Chester just love a set-up like this’ or ‘I wish young Tom could see all this, all the opportunities for a man with his talent and education’. Of course she never stopped talking about her Lily, and praying she’d hear news when we got back about a baby-on-the-way.

She never got back, though – at least not the Bridie we all knew and loved. In Buffalo, on our return trip, she caught some kind of influenza and by the time we got home to New York, she was gravely ill in a coma. I was about to send a telegram to you when she suddenly awakened and seemed miraculously to recover. A day later, however, she suffered what the doctors called a stroke. It left her paralyzed all down the left side. But ill as she was, she could still talk in a slurred sort of voice only I could understand, and when I suggested I ought to telegraph you people and send money for train tickets to New York, she said no. At first I refused to believe her, but I could see in her eyes and in the tortured twisting of her body every time she spoke that she really meant it. She did not want her Lily to see her like this, though she would never tell me why. I honoured her wish, though I’ve been wracked by guilt and unease every day and night since.

For almost five years now we have been living on my family’s estate, Bridie and me. I’ve been taking care of her every need, and she has been as brave and wonderful in her dying as she was in her living. I have no regrets, save the fact that caring for her meant cutting us off from you. But her eyes never once said yes, not in all these months of pain and even in the last serene moments when we both knew the end was near. She is gone now, and I can tell the whole story. She was a remarkable woman.

She will be buried in the Armbruster mausoleum tomorrow. I sincerely hope you can come to visit the gravesite and I trust that I’ll have the opportunity to learn from you more about this great woman I only got to know a little, so late in my life.

All my love,

Melville Armbruster

Something fell out of the envelope. Lily picked it up. It was an American one-hundred-dollar bill.

Tom held Lily in his foreman’s arms all that night. At breakfast she said to him, “I think it’s time we moved.”

“Soon,” he said. “That’s a promise.”

By May of 1870 when the troubles began which would be unresolved even a hundred years later, the Confederatory experiment was not yet three years old. Older by far, indeed celebrating its tenth year of existence, was the company town at the nexus of the River and the Lake. From the outset Point Edward was no ordinary or typical small community of Canada West (or Ontario as it was now nominated in official circles and on the fresh maps of the new Dominion already intimating the imminent annexation of Prince Edward Island, Rupert’s Land and British Columbia). It was not of village size, some seven hundred souls, and growing weekly. But it would be some years yet before any move were made to incorporate it as a self-governing village. The paterfamiliality of the Grand Trunk lay heavily upon it. Though many of the properties and businesses had been purchased outright from the Company, it still owned five boarding-houses on St. Clair Street and most of the undeveloped land to the east and south-east which rested in fallow, and appreciated. Eighty-per-cent of the men in the village worked for the Grand Trunk, the others ran businesses or supplied services directly dependent upon the railway. Because the Company’s facilities were concentrated along the waterfront, the town grew around it in a horse-shoe shape. Here, then, there could be no village green flanked by churches, library and town hall with quaint cottages idling among the grasses and flowers in trim ranks all the way to the outskirts where a tannery or mill or furniture factory might pull their pastoral smoke into the serene evenings of Middletown, Ontario. There was nothing sleepy about Point Edward. Night and day three-dozen locomotives ran their own version of the anvil chorus. Screw-prop freighters churned into the berths along the Grand Trunk wharf and hooted for attention. Twice a day, passenger trains – local and express – roared to a stop before the gothic grandeur of the station-hotel, discharging political hacks, carpetbaggers and commercial bashaws of every breed into the luxury and corruption that only a first-class colonial hotel can guarantee. Occasionally there arrived a cattle-train with Icelandic immigrants heading for the about-to-be-annexed New West, but temporarily herded into one of the engine-barns to wait for a refitted grain-scow to ferry them Huronward. The noise of their appreciation was often enough to keep a Christian awake at his prayers. Surrounding the din and hubbub of the rail-yards were a dozen thriving but obstreperous enterprises linked to prosperity by rail and sail – smithies hammering out plates and spikes, welders scorching metal into submission, even a manufacturer of barrel-staves who preferred to labour at night. So it was that the town proper did not begin for half-a-mile from its commercial heart – on Prince Street in fact, which ran parallel to the River and was unique among small-village boulevards in having buildings only on its east side and each one of them a hotel or something with pretentions in that direction. While the Grand Trunk station-hotel accommodated those worthies staying overnight on business or waiting for water transportation, smaller hostels like The Queen’s served the drummers, gamblers, mountebanks, beached sailors and low-brimmed capitalists seeking illicit pleasures of sundry kind. When the beverage rooms closed, one could drink one’s way into a whiskey stupor in the sanctity of an upstairs boudoir complete with country courtesan and douche. If more daring (or desperate), one could slip over the tracks into Mushroom Alley where the gormandizing was as licorous as it was revulsive. At night all the decent burghers of the village clamped shut their shutters and their curiosity. On Sundays the harbingers of virtue inveighed thunderously from three pulpits but did not extend their pastorates quite as far as Prince Street itself.

Point Edward by day was also unique among the insular Christian communities of those days. In most Ontario towns everyone on a main street would be instantly identifiable – along with his pedigrees, the direction and purpose of his movements, the said-value of these latter and the likely consequences thereof. A stranger’s presence would be noticed as quick as a bur between the toes and be almost as popular. But here, Michigan Ave. and Prince Street – even a back street if it led to the beach – were daily invaded by exotic creatures from every class, the identification of whom could often form an amusing but inconclusive pastime. Tramps, sailors, stockbrokers, escaped felons, failed poets, even Sir John A. Himself might pass by Redmond’s store without a second glance being taken. Notwithstanding such an incongruous cosmopolitanism, there existed alongside it – or within it – a typical ingrown, self-generating community of the Ontario variety. Amazingly, the two societies rarely blended, even at the edges, though they were materially responsible for each other’s welfare. The ‘village’ of Point Edward provided the Grand Trunk with a sober supply of respectable workers with families to ballast their commitment and a church to teach them their manners. The Company – despite the noise, moral squalor, and crass commercialism – ensured the permanent citizens a life of modest affluence and certain progress in divine concert with the Dominion itself.

Lily Marshall stood at her kitchen window and surveyed the wonders of her small world. The tulips she had planted along the garden path bloomed gaily in primary reds and yellows. Clara and Gimpy – returned to their circle of friends once more – had made a special trip out in their new Burlington buggy just to admire them, Clara’s frail teeter and pastel stare reminding them of her recent ordeal, Gimpy joking bravely and poking his leg in jest at the boys. Along the lane the lilacs that Bachelor Bill helped Uncle Chester plant so long ago exploded a dozenfold in mauve and evening indigo, their underground runners popping up everywhere around, stitching earth to air. Along the edge of the spaded vegetable patch, Robbie, dreaming of his seventh birthday and instant manhood, roamed like a scout for King Arthur – nose to the ground, wooden sabre cocked and ready (made for the young paladin by his aging father), and muttering abracadabra oaths to keep his courage charged. With no visible mercy he cut down every milkweed corpse who had dared to survive the winter with a fearsome blow, then scampered into the woods in the direction of Big Creek or Camelot. Ever since Gimpy had read him those King Arthur stories during his stay with them (while Lily nursed Clara alone), Robbie had been wild with them. Tom borrowed the book and read him more, indeed read to them all around the winter fire. Robbie could hardly sit still long enough to hear the end of an adventure; he would be itching to act it out, to get outdoors and stretch his legs and his intrepid arms. He never wanted the same story repeated, and would threaten a tantrum whenever Brad, as he usually did, asked for the one about Gawain or young Lancelot again and again. Lily watched Brad’s eyes, the flame dancing in them, as he lay on the sheepskin and formed the words in his mouth a second before Tom pronounced them, as if he were tasting them, until all at once they struck his imagination with the impact of tattoos. Lily sat beside Tom on the arm of the big chair, matching the letters to her husband’s lips, herself no longer amazed at the magic congruence of letter and sound, the marvelling transformations of the heart it allowed. She could read. Not all by herself yet. But almost, soon. When Robbie went off to school, in the village in September, she would have him bring the gray-covered primer home, and they would learn together. And Brad too. Lily and her boys.

That’s what people whispered behind her along Michigan Ave. when she pulled them into town on the toboggan Tom had made them. She wanted them to say it out loud, to sing it to the congregation. “An’ how are the tow-heads this morning?”grocer Redmond would say, ruffling their hair under the tuques and slipping them an appeasing sweet. “Like two beans on a platter.” But of course they were as different as two humans could be. For Robbie the objects of the variegated world around him were put there by some benign gamesmaster especially for him to explore, expose to delight or plunder with desire. When he rested, they did too. He could watch with dispassion as his father skinned a freshly-killed rabbit, not connecting the clouded eyes in the death-clench of that animal’s face with the bright kinship of those that peered out at him from a brush pile or turned their tender curiosity upon him when he disturbed them over lunch at the lettuce patch. Brad, too, as his health improved, loved to be outdoors in the summer. When the family went walking together, Brad would lag or meander, sometimes even stop in mid-stride as something in the air struck him still: a thrush’s sigh from the shadows, beads of dew along a leaf trapped by light, a crow raking the silence with his caw, a bullfrog’s eyes bobbing in the slime, the flick of a trout in a pool with no bottom. From this window she could, if she were careful, watch him out there – listening, touching, reaching for the roots of awe. At such moments she wished she could bring him – and Robbie as well – to Old Samuels and hear them talk together or not talk in those silences-between-souls she knew were gone now from her own life. Robbie would have bounced into the woods on Sounder’s heels, chattering all the while and then going perfectly quiet for hours, like foxes in the deep grass waiting for prey. Brad and Acorn would have been fast friends, nothing could have stopped them.

Naturally Tom found it easier to relate to Robbie, taking him off to fish in the creek, sometimes letting him come along while he hunted, the boy carrying the lumpy burlap with two dead cottontails on his sore back, blood tickling his bare leg. The boy worshipped Tom’s presence and filled his absence with reverent re-enactments of their pleasures. Brad, horrified by the barn, the stench of carcasses and the accusing eyes of slain creatures, took to Tom slowly and obliquely. At last Tom seemed to understand this and accept it as what would always be between them. Tom had that disarming smile – quick and unprepared for, flashing news of its warmth, its fear of being hurt, the sense of its own helplessness in the mess of emotion and desire that made up his larger being. Gradually and very reluctantly, Brad caught sight of those parts of Tom she herself had loved outright from the moment of contact across a faraway dance-floor. By the time Tom began reading to him, Brad was not surprised. Months later he eased himself up onto Tom’s knee, and Tom kept right on reading.

They are each an extension of one part of Tom, she thought. Does he know that? Is that why he can love them in such different ways? How much of me lies enfolded in them, I don’t really know. I can’t see such things because I think of my love for them as complete and whole – as an unending ache when I fear for their safety, panic when their bodies shiver on the brink of fever, as joy that swells out of my heart and leaves me without breath when I see them laughing together with Tom with nature with the world around that loves them this moment. What the women who will love them later might see, I can never say. The affections that bind us here and now are a web of wondrous intricacy, of inseparable elements: Tom and me, me and Tom, Tom and each of his boys, me and the boys. We are. I never hoped for more.

Tom was more than happy when he was offered the foreman’s job starting in September. He felt vindicated. He wrote to Bags Starkey’s cousin in London to offer Bags a job, but word came back that he had ‘gone off’ without telling anyone where. On the first sunny Sunday in April, Tom had borrowed Gimpy’s old buggy and taken the whole family for a drive in the country. On the way back home they detoured into the village, and Tom, going strangely quiet, pulled the horses up at the corner of Albert and Ernest. Tom pointed his whip towards a newly-built frame cottage covered with cedar-shakes, whose aroma sweetened the air for blocks around.

“It comes up for sale,” Tom said, “at the end of the summer.”

Lily took hold of his other hand. “The school’s just down the street a ways,” she said to the boys.

“I don’t wanna go to no school,” Robbie said.

“He’s just mad ’cause we took so long,” Lily said quickly to Tom. He just laughed and embarrassed the boys by hugging her in public. To the north Lily could hear the waves repeating their chant on Canatara.

What more could I want, Lily thought, watching Brad from her kitchen window as he sat on the oak-stump in the May sunshine staring past his brother’s antics into the woods beyond. The move into the village would be the last link in the chain of connection Lily felt all around her these days. They would at last become part of some larger community, one in which, though she herself might never feel fully a citizen, the boys could grow up inside so naturally they would think later on they had invented it. For Tom, it meant committing himself more certainly to a life he had taken up in large measure because of his love for her; company and family and town would be his domain. But there was a part of him – as with her – that would always remain irreconciled to domesticity, to the predictable rhythms of civility, to a God who hurled brimstone one moment and puffed on a pipe the next. I loved that in him too, she thought, I must have – that perverse will to hazard, to ride the flux, to play truth-or-dare with the random deities of the universe.

Old Samuels was right: the gods don’t disassemble when the hedgerows and the houses and walled gardens go up. When the white man cleared the forest of the great trees that were left in the wake of the fleeing ice, the demons who lived in them did not perish in their ash, they were released into the volatility of air where they still whirl and collide and howl like schizophrenes. Even now they ride the winds of pestilence over the corrupt earth, mocking and vengeful.

Lily had heard their mocking laughter many times. When Clara’s boy was stillborn and she had come down with childbed fever, Lily had wrapped the foetus in a blanket and covered its drowned eyes and begged Clara not to look. She had sat beside her friend for weeks, watching her twist and grimace with dreadful pain and with the dream of the dead child’s face. Most of the time they were alone in the dark, where Lily’s hand on a brow, a cheek, over the eyelids was Clara’s only link with life and its manifest horrors. When the fever broke and Clara was surprised to find herself alive, she gave Lily a look that said: so it was you who brought me back to all this? Later on, when Gimpy arrived and Lily had bathed the stink off her and washed her hair and put a bit of rouge on her ghastly face, Clara smiled and was able to offer something that was almost gratitude. Lily was not in the least offended.

During the winter there had been a diphtheria scare. Quarantine signs dotted the village doors. Lily didn’t go into town for weeks. The boys complained but were not taken to Little Lake to skate. Word came via Tom that Maudie Bacon’s youngest was stricken. “She’s got Mary there to help,” was all Tom said. A week later Maudie’s little girl was dead but not before suffering the bewilderment of pain that no mother’s arms could diminish or explain. She was the first human creature to be buried in the cemetery grounds just donated by the Grand Trunk to the three churches. She’s near the woods and the shy trilliums, Lily thought, blotting out the nasal sentiments of the Reverend Hardman. Old Samuels would approve. But what would he say about Aunt Bridie encased in knickerbocker granite lintelled with a family name that would have shrivelled a leprechaun’s laugh. Or Uncle Chester buttoned up in the chaste Methodist grave of a sometime oil town, the name on the headstone a perpetual puzzlement to the locals ever after. Where were their spirits now?

A few weeks after the funeral Lily caught Robbie in her room with a leather pouch wide open on the floor and one of its objects in his hand. “Uch!” he snorted, “a dead rabbit’s foot.” Lily scolded him more severely than he thought necessary, and then gently replaced the cross, pendant, stone and Testament. The rabbit’s foot she kept in her hand till it warmed. “Did Da shoot that?” Robbie said through his dried tears.

Lily put the token in her apron pocket, and when Tom took the boys off to watch the ice break up on the creek, she put on her coat and scarf and headed into town. She went around the northern perimeter, avoiding the streets, walked along the tracks a ways till she could see the smoke from the shacks in Mushroom Alley, then veered north through the brush, coming out after a while into the windswept clearing she knew so well. She sat down and caught her breath. Soon the voices began, one by one, to detach themselves from the wind. She heard Acorn say something to Sounder and caught Sounder’s shrill laughter. Southener repeated words to her she had almost forgotten. She saw the outlines of his grave, now sunken below ground level with the weight of a dozen years. Where is he? She asked soundlessly, afraid that even a jarring step might be catastrophic. Slowly she felt her head turn to the north-east, and perhaps ten minutes later – how could she tell? – she was able to discern a slight rectangular hump in the sand, well disguised by grass and young aldershoots. She approached the grave, knelt down, said something reverential in a strange tongue, then scooped up a little sand, placed the rabbit’s foot in the hollow, and covered it. Goodbye, Old Samuels.

Lily stood in the kitchen window remembering when Uncle Chester used to hold her aloft to see over the sill into the green world. It was hard to believe that by this September her life would have completed one of its great seasonal shifts, that the Grand Trunk would at last exercise dominion over Bridie’s land, in return for which they would put down fresh roots in the very village her Aunt had dreamed so intensely it had become real. What would you think of that, old Shaman?

In the yard, Robbie had talked or bullied Brad into joining his game. Brad had been offered the sword with the broken blade as a bribe, while Arthur brandished Excalibur possessively. On these rare occasions when Brad was moved to enter into his brother’s fantasies, he did so, unbeknownst to Robbie, on his own terms. While Robbie pursued the treacherous Mordred or the cowardly two-faced Saxon (Hengest-and-Horsa), while he jousted and sallied and cut-to-ribbons – Brad played his designated parts, but Lily could see, as she did now, that in the kingdom of his own imagination he was reinventing a world for his pleasure alone. She could hear him humming or chanting away to himself as he dodged the wrath of Galahad’s forays. For Brad, no re-enactment of the old stories was real without the words tumbling through his head in magic metamorphoses. Suddenly, Galahad’s sword slashed spitefully across an exposed calf. Lily heard the smack and saw Brad fall into the grass. Robbie was stunned by the deed as the victim; he stood gazing at his weapon as if about to accuse it of some crime. Then he turned to watch his brother. Brad’s lower lip quivered as the red welt on his leg rose up, stinging. He glanced towards the house, straight into the morning sun. Robbie waited, something faintly pleading in his face. Brad began rubbing the wound, silent tears sliding out and down. Robbie suddenly sat down beside him. Instinctively Brad started to edge away but was stopped by Robbie’s arm as it came across his shoulder and gripped it. Very slowly Robbie opened the fingers of his brother’s left hand and placed in them the diamond-stubbed Excalibur from Camelot.

Lily was watching it all from her window. A wonder, she thought. The random gesture. Love’s accidence.

Lily had just begun getting Tom’s supper ready when he surprised her – standing in the doorway the way he always did when there was news.

“It’s all right,” he said, seeing her reaction. “We’ve been called up, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

Lily found herself sitting on the arm of the big chair, a kettle steaming in her hand.

“We’re going west. There’s been some trouble with the half-breeds out there, but nobody expects we’ll have to do much shooting.”

Lily felt the kettle brush the floor.

“Say something, Lil. Don’t just sit there looking at me like that. You know I got to go.”

“You’re a volunteer.”

“You know I got to go.”

Yes, I do know, she wanted to say. And I’ve tried to understand all these years, I really have. And maybe, too, its partly my fault for loving that unknowable night-thing in you, for being afraid of it, for wanting to bring it too close to the sunlight and tame it with familiarity, yet all along secretly cherishing it as I do those kinds of things in myself I keep hidden from you. I do know. And I know also that I could reach out at this moment and touch you in a way that would make you want to stay. If I do, I may regret it for the rest of my life. If I don’t...

“We’re going to sail into the north,” Tom was saying, settling her into the chair and sitting beside her on the arm, “all the way to the lakehead, then cross the Rainy River system in canoes like the old voyageurs. Then we march over the Prairie to Fort Garry where we stay for a while to make sure the new province gets off to a proper start. No fighting, no war. Monsieur Riel won’t be there to greet us.”

“Think of the boys,” she said.

“I am,” Tom said. “With the money I’ll get from this stint we’ll be able to buy furniture for the new house, clothes and books for the boys when they go to school. You’ll be able to throw away that wretched quilting frame forever. We’ll come back here and put a torch to this old place and make sure it stays a part of our past. Lily, you don’t understand. I’ve got to go. Now.”

Yes, it may be the last chance.

“I’m gonna come back, you know.”

Lily picked up the kettle. “Supper’s ruined,” she said.

“I promise.”

“I ain’t goin’ down to the boat.”

Lily said her goodbyes at the gate. Gimpy had come with his buggy to take Tom and his gear to the troop-ship waiting at the wharf, and to supervise Robbie who was being allowed to cheer the soldiers off with his hankey-sized Union Jack. Lily waited until the horses had almost reached the bend before she began to tremble all over. Tom turned in his seat and waved back to her, his manly figure caught for a second in a burst of lilac-spray. It was an image she would hold unchanging in her heart for a long, long time.

A few weeks after Tom left, Lily missed her second period.

Early in May of 1870 the new Dominion under the stewardship of Sir John A. Macdonald undertook its first large-scale mobilization and transfer of troops to a distant war zone. Railroad, lake-steamer, bateaux and forced march were splendidly coordinated so that in a mere ninety-six days Colonel Wolseley’s army of twelve-hundred volunteers and regulars arrived at the outskirts of Fort Garry, Manitoba to claim the province for Canada. No resistance was met. Not a soul to shoot at. A member of Wolseley’s staff recorded in his diary that day: ‘We were enthusiastically greeted by a half-naked Indian, very drunk’.

But the getting-there was itself a triumph of Canadian ingenuity. Troop-trains left Montreal and Toronto, picked up volunteer units along the main-line and deposited them on the wharfs of Collingwood and Point Edward, where troop-ships – refitted freighters – whisked the battalions northeastward along the ancient fur-trading routes of Champlain, Radisson and Groseilliers, Marquette and Joliet, and the mighty LaSalle. At Fort William they disembarked, seasick but singing, and clambered into hastily constructed bateaux which were three-quarters canoe and two-quarters sailboat. In mid-May they disappeared into the bush and did not emerge again until August 23. Occasional scouts, of hardy native stock, returned to Base Fort William to report on morale and on progress made to a tense and bored populace. These messengers also brought out mail destined for the home front.

So it was that Lily received five letters from Tom written over a span of six weeks, the last one dated ‘August 7, 1870, near Rat Portage’. Gimpy and Clara (who was pregnant again) came over, and they read through them. Though Lily found she could read much of Tom’s elegant script, she preferred to let Gimpy read aloud so that she could close her eyes and picture every event and hear the words Tom chose: to make each a part of him.

Tom was attached to a forward unit, his company the only volunteer group to be so honoured. The first few days were jolly ones because the recruits could stretch out the muscles cramped by several days in steerage. The sun warmed them by day and the crisp stars overhead at night seemed to bless their enterprise. Then the rains came and the forty-two-mile portage up to Lake Shebandowan. Fire and torrential spring storms had destroyed the primitive right-of-way. Tom’s crew headed into the bush with axe and whip-saw. ‘I felt like one of the pioneers out there, hacking and cursing and blistering in places I didn’t know I owned.’ It took three weeks to clear a path wide enough for the rearguard to dismantle and carry their boats through, along with two-hundred-pound barrels of salt-pork, cannon, cannonballs, rifles and cases of ammunition. The bulkier craft had to be pushed ahead on rollers which disappeared into the muskeg as fast as Tom’s crew could cut them. Now did the muscles rebel in the wet bivouacs of a chilling dark, the mosquitoes take up the flies’ leavings and the rain wash entire tents away from their frail moorings. Exhausted but undaunted, the raw troops reached for fresh inspiration and found it on the smooth straits of Lac des Mille Lacs and the resurgence of July’s best sun. While the paddling arms had strengthened and spirits brightened again, the jolting pattern of shooting rapids, driving hullward into stiff winds on open lakes, making sharp, brutal portages, and searching hopelessly for a dry bivouac – these soon took their toll. The food worsened. Dysentery and the grippe left dozens of men to languish in the rear, slumped among the supplies, moaning to keep each other company. But Tom miraculously grew stronger, healthier, happier. He was placed in the vanguard of the paddlers, in the slick canoes manned by Iroquois and Métis scouts. He sang with them. He seemed to forget where they were going and why. He did not wonder at the arrival of Métis scouts sent by the ‘rebel’ Riel to welcome and guide them in. He revelled in the challenge of the white water, the muskeg like quicksand, the raw cold of the rivers lit by sun but never warmed even in the sweltering heat of early August. Lily could hear him singing, she could see the reddish-blond beard circling the elementary blue of his eyes, she could yearn to be under him anywhere, always, below the altar of the stars.

On August 8 the expedition neared Rat Portage, passing through an uncharted narrows in the Winnipeg River. Lily held her breath as she watched the war-canoe tossed ponderously by the frantic rapid, tilting and dextrously righted by a dozen paddles with a touch as silk as a pianist’s, battered sideways by a furtive boulder to an edge of balance, only to be slung straight by the current itself as it hurtled westward blindly, without cause. All at once the lead canoe pitched left as if a sail had been punched by a gust; it yawed, skidded rudderless along a flat patch in the eye of something sinister, spun counter-clockwise like the earth itself only flatter, only laughing at gravity as the paddlers swung free of its burden and tumbled with military precision, one by one, into the gorge below. Lily saw her Tom strike the surface, lean on its buoyancy for a long second, wave his arms at some invisible rope in the air and go under, his head only – mouth, eyes, nose – bobbing up again farther down the roiling half-mile narrows full of rocks that had broached many a birch-bark or the drum of a man’s belly. He made so sound at all and after a while his eyes quit looking anywhere. When his body was hauled ashore, floating blissfully in a trout-pool miles away, the underwater rocks had battered it beyond recognition. They knew it was him because some of the white skin showed through the bruising. There was no bleeding because his body was frozen; the cold had killed him, they said, before he could be drowned or bludgeoned to death. Just as well.

Still, there on shore it was August with a rotting sun overhead. Nothing to do but bury the soldier with as much dignity as possible, with due notation of his incredible valour, his unshakable patriotism. They gouged a shallow grave out of the muskeg and laid him there in a spruce coffin girdled by a Union Jack. The volunteers shivered in the heat as the Last Post rang emptily over the Barrens – haunted by stunted cedars, wreaths of sphagnum, and brackish moss-water still shaken by the memory of the Great Glacier rumbling backwards overhead.

Two months later, after many of the troops had been quietly returned home by rail through St. Cloud and Chicago, Major Bolton came to the house to tell Lily the story of Tom’s heroic death. The details he provided her – in a kind and fatherly manner that genuinely touched her – added little to what she had already seen in her own way.

After he left, Lily sat for some time, by herself, staring out of the kitchen window she had for so long now used to measure the ebb and flow of her small being-on-this-earth. She tried not to imagine a world that would no longer acknowledge the absence of Aunt Bridie or Uncle Chester, of Bachelor Bill and the moon-sad face of his Violet, of Old Samuels and all his kind, and Mama and Maman and Aunt Elspeth, and Papa wherever the woods was hiding him. She tried not to imagine a life without Tom, without the kind of love engendered only in the dream-songs of the young for whom the future is as real as a moment of touch-and-surrender. She tried not to think of such a place nor the gods mad enough to have contrived it. No deity – whatever its hue or cry – could have invented this, she thought. I cannot accept it. What do you think of that, old Shaman? Do you hear me calling out, shouting over and over again – as if my heart were stone-deaf – I am Lily Marshall, I am Lily Marshall, I am Lily Marshall. And who is there to care?

Something urgent was poking itself into her ribs.

“Mama,” Brad said at her side, still prodding.

“Not now.”

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

And somehow, she did.