1
Dominion Day that year marked the first decade of the new nation and in Sarnia the opening of Lake Chipican and the surrounding Canatara Park. The new recreation facility – yet another outward sign of man’s steady ascendance to perfection – festooned with picnic benches, a bandstand and a mammoth open-air dance pavilion big enough for a whole village to jig upon. The grand debut of the facility would be celebrated with the usual political speech-making, boosterism and fireworks, but by far the greatest attraction was to be the regatta on Lake Chipican itself, starring no-less-a-celebrity than Ned Hanlon, the legendary world-class punter. Sophie decided that Lily ought to go because she had been down-in-the-dumps lately and needed a little music and dancing to cheer her up. When Lily protested mildly that Lake Chipican was just their own Little Lake with a fancy name attached to it to make it sound vaguely Indian, Sophie appealed directly to the boys seated nearby, and the day was carried.
As it turned out, almost everyone from both the town of Sarnia and the unincorporated village of Point Edward came out to watch the races and the mighty Ned Hanlon – whose combination of strength and agility, power and grace, bravura and humility appealed in their different ways to the ages and sexes that rimmed the pond seven-deep that Saturday afternoon.
Sophie and Lily spent the day together. The young people went off by themselves in twos and threes, returning only for supper or an extra nickel. Wee Sue and Brad took Bricky swimming. The sun shone benevolently down upon the festivities, glistening on the muscular arms of the rowers and deepening the contrast of their white-duck trousers and red-striped shirts. They pulled in furious unison, skimming the surface of the pond with the seeming ease of Argonauts, their rhythmic, guttural grunting muffled by the adulating crowd and the evergreen-and-oak of Canatara Park. Sophie was apparelled in a peach-yellow sundress and a billowing bonnet that gave her the appearance of a ruffled bobolink. She clasped Lily by the hand and pulled her here and there in order to improve their view of the racers and get a close-up gander at Ned Hanlon himself. Sophie’s ken, however, soon narrowed to the hefty coxswain of one of the rowing eights, the largest of the shells in the competition, requiring men of fortitude and amplitude to propel her manfully forward, stroke and counter-stroke. Lily preferred the scullers, the solitary racers whisking daft as dragonflies, commuting water to air.
During the picnic supper the Sarnia Bugles entertained from the bandshell and the husky athletes mingled with their worshippers. Several of them had volunteered to supervise the children’s races. Robbie won a prize and was presented with a ribbon by Ned Hanlon himself. With the sun behind them making them mere silhouettes, Lily watched her son and this illustrious Torontonian during the brief ceremony in which she knew much more was being exchanged than a mere ribbon. He’s just like Tom, she was thinking; he can’t live long on small rations of hope. The smile he flashed her way was like a reprieve. When Lily looked around for Sophie, she was gone. Bricky had been laid under an oak to sleep off his indigestion, the young folk had disappeared again, and in the distance the orchestra was just striking its first chord in the new pavilion.
By the time Lily got over there, the hardwood dance-floor was already covered by couples enlinked in a Strauss Waltz, animated by the strings and muted horns of the Detroit City Orchestra just arrived by lake-steamer. The underside of the pagoda-like roof over the raised platform was hung with coloured lanterns and pastel ribbons even though the sun would provide all the illumination required for two hours yet. No one noticed the anomaly. The air of early evening was cool, the music exotic and seductive. Sophie was dancing with the ‘eights’ man, who was smartly attired in yachting white. Lily could see that he too was surprised – and not a little flushed and exhilarated – by the nimble ponderance of her step, the grand sway of her circling: a panda’s waltz on its home ground. Lily was so absorbed in observing this scene that she hardly felt the pressure on her arm guiding her gently into the slipstream of music and dance. Did I say ‘yes’? she thought, settling into the stranger’s embrace. I must have.
He was one of the scullers, who had come second only to Ned Hanlon himself. In his oar’s grip he held Lily as lightly as he would a falling rose-petal. His sandy hair fluttered in the breeze of their own making. In the whirling fandango his fingers on her back praised and applauded. In the slow waltz she put her brown against his bare chin, and they navigated the shoals and eddies of the music with such mutual acuity Lily could feel no part of his motion but the point where brown and chin swivelled on a single bead of sweat. During the jigs she lifted her skirt above her knees and closed her eyes until she could hear, somewhere behind the fiddle’s slither, the bounce of a breath-driven harmonica. When it stopped, she leaned against the railing to steady herself; her premier danseur – Shamus O’Huguin from Burlington – was catechizing her with insatiable sea-green eyes.
As dusk descended and the mosquitoes began rising from the swamps and pools around, the music slowed to a last waltz, and young and old and many between clung together in pairs and danced as if they believed such bonding – such congruence of purpose and desire and hope – were as permanent a part of the human condition as war and depression and the facing of fidelity. “We’re all goin’ over to the Grand Trunk for a party,” he whispered. “You’ll come?”
Around her, jostling couples pushed towards the steps, a bass-viol accidentally groaned, illicit laughter percolated from the shadows, Sophie Potts was waving goodbye with her baby finger and ambling into the brush with her amiable paramour. Lily turned back to the young oarsman and she could tell from the smile on his face that she was about to say yes.
“You comin’, Ma?”
It was Robbie, at the bottom of the steps, alone.
“Yes,” she said, and released her lover’s hand.
2
Next day the Sunday hush lay more heavily than usual upon the village. The church bells importuned as lungfully as ever, but empty places were duly noted in a number of pews, and even in the choir-stall itself. Lily listened to their familiar, reassuring ring as she ironed a clean shirt for Brad, who was to go down to Sarnia tomorrow for his interview with Mr. Axelrod, the principal-designate of the recently constructed, independent high school. Brad lay on the chesterfield pretending to be absorbed by some verse-saga called Don Juan, a gift from Miss Stockton – daintily inscribed – in honour of his extraordinary performance on the Entrance Examination. Lily had taken some of the cash she had been putting away in a crockery jar under her bed and purchased her son his first store-bought oxfords, suit, vest and tie. Robbie was off by himself hunting cottontail in Second Bush.
It was a hot and humid July day without the relief of a breeze. Lily was thinking that she should go discreetly over to Sophie’s to see if the kids wanted to have a picnic and spend the day on the beach. If Wee Sue came along, then Brad would also. She was mulling these thoughts over sleepily – her dreams had been deep and disruptive for weeks now – when she was startled by a commotion in the back shed. A laundry pail clattered, pursued by a mutilated curse. Sophie.
Lily arrived in time to help her upright. Sophie glared at the offending pail, then flashed a teeth-stretching grin at Lily, catching her frontally with a boozy gust of breath. Her eyes hovered, radium red. The thick humus of her hair shrieked outward. The look she gave Lily (just before the mask of her face closed over it) skidded on the edge that separated ecstasy from desperation.
“C’mon, Lil, we’re gonna have us some fun, some real fun,” she said in a voice amazingly unslurred, riding its own energy.
Lily took her friend by the arm: “Let me get you home to bed, Soph. You ain’t had much sleep, I bet.”
“If you’re suggestin’ I been drink’ an’ screwin’ all night, then you’re absolutely right,” she laughed, pulling away and grabbing Lily’s hand in turn. “C’mon, you an’ me’s gonna haul old Duchess’s ass up the hill an’ give that bachelor pig up there the thrill of his life!” She rocked back on her heels, sat down on the cushions of her rump, and let out a dry, rattling cackle like a pullet with a kernel in her craw.
Lily allowed herself to be dragged across the lane to the Potts’ yard, where it became clear that Sophie had already put her plan into action. Beside the pig-pen sat the rickety trundle-wagon Stoker used for hauling logs or vegetables up to the house. Duchess had been lured out of her shady retreat with a bucket of milk-slops strategically set near the gate to the sty.
“C’mon, Lil, I need a little help gettin’ her up on the wagon. Mind you, if she knew where she was goin’ she’d hop up there like a toad into poop, but she won’t listen to a word I say to her.” She flung open the barrier and called out in saccharine, seductive tones: “Soo-ee, soo-ee, soo-ee!”
Duchess pricked up her floppy ears, blinked pinkly, but decided not to abandon the slop-bucket in spite of its barrenness. She was a fine Chesterwhite sow with rosy-hued skin, a soft, lecherous snout, and fold upon fold of self-satisfied fat. More than a dozen litters had suckled from her contented teats, and whenever she was in heat, like now, she lazed in the mud and dreamed of nipples ripening and Farmer Holly’s Yorkshire boar rearing up behind her, his cleft trotters flailing against her roused flanks, while she prinked her golden bristles and joyfully sucked out his seed. But Farmer Holly’s boar was much overdue.
“Son-of-a-bitch up an’ died on us,” Sophie explained, circling the wary sow. “The old man, not the stud,” she chuckled. “Now you put that there ramp up to the wagon while I push this barrel of grease-shit from the rear,” she shouted.
“Soph, you’re crazy. You can’t get Duchess up on that contraption, an’ you can’t let her in with John the Baptist’s boar. He’ll kill you.”
“He ain’t home,” Sophie said triumphantly. “Gone perch fishin’ with Hap Withers’ boys, out on the lake for the whole day!”
“He ain’t gonna like it, you know how he feels about Aquinas.”
Sophie glared over at Lily. “Hey, you an Alleywoman or not?”
Lily grabbed the two planks and tried to make a ramp out of them. Sophie managed to get downwind of Duchess and plop a hand on each of the sow’s haunches. She grunted and heaved the animal forward, and was making some headway when she decided to expedite its progress by twisting its tail about three hundred degrees counterclockwise. Duchess squealed like a bruised bagpipe at the outrage and lurched sideways. Sophie lost her handhold, overcompensated and flopped flat on her back in the slime. Lily leaned forward and put a gentle arm-lock on Duchess while Sophie yawed fitfully in the mire, gained a knee, and then let her jaw slacken like a hippo’s yawn.
“You blubber bucket! You bulb-bellied slop-cunt of a pig’s hooer! You fat-tit, slant-eyed son-of-a-boar’s bitch!” She hollered through her megaphone at the stunned sow – its eyes red as raspberries – and continued improvising her medley of curses, whose foul effluence rose into the air above the Alley and like an irresistible spoor drew to it all manner of curious creature. Indeed, by the time Lily had seduced Duchess to one of the trundle-wagon’s uprights and pulled Sophie to her feet, they were surrounded by McLeods, McCourts and Shawyers of every size and sex. All were eager to help.
Sophie, canary-yellow from the front and mud-umber from the back, re-established what she took to be her dignity by hurling commands into the chaos, and somehow, amid much laughter and several temporary setbacks, managed to assist the terrified sow up the plank and into the wagon. Lily hopped aboard and tried to sooth Duchess with some nonsense patter she thought might approximate a porcine lullaby, a manoeuvre which, while having little evident effect on the beast, did succeed in reducing Lily and Sophie to a state of paralyzing mirth. Sophie leaned the mighty ballast of her body against the rear of the rig while a dozen ululating children pushed from the side and pursued some invisible Pied Piper up the dusty trail towards the bootlegger’s shack. Other pleasure-seekers, large and small, joined the procession en route. Cap Whittle was seen scrambling down a yard-arm. Spartacus and Stumpy fell in behind, and Honeyman Belcher left his pony to graze where it stood.
As the tumbrel lumbered past Hazel’s Heaven, the hoots and cries of the cavalcade awoke the drowsy concubines within, and by the time it reached the stamping ground of John the Baptists’s soul-mate, the afternoon was aflutter with petticoat and tinkling laughter. As the circus crowd gathered and jostled for the best view, Sophie halted the carriage with a toss of her head and waddled aggressively towards the abode of the victim. All commentary ceased. Wavelets could be heard stroking Canatara beach.
Aquinas had come out of his sanctuary to accost the intruders. In some ways his pen was the sturdiest and most impressive structure on the Alley. A commodious corral – of stout split-logs and deeply-augured posts braided with chicken-wire – allowed him freedom to exercise his bulk, loll in the soothing mud, or intimidate children and idling strangers by stamping his trotters on the gravel pad and grunting like a tusked peccary in the wild. Behind him stood a hutch-like affair lovingly constructed by his friend and helpmate. It was water-tight, being shingled with cedar-shake, and the south side of it could be opened completely to the air merely by raising the two wall-size shutters on their hinges and laying them flat across the roof. This transformation occurred on warm sunny days when Aquinas preferred to lie in his manger, shaded and content, and peer out at the fevered world beyond – his feed trough less than a head-loll away, and if he were pressingly hungry, as he often was, he might even nudge open the lid of the large grain-box where the goodies were stored.
When he espied the crowd ringing his demesne on three sides, he stopped in his tracks and tilted forward the horn-shaped ears he often brandished like the sabres of his jungle cousins. Aquinas was a purebred Polish China boar, black as silt except for the tufts of white on his feet, tail and snub-snout that made him look, no matter how fiercely he agitated his bristles, slightly comical. But his grunting in itself could be awesome, and when the foolish or unwary ventured so close as to touch the walls of his monastery, he swung his bullocks in a frenzy and stabbed the air with his progenitive wand. Unfortunately, the only sins of the flesh he had ever committed were those of gluttony and gormandizing. His celibacy was the talk of the Alley, and beyond. Baptiste Cartier, if he himself knew why, would not say. He treated the boar like a favoured pet, feeding him grain and Jersey milk and windfall apples and a lap or two of homemade stout when he was extra good. After dark Baptiste could be heard gabbling in joual to Aquinas, who listened with exaggerated politeness and allowed his itching brow to be stroked and stroked. Sometimes it would be three in the morning before John the Baptist rejoined his customers in the shack at the very end of Mushroom Alley.
At this moment, though, with the afternoon sun blinding him, Aquinas was alone, surrounded by silent, gawking faces and under siege from a large female who had just – incredibly – entered the gate beside the open hutch as if she were waltzing into church. Trying hard to ignore the presence of those arrayed behind her, he pawed the turf with his right trotter and stiffened his jowls like a rooster’s wattles. He belched volcanically and aimed a vicious snort in Sophie’s direction. As he looked about, ready to mount a charge of some sort, his beady eye caught sight of Duchess, who was being escorted down the wagon-ramp right behind the invading force. His nostrils flared, appraised the available odours, and tightened. Sophie hauled Duchess by the ears fully into the pen and Lily slammed the gate shut in back of them. This acted as a signal for the silent chorus to erupt in a series of whoops, hollers, lewd anatomical suggestions and general merriment.
Aquinas froze, and waited in the middle of the sty as the dust from his terrible stomping settled in pools around him. He didn’t seem to know which of the approaching hags he ought to be most chary of. Something in the aura about Duchess – with her pink plumpness, her undulant softness, her wobbling, fetid underparts – prevented him from outright retreat, from unqualified terror. He watched in rapt trepidation as Duchess, veteran breeder that she was, waddled into the muddy wallow a few feet away, tipped forward on her knuckles and presented herself for servicing.
A rasping cheer went up from the well-wishers. Sophie picked up its inspiration. “All right you black-balled son-of-a-bitch” she yelled at Aquinas, “Let’s see what kinda stud you really are!” She turned to the crowd for support, rocking with belly-laughter, and brushing off the mud dried on her backside with lewd aplomb. Aquinas, tempted and shivering, stumbled forward two steps, all caution momentarily overpowered by the incense of passion just beyond his nose. At the last possible second, however, with Duchess braced for capture and rude entry, he lunged diagonally, splashed through the muck and headed for his manger. But the lady’s duenna was even swifter; Sophie cantered after the spooked hog, cutting him off at the corner of the opening to his hutch, where they collided with a blubbery thud. A collective ‘ooh’ was emitted by the throng. Both combatants went down but Sophie was up first, spitting sludge and umbrage. She flopped on top of Aquinas, who made no pretense of resistance. He had given up all emotion but fear, and as she threw a choke-chain of flesh around his neck and jerked him vertical, he closed his eyes, squealed like a piglet without a nipple, and then howled as piteously as a barrow staring at his clipped testicles.
“Grab him by the handle!” someone offered.
“He ain’t got one!”
Sophie was dragging him stiff-legged across the wallow towards the puzzled sow, and might actually have succeeded in carrying out such a forced congress if Duchess herself had not decided she required more privacy than this to satisfy her procreative longing. She stood up, unstuck her front trotters from the mud and stumped past the purblind Aquinas towards the shelter.
“The other way! The other way!”
Sophie uttered an oath that sprung something inside the boar’s head and he went limp, all six hundred pounds of him. Undaunted, Sophie gripped him by the knuckles and inched him back towards the sow now settled in the shade of the manger. The crowd whooped. Suddenly Lily was at Sophie’s side. Together they tugged Aquina’s deadweight slithering through the slough, tumbling into it themselves, popping up again with only their eyes and teeth to signal the manic delight of their laughter and fury, and finally – riding a crest of hysterical cheering and good-will – they pitched the wretched male creature into the straw beside Duchess. Lily fell back against the stool John the Baptist used when conversing with his bachelor friend, and let the tears wash over the mud on her cheeks. But Sophie – fuelled by some darker, unspoken purpose – belly-flopped between the dazed beasts and made a lunge for Aquinas’s crotch. There was no need. In panic or dread or desire – who would ever know? – the Polish China boar rose up and then down, and with a savage thrust did his pedigree proud.
Before the crowd could confer its ultimate accolade on Sophie’s daring, however, two more unexpected things happened. First, Cap Whittle, athwart an alder branch, cried out, “Man ahoy,” and John the Baptist was spotted tearing across the flats towards the mêlée. Second, the combined plentitude of sow, boar and human attendants caused the ground to give way under them. Not all at once but steadily, like quicksand, and accelerating with each floundering second. Straw, dirt, pigshit, rotting timbers, splintered floorboards – all caved inward and down and swept a cargo of flesh into the vortex. Moments later, through a maze of squeals, whimpers, gasps and settling dust – first Lily, then Duchess, then Aquinas, then Sophie clambered up and rolled onto firm ground. And just in time.
As the throng parted and drew back to allow for the entrance of the aggrieved party whose French oaths and howl of desolation preceded him by two hundred yards, they gasped as one when the earth under them rumbled and exploded, and a geyser of smoke-and-steam shot up no more than a handspan behind Sophie’s rump. The shock of it bowled her over against Lily, and, arms enlinked, they followed the goose-white plume as it hissed skyward from its underground eruption. Moments later Cap Whittle caught the first whiff of raw whiskey.
A few weeks later Sophie stopped Lily on the lane and said, “Hey, I got news. Duchess is up the stump.” She grinned her most wicked grin: “Must’ve been the holy water!”