1
In September of 1878, after flinging their slogans and exordia fruitlessly into the machinery of the universe, the Liberals lay down and let the Tories take up the torch with their cries of ‘National Policy’ and ‘Reciprocity of Tariffs’ that must have sent a shudder rippling through the outer galaxies. Hopes were raised much faster than the fallen economy: The North-West Mounted Police cantered onto the plains to save them from whiskey and Indians. The Métis retreated even farther up the North Saskatchewan to obscure enclaves with immemorable names like Duck Lake and Batoche. With Sir John A. – resuscitated and breathing fire – at the throttle, the Canadian Pacific Railway took lethal aim at the Rockies, and the shockwaves of its revived thunder rolled into the Ontario boardrooms of the Great Western and the Grand Trunk. Talk of amalgamation was in the air that autumn. Retrenchment and consolidation were dusted off and re-presented as bywords of conventional wisdom. At any rate – whatever the reason – the Grand Trunk did decide that it was no longer expedient to supervise the daily comings and doings of its foster-child, Point Edward. Incorporation was hastily added to its list of bywords. After all, the company had more reserve land than it would ever need for future development, had already sold off the choice commercial lots it could not use, and even had a fine locally-situated candidate in mind to act as reeve and avuncular guide. Accordingly, the necessary legal trivia were arranged in the summer of 1878, elections for the first council announced for early October, and a proclamation date set for the transfer of power: January 1, 1879.
2
It was probably Hazel who first raised the question, but it soon became general up and down the Alley: what would be the fate of squatters and outcasts in a village controlled by its own elders and grandees? This question took on more biting import when it was learned that the Railway was ceding – gratis and as a gesture of its good-will – all such marginal territories to the corporation for ‘future recreational or industrial development’. The town council would own the Alley – outright. When the elections in October returned two clergymen, a shop foreman and a druggist as councillors, and acclaimed Stanley R. ‘Cap’ Dowling as reeve-elect – no doubt was left about the precariousness of the Alley community. So when they gathered at Hazel’s on the Saturday following the municipal election – more than two dozen of them, including even old Angus Shawyer sobered up for the day – they were not unaware of the irony of the situation: a town meeting of people who had settled here so they wouldn’t ever have to worry about politics and who had never been called upon to publicly confess that they were a community of any kind, even renegades.
Stump Starkey, Bible clamped akimbo, ascended the dais and accepted the burden of explaining the legal details as far as they were known, and when each of these had been thoroughly depreciated by argument and imprecation, he went on to recite the actual words of the Reverend Clough, councillor-elect, who had declared from the sanctity of his altar that the new village would be ‘purged of that empustulated rot by spring’. A number of suggestions were made for remediation, all of them indictable, and then the mood of anger changed to frustration and finally to sullen resignation. At the point where the meeting was about to break up, Sophie Potts was helped up onto the makeshift platform (Shadrack Lincoln’s steamer-trunk). The silence turned from sulky to expectant. Braced on either arm by Stumpy and Spartacus, she began to speak.
Sophie was now a truly gargantuan figure. The hummocks and drumlins and foothills of her flesh were housed in a cerise-and-violet-striped awning which Spartacus had filched from a Sarnia squire and Lily had fashioned into some sort of presentable container. Her cheeks, unbusked by sun, were nonetheless puffed with scarlet striations merely from the effort of breathing. The spoor of her sweat knocked dogs to their knees. Her chickory-dark hair sprouted up anywhere in thicket and thew. When she spoke, her voice, though unmistakably female, reminded her listeners of hickory smoke, licorice and deep-ground peppercorn.
“First of all, I’m sick an’ tired of this whinin’ an’ gabble-gruntin’. Won’t do us no more good than a tinker’s fart, an’ it’s not worthy of any one of you. I know you all. I met you one at a time. I liked an’ I hated you as I saw fit an’ you deserved. We all came here for our own special purpose, an’ we don’t have to tell one another why, now or ever. We like it here for our own peculiar reasons, an’ most of us wanna keep it that way. Most of us won’t do too good out there in the other world: we know too damn much about livin’ to last long out there. The question for us is not ‘do we want to stay?’ but ‘how can we swing it?’ Well, I’m gonna tell you how, right now.”
Stumpy and Spartacus got a firm double-grip and eased Sophie forward till she caught her breath – huffing in the most frightening manner. She continued.
“You’re all tryin’ to dream up ways of defendin’ your rights or gettin’ back at the respectable folk or cuttin’ your losses before you hightail it outta here like a jarful of spooked jackrabbits. Well you don’t need to. This town ain’t gonna toss us out on our noses no matter how much hot air the Reverend One-Ball Clough bellows out his belfry. This town needs us, an’ they know it. All we got to do is remind them a little bit.”
No one present had ever heard Sophie Potts talk like this before. Her gossipy tales and deadly retorts, her mustard tongue and nettling glance, her Olympian profanity – these were legend on the lane, but not this. The Alleyfolk listened, not quite believing what they heard.
“Think about it. Them people out there may look on us as a cartful of cripples, ninnies, hooers and downright heathen, but they get a lot of pleasure out of thinkin’ such things an’ feelin’ a tad better about themselves for thinkin’ them. And all the time they know they can’t really do without us. If Honeyman left, who would clean the shithouses an’ septic tanks? If they lost Spartacus, who would keep their boulevards clean an’ give ’em a pile of cheap furniture from Sarnia to choose from? Who’d keep the tramps safe an’ warm outta harm’s way if Stumpy up an’ left? And if Hazel were shut down, where would all them rutting sailors end up, eh? In the chaste beds of their precious little daughters! They may curse old Baptiste every mornin’ before prayers, but half the town buys its hooch from that fine, unlicensed establishment. And if they dump the Shawyers an’ McLeods an’ McCourts onto the streets, what maids will there be to change the sheets on their beds or wipe the snot off their kids’ faces? An’ think of the mountain of dirty laundry chokin’ the closets an’ hallways of the town’s best houses if our dear Lily was given her walkin’ papers?”
Sophie had struck the chord she had intended, and now she merely played the instrument – with intervals for deep breathing. “Now, here’s the plan,” she said when the cheering had almost ceased.
She had worked it out carefully in her own mind, trying it out first on Lily, and together they shaped it for presentation. The Alleyfolk, each in the course of his self-appointed duties, would take a petition out among the populace. The gist of the petition, written out in legal fashion for them by Shadrack Lincoln, was this: for a fee to be negotiated the squatters on the lane known as Mushroom Alley would have their properties surveyed, after which they would be given outright title. The lane itself would be formally attached to Prince Street at the south side of the tracks. With the addition by Shadrack of several ‘whereas’ and ‘we the undersigned’, the finished product looked impressive. Five copies were made. The strategy, as evolved by Sophie and Lily, was first to talk, in the natural course of business or social interchange, individually with a storekeeping, a lady-of-the-house, a day-labourer resting at Baptiste’s or exercising at Hazel’s, a satisfied customer, a charitable heart – and when that individual seemed convinced by the justice or necessity of the cause, then and only then would the petition be proffered for a confirming signature. Moreover, only the petition for that designated interest-group would be shown; that is, there were separate duplicate petitions for housewives, shopkeepers, Grand Trunk employees and other workers, tradesmen, and various self-appointed burghers of high standing. Discreetness, subterfuge, a touch of flim-flam – traits revered and practiced in the Alley – were thus to be used to telling effect.
The stratagem worked. On the five documents they amassed three hundred and fifty signatures, more than half of the adult population of the village – though strictly speaking not all by any means were eligible voters. But the moral impetus of the suit was considerable; after all, few of the resident landowners could deny having a father or grandfather who had begun life in British North America as a squatter. Nor was the instinct to poach completely extinguished by the advance of civility.
A delegation was appointed to take the petition to Reeve-elect Dowling. Stumpy was chosen to present the suit and do all the talking, his chief qualification for the task being his gender. Dowling lived in a two-storey brick house on Victoria Street in a style appropriate to a factory-owner, retired railway executive and budding politician. A maid, Carrie McCourt, answered the door and curtseyed before she recognized her neighbours and lapsed into an incurable titter. Before she recovered, they were inside, past the vestibule and fully into the drawing room – Stumpy, Sophie, Maggie Shawyer, Hazel and, well in the background, Lily Marshall. Dowling, his tie askew and his shirt in a rumpus, was caught off-guard and never regained his balance. He read through the papers at a muttering clip – glancing up from time to time at the odd components of the delegation, none of whom he recognized with any certainty. He said nothing for fully five minutes. Then he looked up at Stumpy. “Well, I am the Reeve of all the people here; I’ll present this to the council in January. Carrie will show you out.”
Sophie brushed Stumpy back with a gentle flipper and rolled her bulk till it was planted solidly in front of the reeve-elect, now trapped between his fireplace and divan. “Take it to them right now. We got to know your feelings on this right away. We don’t propose to hang around an’ wait for your mercy or neglect. We mean what we say here. All the services we provide are gonna vanish quicker than you can count your money. The people who signed there are tellin’ you they want them services an’ that they agree we got the same squatters’ rights as was given to their parents an’ to the lowliest of Negro slaves brung over the border from the States. We want an answer in a week, one way or another.”
Dowling gave them all his best smile but there was no mirth in it. He promised a response within a week.
3
I’m thirty-eight years old, Lily thought. It’s time I put down some roots of my own. I’ll take some of Brad’s schooling money and turn the place into a cottage. I’ll paint it blue. It’ll be a place he’ll want to come back to, the kind of place everybody needs once in a while – a sanctuary. For me, it will be home.
It was hard for Lily to believe that Brad was now in grade ten at the Sarnia High School, having completed grade nine with honours in every subject. He was studying literature and grammar and mathematics, even French. But when she attempted a brief conversation in the tongue she had known from childhood, Brad grimaced, then announced that she wasn’t speaking any version of French that he knew of. She started to explain her position but for some reason stopped part-way through and mumbled, “Well, I guess your teachers would know best.” They had more luck in their discussions of history and geography, certainly in the flush of mutual excitement during those first few months when Lily packed him a lunch and walked with him to the trolley and waited by the window in the gathering dusk till she spied his slim figure among the crowd of returning workers and put their kettle on. Lily listened to his tales of the English kings – the wicked and the sublime – and of the odysseys of the mad, foolish, wonderful seafarers who sailed straight off any horizon. Cautiously she would interrupt him, trying anxiously to keep the countries and oceans in their place, not a little baffled by the flat maps in Brad’s textbook and by his abrupt expositions. He himself worshipped England, her sanguinary pageant and her heroic verse, and was quickly irked by Lily’s persistent questions about Ireland and where this or that minor country might be, as if it really mattered to anyone. When Lily reminded him that his grandfather and grandmother came from there, he simply looked puzzled, then hurt; finally he would sputter, “This is history, Ma, not family.” Then that soft and engaging side of his nature, the side that needed to be loved utterly, re-emerged and he would curl up beside her on the chesterfield and read aloud to her from The Idylls of the King.
By the winter term, however, these happier sessions were fewer and further apart. He seemed more and more to prefer studying alone, drawing the curtain around his bed or when Robbie clumped through, wrapping himself in a shawl and disappearing into the drafty shed. Several times in January he came home late for supper without explanation, and picked at his food. Finally he confessed that he was going out with school chums to have a coffee at a restaurant where they read the newspapers and talked, and occasionally bought some supper. He said how sorry he was for worrying her and that it would not happen again, he was sure, because the fellows had all treated him so many times he just couldn’t throw himself on their hospitality any more. Next morning Lily gave him a silver dollar: “You ain’t a beggar,” she said. “You need money to treat your friends. Just tell me when you plan to stay late down there.” Brad made a solemn promise, and most of the time remembered to honour it.
In June Lily received a letter from Mr. Axelrod, the principal, and read it with wonder and trepidation. In a formal style and script, it informed her that her son was at the head of the class and reported to be one of the most brilliant students his teachers had ever seen. She was exhorted not to reveal such appraisal to her son for fear of unpredictable consequences in regard to the orderly development of his moral character. Nevertheless, it was important for his mother to realize the depth of his talent that still lay untapped by enlightened instruction, and to make preparations for her son’s potentially long and certainly fruitful academic career. In short, it was never too soon to start saving money, as even with the scholarships Brad was sure to obtain, a university education in a capital city was expensive. That much Lily already knew, and her intuition about her son’s precocity was now fully confirmed. She went immediately to the jar under her bed, next to Sounder’s pouch, and counted out sixty-nine dollars – two year’s savings. She would have to find more, but there were three years still to worry about that. Robbie was paying her a little board money whenever he got work at the sheds. Violet often refused to take the salary Lily gave her, but Lily merely put it aside in a separate cache – it wasn’t her money. We’ll make out, she said to Tom, like we always do.
In March she had wondered if that sentiment were true when Brad, studying in the shed to punish his boorish brother, caught a chest cold which rapidly turned into pneumonia. “It ain’t my fault, Ma,” Robbie pleaded and Lily absolved him with a touch and together they once again nursed Brad through his fever and delirium, but in so doing Robbie expended some small part of affection and faith that was afterwards irrecoverable. Robbie pitched in and helped Violet with the laundering – swearing the household to secrecy – while Lily sat by Brad’s bed reading aloud to him (in a cadence almost as good as Miss Kingman’s) his current favourite, ‘The Lady of Shallot’. When at last he was strong enough to speak, the first words he said were: “I love you, Ma. I’ll never leave you. Never.” He began to shake, not from the fever but its devastating aftermath. Tears slipped unannounced down his livid cheeks, and though Lily brushed them aside with a soft cloth, they continued to fall. He knows already, she thought. One way or another, I will lose him.
As soon as she had finished counting out the precious savings, Lily went fishing for Brad’s Easter report card; she didn’t know why but she wanted just to look at it and admire the scarlet A’s printed there and shimmering like heraldic gules – to hold them up to the light for Tom to see. It wasn’t in the apple-box beside the bookcase so Lily pulled out the drawer under Brad’s bed where he often kept his papers and notes from school. It was there, but she didn’t pick it up. A notebook, half-open caught her eye and held it. She leafed through it, scanning the crabbed printing that was unmistakably her son’s. Each page contained a poem, scribbled over and copied out and altered and finally printed in immalleable block capitals. They were Brad’s own poems. From the fading of the ink, she concluded that some of them had been written many, many months ago. She could not read them. She closed up the secret book and carefully put it back in its rightful place. She sat down at the kitchen table, shaken, unable to think a single mitigating thought. “Hey, Ma, I’m cleanin’ two cottontails out here, you want ’em for supper?” Robbie called, and then came in from the shed to see if she was all right. “I’ll get the fire goin’,” he said.
With the depression showing no sign of being able to discriminate between bleu and rouge, Robbie had been able to find only occasional work at the freight-sheds, lugging barrels and crates much as Tom had done in the full heat of the summer. Redmond continued to give him three half-days delivering grocers in the township, plodding along at the mercy of Rocket whose swayback and irregular trot amused children and roused the derisive instincts of the young toughs-about-town. Robbie never complained, and although he was naturally taciturn, he often sank into a black silence that Lily noticed immediately and gave a wide berth to. When Brad blundered into one of them, a brief flare-up ensued with Brad snapping out something elegant and barbed and Robbie stammering an unoriginal curse before stomping off to the woods.
The woods he loved still – to walk in, hunt in, do whatever private ruminating he needed to do when the world flummoxed him as it so often did. He was like a gentle bull with its horns growing inward. One day on his return from hunting in Second Bush, he said to Lily, “I stopped over at the old place.” “You did?” “I looked in the barn. Nothin’s been touched. There’s a bed in there an’ Ti-Jeans rocker. I almost forgot about that old place, you know.” “It’s still ours,” Lily said, looking for some defense. A week or so later Robbie did not come home all night; Lily didn’t notice until she called out to the pup-tent where he often slept in the spring and discovered it was empty. He arrived shortly after breakfast and said, with a hint of badgering pride, “I slept over at the old place. It’s real cozy. You get a fresh breeze out there, all night.” During the month of June he seemed to spend more and more of his spare time ‘out there’. When she casually questioned him about this, he grew silent, then morose. She stopped asking. But one day when she and Violet were out for their Sunday walk, they found themselves by chance coming out of First Bush by a new path and crossing Michigan Ave. towards the town-line not a stone’s throw from Bridie’s place. Sensing where they were destined, Violet drew Lily into a direct route and they came upon their ruined homesteads through the rotting stumps of the windbreak. What they saw surprised and then astonished them. A fully developed vegetable garden had arisen like a materialized dream-image exactly where the old one had always been – leaf and vine and tuber and wrinkled blossom. Robbie came out of the barn, blinking. “It’s real good ground,” he said.
Nothing was said about it but when Lily felt up to it she slipped over to ‘Rob’s place’ (as it was now called) in the early June evenings of 1878 and stepped into stride beside her son, hoe in hand, as of old. She offered no advice and none was asked for. He can’t make a living out of this patch, fertile as it is, but he loves it: it allows him to give something of himself completely without the fear of hurting or being hurt, she thought. When the August blights spoiled half of his crop, he was undaunted. He gathered his harvest, sold it at the Sarnia Market every Saturday during the season (she was told), and gave his mother ten dollars of his earnings. She put it in the schooling fund. And when Brad whined and pleaded and threatened over the question of his boarding in Sarnia during his grade-ten year, Lily was able to hold fast and say no. The trust fund had taken on an aura of something sacred between them. Someday Brad would understand it all. For the time being, though, he retaliated by staying away more and more to squander his money and time with school friends she was never to meet.
Just before the elections and the fuss over property title, Robbie received a letter with an exotic stamp on it. He had never before received a letter of any kind. Somewhat guiltily he slunk away to his tent and read it. Lily heard him jerk his shotgun off the shed wall and tramp towards the bush. The letter was floating in the breeze near the tent, abandoned. Lily rescued it, then read it as she knew she was meant to. It was from Fred Potts – Blub – and contained a thrilling account of his adventures with the circus, including lurid descriptions of the southern American towns and backwaters they visited each year, and a narrative of his own rise from stableboy to midway helper to full-scale barker for the girly-show. Fred hinted darkly that the circus would be coming next spring at least as far as London, and that a world of unimaginable, footloose wonder awaited the ruthless and the brave.
When Lily and Rob had finally finished piling the last of the pumpkins onto the barrow, they sat on the bench outside the barn and sipped tea made over the open fieldstone fireplace Rob had built nearby. Lil was thinking of past pleasures and sadnesses so she was startled when Rob said to her in his blunt, unprefaced manner, “I’ll never leave you, Ma.”
4
It was close to Halloween with a frail bloom of Indian summer on the village-to-be when news reached the Alleyfolk that the council-elect had voted – unofficially of course – three to two in favour of accepting their suit. Nor was their unreserved joy dampened one whit by the various provisos attached to the original request: that the lots be resurveyed as far as possible to conform with the accepted geometric principles, that the winding lane in consequence be ‘straightened’ into two tolerable curves, that the latter be attached to Prince Street at the tracks and adopt that nomination for all time-to-come, and finally that a settlement stipend of fifty dollars per property – regardless of size or length of tenure – be paid within three years to cover back taxes, the cost of the survey and the necessary legal fees, and to convince the legitimate citizens once and for all that the Alleyfolk intended to be ratepaying members of this community. The celebration, fueled by John the Baptist’s new still, went on for days.
Lily took no part in it. She was not ready yet to celebrate. She had more than the necessary fifty dollars, and could certainly raise that much again in three years if need be. In the back of her mind she had thought all along that she would sell Bridie’s legacy and with it invest at last in something of her own making and choosing: thus the appropriateness of taking possession of this property seemed foreordained. She owed ten or twelve dollars in back taxes on the old place, which the township, noting the rekindled interest in the land, had decided to press for, but even in the currently depressed market, almost two acres of cultivated land with a barn would sell for forty dollars or more. But Bridie’s place was now Rob’s place. No thought of selling it could enter her mind. It’s his, she thought; he’s made it his. I’ll pay the taxes and sign the deed over to him. What else have I to give my firstborn son? Even so, enough cash remained to buy back her birthright, as she now thought of it. Of course she would have no reserve money of any kind. Brad needed a new suit; the two she’d bought him last year had shrunk around his sprouting frame – he was going to be tall and slim and handsome. But more importantly, the warning in the principal’s letter and the burden of her own responsibility weighted heavily upon her. More immediately she was worried about Brad’s increasing truancy, and though his grades remained high, he was drifting away from her control and into habits that could be ruinous. She knew she must let him board in Sarnia under the supervision of a respectable family whose influence, though not her own, would be essential to his progress. Painful as it might be, she would have to make the move after Christmas. For that, she needed cash, all she could possibly earn slaving six days a week.
When Sophie heard, she was shocked, then enraged, then consoling – offering to give Lily every dollar she could “squeeze out of Mr. Flintskin, esquire, when he comes home.” The only concrete form of assistance she contributed, though, was to tell Lily’s story to Hap Withers, Dowling’s factory foreman and father of ten. Hap came right up to Lily’s place the next day and made the offer in that quiet, direct way of his that had endeared him to both sides of the village tracks. His own house lay on Prince Street, a hundred feet from the Alley. He proposed to pay Lily’s fifty-dollar fee to the council himself, take temporary ownership of the property only, and rent it back to Lily for a dollar a year and taxes. “I’ll have a contract drawn up,” he said, “to say that you have a right to buy me out for fifty dollars anytime over the next five years – and of course I won’t be able to sell the land. If you don’t want or need the place by then, I’ll buy your house and give it to one of my sons.”
Well, Lily mused, watching Hap whistling down the lane, I’ve got half a root down, and five years to grow the rest of it. There’s lots in this world who’ve got less than that. By Halloween Rob had a deed and Lily became a tenant.