Lily's Story

March of 1922 was one of those late-winter months which people are forever remembering as part of a past that was not only better but more certainly connected with God’s Grace and His grand scheduling of events for the world’s good – before the rude intercession of wars, pestilence, and apostasy shook the embedded railings of the Divine Throne itself. Even God was growing nostalgic.

But here before the villager’s immediate eye was proof of a larger beneficence, a firm hand on the throttle of natural progress. The snow continued to fall but only at night, silent and windless. Each morning it surprised and delighted anew, fostering the hope that it had not fallen from an empty sieve of the universe but rather had grown wondrously from the essence of limb, eave and chimney pot. By day the thermometer held steady at thirty degrees under a velvet sun, coaxing icicles out of warmed gables and generally rounding, curving, mellowing. Rinks glistened by noon but froze tight again overnight. Snowballs packed as neat as baseballs yet struck like puffs of childish laughter. The meanest shanty, suffering the neglect brought on by war and the failure of hope, was transformed by the architecture of ice and snow into a glittering edifice, bemused by the temporary perfection of its impromptu scrolls, prisms, mossy filigrees. Some folk even conceded that the old Coote shack was ‘almost presentable’, though the latter sentiment may have been prompted equally by the thought that, come spring, it would no longer grace the village landscape in any of its transformations. During this brief, cherished interregnum of the seasons, passers-by could not help but notice the small, still, alert face of Granny Coote in her front window. She seemed, to all her newly-hatched well-wishers, to be staring intently across the street where, despite the weather, several burly young men were to be seen, at noon-hour or after work, clearing the snow and chopping out a rectangular trench that would, when winter had yielded to necessity, hold the concrete footing of a new house. Around them were conspicuously piled a number of sections of ‘material’ – two-by-fours, joists, cedar siding – purchased out of the public purse and the charity of the citizenry, and carefully covered with several tarpaulins, all of them turned outward to expose the donor’s identity: McKeough Fishery, Point Edward, Canada.

Though her attention was from time to time drawn towards the intermittent construction activity – she noted with appreciation (and the pure pleasure of memory) the presence of Charlie Brighton, old Mike’s boy, out of work, his ‘nerves’ still bad from the War; of Wilf Underhill, taking precious time from his new son; of Stu Macdonald and young MacIntosh; and of Sunny Denfield who always came over afterward – Granny Coote was more likely to be thinking back to other days of renewal and starting over, to the gentle remembrance of those few, joyous months with Lucien Burgher, and those years afterward – unexpected, unearned – when she bore his name proudly through some of the darkest times of her long, long life. Cora. Cora Burgher. Cora Coote. Cora the Cleaning Woman. She was all of them, none of them. And before that, through a haze of memories deliberately but imperfectly obliterated, she remembered being Lily – of Mushroom Alley, of Potts’ Lane…

The years between 1879 and 1885 saw the new nation gradually regain the confidence it had lost during the great depression when for a few shameful moments some citizens had suffered a lapse of faith in the ineluctability of their own progress. Aided by crop failures and a cattle epidemic in England and sanguinary adventures in Egypt and the Sudan, the local economy turned pink with health. If good works were a certain sign of election, then who could doubt the divine rightness of Sir John A’s national hope, fulfilled at last in 1885: a three-thousand-mile band of iron to weld the faintheart provinces and empty territories together in a singular purpose. And add to this a thousand breath-taking bridges and trestles, mathematically graded inclines, brooding watchtowers, suspended steel arcs and ballooning grain elevators stretched between Montreal and Vancouver. The Canadian Pacific Railway swept all before it, the juggernaut of the transcendentalist dream. By happy coincidence in 1882 the Grand Trunk finally succeeded in swallowing whole its ancient rival, the Great Western, and within a year rumours of a magical underwater tunnel began to circulate, an engineering miracle that would not only confirm God’s allegiance to His chosen creatures but also link the Canadian transcontinental grid with the rich, spidering network of iron and affluence south of the border.

In 1884 when the world adopted Sir Sandford Fleming’s scheme for Standard Time – made necessary throughout the civilized world if rational and efficient train schedules were to be realized – who then could doubt that the railways, and the foundries forging their steel nervous-system, carried with them the aspirations of mankind and the sanction of the Almighty? True, a number of malcontents and Luddites (who curiously enough preferred to set local time by the local sun) did write strident letters to newspapers complaining of “railroad tyranny” and accusing our noble men of science of “tampering with God’s time”. But pusillanimous voices such as these were forever silenced by the last spike driven home at Craigalachie.

For Lily the first two years following the incorporation of Point Edward as a village were deceptively peaceful. She mourned the death of Sophie quietly and deeply, as she did all those she had lost, but around her the seasons and the lives within them changed and throve. The surveys along Potts’ Lane were duly carried out. The new half of the street was a little less rambling than before but certainly not as straight as the town’s other ones were (having been drawn on a map with a ruler in some official’s study). Except for Lily and her secret arrangement with Hap Withers, no one on the Lane was unable to scrape together the fifty dollars to make their quietus with the council and the railway. The surveyors ‘squared up’ the wandering lot-lines, driving red stakes in the ground to prove their point. The resulting deeds were then registered, fixed for all time. But if the village worthies expected fences and hedges to spring up along these fresh definitions of ownership, they were disappointed. Nor was there a rush on paint and plaster at Lockwood’s Hardware by the citizenry of Potts’ Lane. However, over a period of many months some signs of proprietorship did become visible to the discerning eye – a shingled roof (one side only), a single sparkling pane of glass, a thrust of perennials along a barren wall permitted to bloom if they were persistent enough, a stone fireplace that didn’t quite get finished but was used and admired nonetheless.

Mushroom Alley evolved slowly in the Lane in other ways, no more dramatic but much more important to Lily and her own life there. People moved away and were replaced – one or two at a time, so at first little difference was felt: a brief break, a hiatus, some memories, a forgetting – and you could reassure yourself that the Lane was still the alley with a better truer name and that the requisite essentials for one’s own continuance were still in place. Then one morning you wake up and realize that everything has changed, that it has been changed for some time, and people around you are looking at you as if you’re the only thing that hasn’t. And you ask, how did it happen?

That Stoker Potts didn’t come back from the Bruce was no surprise to anybody on the Lane. The house stood empty all that winter, the screen door slamming in the wind till Rob finally went over for Lily and nailed it shut. Next to Hazel’s it was the biggest and best-built house among them. Rumours flew that some entrepreneurial stranger was about to buy it with a view to gobbling up the neighbouring properties to make room enough for a hotel larger than The Queen’s – now that the depression was giving way to prosperity and financial adventure. It was soon confirmed that the fifty dollars had been duly paid and a deed transferred. There was considerable relief when Peg Potts (now Granger) and her husband moved in, bringing their own child, and her young brother, Bricky, with them. But Peg, though she still had Sophie’s devilish eyes and hair-trigger laugh, had got religion and was quite reserved, ‘standoffish’ according to Betsy and Winnie. Her husband was a sober man who worked in Sarnia and tried to build a fireplace to please his wife. “Still,” Hazel philosophized, “they’re really not the other kind.” Bricky spent a lot of time with Rob, and when Rob was away, with Lily.

Cap Whittle, one windy autumn day in 1880, leaned too far out on his topsail yardarm and tumbled into the billows below, cracking three ribs and jarring another dime loose in his overworked imagination. His lot was sold to the eldest McCourt boy and his girlfriend, who proceeded to live in splendid sin in the neat clapboard cottage they erected and painted pale blue – once. Despite the impudence of the paint, they were deemed to be genuine Alleyfolk (the girl being a cousin of the Shawyers from Bosanquet Township). Lily had known Pippy McCourt for years, and she waved to him every day as he passed on his way to the freight-sheds. He always gave her a big smile. I wonder why, Lily thought, then chided herself for such foolish introspection.

In the bitter winter of 1881-82 Honeyman Belcher caught pneumonia and died alone in his shack. The frozen body was discovered three days later by his friend Stumpy. Honeyman’s business was taken over by a man from Sarnia. Hazel organized a campaign to raise money so that one of the Shawyer girls and her husband could afford to buy the lot and make the place habitable. It was something Sophie might have done – they all thought but did not say. Another property have been preserved from contamination, it seemed, but no one was willing yet to admit that each change somehow put the whole enterprise – if indeed there was one – in jeopardy. No one dared to even think that with Sophie’s death something vital and irreplaceable had gone out of their collective life, that in some mysterious way Sophie Potts had been the Alley and that the Lane in which they had immortalized her name was already something else.

Such sacrilege may have entered the minds of one or two of the believers when in May of 1881, without warning or explanation, John the Baptist capped his still, chivvied Aquinas the boar onto a wagon with his furniture, and moved to another shack in the south end near the recently constructed racetrack and fairgrounds. “Got some French woman hot for his product,” Hazel opined freely, but nobody laughed. A few nights later a gang of hooligans put the torch to his shanty when they found the still without sustenance. “I don’t believe in signs!” Hazel snapped at Betsy to shut her up.

As it turned out, Stumpy and Lily were the last of the hard-core Laners to survive there. In the fall of 1882 Spartacus, complaining of “too damn much noise an’ interferin’ in a body’s business” moved in with John the Baptist. Both lived and carried on their work into the ’nineties and were missed when they passed on. They never returned to the Lane. Poor Stumpy, whose supply of derelicts was not diminished by Sir John’s ‘economic miracle’, continued his good deeds until December of 1884 when one of his boarders stabbed him to death, mistaking him in the dark for an avenging Beelzebub whom he had seen leaping from the evening express just moments before. The assassin was shipped off to the asylum in London.

Several weeks after Baptiste Cartier’s place burned down, Violet arrived at Lily’s in tears.

“What’s wrong?” Lily said.

“Betsy an’ Shad are gettin’ married.”

“What else?”

“We’re all gonna move.”

To a rambling brick house in Forest, twenty miles to the north-east. “We’re goin’ legitimate again, Lil,” Hazel explained, “in a town where we can start over. Shad an’ my girls – Winnie an’ Betsy an’ dear, dear Vi – we’re gonna fix it up an’ start a boardin’ house. I mean it, Lil, a genuine boardin’ house. I’m goin’ back to cookin’ again. This here’s been fun but we’re all too old for it. Winnie almost died with her last abortion an’ Betsy’s insistin’ on keepin’ the one she’s got in her now – at forty-six years of age – ’cause she’s sure it belongs to Shad. So I headed off for Forest on the train one day last week and I just up an’ bought this old place.”

“Who’ll get this house?” Lily asked.

“Hap Withers has already bought it – for his eldest.”

“When’re you leavin’, then?”

“Next week, after the holiday. Ain’t it excitin’? You can hop on the Day Express an’ come up an’ visit us any time. Any time you please.”

“Yes,” Lily said, “it’s not even an hour, I’m told.”

Hazel, almost white-haired now, let her eyes mist over. “I remember when you was a red-haired beauty with the shyest smile in the County an’ your little pony Benjamin pullin’ you up Front Street every Saturday mornin’, an’ Betsy an’ Winnie were the worst teases ever.”

“I remember, Char.”

“Christ in Heaven, Lily,” she cried, “what’s to become of us?”

Violet came in to the laundry shed to say goodbye. When Lily had gathered enough courage to ask her why she wanted to go with Hazel and to assure her that she could stay here and live and work and be happy as long as she lived, Violet looked at the floor and said, “I got to go with Hazel. She’s been good to me.” Like the mother you never had, Lily was thinking when Violet stunned her with: “She needs me, Lil.”

The two women embraced, and it was Lily who let go first.

“I got somethin’ for you,” Lily said.

Violet glanced at the carpetbag in which Lily had packed some of the clothes and trinkets Violet had left here over the years and into which she had secretly tucked the one hundred and fifty dollars of unclaimed income that Bachelor Bill’s ‘retarded’ daughter had earned as her helper and her friend.

“Not that,” Lily said. “Something my mother gave me I’d like you to have, to remember me by.”

“Hazel says you’ll come up to see us on the train.”

“Of course I will.” Lily drew the gold crucifix and chain from her apron pocket and as Violet leaned forward, Lily placed it around her throat where it settled as soft as a butterfly’s dream on clover.

“Remember me,” Lily whispered.

Lily always intended to visit Hazel and Violet, and did receive one letter months later indicating that all was well: Betsy’s baby was robust and black, Winnie’s health had improved, Hazel was practically running the village, and oh yes, Violet had found herself a gentleman friend and specially asked after Lily. With Brad’s help Lily composed a stilted letter wishing them all well and promising once again to climb on the train and visit. She couldn’t, of course, tell them what sort of chaos her own life was sliding into.

Granny: in the belly of the Night-Dream again from which mercifully there was no remembrance, only the aftertaste of ash and self-loathing: Birdsky’s child called Rabbit was dancing around her again on his jackrabbit legs, his chestnut face burnished by the uninnocence of the summer’s sun and his slim boy’s arms undulant as willow and waving, wending them both backwards towards the bush towards the forbidden dark at the reaches of the East Field and beyond the last spot of sunlight reserved for Mama’s grave, its honey-heat pouring longingly on her neck, her shoulders bare, on her gooseflesh calves and casting a nine-year-old Lily-shadow upon the ghost of her mother’s cold breathing but Rabbit’s happy-dance was hopping in the bell-chambers of her little-girl’s heart and he was leading her away from the hearth where death dwelt unabashed in the daylight where Papa committed his treacheries upon the copper woman who cried out like a night-jar, her baby Rabbit dancing his two-foot/four-foot Indian jig into the crooked dank into the sweated crotch of ancient branch and Cambrian bole and somewhere out of the black interior the sound of music drifting out of brass and violin and tympany striving towards the geometry of a waltz or galop or durable lancers and Rabbit’s hand grew suddenly firmer and in the glow of hoarded moonlight she could see he had sprung taller and light-of-hair and his smile was Tom’s smile, a first-lover’s smile and “Come on, come on” it crooned waltzing into the intricate distance till it drew her at last into his dancer’s grip and she saw that his eyes were pebble-blue, iced amethysts agleam like the stiffened orbs of the long-drowned staring starward as the seasons’ rivers wash mockingly over them...