1
The hardest thing Cora had ever done in her fifty-some years on this earth was to start walking up the Lane a few doors in order to tell Peg Granger that she couldn’t keep the baby, she’d have to give him up. Peg had been looking after him while Cora nursed Bradley; she had not set eyes on the thin, quaking thing since. Ten years ago any decision not to accept the responsibility of rearing an orphaned creature – especially one with her own blood in its veins – would have been unthinkable. Those ten intervening years, then, had brought her to this pass: where, for two nights following Bradley’s interment in the Point Edward cemetery (not many yards from Cap’s resting place), she had lain awake rehearsing the speech she would deliver to Peg explaining why the child ought to be placed in the Sarnia orphanage. That Peg herself might offer to raise it with her own large brood – two of them almost grown – had not figured into her stream of excuses and pleas. I am old, she had thought, not necessarily in years but in experience, in the expenditure of human feeling. After all there was only so much pity or remorse or hurt, only so many tiny jolts of joy or vacant acres of grieving loss that any one set of flesh-and-bones could be expected to endure. Something had to be kept in reserve: for oneself, for the last days. It took energy to die, as Bradley had just shown her, and reserves of feeling. With Cap, she had known this from the moment she had interceded to prolong his life. There was to be no redemption for either of them, but at their age and in their circumstance something more vital and prized: a rich living-through of select hours, one by one by one. That she was there in his room to shepherd him towards death and towards some version of dying he could accept as appropriate, was never in question. But it had been only towards the end that she had come to the realization that Cap himself began to understand how much it was she who needed him. And when he died, she did not feel the stabbing sense of loss and dismemberment that followed the other deaths small and large, expected and sudden. She missed him, she would have to reorient her remaining days to exclude their daily collaborations, but Cap’s voice persisted inside her – not as a lapsing memory or object of endearment (as the others were, still) but as part of her own speech and the thoughts it shaped – a live, thrashing verb whose argument would not be quelled, nor patronized by the simple affection with which the dead are decorated. You will never be anybody’s memory, she said. Not like Brad, she thought sadly, resurrected, for what? To die again? To let me play out once again the mockeries of nurse and angel?
But a child, six-months old, who deserved to grow and breathe the wide air and become something in a world partly of his own making – that was asking more than she was capable of giving. That the dark gods were heartless she had known since she was eight or nine, and ever since had gathered evidence for the case against them. That they were capable of such a cruel jest as this, that their laughter was a joker’s guffaw –she was now certain. In her own view, she was a tired, worn-out, benumbed creature, disenfranchised of the earth’s aboriginal blessings. She desired now only the small comfort of a quiet, brief old-age, a little time to dream backwards, to reacquaint herself with the shy deities of woodland and brook. Then, out of the jester’s joke-book – or the world’s will as Cap might say – presto: the return of the prodigal son, dead twice already, and the babe, the boy – Eddie. How can I play the mother again? she thought in a panic. My fingers are arthritic, the skin droops from my cheeks, I’ve lost a tooth, my breasts are withered pods, I am a parody of motherhood, I haven’t smiled with any semblance of innocence in ten years, the little tad will shriek when he sees me, as he did the first night in his fever. And what if I should dredge up, somewhere, some facsimile of mother’s love, some fissure of untapped affection from which to nurture that miniature being – what then? I might die when he’s four or eight or twelve, when he’s still becoming and mercifully dependent – where will be he then? Who would care for him enough to embrace his orphaned heart? I am alone. I have no one. I rent two rooms in an old man’s house. I have nothing to give but the derelict self. And what if some perverse miracle should occur and we both survive? When he’s twenty and a man, I will be over seventy years – a creaking, babbling buffoon of a woman with cataracts and a weak bladder and the temper of a nanny-goat. It can’t be done, she concluded. It would defy reason and nature. It was just the sort of misguided world-desire that Cap’s all-seeing Will found to be as pathetic as it was common.
So when she had left her place that bright morning in October, she had irrevocably decided to have Peg carry the babe straight to the orphanage. She wouldn’t even ask to see it. But in the few minutes it took her to reach the tracks and cross them, she changed her mind. She decided to take Eddie back with her. Reasons were never enough. Don’t you dare laugh, Cap Dowling, she said, swinging her arms vigorously to work out the kinks.
“He’s an angel,” Peg Granger said. “Good as gold; you won’t ever be sorry for keepin’ him.”
Cora had steeled herself against the worst: nights of fretful crying, daytime tantrums, the numb suffering under the fever of measles, chicken-pox, mumps, whooping cough or worse. She had seen it all, survived and not survived, and if she must do it again, she’d take the bit as far forward in her teeth as she could and smile through the grimace. Eddie soon let her down. He was a joy, a child with happiness and good humour born in him. He slept right through most nights, and the few occasions when the colic struck he needed only to feel her arms around him and the rhythm of the rocker to be soothed again. And just before he’d drift back to sleep, without fail he would grasp her by one of her thumbs and squeeze it. When he did get the measles, at two, he whimpered with the pain in his sunless room till she thought she’d go mad with her own, but the moment the fever subsided he cast the pale, blue gratitude of his eyes upon her and begged for a story. Even then he never took advantage of an illness, as most children quite naturally do. Whenever he complained, Cora was certain he was hurting somewhere. Whenever he had a choice, he chose joy.
Where did such feeling originate? she often wondered. I loved all my own children as much, doted on them more than I do Eddie because I was then young and vigorous and foolhardy. During the first winter she left him on his own more than she should have – when the arthritis or the black-mood would come upon her and leave her frozen to the bed for hours on end while the fire took its chill from the room. Once in February when he was starting to crawl everywhere and she lay in a daze dreaming of snow and fiery locomotion, she was brought back from the brink of something wondrous and lethal by a tug on her left thumb. She opened her eyes. Eddie was pulling himself upright so that his face was parallel with hers. He grinned in delight at his triumph and her sharing of it. He pushed his nose against her stiff cheek and made his ‘choo-choo’ sound, and laughed. She let him pretend he was drawing her upright by the thumbs out of her delirium.
Hap Withers, now over seventy, went up to the Lane to live with his son and family. He told Cora she could have all four rooms of the cottage if she wanted, for a dollar a year. All he needed to know was that the couch in his old room would be available on those few occasions when he felt like “coming home for a spell”. He never did, and that room became Eddie’s when he was ready for it.
When the decline of the village began in earnest, Cora found herself working only two days a week at The Queen’s. She bundled Eddie up, tucked him in a wicker basket and hauled him on a sled down there with her, where the staff did their best to disrupt his even disposition. With her savings over the years she really didn’t need to work full-time, but she found it helped to get out and around and see familiar faces and places, even though many of them jarred old griefs from their manageable grooves. By spring, Eddie was beginning to toddle and say his first words, and she could see that he deserved better than to be cooped up day and night with an old crone. On sunny days while she coaxed her vegetable patch into reviving, she tied Eddie onto a long rope so he could roam a bit and get the feel of what walking would be like when it was unfettered. Still, he had little company except the maids at The Queen’s. She watched his eyes perk up at the animal calls of the urchin boys back in the dunes.
So she went out and arranged to do some housecleaning for Elizabeth Sanders, the schoolteacher and, incidentally, helped mind her slightly retarded son, Sammy (Slowboat to the kids). She was recommended in turn to Maggie Hare, the wife of the manager of the freight-sheds. From time to time she worked also for Agnes Farrow and Mrs. Thibeault, scrubbing or ironing or helping with a meal on special family occasions. “She’s quick and quiet,” Mrs. Thibeault said all over town, “and what’s more, she keeps her mouth shut afterwards. For some queer reason, the kids go for her.”
Eddie was brought along – on a sled in winter, a wagon in summer – and spent much of his second year of life sitting on a pile of laundry, playing second or third fiddle to the children of the household, watching Cora as she watched him, and in general enjoying the constant shift of scene and character. His cheerfulness was so infectious that it often obstructed the premeditated whining of the little brats unofficially abandoned to her care. If Sammy lunged after a certain toy of his, Eddie would look hurt for a fraction of a second, weigh the effects of a pathetic glance at Cora, then pick up a less-prized object and before long begin to play happily with it. Sammy, who was a year older than Eddie but spoke with a slurred stutter, soon started to call her ‘Gran-nee’, despite repeated warnings from his mother. When Eddie’s words began to arrive – fresh and tumbling over each other – the one he chose for her was Granny. And Granny she became, even at The Queen’s among the staff and old-timers in the lobby, several of whom remembered most of the names she had accepted as her own in the long years past.
Granny in turn decided to give Lucien’s name to young Eddie. Eddie Burgher. Why not? she thought. I have been Mrs. Cora Burgher now for eight years. It is the name I will take to my grave. All she ever told Eddie about his real parents was that his mother died having him in Toronto (which was almost the truth) and that his father had been an engineer on the Grand Trunk, whose locomotives still roared by their back window several times a day. “When you’re grown up, I’ll tell you all I know about them,” she promised him after he’d been teased about it in the schoolyard. And, trusting her with a naive faith which afterwards led her to weep alone in her room, Eddie never once raised the subject again.
Still, many days were spent at the little cottage Hap Withers so generously provided for them. Sometimes Hap could be persuaded to leave his own clan and join them for a Saturday supper. Eddie, normally very shy around males, took to him immediately. Hap whittled him a tiny flute out of willow and showed him how to tease a skidding, dizzy music out of it. The neighbourhood near the tracks was populated not only by Hap’s numerous grandchildren but by second and third generations of Shawyers, McCourts and McLeods. Gangs of ruffian boys combed the shadows at dusk with their signal cries, and bruited danger in the long afternoons of summer. One day when Eddie was three, they came for him, and she could no longer hold him back.
“We’re just gonna play hide-and-go-seek,” he begged her. “I won’t go near the water.”
From her place in the garden she scanned the flats and the blotches of bush, detecting the tell-tale signs of his running, the glee of his cries on the wind, the teasing crouch behind a shrub or sandbank, the soar of his little-boy voice “Home free!” against the derision and mockery everywhere about him. When he came home, he had a scrape and a bruise on his cheek. “I fell down chasing Jimmy Shawyer,” he lied. Though he never really became part of the residential gangs, he would gladly join them for games or swimming at the beach, seemingly content to take what the moment offered and always always making up his own mind about what he wished to do or how far he would be absorbed into their tribal rites. Oddly enough they could not cope with his cheerful outlook or his irrepressible goodwill. One day when one of the bullies challenged him by jerking his prize apple out of his hand and chomping into it, Eddie grabbed him so quickly by the wrists that the bully’s back was against a tree-trunk with his dignity collapsing before he could bleat out a protest. With the entire retinue watching (and Granny from behind her raspberry canes), Eddie glared at his tormentor, threatened him with a devastating knee, then slowly let a smile overtake his whole countenance, his laugh gently coaxing a guarded one out of the bully till they were both laughing and Eddie relaxed his grip and turned around to let the others know that it had all been in good fun, even the gesture of contempt that had initiated the coward’s game. He’s going to be all right, Granny thought. Whenever he can, he’ll choose happiness.
One of the accidental side-effects of Eddie’s playing with the neighbourhood children was his request, the summer before he entered grade one at Edward Street School, to be allowed to accompany Meg and Burt Granger to the Methodist Sunday School. He studied the indecision on her face with growing puzzlement, and the stalling tactic of “we’ll see” died on her tongue. “Course you can,” she said. She covered her guilt next day by showing excessive interest in his grooming, and when the Granger kids – all five of them – arrived to escort him up Michigan Ave., she said loudly enough for all to hear, “Put on your Sunday smile, Eddie”. She was genuinely surprised when he reported that he had enjoyed the experience, that they did a lot of singing and hand-clapping, and a funny old fellow came in near the end and played hymns on the piano and sang till his eyes almost popped out. He went back every Sunday after that. Mrs. Sanders gave him lessons to bring home and learn. Granny sat with him and taught him the verses, one by one. Do I laugh or cry? was her thought at the close of each Sabbath. Not once did Eddie ask her why she herself never went to church.
By that Christmas, though, Eddie was in school and reading well enough to commit the innocent homilies to memory on his own. He’s going to be a reader, too, she thought. Like his father. Then what?
2
The effects upon Point Edward of the new tunnel under the St. Clair River were not immediate. Indeed, people in the Point at first joined in the general bubbling of self-congratulation over having one of the century’s great engineering achievements. ‘Let the Yankees top that one’ was a common sentiment. The first cheer was echoed when the passenger service from London – despite the skeptics and doomsayers – was maintained right through to the Point Edward wharf. And even though the ferries, which had begun service before the first log-hut was built on the site, were silenced forever, the car-shops and round-house and the freight-sheds to service the steamships were left intact and thriving – in the last boom years before the depression of the early ’nineties.
But when some strangers arrived one morning in 1893 and began chipping away at the brick and stone of the grand station as if it were some sort of pagan temple whose gods had abandoned it to the conquerors, people began to talk – on corners, in the barbershop, over tea, in smoky taverns. Then when the wrecking crew came shortly thereafter and proceeded to demolish the round-house without a care to what they smashed or burnt brazenly in the fields for all to see – the talk turned to whispers, half-hearted jokes, jittery silences between sidelong glances. No one was consulted. Everyone and no one knew what blow would next be struck or from what quarter. Half the town either worked in or supplied the wants of the car-shops, where every damaged coach or hopper in western Ontario was hauled for rehabilitation. It was discovered that a small local car-shop had been constructed in Sarnia near the new round-house which was near the new tunnel. A few men were transferred there. No one panicked yet. Obstinately the transferees stayed put, taking the trolley to work every morning. They were lauded from three pulpits.