Lily's Story (64 page)

When she
looked up much later, she was surprised to see a solitary figure
making its way towards her. At first she thought it might be
wounded because it was staggering and then stopping up short, as if
calculating the extent of some pain, only to step out again and
teeter its way forward another few feet. The man, for so it was
from the cut of his gentleman’s coat, grunted out a curse every
time a wayward foo
t deposited
him in a puddle, but to no evident effect as the splashing and
cursing continued at an accelerated pace. He’ll never make it to
John the Baptist’s, Lily mused as she turned away. It was not an
uncommon sight, but she was a little puzzled by the clothes and by
something unique in the gestures, something melancholy and alone.
Just as she was about to blow the night-candle out, she heard a
loud splash, then nothing.

Wrapping a shawl over her
shift, Lily went out into the yard and looked down the lane. Grass
and mud oozed between her toes. She whispered sharply, “You all
right out there?” Nothing. Drunk and passed out, was her first
thought. Well, he won’t freeze out here tonight. But something
urged her to continue, and a few yards farther down where the curve
widened the path, she saw the man, as she had surmised, face-down
and unmoving. But he was not on the ground, he was in the middle of
a small slough with his hands stretched out in front of him, his
feet splayed, and his face completely buried in the six-inch slime.
He’s drowned, she thought, racing over and grabbing him by the
shoulders and flinging him on his back. His eyes were sealed shut
with mud, the nostrils plugged, the mouth gagged. On her knees in
the water, she wetted her fingers and scooped the muck out of his
mouth, at the same time splashing him all over the face with
handfuls of water. Then she struck him on the back with her balled
fist as if he were a newborn resisting breath. A wheezing rattle
started up from somewhere deep inside, and the man coughed once
wrenchingly, as if scraping the catarrh from his lungs. His eyes
popped open and welcomed the pain of the grit against them. For
several minutes he gagged and spat, swinging between disgust and
fury, it seemed. Then he began to weep softly just before he slid
into unconsciousness in the arms of his saviour.

One minute longer, Lily
thought as she carried the frail victim up the path to her house,
and he would have been a dead man. Maybe he wanted to
be.

W
hen Lily woke it was
still dark. A fresh breeze fluffed the curtains beside her head.
She uncrooked her neck and peered across the room. The fire she had
set in the hearth glowed weakly; the clothes-horse she had brought
in from the shed still held the suitcoat, trousers, socks and linen
underthings she had removed from the soaked, shivering, comatose
body of the stranger. He sat exactly where she had propped him up
on the settee with pillows and a quilt, but his eyes were wide
open. They were staring at the last nugget of firelight, which in
its turn kindled some flickering vitality in them. Lily saw at once
that these eyes were intelligent, guarded, caring, and as alert and
quick as a hare’s in the open field. He had been awake for some
time – watching her perhaps – because he seemed quite settled in
the coziness of the room with his chin resting comfortably on his
chest, his breathing regular and his face pallid yet void of any
real tension. He appeared to be a man who was accustomed to waking
up in strange places with colossally harmless hangovers and no
memory of what indiscretions led him thence.

“
Don’t be
alarmed, madam. I’ve just been watching you sleep.”

She picked out his Scotch burr
somewhat undercut by the vowels of the countryside. Though softened
to suit the room and the occasion, the voice was deep and
resonant.

“
You’ll pardon
my dishabillement, I trust, particularly because you appear to have
taken a major role in effecting it.” His eye twinkled and she
sensed the effort behind his words. “I hope the sight of
unaccommodated man has not discouraged you forever from respecting
the species?” He pulled the quilt across the upper reaches of his
hairy chest, and his lip curled towards a smile.

“
You one of
them politician fellas?”

The smile completed its
trajectory. He was scrutinizing her through the semi-darkness.
“Could we have some light?”

“
Of course.”
Lily got up and lit the small lamp beside her. She glanced over at
the curtained-off section where the boys slept. Then she realized
she was dressed only in her shift, so she went into her own cubicle
and returned wearing the floral kimono Sophie had given her (“Don’t
worry, it’s Marlene’s, she don’t need it no more”). She stirred the
fire and put the kettle on for tea. For a moment she felt
embarrassed to be standing here with a man clothed only in a quilt
and his most intimate apparel displayed on a rack before them like
the severed parts of his body set out in the sun to be cured. Then
she recalled – with a slight, rueful smile – that she had dragged
him through the mud of her own yard up the steps and into this room
– only hours before – and with no other course open to her had
stripped away every shred of clothing from his tremoring body and
laid his unconscious form on the settee. Then she had proceeded to
rub him dry with a thick towel from The Queen’s, apply a vigorous
sheen of liniment, and mummify him with blankets. When she had made
him comfortable and was certain his breathing was normal, she took
his clothes into the shed and by the light of a candle, scrubbed
the mud and vomit off them. She lit a fire, despite the warmth of
the night, and set them on the horse to dry. What a pathetic
withered creature had been revealed to her beneath the gentleman’s
disguise – hardly an ounce of flesh to float the brittling bones
into old-age, every rib registering its own protest, the shrivelled
penis and hairless seed-sack as smooth as a boy’s after a chilling
swim in the great wide waters of the Lake. Lily could make no
connection between that flesh and this voice, these darting
eyes.

She handed him his tea and sat
down in the chair near him. “You been up to that meetin’ in
Sarnia?”

“
I confess
that I have.”

“
Government
man?”

“
I must plead
guilty to that also.”

“
How’d you get
way down here?”

He chuckled grimly and sipped
his tea with a greedy, unsteady hand. In the lamplight his
complexion had the pallor of a gutted mullet. “That’s a long story,
only part of which I can recall. I’m staying on the big boat docked
up by the station; one of my friends from the town was in the
process of leading me to a local watering-hole with the refreshing
name of John the Baptist’s when his legs went numb and he retired
to the wayside. Being the intrepid type, I continued apace.” He
held out his cup for more tea and when he had trapped her glance,
he said, “You are definitely not John the Baptist.”

“
You give me a
terrible fright, I thought you was dead for a minute.”

“
No doubt I
was,” he said, letting fatigue take hold of his face for a few
moments. He dozed off, and Lily just caught the teacup before it
tumbled to a certain death.

T
he clothes were dry
now. The false dawn told her it must be close to four o’clock. The
boys still slept soundly, undisturbed by the deep snoring from the
stranger on the settee. When the snoring stalled suddenly, she
turned around and looked into his wideawake, bemused smile. There
seemed to be no border land between his sleeping and waking states.
Probably he doesn’t even dream, Lily thought. She held the quilt up
as a screen behind which, labouring for breath, he donned his
gentleman’s vestments once more.

“W
e lead a difficult
life,” he was saying. “Politicians are a greatly misunderstood
breed, especially in this wretched, ill-informed country. You take
this county, for example. It’s one of the richest places in the
Dominion, on the whole continent. I see farms from the train and
the shoreline, wealthy beyond description, and owned by men who
were, like my own parents, slaves and vassals in their home
country, without a pot to spit in. Naturally, they attribute their
success to their own hard work, clearing and ploughing and
harvesting – and we know all about that because most of us are the
sons of farmers. They don’t seem to understand that it was the
government and their politicians who negotiated the Reciprocity
Treaty which kept the wheat flowing to the United States throughout
the Civil War, and yet when that treaty is abrogated by the
intransigence of the Yankees they are quick to blame
us
for their troubles, including, if you please, the foul
weather and the bugs. We have done everything imaginable for the
people of this county, and what is our reward? Vilification and
perpetual calumny! A hotbed of unrepentant Reformers whose
laissez-faire
mumbo jumbo would ruin every farmer in Lambton.
But can they see that? Why aren’t they grateful? What have we to do
to please them?” He looked at Lily.

“
Maybe they
just want to have a little say in what’s bein’ done for them,” she
said.

He opened his mouth to say
something profound or orotund but nothing came out. She went over
to the clothes-horse where his morning-coat still hung and began
brushing the residual dried-mud off it, one speck at a time.

“
The railroads
are an even more egregious example of ingratitude,” he continued
while she worked. “What was this town before the Grand Trunk? How
did the farmers move their wheat to the markets of the whole
continent or the lumbermen their timber to the mills of America?
Would there be an oil boom without rail-cars to deliver crude to
the refineries? Would there be a factory of any kind in Sarnia?
They whine and they complain about the expense, about the loss of a
few acres of land in a county that has millions to squander, about
a few tarnished hands in the till when there’s enough in the
general larder to make all of us rich. But everyone wants it
now
, wants it
cheap
and wants it
without
pain
. They have no
vision. But I tell you there will be no country from sea to sea
without the Canadian Pacific to bind it into one. Again, they
cry
foul
! They cavil and belittle, laughing at a band of
steel stretching across prairies occupied only by a scattering of
aborigines, but I see those grasslands full of people and wheat and
British towns and villages. The same detractors wept their
crocodile tears when we sent an army to establish dominion in
Rupert’s Land. They fussed and channered over a ragtaggle band of
half-breeds as if the world could be stopped long enough to grieve
over lost causes. But even out there – with their own province now
and their own government, they grumble and claim they are
misunderstood.” He sighed, intermittent between exhaustion and the
ignition of fresh fervour. He turned for sympathy,
anywhere.

Lily shook the suitcoat and
held it up to the lamplight. “Did anybody ask them Indians what
they wanted?” she said.

He looked irreparably aggrieved
but soon recovered sufficiently to say “I take it you don’t approve
of railroads, either?”

Lily nodded.

“
You have a
personal grudge?”

Lily thought for a moment, then
said, “No.” Something in her face and in the manner of her denial
arrested his attention. He peered around at the room, at the shabby
furniture, the cracks in the siding and the patchwork roof as if he
were seeing it for the first time. “Why do you live here?” he said
softly.

“
My husband
died. Then our house burned down. We came here, me an’ my two
boys.”

“
I have a
daughter,” he said. “She’s not well.”

“
Sorry to hear
that.”

“
Your husband
had no insurance? No pension?”

“
No. He died
up north.” She hesitated as if contemplating some revelation which
might alter the course of the strange feeling that now lay between
them as vivid as it was precarious. Then she said, “But we get
along here just fine. I got my own work, an’ my boys are goin’ to
school. We’re all right.”

“
Yes, I can
see you are,” he said. “And things will be better for all of us,
soon. You have to believe that the sacrifices you’ve made – that
all our forebears made – are for the best, that life
will
get better. You are still young, you are a vigorous and
attractive and kind woman. You will marry again.”

He put out his arm and she slid
the coat over it. Suddenly he winced and clutched at his eyelid.
“Damn, got something stuck in here,” he said.

Lily bent over him with a damp
cloth and gently rolled the upper lid back till the mote was
revealed. “Just a piece of grit,” she said, swabbing it away.

She felt the
chuckle rumble all the way through him. “It’s not
clear
grit, I hope?”

“Y
ou make sure you
keep your boys in school,” he said, letting her do up the buttons
and straighten the lapels. “Right now ignorance is our only enemy.
We’re going to need an educated populace if we’re to preserve this
democracy from the corruption of Yankee republicanism and from the
excesses of our own greed. I want to see the schools of this county
bulging with happy, learning faces. Maybe then, long after I’m dead
and buried, they’ll be able to understand what we’ve built here out
of a wilderness and against all the odds. I try not to let the
whining and the ingratitude get me down too much, I do try to
remember that few of our citizens have had time to learn much
history or comprehend the difference between tyranny and
constitutional freedom. When they get particularly vehement I just
skewer them with my Scot’s glare and I say: ‘You registered your
opinion with your vote – a privilege shared by few in this irksome
world – so kindly shut up till the next election’. Of course, over
half the people in this county don’t even bother to vote and when
they do, they haven’t a clue what the issues are. No, you tell your
boys to stay in school as long as they can. We’ll need them. No
democracy can long survive if its citizens don’t inform themselves
of the issues and go out and vote. Is that not an absolute
truth?”