“That’s what I meant,” he said, patting her wrist.
“All the time,” she said.
It wasn’t the answer he expected.
“You’ll find it hard to believe but I’m known among my cronies as the strong and silent type,” Tom said. They were walking hand in hand in the countryside just north of the city after a pleasant ride in the surrey. The country lane was fringed with young goldenrod and late-blooming, orange-throated lilies.
“I’ll be goin’ back home soon,” Lily said. “I ain’t heard from Auntie in a month. I’m worried about her. Things ain’t been goin’ good for us the last while.”
Keep talking, Lily, his eyes said.
“Why do you want to be a soldier?” she said.
After their picnic under a huge elm beside the creek, Tom reached for her but she drew back ever so slightly.
“Well, I guess I started out just wanting to prove something to my Aunt and her friends. I was never too good at it, even then. By the time I was eighteen I was running around with Mad-Cap Dowling and that fast crowd, drinking and...carrying on.”
“With fallen women,” Lily added.
“Scarlet women is the term used in polite society,” Tom said, scanning her face. “I had my own money at last and spent it as fast as it came in. So when my Aunt suggested I go off to Toronto, not to the University but to clerk in a law firm, I said yes. I wanted to travel, to see the country and the big city. I discovered that the Dowlings of this world are not confined to London.”
“An’ then?”
“Then I decided one morning last fall that with my income about to be ended this year, I had to look at my life, my future. And I did. I joined the Canadian Rifles volunteer brigade the next day. I attended all the drills, read the manuals, bought my own uniform and was made a corporal. Then I heard that the British Army was going to allow Canadians to join regular units to serve here and abroad.”
Overhead, cicadas announced mid-afternoon August with a reedy voluntary. In the meadow grasshoppers dozed in the heat.
“What do soldiers do,” Lily asked, “besides killing people?”
Tom was taken aback, then sprang forward at the ready. Her directness was something he could find no antidote for. Had she just asked a question or made a cutting appraisal? Nothing in her steady gaze could help him. He gathered his dignity and said overly loud: “The British Army and our militia do not kill people. Our job is to protect the lands and homes and lives of our citizens – ordinary people like your Uncle and Aunt who would be prey to thieves, murderers and foreigners. None of us would be safe without them. None of us would be here without them. Surely you’ve heard of the Rebellion? The Patriot’s War?”
“I had no schoolin’,” Lily said.
He pretended to ignore this remark. “Even now there’s rumblings of a war between the states over there, a big fight over slavery. We’ve been put on alert at all the border points. The boys are growing real excited about it. There’s a good chance I’ll get into the regulars by September. That’s what I want. To be a defender of my country. That’s what putting on the uniform is about.” His eyes were glistening, and in spite of herself Lily was held by the brilliant, earnest, frightened power in them. “The army’s about the things that are most important to any man anywhere: honour, duty, loyalty, service and patriotism.”
He sought the confirmation of Lily’s hand; she allowed him to take it, but said after a bit: “I’ve heard of them words.”
He gave her a grateful, jittery smile.
“Where’s Tom?” Lily said to Mrs. Edgeworth at breakfast.
“Tippy’s been called away to Toronto,” said the good lady, her face reflecting both the panic and bemusement with which she had been observing the month-long convalescence of Lily and her nephew.
Lily finally got up the courage to ask Lucille if she knew anything about Tom’s call to Toronto. Lucille didn’t, but speculated that he might be home either the next day or not at all – depending on her mood.
Lily could not sleep. Two nightmares recurred and competed to keep her edgy and restless. In one a pulpy-pink fish with her daughter’s eyes lay belly-up at the bottom of an ebony stream where fierce currents roared by, carrying with them ribbons and braids and colophons of infant-flesh until its idiom-bone showed through and let the tides polish it to fossil; the eyes alone remained in their jellied pools, like orphaned pollywogs. In the second dream she and Tom were riding on a train, not in a passenger coach but on top of the tender; they were roaring through a night-blizzard with the engine’s boiler red-hot and sizzling; the two of them were laughing and tossing their clothes into the white wind, and the train was rising up off the tracks and driving skyward into the throat of the maelstrom that contended, in its own accelerating screams, with those of the locomotive and the lovers posed to collide…
Mrs. Edgeworth changed the sweat-soaked sheets each morning, and thought of calling the doctor. She feared that Lily was having a relapse, and fading fast.
Then Tom returned – in the regalia of his militia unit, and a rapid recovery ensued.
“It's a wonderful city, Lily. Full of parks and brick buildings and a beautiful lake. You must see it sometime. When you’re better.”
“I am better, Tom. Really.”
“You look pale.”
“I been indoors too much.”
“I never should’ve left you!”
“I’ll be goin’ home. Probably next week.”
Lily held her hands like a prayer in her lap. The sun, through the scrim of trees in the garden gilded her face. In a voice about to break Tom said, “You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
Lily felt herself on the edge of a precipice. She shuddered – memory and dream propelling the commotion in her blood. She longed for the unknown yet knew too much. She needed to surrender unconditionally to some mystery, some hazard beyond these torturing certainties.
“I heard them words before,” she heard herself say. “Just before he ruined me.”
“For Christ’s sake, Lily, why do you take your bitterness out on me? I’m trying to help you. I’m your friend.”
“I know.”
“I love you,” he said to stop the pain.
Lily studied him. In a voice that was an echo of a whisper, she said, “I can’t love a man who pities me.”
The distant door slammed like a cannon-shot in a barracks.
Why haven’t you written me? Lily asked her Aunt between the alternating nightmares. Mrs. Edgeworth had persuaded her to send a telegram to Port Sarnia, but it was returned with the curt message: “No response”. On the third day of Tom’s unexplained disappearance – even his Aunt looked anxious – Lily announced that she was better and would leave for home the next day, the fifteenth of August. She had been away for over three months.
Mrs. Edgeworth teetered on the brink of panic; all her breeding was about to dissolve under her. “He’ll be back,” she said, dropping all pretense. “I know him, dear-heart.”
“I got to see my Aunt,” Lily said.
“Oh, I know, Lily, I know I can’t keep you. I’ve been too selfish already. But you are such a sweet, such a kind thing –”
“Can you buy a ticket for me?” Lily asked.
“Of course, I can. You can have all the money you need.”
“Just the ticket, please. And I’d like to send another telegram if I could, asking them to meet me at the station.”
“Of course, of course.”
Lily slumped in her chair. Mrs. Edgeworth came over. Without looking Lily reached for her hands, and the two women held each other that way, rocking gently back and forth in the midst of their mutual helplessness. In the kitchen they could hear Lucille’s grotesque whimpering.
2
Lily was just about to settle into one of her nightmares when she was awakened by a loud scuffle and bumping below. Mrs. Edgeworth’s scream shot up to the gables of the house. “Come back here you – you blackguard!”<
br />
Lily sat bolt upright, her thin gown pulled down to the tips of her breasts, as the door popped open and Tom staggered in behind it. He had not removed his boots nor his cloak; his eyes were wild with fatigue and fading rage. She fully expected to see him foam at the mouth.
“Goddammit, I will have you! I will!” He flung his cloak across the room, spilling the figurine of a mermaid which cracked lengthwise on the carpet. Lily didn’t move. If she were aware that most of her bosom was exposed in the dim light from the hall and in the lamp her demon lover now swung towards her, she made no move to cover herself.
The lamp fell to the floor, and Tom lurched onto the bed beside her. “I will have you, I will, I will,” he muttered into the slurred haze in front of him. His hands clasped her bare shoulders and in their rough urgency jerked the nightgown down to her waist. He froze. Her sharp breath and his heaving gasp for air filled the room. He stared at her breasts.
He rocked back, chin sagging to chest.
Mrs. Edgeworth, having found a candle, could be heard huffing up the stairs.
“It’s all right, Auntie,” Lily called. “Tom got in the wrong room by mistake. He’s comin’ down.”
After breakfast Lily asked to be alone for a while in the garden she had seen through its best season and come to love. She was there after mid-morning when Tom came up to her. He looked wary but was shaved and trim in his uniform.
“Lily,” he said, “I can’t live without you. I have every reason to believe you have strong feelings for me. Last night was the last time you’ll ever see me drunk.”
Lily gave him no help, but even in his turmoil he could see that she was alert and listening. “I love you. I don’t pity you. How can anyone pity a person who is twice as strong as they are? I may not know what love is, but I can still say I love you and know I’m telling the truth.”
“Yes,” Lily said.
“Here is a token of what I feel,” he said shyly, opening his fist – his sword hand – and letting the sun catch the facets of the ruby stone set in a gold ring. “My mother’s,” he said. “For you. For us.”
Lily made no gesture towards the words or the gift.
“I’m asking you to marry me right away, to go off to Toronto with me. I’ve got word that the Regulars will take me; that’ll mean a salary, a home for us, perhaps by the lake or on the island.”
Lily looked as if she were struggling to interpret the speech of an earnest but thick-tongued foreigner. Surprise, wonder, doubt –all contended there as Tom talked on.
“I’m almost certain to be stationed at Fort York, unless some foreign war broke out, but there’s little chance of that. Lily, I’m asking you to take a chance on me. I’ll love you like no other man will ever love you.”
Lily had no doubts about that.
“I do love you, Tom.”
“Then you’ll marry me?”
Lily looked away, then back. “I can’t,” she said.
“But why?”
She felt the full weight of his hurt and her own.
“I can’t marry a soldier.”
3
“I’ve sent the telegram,” said a chastened Mrs. Edgeworth. Over and over she apologized for the behaviour of her nephew, last night and again this morning when he smashed the glass on her china cabinet and stomped off to his drunken pals again. “I’m just thankful the dear Colonel was not alive to see it,” she said, wishing he were here to help, to share the guilt, to give her life some point once more.
“I’ll come to visit you,” Lily said, tucking the baggage tickets in the little leather purse Lucille had insisted she take.
“You’re not just saying that?”
“Soon as I’m sure everythin’s okay at home.”
“God bless you, child.”
“Thank you for everythin’,” Lily said shyly. The locomotive let out a peremptory blast.
“Last night,” said Mrs. Edgeworth, “when you called down to me, did you...die you mean –”
“Yes, Auntie,” Lily said, ending the embrace. She stepped aboard, turning her back on London and all it had brought with it. Over the shriek of the whistle she mouthed, “Goodbye, Auntie, I love you.”
In less than ten minutes the train had left the city and plunged straight into the bush. Lily sat by herself on a bench and gazed blankly at the landscape fleeing past her. In two hours she would be in Port Sarnia, a journey that only three years before would have taken her a full day in ideal weather. She thought of her own two-day’s trek up the River so long ago.
Here and there, as the coach rocked and swayed, Lily noted the gaps in the trees where a farm had been cleared up to the right-of-way, an occasional cabin in the distance with its chimney-smoke indolent in the afternoon haze, the flash of an apron or chemise signalling life, and hope. Beyond the thick border of woods on either side of the track lay hundreds of partially cleared farms like these. The bush had been broken.
Lily soon found herself very drowsy. The repetition of tree-line and the rocking monotony of the wheels below her made her heavy-lidded. Though she was certain she was not asleep, the images of sleep rose up and fell away. She was in the cabin brushing her mother’s hair, pulling the livid sun through it with every stroke, and Mama was smiling at her and saying what a sweet voice she had even though Lily’s lips were not moving except to record the cadence of her combing. Then Maman LaRouche appeared, her cheeks buffed by oven-heat, the sweat bubbling through her grin as she bent down to the wee sprite of a girl and wrapped her in the great loaves of her forearms. Behind her at the verge of the North Field, Old Samuels waved at her, and as the girl danced towards him, the smoke from his calumet whitened around him and he dissolved tenderly in the green backdrop of his own words – take me with you, take me with you, I will tell you their meaning but the waif trips on a stone and when she looks up the figure is gone and the grave-ground under her is ice-cold and she is about to cry when Papa comes to launch her upon his shoulder and they stride through the umber dawn towards a sun rising in the east, there is the rhythm of skin-drums and a ululating chant as the wood wakens to the ancient tribal roundelay, and the girl is about to dance when out of the river’s silver surface slides a black hand and arm and shoulder and – eyeless – the thing is beckoning her down where the currents run as deep as blood in the antechambers of the earth.
The train jogged, bucked, shuddered and squealed to a halt. Lily looked out. They were not in Port Sarnia.
“What are we doin’ here?” she heard a male voice ask the conductor farther down the coach. She could hear the confusion of people collecting their belongings and shuffling to the exits.
“Wyoming Station,” said a deeper voice. “Gotta stop here now. It’s the oil boom south of here. Dozens of people every day, carryin’ their life on their backs. Diggin’ for oil. Crazy, the whole bunch of them.”
When Lily opened her eyes again, they were moving cautiously through the environs of Port Sarnia, now referred to by the natives as just plain Sarnia. She picked up her carpetbag crammed with the gifts she could find no way to refuse, and walked through the stifling air to the end of the coach where she waited quietly until the train stopped. The conductor took her bag as she stepped down, and held her arm.
“Watch your step, ma’am,” he said, following her with his practiced eye.
Lily stood in the bracing air of the open platform, unable to look around her. In a few minutes she was almost alone. No one called out her name. No one was waiting for her. She went over to the baggage-man and asked if he could find her a taxi. He took all of her in – slowly – then said , “Yes, ma’am. Just here for a visit, are you?” He whistled towards the livery area.
Lily smiled her gratitude. Moments later Pig-Eye Poland, who had driven cart and cab for two decades, pulled up with his pair of bays. Lily gave him the instructions.
“You from London?” he asked when they were underway.
“Just arrived,” Lily said to the man who had waved to her every Saturday as
she trotted Benjamin up to the back door of the St. Clair Inn.
Pig-Eye’s steady chatter ceased by the time they left Exmouth Street and headed north-east up the Errol Road. He sensed the tension in Lily’s laconic replies, and respected her need for silence. At the gate she paid him twenty cents from the silver coins Mrs. Edgeworth had pressed on her “for emergencies, dear-heart”. It was late afternoon and the August sun still burned hazily over the western sky. Lily looked at her home.
The fields had been planted, but instead of the neat rows of beans and potatoes Lily saw ragweed and wild mustard and Scotch thistle choking in their own glut. The little barn and south coop struck her with their old familiarity, but not a sound came from them. Only the flap of a stunted corn-leaf in the wind reached across the waste of Aunt Bridie’s prized garden. On the pond near the house, Booster the gander swam alone in a single circle. No smoke in the chimney. Well, it was afternoon and very hot. As she approached she saw that the door was shut tight, and the windows pressed against the sashes. She listened. Behind the woodshed a groundhog rubbed its back against the rim of its burrow; a garter snake sawed through the grass; a mouse sneezed.
“They ain’t there!”
Old Bill had emerged from his hut and was calling to her as he hobbled across the cucumber patch. She waited for him to come up to her before she said, “Are they in town?”
“Then you ain’t heard,” Old Bill said, suddenly looking at the ground and smacking his gums together nervously.
Lily waited.
“Bridie wrote you a letter about it,” Old Bill said.
“Where’ve they gone?”
“Packed up an’ went off to the oil fields,” Old Bill said. “Down there Petrolia way,” he added, seeing her puzzlement.
“Left the farm?”
“Yup. After fifteen years they just up an’ left. God-dammedest thing I ever seen,” he said, “if you’ll pardon my French.”
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