Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  “For good?”

  “Yup. Had their bags packed by noon an’ just left the house an’ the doo-dads and all standin’ pat, an’ hitched up Benjamin an’ headed for the oil. Dammedest thing I ever seen.”

  Gradually Lily got the whole story from him. She took him inside where she found everything still in place: the breakfast dishes on the table infested with flies; the kettle on the stove, half-full and waiting. The beds were unmade, as if they had discarded their occupants only moments before. Lily started a small fire, made some tea, and tried to keep Old Bill settled long enough to achieve some kind of coherence.

  Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester had gone to the Petrolia area about the time the baby was born. Bridie had put all the details in a letter which, of course, never reached Lily. The Grand Trunk had served the expropriation papers on them in early June. Old Bill’s hut and yard were exempted, as were the house, barn, coop, shed, pond and kitchen garden of the Ramsbottom property – about an acre and a half in total. The rest – the fields, woodlot, cleared fallow, planted gardens – were needed, they said, for the sprawling company town already starting to unfold on the ordnance grounds of Point Edward. Naturally since the GTR was a humane, Canadian-directed enterprise, the Ramsbottoms would be permitted to harvest this year’s crop or take a small sum in lieu thereof. A reasonable – even generous – offer was made for the seized acreage and pinery. That such money was of little value to a couple who had depended on developed land for their continuing livelihood was an argument considered by the directorate to be seditiously Luddite in nature and intent.

  Uncle Chester had mentioned the business proposal of his friend from London, who had written during the winter to say that he had put capital into an oil-drilling company under the command of a fast-talking, knowledgeable New Yorker, and that they were looking for another partner. Aunt Bridie suddenly began quizzing Uncle Chester closely on the matter, and within a day the decision had been made. Old Bill was to sell off the Guernsey and the remaining chickens and take what he could use or sell from the garden, They left him some money, but he had hidden it so well he could no longer find it. As he talked, he dunked chunks of mildewed bread into his tea and slurped them through the sieve of his gums.

  “Why?” Lily said.

  “Dunno, little one. Never seen the like of it. Woman like that farmin’ all her days, then just up an’ leaves it all. I saw her walk out to them cabbages that mornin’, an’ she mumbled somethin’ at them, an’ then kicked one of ’em square in the head.”

  “She hated it,” Lily said.

  “All she said to me was: ‘I can’t let Lily an’ the babe come back to a patch of ground. You take care of them front teeth now Bill,’ she says to me.”

  “The babe died,” Lily said. “She knows that.”

  After a while Old Bill said, “They sent a fella here a while back to tell me everythin’ was goin’ good down there. They’re stayin’ in a fancy hotel somewhere – it’s wrote down for you – an’ you’re to go there soon’s you get back. They’ll send a buggy to Wyomin’ to take you an’ the babe down. You’re to live with them there.”

  “The babe died.”

  Old Bill went to the cupboard and pulled out some rumpled papers. “Here’s where it’s wrote down,” he said. “You’re to send a telegram the minute you arrive.”

  Lily looked around at all that was familiar, at nine years of her life spent in this kitchen with its own seasons of disappointment and delight, of love and its absence.

  “This here paper’s specially for you,” Old Bill said, flogging his memory for some gist of significance.

  Lily took it. She recognized her name in print and her Aunt’s signature, and a bit of the date.

  “What does it say?” she asked.

  “It’s a deed,” Old Bill said, showing the purple of his gums as he stuttered over the legal script: “It gives you – Lily Ramsbottom – what’s left of the farm when the railroad is done.”

  Lily stared in awe at the official stamp.

  “Your Aunt says to me, Bill, she says, you tell her the patch is hers, so’s she’ll always have a home to come back to no matter what happens to us down there.”

  Old Bill munched the last of his soggy tea. The kettle was humming again, but Lily made no move to tend it.

  “I can go to the telegraph first thing in the mornin’,” Old Bill said at the door.

  “Not yet, Bill. I want to wait a bit. To think.”

  “Okay.” He was about to leave when he pretended to remember something. “By-the-by,” he said, “when you was down to London way, did ya happen to see anythin’ of my Violet?”

  4

  The hoe in her hands felt good again: astringent, righteous. She worked without rest in the steaming humidity. Blisters formed on her palms; her back ached like a loosened tooth; at night her muscles buckled. Her hair was a frazzled rope. Still, the weeds died and the vegetables – chastened, attenuated – took shape and then heart. She herself ate whatever had been left, scraping off the mould with a jack-knife and splashing pump-water over her bone-weariness at day’s end. By the third morning she smelled worse than Old Bill. She couldn’t get out of bed. Her back had jammed at right angles to her hips. She shuffled through the shed to the back door where she eased herself down on the bench so that the morning sun would catch and soften the seizure in her back. She pulled up her nightshirt and moaned softly as the heat soaked in. If anyone saw me like this, she thought, they’d think I was a crone tuning up for flight.

  She heard Old Bill coming faithfully up the path to the front door, as he had each morning only to see in her face the answer to his question about the telegram. She poked her head around the shed corner to intercept him. The sunlight rolled in a horizontal wave across the frayed garden and struck the approaching figure with indelible illumination.

  Lily saw the carpenter’s tool-kit first, then the overalls, bib, and navvy’s cap.

  “Good mornin’, ma’am,” Tom said. “I’m lookin’ for work.”

  PART TWO

  Tom

  13

  1

  Besides the wedding of Thomas Marshall and Lily Ramsbottom, née Corcoran cum Fairchild, the autumn of 1861 produced several other events of moment in what was known throughout the province as ‘the Lambton swamps’. Alexander Mackenzie – who was later to prove that stonemasonry and Haldane Baptism were no obstacles to the highest political office in a country that was still a pipe-dream in George Brown’s head – had succeeded in overthrowing the old reformer, “Coon” Cameron, and delivering the counties of the West into the political jaws of the Clear Grits. The gum-beds of Enniskillen ceased harassing wayward oxen and began oozing oil, in commercial quantities plump enough to be noticed in Chicago and New York. Twenty thousand barrels – each one constructed on-the-spot of the finest, most perishable oak – were hauled through bogs and sloughs up to Wyoming Station, in spite of every attempt by the County to provide a road for such traffic. Within a year the town of Oil Springs was confected to match the expectations of the drillers, dreamers, and exploiters of the human condition.

  Less ostentatious but no less bumptious was the rise of the village around the railway terminus on the old ordnance grounds. What boundless optimism it was – in the face of Darwin’s grim gospel and the resuscitated silliness of Bishop Ussher and the mute unglory of Balaclava – to lay out a town site crammed with streets without the ghost of a house to grace them, and each one meridian-straight, square to the intangible North, and festooned with a denomination derived from the Royal Egg itself: Emma, Maud, Alice, Alexandra, Albert, Alfred and, of course, Victoria – regina and imperatrix. By the summer of 1861, besides the makeshift workers’ shanties sprawled around the sheds and yards, several clapboard houses and one less doubting brick establishment had aligned themselves with the future forecast by the unpeopled street. Some attempt was made by outsiders to call the new municipality Huron Village, but the Point it had been, was, and is.

  2
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br />   The nuptial ceremony did not take place until early September. Lily herself didn’t know why but she set up a room for Tom in Benjamin’s barn, where Chester had so often hibernated, and to the amazement of Old Bill who watched till his eyes glazed and he fell asleep propped up on the sill each night, the lovers parted half-way down the garden path just before dark, each to a cold bed. If anyone had asked Old Bill for an opinion, he would have said, “Looks to me like a marriage made in purgatory.”

  Tom had proposed on the day of his arrival, and Lily had said “yes”. “Tomorrow?” “Soon.” The groom-to-be then bedded down in the straw, grateful that the pony had been gracious enough to move his quarters to town a month before. In the weeks before Lily announced that she was ready to set a date, a daily routine was established. In the morning they worked side by side to save what they could of the garden and to prepare for a more productive season of their own next spring. Lily tried not to laugh at Tom’s ungainliness in the field, where he would attack in a frenzy – his sickle stabling like a bayonet, decapitating as many allies as enemies – then retreat sans dignity with his hands blistered and rebellious. Working at the steady pace she had learned so long ago – with her body low to the earth, her legs apart in an unmaidenly but resilient squat – Lily would pass her sweating lover, only to hear him wheeze and rally his forces behind her for yet another volley-and-retreat. As they rested in the shade periodically, she would kiss the blisters on his palms, but he tensed like a trigger before her soft insistence triumphed and he eased himself into the grass where she could stretch alongside him and let his hands find solace where they would. In the afternoon Tom would take up his tool-kit, fling it like a haversack over his shoulder and, whistling a grenadier’s march, tramp through the parapet of pines separating them from the townsite, and head for the rail-yards through the grassy streets. Lily watched him till his sandy hair was no longer distinguishable from the goldenrod in full bloom. Most days he came back at dusk, whistling and telegraphing his coins in his pocket: the Grand Trunk in its benevolence had found some occasional task for his limited skills.

  “Almost got enough to pay the preacher,” he’d say each time, going through a mock counting-ceremony till she laughed and made a grab for the half-dollars, whereupon he would seize her wrists, pull her to him and give Old Bill a quick seizure by kissing her full on the lips. “What do you charge, mam’selle?” “More ’n you earn in a year, laddie.” “Then I’m off to seek my fortune in the big, bad world!” “I’ll be waitin’, if you ain’t too long.” Always Lily would turn away first and head for the house. Once, she heard his footsteps right behind her; she stopped. The crickets all leaned one way. He said nothing but she recognized the sharp breathing that signaled suppressed anger. She longed for Aunt Bridie’s voice to give her some warning or assurance, but none came. That night she lay awake in a silence of her own composition.

  The railway expropriation left them with so little land that they dismantled what was left of the hen-houses to make room for more garden. A make-shift coop was rigged up near the barn, but no chickens were to be installed until after the wedding. In the meantime, Booster the gander was made a gift of three lubricious females, whom he trod regularly and flamboyantly near the pond below Lily’s window.

  On the last day of August she heard Tom’s step in the field; he wasn’t whistling. She came out to meet him, apprehensive. He stopped just where the stunted sunflowers grimaced in the thinning light.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing much. They’ve finished the new freight-shed.”

  She brightened.

  His smile was genuine but guarded. He was looking directly in her eyes, as if searching for some valuable that might not ever have been lost, for some certainty the knowledge of which could have been as deadly as it was redemptive.

  “They’re taking on stevedores. Full time.”

  Lily waited.

  “I’m one of them.”

  After supper they set the date. The harvest moon – ovular, increscent – was almost wholly above the horizon before Old Bill saw the cottage door open and a male figure bound towards the barn in a step that was somewhere between a quick march and a gavotte. He smiled toothlessly, and thought again of Violet, and absence.

  3

  The ceremony itself took place on a warm Saturday morning in September ‘on the porch’ of the Anglican Church, the latter expedient being resorted to as the best compromise, considering the lapse faith of the groom and the apostasy of the bride. “It would mean a great deal to Auntie,” Tom had said and Lily replied, “Well, one of our Aunts anyway,” and smiled in the hope that Bridie herself might savour the ironies. Mrs. Edgeworth was too ill to travel, and so it fell to Alice and Maurice Templeton to serve as witness and as family for the occasion. Mrs. Templeton was deliciously horrified at the thought of a semi-sanctified union under some shady portico in the far reaches of the nave. She insisted that Lily wear the dress she had worn to the Great Western Ball three years before, and though it needed some alterations, Lily was happy with the results – and the appropriateness. He won’t remember, she thought, but I will. A small reception – just tea, cakes and chilled champagne among the rusting flowers – with the Templeton’s daughters and their prospering husbands down from Toronto to supervise the move of their parents. For Mrs. Templeton, and Lily, too, that was the only sad aspect of an otherwise happy series of events. Maurice had at last been persuaded that his business and political fortunes lay ahead of him in the provincial capital, and his wife – eager to be near her first grandchild – was in no position to second his reluctance. The decision had been made. Both Lily and her benefactress well knew that, despite the miracle of railroads, a separation of two hundred miles and a full social stratum in that day meant it would be many years before they were likely to meet again, if ever.

  Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester did not come. Lily had got Tom to write them a letter a few days after his arrival, telling them of the impending marriage, and several days later a long letter arrived from “Oil Springs, Enniskillen Township.” Needless to say, Aunt Bridie was relieved to learn that Lily was all right, and delighted with the proposed union. No mention was made of the baby’s death.” “We are doing fine,” she went on. “Please don’t worry. When you come to us I’ll explain why we did what we did, though I’m not sure I even understand it myself. Anyway, I reckon you won’t believe this but Chester and me took all the money from the sale – robbery – of the farm and all the savings in the bank we all helped to earn, and we packed up in one day and moved down here. Your Uncle’s friend in London said we should join up with his friend from New York and form a company to search for oil. I didn’t know anything about oil but I’m learning fast. Mr. Armbruster is a wonderful man. We’re all living for a while here in the Lucky Derrick Hotel. We have a huge piece of land out by Black Creek. Uncle Chester is back making things like barrels and rigs. Mr. Armbruster and I look after the business end. We are doing very well. We may be rich some day. But you know, Lily, your happiness means so much to us. We want you and Tom to come and stay with us as soon as you can.”

  As it turned out, after several exchanges of correspondence, Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester, because of their work it seemed, were unable to come to the wedding, but Tom and Lily were to go to Oil Springs for their honeymoon, and then go on to London for a week to visit with Mrs. Edgeworth.

  For Lily none of this seemed real. For her the only grip upon reality in the days leading up to the ceremony was the presence of Tom: in the flesh she clove to daily and in the dreams she cherished and prolonged through the solitary nights. I must not believe in such happiness, she thought. I may enjoy it, regret it, kindle it, remember it – but it’s not mine to possess outright. But her dreams whispered ‘yes’.

  4

  After the morning vows and the afternoon champagne and the extended goodbyes, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Marshall were carried off by the engines of the Great Western Railway as far as Wyoming Statio
n, where they disembarked in preparation for the fifteen-mile journey south to the gum-beds of Enniskillen.

  “At least we don’t have trunks to lug about,” Tom said, looking around in bewilderment at the prospectors and their families as they dragged steam-trunks, roped-in suitcases, haversacks, tool-boxes and assorted bundles of blankets and clothing along the plank platform and down the improvised alleys of the shantytown. Babies squalled, draymen cursed, women wept, husbands railed and cuffed. Somehow bag and baggage managed to find its way onto the waiting carts. Driven by the fearsome oaths of the teamsters, the horses lurched and skidded southward on what appeared to be a road through the bush.

  “Plank road all the way to Oil Springs,” a grizzled veteran of these wars yelled whiskily into Tom’s face. “Just built her last month. A joy to ride on!”

  Lily squeezed Tom’s arm in a reassuring gesture. It struck her forcefully how much of an urban man he was. She wondered if he knew or would be upset to know how much at home she felt here looking beyond this ephemeral paraphernalia and seeing the rows of farms backing sleepily onto the right-of-way, a team of oxen currying the earth with unfathomable patience, the distant chime of an axe in some field-to-be, the curl of woodsmoke from homesteads secure among the trees, a small girl near the tracks gathering wild columbine.

  “There’s our coach,” Lily shouted.

  Anyone remotely prejudiced by the romanticism of the stagecoach in the American wild-west would have been shocked by the contraption that went under that guise in Lambton County in 1861. Tom was speechless. What he saw was a sort of haywagon on which had been erected five backless benches set in theatrical rows and over which there perched a wooden roof held up by several stilts that also served to lend the allusion of windows and doors. Some prankster had tacked an orange fringe around the perimeter of the roof, on which were hand-printed these already-fading letters: ‘Enniskillen Coach Lines: the Road to Oil’.