“We got trouble,” Sophie said without turning to greet him. She waved Marlene to the other side of the bed.
“Sons-a-bitches are all gone somewhere,” Tom cried to no one in particular. “Dollard’s on a call to Corunna. Benchley’s on holiday. Nobody bothered answering at McElroy’s on the London Road. Nobody.”
“Marlene, you get her to drink some of this if you have to choke it down her. Then keep the sweat outta her eyes, an’ this towel between her teeth when she needs it. An’ you, ya’ dumb untrustin’ bastard, get your butt over here an’ hold a leg. I can’t do this without you.”
“You’re drunk!” Tom shouted. “You’re pissed! You think I’m gonna let you kill my wife?
“Hold her gently just behind the knee,” Sophie said. She had to force his hand there and close it.
“Cry later”, she said. “Right now, I’m all you got.”
“Tom,” Lily said. “I can’t see you.”
“I’m right here, love. Everything’s goin’ to be fine now,” he said, biting into his tears.
“Just pray to Heaven she’s a strong one,” Sophie said.
Marlene managed to get Lily to drink the potion.
“It’s a narcotic,” Sophie said towards Tom. “Old Indian recipe,” she winked. “Christ, I can’t work up here. Come on, we’ll lift this mattress onto the floor.”
They lifted the mattress and its tender cargo as gently as they could onto the floor, where Sophie then heaved her own beluga bulk between Lily’s spread legs and set to work. “A breech birth,” she said, “little bugger’s tryin’ to come out feet first.”
Tom kept his eyes averted, occasionally peeking up from his station to read the agony on his wife’s face, and worse: that glint of first-terror when the mind begins to doubt the body’s daunted vigour. He could not, however, close off any of the sounds that filled the room: Lily’s coughing gasps as she fought for each breath and then repulsed it as if it were a poison gas; Sophie’s grunts and coarse whinnying as she pushed and wheedled, grappled and comforted; the sucking noise between Lily’s thighs as Sophie’s fingers began to probe, stretch, demand; the drip of blood – one bubble at a time – onto the oil-cloth; Lily’s voice: a continuous whimper containing no ghost of a word, fading down down until interrupted by a stiletto cry that confirmed the depth of pain and the resistance of a life somewhere within.
Tom heard a vile curse from Sophie, felt a great shifting of her amphibious flesh, and could not help looking up. He saw a gush of purplish blood splatter over Sophie, followed shortly by a guttural, clenching moan from Lily in a voice he had never heard or imagined. Sophie’s hands were buried in his wife’s body, in regions that resembled none he had been witness to – grotesque, stretched, blood-pummelled flaps of flesh.
“Come outta there, you little fucker!” Sophie commanded. “Marlene, get that towel between her teeth before she bites her tongue off! Tom Marshall, bring in hot water an’ fresh towels. We’re gonna need ‘em.”
When Tom came back in, Lily was arched fully and breathing like an asthmatic near the end. Sophie was hunched over with her flippers stiffened and jerking back. Tom saw the child’s legs in Sophie’s grasp, blood pouring over them like pus.
“Gotta hurry, gotta hurry,” she panted. She gave a wrench that would have stripped a calf of its intestines, Lily coughed and moaned sweetly, and a rump popped into view, followed immediately by a curved back and the rim of a skull.
“My God, it’s coming !” Tom said glancing up to check on Lily. Her scarlet saliva had stained the towel between her teeth.
“Holy Jesus,” Sophie whispered.
“What’s wrong?”
“The fuckin’ cord,” she wheezed, panic in her swollen face. “It’s wrapped around his neck. Help me!”
Tom’s hand shook, his teeth chattered, and the sweat poured into his eyes, but somehow he managed to take hold of the eel-slippery, half-born foetus and, forgetting it was alive and humanoid, squeeze its body mercilessly while Sophie reached one finger through the flensed crevice and with a series of deft manoeuvres somehow coordinated with Lily’s last spasms, managed to slip the cord over the baby’s head as it propelled itself – at last, reluctantly, perversely – into the air above the ocean.
Dangling it upside down as the afterbirth gushed in a fetid pool at her feet, Sophie tapped on its heels and it howled triumphantly, as if it had made this journey, thank you, on its own merit. Bradley Marshall had uttered the first of his million syllables.
“I’m gonna leave Marlene here,” Sophie said. “Lily’s very weak an’ ripped open a bit. Marlene knows how to put on the special plasters I’m gonna leave you. She’ll need the narcotic, too, and the tonic later on. I’ll come by if you need me. Just send Marlene.”
Tom poured himself another mug of coffee. He had no emotions left to exercise, but if he could have, he would have felt puzzled and sad at what he saw across the table from him. This woman, who had just saved the life of his wife and his son, looked utterly wasted, drained of all vitality. She must have put on a hundred pounds since her visit here last year. Everywhere she wasn’t bloated, she sagged. It was more, he knew, than mere fatigue from the ordeal of the birthing room. When he had arrived at her house, hours before, she had barely recognized him. She had fallen on her rump and cursed him out of her house. Even now, she bore the same badge of abuse he had recoiled at earlier in the day. The left side of her face was swollen to twice its size, leaving only a puffed slit for the dark, gypsy’s eye to manoeuvre through. The flesh there, previously a sort of scorched red, was now souring thickly: a purpling, yellowish, aborted tumour. When she slumped on her elbows, it dripped – like a smashed pepper-squash.
“Who did that to you?” Tom asked.
Sophie glared balefully at him, then smiled as best she could and said, “My hubbie, of course. With his stokin’ fist.”
The shock must have registered on Tom’s face for Sophie said: “You don’t think I’d let anybody else do this to me, do you?” She straightened up. “Now where in hell do you keep the pain-killer around here?”
The minute I’m feelin’ up to it, I’m gonna walk over there an’ thank that woman myself,” Lily said.
Tom tossed Robbie into Uncle Chester’s chair, then nuzzled into him till the boy screamed in delight.
“I may just bake her the biggest pie I ever baked,” Lily said. Then, “Ow, I swear this little jigger’s tryin’ to bite me.”
Tom came over. “She lives on squatter’s row,” he said.
“Does that matter?” Lily said.
3
Lily felt guilty at waiting so long but finally she did find time to bake an apple pie with the first crop of green cookers from Clara Fitchett’s orchard. It was almost September. She was in no particular hurry to pass through the meadows still half-a-mile wide between their property and the outskirts of the village: the goldenrod was new, the bobolinks and killdeer sang in the distance, the sun was warm on her bare arms. As she neared the houses on Charles Street, several with partly finished rooves, she tried to think of all the things she had seen and heard about the squatters.
“Bunch of hoo-ers an’ pimps,” she’d heard Gimpy say to a pal at one of the Saturday dances, and Tom had a difficult time explaining the terms to her afterward. “Railway oughta clean them gypsies right outta there,” was one variation of a recommendation offered by numerous storekeepers and rate-payers along the main street. “They squat on Grand Trunk land, an’ just ’cause it ain’t good for nothin’ else don’t mean they shouldn’t kick their butts clean to London an’ back.” “Marg’s hubby slips over to Car-teer’s come Saturday night,” Maudie whispered, assuming she would know what a bootlegger was and was for. “Could be worse,” Clara countered. “Hazel’s ain’t far away.” Hazel’s Heaven it was called – where the pimps and hooers went to commit their anti-social acts. “When we get our own church here next year,” Maudie said, “that’ll be the end of all that filth. Then maybe honest folk won’t have to lock their door
s at night or keep an eye out on the boardwalk for the riff-raff that comes floatin’ up from that sewer.”
Lily herself had seen children – freckled, orange-headed, streaked with dirt – bounding over the tracks from that direction to be shooed and badgered by the neighbouring townsfolk as if they were chickens out of their run – laughing and cursing merrily as they dodged all blows and melted into the scrub-bush. “Them’s the McCourt brood,” Redmond sighed over his scales, “leastways the redheads is, the others are most likely bastards of dubious origin, if you know what I mean. Old Jess McCourt died under a hopper-wheel up in Camlachie two winters ago – cut him right in two, clean as a firelog. His old lady scrubs out toilets for the Grand Trunk; they don’t care if she squats in that shack, long as she don’t mind swabbin’ up other people’s you-know-what.”
Lily turned off Michigan Ave. onto Prince Street. Several sailors lounged on the patio outside the Queen’s Hotel; she let their whistle sail amiably by. A number of large boats were in port. Prince Street, named in honour of His Royal Highness, was less than a hundred yards long, ending its brief north-easterly path a few feet before the Grand Trunk main-line which entered the village farther to the east, looped around its northern limit till it came close to the lakeshore, and then swung south along the riverfront to the docks and station. Beyond the track where it almost intersected Prince Street lay a screen of runt hawthorn, soft poplar and red-willow and beyond it a patchy piece of open ground covered with sawgrass and sandburs that rolled northward till overtaken by the dunes and the beach below them. As Lily reached the end of Prince Street, she spotted a walking path through the grass, followed it over the tracks, picked it up on the other side and went through the curtain of bush into what had already become known, inside and outside the community, as Mushroom Alley.
And there was a kind of lane or alley, about as broad as a dog-cart’s track, that might have been labelled a street if it had not so flagrantly meandered and ox-bowed its way among the residences on either side. The first two dwellings Lily saw, partly hidden away among some poplars, were not luxurious enough even to be called shanties. They were confected out of the jetsam of the Grand Trunk: rusted corrugated iron, chipped packing cases and chewed-up graindoors. Barred rocks skittered in the dirt where grass had been, then fluttered aloft in the wake of the children who came hurtling from behind one of the shacks. Copper-topped and black-haired, mostly naked, of every size and sex – they roared past Lily without a nod, intent on some ritual game more compelling than the arrival of a stranger. McCourts and McLeods, she thought. From the edge of a hog-wallow, Lily felt the cold eyes of a woman, who did not wave when she did but watched her until she had veered out of sight. Suddenly she began to wonder how she would ever discover where Sophie Potts lived. She would have to speak to someone.
Next she came across a genuine shanty, a barn-like structure with vertical boards and proper crossbeams and a slanted roof bearing an iron-plate cover, rusted with moss. The siding had been undisturbed by paint, and while not yet rotten, it had decided to rest a little by leaning fifteen degrees to the left. The single window was covered with greased paper. Like the cabins used to be, she thought. Behind this house, and to a lesser extent beside and in front of it, had been dumped all manner of junk, refuse and castaway valuables: broken tables, backless chairs, two iron stoves irrevocably cracked in different places, piles of gunnysack, burlap, wretched bits of clothing, and utensils of every kind, many of them taking root in the inhospitable soil. A thin figure in an outsize flannel shirt stood over one of the racked stoves holding a piece of sandpaper poised above one of its incurable blemishes. Lily waved and took a step off the path. The figure, male and possibly advanced in years, started to raise its right hand, then stopped and turned back to its labour. Lily could see the left sleeve of the man’s shirt flapping in the breeze.
She looked away towards the river mouth, whose contrary currents she could hear even from this distance. Where the grassy field sloped away towards the water, she could see the smoke from several campfires and, partially obscured by the uncertain undulations of the ground, the smudged outlines of the hoboes and bums just off the trains. They slept down there in the open or in makeshift lean-to’s; some of them, it was widely rumoured, were deserters from the Union Army or spies from the Confederacy. None had ever been apprehended. Lily quickened her pace. Around another bend she encountered what appeared to be a deserted shack on her right and a bit farther on the left a sizable-looking house with a verandah, glazed windows, several rambling sheds somewhat attached to the main structure, a see-through barn behind, along with a coop, pig-pen and two smaller huts, possibly for implements. Some attempt had been made to grow vegetables in the thin, wind-bitter soil. The clapboard had once long ago been painted – a sprightly blue perhaps. Seated on a wicker rocker on the verandah, Lily spied the unmistakeable profile of young Marlene.
Lily waved and started through the burdocks, balancing her pie with its gauze cover. Marlene appeared to be startled, squinted into the sunlight, then bolted off the porch and into the back yard where she disappeared behind one of the outhouses. Lily stopped. The grasshoppers see-sawed around her. No sound came from the house. She glanced farther up the Alley. In the distance among the trees she could discern two other dwellings, the nearest quite large, its canary yellow and mauve exterior glinting seditiously. Well, she’d come this far. Faintly came the echo of children’s voices, the ebb and flow of their carefree play somewhere among the pliant dunes. She walked boldly up to the verandah, slipped on a wobbly step, righted herself noisily, and rapped on the screen door, an action which stirred up a harem of flies drowsing there. Half of them plunged into the dark interior through one of the several portholes.
“Anybody home?” Lily called softly. The flies had noticed the pie. As she turned to go, she heard the squeak of a wicker chair, as if someone had just shifted their weight from one buttock to another. “You there, Sophie?”
“What in hell do you want here?” It was a male voice, deep and angered.
“I come to see Sophie. Is she here?”
A long pause, a stretching of wicker mesh, then: “An’ who might you be?”
“Sophie Potts live here?”
“Who in Sam Shit wants to know.”
“Tell her Lily came to see her. I’ll come back another time.”
A shadow filled the doorway. The flies danced and disappeared. Two black eyes, like chiselled coal, burned flamelessly in the bearded face suddenly peering out at her. White teeth flashed in a friendly grin. “Hey, you don’t go runnin’ off, Miss Lily Whats-her-name. Don’t you know a joke when you hear one?”
Lily paused without turning back.
“Better brush them flies offa that pie,” he said. “I like my sweets nice an’ clean.”
Lily looked back up at him. “Is Sophie home?”
“Why don’t you come inside like a proper lady and I’ll see if she might be.”
“I just wanted to –”
He opened the door with a flourish and she saw him fully in the light. He was a large, well-proportioned man with a handsome, bearded face, arms that bulged with a surplus of muscle, and ape-size hands that were scarred with calluses as thick and layered as a toad’s skin. His teeth were wonderfully even and his eyes rolled in their lively sockets to express and disguise. The only thing to mar an otherwise striking impression was a slight crook of the spine, camouflaged somewhat by his loose workshirt, as if he had spent too long arched in one position.
“I said come in. What’re ya’ scared of, eh! I’m Morty Potts, Stoker to them that hate me. I crush big bugs an’ little mates who get on my nerves, but I ain’t killed a sweet-lookin’ woman yet. Least none that I know of.”
“Sophie home?”
“You got a one-track mind, girl.” She caught the blast of his whiskey breath. “Soph’ll be real mad now if I don’t invite you in to wait for her. You comin’ in or not?”
“Where is she?”
; “She’s down at the Lake bathin’ the kids, for Christ’s sake. There’s only me here.”
“An’ Marlene.”
His stare darkened. Flies were pouring into the house as he held the door wide open. Lily caught a whiff of urine and festering diaper. “Marlene’s gone off,” he said. “Most likely she’s fetchin’ her momma right now, so why don’t you just come on in an’ have a drink ...of tea.”
“I better not wait. Please tell Sophie I’ll be back.”
“Hey!” he called down to her.
Lily stiffened, then turned slowly.
“You gonna leave that pie?”
As Lily made the first bend in the Alley, out of the corner of her eye she saw Marlene emerge from the bushes and tiptoe up to the house. Lily sped up but she wasn’t fast enough. The smack of hand to cheek flew past her towards the foul hearth-fires ahead. She heard the girl shriek once like a reflex. She thought of a stoker’s hands, ferrying coal from bin to blast with Beelzebub’s grip.
“Well,” Tom said, grateful for her return. “Did she like the pie?”
“She wasn’t home,” Lily said.
“Oh. That’s too bad.” He looked away. “You going back?”
“Soon as I can,” she said with no conviction. “How’ve my boys been?”
17
1
By 1866 the War Between the States had passed through denouement to catastrophe and uneasy resolution, just as its wily protagonist – the Great Emancipator – was gunned down front and centre by a bad actor who hadn’t read the original script. The million casualties – dead and maimed and orphaned – did not return for a curtain call. It was said that an epilogue to this melodrama was already in rehearsal under the working title ‘Manifest Destiny’. Farther north, the hastily arranged marriage of the two Canadas was heading, after twenty-five years of mutual incompatability, towards certain divorce – unless some close relatives could be persuaded to share the misery in a more encompassing family unit dubbed by its proponents ‘confederation’. The papers were full of little else but news of the scheme and of the tub-thumping Fenians below the border uttering the most horrible threats against the peace of not only Canadians but also and especially New Brunswickers, Nova Scotians and Prince Edward Islanders. The hue and cry went up everywhere, no more so than in those towns unfortunate enough to abut an American state bristling with Fenian brothers determined to liberate Ireland by decapitating the silos of every barn between Fort Erie and Sarnia.
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