No town celebrated the nativity more avidly than Sarnia. The local press accounts tell the whole story. ‘During the morning a large number of loyal yeoman from the neighbouring townships, accompanied in most cases by the members of their families, came into town by all the leading roads, until ultimately there was a larger influx of strangers than was ever before present, except on the occasion of the visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.’ Two infantry companies from Moore and Sarnia marched to the parade-grounds led by the Sarnia Cornet Band, bugles ablaze in the sun. Here they were joined by the Grand Trunk Rifle Companies from Point Edward under Major Riley. ‘After going through a variety of evolutions, the Companies were formed into line, and fired the feu-de-joie at noon.’ A grand procession then took place back through the town’s thoroughfares, bedecked with bunting and spruce-boughs and lined with crowds cheering and waving Union Jacks, as if Wellington himself were marching home from Waterloo. Right behind the band came the volunteers – their combat dreams still warm – and then the town clerk with Queen Victoria’s Proclamation and, wonder of wonders, ‘four young virgins in white, in a carriage and four, as representatives of the four Provinces’. Following on the heels of the Fire Brigades of Port Huron and Sarnia were the Sabbath school children – skipping, hitching, sidling, scooting and tumbling in egregious disarray. ‘On the whole, the Procession was the largest and most imposing ever found in the Town with the exception of that which proceeded from the Town to Point Edward on the Prince of Wales’ visit.’ Particularly impressive were the volunteer companies of the St. Clair Borderers, all in green, rifles erect, bayonets glinting, their synchromeshed strut signalling their martial pride, warning of borders to be defended to the death, and boasting of heroics certain to come.
When the soldiers fired their rifles at noon, Brad screamed and jumped into Lily’s arms. Robbie hopped up and down, searching for a face among the uniforms. She had just got Brad settled down – standing with the boys at the corner of Christina and George – when the bugles struck up a battle hymn right in front of them. She could feel Robbie’s body – through his hand – keeping time to the quick-step. The green tunics of the Borderers swept into view around the corner. They seemed to be striding into the vacuum left by the imperial alarums of the trumpeters, a capsule of silence designed to exaggerate the thud of every jack-boot, the clink of tunic metal, the rasp of martial cloth against pink flesh. But if you swung your head rapidly past the moving ranks, the silver bayonets might have been mistaken for the quills of a chieftain’s headdress.
Brad started to whimper; he buried his face in Lily’s skirt and trembled. Softly into his ear she hummed something gentle, but the crowd noise rose around her like an ambuscade as the Proclamation coach was spotted, and deafened them both, so that they almost didn’t notice Robbie leap up with a body-length salute and cry out, “Look, there’s Da!”
3
Tom came in from work. Since his promotion to assistant foreman (Warden Hargreaves had been transferred temporarily to Ottawa for strategic purposes), he was invariably all smiles.
“What’s wrong?” Lily said.
“We got a letter, from New York.”
Lily stood beside him and watched him read it, seeing the words and hearing the strange voice of Melville Armbruster ricochet inside them, and hearing under them – like the echo of a sea-conch under oceans – a tiny, compressed cry that might have been her own.
Long Island, N.Y.
August 5, 1867.
Dear Lily:
I am writing to tell you that your Aunt Bridie passed away yesterday. She died peacefully in her sleep, and now rests in the arms of her Maker. Let me tell you what has happened since those happy days when we last say you. I hope and pray that you will understand.
When Bridie and I got to New York after the wedding in London, we stayed only long enough to meet my family here on our estate, and then we were off on a honeymoon and business trip that lasted three glorious months. We travelled first-class by train to Baltimore, Washington, St. Louis, Chicago and as far west as St. Cloud, Minnesota. We stayed at the best hotels, several of which we invested in, and I showed your Aunt the heart and soul of democratic America. She said it was the happiest time of her life. Certainly it was that, and more, for me. Let me say also that Bridie never forgot your Uncle Chester or you and Tom. Whenever we’d tour a lumber mill or carriage maker’s, she’d say, ‘now wouldn’t Chester just love a set-up like this’ or ‘I wish young Tom could see all this, all the opportunities for a man with his talent and education’. Of course she never stopped talking about her Lily, and praying she’d hear news when we got back about a baby-on-the-way.
She never got back, though – at least not the Bridie we all knew and loved. In Buffalo, on our return trip, she caught some kind of influenza and by the time we got home to New York, she was gravely ill in a coma. I was about to send a telegram to you when she suddenly awakened and seemed miraculously to recover. A day later, however, she suffered what the doctors called a stroke. It left her paralyzed all down the left side. But ill as she was, she could still talk in a slurred sort of voice only I could understand, and when I suggested I ought to telegraph you people and send money for train tickets to New York, she said no. At first I refused to believe her, but I could see in her eyes and in the tortured twisting of her body every time she spoke that she really meant it. She did not want her Lily to see her like this, though she would never tell me why. I honoured her wish, though I’ve been wracked by guilt and unease every day and night since.
For almost five years now we have been living on my family’s estate, Bridie and me. I’ve been taking care of her every need, and she has been as brave and wonderful in her dying as she was in her living. I have no regrets, save the fact that caring for her meant cutting us off from you. But her eyes never once said yes, not in all these months of pain and even in the last serene moments when we both knew the end was near. She is gone now, and I can tell the whole story. She was a remarkable woman.
She will be buried in the Armbruster mausoleum tomorrow. I sincerely hope you can come to visit the gravesite and I trust that I’ll have the opportunity to learn from you more about this great woman I only got to know a little, so late in my life.
All my love,
Melville Armbruster
Something fell out of the envelope. Lily picked it up. It was an American one-hundred-dollar bill.
Tom held Lily in his foreman’s arms all that night. At breakfast she said to him, “I think it’s time we moved.”
“Soon,” he said. “That’s a promise.”
4
By May of 1870 when the troubles began which would be unresolved even a hundred years later, the Confederatory experiment was not yet three years old. Older by far, indeed celebrating its tenth year of existence, was the company town at the nexus of the River and the Lake. From the outset Point Edward was no ordinary or typical small community of Canada West (or Ontario as it was now nominated in official circles and on the fresh maps of the new Dominion already intimating the imminent annexation of Prince Edward Island, Rupert’s Land and British Columbia). It was not of village size, some seven hundred souls, and growing weekly. But it would be some years yet before any move were made to incorporate it as a self-governing village. The paterfamiliality of the Grand Trunk lay heavily upon it. Though many of the properties and businesses had been purchased outright from the Company, it still owned five boarding-houses on St. Clair Street and most of the undeveloped land to the east and south-east which rested in fallow, and appreciated. Eighty-per-cent of the men in the village worked for the Grand Trunk, the others ran businesses or supplied services directly dependent upon the railway. Because the Company’s facilities were concentrated along the waterfront, the town grew around it in a horse-shoe shape. Here, then, there could be no village green flanked by churches, library and town hall with quaint cottages idling among the grasses and flowers in trim ranks all the way to the outskirts where a tannery
or mill or furniture factory might pull their pastoral smoke into the serene evenings of Middletown, Ontario. There was nothing sleepy about Point Edward. Night and day three-dozen locomotives ran their own version of the anvil chorus. Screw-prop freighters churned into the berths along the Grand Trunk wharf and hooted for attention. Twice a day, passenger trains – local and express – roared to a stop before the gothic grandeur of the station-hotel, discharging political hacks, carpetbaggers and commercial bashaws of every breed into the luxury and corruption that only a first-class colonial hotel can guarantee. Occasionally there arrived a cattle-train with Icelandic immigrants heading for the about-to-be-annexed New West, but temporarily herded into one of the engine-barns to wait for a refitted grain-scow to ferry them Huronward. The noise of their appreciation was often enough to keep a Christian awake at his prayers. Surrounding the din and hubbub of the rail-yards were a dozen thriving but obstreperous enterprises linked to prosperity by rail and sail – smithies hammering out plates and spikes, welders scorching metal into submission, even a manufacturer of barrel-staves who preferred to labour at night. So it was that the town proper did not begin for half-a-mile from its commercial heart – on Prince Street in fact, which ran parallel to the River and was unique among small-village boulevards in having buildings only on its east side and each one of them a hotel or something with pretentions in that direction. While the Grand Trunk station-hotel accommodated those worthies staying overnight on business or waiting for water transportation, smaller hostels like The Queen’s served the drummers, gamblers, mountebanks, beached sailors and low-brimmed capitalists seeking illicit pleasures of sundry kind. When the beverage rooms closed, one could drink one’s way into a whiskey stupor in the sanctity of an upstairs boudoir complete with country courtesan and douche. If more daring (or desperate), one could slip over the tracks into Mushroom Alley where the gormandizing was as licorous as it was revulsive. At night all the decent burghers of the village clamped shut their shutters and their curiosity. On Sundays the harbingers of virtue inveighed thunderously from three pulpits but did not extend their pastorates quite as far as Prince Street itself.
Point Edward by day was also unique among the insular Christian communities of those days. In most Ontario towns everyone on a main street would be instantly identifiable – along with his pedigrees, the direction and purpose of his movements, the said-value of these latter and the likely consequences thereof. A stranger’s presence would be noticed as quick as a bur between the toes and be almost as popular. But here, Michigan Ave. and Prince Street – even a back street if it led to the beach – were daily invaded by exotic creatures from every class, the identification of whom could often form an amusing but inconclusive pastime. Tramps, sailors, stockbrokers, escaped felons, failed poets, even Sir John A. Himself might pass by Redmond’s store without a second glance being taken. Notwithstanding such an incongruous cosmopolitanism, there existed alongside it – or within it – a typical ingrown, self-generating community of the Ontario variety. Amazingly, the two societies rarely blended, even at the edges, though they were materially responsible for each other’s welfare. The ‘village’ of Point Edward provided the Grand Trunk with a sober supply of respectable workers with families to ballast their commitment and a church to teach them their manners. The Company – despite the noise, moral squalor, and crass commercialism – ensured the permanent citizens a life of modest affluence and certain progress in divine concert with the Dominion itself.
5
Lily Marshall stood at her kitchen window and surveyed the wonders of her small world. The tulips she had planted along the garden path bloomed gaily in primary reds and yellows. Clara and Gimpy – returned to their circle of friends once more – had made a special trip out in their new Burlington buggy just to admire them, Clara’s frail teeter and pastel stare reminding them of her recent ordeal, Gimpy joking bravely and poking his leg in jest at the boys. Along the lane the lilacs that Bachelor Bill helped Uncle Chester plant so long ago exploded a dozenfold in mauve and evening indigo, their underground runners popping up everywhere around, stitching earth to air. Along the edge of the spaded vegetable patch, Robbie, dreaming of his seventh birthday and instant manhood, roamed like a scout for King Arthur – nose to the ground, wooden sabre cocked and ready (made for the young paladin by his aging father), and muttering abracadabra oaths to keep his courage charged. With no visible mercy he cut down every milkweed corpse who had dared to survive the winter with a fearsome blow, then scampered into the woods in the direction of Big Creek or Camelot. Ever since Gimpy had read him those King Arthur stories during his stay with them (while Lily nursed Clara alone), Robbie had been wild with them. Tom borrowed the book and read him more, indeed read to them all around the winter fire. Robbie could hardly sit still long enough to hear the end of an adventure; he would be itching to act it out, to get outdoors and stretch his legs and his intrepid arms. He never wanted the same story repeated, and would threaten a tantrum whenever Brad, as he usually did, asked for the one about Gawain or young Lancelot again and again. Lily watched Brad’s eyes, the flame dancing in them, as he lay on the sheepskin and formed the words in his mouth a second before Tom pronounced them, as if he were tasting them, until all at once they struck his imagination with the impact of tattoos. Lily sat beside Tom on the arm of the big chair, matching the letters to her husband’s lips, herself no longer amazed at the magic congruence of letter and sound, the marvelling transformations of the heart it allowed. She could read. Not all by herself yet. But almost, soon. When Robbie went off to school, in the village in September, she would have him bring the gray-covered primer home, and they would learn together. And Brad too. Lily and her boys.
That’s what people whispered behind her along Michigan Ave. when she pulled them into town on the toboggan Tom had made them. She wanted them to say it out loud, to sing it to the congregation. “An’ how are the tow-heads this morning?”grocer Redmond would say, ruffling their hair under the tuques and slipping them an appeasing sweet. “Like two beans on a platter.” But of course they were as different as two humans could be. For Robbie the objects of the variegated world around him were put there by some benign gamesmaster especially for him to explore, expose to delight or plunder with desire. When he rested, they did too. He could watch with dispassion as his father skinned a freshly-killed rabbit, not connecting the clouded eyes in the death-clench of that animal’s face with the bright kinship of those that peered out at him from a brush pile or turned their tender curiosity upon him when he disturbed them over lunch at the lettuce patch. Brad, too, as his health improved, loved to be outdoors in the summer. When the family went walking together, Brad would lag or meander, sometimes even stop in mid-stride as something in the air struck him still: a thrush’s sigh from the shadows, beads of dew along a leaf trapped by light, a crow raking the silence with his caw, a bullfrog’s eyes bobbing in the slime, the flick of a trout in a pool with no bottom. From this window she could, if she were careful, watch him out there – listening, touching, reaching for the roots of awe. At such moments she wished she could bring him – and Robbie as well – to Old Samuels and hear them talk together or not talk in those silences-between-souls she knew were gone now from her own life. Robbie would have bounced into the woods on Sounder’s heels, chattering all the while and then going perfectly quiet for hours, like foxes in the deep grass waiting for prey. Brad and Acorn would have been fast friends, nothing could have stopped them.
Naturally Tom found it easier to relate to Robbie, taking him off to fish in the creek, sometimes letting him come along while he hunted, the boy carrying the lumpy burlap with two dead cottontails on his sore back, blood tickling his bare leg. The boy worshipped Tom’s presence and filled his absence with reverent re-enactments of their pleasures. Brad, horrified by the barn, the stench of carcasses and the accusing eyes of slain creatures, took to Tom slowly and obliquely. At last Tom seemed to understand this and accept it as what would always be between them. T
om had that disarming smile – quick and unprepared for, flashing news of its warmth, its fear of being hurt, the sense of its own helplessness in the mess of emotion and desire that made up his larger being. Gradually and very reluctantly, Brad caught sight of those parts of Tom she herself had loved outright from the moment of contact across a faraway dance-floor. By the time Tom began reading to him, Brad was not surprised. Months later he eased himself up onto Tom’s knee, and Tom kept right on reading.
They are each an extension of one part of Tom, she thought. Does he know that? Is that why he can love them in such different ways? How much of me lies enfolded in them, I don’t really know. I can’t see such things because I think of my love for them as complete and whole – as an unending ache when I fear for their safety, panic when their bodies shiver on the brink of fever, as joy that swells out of my heart and leaves me without breath when I see them laughing together with Tom with nature with the world around that loves them this moment. What the women who will love them later might see, I can never say. The affections that bind us here and now are a web of wondrous intricacy, of inseparable elements: Tom and me, me and Tom, Tom and each of his boys, me and the boys. We are. I never hoped for more.
Tom was more than happy when he was offered the foreman’s job starting in September. He felt vindicated. He wrote to Bags Starkey’s cousin in London to offer Bags a job, but word came back that he had ‘gone off’ without telling anyone where. On the first sunny Sunday in April, Tom had borrowed Gimpy’s old buggy and taken the whole family for a drive in the country. On the way back home they detoured into the village, and Tom, going strangely quiet, pulled the horses up at the corner of Albert and Ernest. Tom pointed his whip towards a newly-built frame cottage covered with cedar-shakes, whose aroma sweetened the air for blocks around.
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