Lily showed her surprise.
“Told ya’ so. Though I reckon Stoke suspected right from the start, if you know what I mean. My Mama’s mama was full-blood Ojibwa, from Kettle Point. She was the daughter of a medicine man from Manitoulin. She passed the lore along to me.”
“Where’d you grow all these things?”
Sophie guffawed and the manic gleam was suddenly back in her eye, as if all the alcohol from Stoker’s store had been holding its potency in check till now, as he himself sometimes tried to do – wondering if, unleashed, it would stretch and burst inside them both in a paroxysm of pleasure and fiery demise. “Not on this singed arsehole of land, that’s for sure. And even if I did manage to coax anything’ up out there, some brat would piss all over it for a penny.” Her chuckle, rumbling up through her, toppled her against the bench where her elbow struck the crate. “No, my cousin used to bring me the supplies down from the Reserve every couple of months. But I made up the potions and poultices right here, right on this bench, early in the mornin’ when the sun would shoot right through that window, when nobody was around to unsettle me except the babe kickin’ at me from indoors.” She patted her belly reminiscently. “They were good medicines, Lil, an’ don’t you ever forget that.”
“What are those, then?” Lily said.
“Hey! That’s what I wanted to show you. To show you how good I really was. You wouldn’t believe it, Lil, but Stoker, he was proud as punch of me in them days. People couldn’t pay much, of course, but they’d bring the kids little presents an’ do favours for Stoker around here when he was off on the boats. An’ when he’d come home, he’d give out an Indian whoop an’ say, ‘C’mere little squaw-lady, give big chief some of that wampum.’ An’ he didn’t mean a cup of rose-hip tea!” She stared at the dusty bottles as if waiting for them to speak for themselves.
“But these’re drugstore medicines,” Lily said after a bit, picking up one of the bottles. “Real old ones.”
“Yup. Every one of ’em. I got each of these from a person I helped in my rounds. Whenever my medicine worked for them, they always said, ‘Here, Sophie dear, take this quack stuff an’ throw it in the River.’ But I always brung it straight back here an’ put in my trophy case. That’s what Stoke used to call it.”
Lily started to read one of the labels, a syllable at a time: “Doc-tor Maur-ice’s Cel-e-brated Worm Can-dy.”
Sophie chortled and hiccoughed at the same time; her eyes bulged and narrowed raffishly. “That ain’t as funny as Sir Astley Cooper’s Worm Tea!” she said, dumping the bottles onto the bench and then lifting them one at a time to the naked light. “Or how about Ayer’s Sasarsparilla: ‘cures scrofula, ulcers, pimples, salt rheum, scald head, syphilis, dropsy, neuralgia, tic dolour-eux, debility, dyspepsia, eruptions, erysipals an’ St. Anthony’s Fire.” She snorted: “Want your fire put out, luv?”
“They left out St. Vitus’ Dance,” Lily tittered.
“How about this one. Holloway’s Pills For Sickly Females! ‘Can be taken with safety in all periodical and feminine disorganizations. Its effect is all but miraculous’,” she read with a barker’s zest. “Now what in Sam Shit is a ‘feminine disorganization’? A busted hen party?”
Lily started to giggle in earnest, the flume from three of stoker’s brown ones taking belated effect perhaps.
“Here’s a dandy!” Sophie said. “Bryan’s Pulmonic Wafers: ‘a blessing to all classes and constitutions’. You an’ me now, we got the constitution of a lady ox but no more class than a squirrel-nut.”
She had got herself fully launched. She belched, took a lungful of air and carried on. “Judson’s Mountain Herb Pills: ‘they purify the blood, remove obstructions of all kinds, cleanse the skin of all pimples and blotches, and bring the rich odour of health to the pale cheek’. Ain’t that enough to make you puke pennies? The only rich odour we got here in Mushroom Alley is the perfumery of pigshit!”
Lily, her giggle askew, handed her another one. Sophie’s eyes glinted. “Dr. Chessman’s Female Regulating Pills: ‘the oldest regulator for females’.” The backwash of her guffaw pitched her forward and she tottered helplessly against Lily’s shoulder and they staggered in loose tandem through the door and outside, where they collapsed into the bent grass – debilitated by laughter and the sudden zaniness of the ordered universe.
“And all this time,” Sophie said, trying in vain to keep the punch-line primly swallowed, “all this time, I thought the oldest female regulator in the world was that little pulmonic wafer between Stoker’s legs.”
“You mean the one that cures all classes an’ constitutions,” Lily said, and they rolled onto their backs, side by side, letting the excitement of the alcohol, the sun-drenched sky, the woozy delight of their own improvisation flow through them and across the maddening divide that kept their beings temporarily separate. The grass and the heat and the afternoon enfolded them.
Lily drifted in and out of sleep. Hours later the shadow of the shed fell upon her exposed face like a bat’s wing.
She sat up. Sophie was sitting up beside her. Lily reached out to touch her sleeveless arm. Sophie looked down at her.
“Every night I pray to God he’ll sail away on one of them goddam boats an’ never come back. Sometimes I even wish the bugger’d fall overboard an’ drown, or trip an’ go headfirst into the fuckin’ furnace.”
Desperately she tried to read the response in Lily’s face. “I’m wicked, ain’t I, Lil?”
29
1
In September of 1878, after flinging their slogans and exordia fruitlessly into the machinery of the universe, the Liberals lay down and let the Tories take up the torch with their cries of ‘National Policy’ and ‘Reciprocity of Tariffs’ that must have sent a shudder rippling through the outer galaxies. Hopes were raised much faster than the fallen economy: The North-West Mounted Police cantered onto the plains to save them from whiskey and Indians. The Métis retreated even farther up the North Saskatchewan to obscure enclaves with immemorable names like Duck Lake and Batoche. With Sir John A. – resuscitated and breathing fire – at the throttle, the Canadian Pacific Railway took lethal aim at the Rockies, and the shockwaves of its revived thunder rolled into the Ontario boardrooms of the Great Western and the Grand Trunk. Talk of amalgamation was in the air that autumn. Retrenchment and consolidation were dusted off and re-presented as bywords of conventional wisdom. At any rate – whatever the reason – the Grand Trunk did decide that it was no longer expedient to supervise the daily comings and doings of its foster-child, Point Edward. Incorporation was hastily added to its list of bywords. After all, the company had more reserve land than it would ever need for future development, had already sold off the choice commercial lots it could not use, and even had a fine locally-situated candidate in mind to act as reeve and avuncular guide. Accordingly, the necessary legal trivia were arranged in the summer of 1878, elections for the first council announced for early October, and a proclamation date set for the transfer of power: January 1, 1879.
2
It was probably Hazel who first raised the question, but it soon became general up and down the Alley: what would be the fate of squatters and outcasts in a village controlled by its own elders and grandees? This question took on more biting import when it was learned that the Railway was ceding – gratis and as a gesture of its good-will – all such marginal territories to the corporation for ‘future recreational or industrial development’. The town council would own the Alley – outright. When the elections in October returned two clergymen, a shop foreman and a druggist as councillors, and acclaimed Stanley R. ‘Cap’ Dowling as reeve-elect – no doubt was left about the precariousness of the Alley community. So when they gathered at Hazel’s on the Saturday following the municipal election – more than two dozen of them, including even old Angus Shawyer sobered up for the day – they were not unaware of the irony of the situation: a town meeting of people who had settled here so they wouldn’t ever have to worry about polit
ics and who had never been called upon to publicly confess that they were a community of any kind, even renegades.
Stump Starkey, Bible clamped akimbo, ascended the dais and accepted the burden of explaining the legal details as far as they were known, and when each of these had been thoroughly depreciated by argument and imprecation, he went on to recite the actual words of the Reverend Clough, councillor-elect, who had declared from the sanctity of his altar that the new village would be ‘purged of that empustulated rot by spring’. A number of suggestions were made for remediation, all of them indictable, and then the mood of anger changed to frustration and finally to sullen resignation. At the point where the meeting was about to break up, Sophie Potts was helped up onto the makeshift platform (Shadrack Lincoln’s steamer-trunk). The silence turned from sulky to expectant. Braced on either arm by Stumpy and Spartacus, she began to speak.
Sophie was now a truly gargantuan figure. The hummocks and drumlins and foothills of her flesh were housed in a cerise-and-violet-striped awning which Spartacus had filched from a Sarnia squire and Lily had fashioned into some sort of presentable container. Her cheeks, unbusked by sun, were nonetheless puffed with scarlet striations merely from the effort of breathing. The spoor of her sweat knocked dogs to their knees. Her chickory-dark hair sprouted up anywhere in thicket and thew. When she spoke, her voice, though unmistakably female, reminded her listeners of hickory smoke, licorice and deep-ground peppercorn.
“First of all, I’m sick an’ tired of this whinin’ an’ gabble-gruntin’. Won’t do us no more good than a tinker’s fart, an’ it’s not worthy of any one of you. I know you all. I met you one at a time. I liked an’ I hated you as I saw fit an’ you deserved. We all came here for our own special purpose, an’ we don’t have to tell one another why, now or ever. We like it here for our own peculiar reasons, an’ most of us wanna keep it that way. Most of us won’t do too good out there in the other world: we know too damn much about livin’ to last long out there. The question for us is not ‘do we want to stay?’ but ‘how can we swing it?’ Well, I’m gonna tell you how, right now.”
Stumpy and Spartacus got a firm double-grip and eased Sophie forward till she caught her breath – huffing in the most frightening manner. She continued.
“You’re all tryin’ to dream up ways of defendin’ your rights or gettin’ back at the respectable folk or cuttin’ your losses before you hightail it outta here like a jarful of spooked jackrabbits. Well you don’t need to. This town ain’t gonna toss us out on our noses no matter how much hot air the Reverend One-Ball Clough bellows out his belfry. This town needs us, an’ they know it. All we got to do is remind them a little bit.”
No one present had ever heard Sophie Potts talk like this before. Her gossipy tales and deadly retorts, her mustard tongue and nettling glance, her Olympian profanity – these were legend on the lane, but not this. The Alleyfolk listened, not quite believing what they heard.
“Think about it. Them people out there may look on us as a cartful of cripples, ninnies, hooers and downright heathen, but they get a lot of pleasure out of thinkin’ such things an’ feelin’ a tad better about themselves for thinkin’ them. And all the time they know they can’t really do without us. If Honeyman left, who would clean the shithouses an’ septic tanks? If they lost Spartacus, who would keep their boulevards clean an’ give ’em a pile of cheap furniture from Sarnia to choose from? Who’d keep the tramps safe an’ warm outta harm’s way if Stumpy up an’ left? And if Hazel were shut down, where would all them rutting sailors end up, eh? In the chaste beds of their precious little daughters! They may curse old Baptiste every mornin’ before prayers, but half the town buys its hooch from that fine, unlicensed establishment. And if they dump the Shawyers an’ McLeods an’ McCourts onto the streets, what maids will there be to change the sheets on their beds or wipe the snot off their kids’ faces? An’ think of the mountain of dirty laundry chokin’ the closets an’ hallways of the town’s best houses if our dear Lily was given her walkin’ papers?”
Sophie had struck the chord she had intended, and now she merely played the instrument – with intervals for deep breathing. “Now, here’s the plan,” she said when the cheering had almost ceased.
She had worked it out carefully in her own mind, trying it out first on Lily, and together they shaped it for presentation. The Alleyfolk, each in the course of his self-appointed duties, would take a petition out among the populace. The gist of the petition, written out in legal fashion for them by Shadrack Lincoln, was this: for a fee to be negotiated the squatters on the lane known as Mushroom Alley would have their properties surveyed, after which they would be given outright title. The lane itself would be formally attached to Prince Street at the south side of the tracks. With the addition by Shadrack of several ‘whereas’ and ‘we the undersigned’, the finished product looked impressive. Five copies were made. The strategy, as evolved by Sophie and Lily, was first to talk, in the natural course of business or social interchange, individually with a storekeeping, a lady-of-the-house, a day-labourer resting at Baptiste’s or exercising at Hazel’s, a satisfied customer, a charitable heart – and when that individual seemed convinced by the justice or necessity of the cause, then and only then would the petition be proffered for a confirming signature. Moreover, only the petition for that designated interest-group would be shown; that is, there were separate duplicate petitions for housewives, shopkeepers, Grand Trunk employees and other workers, tradesmen, and various self-appointed burghers of high standing. Discreetness, subterfuge, a touch of flim-flam – traits revered and practiced in the Alley – were thus to be used to telling effect.
The stratagem worked. On the five documents they amassed three hundred and fifty signatures, more than half of the adult population of the village – though strictly speaking not all by any means were eligible voters. But the moral impetus of the suit was considerable; after all, few of the resident landowners could deny having a father or grandfather who had begun life in British North America as a squatter. Nor was the instinct to poach completely extinguished by the advance of civility.
A delegation was appointed to take the petition to Reeve-elect Dowling. Stumpy was chosen to present the suit and do all the talking, his chief qualification for the task being his gender. Dowling lived in a two-storey brick house on Victoria Street in a style appropriate to a factory-owner, retired railway executive and budding politician. A maid, Carrie McCourt, answered the door and curtseyed before she recognized her neighbours and lapsed into an incurable titter. Before she recovered, they were inside, past the vestibule and fully into the drawing room – Stumpy, Sophie, Maggie Shawyer, Hazel and, well in the background, Lily Marshall. Dowling, his tie askew and his shirt in a rumpus, was caught off-guard and never regained his balance. He read through the papers at a muttering clip – glancing up from time to time at the odd components of the delegation, none of whom he recognized with any certainty. He said nothing for fully five minutes. Then he looked up at Stumpy. “Well, I am the Reeve of all the people here; I’ll present this to the council in January. Carrie will show you out.”
Sophie brushed Stumpy back with a gentle flipper and rolled her bulk till it was planted solidly in front of the reeve-elect, now trapped between his fireplace and divan. “Take it to them right now. We got to know your feelings on this right away. We don’t propose to hang around an’ wait for your mercy or neglect. We mean what we say here. All the services we provide are gonna vanish quicker than you can count your money. The people who signed there are tellin’ you they want them services an’ that they agree we got the same squatters’ rights as was given to their parents an’ to the lowliest of Negro slaves brung over the border from the States. We want an answer in a week, one way or another.”
Dowling gave them all his best smile but there was no mirth in it. He promised a response within a week.
3
I’m thirty-eight years old, Lily thought. It’s time I put down some roots of my own. I’ll t
ake some of Brad’s schooling money and turn the place into a cottage. I’ll paint it blue. It’ll be a place he’ll want to come back to, the kind of place everybody needs once in a while – a sanctuary. For me, it will be home.
It was hard for Lily to believe that Brad was now in grade ten at the Sarnia High School, having completed grade nine with honours in every subject. He was studying literature and grammar and mathematics, even French. But when she attempted a brief conversation in the tongue she had known from childhood, Brad grimaced, then announced that she wasn’t speaking any version of French that he knew of. She started to explain her position but for some reason stopped part-way through and mumbled, “Well, I guess your teachers would know best.” They had more luck in their discussions of history and geography, certainly in the flush of mutual excitement during those first few months when Lily packed him a lunch and walked with him to the trolley and waited by the window in the gathering dusk till she spied his slim figure among the crowd of returning workers and put their kettle on. Lily listened to his tales of the English kings – the wicked and the sublime – and of the odysseys of the mad, foolish, wonderful seafarers who sailed straight off any horizon. Cautiously she would interrupt him, trying anxiously to keep the countries and oceans in their place, not a little baffled by the flat maps in Brad’s textbook and by his abrupt expositions. He himself worshipped England, her sanguinary pageant and her heroic verse, and was quickly irked by Lily’s persistent questions about Ireland and where this or that minor country might be, as if it really mattered to anyone. When Lily reminded him that his grandfather and grandmother came from there, he simply looked puzzled, then hurt; finally he would sputter, “This is history, Ma, not family.” Then that soft and engaging side of his nature, the side that needed to be loved utterly, re-emerged and he would curl up beside her on the chesterfield and read aloud to her from The Idylls of the King.
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