By the winter term, however, these happier sessions were fewer and further apart. He seemed more and more to prefer studying alone, drawing the curtain around his bed or when Robbie clumped through, wrapping himself in a shawl and disappearing into the drafty shed. Several times in January he came home late for supper without explanation, and picked at his food. Finally he confessed that he was going out with school chums to have a coffee at a restaurant where they read the newspapers and talked, and occasionally bought some supper. He said how sorry he was for worrying her and that it would not happen again, he was sure, because the fellows had all treated him so many times he just couldn’t throw himself on their hospitality any more. Next morning Lily gave him a silver dollar: “You ain’t a beggar,” she said. “You need money to treat your friends. Just tell me when you plan to stay late down there.” Brad made a solemn promise, and most of the time remembered to honour it.
In June Lily received a letter from Mr. Axelrod, the principal, and read it with wonder and trepidation. In a formal style and script, it informed her that her son was at the head of the class and reported to be one of the most brilliant students his teachers had ever seen. She was exhorted not to reveal such appraisal to her son for fear of unpredictable consequences in regard to the orderly development of his moral character. Nevertheless, it was important for his mother to realize the depth of his talent that still lay untapped by enlightened instruction, and to make preparations for her son’s potentially long and certainly fruitful academic career. In short, it was never too soon to start saving money, as even with the scholarships Brad was sure to obtain, a university education in a capital city was expensive. That much Lily already knew, and her intuition about her son’s precocity was now fully confirmed. She went immediately to the jar under her bed, next to Sounder’s pouch, and counted out sixty-nine dollars – two year’s savings. She would have to find more, but there were three years still to worry about that. Robbie was paying her a little board money whenever he got work at the sheds. Violet often refused to take the salary Lily gave her, but Lily merely put it aside in a separate cache – it wasn’t her money. We’ll make out, she said to Tom, like we always do.
In March she had wondered if that sentiment were true when Brad, studying in the shed to punish his boorish brother, caught a chest cold which rapidly turned into pneumonia. “It ain’t my fault, Ma,” Robbie pleaded and Lily absolved him with a touch and together they once again nursed Brad through his fever and delirium, but in so doing Robbie expended some small part of affection and faith that was afterwards irrecoverable. Robbie pitched in and helped Violet with the laundering – swearing the household to secrecy – while Lily sat by Brad’s bed reading aloud to him (in a cadence almost as good as Miss Kingman’s) his current favourite, ‘The Lady of Shallot’. When at last he was strong enough to speak, the first words he said were: “I love you, Ma. I’ll never leave you. Never.” He began to shake, not from the fever but its devastating aftermath. Tears slipped unannounced down his livid cheeks, and though Lily brushed them aside with a soft cloth, they continued to fall. He knows already, she thought. One way or another, I will lose him.
As soon as she had finished counting out the precious savings, Lily went fishing for Brad’s Easter report card; she didn’t know why but she wanted just to look at it and admire the scarlet A’s printed there and shimmering like heraldic gules – to hold them up to the light for Tom to see. It wasn’t in the apple-box beside the bookcase so Lily pulled out the drawer under Brad’s bed where he often kept his papers and notes from school. It was there, but she didn’t pick it up. A notebook, half-open caught her eye and held it. She leafed through it, scanning the crabbed printing that was unmistakably her son’s. Each page contained a poem, scribbled over and copied out and altered and finally printed in immalleable block capitals. They were Brad’s own poems. From the fading of the ink, she concluded that some of them had been written many, many months ago. She could not read them. She closed up the secret book and carefully put it back in its rightful place. She sat down at the kitchen table, shaken, unable to think a single mitigating thought. “Hey, Ma, I’m cleanin’ two cottontails out here, you want ’em for supper?” Robbie called, and then came in from the shed to see if she was all right. “I’ll get the fire goin’,” he said.
With the depression showing no sign of being able to discriminate between bleu and rouge, Robbie had been able to find only occasional work at the freight-sheds, lugging barrels and crates much as Tom had done in the full heat of the summer. Redmond continued to give him three half-days delivering grocers in the township, plodding along at the mercy of Rocket whose swayback and irregular trot amused children and roused the derisive instincts of the young toughs-about-town. Robbie never complained, and although he was naturally taciturn, he often sank into a black silence that Lily noticed immediately and gave a wide berth to. When Brad blundered into one of them, a brief flare-up ensued with Brad snapping out something elegant and barbed and Robbie stammering an unoriginal curse before stomping off to the woods.
The woods he loved still – to walk in, hunt in, do whatever private ruminating he needed to do when the world flummoxed him as it so often did. He was like a gentle bull with its horns growing inward. One day on his return from hunting in Second Bush, he said to Lily, “I stopped over at the old place.” “You did?” “I looked in the barn. Nothin’s been touched. There’s a bed in there an’ Ti-Jeans rocker. I almost forgot about that old place, you know.” “It’s still ours,” Lily said, looking for some defense. A week or so later Robbie did not come home all night; Lily didn’t notice until she called out to the pup-tent where he often slept in the spring and discovered it was empty. He arrived shortly after breakfast and said, with a hint of badgering pride, “I slept over at the old place. It’s real cozy. You get a fresh breeze out there, all night.” During the month of June he seemed to spend more and more of his spare time ‘out there’. When she casually questioned him about this, he grew silent, then morose. She stopped asking. But one day when she and Violet were out for their Sunday walk, they found themselves by chance coming out of First Bush by a new path and crossing Michigan Ave. towards the town-line not a stone’s throw from Bridie’s place. Sensing where they were destined, Violet drew Lily into a direct route and they came upon their ruined homesteads through the rotting stumps of the windbreak. What they saw surprised and then astonished them. A fully developed vegetable garden had arisen like a materialized dream-image exactly where the old one had always been – leaf and vine and tuber and wrinkled blossom. Robbie came out of the barn, blinking. “It’s real good ground,” he said.
Nothing was said about it but when Lily felt up to it she slipped over to ‘Rob’s place’ (as it was now called) in the early June evenings of 1878 and stepped into stride beside her son, hoe in hand, as of old. She offered no advice and none was asked for. He can’t make a living out of this patch, fertile as it is, but he loves it: it allows him to give something of himself completely without the fear of hurting or being hurt, she thought. When the August blights spoiled half of his crop, he was undaunted. He gathered his harvest, sold it at the Sarnia Market every Saturday during the season (she was told), and gave his mother ten dollars of his earnings. She put it in the schooling fund. And when Brad whined and pleaded and threatened over the question of his boarding in Sarnia during his grade-ten year, Lily was able to hold fast and say no. The trust fund had taken on an aura of something sacred between them. Someday Brad would understand it all. For the time being, though, he retaliated by staying away more and more to squander his money and time with school friends she was never to meet.
Just before the elections and the fuss over property title, Robbie received a letter with an exotic stamp on it. He had never before received a letter of any kind. Somewhat guiltily he slunk away to his tent and read it. Lily heard him jerk his shotgun off the shed wall and tramp towards the bush. The letter was floating in the breeze near the tent, abandoned. Lily rescued it,
then read it as she knew she was meant to. It was from Fred Potts – Blub – and contained a thrilling account of his adventures with the circus, including lurid descriptions of the southern American towns and backwaters they visited each year, and a narrative of his own rise from stableboy to midway helper to full-scale barker for the girly-show. Fred hinted darkly that the circus would be coming next spring at least as far as London, and that a world of unimaginable, footloose wonder awaited the ruthless and the brave.
When Lily and Rob had finally finished piling the last of the pumpkins onto the barrow, they sat on the bench outside the barn and sipped tea made over the open fieldstone fireplace Rob had built nearby. Lil was thinking of past pleasures and sadnesses so she was startled when Rob said to her in his blunt, unprefaced manner, “I’ll never leave you, Ma.”
4
It was close to Halloween with a frail bloom of Indian summer on the village-to-be when news reached the Alleyfolk that the council-elect had voted – unofficially of course – three to two in favour of accepting their suit. Nor was their unreserved joy dampened one whit by the various provisos attached to the original request: that the lots be resurveyed as far as possible to conform with the accepted geometric principles, that the winding lane in consequence be ‘straightened’ into two tolerable curves, that the latter be attached to Prince Street at the tracks and adopt that nomination for all time-to-come, and finally that a settlement stipend of fifty dollars per property – regardless of size or length of tenure – be paid within three years to cover back taxes, the cost of the survey and the necessary legal fees, and to convince the legitimate citizens once and for all that the Alleyfolk intended to be ratepaying members of this community. The celebration, fueled by John the Baptist’s new still, went on for days.
Lily took no part in it. She was not ready yet to celebrate. She had more than the necessary fifty dollars, and could certainly raise that much again in three years if need be. In the back of her mind she had thought all along that she would sell Bridie’s legacy and with it invest at last in something of her own making and choosing: thus the appropriateness of taking possession of this property seemed foreordained. She owed ten or twelve dollars in back taxes on the old place, which the township, noting the rekindled interest in the land, had decided to press for, but even in the currently depressed market, almost two acres of cultivated land with a barn would sell for forty dollars or more. But Bridie’s place was now Rob’s place. No thought of selling it could enter her mind. It’s his, she thought; he’s made it his. I’ll pay the taxes and sign the deed over to him. What else have I to give my firstborn son? Even so, enough cash remained to buy back her birthright, as she now thought of it. Of course she would have no reserve money of any kind. Brad needed a new suit; the two she’d bought him last year had shrunk around his sprouting frame – he was going to be tall and slim and handsome. But more importantly, the warning in the principal’s letter and the burden of her own responsibility weighted heavily upon her. More immediately she was worried about Brad’s increasing truancy, and though his grades remained high, he was drifting away from her control and into habits that could be ruinous. She knew she must let him board in Sarnia under the supervision of a respectable family whose influence, though not her own, would be essential to his progress. Painful as it might be, she would have to make the move after Christmas. For that, she needed cash, all she could possibly earn slaving six days a week.
When Sophie heard, she was shocked, then enraged, then consoling – offering to give Lily every dollar she could “squeeze out of Mr. Flintskin, esquire, when he comes home.” The only concrete form of assistance she contributed, though, was to tell Lily’s story to Hap Withers, Dowling’s factory foreman and father of ten. Hap came right up to Lily’s place the next day and made the offer in that quiet, direct way of his that had endeared him to both sides of the village tracks. His own house lay on Prince Street, a hundred feet from the Alley. He proposed to pay Lily’s fifty-dollar fee to the council himself, take temporary ownership of the property only, and rent it back to Lily for a dollar a year and taxes. “I’ll have a contract drawn up,” he said, “to say that you have a right to buy me out for fifty dollars anytime over the next five years – and of course I won’t be able to sell the land. If you don’t want or need the place by then, I’ll buy your house and give it to one of my sons.”
Well, Lily mused, watching Hap whistling down the lane, I’ve got half a root down, and five years to grow the rest of it. There’s lots in this world who’ve got less than that. By Halloween Rob had a deed and Lily became a tenant.
30
1
Stoker arrived home unexpectedly at the end of the first week of November. His ship had run aground near Goderich and limped into dry dock there. With only three weeks left in the season, it was possible the crew would not be asked to make another trip. Stoker usually headed north to the Bruce lumber camp on the first of December. So it was three weeks at home – with Sophie. Lily did not go over, of course, but she kept a wary eye on the Potts’ place and at night slept lightly, listening for the telltale sounds.
After a snowy Halloween, Indian summer had returned more perfect and fragile than ever – a thin, sweet stratosphere distilled of all impurities. Lily and Violet went for long strolls across the river flats and the blanched, silent marshes. They gathered bulrushes and feathered cattails and milkweed pods whose silk parachutes sailed happily anywhere the wind swivelled them. Coming home from Hazel’s late one afternoon, Lily saw Stoker and Sophie with Bricky between them (Wee Sue had gone ‘into service’ in September), ambling towards the flats at the back of their property with a slow ease that bespoke comfort, familiarity and trust. Against the setting sun they were a single etched silhouette. Lily hurried on, repassing a pang of envy or regret. Next morning she woke with a start at the slap of a screen door, and stumbled to the window in time to see Stoker and Bricky walking north-east towards First bush, their claret hunting caps winking in the early sun. Later in the morning, after her first wash was complete, she saw Sophie flopped in her rocking chair on the verandah, fanning herself languorously. She had somehow squeezed into her orange print dress, the effort leaving her strapped for breath. She waved at Lily. Lily waved back, then rejoined Violet in the steaming laundry room. At dusk she heard singing and looked out to see Stoker and Bricky cavorting around a huge bonfire onto which they were tossing, on the off-beat, armfuls of stubble, husks and other refuse of the spent harvest. Sophie was watching them as the hens eddied about her feet and the sow sighed a few yards away among her suckling.
The next day Bricky went off with Rob to sleep overnight in “the little barn” and join in a squirrel-shoot organized by the McCourt boys. Stoker had given him a new .410 gauge with instructions that he was to use it only under Rob’s supervision. To Lily’s surprise, Rob walked over to Potts’ and spent several hours with Stoker (“shooting the breeze, he’s a great guy, Ma, he’s got a million stories”) before leading Bricky off on his first all-male expedition. Even though Brad was staying over with one of his Sarnia chums and the house was strangely empty, Lily fell into the first deep sleep she’d had in some time.
She was wakened, not ungently, by the twang of a banjo, a quarter-note chord – tart and sensual. Then Sophie’s laughter in the rich full calliope of its range from skirring giggle to braying chortle – rude, skeptical, and embracing: a chocolate taunt. Then: low musical murmurings that might have been leftover choruses from a dozen love-songs. A long quiet. Then the crash of flung glass followed by a descanting, tittering hysteria (that could have been meant as hilarity) rescued at the brink by the banjo’s bawdy accompaniment. This lewd invitation reached Lily’s ears intact and aflame, until Sophie crushed it with a stuttering guffaw. Words now: projectile and buckler; Sophie’s taunting mockery above the lumbering accusation beneath it. Lily was half-way across her yard and flinging a kimono over her shift when she heard the clatter of struck furniture and Sophie’s gloating whoop. Then she
heard Stoker grunt reflexively and the smack of flesh on flesh. Lily flung open the door and barged straight into the Potts’ kitchen.
Two lamps had been smashed and lay smouldering in corners. Only one small oil-flame illumined the faces which froze before Lily’s intrusion. Sophie was sitting on the table where she’d landed after being struck by Stoker, a frying pan distended from her right hand, the left side of her face still bearing the livid imprint of his fingers, her eyes braced for the coming shock of pain but still able to bring a glance of incomprehension and dismay upon Lily’s presence. Stoker had raised his fist again in such a way as to strike a backhand blow on Sophie’s other cheek, but at the sound of the door opening he had stopped it long enough to stare down anyone foolhardy enough to enter this territory. He turned the alcoholic jet of his gaze upon the interloper: “Who the fuck are you?”
Lily edged slowly into the pool of light. “You know who I am, Stoker Potts,” she said as softly as if they were at tea together.
“Go home, Lil, go home,” Sophie said in a ghastly whisper just before the pain hit and she crumpled noisily to the floor, tipping over the table.
“No good layin’ there like a whimperin’ pig,” Stoker said, turning away from Lily and advancing towards Sophie, “get your fat ass off the floor an’ take your lumps.” An egg-size bump wobbled at the base of his skull.
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