Yet how indifferent the world’s imperatives must be to have passed by so many with barely a sideways glance, their primal promptings seemingly devoid of pity or humanity or even acknowledgement. How little comfort they had been to Solomon in his sea-coffin, to Maman and Mama in their frozen loneliness, to Aunt Bridie or Uncle Chester or Papa in their grave-grounds as alien as the moonscape above her now. How much time, even, had she herself been given to mourn her lover, wild and brave and cold as the snows that held his faithfulness forever from the true earth? Who had decided then that she should go on? And how often had she yearned to hear the voices of the good, dear gods – the ones Old Samuels had promised her if she could only find the shaman’s ground they worshipped from in the midst of their fear and helplessness. They would surely have something to say to her, here, now, not an arrow’s toss from the hallowed mounds where he and Southener lay in perpetual something-or-other.
I am here. And Sophie is already become another of those I can weep for only because they are absent. Not so. Not true. The dead drive us forward, onward, headlong towards the dark heart of what haunts them. They ache in their knowing.
Without realizing it Lily had drifted back into the quick heat of the ballroom. She felt the blush of it across the nape of her neck, and instinctively removed her coat. Something whisked it away to her right. Her scarf unwound itself and slithered off. She registered only mild puzzlement. The music rose up to meet her sudden attention. It filled her ears like harp’s-wind through a seashell, its echoes celestially infinitesimal.
“It’s a waltz. Would you like to dance?”
“Yes. I think so.”
A muscled hand, her own gently crushed within it.
“A tad off-key, but our own, eh?”
Eager, masculine voice. Accustomed to command?
She must have told him her name, for it graced his lips as often as he dare allow between the suave stint-and-glide of the waltz they were now so evidently engaged in. Then she did hear her own voice, witty and demure and only-just-withholding. Then the music took them both into the sweet morphia of its all-encompassment, and she felt her body detach itself from something ugly and abiding, and swing free, at last, of its own longing.
Who cared that such music was a prisoning bliss? And not once did she deign to glance down at her partner to confirm what she already knew: that it was Tom on that miraculous night of the Great Western Ball, that it was Ti-Jean tender in the breathless music of their cabin, that it was her husky sculler with arms like oars under the pavilion’s perfect light. She was, after all, here. She was alive. She was Lily. She was dancing.
BOOK TWO
Shaman’s Ground
PART ONE
Granny
32
1
Granny Coote was dreaming she was awake again. The sun’s velvet buzz on her eyelids was almost real, the memory of its insistence sweet and bitter over the decades – but she wouldn’t be fooled again. No fool like an old one, she thought, especially one who has learned so little for the effort spent. More and more she was having trouble keeping her dreams and her reveries apart. Yesterday afternoon, for instance, she had sat down at the kitchen table with the fresh tomatoes left for her by the well-meaning Mrs. Buchan, and was about to slice the ripest one with a shaky right hand when the room went dark. She was positive she had not closed her eyes, had not fallen asleep, but the sun had gone down without notice, it seemed, and the tomato lay neatly carved on the breadboard in those little wedges she had been fashioning for more than seventy years. The knife was still in her hand. Arthur and Eddie had been visiting again: Arthur at the piano, Eddie tapping his toes and letting the juice from the tomatoes squirt down his chin, while his blue eyes – replica of his father’s – never left his Granny: teasing, tempting, full of the wondering beneficence of the happy child. “Eat your supper, then sing,” she had told him, as always. “He’s singing for his supper!” Arthur called from his dais, and broke into a verse from ‘A Wandering Minstrel’ just to annoy her. “Let the boy finish his supper, you old coot!”, but both the boy and the baritone broke into unchastened laughter. “He’s just teasing, Granny,” Eddie said. And she wanted to reach across the table and hug him with her bony arms. Arthur was wailing out his parody of Katashaw’s song, his grin as sun-lit as the meadows of Titi-pu.
But of course there was no music here; there had been none since Eddie went away so many years ago. And Arthur, bless him, slept near his wife in the village cemetery beyond First Bush. So she had continued her meal as if she had not lost three hours somewhere, glad to sit in the dark where it didn’t matter if she were asleep or not. Still, it worried her, this lapsing, this forgetting in the middle of an action – cutting flowers, mending the old chesterfield Arthur loved so much, where they had made their last, startling love, and where Arthur had closed his eyes so she wouldn’t see his treachery as his hand stiffened forever in hers. And she would wake suddenly to find herself away off in the sunflowers or squatting foolishly beside the hedge that kept the street at bay. So this is what it is to be senile, she thought; I already know what it is to be old, I’ve had lots of practice chewing on my gums and getting out of bed piecemeal with every joint cracking like a rusted block-and-tackle. But this. This is trouble. They’ll finally have an excuse to put me out of this place, and lord knows they’ve been looking for one ever since Arthur died and that thing happened with Eddie and the Ladies Auxiliary suggested a ‘good home’ in the city she had spent her life fighting. But then the tragedy of ’eighteen had struck like the foul afterbreath of the Great War itself, and she had given them something else to think about.
I’m not senile, she thought, refusing to open her eyes, to acknowledge the supremacy of the dream and the incursions of the night-world. I may be a bit ‘barmy’ as the Alleyfolk used to say, but then I have cause, we all have cause. When that thing happened to her throat after the news came, she had been unable to tell them it was all right, that she understood exactly why and how it had happened, had had to be. She saw her neighbours turn away, their fright a reflection of her own, the same stunned stare she had already seen in the eyes of the bereft – the widows, mothers, betrothed – most of whom had lost a loved one and a god also. They, too, were speechless in their dumbfounding.
The rattle of pebbles across the glass of the front window confirmed it: she was asleep and about to awake. Her eyes opened to the richness of mid-morning August, 1921. She was, she noted ruefully, fully clothed; her flower-print housedress was soaked with sweat and wrinkled beyond redemption. They’d love to come in and catch me like this, she thought, easing her brittle body off the cot – still slim but no longer muscled, her breasts about as lively as a couple of fallen cupcakes (“The trouble with old age,” Sophie used to say, “is your arse gets too tight an’ your cunny too loose”). Granny got seated upright, steadied herself on the edge of the cot for a moment, then let the sun pour across her bare feet from the vivifying east. As the circulation pushed fretfully through her warming bones, she felt the rheumatic ache subside to its daytime level. She flexed her legs and stood up. The blood rushed back to her head and she grabbed the dressing table just in time.
Stupid old woman, she muttered to herself. Mrs. Buchan’d love to come in here the saft and find me sprawled on the rug with a broken hip and lolling like a mute. It would be Sunset Glades for sure. The village’d be rid of the last of its eyesores, and the council would get its house back and the urchins’d have to go all the way to Potts’ Lane for their amusement.
She felt fine now, just a touch woozy, most likely because she had merely fantasized having supper as the wincing of her stomach reminded her. She glanced about the single room that had been her home for five years, ever since she had shut up the last of the two little bedrooms Arthur had added to the far side of the place – Coote’s shack as it was known in the village. However, it was a large enough room with the kitchen area facing the south sun and the parlour with its spacious east window and two
‘port-holes’ in the north wall over Arthur’s piano with his music sheets still opened upon it. The rug was bleached erratically by the sun and stained where the roof had leaked before the Reeve had come over to fix it for her.
Yes, her supper – vegetables from her garden (and Mrs. Buchan’s) and some lumpish bread she’d made one cool morning in the oven of the stove she’d picked up from the Lane, and Eddie had squealed with delight when old Badger Coombs had let him take the reins for a while, and pouted all afternoon till she baked him his red-currant tarts. Her blood was flowing again, her muscles loosened in the warmth of the room, the rheumatism in temporary retreat. Granny felt strong enough to face the day – whichever one it was – as surprised as ever at the resilience of her body’s flesh and nerve, the unwilled potency that gathered its wits each night and surged forth to greet each anonymous morning. In spring, summer and fall there was the garden to occupy her body’s self-renewing restlessness, the passage of people before her parlour window, the cries of children from the fields and swamps below her yard, the bleat and harrumphing of lake-steamers half-a-mile away on the St. Clair, the clatter of the city-line streetcar on Michigan Ave., and the periodic fart of Gassy Peter’s flivver jostling with the gravelled lanes of the village. She needed all of them: she had not left her property – except for the epidemic – since that black day in September.
It was the winter that frightened her most: the stark stretches of space between house and trees; the icy desert of ragged swamp all the way down to the St. Clair and the distant snow-shrouded freight-sheds; the river’s tongue stiffened blue, vacant of vessel or human save for the odd dot of a fisherman expunged by the slightest drift of wind. Birds fled or vowed silence. The children emerged occasionally, as from cocoons, to test the air or the ice, and on Sunday afternoons their cheers and angel-gliding over the improvised rinks of the marsh saved her from whatever form of darkness that was threatening the domestic and habitable variety she had known and coped with for over eighty years. Though her ancient bones invariably found some fresh and independent source for hope, she was not sure she could survive another winter. Why don’t you just pack it in, she often said to her complaining flesh. After all I’ve given you a good run; there’s nothing you haven’t tried or survived; no muscle, no gland has gone unflexed or untitillated; no appetite untempted or unappeased. I’m as sick and tired of your whining as you are of mine. I’m ready. I’ve been ready for a long time. What sort of bribe will you consider? Think about it, because I’m about to embarrass us both.
She remembered the clatter of stones that had just roused her. She went to the only door, on the south side near the sink, and pushed on the sagging screen. On the plank stoop sat a glass bowl covered by a dish-cloth. Granny reached down and lifted it up. Inside the kitchen again, she removed the cover and saw half-a-dozen sweetcakes and a small loaf of raisin-bread, the signature of the handiwork of Leila Savage across the street. She went to the front window and peered about for any sign of the Savage twins or the McCourt bullies who often led them by the nose. The roadway was deserted: the men were all off to work in the City, the wives toiling in the back kitchens or leftover victory gardens, the liberated children at the beach or roaming the dunes and bushland with the eyes of aborigines. Over on the main street, she knew, the post office and market provided a hub of activity for the women to shop, gossip and exchange complaints – for those who could still talk.
There you go again, old woman, she thought, feeling sorry for yourself. It does you no good and you know it. Believe me, nobody’s listening.
The McCourt cousins – five of them from three strands of the same freckled stock – spent much of their time, it seemed, mimicking their elders by plotting ambushes against the offspring of the village’s half-dozen Catholic families, picking fights at random or on principle to keep their prejudices tuned, and generally misleading the susceptible youth of the Point. When things were particularly quiet or unpromising on a summer’s night, they would skulk into Granny’s garden from the marsh and, under cover of the shrubs and a beclouded moon, would begin their low, repeated, increasingly cantatory verses:
Granny Coote is a witch
Granny Coote is a bitch
Granny Coote hitched a
Ride on a broomstick…
(pause, then chorically:)
and the broom bit back!
This latter retort was unfailingly followed by disintegrating laughter before the charm was again wound up in the moon-filtered dark. What they were hoping for, naturally, was that the witch herself should materialize, shaking with righteous anger to the point where she would start to rail at them and they would hear – as they had only once before – the unalloyed, chilling, magic-babble of wizardry itself. Then could they scatter in gleeful terror to the four winds awaiting them. Once last summer, from her gladioli beds in the front yard, she had heard two little girls a block away skipping rope and chanting as if the words had no meaning beyond the dance of innocence they accompanied:
Granny Coote has no teeth
Granny Coote eats roast beef
with her
gum gums!
Granny Coote has no toes
Granny Coote counts by twos
on her
bum bum!
She heard the rope accelerate at the end, and pictured the wild fandango of the elfin feet. She too had danced to that irreverent beat, once, when the lily of her name had hung like a bell in her child’s heart.
Lately the McCourts and occasional camp-followers like the Savage twins had become bolder. They would appear behind the house at dusk – taunting, daring the village with the sounds of their illicit boy-bravery. Still, the victim did not appear. But one evening last week after a particularly callous variation of their rhyme, the side-door swung open and into the twilight floated a caped figure, its legless silhouette seemingly welded to a large whisker-broom, its arms extended more like wings set to try the wind over the hushed garden. The shadows seemed to hide all trace of human visage except for the yellow pricks of eyes and the toothless hollow of a mouth – beef-blooded in hue and emitting a shrill thread of sound like a scream being squeezed to death. The Savage twins were trampled by the precipitate retreat of the Ulster vigilantes.
Back inside the house Granny Coote shook with laughter and after-shock, amazed that she had once again taken up the cudgel, so to speak, having hauled the cape, mask and whistle out of Arthur’s ancient theatrical trunk in order to lie in wait for the pranksters as she had so many times in her eighty-odd years of being on the wrong side of respectability and suffering the consequences, or abetting them. “You chose to be an outsider,” Cap had said to her accusingly, and she had shot back: “None of us chooses anything except the form of our reprisals.” How she could talk then. As the thumping of the routed platoon through the bushes near the march reached her ears, Granny removed the mask and smiled to herself: this one is for you, Arthur, who showed me the gentle half of men’s dominion, who gave me a name and a house to carry me through these final years more to be endured than understood. But then, when had she understood anything even in the midst of love, of commitment to those whose youth or vulnerability bound her to a future she never really believed in. Anyway, sweet Arthur, I shall wear your name, surrogate though it may be, till they chisel it on the granite beside yours.
2
After nibbling at one of Leila Savage’s cakes – a touch too much vanilla in the overbeaten batter – Granny Coote went into her garden as she had done for seventy-odd summers without fail. It was, as she herself termed it, a little-old-lady’s vanity patch. Showy English-style perennials on the perimeter, a neat elevated vegetable section in the middle, divided off by Grand Trunk ties Arthur had brought here when the railway left and the town went bust. Arthur’s wife’s hands had been bred to coddle a bassoon not a hoe-handle, so it was with some relish that Granny had undertaken the familiar task of resurrecting a moribund garden. Arthur had been pleased, amazed even as cityfolk often ar
e before the vigour and dexterity of country labours. Of course, it was vanity now, pure and simple. She could not eat a quarter of what bulged and fletched here in the summer heat, nor could she give much away to the thrifty, war-wary householders with well-stocked victory gardens of their own. Once a week or so, young Wilf Underhill would stop by to collect several packets of peppers or carrots to take down to the destitute beyond Potts’ Lane. He had not forgotten her ‘service’ during the terrible fall of ’eighteen, and shy though he was, he often sat and had a cup of tea with her, content to let the silence ferry its own meaning back and forth between them, occasionally telling her a bit about his life in the Old Country because he could see from the shifting light in her eyes that she enjoyed his company. And now that their baby boy had arrived, there was more joy to share. At times like that she was not unhappy about what had happened to her throat because she would not have to tell him what anguish the world might yet bring to those who dared poach on its prerogatives.
Still, the flowers and shrubs were beautiful; they gave pleasure to the eye and to the village heart shaken by doubt. With every root that delved thumbs-down into this patch of ground and with every corona of colour that took majestic possession of this air, Granny felt she was establishing her right to belong. The council wanted this land back as vacant as the lot they had conceded in their haste to Arthur and his bride. They would not get it. It was never theirs, she thought. It is only mine in trust.
Lily's Story Page 56