“You give us quite a scare,” Malloney said. He looked very uncomfortable, not certain whether to sit on the captain’s chair that could barely contain his bulk or to stand awkwardly above her with no place to plant his hands. They were alone, in his room at the right-front of the hotel. She cleaned it twice a week.
“It’s lucky for us all,” he said, glancing hopefully around, “we was havin’ our Oddfellows’ meetin’ down there tonight.”
She coughed, and he sprang cumbrously forward with a cup of hot tea in his grip. She saw that it was half-consumed.
“You’ll need some more of this,” he said, then suddenly looked away.
She was crying.
She thought: poor Duckface. That is what everyone called Kevin P. Malloney, some to his face, others out of earshot. The epithet was descriptive of his large, fleshly face that was pushed inward vertically along the centre-line, resembling a ruffled duck’s tail, as if his mother, in shock or despair, had struck her infant with an angle-iron. As a result, his beady eyes had been squeezed even closer together and his mouth, longing to be spacious, pursed and dilated simultaneously. Hence it was very difficult for him to convey emotion, the range of overt expression being limited, as it were, from the outset. Most people were content merely to assume and accept that he was, as his face forewarned the world, a saturnine, obtuse, uncaring sloth of a man. It was widely reported that his Irish eyes only danced to the jig of a cash-register.
She saw that her hands were shaking as she sipped absently at the tea.
“Almost froze to death, you did,” Malloney said, automatically drawing one of the shawls more firmly about her shoulders with a shy hand. “I saw this bunch of clothin’ through the snow, scrunched under that big tree back of the Hall and I says to old Redmond, I think somebody’s fallen over, sick or somethin’. Just your imagination, he says. But I goes over anyways. Thank the Lord.”
She felt nothing but the fierce scald – on her tongue, on her cheeks – and a mocking pulse somewhere below her throat. Malloney tried to catch the cup before it toppled off the bed but he missed, burnt his finger, and stifled a curse. All the mutant angles of his face grimaced inward to corral the giant’s breath behind it. “Owww,” he squeaked, and, pitched sideways by the congested pressure, he crushed the china cup.
She giggled. My word, she thought, I’m alive.
“Nobody’s got more right than you to think about endin’ it all. There comes a time when everybody, churchgoer or not, thinks about it. Few people in this town or any other have gone through what you have: your husband, your kids, not to speak of poor ol’ Sophie goin’ up in –”. Malloney was clearing away the supper plate he’d secretly brought into her. It appeared to her that he was intent on preserving his reputation for toughness. Certainly he was aware that she had no reputation worth saving. She had never heard him string so many sentences together before, but it didn’t surprise her in the least. She’d lived long enough to know that even the most taciturn being had inside him whole pages and chapters of the unspoken – lamentations, indictments, confessions, recantations, fervent manifestoes, poems of the beleaguered heart. She had heard them all, in herself and in others.
“What you need most is to get out of here, away from this place. You been here too long. You’ve had too much grief here. There’s ghosts on every street. You been in most of the houses in this dump, so you can’t shut out what you know they’re sayin’, even now. Every one of them cheered when Riel was strung up, you could hear them on the docks. Don’t matter to them what the Rebellion did to you an’ Rob.”
Later, when it was dark in the room, he returned. He lit the small lamp by the bed. His face was scavenged by shadow and lurid light, but the eyes shone out at her, their message clear and unmistakable. Don’t do this to me, she shouted, but his was the only voice in the room.
“You’ve got no hold here any more,” he said. “No kin, no land. What you had is all gone. Wiped clean. No reason to stay. You’ve got to start fresh. You ain’t fifty years old yet. You’re as healthy as a yearling.”
Stop, please.
“I got a friend in Sarnia, works on the railroad there. They need a janitor, a woman. I can arrange for you to have the job, right away. About two blocks from the station there’s a boarding house run by the Widow Jarvis, a former lady-friend of mine. She’ll take you in. You’ll be a long, long ways from this place,” he said, “from this, this shit.”
“Could I have more tea,” she said.
2
The Widow Jarvis was an excessively discreet woman and kind-hearted to a fault if obsessive interest in her acquaintances’ welfare (present and past) were the criterion of measurement. “Don’t you worry now, luv,” she soothed and patted in her English mum’s accent. “Ducky tells me you been hard done by of late, downright abused, he says, an’ I should take good care of you an’ not be askin’ too many questions about what’s happened to you, leastways not for a while, till you settles in an’ starts to feel at home with your bones again. Well now, luv, he don’t haveta tell the Missus Jarvis a thing like that, now do he? One look at you and I knowed it all, straightway. Cup-a-tea, luv?”
“Thank you, yes. You’re very kind.”
Malloney had been right about the job. She was taken on immediately. Her duties were simple, repetitive and comfortably numbing. She felt no twinge of irony or resentment at being, after all these years, an employee of the Grand Trunk Western. She was employed. She worked. She walked two blocks to a boarding house made up with ferns, doilies, lace curtains, carpets and comforters to resemble a home. She ate, tolerated the chit-chat of the resident ladies, slept without dreaming, walked to work again. The only change in routine occurred when she switched on alternate weeks from day shift to afternoons – when she worked from four till midnight. The tasks were much the same. She assisted the male janitors in scrubbing and dusting the waiting room of the huge, refurbished station – six passenger trains a day between Chicago and Toronto and dozens of local and highball freights. By herself, she kept the ladies’ toilets clean. On the afternoon shift, at seven o’clock, she walked down the platform and across the yard to the new bunkhouse complex where she worked alone for an hour or so, washing dishes and tidying up. Twice a week (she worked six days with Sundays off) she stayed longer, moving to the attached laundry room where she ‘did’ the dirty sheets and pillow-cases which had accumulated from the men’s bunks. In the damp steam-chill of that room, arms up to elbow in boiling water, hands like flails against the washboard, punching into resistant shape these cotton sheets, wet-heaving as drowned flesh – she felt, at last, bone-and-body take full possession of her being. Why did I fight it so long, was all she thought.
The long, empty Sundays were difficult; so were the mornings and early afternoons before the late shift. Usually she filled the hours with walking, often following the old spur-line (no longer used since amalgamation) southward to where it stopped in a field before the River. The late-December wind blew forlornly over it. In the distance, an ice-fisherman’s tent shivered.
“That Mrs. Marshall’s a quiet one, ain’t she?” Miss Spence whispered.
“Had her troubles, poor dear,” Mrs. Jarvis countered.
“Still waters run deep,” reflected Miss Campbell, who had a high school diploma and was soon to be married.
The Widow and her boarders tried very hard to include the new arrival in their conversation, whether she was present or not. When pressed, she told them about her work, though its fascination waned somewhat after the initial description. They asked about the fashions and manners of the V.I.P.’s from exotic Toronto or scandalous Chicago. She was not helpful.
Miss Spence was an angular schoolteacher (third-class ‘local’ certificate) of indeterminate age with a voice like a chalk-squeak always delivered at full vent, as if she were trying to start each sentence somewhere in the middle. Perhaps she felt this lent authority to her many strong opinions.
“He got what he deserved, no more, no l
ess. Where on earth would we be if we let rebels and murderers run around scot free? Grandpa Spence fought the Frenchies way back in ’thirty-seven, as you all know.”
They knew.
“An’ what’d they do then? Let ’em all come back as smiling an’ rosy as ever they was. Bad seed oughta be scalded at birth, my granny always said, and if they’d done that for Mister Loo-ee Ree-al we’d all be a darn sight better off.”
Miss Campbell nodded vigorously, her husband-to-be having just returned from the North-West mercifully intact. Mrs. Jarvis was only half-listening; her eyes were riveted on the one who had not spoken.
The bunkhouse was relatively new and comfortable, having been built only two years previously, following the merger of the Grand Trunk and the Great Western. Being a woman, Lily was not allowed into the bunk rooms, which formed a separate section of the complex. Being a woman, she was expected to be at ease in the kitchen and laundry room, set on the side of the building opposite the bunks. Between these exclusively male and female demesnes lay the sprawling comfort of the ‘parlour’, replete with tables and chairs (for eating, poker-play, solitaire) and several chesterfield suites of chewed leather (for snoozing, contending, yarn-spinning). Its hallmark was tobacco smoke and the afterbite of spittoons. As a woman, she was allowed in to clear the tables of dishes, to empty ashtrays, flush out cuspidors, and when no one was present, scrub out a week’s soil and smudge.
The bunkhouse was frequented by engineers, brakemen and conductors whose homes, when they had any, were not in Sarnia. Since most of the passenger and freight trains plied between Sarnia and Toronto (a few still followed the old Grand Trunk route to Stratford and Berlin), these men were likely to be from the capital city, using the new facility to ‘lay over’ until they were due to make a return run, usually the next day. Railroaders from Sarnia likewise ‘lay over’ in Toronto. Many of them, bachelors or de facto bachelors, lived in boarding houses near the station here (or in Port Edward), where they waited to be called. She had on occasion been asked to sweep out the Yard Office, where she had seen the huge call-boards listing the names of the running crews and yard gangs. When a train was ‘made up’ and ready to go, elfin messengers would scatter from here across the south end of the city to ‘call’ the men to their labour. Sometimes, of course, they had only to dash to the bunkhouse or, as one of the regulars dubbed it, ‘Palaver Palace’. Some of the grizzled veterans among the engineers and conductors had routine schedules. Most of the running crew, however, seemed to lead semi-nomadic lives with sudden wake-ups, cold breakfasts, chilling dashes to overheated cabooses or blazing furnace rooms where even the iron stanchions froze as the arctic night whistled by.
“I just ignore ’em, I barge right in there; after all’s said, I got my work to do,” Big Meg had explained to her at the beginning. “Most of them’s gentlemen, really, long as you ignore their cussin’, which they can’t help, and don’t want to help when it comes right down to it.” She chortled, and her forearms shook. “If you don’t barge right in there, you’ll never get the chores done. Besides,” she winked lasciviously,” they tell a juicy story or two.”
But she did not take Big Meg’s advice. She quickly figured out – for both shifts – when the peak periods of use occurred and when the parlour would be empty or be occupied by a solitary derelict snoozing away a hangover or sulking with a cigar in a far corner. During the latter times she whisked in and out – tiny, unnoted, anonymous. In the kitchen, with its own stove and gingham curtains and lamplight on the copper pans, with snow sizzling against the glass – she felt able to breathe again, surprised as she had so often been before at the unencouraged robustness of her small body, the gleeful pleasure it took in routine acts. However, because the parlour was separated from the kitchen only by a heavy velvet curtain (the original door having been kicked in by a drunken fireman under the misapprehension that his young wife lay thrashing behind it with her secret lover) she could hardly help but hear, from time to time, the muffled grit of railroader talk, with its blend of scuttlebutt and tall-tale. She could rattle the dishes in their warm suds or hum too loud for comfort, but not forever. Whenever there were three or more men in there, they were constantly gabbing – between hands at poker, slumped on smoky leather, or floating on a whiskey-edge.
One voice in particular insisted on separating itself from the others, not merely because it was loud (they were all loud) or colloquial (earthiness of speech was endemic): there was something in it that was at once hearty, spare, generous, withholding. When this one spun a yarn, the room would be restless at first as some of the uninitiates or the odd interloper would spar with the teller, according to custom and at certain sanctioned intervals; then gradually these exchanges gave way to rapt attention, as the voice took control and the story itself grew larger and grander (though many had told it before) and the laughter at the end not quite as predictable. She heard him laugh too – at the story, at the teller, at the trapped parishioners. His guffaw would have embarrassed a bull moose.
“You remember the Guffer? Stuffy McGuffin we called him when he first come brakin’ on the late-great Western. ’Course the son-of-a-bitch was near fifty even then. Married the leanest of the superintendent’s three daughters. Hell of a way to break into railroadin.” A pause for laughter, then: “She turned out to be a bit too tart for him to ever call her sweetheart, but he always claimed if he caught her downwind on a Saturday night, she give him more bumps an’ thrills than a gravel train to Cayuga. Mind you now, these trips didn’t happen too often, least not as often as Guffer would’ve liked, so the poor bugger got to draggin’ his caboose into every ‘waterin’ trough’ between Trenton and Ing-arse-hole. Now drinkin’ was harmless as long as he was brakin’, and even when he fell into stokin’, it wasn’t too bad – though you all remember the story, denied by everybody but the Guffer himself, about him pissin’ his pants in the cab of 1546 on the old Barrie run in the middle of February an’ the air cold enough to crack walnuts an’ other precious jewels, and’ old Fartsy Farmer cursin’ beside him an’ tryin’ to see through the snow comin’ as thick as the Governor-General’s undies, ‘Jesus McJesus, you stupid son-of-a-bitch, do somethin’ about that stink or I’ll pitch you onto the first siding I can see.’ ’Course, it’s the ice formin’ round his balls that’s interestin’ Guffer the most, so, driven by the thought of no more gravel runs to Cayuga, he yanks open the firebox door, drops his pants, turns round, and sits down.”
“Horseshit!”
Gales of horse laughter.
“I’m only repeatin’ what I know to be the gospel truth. The Guffer soft-boiled his eggs so beautifully that night near Barrie, he went straight home and at the tender age of fifty-nine started to assemble his own way-freight. It’s true, the son-of-a-bitch had five kids before he retired.”
Skeptical, gelding laughter.
“I thought you was gonna tell us a new one, you prevaricatin’ bastard!” Hoots, steam-whistles, derisive applause.
“Where was I? Ah, yes. I got the Guffer up to –”
“Up to his arse in bullshit!”
“– Up to his last fateful year of the Festerin’ Western, when, in order to save a dyin’ enterprise, they promoted the old fart to engineer. Christ, he was like a kid with a hay-rake. An’ they give him one of the new 2160’s, runnin’ highballs between here and Toronto. Well, one day in the middle of July he gets all tanked up on his stopover in London, he’s so pissed his eyes are settin’ fire to the table-cloth, an’ he churns up old ’62 an’ starts to let her loose around Mandaumin, an’ by this time he’s got her up to eighty miles an hour an’ climbin’, an’ his fireman’s hanging onto the tender for dear life and a high wailin’ sound can be heard from the caboose a hundred yards behind, but the Guffer he’s laughin’ an’ singin’ away like one of them Eye-talian bassoes with a pinched prick, an’ suddenly they’re only five minutes outside Sarnia Yard, an’ wouldn’t you know, on the main-line track of this here station was sittin’ the doodle-
bug from Stratford waitin’ to take on passengers. The platform was jammed with people. At first they was all intent on gettin’ their tickets an’ baggage in order, an’ then they heard this god-forsaken screech-a-comin’ at them from the east an’ their hearts froze – it was the Guffer’s song ridin’ along in front of old ’62, now doin’ ninety-five miles-an-hour an’ scatterin’ car-men, oilers, yard crew an’ jiggers in all directions. Mercifully the Guffer brought her untouched an’ unscathed – there wasn’t a mark on him – clean through to the station. Some say he was pullin’ on the throttle ’cause he thought it was the brake, but we’ll never know. What we do know is that the engineer, fireman an’ conductor on the doodle-bug jumped left an’ right an’ that the Guffer stopped singin’ about two seconds before the collision.”
Another pause: to take breath, relight a pipe?
“As luck would have it –”
Raucous response, conspiring and brotherly, checked only by the anticipation of something further.
“As luck would have it, the doodle-bug was not bashed to one side or the other – which would have resulted in the grisly deaths of numerous bystanders or the sudden slaughter of a corral-full of steers – she was knocked straight an’ clean ahead, she popped up into the air an’ did a series of back-flips down the main-line as tidy as a tumbler across a mat. About a hundred yards from the end-of-line near the old dock by the River, it hopped sideways an’ settled into an alfalfa field. Which was a good thing, too, ’cause Guffer an’ number 62 was followin’ it real close, rippin’ up track all the way but stickin’ to its line like a trouper. Then, boom she hits the block an’ flicks it aside like a flea on your collar, an’ in she went.”
Lily's Story Page 64