“Top of the mornin’ to you, Mrs...Burgher. A menu?”
“The usual, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I do hope you haven’t gone an’ lost your wedding ring,” – staring hard at her left hand exposed upon a soiled napkin.
“Not at all. As a matter of fact, my husband keeps it...”
Pause: the silence delicate.
“...in his nose.”
To which Lucien would applaud with a bray of guffaws loud enough to make the clerk’s bell jump with alarm in the lobby below them.
But of course there was mainly the long Sunday to fill and a few scattered hours over meals and after naps during the week. There would not have been enough stories to plug the silences that a day-to-day, hour-to-hour relationship would have demanded. Nor could they have sustained the bruising-healing quality of their love-making outside of regulated absence and joyous reacquaintance. When they were separated, and alone, though, the hours were hard won. Cora walked, made polite conversation with young Suds and several of the benchwarmers in the lobby, and waited for the black moments to engulf her. When they did, she tried to muffle her sobbing with the comforter – Lucien’s smell lingering there – but sometimes she forgot or did not care, and woke up in a daze in the sitting room with a broken glass at her side and the window wide open to let the wind howl through – whetted by ice, neutered, pneumoniac.
She supposed that he too suffered such relapses, though she saw only the wreckage in his fatigued flesh as he slumped into sleep after a difficult shift. He works it out, though, she thought, he rides that locomotive through the dark, I can hear its singing whistle in the words of his stories. But I am alone, without work, without recourse. I am mad, with little islands of sanity bubbling up and mocking me several times a week. Then Lucien would come back – needing her to need him. I am sane, she concluded. When I go mad, I won’t know it. That’s a comfort.
“You need a story,” Lucien said, “even though it ain’t Sunday yet. A Pokey Burdette story by the look of ya’.”
She stirred his coffee.
“Well, Pokey comes into the Yard Office one time an’ he’s all hunched over an’ humble-lookin’, an’ he’s got his cap by the brim an’ turned over like an organ-grinder without a monkey, an’ this time he waits till everyone’s lookin’ his way an’ he says, ‘I’m passin’ the hat, boys, and I expect you to be generouser than a church warden ’cause we got a charity case right here in our own little family, an’ who might that be, you ask?’ Then he says, ‘Would you be shocked if I told you it was none other than vice-president Margison Dilworth. Yes, it’s true, I swear on my grand-daddy’s underwear, so dig deep fellas’, and all the time he’s anglin’ around with his cap outstretched lookin’ for donations an’ brushin’ a tear from his eye. ‘Poor bugger’s broke,’ he says, ‘down on his luck so far his kids need shoes, eh, his girls’re ashamed to go to school, they are, ’cause of the holes in their last pair of patents, an’ the eldest lad’s got his feet wrapped up in little red bandanas with G.T.R. stamped on the toe.’ By now everybody’s laughin’ an’ whoopin’ an’ trying’ to ad-lib but he keeps it up and at last he jumps up on the counter an’ hollers, ‘Bleedin’ Christ but I ain’t collected a red cent, not a copper for a man who’d give you guys the skin off his – nose, if he hadn’t of worn it out kissin’ arse’. He’s got them right where he wants them now, eh, keepin’ a perfectly straight face till the guffaws die down, then he says, real quiet, ‘Now what am I gonna tell Mrs. Marge when I go over there this mornin’ an’ she begs me to give her some comfort afore hubby comes back from the office?’”
Cora laughed in all the right places, reassured once more by the unaffected ease of her response and the certain knowledge that Pokey Burdette had never had any existence beyond the confines of this room.
2
Early in February Lucien arrived from Toronto bearing under his arm a cardboard carton tied up with string. “For you,” he announced, grinning and wary. She sensed something forced in his voice.
“Nice wrapping,” she said.
“Did it myself.”
“A shame.”
“Go on, silly woman, open it.”
She did. Inside were a dozen or so very large books, several of them uncut, their calf bindings unsmudged.
She stared.
“From my mother’s old place. She liked to read.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Dickens, Trollope, some fella named Hardy. A Yankee called Fenimore Cooper; Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She liked them all.”
“They must’ve cost an awful lot.”
“They’re for you – to read on the days when I’m on the road.”
She was holding the largest book in her hands, as if guessing its weight.
“You do like to read?”
“Yes. I do. Really.” She seemed strangely touched, and he knew enough to say nothing more, though words of all sorts ached for release. She saw the desperate reconnaissance of his eyes, but could not help.
The books remained on the little mahogany table where they had been opened, and the weekday routine continued as before. The next morning Lucien left for the Yard earlier than usual. She felt the extra tension in his shoulders as he held her.
“When you hold my arm like that,” she said once, “I get the feeling you’re squeezin’ a throttle.”
“My hands never leave it,” he said, trying to grin.
“You can’t set still for long.”
“Had St. Vitus dance when I was a kid.”
“I’m serious.”
“It’s not so much that I like bein’ on the road,” he said at last. “After all, I don’t get anywhere. It’s just that I can’t stand bein’ cooped up. Makes me feel like a badger in a hutch.”
So he was off again, to ride down whatever demons had chosen him long ago. As usual, though she still felt badly sometimes, she was relieved. The rooms were hers. They were sanctuary. And now there were the books. She went right to them.
At first she treated them like sacred texts, circling them, easing them open, glancing quarterwise at the black type as if it were a set of shimmering runes about to divulge something clandestine. Gradually her anxieties diminished, and though she was not ready to tackle an entire book, she would flip open one of them to a random page, and sit for a long time reading and re-reading a single paragraph. An hour might go by before she looked up long enough to realize that the sun had moved above the sash.
“I see you been readin’ a bit,” Lucien remarked as soon as he got in. She caught the strained casualness of his tone right away.
“A little bit. They’re beautiful books. Your mother must’ve been a beautiful person.”
The book froze in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. I didn’t mean –”
“These were her favourites,” he whispered.
“I’ll read them, Luce,” she said. “All of them.”
First, she had to read one of them. It had been a little while since she had read anything, and while the trick of it came back quickly to her, the associations it brought with it were not pleasant. After an hour or so of trying to decipher the opening of Bleak House (she was drawn to the title), she found herself dizzy and faint. She went to lie down on the bed. She did not remember reaching it, though she was evidently asleep for the black dream was now upon her, its pestilential winds sweeping her along, as always, while she lay begging that other half of her self – the one that would not speak – to succumb, to give it all up, to let the greater will have its way. When she opened her eyes she realized with dread that she was lying on the carpet in the hallway outside Mr. Stewart’s room. The hall table was tipped beside her, its little genie-lamp shattered.
“Are you all right, Missus – un – ma’am?”
Waves of nausea rolled up into her throat. She blinked at the young clerk. His hand was very gently upon her arm, about to lift. Suddenly he jerked back as if stung. He crab-walked away from her d
own the hall, stumbling, reaching wildly behind him for the railing. Stamped on the tabula rasa of his boy’s face, she saw the insignia of her misery.
“I’ll g-get some help,” he called hoarsely and disappeared.
Where? she thought, and was sick on the wool roses.
Tell me, Mr. O’Boyle,” she said to him in the lobby the next week, “what does the word ‘chancery’ mean?”
“Don’t know, ma’am,” he said warily. “Somethin’ to do with courts and b-bigwigs, I think.”
“Did you go to school?”
He looked for help. “Yes, m-ma’am. We all did, I got my l-leavin’ certificate. Did real good, my m-mum says. She don’t approve of m-me slingin’ beer.”
“Do you have one of them books that explains all the words?”
“A dictionary, you mean? No, I don’t. But Mr. M-Mulligan’s got one in the office b-back there. Belonged to his wife, b-before she run off.” Then as if he felt the latter remark demanded exposition, he said, “That was all she l-left him.”
It was heavy sledding, decoding Bleak House with the aid of Noah Webster’s Dictionary and her own mother wit. It wasn’t merely that the words were long and the sentences interminable, but so much of the world being described therein was itself so foreign. The strange speech; the courts and alleys and traffic of an imperial metropolis; the exotic manners and customs – all had to be learned part by part in a vain effort to get some sense of the whole society, some feel for the meaning she was certain lay locked between the words and their referents. Sometimes, as she used to do, she read quickly, letting her instincts and intuitions catch at the flutter of truth sweeping past her. Gradually, assuredly, she felt the grip of the story, the particulars fading the moment their impression was made. She felt the loneliness and the spirit of the motherless heroine, her heart went out to the poor and the abused, but most of all she was drawn to Jo – she read the chapters about the abandoned street-urchin many times over, struck by the pathos of a soul so orphaned by the world he had less than half a name to call his own.
“You’re gonna wear that one out,” Lucien said.
“I will get to the others,” she replied, and seeing that look in his face, she brightened and said, “but let’s get the cutter and go into the country. I feel like a little travellin’ today.”
The air was clear and cold. The sun shone on them. Across the fields the wind blew soft snow upon the week’s bruising. The runners sang in the horses’ wake.
“You ain’t travelled much, have you,” Lucien said, turning for home.
A bit later, Cora opened her eyes, her lashes laced with frost. “This is far enough for me.”
“Someday soon, I’ll take you for a real ride,” he said. “We’ll get on the C.P.R. an’ cruise all the way over the prairies and up the backside of the Rocky Mountains an’ slide down to the ocean out there past Vancouver an’ hop the first whale we see an’ sail the blue sea to China.”
This was a voice she hadn’t heard before. Still looking ahead she reached across and touched his hand, tight on the reins. “An’ have a decent cup of tea,” she said.
When they pulled up in front of McPeck’s livery, Lucien gave her a furry bear-hug in full view of the astonished grooms.
“You were right,” he whispered. “She was beautiful.”
And she did get to the other books. For five weeks on alternate days, she read and absorbed and puzzled and thought more than she ever had in her whole life. She began to get some sense of that ‘old country’ she had known till now only through what she had heard and been told: that old old land where her own parents and the parents of almost everyone she knew had begun their lives, and who gave, through their stories and speech, a temporary credence to exotic landscapes – gardens, hedgerows, wobbly lanes, ancient abbeys among the meadow-growth – and peculiar notions of town and village and dialect as indigenous as the local loam or limestone. In some ways, thinking as she must about the mighty River and the Freshwater Sea of the Hurons and the vast prairie the scarlet soldiers had crossed, the old world was as exotic as ancient China or some far Hindustan. Somehow, she thought, alone in her brown study, I am one of them, yet not a part of them. Then, like most of her thoughts, it wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to grasp it fully, and she would be left frustrated and aching with a great emptiness.
When she began browsing through the other books, she noticed a peculiar thing: the fly-leaf page had been cut out of each, probably with a razor, so neat was the incision. She became aware of this only because in the copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin the page had been crudely removed, as if in anger, leaving jagged edges despite a subsequent attempt to disguise the initial violence. Which was the moment she realized that every book was supposed to have such a page, and began examining the others. She said nothing to Lucien. He seemed more and more tense, and absorbed, though at times he could be garrulously happy in the usual manner. She would catch him staring at her at odd angles, the mask of his face dissolved, leaving only his eyes to carry the burden of whatever he could not feel or say. So she found herself beginning to fill some of the more frequent silences by recounting for him the stories, as she heard them, from the great tomes he had brought her.
“We’ll make a story-teller out of you yet,” he said.
She put on a brave front. When he was away, she thought: this cannot last. We’ve tried, but it can’t be done. Whatever has happened to him, he’s needed me in the same way I’ve needed him – to get through enough days with some feeling, some pretence of caring, some ritual repeated enough to seem necessary: just until we can decide whether there’s anything left worth salvaging. But I don’t want this to stop. Neither does he, I think. Why, then, should we not keep it going? Who is to tell us it can’t be done? Just because it isn’t or isn’t supposed to. It was we ourselves who decided to make the night we met the first day of our lives. So be it. But it can’t last. Love, whatever it’s been, has never been enough.
Absently, she leafed through The Last of the Mohicans, a novel she had started but left, for some reason, till now. A page fell out. It was blank. A fly-leaf ripped. From Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She turned it over. She saw the handwriting there, but it was several minutes before she could disentangle it enough to be sure of the sense: ‘To my beloved Mary, to while away the lonesome nights, from your devoted wanderer, Luce; Christmas 1875’.
When he arrived home that afternoon – early in March of 1886 – Lucien was all smiles. She’d heard him humming to the banisters. “Get your bonnet on, Susie-Q,” he said. “We got business at the Court House.”
They did. They were married by a drowsy judge in cold chambers with a scrubwoman and a janitor gaping on. They hurried home to a warm bed and made love as if it were New Years.
“You went an’ made an honest woman outta me,” she said, watching him smoke.
“Too late for that.”
“Too late long ago. An’ more than once.”
“That wasn’t the main reason, though,” he said.
“Oh?”
He grinned. “Somebody had to do somethin’ about young Sudsy’s stutter.”
44
1
All across the reunited Confederation it had been a heartless, unrelenting winter. Snow clogged the Laurentian trench, inundated the fields and fallow of the south-west, blew without purpose across the vacant prairielands, and settled like a mocking bride’s-veil over the little graves at Batoche and Duck Lake. In March, a week after the wedding of Cora and Lucien Burgher, came the great thaw. The world around them sagged, glistened, and hummed with the promise of heat. Then unexpectedly and just when the severest skeptic was about to admit the possibility of spring, the unforgettable blizzard of 1886 struck home: in the middle of the night, howling from the north-west.
For three citizens of the Province, though, such a dramatic shift in the weather seemed like an act of divine intervention, a pope’s blessing on the deed about to be accomplished. Their meeting, if somewhat unorthodox, was
nonetheless predestined: sometime just before or just after the trio’s singing of Auld Lang Syne at the Grand Trunk Ball, the initial commitment had been made. The Honourable Halpenny Pebbles, Mr. Margison Dilworth, Q.C., and Stanley R. Dowling, reeve of the village, whispered the same word together and decided that after due time for consultation and soul-searching, they should meet again – in utmost secrecy – to put their particular seals upon these first covenants. The word they whispered was ‘tunnel’.
It was a word heard before in these parts. Both the Great Western and the Grand Trunk has boasted of blasting a channel below the St. Clair River to link the destinies, common ideals and profit margins of the two great nations so unhappily divided by the inconvenience of a natural border. It was all bluff. No one in Sarnia or the Point took it seriously; before the merger of 1882, that is. With a combined strength and an unabated capacity to plunder the public purse at will, the Grand Trunk Western’s boasting about a tunnel was henceforth received with joy in the village and muted applause in the town. Naturally any such tunnel would be built across the narrowest strip between the Republic and the Dominion: where the GTR reached the very edge of Canada: Point Edward. Which meant that some of the advantages gained by Sarnia at the original merger – main passenger terminus on the principal line between Sarnia-London-Brantford-Toronto, expanded switching yards and car-shops – might well be stunted or, heaven forfend, wiped out by the inevitable surge of power westward towards the heartland of America – via a Point Edward tunnel. Strangely, though, little talk of any kind regarding such an engineering miracle had been heard for more than a year. To those in the know, of course – board-room bullies, intimates of the disbanded Compact, the Scottish moneylenders – such silence signalled clearly that the most feverish plans were afoot. However, only the most trusted insiders – the directors of the Railway, the premier’s own privy council – and one outsider, knew that the issue was no longer financial or even technological. If the fittest were to survive, then the survivors of this Dominion would be the fittest: the dynamite and the air compressors were ready. What was holding up the orderly advancement of the nation was something more pivotal than money or technique: politics. Though merely a village, the Point had become a symbol to many another small Ontario community that had invested in railway promises only to be left holding worthless debentures and their assigned mortgages. Indeed the government-of-the-day was vulnerable in the villages and hamlets. If Point Edward were seen to have been ‘done dirty’ by the Railway or what-is-worse by a government in collusion with a railway, then the upcoming election itself might be lost, with the resultant chaos and inestimable human calamity. Word had just come from Montreal by coded message: Hobson, the world-renowned Canadian engineer, had completed his feasibility study. His news was unequivocal and without prejudice: the geology of the terrain at Point Edward absolutely precluded a tunnel ever being built there; the ideal spot lay five miles to the south, near Sarnia.
Lily's Story Page 67