Читать книгу Lily Fairchild - Don Gutteridge - Страница 10

Much had happened to the world since 1855. The boom of the mid-fifties gave way to the bust of ’57 and ‘58. In the wake of the depression, few if any in Lambton County would have anticipated or paid attention to the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Speciesand if they had, they would have been outraged by its apostasy while simultaneously appropriating it to explain – despite temporary recessions – the inevitability of progress, North American style. The word “progress” itself was in the air, on the tongues of Tory and Reformer alike, and its principal articulation was in the chug of the locomotive.

The Great Western Railway had hammered its cross-ties through the startled forests of Kent all the way to Chatham and Windsor, eclipsing villages and fathering towns, its patrimony as ineluctable as a mutant gene in biological ascendancy. Its managing director, Charles John Brydges, had already dreamt a horizontal line through the maze between London and Port Sarnia. Unbeknownst to the good burghers of either town, the Grand Trunk had hatched a scheme to drive a second line, slightly north, from Stratford to the military reserve at the junction of Lake Huron and the St. Clair River, denoted on the official maps as Point Edward though known locally as “the ordnance lands” or “the rapids” or just plain “Slocum’s fishery”. At the stroke of a pen, the hamlets of Forest and Thedford were declared to have a future. The future also looked brighter for John A. Macdonald who, having purchased a leasehold on said lands, stood to make a handsome profit.

Important as these latter developments were, the most pressing concern for the Lambtonians of 1858 was the poor weather and the resultant general crop failure. It rained all spring, followed by weeks of summer drought. Every imaginable variety of blight and pestilence – taking their cue from Darwin – took full advantage of the situation and ravaged those inferior species to near extinction. Whilst some of the cereal crops fared reasonably well, Bridie’s garden plot suffered most cruelly. They watched it mildew in the wet and wither in the heat, while slugs and mites and chiggers and rusts flourished. In August, a paralytic bacterium swept through one of the coops; the birds’ corpses had to be burned like stubble.

For a time Chester forgot about his weak ticker and bad back, and pitched in to salvage part of the potato crop and most of the hardy turnip. Lily flailed at bugs, pinched worms and popped caterpillars till exhaustion overtook her each night that summer. They could not deny the inevitable; their business was in ruins.

“We’ll start over next spring,” Bridie said after each disaster. “That’s why we got cash in the bank.” In desperation she would mention the recent survey of the pine-bush and swamps of the ordnance grounds. Uncle Chester would sigh knowingly.

But there was more to it than the accidents of weather. Unable to keep up deliveries except for a few eggs to the old customers, Bridie was compelled to sell what produce her garden did yield to jobbers, who collected it at the farm gate with their great wagons and took it off to the expanding markets in town and to the wharfs where lake-steamers whisked it daily to the hostels of Detroit and Cleveland. Within months the stock-cars and hoppers of the Great Western would be shunting produce between towns within hours, not days. The era of large-scale cash cropping had been launched.

“We’ll lick them,” Bridie said. “We’ll get by. We always have, haven’t we, Chester?” Uncle had succumbed to sleep.

One stroke of good fortune was that Bill, with his own farm in disarray, had abandoned it and become more or less their hired man. Without him they could not have managed to salvage anything of that season. On the twenty-first of June he brought over a bottle of mulberry wine and they all toasted Lily’s eighteenth birthday. There was no society coming out for Lily, however, unless she counted waltzing with her uncle in the kitchen.

A few days later, Lily found Bridie at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. She was ashen; the perpetual glint in her eyes was glazed with disappointment and something worse, despair. With her intrinsic strength and constitutional optimism, Bridie had faced any number of temporary calamities in the past. She would suffer any physical discomfort, any mental anguish, and take any risks demanded by Fate so long as there was hope that she could escape the one thing in life she feared the most: the drudgery of a labour which has no end, no gain, beyond mere survival. Even the meaning of seasons would be lost. In the pleading of those eyes Lily saw the fear of a life lived without a future and a glimpse of a woman’s lot in such times.

Bridie looked up. “The worst of it, Lily, the very worst of it is somethin’ I’ve dreaded like the plague itself. You’ll have to go out to service.”

Lily could think of nothing to say.

“We’ll need the money. I got plans to rearrange this place, I have. Next spring. When things are better. But we’ll have to have money.”

By now Lily had found a voice to reply. “Who wants me?” she said.

“I dread to tell you,” Auntie said. “Lord knows what’ll become of you in that town.”

Lily tried as best she could to look concerned.

“But she’ll pay well, no doubt, Mrs. Templeton will.”

“Weepin’ just blinds you to what is right in front of you,” Old Samuels used to say. Lily never saw him cry, despite the anguish he must have felt when telling his stories of the diaspora of the Attawandarons and the disappearance of their ancient tongue. Sitting in her new room at the Templetons, couched for the first time in her life with luxury, she examined her tiny chest of accumulated treasures – the rabbit’s foot, pendant, crucifix, Testament, and jasper talisman – and simply wept for all the lost benefactors these objects recalled.

Later when she was able to stop and present a decent, grateful face to Mr and Mrs Templeton, she realized how utterly fatigued she had been on her arrival here at the end of September. From pre-dawn till deep dusk, Bernie, Chester and Lily had toiled in the devastated fields to salvage what they could of the harvest, to garner seed and cuttings for a doubtful spring, to pickle and can and store what they could to tide them over the winter and, most important for Bridie, to conserve their depleted reserve of cash. By ten o’clock each night, barely able to swallow some cold mutton and sourdough, they collapsed into a dreamless sleep. In such circumstances conversation seemed not only redundant but threatening. Relying as she did on day-dreams and the spontaneous hum of music inside her, Lily soon found herself laboring without the solace of fancy or song.

It was almost a week before she was able to leave this pink and papered boudoir – young Pamela’s room before she left for school – and join her new household. Mrs. Templeton came in several times a day to talk to her, to listen with patience and near-understanding, and divert her with family news or a display of Pamela’s “old” frocks for which she assumed Lily would be a “perfect match”. Gradually the numbness of mental and physical exhaustion wore off, and Lily felt the re-emergence of her familiar self. She fell asleep in the feather tick with the talisman in her clutch, and that night she dreamed of a fine-boned young man with loose, sandy hair and a radium stare that held her in its power till he dissolved in an ambiguous mist.

“You’re certainly not going to be a servant in my house!” Mrs. Templeton exclaimed when Lily appeared on a Saturday morning attired in her own housedress and a maid’s apron she had found in the upstairs hall closet. “Gracious, what would Bridie think of me, then?”

She marched Lily back up the carpeted stairs to Pamela’s bedroom and with commendable briskness re-attired her for her new role. Pulling Lily in front of a long mirror on the inside of the door of the black-walnut wardrobe, she said with satisfaction, “There, now. What do you think?”

Lily was sure what Bridie would think. Since no mirror ever graced her aunt’s house –“greatest time-waster and corrupter of good intentions ever devised”– Lily had little experience in physical self-assessment. On occasion she had peered at her rippled face in the goose-pond and watched fascinated as that other visage – fay, unmoored, incomplete – yearned back at her from the depths. But she had appreciation of her whole body or the sudden shape it had taken.

“The dress is beautiful,” Lily said. “But how can I work in these petticoats?”

“The dress is not beautiful, pet, youare. It’s high time you realized that. Walk around for me. See? You have no idea how graceful you really are. Bridie tried to take it out of you, no doubt, putting calluses on your hands and letting the sun burn and freckle that glorious Irish skin of yours.”

Lily was abashed. She felt she ought to defend Bridie but couldn’t find ready words to do so. Mrs. Templeton was not looking for commentary.

“I’ve got Iris to do the housework, pet,” she explained, “and Bonnie comes in to serve and scull at parties. But I do my own cooking and you’ll be a big help to me. Other times, like now, I want you to be my ‘companion’, to sit with me at teas, to talk to me when you feel like it, and to let me make a lady out of you.”

Lily looked dubious.

“I’ll send your wages to Bridie every month,” she said, picking up one of Pamela’s cloth-and-china dolls and caressing it fondly.

Lily relaxed a little; Aunt Bridie was counting on her for that. “Will you teach me to read?”

“Of course, pet,” said Mrs. Templeton, suddenly as serious as Lily. “Why do you think I arranged your rescue?”

They began with recipes, just the two of them working in the kitchen. Mrs. Templeton was amazingly patient. She sounded out the recipe words slowly and repeatedly with Lily at her shoulder. They would say them together, Lily’s alto voice melding with the older woman’s soprano.

After the second week Lily was reading the familiar recipes haltingly to Mrs. Templeton who matched her actions to Lily’s words. “Remember now, pet, read the words clearly, ’cause I’m doing exactly what you say. If the pie wins a prize, then we’ll know you can read!” she giggled.

Towards the end of October, Mrs. Templeton would sit with Lily before a blazing fire in the parlour and read from The Arabian Nights, a book that Bridie would have found scandalous not because of its racy tales but rather for its utter “silliness”. Lily began to ‘read’ parts of these stories aloud, easy sections carefully picked out by Mrs. Templeton and abetted by repetition and memory. One evening she was allowed to take the book to her room where she struggled once again through the early paragraphs of Aladdin and his magic lamp. There was some imperative in this story that drove her to try to decipher the exotic words, to grasp at the central thread of events whose import she sensed but could not pin down. Suddenly the aura of meaning faded and went out like the genie himself. In frustration she threw the book across the room and sat shaking for five minutes before she hurried over in panic to see if she had damaged it. Only her pride was bruised.

Even Mr Templeton – now His Worship the Mayor – got into the game. He would call Lily into his den, detonate a cigar, wave her to a plump chair, and begin to read aloud from one of his legal tomes. “Know what thatword means, Lily?” he’d say with mock-sternness, rolling off his tongue some arcane polysyllable. Lily would shake her head. “Neither does Judge Maitland!” he’d rumble. “And I doubt if the dolt who thought it up does either!” Then he’d go dead-serious again. “But that’s the law, Lily dear. Men have been hanged on it!” Lily soon realized that this was a game he had played with both his daughters before they left for school in London and marriage in Toronto. And some of the words she would remember.

Lily found herself doing little domestic work. The calluses on her hands shrank and faded. Bonnet and parasol soon whitened her skin, though the freckles remained as permanent record of a different past. Lily even attended church – the Anglican church – with the Templetons, though no word was ever said about baptism nor question raised about her not taking communion. The Church of England seemed to be quite accommodating after all. Lily watched, listened, and learned.

After Church she would be given the pony-and-surrey and allowed to drive out to visit her Bridie and Chester. Chester was always overjoyed to see her, though he would sometimes embarrass the women – for different reasons – by bursting into tears without apparent reason. Bridie’s assessment of Lily’s gradual transformation to citified lady was not discernible in her talk or her manner. She continued to refer to Lily’s “work” and as the girl prepared to leave each Sunday, she would grasp her hand and say, “Thank you, lass. You’re a good girl.”

Lily’s duties consisted mainly of being at Mrs. Templeton’s side during her frequent ‘At Homes’, given in deference to her role as the wife of the mayor. “Sweet but dreadfully quiet,” Lily overheard one of the dowagers remark to another. “Might be pretty, in time, though Lord knows where she comes from.” Her days as a tactful delivery girl and easy conversationalist served her well with the women when at tea. The surprise and challenge came from the gentlemen and grandees who frequented the bi-weekly political ‘socials’ (salons was a word not infrequently heard) held by the mayor. As hostesses, Lily and Mrs. Templeton engineered the distribution of food and drink and were expected to provide casual divertissement for those gentlemen who found the strain of political discussion too hard on a thinning intellect.

The political chatter in late 1858 concerned the coming of the Great Western and the machinations of its rival, the Grand Trunk. Much bitterness, not fully assuaged by the good brandy and home-made chocolates, was expressed over the shabby treatment of the town’s noblest citizen, Malcolm “Coon” Cameron, whose moderate reformers had been outflanked by the chicanery of the Clear Grits. Lily was exposed to the intemperate talk of radicals as well as the lamentations of old-compact Tories and the hollow bellicosities of the local Orangemen, Although His Worship would soon depart Port Sarnia and later join the coalition as a repentant reformer, his hospitality was so generous that the warring factions in town not only answered all invitations to attend, but often broke protocol by appearing unannounced. The result was a series of spirited and spirit-fuelled soirees which furthered Lily’s education in unexpected ways.

Regardless of party affiliation or ideological bent, Lily learned there were four elements common to a politician’s life: food, liquor, gossip and sex. Indeed, she soon became adept at identifying parliamentary loyalties not by the swagger and fire of the rhetoric but by the method through which the fourth element was realized. The very first evening she attended one of these salons – radiant in Pamela’s ‘best’, her eyes alight with intelligence – Lily was standing suitably aloof from a heated exchange about the abomination of separate school rights, intent on following the swing of the argument, when she felt a hand slink its way across the stretched silk at her lower back.

“Don’t let those Orangemen put ideas into your pretty head,” whispered the owner of the errant appendage into her ear. Lily turned to see Dr. Michaelmas, the ardent Reformer, smiling behind his trimmed moustaches.

“It’s not my head concerns me at the moment,” Lily said, slipping to one side and casting him an ambivalent smile.

Without a doubt, she concluded, you could tell a Reformer because they were all sly touch, accidental nudge, a fleshy press in tight corners. The Old Tories, on the other hand, because of their advanced infirmities or belief in divine right, were the boldest. Judge Maitland, for example, stalked her in the den on the pretext of discussing recipes and tried to pinch her bum through two layers of crinoline. “My God, you’re a little beauty,” he drooled, aiming a paw at her décolletage, his lust positively aquiline. Lily knew she could cry for help, but instead she curled up her fingers and delivered a muted rebuff to the old scarecrow’s lower abdomen – not hard enough to cripple his intent outright yet insistent enough to make him wheeze, double, and hobble towards the parlour. She watched him trying to straighten his stride as he headed for the brandy. “Got your limp again?” said McWhinney, the clothier. “Touch of the gout,” whistled his Honour.

The radicals, or Clear Grits as they styled themselves, so loved the buzz of their own perorations that they made their passes at her in verbal terms only- innuendo, double entendre, a sotto voce vulgarism when desire overwhelmed – though she had little doubt that, were their sundry propositions to be accepted, they might have flashed the genuine metal. However, they soon discovered that this waif from the sticks was unconscionably swift at rejoinder and not as accustomed to acquiescence as a real lady might be.

“That orphling brat of Templeton’s got a wicked tongue in her head,” one guest told a consoling judge later. “She needs to be taken in hand.” But of course they had already tried that.

Not once was she accosted by any of the Orangemen. They were either uninterested in anything but the eradication of popery or were put off by the gold cross she wore on these occasions.

Lily’s rebuffs and inventive parries did not escape the notice of Alice Templeton. “You’re learning fast and well,” she said with undisguised admiration.

“Are they all like that?”

“Most of them, I’m afraid. It’s the climate.”

Lily laughed but then said soberly, “Why do we put up with it?”

Mrs. Templeton sighed deeply. “There’s an awful lot we have to put with,” she said.

Not me, Lily thought.