Читать книгу Lily Fairchild - Don Gutteridge - Страница 12

The year 1860 was born in hope. For the county’s farmers, victims of the ‘black frost’ of 1859, there was not much else left. Those who tilled the soil were left with shrivelled roots and wizened leafage to mock them through the hot summer of ’59 with little chance that they could afford even to buy seed for next year’s planting and some chance in the back townships that they might starve or chew their way through a winter of turnip, chicory and hazelnut.

Typhus, cholera and diphtheria trimmed the infant population with regular and reliable horror, and struck down among the adults those who were weak or unwary. Moreover, the high cost of progress – of living up to the county’s adopted motto, Ongoing– appeared to be routinely accepted by the populace. Certainly the 440 shipping disasters listed for 1859, at a cost of $668,565.00 and 105 lives, offered no deterrent to the expansion of water commerce. Nor did they discourage excursionists and pleasure-seekers from boarding hundreds of cruiser-craft and heading out ‘into the blue’. In September 1860, the excursion boat Lady Elgin went down with a loss of 287 lives. The disasters on the new, often jerry-built, railroads, though not as calamitous, were as frequent and as cavalier. Notwithstanding, the Great Western moved more than 800,000 passengers per annum in Upper Canada in these years. And the Grand Trunk had designs of its own on the landscape. Elsewhere, bridges were being flung across the St. Lawrence at Quebec and at Lewiston, swing ferries wobbled over the St. Clair rapids, and canals were deepened and widened – each leap forward taking its routine toll in killed and maimed.

But the spring of 1860 seemed blessed by that same Providence whose hand was ever on the tiller and the throttle. Sun and rain collaborated so that the wheat grew and the fruit trees blossomed on cue. Even Bridie began once again to entertain the notion of a future. She had become resigned to the fact that all of their efforts had now to be put into maintaining a few cash crops to be sold, at outrageously low prices, at the farm gate. Nonetheless, she persevered through two long winters with her quilting despite the onset of arthritis, which she mocked as “a little twinge or two to remind me I’m gettin’ old an’ to keep me honest.” Only their cash reserves had allowed them to survive the ravages of the black frost, but as Bridie often said, “We’re holdin’ our own with our heads up, lass, don’t ever forget that.” Still, Lily sensed a hollowness to Bridie’s aphorisms and more than a little world-weariness.

With Chester a virtual invalid, there was no talk of Lily’s going back into service even though the income would have helped them a great deal. Someone had to nurse the man night and day, summer and winter. His heart attack had been real, and he was fortunate enough to have the doctor arrive from town too late to be of immediate harm, and thus managed to survive. For months he lay on Lily’s bed (she now slept on a cot in the kitchen) barely able to express his thanks as she fed him with a spoon, emptied his festering bedpan, or bathed his bleached flesh. By the spring of 1859 his voice was a guttural rasp, like a wraith calling from some shallow part of purgatory.

“I don’t pray much, Lily,” Bridie said. “But if I did, I’d ask my maker to take Chester back. Nobody oughta suffer like that.”

However, early in the summer of ’59, even as the black frost’s legacy lingered, Chester stirred himself, sat up, smiled, and became impossible. Bridie stared at him as if he had, for a second and more unforgivable time, betrayed her. But she did her duty. They bought a wicker chair with feather pillows and wheels so that he could sit by the stove or out on the flagstones in the sun or be ferried about on short excursions through the garden and woodlot. Alas, his appreciation was in short supply. He whined and wheedled, threw tantrums and dinner plates, cried like a baby and grumbled like an ogre, and generally wallowed in self-pity.

“I should’ve gone,” he’d say, “the world’d be a better place without old Chester in it.” Bridie would glare, then relent and say without conviction, “But you’ll be up an’ walkin’ soon. Is there anythin’ special Lily can fix you for supper?”

“Well, rhubarb tart’d be nice, but I expect it’s too late for that.” It invariably was, and he then had to be mollified with whatever second-best alternative could be offered.

If it hadn’t been for Bill, the farm itself would have collapsed. When his wheat crop was wiped out by the black frost, he came to Bridie and asked her to buy his fields, leaving him only his shanty and garden, and hoping for continuing employment as her hired hand. Sniffing the scent of an opportunity, Bridie went into town that very day, withdrew most of her savings from the Bank of Upper Canada, and doubled her land holdings when everyone else was retrenching or going under. More and more, Bridie seemed to be placing her hopes not on their crops or cash from the woodlot but on the sounds now ringing through the pinery that lay between their fields and the waters to the north and west. The long-rumoured arrival of the second and most ambitious of the great railway networks, was happening. And less than half-a-mile from their property.

“I told you, didn’t I, Chester, they’d build somethin’ big on that land. That’s why we moved out here in the first place, Lily. Mayn’t be soldiers over there, but there’s gonna be trains,” she said wistfully, “an’ people, too. We’re gonna have neighbours, lass, a real town of our own right next door. Didn’t I say so, Chester?”

July was sweltering, but Bridie, Bill and Lily had no choice but to sweat in the fields. Lily burned, freckled, peeled and then burned anew. Chester took his first convalescent steps, tottered, fell, sprained his wrist, setting him back once again.

About the middle of the month, Violet ran off. Work was halted so that a search could begin. Lily went first to the pond where she’d spotted Violet peering into its coppery mirror on several recent occasions. Only the gander and his harem were there, looking on in bemusement. Throughout the afternoon they combed the pinery, and Bridie even walked as far as the oak ridge and Little Lake to the north-east, pausing to contemplate the future as she crossed the freshly-laid imprint of the Grand Trunk.

But it was Lily who found Violet sitting in a daze in a field near the railway worker’s shanties, down by the construction site for the new wharf and station. It was dusk, and Violet must have become alarmed enough to start crying. When Lily arrived, Violet was sobbing incoherently; Lily could make out no word. She put her arm about the wretched girl and half-carried her home. Bridie intercepted them near the house and together they took Violet into the tallow-lit gloom of the log hut. Bill, sitting with his head buried in his hands, looked up with mixed rage and relief, but said nothing. He glared at Violet as Bridie and Lily calmed the girl’s sobbing, washed her streaked face, helped her into a clean nightdress. Finally they rose and with reluctance left the house. Outside they paused, waiting for the explosion within and ready to intervene if necessary.

From the hut came the unmistakable sound of Bill’s harmonica: thin strains of an old-country air, reedy and elegiac. The women went home.

For a year they had heard the distant din of railway construction, the saws, axes, hammers and navvies’ curses of a brutal work-in-progress. By the fall, Bridie walked over every day she could to watch the ties straighten the landscape, foot by foot, amazed that such delicate calligraphy had printed its message from here to London and beyond, to the edge of the ocean itself they were told. During the search for Violet, Lily had glimpsed the havoc wrought there and felt an irresistible urge to return in the daylight to see it for herself.

A few hundred yards north of their woodlot the destruction began. Lily had imagined a neat swath cut through the bush; there was no bush left. Every pine within a mile’s radius of the wharf-site, on the River just below the Lake, had been haphazardly hacked away. The areas near the right-of-way were efficiently trim, but the so-called town-site was a wasteland of split trunks, charred branches and smouldering stumps. The sprawling, unpainted wharfs and freight-sheds were almost completed, and to the south at the periphery of the remaining stand of trees, Lily spied the brick station-and-hotel towering three stories above the shoreline. Its several dozen glazed windows beamed ‘progress’ across a clearing that, it seemed, must inevitably yield houses and people to inhabit them. But why would they come here? Why would they want to? For now, only a handful of workers’ shanties, which had served the fisherman before them, gave any promise of settlement.

Though she was curious, Lily didn’t approach the station-hotel. Something told her she would see the inside of it soon enough. Instead she walked across the tracks to the point where the Lake and River joined, and stared out at the generous beauty of the blue waters flowing out of the north-sky itself and condescending to the south. She glanced anxiously towards the scrub bush and dunes along the lakeshore, noting with relief that progress had by-passed the sleeping graves of the lost. You are safe, Southener, she thought.

“She’s gone again,” said Bridie sternly when Lily entered the garden.

This time they did not find her. Not that evening, nor the next morning. At noon several men on horseback rode up the lane and stopped in front of the shanty. Bill was with them. Lily and Bridie hurried over, leaving Chester to fend for himself. They found Bill utterly distraught. “They say she’s crazy an’ they have to take her away, an’ they just picks her up an’ her eyes is beggin’ me, an’ they just cart her off to London. They’re gonna lock her up, Bridie, they’re gonna lock her up somewheres.”

Bridie took control, and got the whole story. But nothing could be done, they said. Three or four of the railway workmen had pulled Violet into a field where they raped her repeatedly, and then left her there bleeding and babbling in her alien speech. The incident had been witnessed by a minor official of the Grand Trunk who was inspecting one of the fancy new rooms on the third floor of the hotel. He couldn’t exactly see who the men were from such a distance, and didn’t report the incident till the next morning because he saw the girl get up on her own and wander towards Sarnia. Naturally he reckoned that it wasn’t really rape after all.

In the end, no one was ever charged with the crime. No reliable witnesses could be found. Violet, her terror and pain locked forever inside her, “went crazy”, and the constable and the magistrate decided she would be better off “getting proper treatment”. was inconsolable. Bridie ranted against all officialdom and grew grim. Lily felt bereft of something irreplaceable. She got a taste of what despair would be like.