Читать книгу Lily Fairchild - Don Gutteridge - Страница 9

Saturday was Lily’s favourite day. Summer and winter, spring and fall, Saturday was the day of deliverance. Even though the mid-summer sun had lifted barely half a brow over the forest rim in the distant east, Lily felt liberated; and she conveyed her excitement to Benjamin, the Walpole ‘paint’ who jogged happily over the rough road towards the village of Part Sarnia. This June Saturday was particularly magical.

Aunt Bridie had rejected Uncle Chester’s plea for a genuine birthday cake –“You’ll spoil the child silly, you old coot”– but she had baked a strawberry pie special for the occasion and even wrapped the newly-made linen blouse and plain calico skirt in tissue as if it were a real surprise. Chester applauded when Lily opened it; Bridie gave him one of her quartering glances but said nothing. Later, as they sat outside on wicker chairs in a garden perfumed with wild hedge roses, their widower neighbour Bill walked over, and through his shy grin – made more prominent by the absence of all but two mismatching front teeth – presented Lily with a blue hair ribbon that might have been made of silk.

“Ma bought it for my daughter, Violet, way back, but she don’t wear it,” he explained. Lily kissed him on the cheek, which either frightened or scandalized him into a hasty departure. When he had gone, Bridie mumbled about such “fool things” as hair ribbons, so Lily, though tempted by the encouragement in Chester’s eye, hid the gift away with her other precious mementoes. In the weeks after her arrival, she had thought she ought to reveal to Bridie the sacred objects in her treasure-pouch, but even then something told her to hold back, that a lady as angular and opinionated as Aunt Bridie would not likely be impressed by a native talisman or even one of God’s Testaments. So they remained secreted in her room to be taken out on those few occasions when she had felt unhappy here, or homesick for what she’d left behind.

Which was not often. And certainly never on Saturdays. She reined in Benjamin as they neared Exmouth Street, the edge of the cleared plain that was soon to be an official town, a county seat. It was a new split-log road and dangerously rough. She glanced back at her cargo of eggs and fresh raspberries – so neatly packed in the boxwood containers Chester had tacked together with guarded precision. They rested in a market wagon he had customized with double-leather springs and straw padding, and fitted with snug compartments for Bridie’s eggs and seasonal specialties.

Lily had no reason in this world to be sad. She loved her aunt and uncle and she was loved by them. Bridie, her flame-red hair so earnestly harnessed during the day, would come to Lily at bedtime, her hair loose and haphazard, her ice-blue eyes weakened by fatigue, and bending over, bless Lily’s cheek with a dry, well-meant kiss. “Thank your maker for makin’ you and givin’ you such a day,” she would invariably murmur before snuffing the candle. It was the only religious sentiment that ever passed her lips. Bridie did not, it seemed, believe in “all this churchin’.” Chester, if he held an opinion on the subject, did not offer it.

Over the previous three years, Bridie had taught Lily much about “how to get along in this world”, starting in the fields where, in the rich humus of the cleared pine-woods, they grew vegetables and fruits of every tint and texture. Bridie adamantly did not grow wheat, unlike the farmers in the townships east along the London Road or north along the Errol Road, who had to haul their crop to the grist mills where they “left half their profits,” or who had to accept that far-off wars would determine their prices.

“Turnips are slow-growin’ but they eat easy and winter over,” Bridie cautioned more than once during their back-bending weeding marathons. Bridie’s bonnet framed her sharp features like a sapper’s helmet and a long linen shawl was covered her arms to her wrists. Her skin was not allowed to tan, even in August’s humidity when perspiration poured down her back and chest. Lily, wanting to cry out sometimes at her rebellious muscles, swallowed her aches and grew strong.

Their produce and the eggs from a hundred Rhode Island reds, were taken to town each Saturday where they found a ready market. Although most villagers had gardens of their own, the three hotels and five boarding houses that served an army of bachelor workers at the new factories and on the right-of-way clearance out to Enniskillen, along with stopover sailors and excursion passengers, needed a ceaseless supply of provisions in season. Bridie had been the first to seize this opportunity, and though she suffered periodic competition from the local farmer’s market, her reliability, home-delivery service, and unfailingly superior produce had won her a steady and profitable business.

“Take care of the pennies an’ the pounds’ll take care of themselves,” Bridie had coached Lily on the day she first took her niece with her into town to “learn the business” and “see for yourself how the other-half lives.”

“Your Auntie’s the smartest woman in this township,” Chester said, helping her stake the beans that summer. “When we came lookin’ up here from London, she sees this pine-bush an’ she says here’s the best spot for what we want. I says, no, it’s a mile from town an’ nowhere near the cleared lots on the London Road. But she says the soil’ll be better here, and of course she was right, includin’ that sandy stretch towards the lakeside where the berries grow big as plums, an’ includin’ the pine itself, some of which we sold the first year and every year since.”

Chester had lost his rhythm and a section of the bean plants toppled to the ground.

“Mind you now, it was cuttin’ them pines that give me the crick in my back, so’s I ain’t been too good at weedin’ or any heavy work ever since, which along with my fluctuatin’ ticker don’t make me the hardiest farmer.

“Then your Auntie decides to go in for eggs, so we buys the hens an’ I build the two coops and we’re in business.” Lily looked at the east field next to Bill’s makeshift barn where their only field-crop – feed corn – was greening in the sun. “Yessir, it’s your Auntie’s got the head for business.”

The sun was fully up when Benjamin trotted past the London Road crossing and kept southerly on Front Street. To her right, Lily could see the cobalt of the River – the St, Clair River, she’d been told to call it – its beauty only slightly dimmed by familiarity. She had not yet seen the Lake, though every day steamers left the bay for distant points north, and its untouched beaches lay less than a mile through the pines behind her house. The muffled thunder of its breakers was audible below the wind on stormy nights in April or November. “Nothin’ to see up there but a lot of water,” Bridie admonished her, though Chester’s look said otherwise.

Past the London Road lay the town itself, boasting more than a thousand souls. Already a second thoroughfare back from the River, Christina Street, was filling up with clapboard and split-log houses, with shops and a second tannery. Benjamin, unaided, drew driver and cart straight down Front Street to the Western Hotel opposite the Ferry Dock, no more than half a mile from the site of the last gift-giving ceremony. She always started with the hotels since their staffs were up at dawn and happy to welcome her wide-awake greeting. Then she did the boarding-houses on the five east-west intersecting streets that stretched, houseless, into cleared land for more than a mile. By then it was usually after seven and she moved on to the fifteen or twenty private homes on the route, abodes of the well-to-do who, though they could afford gardens and gardeners, preferred to be known to pay for their produce.

Lily thought fleetingly of her first encounters, clinging to a straight-backed Bridie on the wagon seat, intimidated by these well-dressed women and their eccentric town accents. If introductions could not be avoided, she was Lily Ramsbottom, given Chester’s name. Mostly, she was allowed to stay silent, handing Bridie the proper boxes, rearranging those left in the cart, and feeding, watering and soothing Benjamin excessively. All the while she kept her ears and a curious eye open.

“Good morning, Bridie,” said Mrs. McWhinney, the clothier’s wife, in an off-hand way from her watch at the rose bush. “Just take them right through the shed there and leave them on the bench by the sink, that’s a good dear,” she added, as if addressing her Sunday school class at the Church of England.

Bridie set the eggs and a clutch of rhubarb on a table by the shed door. “No need to stir, Maggie,” she called out, “I’ll collect next time.”

Maggie caught sight of the figure of a child in the cart and inadvertently cut the throat of a prize rose.

“Morning, Miz Ramsbottom,” said the Reverend McHarg’s missus from the back door of the red-fronted brick manse, her voice carrying to the far pews.

“Three dozen today, Clara?”

“Who’s the little bundle you brung with you?” Pince-nez poking around Bridie, glinting towards the cart on the street.

“Got some late raspberries I think the reverend would appreciate. Like to see ’em?”

“I’ll come out and have a look, I will,” burbled Mrs. McHarg, brushing past a startled Bridie, who recovered in time to insert her body between the pince-nez and the cowering child on the cart-seat.

“Oh what a dear little orphling! Where didyou pick up such a precious thing?”

Bridie reached into the cart, drew out a quart of enticing berries, and said evenly: “These are free, for my best customer.”

Mrs. McHarg, a Presbyterian inured to temptation, hesitated just long enough before accepting the offering in both hands, then quickly regained the offensive. “A foundling?” she asked, raising the tip of her Calvinist nose.

Bridie touched the reins smartly and Benjamin lurched forward. Looking straight ahead she said, “My daughter,” and was already moving too resolutely for any exclamation to be heard. Lily thought she heard a berry-box crack open as it struck the ground.

“My gracious, you’re early! Barely got my bonnet on! But ain’t you a sight for sore eyes; an’ you brought the wee one along for company. How’s my Lily Blossom doin’ today? Cat got your tongue?” Mrs. Salter was constitutionally cheerful despite her husband being a Methodist lay preacher who could, according to Auntie “rant and roll with the best of them hell-an-damnationers.”

“Heard a box of your tomatoes went bad on you last week,” Bridie said from the side porch of the St. Clair Inn. “Here’s an extra two boxes of the best. Guaranteed.”

The good lady blushed. “Goodness me, but it’s that big-mouth girl of mine blabbin’ an’ exaggeratin’ all over town. I’ll take the switch to her, I reckon.” She also took the berries.

Vines of ivy and other exotica climbed about a third of the way up the walls of the stone cottage belonging to the Misses Baines-Powell, plump Caroline and fat Charlotte. The sign in front announced “Baines-Powell: Musical Instruction, By Arrangement.” Bridie tried to explain what that meant. Only one of the instructresses ever came to the back door, though not always the same one. The other hovered in the draped shadows of the sitting room beyond.

“Found a slug in my cabbage,” said Miss Charlotte, peering past Bridie at Lily, who was holding a rack of berry-boxes, as if there were some direct but unnamable connection between slugs and girl-helpers of questionable kin.

“Boil them like I told you?” Bridie asked.

“Of course. Made no difference. Ugly thing popped out onto Miss Baines-Powell’s plate an’ she almost ’et it, didn’t you, dear?”

Muffled assent from within.

“Get a rollin’ boil, Charlotte, an’ keep at it for five to seven minutes. Nothin’ else can be done.”

Bridie took three boxes of berries from the rack and set them beside the eggs and carrots on the porch step. “There you are, Charlotte. That’ll be ninety-six cents. Any changes for next week? The corn’ll be in most likely.”

Charlotte surrendered the money and stood watching them leave. Lily always lingered behind a bit, ears pricked.

“Scruffy little ragamuffin, ain’t she?”

“You think with the prices Bridie charges she’d be able to put a decent dress on the girl.”

“Might even be pretty, don’t you think, Lottie?”

“It’d take some scrubbin’, I’m afraid.”

Bridie always walked steadily forward; she was not a lingerer. Once she turned and said, “Don’t let those two old maids go puttin’ a lot of tom-fool notions in your head.”

The Templeton house was the most attractive of their stops, though by no means the most ostentatious in town. It wasn’t even brick, but the siding was lovingly lapped and painted a shade of blue that resembled the River when the ice leaves it in March. The gardens here flourished, invariably dazzling Lily with their lush variety: delphinium, giant poppies, sunflowers, peonies, arboured roses, and marigolds and lilies with the tang of marsh still in them.

Mrs. Alice Templeton almost always intercepted them at the side door. Trim, silver-haired, neatly attired, smiling with both eyes, she invariably asked them to come into the front den, to cool or warm or dry themselves, depending on the season. Sometimes Maurice Templeton, a prominent lawyer, was discovered snoozing there into a gray volume on his lap. Lily feasted on the sight of book-lined walls, porcelain figurines and blue chinaware displayed in an adjoining dining room. The odour of pipe-tobacco lingered and stirred the memory.

On a lucky day there was Ceylon tea and tarts, and talk.

“Your brother’s daughter, you say? I can certainly see your eyes there, no question about that.”

“She’s had no upbringin’, mind you, but she’s a good worker.”

“Another cake, Lily?”

“No, ma’am. Thank you.”

“Go ahead, looks like it’d do you good.”

Lily glanced at Aunt Bridie. “No, thank you, ma’am.”

“Say, Bridie, my girls are both at boarding school in London, as you know, and I’ve never thrown away any of their dresses or slips. God knows, there’s a pile of bonnets too in a trunk –”

Bridie rose suddenly to her full height. “Thank you for the tea, missus, but we really must be gettin’ along. Got a schedule to keep.” In fact, the Templetons were always their last stop.

“But I haven’t paid you yet.”

“Next time,” Bridie replied; they were already at the door. Once away, Bridie tried to make light of their hasty departure. “We’d never get away from the old gabbler. Never did hear anyone like to carry on so and fritter away so much time. Besides, your uncle’d wear his shoes to bed if we left him alone too long.”

Then, more seriously, she added, “They’re all the same, Lily. You remember that. Can’t leave off interferin’ with people’s lives.”

Lily was not sure. Was it “interferin” to offer unused dresses and bonnets? And that triggered another thought: why had Luc never delivered father’s trunks? And why had she not heard from her father? She was sure he loved her and she thought often of his kindly face.

Come winter, the physical labour of planting, weeding and harvesting was exchanged for equally arduous indoor tasks. Bridie made quilts and candles and soon discovered that Lily’s fingers were more nimble than her own. Her chores in the barn and coops never ended, nor her share of the cooking, regular mending and wood chopping when Chester’s back acted up, as it did more often of late. Lily found the fine needlework as fatiguing as hoeing lettuce; but she loved arranging the harlequin swatches of the quilts, composing their colours into prescribed patterns. By April Bridie and Lily had stitched eight quilts that would bring ready cash to tide them over the lean spring months. With candle sales, there was sufficient to buy them each a pair of new leather boots from McWhinney’s Haberdashery.

By the third summer, after her fourteenth birthday, Lily Ramsbottom was making half of their deliveries alone. More and more, Bridie left the egg-and-vegetable side of the business to her, while she herself drummed up further trade in the expanding sections back of Christina Street or scouted the competition’s prices at the Saturday market beside the St. Clair Inn. As far as Lily could tell, Bridie was never tempted by the displays of finery in the shops along Front Street.

“Tell me, Lily dear, what Church is your aunt raisin’ you in?” asked Mrs. McHarg, sweetly, for her husband’s sake.

“The green peppers’re good today, ma’am. Crisp as ice.”

“You areattendin’ a church of some kind, aren’t you?”

“No, ma’am.” Lily felt her eyes drop, a flush of red staining her cheeks.

“You poor, poor thing, you.” The woman’s voice trembled with delicious shock. “An’ why not?” she ventured.

“We work on Sundays,” Lily said, looking up proudly.

Mrs. McHarg was speechless. Lily was already giving Benjamin a nudge when she heard faintly from the back doorway: “That woman oughta be hanged!” Then: “Lily, you tell that so-called aunt of yours not to bother comin’ round here again!”

Lily did no such thing.

Lily loved the boarding houses, especially the rambling clapboard establishment on Lochiel Street run by Char Hazelberry. If she wished, which was often, Lily stepped right inside the cozy kitchens where aproned servants cooked and scrubbed and gossiped; where some of the resident working men – dilatory, hungover or recuperative – lingered about to tease them. When Lily questioned the landlady’s name, Badger McCovey whispered breezily in her ear: “Short for Charity, but she ain’t got none, get it?” Walleye Watson, his good peeper next to hers, declared, “It’s the way she cooks the food!” He tried to wink, with absurd results, and she laughed with the rest of the room.

“Hi, toots, gonna take me to the shindig, Saird’y?”

“I get first dance, promise?”

“Not me, I’ll take the last one, eh Lily gal?”

“Don’t you pay them geezers no mind,” Char would tell Lily. “Most of them’s well past it anyways! They couldn’t raise dust in a hen-house.”

Lily usually left Char’s place feeling faintly wicked but welcomed and cheered, – and humming all the way to Exmouth.

Lily carried the last order of the day to the back of the Templeton’s blue cottage, under the rose arbour in primary bloom and into the meadow of the Templeton’s dooryard. She was delighted to see the cedar table covered with a linen cloth and set for tea. The missus must be planning a garden party, she thought. And by the looks of the fancy cakes and scones and the silver tea-set, the company expected must be the hoity-toity. Mrs. Templeton popped from her shed, brushing back her uncovered hair, and swept across the lawn to Lily.

“Well, young lady, don’t just stand there lookin’, sit down.”

Mrs. Templeton showed Lily the proper way to pour tea and how to hold a scone with three digits and some dignity. She smiled sideways and whispered, “Wouldn’t want to upset the good ladies of the town, now would we?” She took Lily’s arm and escorted her about the garden, explaining carefully how one nursed and groomed such unruly beauty, prompting Lily to recall and speak about the wild blossoms of the townships.

“Well, Lily my sweet,” she said with a sigh, “I mustn’t keep you. Bridie will soon be frettin’.” She tied Lily’s bonnet snugly below her chin. “I just hope your auntie knows what a prize she’s got.”

Lily blushed. Bridie, she knew, would not approve of such “spoilin’” that could “turn a girl’s head” in a direction that would eventually – one had to assume – prove regrettable.

As Lily was leaving, Mrs. Templeton turned suddenly and called after her. She had a piece of paper in her hand. “I almost forgot: Maurice and I are holding meeting here in a week, we’ll need a few extras, delivered early in the morning if that’s all right.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lily’s eyes were fastened on the fluttering note.

“There’s so many things, I wrote them all down for you. Here, take this along.”

Lily took the paper, turned and was almost under the rose arbour when Mrs. Templeton said, a bit too quickly, “Oh Lily, would you mind checking, do I have cucumbers on that list?”

Lily froze. She felt the confiding coziness of the morning ebb away.

“Just take a quick glance at the list, love.” Mrs. Templeton prompted, but kindly

Lily looked sideways then directly to Mrs. Templeton. “I can’t,” she said tonelessly.

“Well then, it’s high time we did something about that!”

Lily desperately wanted to be present when Bridie and Mrs. Templeton had their tête à tête. A letter in an engraved envelope had been delivered right to their door by a suborned errand-boy. Bridie read it, her brow furrowing, her lips mouthing the words. “Some nerve!” But next morning she and Lily scoured the house and, to Lily’s amazement, a pewter tea-service materialized from the steamer-trunk to be set upon a crocheted tablecloth of ancient but unblemished vintage. Then she and Uncle Chester – only one of them protesting – were banished to the barn.

Bridie was a good reader, Chester said so many times. But there were no books in evidence in their home. Lily did see her aunt reading, though, for each week she picked up The Canadian Observer and brought it home, taking special pains to read it on the Sabbath. Chester would peek at it occasionally but would say to Lily, “It’s full of radical ranting, girl, an’ bad politics that’ll come to no good end.” He sigh with the feigned resignation he used whenever Bridie’s behavior frustrated him. “It’s beyond me why she takes in that stuff. ’Course, you gotta remember where she come from.”

Lily couldn’t remember what she didn’t know. Bridie wouldn’t talk about the old country. Chester would, after a slug or two from his cache in Benjamin’s stall, about the Ramsbottom tribe in Lancashire, the innumerable cousins he’d never met, his own history as the only child of a shipwright attached to the military command during the Simcoe regime, the premature deaths of his parents from cholera. The Ramsbottoms, however legendary, were not blood.

“Don’t ask,” Auntie would say, seeing the tilt of Lily’s chin. “The Old Country’s old, it’s only good for forgettin’. This is the here and now and that’s what’s important.”

Seeing Lily’s disappointment, Chester slipped into his bedroom, opened the trunk with a squeal that arched Bridie’s’s eyebrows, and returned with a large leather-bound book. “I’ll just read her the story parts,” he said in Bridie’s direction. “It’s her right, you know,” he added vehemently though his voice didn’t sound fully confident until Samson had pushed both columns aside and brought the wicked temple down upon himself.

The next winter Chester grew bolder and brought out a calf-covered novel called The Last of the Mohicans, from which he read aloud to Lily, curled up on his lap in the armchair, all through that dark, cold season. Last winter, when The Deerslayer made its debut, Lily perched on the ample arm of the chair and followed the words on the page. Soon she was able to point to some of the words and repeat them back. “See, Bridie love, the young lady can read. Smart as a whip, she is.”

Bridie, who appeared not to be listening, snapped, “Don’t be turnin’ her head, you old fool. She can’t read. Soon as I get some time, soon as everybody around here pulls their weight, I’m gonna teach the child to read properly.”

“Don’t blame the girl,” he said petulantly. “After all, she’s had no educatin’ to speak of.”

“An’ never willwith the likes of you around her.” The reading was over for that evening.

When Lily ventured in to see if Bridie and Mrs Templeton were still talking, she found Mrs. Templeton adjusting her Sunday hat and looking quite pleased with herself. “Thanks for the tea, Bridie. You really must let me return the hospitality soon.”

In her working smock, Lily felt smudged and unworthy, but Mrs. Templeton kissed her warmly on the cheek. Bridie smoothed her skirt and said to Lily: “It’s all fixed. You’ll start in at the Common School first thing next Monday.”

Lily turned her shining face to Mrs. Templeton. “Don’t thank me, young lady. Thank your Aunt; she’s givin’ up the best helper she’s got.”

Bridie wanted to be severe but couldn’t manage it.

Her aunt had argued for starting in September when the new term began. After all, only one week remained in the current school year. “This way,” Mrs. Templeton had insisted, “she can try it out, introduce herself to Miss Pringle, and get set up for the fall term.” What she really meant was that it would be cruel to let a girl of Lily’s temperament wait in uncertainty over a whole summer.

“Only if Chester’ll help out with the weedin’,” Bridie had countered. Fortunately Chester’s troublesome back took a turn for the better, and dressed in a brown-and-tan gingham especially cut down by Bridie and with a lunch-pail in hand, Lily set off for Port Sarnia.

The Monday-morning sun had risen full of hope, then retreated. An east wind brought dark clouds prophesying thunder, and worse. The rain gusted sideways at Lily, who was torn between sheltering in the bush by the road or being late for school. Mrs. Templeton had made the arrangements; Lily was expected. Using her thin broadcloth shawl as deftly as she could, Lily manoeuvred her way through the squalls and mud into the open streets of the town. She was soaked through to the skin. Even her petticoat, improvised from a plain calico skirt, was sodden. Her boots were wet and plastered with grime that splashed up to her ankles and soiled the hem of her dress. Lily gritted her teeth and wedged her right cheek into the rain.

When she got to the schoolhouse on George Street, the sun was making a comeback. No children skipped or cavorted in the grounds. Lily paused at the door about to knock when a large boy with a pimple on his nose opened it, and called back: “It’s the new girl, Miss Pringle! Looks like she’s fallen in Durand’s Pond!”

A gale of laughter greeted Lily as she entered the room, her shawl dripping. Standing at the front behind a table, Miss Pringle – frightfully tall, angular, eyes overly brilliant like a starved cat’s – slammed her fuller down. “Behave yourselves, class,” she shouted an octave above normal. “Remember, you’re young ladies and gentlemen.”

The ragtaggles and strays among this motley group of ages and sexes were not taken in: ladies-and-gentlemen-to-be went to the Grammar School on Christina Street. When the hubbub had died of its own weight, Miss Pringle said, “Please hang your cloak on the nail to your right, and take a seat. Class, say hello to our new pupil, Miss Lily Ramsbottom.”

The surname had barely left Miss Pringle’s lips when three or four unsynchronized snorts were heard, followed by girlish giggles. “That’s enough!” bellowed Miss Pringle. “We don’t make fun of people’s names no matter how odd they may be.”

Lily sat down at an empty place on the bench that held three other girls who might have been her age. Her gingham, still sopping, clung to her. The dark-haired girl next to her edged away.

“Have you attended school elsewhere?” Miss Pringle asked sweetly, not leaving her post.

“No, ma’am. This is my first time.”

Miss Pringle paused, her gasp communicated instantly to the class. “Then what on earth are you doing sitting with the Fourth Book?” she snapped with more satisfaction than the situation warranted. Her ruler pointed left like a claw. “You’ll have to sit with the First Book, over there.”

Lily saw a spot at the end of the back-left bench beside an oversized boy who swivelled and beamed at her. Lily hesitated.

“There’s a Reading Primer waiting for you,” Miss Pringle said, indicating the gray-backed tome on the desk. Lily rose to take her appointed place, now studied more carefully by the teacher.

“Good heavens!” sputtered Miss Pringle, as she took in Lily’s thin but drenched gingham. The class reeled as one and swung to the point of Miss Pringle’s scandalized glare. “You can’t sit there… like that!” she sputtered, unconsciously lifting her hands towards her own well-harnessed bosom. “Please retrieve your cloak!”

Beside her, not unkindly, the boy in Book One whispered: “Your bubs are peekin’.”

Chester was all for driving into town and taking his buggy-whip to Miss Pringle, even after hearing Lily’s abbreviated account of her humiliation.

“Don’t you fret about it, child,” Bridie soothed. “Not much learnin’ goes on in schools anyway. Come September, we’ll teach you to read proper.” She was looking at Lily now. “Remember this: We’re not gonna spend all our life chewin’ dirt.”

The summer of Lily’s fifteenth year was not as uneventful as she had feared. Bridie, ever eager for new business, opened a stall at the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings during the growing season, giving over the house-to-house deliveries completely to Lily. Their neighbor Bill, content to let his wheat ripen unaided, was brought over to help with the added weeding, picking and preparations for marketing. Uncle’s back seemed baulkier than usual. In mid-July Bridie astonished them by announcing that she was leaving for a few days to cook for the road-clearance workers who had set up a tent city near the Reserve. Rumours in the town suggested that some of the clearing was in anticipation of a railway line, but no confirmation was available.

“Your auntie ain’t worked for nobody, cookin’ or cleanin’, since her days in Toronto. She don’t believe in it. Got her pride, that woman.” Lily nodded.

“We need the money,” was all Bridie would say. “I’m gonna hire a man to cut pine again. They’re a cash crop like anything else. Besides, we should try to clear another two acres for planting next year.”

Bridie was so exhausted when she came home from her three-day stint at the camp that she went straight to bed and slept right through Bill’s Saturday visit and harmonica serenade. Lily was even persuaded to attempt a jig. The two men sipped from Bill’s flask and tapped in time.

“Why don’t you ever bring Violet with you?” Lily asked, flushed and sweating. “I could teach her to dance.”

“Oh, she don’t dance none,” Bill said in a drawl that was as lethargic as his music was sprightly. “She’s a bit tetched in the head, you know. Been like that since she were a babe. No sir, she don’t like to come outta the house at all.”

Chester asked Lily if she’d like to try a “wee drop”, and was so persistent that Lily made a show of tilting the flask against her teeth, wincing and gasping in feigned pleasure. They seemed satisfied with her performance. To deflect their further hopes she called for a hornpipe and flung her body into the music’s coil. The two men applauded in appreciation as Lily came to a stop in the middle of the room. The last filament of Bill’s music quavered in the coal-oil light when Lily caught sight of a face in the window above the sink, staring at her with wide innocent eyes full of longing. For a second Lily thought she was looking at herself.

Then Violet let out the whirring, wordless cry she used for delight or despair, and vanished into the night.

It was August. Bridie was off to the camp once more “just to help out.” At Chester’s insistence, she agreed to deposit their savings in the Bank of Upper Canada in Port Sarnia. At the beginning of the month a hired hand arrived to cut timber and be generally useful around the place. Chester was made to give up his workshop in the barn wherein a pallet and table were installed for the new arrival. Uncle’s back “did a dip” and he was laid up with lumbago for several days. Lily did the chores by herself. She might have been a little resentful but then watching the hired man proved to be adequate compensation.

Lily expected the fellow to be old, grizzled, and down-on-his-luck. Instead, Cam was twenty, as sleek and muscled as a muskellunge, with an open smile and black Scotch eyes that were curious and bold. “A bit too bold if you ask me,” said Bridie. To Bridie, Cam was unfailingly polite and deferential, and he certainly was a good worker. In ninety-degree heat he stripped to his waist, confronted the four-foot girth of a pine, and slung his executioner’s axe. Sweat raced in rivulets down the small of his back, staining his trousers to the thighs. Positioning herself perfectly between the vegetable rows, Lily was able to keep a close watch on his performance.

The feelings she was experiencing were new, and puzzling. She knew what animals suffered to procreate and what men and women, for inscrutable reasons, accomplished in their midnight chambers. That such acts might be accompanied by the most exquisite configuration of emotion, titillation and ecstasy had not occurred to her outside the vague intimations of her dreams. Until now. Her legs, made sturdy with farm work, went to jelly in his presence; her heart, thoroughly sound, pounded as if in distress. Always he was polite, solicitous: “Can I help you with that, Lily? Looks too heavy for you, that pail.” But his gaze clung to her, and she wondered frantically if he too could see her breasts, if even the extra band of muslin she tied around herself were not enough to bridle them.

“That young man’s got to go,” Bridie said near month’s end. “He never stops leerin’ at Lily.”

“But the girl’s fifteen,” said Chester. “She’s bound to attract the boys.”

“I’ll stay out of his way, Auntie.”

“He’s a real good worker, woman. You know how bad my back’s been lately.”

“I know how bad your medicine’s been,” she shot back. Then full of weariness she said, “All right. He stays. But just till the next section’s done. Then out he goes, bag and baggage.”

As if he had overheard the threat, Cam took his glistening biceps and shoulders to the farthest corner of the timber stand, out of sight and harm’s way. He ate his lunch in the woods. At supper he wore a clean shirt and got Bridie talking about her business, the growth in town, even radical politics. Bridie was amazed to learn that one so young could understand the imperatives of George Brown’s ‘true grit’ policies. Lily, naturally, had expected such genius from the outset. Chester swung between envy and relief. September came. The muggy weather remained. So did Cam. Bridie left for the camp “one last time, I swear by all the snakes in Scotland!”

Lily felt undone by Cam’s sudden distance. With Bridie away, he returned to the bush after supper, swinging his axe against the yielding pine until twilight. I’ll go to him, Lily decided. And why not? Something inevitable and foregone has already happened; it’s only the working out that’s left.

Leaving Chester slumped in a doze, Lily slipped out into the gloaming. It was a perfect night. Even Bill had gone off to town in his buggy. She and Cam would be alone under a consenting moon. With no particular stratagem in mind, Lily hastened towards the barn. A sound, like the cry of a creature struck by talons, came from Lily’s left. She stopped. Now it was a soft mewling. Old Bill’s tabby birthing kittens again? Lily sidled through the beanstalks and came up behind the Indian corn that bordered on Bill’s property. His log barn was illuminated in the moonlight as war the source of the sounds.

Violet was half-sitting with her back against the wall, her loose dress open to expose her breasts, which Cam was kneading with both hands as if he were stretching dough. Violet’s own hands were busy in Cam’s lap, coaxing his flabby member as they would the Guernsey’s teat. Violet uttered a wail of pain, release or frustration – Lily could not discern which.

“Shut up, ya fuckin’ bitch! Shut the hell up!” He slapped her so hard her head snapped back and hit the logs behind her. Then he was shoving his instrument into his trousers and stomping away into the dark. Violet’s sobs pursued him, inarticulate and discordant. But, at the first nicker of Bill’s pony in the lane, she stopped, pulled her dress together, and scuttled towards the unlit cabin.

Lily stood in the corn, bereft, empty, then furious. Above her the jib of the quartering moon luffed, and went out.

“Three of ’em, city-biddies,” Bill warned Bridie at the doorstep “All dolled up for christenin’ by the look of it.” And he winked mysteriously towards Lily. “They’ve already made the turn, I reckon.”

Aunt Bridie never panicked, especially on Saturday afternoons in September with the weather clement and the week’s market done. “If God hadn’t been Presbyterian,” she would say, “he’d’ve made his Sabbath on Saturday afternoons so’s all of us could rest together.” Nonetheless, she went indoors at a trot, signaling for Lily to follow.

“It’s the Ladies Aid for sure,” she mumbled. Wordlessly they hurried about “straightening up” the living area. Bridie covered the table, set it for tea and put the kettle on. She turned to Lily. “This is about you, you can be sure.”

No doubt they were coming to drag her away to Miss Pringle’s school. “Go an’ see that uncle of yours is safe in his stall,” Bridie said, removing her apron but otherwise making no further concessions to the visitors. Lily raced to the barn. Chester was in his workshop, now fully restored to him since Cam’s sudden departure. He hadn’t bothered to remove the pallet, finding it a more convenient spot to rest between stints at the workbench. That is where Lily found him.

Meanwhile, the delegation had arrived: the missuses McHarg, Salter and McWhinney. After tea and niceties, Mrs. McWhinney took the lead. “I’ll come right to the point,” she said with mercantilist efficiency, draining her cup.

“The point,” interrupted Reverend McHarg’s representative, “is Lily.”

Bridie poured Mrs. McWhinney another cup of tea.

“The point is the baptism of this innocent child.”

“We know how good you been to her an’ all,” added Josephine Salter hastily. “Nobody can take that away from you. You been a wonderful momma to this dear little foundlin’ here. Just the other night I says to Mr. Salter –”

“What Josie means, is that it may be all right for you to reject your Maker, to live out here in a state of sin and run the risk of eternal damnation –”

“You’re a bright woman, Bridie,” said Mrs McWhinney. “Nobody denies you that. You work hard an’ you keep your own counsel. Well an’ good. But we’re talkin’ here about the girl. Now we all might come from different churches, an’ we have our set-to’s from time to time, but we all agree on this – the girl deserves a chance to save her own soul.”

“It don’t even matter who baptizes her,” added Mrs. Salter with Methodist charity. “It’s just gotta be done, that’s all.”

No one had looked directly at Lily during this exchange though she was occasionally acknowledged with a flutter of fingers or a glancing nod. Bridie sat straight-backed, following each of the speakers with intense interest.

“Do you intend to toss a coin?” she asked.

“Bridie, this is serious. We’re just askin’ you to think about the girl, about her future.”

“In Heaven or Port Sarnia?”

The sudden edge to Aunt Bridie’s voice silenced Mrs. Salter and Mrs. McWhinney. They hadn’t expected it to come to this. Mrs. McHarg, being Orange, had more ancient claim on self-righteousness.

“Both,” she said.

Bridie leaned forward and looked over at Lily, who could not read the emotions held in check by that awesome will. “Well then,” she said. “We’ll let the girl decide. Lily, dear, what do you say?”

Lily, concluding it was time to find out once and for all who this God was, answered, “Yes.”

It was agreed that Lily Ramsbottom’s religious education would begin a week Sunday with an interview with the Reverend McHarg himself at the Manse. He would determine the status of the girl’s ‘natural’ inclinations to religious sentiment, after which she would be placed exclusively in the hands of Mrs. McHarg for special tutoring before being released to the general influence of Sunday School and Service.

On the day of the interview, Chester took Lily by horse and cart to the door of the imposing red-brick Manse. He held her hand, squeezed it, and tried to say something encouraging, but couldn’t. Lily watched the rig move west down George Street and stop in front of the Anglican Church whose spire glinted above the horizon. Uncle Chester got out and, a bit like a thief entering a shop, went in.

“Come in, come in, my child!” boomed the Reverend Clarion McHarg, swivelling in his desk chair and waving the deaf housekeeper away.

Lily obeyed. The woman had taken her shawl somewhere. She peered around the dimly-lit room embroidered with walnut and cherrywood and leather-skinned tomes of impressive dimension.

“Sit,” said the Reverend, pointing to a padded, armless chair across from the littered secretary. “My, don’t we look pretty, today,” he added, finishing up a sentence and blotting it. Adjusted now to the poor light, Lily saw that his features were all crags and cliffs, with spiky eyebrows that bunched like a pair of singed caterpillars. Despite the eager teeth of his smile, his eyes burned. “You’re the…young lady from the township my wife was telling me about?”

“Yes, your reverence.” Chester had instructed her in the appropriate form of address.

“I ain’t been baptized,” Lily ventured.

“Haven’tbeen,” he said automatically.

“Yes, sir. My aunt says I haven’t had a proper upbringin’.”

“Do you know what being baptized in the Lord means?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, then, let’s find out, shall we, how much you doknow.” The caterpillars arched expectantly. “God will be pleased, I’m sure, to have you join His congregation of the Saved.”

“Yes,” Lily said. “I come here to find out about him. I do have questions.”

“Such as?”

“Can I talk to him?”

The good Reverend smiled as if charmed by the naiveté of such a remark. “You may prayto Him.”

“How do I do that?” Lily wanted to hear it from the source.

My word, the ignorance of some of these country folks was appalling! “You get down on your knees, close your eyes, and tell God about your sins and ask Him to offer you strength and succor.”

“What sins?”

The Reverend stared at Lily as if trying to catch her out at some trick. “You don’t know?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I can see that Mrs. McHarg has some tough cloth to cut here.”

“Can I speak to God, like this, like we are?” Lily said.

“Of course not,” he snapped. “The Lord will answer your prayers if and when He decides.”

“When he does answer, will it be in English?”

“Are you being blasphemous, child?”

“What’s blasphemous, sir?”

“God speaks to each man in his own tongue; He hears, sees and knows everything.”

“Uncle Chester says that according to his Bible, God talks in Hebrew.”

“Damnation to Uncle Chester! Excuse me, child. You see why we must all pray.”

Lily didn’t. She straightened up, charily. McHarg did the same. “Would God, if I prayed to him real hard, talk to me in Pottawatomie?”

The caterpillars jumped in agitation. “Who put you up to this? That heathen aunt of yours?” He had both of her shoulders in his grip.

“No, sir. I just thought if your god can talk in every tongue, then he could if he wants talk to me in Pottawatomie. Or Chippewa or Attawan –”

“Cease this sacrilege! Now!”

Lily quaked before Reverend McHarg’s temper. His hands had slipped down so that they were squeezing her exposed forearms. Suddenly he let go of her as if she were contagious. He sat down again, gathering the frayed ends of his composure. Lily didn’t move. He seemed surprised, even discomfited, by the fact that she had fled his study. He felt her presence– the Lord’s anteroom, as it were – as something indefinably threatening and darkly tempting.

“Mrs. Beecroft will show you out,” he said at last. When she reached the study door, though, he shouted desperately. “Whatever becomes of you, Miss, just remember this: God is not a Pottawatomie!”

As best she could, Lily told Bridie what had trespassed at the Manse. Bridie listened with interest, not once interrupting.

“God’s not there,” Lily said. “I know it.”

Bridie’s face clouded. “I don’t deny it. But if you turn away from all the churchin’ these folk ’round here can’t do without, they’ll never ever forgive you. You’ll have to pay for that rebel streak all your life.”

“But you –”

“Yes, I did it, I know. As far as I’m concerned, the god they pray to was invented by landlords and greengrocers. An’ now that I look at you, I see somethin’ in your face, somethin’ from that mad father of yours or the wild bush you was let roam in –.” She didn’t finish, as if she’d already said too much. Then: “Well, don’t just stand there with your legs in a knot, get that frumpery off, we got corn to shuck!”

When they were again working side by side, Lily said, “Will you teach me how to read?”

“Yes, honey, real soon. That’s a solemn promise.” And she tore at the stubborn shocks in a frenzy.

Contrary to her own declarations, Bridie was off to cook at the camp yet again. As many of the workers brought their families into the area and moved to more permanent quarters, Bridie’s business followed them. Already she was plotting the use of the new acres cleared, cut and sold by Cam before he left, not even taking his last week’s pay. Orders were left with her subordinates: Lily was to bake two dozen pumpkin pies for a special Thanksgiving celebration at the camp, courtesy of the soon-to-be-announced candidate for mayor of the newly incorporated town: Maurice Templeton, Esquire. “I’m trustin’ you to do as I’ve showed you; somethin’ big could come outta this,” Bridie said. Second, Chester was to give the north coop a thorough scrubbing and white-washing as several hens had recently died from some mysterious cause.

Lily was delighted, but Chester’s back went on leave. Lately Bridie had been more than usually stern and grumpy, snapping at her and Chester with little or no provocation. Most of her wrath was directed towards him, though Lily failed to see why. Seldom would he talk back, and even then the argument always collapsed after a single strike. Sometimes he would look over at Lily, aggrieved and helpless, as if to say, “See, this is what it’s really like.” Once she had seen Chester, unaware he was being observed, pick up Bridie’s pince-nez – which she needed to read The Observerand “do the books”– and hid them under the mattress. Bridie searched high and low for them, more than routinely disturbed that she had been so careless as to mislay them. Chester meantime made a great fuss about helping her locate them: “Thought they might’ve fallen off in the fruit cellar when you was labellin’ the jars, but not so, I’m afraid,” he said solicitously. “Not like you to be so careless with your valuables.” Three days later when the spectacles turned up magically between two butter-boxes on the kitchen shelf, Bridie gave her husband the oddest look, then went about her business.

Grumbling about his lumbago, Chester went off to the north chicken coop, tools in hand. Lily went to the pumpkin patch and started the laborious task of loading the ripest ones into the barrow and pushing them through the loose soil to the dooryard. On the very first load Lily saw she had been too ambitious: the wheel buried itself in the ground, and when Lily got angry with it, it lurched sideways and sent the pumpkins thumping overboard. Uncle Chester was suddenly beside her. “I’ll help you with that,” he said. “Damn woman oughta know better’n to make you push a thing like this. There’s times I think she just forgets you’re a girl…a young lady,” he said, puffing and huffing a huge pumpkin into the barrow.

“Be careful of your heart, now,” Lily said, but she was happy to have help. Together they managed to get three loads of the unwieldy fruit safely to a pile beside the stoop.

“There now, my lass, you can go on with your woman’s work,” said Chester.

Lily leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Maybe I can get this done an’ come help with the coop.”

He sighed: “That’s a dog’s work,” and trudged off.

Lily split the pumpkins and removed the pulp, then cooked and strained it in large kettles supplied by Mrs Templeton before setting it in the cool of the back shed. She would have to build a hot, sustaining fire in the stove for the pies; in the meantime, she and Chester would eat a cold supper.

After getting a good blaze started, she set out to fetch him home. The first place she looked was the barn. He wasn’t in his workshop; nor were there any signs that he had been there. Puzzled, she walked over to the north coop. Inside she was greeted by a spray of chicken feathers and dust; when it settled in the fading light, she saw Chester sprawled on his back, his clay jug overturned and empty beside him. He was awake, but his eyes were half-lidded as if he were just waking or about to drop off. His face glowed as if sunburned. The place was a mess, and Uncle Chester lay fully in it; bits of cast-off straw and chicken droppings, hen-pecked dirt and disembowelled seed-husks. “Uncle?”

“Ah, is it you, Lily? You see what she’s done now, you see what she’s driven us to?”

“Come on, Uncle. Your supper’s ready.”

“You’re the loyal one, though. Chester can always count on his little Lily.” She had him by the arm, and he made a half-hearted effort to get up. “You wouldn’t drive a man to this, would you, my sweet?”

He was up, but when she let go, his eyes rolled and he slumped back into the muck. “Where’d the room go?” he said, trying to laugh through his coughing jag. Lily was able to wrap one of his arms around her shoulder and with great difficulty manoeuvre him out of the coop and onto the path that led to the house. The odours of whiskey and offal contended in the evening air.

“You always thought she was so damn smart, didn’t you, pickin’ this spot out. Well, you’re old enough now to be told the truth,” he said, guiding his slurs. He stopped to retch into the last of the cucumbers.

“I’ll put some tea on,” Lily said.

“Picked this hell-hole in a pine-bush ’cause it was next to the army reserve. They’re gonna build a fort an’ barracks right there, she says, an’ we’ll be right next to them. Some fort, eh? Nothin’ but pine trees an’ always will be! Some smart, eh?”

They were at the house. Uncle Chester dropped to his knees and vomited copiously on the flagstones, spraying Lily in the process. Then he looked up at her as if he had just wakened from a messy dream and was wondering where he was: “Your Auntie’s a good woman,” he said softly. “An’ don’t you ever forget it.”

“I’ll get out the tub,” Lily said. “You can just sit right here.” Lily hurried inside, got him a cup of clear tea, and then proceeded to prepare a bath. Using the extra kettles from the Templetons, she boiled enough water to almost fill the shiny metal tub they’d bought last winter to help “straighten out” his unreliable backbone. Not once had Bridie used it, nor had Lily – both of them continuing to wash at the outside pump in the sheltering dusk or once-a-week with a pail and warm water and soap in the dank kitchen.

Lily went out to Chester with a flannel sheet, and after managing to slurp half-a-cup of tea, he wobbled to his feet and let Lily pull off his reeking shirt and trousers under cover. Somehow, with Lily keeping the sheet in place, he succeeded in removing his undervest and linens. Through the sheet Lily could see how thin his arms and legs had become in the last year, He held her hand like a little boy as he stepped into the tub, cupping his private parts in an automatic gesture. But Lily had already turned away, leaving the warm steamy room and walking wearily to the well-pump through the cloudless afterglow of twilight. Her arm ached as she primed and pumped, and her skin recoiled at the icy touch of the water. Nonetheless, she stripped naked and scoured herself with lye-soap, letting it sting and purge. The chill air soon dried her, and she slipped her nightshirt over the gooseflesh. Suddenly she was famished, and very thirsty. She felt the moon’s weight on her back as she headed for the house.

Chester was out of the tub, sitting in his wingback chair with the flannel towel wrapped around him, toga-like. He was clean, but the fatigue and strain of the day’s excess was etched into his face. He’s an old man, thought Lily. He forced a sheepish smile.

“What would I do without you, Lily?” he said wanly.