Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      7

      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 СКАЧАТЬ