“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