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 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