LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      3

      Sometime towards dawn Lily was awakened by a blaze of lightning, followed seconds later by a hard crack of thunder. Then the rain came, first slashing at the dry woods and vulnerable gardens, then easing off to a steady, sustaining downpour. When she arose with the sun, the air was sweet with growth, the earth slaked and grateful.

      Hearing Bridie stir restlessly in her room, Lily sat on the cot for a long while letting the infant light brush over her, quicksilvering her skin. She reached into the applewood box below the cot and drew out the leather pouch. The jasper talisman felt cold in her cupped palms. She pressed it tightly, squeezing her eyes shut, and begging the driven thoughts in her mind to seek some shape, some release, some reconciliation. It occurred to her that she might be praying. The talisman grew warm, incarnadine, then seemed to pulse in her grip. “Are you up, dear?”

      “Yes, Auntie. You stay put a while. It’s a bit wet for weedin’ right off.”

      She heard the creak and shuffle of her aunt rigging her body for the day ahead.

      Later, Lily glanced up from her hoeing. Bridie was waving from the yard, something white and fluttering in her hand. When Lily came up to her, she recognized Silas, the butcher’s son.

      “He’s brung a note from Alice Templeton,” said Bridie evenly. “Do you want me to read it?”

      “Please.”

      In a halting voice, Bridie read: “Dear Lily: You are cordially invited to attend the official luncheon for His Royal Highness, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, to be held at the Grand Trunk Hotel at twelve noon, September 13, 1860. Please say you’ll come. Affectionately, Alice Templeton.”

      Bridie looked at Lily expectantly. “Sounds like Mrs Templeton would like you there,” she said to fill the silence. Silas nodded.

      “Tell her, thanks. But no.”

      “You want me to write that?”

      “Yes.”

      “Lily, love, I think you oughta go. What else isthere?” Bridie said pointedly.

      “We

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