Lily's Story (89 page)

The bunkhouse
was frequented by engineers, brakemen and conductors whose homes,
when they had any, were not in Sarnia. Since most of the passenger
and freight trains plied between Sarnia and Toronto (a few still
followed the old Grand Trunk route to Stratford and Berlin), these
men were likely to be from the capital city, using the new facility
to ‘lay over’ until they were due to make a return run, usually the
next day. Railroaders from Sarnia likewise ‘lay over’ in Toronto.
Many of them, bachelors or
de
facto
bachelors, lived in
boarding houses near the station here (or in Port Edward), where
they waited to be called. She had on occasion been asked to sweep
out the Yard Office, where she had seen the huge call-boards
listing the names of the running crews and yard gangs. When a train
was ‘made up’ and ready to go, elfin messengers would scatter from
here across the south end of the city to ‘call’ the men to their
labour. Sometimes, of course, they had only to dash to the
bunkhouse or, as one of the regulars dubbed it, ‘Palaver Palace’.
Some of the grizzled veterans among the engineers and conductors
had routine schedules. Most of the running crew, however, seemed to
lead semi-nomadic lives with sudden wake-ups, cold breakfasts,
chilling dashes to overheated cabooses or blazing furnace rooms
where even the iron stanchions froze as the arctic night whistled
by.

“
I just ignore
’em, I barge right in there; after all’s said, I got my work to
do,” Big Meg had explained to her at the beginning. “Most of them’s
gentlemen, really, long as you ignore their cussin’, which they
can’t help, and don’t want to help when it comes right down to it.”
She chortled, and her forearms shook. “If you don’t barge right in
there, you’ll never get the chores done. Besides,” she winked
lasciviously,” they tell a juicy story or two.”

But she did not take Big
Meg’s advice. She quickly figured out – for both shifts – when the
peak periods of use occurred and when the parlour would be empty or
be occupied by a solitary derelict snoozing away a hangover or
sulking with a cigar in a far corner. During the latter times she
whisked in and out – tiny, unnoted, anonymous. In the kitchen, with
its own stove and gingham curtains and lamplight on the copper
pans, with snow sizzling against the glass – she felt able to
breathe again, surprised as she had so often been before at the
unencouraged robustness of her small body, the gleeful pleasure it
took in routine acts. However, because the parlour was separated
from the kitchen only by a heavy velvet curtain (the original door
having been kicked in by a drunken fireman under the
misapprehension that his young wife lay thrashing behind it with
her secret lover) she could hardly help but hear, from time to
time, the muffled grit of railroader talk, with its blend of
scuttlebutt and tall-tale. She could rattle the dishes in their
warm suds or hum too loud for comfort, but not forever. Whenever
there were three or more men in there, they were constantly gabbing
– between hands at poker, slumped on smoky leather, or floating on
a whiskey-edge.

One voice in particular
insisted on separating itself from the others, not merely because
it was loud (they were all loud) or colloquial (earthiness of
speech was endemic): there was something in it that was at once
hearty, spare, generous, withholding. When this one spun a yarn,
the room would be restless at first as some of the uninitiates or
the odd interloper would spar with the teller, according to custom
and at certain sanctioned intervals; then gradually these exchanges
gave way to rapt attention, as the voice took control and the story
itself grew larger and grander (though many had told it before) and
the laughter at the end not quite as predictable. She heard him
laugh too – at the story, at the teller, at the trapped
parishioners. His guffaw would have embarrassed a bull
moose.

“
You remember
the Guffer? Stuffy McGuffin we called him when he first come
brakin’ on the late-great Western. ’Course the son-of-a-bitch was
near fifty even then. Married the leanest of the superintendent’s
three daughters. Hell of a way to break into railroadin.” A pause
for laughter, then: “She turned out to be a bit too tart for him to
ever call her sweetheart, but he always claimed if he caught her
downwind on a Saturday night, she give him more bumps an’ thrills
than a gravel train to Cayuga. Mind you now, these trips didn’t
happen too often, least not as often as Guffer would’ve liked, so
the poor bugger got to draggin’ his caboose into every ‘waterin’
trough’ between Trenton and Ing-arse-hole. Now drinkin’ was
harmless as long as he was brakin’, and even when he fell into
stokin’, it wasn’t too bad – though you all remember the story,
denied by everybody but the Guffer himself, about him pissin’ his
pants in the cab of 1546 on the old Barrie run in the middle of
February an’ the air cold enough to crack walnuts an’ other
precious jewels, and’ old Fartsy Farmer cursin’ beside him an’
tryin’ to see through the snow comin’ as thick as the
Governor-General’s undies, ‘Jesus McJesus, you stupid
son-of-a-bitch, do somethin’ about that stink or I’ll pitch you
onto the first siding I can see.’ ’Course, it’s the ice formin’
round his balls that’s interestin’ Guffer the most, so, driven by
the thought of no more gravel runs to Cayuga, he yanks open the
firebox door, drops his pants, turns round, and
sits down
.”

“
Horseshit!”

Gales of horse laughter.

“
I’m only
repeatin’ what I know to be the gospel truth. The Guffer
soft-boiled his eggs so beautifully that night near Barrie, he went
straight home and at the tender age of fifty-nine started to
assemble his own way-freight. It’s true, the son-of-a-bitch had
five kids before he retired.”

Skeptical, gelding
laughter.

“
I thought you
was gonna tell us a new one, you prevaricatin’ bastard!” Hoots,
steam-whistles, derisive applause.

“
Where was I?
Ah, yes. I got the Guffer up to –”

“
Up to his
arse in bullshit!”

“–
Up to his
last fateful year of the Festerin’ Western, when, in order to save
a dyin’ enterprise, they promoted the old fart to engineer. Christ,
he was like a kid with a hay-rake. An’ they give him one of the new
2160’s, runnin’ highballs between here and Toronto. Well, one day
in the middle of July he gets all tanked up on his stopover in
London, he’s so pissed his eyes are settin’ fire to the
table-cloth, an’ he churns up old ’62 an’ starts to let her loose
around Mandaumin, an’ by this time he’s got her up to eighty miles
an hour an’ climbin’, an’ his fireman’s hanging onto the tender for
dear life and a high wailin’ sound can be heard from the caboose a
hundred yards behind, but the Guffer he’s laughin’ an’ singin’ away
like one of them Eye-talian bassoes with a pinched prick, an’
suddenly they’re only five minutes outside Sarnia Yard, an’
wouldn’t you know, on the main-line track of this here station was
sittin’ the doodle-bug from Stratford waitin’ to take on
passengers. The platform was jammed with people. At first they was
all intent on gettin’ their tickets an’ baggage in order, an’ then
they heard this god-forsaken screech-a-comin’ at them from the east
an’ their hearts froze – it was the Guffer’s song ridin’ along in
front of old ’62, now doin’ ninety-five miles-an-hour an’
scatterin’ car-men, oilers, yard crew an’ jiggers in all
directions. Mercifully the Guffer brought her untouched an’
unscathed – there wasn’t a mark on him – clean through to the
station. Some say he was pullin’ on the throttle ’cause he thought
it was the brake, but we’ll never know. What we do know is that the
engineer, fireman an’ conductor on the doodle-bug jumped left an’
right an’ that the Guffer stopped singin’ about two seconds before
the collision.”

Another pause: to take breath,
relight a pipe?

“
As luck would
have it –”

Raucous response, conspiring
and brotherly, checked only by the anticipation of something
further.

“
As luck would
have it, the doodle-bug was not bashed to one side or the other –
which would have resulted in the grisly deaths of numerous
bystanders or the sudden slaughter of a corral-full of steers – she
was knocked straight an’ clean ahead, she popped up into the air
an’ did a series of back-flips down the main-line as tidy as a
tumbler across a mat. About a hundred yards from the end-of-line
near the old dock by the River, it hopped sideways an’ settled into
an alfalfa field. Which was a good thing, too, ’cause Guffer an’
number 62 was followin’ it real close, rippin’ up track all the way
but stickin’ to its line like a trouper. Then, boom she hits the
block an’ flicks it aside like a flea on your collar, an’
in she went
.”

A gulf of speechlessness.
Finally, on cue, a miniature “In the river?”

“
Christ no,
into the river
bank
, an’ deflectin’
downward so she starts to plough forward, an’ the stoker an’ crew
jump just before she disappears completely into the ground, tossin’
back whole gopher-towns of dirt risin’ up like a huge sandstorm
that covers all of Sarnia, an’ some of the passengers on the
platform think its Armageddon – with the passin’ of the Juggernaut
an’ the great seals busted wide open for all time, an’ the last we
ever saw of old ’62 was the thrashin’ of the caboose before she was
sucked underground.”

“
And the
Guffer?”

Wheezing of freshly stoked
pipe. The timing was all.

“
Oh,
him
. Why, he come up face-first on the other side of the
River, smilin’ and fartin’ and assumin’ he was in paradise. Yessir,
he done the Great Western a genuine favour; he gouged a
tunnel
straight under the St. Clair from the Dominion of Canada to
the U.S. of A. Now all we gotta do is figure out how to get the
son-of-a-bitchin’
train
out of the
hole!”

Uproarious approbation. A
spell had been wound up, achieved, held, and released. She heard
the conversation break up into its customary blurred elements. The
dishes, rattling and all, had got themselves washed and dried. From
the shuffling behind her she knew the men were about to leave, some
to work, some to town or to their bunks. She edged over to the
curtained doorway, drew the velvet slightly apart, and watched.
They were every shape, size and age. They lumbered, sauntered,
hurried – only their faces exposed above mackinaws and denim as
they turned from the cozy brotherhood of their room to the blizzard
outside.

She could not fit the
voice to a body.

M
ost of the times they
played cards – poker – and the yarn-spinning was given over to
sporadic jokes and what sounded like ritual teasing. Even then,
though less often, that grained, seasoned voice prevailed; and no
amount of compulsory bluff-and-blarney could completely disguise
the grit of authenticity at the core of it.

“
Hear the one
about the brewer who couldn’t swim?”

“
Are you in or
out?”

“
In.”

“
What’d he do,
Luce?”

“
Fell into a
vat of his own beer. Raise you two.”

“
See ya’. Did
he drown or what?”

“
Not right
away.” Brief interlude of clinking coins. “He had to crawl out
twice an’ take a piss.”

Belly laugh as big as moose
country.

“
Jesus Murphy,
but who laughs louder at his own shit?”

“
C’mon Luce,
stop laughin’ an tell us what ya’ got.”

“
Three aces.
Sorry.”

“
You
son-of-a-bitch!”

All the coins see-sawed in one
direction.

W
hen they were all
gone, clumping into the snowy dark, she waited fifteen minutes and
then entered the parlour to clean up. She emptied the ashtrays into
a can and was brushing the crumbs off the table when she noticed
that one of the overstuffed chairs at the back was occupied. A
coal-oil lamp, singed and smoking, threw a shadowed light across
the face which was turned towards the door, though it did not
appear to be looking at it. A smouldering briar pipe sat discarded
on the low table beside the chair. Near it, as if flung aside in
the same gesture, lay a puffed, expired hand. At the sound of
falling glass, the face belonging to the hand swung numbly towards
her, tried to focus on the source of irritation, failed, and swung
back.

In that instant she knew who it
was. She had an impression of size – of bulk and crag and
underpracticed muscle – and a rumpled dignity of dress and
demeanour. But it was only the face that registered: the grooved
laugh-lines sagged and fleshed around the mouth – generous and
quick but fallen now into the very shape it did everything to
forestall- and around the eyes also that were capacious and
coal-black and used to dancing for reasons the heart behind them
kept to itself. At this moment, though, they slackened in their
oversize sockets like exhausted gavottes. They saw nothing.

She fought to regain her
breath, turning to go.

“
Don’t,
please. You’re not disturbin’ me.”

It was him. She left.

T
he tenor of the talk
in the parlour of the Widow Jarvis had shifted several quarters as
December of 1885 drew to a close.