Then a wrenching groan, a high-pitched wail, the drones start up and the pipes are on the march again. This releases tears, although the bagpipes do people’s keening for them. A primitive reed instrument awakens something very old, and puts sorrow in a consolingly long perspective. Perhaps because grass is the oldest musical instrument for all kinds of people.
Lily feels secure among all the hard hairy pale male knees keeping time between socks and swinging sporrans and swaying kilts. She feels a camaraderie with the men. As if they’d all fought the war together. She would like to be a soldier. She’s ten. She would like to be a veteran when she grows up. She wouldn’t be afraid of the pain or the bullets, she’d leap over the top and charge with bare knees into battle. Daddy got the DSO medal. She knows because Mr MacIsaac told her.
It’s only when the pipes and drums cease and the brass band at the rear strikes up “Rule Britannia” that Lily feels the first twinge in her left foot, the little one. Her brown boot, with the built-up sole that Daddy made specially, is firmly harnessed between the steel supports of her brace, but it has been rubbing the top of her heel because it’s new. A red stain has spread around her ankle. Lily steals a look, but doesn’t miss a beat. There are Daddy and Mercedes. There are Mr and Mrs MacIsaac. Lily gives them what she hopes is a manly smile. Many people, not just those she knows, smile back.
Lily is unaware of the stigma surrounding her father, and people — not only her family — conspire to keep her that way. There are plenty of children with braces on their legs, some with crooked backs too, but Lily is the only one out marching. She is also the prettiest child ever to have been stricken. And the sweetest. Lily has become well known in town thanks to Mercedes, but she has become well loved because of herself.
New Waterford hasn’t changed much. The company stores have gone. Besco never reopened them after the looting of ’25. Many miners went back to work with an eight-percent wage cut but many others were blacklisted as Bolsheviks and wound up moving south of the border to Boston, and to the mills and lumber camps of New England. It was the beginning of the exodus to points south and west which shows no sign of stopping. The crash of ’29 rocked the world but registered as a ripple in Cape Breton, where it takes a while for the Depression to sink in because it had already been going on for so long. Besides, it is widely believed that Nova Scotia’s catastrophe occurred in 1867 with Confederation. Anything since then has just been an aftershock. No one can imagine how the thirties could be worse than the twenties. And as R.B. Bennett is fond of saying, “Prosperity is just around the corner.”
But nothing can dampen civic pride — the turn-out today shows that. Cape Bretoners have reconciled loyalty to King and country with scorn and skepticism for all things “from away” — the foolish arses in Upper Canada and the useless bowler hats in Whitehall. They are fiercely proud of their veterans, yet bitter about the Canadian army that has so often invaded the coalfields. In spite of this, the armed forces are increasingly an option for the jobless and the working poor looking to get off this cursèd godforsaken rock that they love more than the breath in their own lungs. There is no such place as “down home” unless you are “away”. By November 1929 the process is under way whereby, eventually, more people will have a “down home” than a “home”. Remembrance Day tends to stir up a lot of mixed emotions.
On days like this, Prohibition seems doubly ludicrous. By evening, kitchens will overflow with music and family and conversation. Jugs and cups of tea will be passed around. Mounties will turn a blind eye to hotel bars and speakeasies and more than one brawl will add to the evening’s entertainment.
James will not work tonight. And he certainly will not socialize, although this is the one night when bridges might be mended — he is a veteran, after all, and decorated. But this is also one of two nights in the year when he does not trust himself near a bottle, because he wishes to forget, not remember, the day the Armistice was signed. All over town, people are asking each other the ritual question “Do you remember where you were the day the war ended, b’y?” James remembers all too well. He was in New York City. He was in Giles’s apartment in Greenwich Village. He was walking through the front door because it was unlocked. He had called out but no one answered. He is walking down the hallway, the apartment smells like lavender, he is looking for Kathleen, he finds her — stop
Tonight James needs to be safe at home in the bosom of his family.
Frances is already home playing piano, imagining her future life as a white slave cabaret dancer in Cairo, playing Mumma’s forbidden music from the hope chest — Daddy says it’s coloured music, put it away. She is bobbing on the bench to “Coal Black Rose” when James and Mercedes rush in with Lily. Daddy carries Lily upstairs and Mercedes follows. Frances leaves the piano and takes the steps two at a time to the bathroom, where Daddy unrolls the stocking that’s stuck to Lily’s tiny foot and Mercedes gets the carbolic acid. Lily doesn’t cry out at the pain, she just looks over Mercedes’ shoulder at Frances in the doorway. Frances says, “It’s okay, little gingerbread boy,” which is one of their special codes, adding, “Hayola kellu bas Helm.” Lily’s gaze does not waver as she replies, “Inshallah.” James glances at Frances in the doorway but says nothing. Mercedes bandages Lily’s foot, praying that there won’t be a scene later.
Inshallah is Lily’s magic word. It is from the language that she knows ought not to be used by day except in an emergency. Because the words are like wishes from a genie — don’t waste them. Lily has not even a rudimentary understanding of Arabic; it is, rather, dreamlike. At night in bed, long after lights-out, she and Frances speak the strange language. Their bed language. Frances uses half-remembered phrases and tells fragments of old stories, weaving them with pieces of songs, filling in the many gaps with her own made-up words that approximate the sounds of Mumma’s Old Country tongue. Lily converses fluently in the made-up language, unaware which words are authentic, which invented, which hybrid. The meaning resides in the music and the privacy of their magic carpet bed. Arabian Nights.
Later that evening, when Mercedes has gone into the kitchen to make cocoa for everyone, Lily slips off Daddy’s lap in the wingback chair without waking him and quietly asks Frances to redo her bandage: Mercedes has wrapped it a little too tightly.
Sweet Sixteen
Frances has grown an inch and a half. She is now five feet tall and old enough to quit school. And she would, except that Daddy will not hear of it. Frances wants to get out in the world and garner some practical experience so she can join the French Foreign Legion as a nurse. She wants to cross the desert disguised as a camel driver by day and a seductress by night, smuggling secret documents to the Allies. Mata Hari and her seven veils. Except that Frances would escape the firing squad at the last second. But Daddy only ever has one response regardless of the extravagance of Frances’s ambitions: “Even spies — especially spies — need an education.”
Frances has already shamed Mercedes by flunking two grades. Not that it makes much difference, seeing’s how they were both put ahead a year when they started, owing to the fact that they could already read and do long division. So by Frances’s calculations she has really only flunked one grade.
Frances always sat at the back of the class with the hulking boys until the teacher realized it was best to move her up front. She has become pretty tight with the Corneliuses. Cornelius the younger has turned out nice, his friends call him Puss-Eye. Everyone expects him to be a priest because no one can imagine him as a miner or a soldier. Cornelius the older is nasty, his nickname is Petal. Frances saw Petal’s thing three years ago but she has never shown him hers. From Petal, Frances extorted forbidden information and cigarettes in exchange for false hope. Petal always thought Frances was going to let him demonstrate his lessons one of these days, but Frances would just tell him, “You’re nothing but a brute. Piss off.” Petal quit school last year and moved to Vermont to cut wood and terrorize Americans, so aside from Puss-Eye and Mercedes, who don’t count, Frances is without a worthy ally at Mount Carmel. Unless you can call Sister Saint Eustace Martyr an ally.