Lily's Story Page 10

  In the shimmering glow around her, Lil saw that she was standing, still hidden by the pines, slightly above a sort of cove where the stream entered the River, a gravelly indentation really that formed a beach four or five feet below the main line of the bank. A pit-fire was in full bloom; two figures were seated on stumps, roasting something that might have been rabbit. A longish bundle of something lay rumpled in the shadows behind them. On the point formed by the cove, tied to a boulder, a row-boat rocked and complained.

  “Goddammit, I figure we oughta haul his black arse across while the gettin’s good.”

  “I’m hungry. So are you.”

  “Hungry for two thousand dollars, I am.”

  “Besides, I don’t like that moon. It’s gonna cloud over afore midnight. Eat.”

  “This shit’s all burnt.”

  “Suits you then, don’t it.”

  Without realizing it Lil had backed off so that she was fully shielded by a tall pine. Neither man was looking in her direction; they faced the south-west where the moon sat, unclouded. Something icy and alien gripped her. She could not flee; she could not even close her eyes. Hence, she was the first to see the rumpled bundle flinch, stretch, and assemble itself. Solomon was sitting up, his hands bound behind him with rope. Another rope dangled loosely from an ankle. Somehow he had worked his legs free. Without once taking his eyes off the backs of his captors, he rose to his full height without the slightest sound and edged towards the boat fifteen feet away.

  “Sometimes, Sherm, you talk to me’s if I was no better’n that nigger.”

  Sherm let the opportunity pass.

  “Matter-of-fact, think I’ll feed some of this here charcoal shit to him right now. Cain’t have him lookin’ too lean an’ all, can we?” Beau turned. “Christ! He’s after the boat.”

  Both men jumped instantly, but Solomon was already there. He placed one foot over the gunwale, the other on the rock next to the painter, and gave a tremendous shove. Lil could hear the whoosh of air leave his lungs as he did so. The painter rope popped free and the boat shot out into the swift current. Solomon fell face-down into the aft section with a clatter of wood and bone. Unruddered, the boat spun slowly – caught in a momentary eddy.

  “What the fuck you doin’, you stupid nigger! You cain’t row that thing with your hands tied up. Come on back here!”

  “We’ll get him downstream,” Sherm said, already heading back for his gun. “If not, he’ll end up on the other side. They always do.”

  But Beau wasn’t listening. “Oh Jesus! Jesus!” he screamed as if his soul had been seared. “He’s goin’ over!”

  Solomon was standing upright; his powerful six-foot frame burned black against the pre-harvest moon behind him. He was standing on one of the thwarts staring down into the current that was just catching the boat and swinging it, it seemed, southward to safety, and freedom. But Solomon leaped high and northward, as if his fugitive eye lay still upon the gourd of the North Star. His figure, abandoned by the boat, arced across the horizon and entered the welcoming water face-first. The eddy of bubbles, which was all that marked his exit, was soon swept away.

  “I never seen the like o’ that, never. Did ya see the stupid fucker, Sherm. Jumps right in there an’ takes our two thousand bucks with him. I tell ya, I’ll never figure out a nigger if I live a hundred years.”

  Sherm was throwing water on the fire and gathering their things together. “We better get lookin’ for another boat. This ain’t exactly friendly territory, you know.”

  Beau continued to stare out over the foaming torrent, wild with the weight of the glacial seas behind it, and yelled to that portion of the universe he could see: “Why’d ya go an’ do that, ya stupid, ignorant son-of-a-bitch?”

  “Why?”

  No echo came back.

  “Maybe we can get the body,” Sherm said.

  4

  Long after the bounty-hunters had left – their fire doused, the sky clouded over and menacing, the wind rushing to keep up with the river’s urgency – Lil stood where she was and wrestled with the dark angels of her imagination. Once again she saw Solomon hunted through the unending nights, fleeing further and further into the forest. Later in her life she would know that he fled not because he feared capture or bondage or humiliation – these he had known and borne already – but because he needed to find, in these woods, a nightmare more horrific than his own, to stare it straight in the eye, and whisper oblivion to it.

  How welcome those waters must have felt, she thought, how sweet the tender descent, how soft the bottom-sands sifted and cleansed by centuries of seeking, how loving the icy currents that would let the flesh float unrotted from the bones that would drift, inch by hour, seaward over time – they eyes in the blanched, purged skull titled forever towards light.

  Lil knew she must get to Corunna as soon as possible at whatever cost. She had no idea how much time she had spent staring out at the River. The night wind was up; the sky was covered and threatening. She was shivering with fright or, worse, fever. She couldn’t feel her feet against the road as she turned north, stumbling in the dark on jagged boards, patches of logs and branches. Then the rain came, lashing and cold, blending with the blood running down her calves

  She fell. She rolled onto her side, partly screened by some underbrush, numb and shivering, peering curiously at the silver imbedded in her right hand. Her eyes closed. No dream forestalled her slow falling away.

  Even though she had not yet opened her eyes, Lil was awake. She was warm. Her shivering had subsided. She was propped up against something soft and inviting. A wooly shawl curled affectionately over her shoulders. She had slept. Someone had found her and brought her to a warm, safe place. Nearby a dampened fire radiated heat and welcome. Papa! She opened her eyes and looked over at the crouched figure across from her.

  “Ah, the little one wakes up.”

  “Have you seen Papa?” she asked, faintly, in Pottawatomie.

  Southener, his kindly eyes scrutinizing her, said: “I made you drink the tamarack tea; I am sorry if I hurt you. You were shaking with the swamp fever.”

  Lil felt too weak to move, but Southener noted her anxious glances about the campsite, which was deep in one of the pine groves.

  “They are safe, little one,” he smiled, his skin as rough as hickory bark, his sable hair flecked with gray and tied behind with a leather barrette, his gnarled warrior’s hands too large now for the uses to which they were put and turning restlessly in upon themselves. “I found them near you when I picked you up, soaking and hot, on that pitiful roadway.” He reached down and produced Lil’s drenched pack and the pouch with the sacred treasures of her life in it.

  “Thank you,” Lil whispered, keeping to his language.

  “You’re young and very strong,” he said, stirring the fire a little to give more light to their conversation. “Already the fever is gone. By morning you’ll be ready to go north.”

  Did he know?

  “When I started to dry out your things after the rain stopped, I found this map,” he said unfolding for her Papa’s letter which she could not read. “It will tell you where to go.”

  So Papa had not left her a note after all. Lil tried to think of what that meant, but she could not think at all, she was drifting into sleep again, relieved even to feel the jagged pain in her right hand. When her eyes once more opened, the glow of false-dawn was visible through the pines overhead. Southener was awake, watching her as if she were some sort of wooden idol whose very presence would bring the news he was waiting for. He was beside her, with steaming tea at the ready. As she sipped at its fragrance, Southener washed the cuts on her legs with a piece of flannel and then stuck some tiny leaves on each of them. The stinging was not unpleasant.

  “As soon as the sun comes up, I must leave you. There’s meat in your pack; eat it if you can. You’re safe here. When you feel like walking, the road is directly east of us; the morning sun over the tree-line will take you right there.”
>
  “I remember you, Southener,” Lil said. “I’m much bigger now.”

  “You were the best dancer,” Southener said. “I watched you all day. You let the elves loose in your legs. You let the trolls decide for themselves. Now your tongue tells the true story.”

  “Old Samuels taught me,” Lil said, wide awake now, every nerve alert.

  “You have made me happy in my age,” he went on in a hushed tone that Lil had already come to recognize and revere, perfectly aware that both of them were, in a special sense, listeners. “I am almost at the end of my exile. I have little use any more for the magic amulet that has shielded me from my enemies and rescued me from my own folly many-a-time.”From a pouch at his waist he drew a pebble of blood-red jasper that glowed even in the dull dawn-light, that pulsed as if quick with hope and memory, whose indistinct oval had been rubbed over generations to resemble – if you looked long and rightly enough – the vibrant, plasmic bubble of a baby’s heart. Southener let it lie in his open palm, let it breathe the fire’s flame for a while.

  “This will bring you luck all your days,” he said. “Not happiness, as you already know, for they do not wear the same colour. It will make your life a good one, with enough joy to keep you from despair, enough hurt to keep you loving. It will help you find a home, here and in the hereafter. It has helped me do all these things, fivefold. I am nearing the end of a journey that’s bigger than I am. I received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as such by generation upon generation of tribes who have dwelt in these woods and waters and passed on, as we all do. I ask only two things in return. The days of its guardianship are almost over; there is little magic left in the forests and the streams, older now than our legends; the locomotives of the white man’s soul are on their way. You will hear them soon. So, when you have no more use for the stone’s powers, I ask that you return it to the sacred grove whence it came, to the gods of that place who lent their spirit to it. I have looked at the map your Papa left, and I know when the proper time comes, you will be close to it. There is no way of marking such a place on a map, for the penitent must feel its presence before he can see it. You will know when you are standing on it, though, because it resides beneath the protecting branches of a giant hickory on a knoll just where the forest begins, and when you look west and north you will be able to see, at the commencement of summer, the joining of the Lake and the River set perfectly on a line to the North Star, whom we call the Eye of Wendigo.”

  Lil was watching the miniature heart, absorbing light like blood.

  “Secondly, I am nearing my own end. My people have been scattered like chaff before the flail. There is no home for us to rest our souls in. Save one. North of the town your father has chosen for you lies the military reserve, a boggy swampland no one, not even the rapacious whites, will ever want. Above the main bay, just past the point where lake and river meet, is a small cove among the sand dunes, and here, unobserved among the grasses and snakeweed, is an ancient Indian cemetery which bears the remains of hundreds of souls who could find no burial place with their own people. It’s a graveyard for wanderers, for the lost, and for the permanently dispossessed. If the military knew it was there they would perhaps allow the spirits to remain undisturbed, but certainly they would let no new dead be interred there. So it is that we few remaining outcasts must have our corpses carried there in the dark and secretly and unceremonially buried in that consecrated earth. My request to you is to keep that ground holy in your mind, protect it with your life, and once in a while honour it with your presence and prayers. If you see a freshly-turned mound among the milkweed and rustling poplar, know that I lie under it, wanting, like all of us, to be remembered.”

  With that he placed the talisman in Lil’s left hand and rolled her fingers gently over it. Some part of its potency must have been immediately transferred for when Southener looked up to check the wonder in Lil’s face, she was blissfully asleep.

  The instructions the map gave were sharp and ineluctable. Lil was good at drawing and pictures. With her pendant, crucifix, rabbit’s foot, Testament and Southener’s amulet tucked lovingly in their leather sachet, Lil began the long walk north moments after sunrise.

  She did not stop at the Partridges nor acknowledge, if she saw it, the wave of greeting and farewell anxiously offered. She walked steadily, purposefully, and to any one of the startled onlookers in the booming hamlet of Froomfield below the Reserve, almost serenely. “She’s in a daze or a reverie,” was one unsolicited opinion. “Nobody passes through this town and ignores our windmill,” was another. If Lil saw or heard the creaking, anomalous replica of its Dutch cousin that intercepted the north-west blows from the Lake, she gave no sign.

  Through the Reserve, six miles long, the road meandered and rested, but the wisp of a figure of a girl kept its pace – noticed and unaccosted – sights set on what a map held out. Just before noon, with the sun in full stretch, Lil walked into her first town.

  In her head Papa’s map hovered like a detached palm-print, a legacy in code. Her boots, worn thin, cracked on the town’s singular macadam. Lil was tempted neither left nor right. It was possible that she did not see Cameron’s Emporium with its checker-glass windows a-glitter with frill and frumpery; did not smell the dust and wheeze from Blaikie’s Foundry, home to the famous Blaikie Patent Steam Engine; did not sniff at the delectables from two bakeries nor the acrid smarting of Hall’s tannery in the weighted, standing heat of summer; did not hear the torturing of wood nor the grinding of ill-matched gears in Flintoft’s steam-mill; did not respond to her own reflection in the coppery mirror of Durand’s pond where the little walking-bridge crossed the canal from Perch Creek, nor laugh at the gleeful whoop and water-slap of near-naked youths emancipated by summer; did not cross herself or say a grateful prayer on passing the seven chapels dedicated – each in its own fervent, unecumenical manner – to the indivisibility of the Divine Spirit; did not smile, in passing, at Crampton’s “Double-N-One” tavern for wayfaring tipplers who, if they stood on their heads, could discern the sign INN as it was meant to appear to the sober and upright. Indeed, no-less-than-three respectable ladies and one irrespectable gentleman nodded to her out of concern or curiosity, and received no decipherable recognition of their magnanimity.

  As Lil left the last of the ordered pathways, her eyes set upon the red-pine forest to the west of the Errol Road, the one o’clock factory whistle at Blaikie’s shrilled and beckoned, and out in the blue bays of Lake Huron just beyond the pine-ridge the steamer Ben Franklin hooted cheerily and democratically as it pointed itself north to the fresh-water oceans of the Cree and Ojibwa. A mile up this high road Lil noticed the break in the forest wall. For the first time in many hours her heart jumped in its stirrups. The map was real. She could read. Something vital with a future waited for her at the end of this lane. Although her exhausted feet made no distinctive shift in their cadence, Lil was sure she was skipping. A melody disarranged itself in her head and sailed like a loose trapeze.

  At the end of the lane, set in two pockets of cleared pine, lay the farms. Small one to the left with a log hut and sheds; large one to the right with the whitewashed, split-log house and the sideboard barns and the emerald grapevines and the pond with Sunday-white geese on it.

  For a while she just stood at the point where the lane branched into paths, waiting for something to happen. Some large creature let out a muffled sneeze; hens, unseen, clicked pebbles into their craws; a sow wallowed, setting off a sequence of squeals and oozing. Above the stone chimney on the white-washed cottage, a bubble of pale smoke lifted in expectation, then stalled. Above it a red-tailed squirrel hung and craned, feigning patience.

  At the last moment Lil remembered to knock on the firmly latched, blue-trimmed door set in the exact centre of the facing wall. She felt the shadow of the overhanging eave cool her cheek. She pulled tightly the bridle on her heart, and waited.

  The door was pulled inward slowly, guardedly. Lil saw the strong woman�
��s-hand, red from the sun, gripping the sash before the face and figure were disclosed.

  “Yes?”

  “Aunt Bridie?”

  “An’ who might you be, if I may ask?”

  “I’m...Lil.”

  “What do you want here, girl? State your business or leave a body in peace.”

  “Papa sent me.”

  The hand dropped from the sash, the door sagged fully open, untended.

  Sensing the bewilderment in the woman’s face, Lil’s heart sank. She fought against the faintness and vertigo as best she could, but it felt as if her bones had melted outright in a treacherous sun. As she slumped onto the doorstep, she was certain she heard herself say, “I’m Lily. Lily Fairchild.”

  6

  1

  Saturday was Lily’s favourite day. Summer and winter, spring and fall, Saturday was the day of deliverance. Even though the late June sun had lifted barely half a brow over the forest rim in the distant east, Lily felt liberated; and she conveyed her mounting sense of excitement to Benjamin, the Walpole ‘paint’ who jogged happily over the rough road towards the village. Soon-to-be an official town, Lily recalled. A Saturday in June was particularly magical.

  Although Aunt Bridie had rejected Uncle Chester’s plea for a genuine birthday cake – “You’ll spoil the child silly, you old coot” – she had baked strawberry tarts special for the occasion and even wrapped the newly-made linen blouse and plain calico skirt in tissue as if it were a real surprise. Uncle Chester clapped when she opened it; Auntie gave him one of her quartering glances but said nothing. Later as they sat outside on wicker chairs in the dooryard perfumed with wild hedgeroses, with the gloaming of the solstice settling as softly as ash about them, Bachelor Bill walked over, and through his shy grin – made more prominent by the absence of all but two mismatching front teeth – presented Lily with a blue hair ribbon that might have been made of silk. “Ma bought it for Violet way back, but she don’t wear it,” he explained. Lily kissed him on the cheek, which either frightened or scandalized him so much he could not be persuaded to play the mouth-organ that never left the back pocket of his overalls. When he had gone, Auntie mumbled about such “fool things” as hair ribbons, so Lily, though tempted by the encouragement in Uncle’s eye, hid the gift away with her other precious things. Several weeks after her arrival, so long ago now, she had thought she ought to reveal to Auntie the sacred objects in her treasure-pouch, but even then something told her to hold back, that a lady as angular and impressive as Aunt Bridie would not likely be overawed by a talisman or even one of God’s Testaments. So they remained secreted in her room to be taken out on those few occasions when she had felt unhappy here, and even then with no sense of why she would be overwhelmed suddenly with a sadness for things once prized and irretrievable.