Lily's Story Read online

  “How does he get here if he can’t see?” Lil asked Papa. “He says he’s lived here so long he knows every bush and beetle in the territory,” Papa said. And it seemed to be true, as Lil would watch him enter their land at the far corner of the East Field just past the Brown Creek (that went, they said, all the way to the Indian camp in the back bush), and then thread his way through the maze of stumps and ash-heaps, never once stepping on the haphazard swirls of wheat between.

  “Redmen smells his way in the bush,” he told Lil. “Don’t need eyes. Redmen sniffs the air currents like the white-tail.” He demonstrated. “Raspberry jam,” he announced, “from the Frenchman’s woman.”

  “Yes,” said Lil, duly amazed.

  Last week, though, after the Frenchman and his three eldest – Luc, Jean-Pierre and Anatole – had finished piling and burning the last log in the North Field, and after some firewater had been consumed by all, Lil saw Old Samuels weave his way towards the back bush, teetering and righting himself as he went. At the corner of the East Field, he paused. The sounds of the men parting in the other direction diminished and died. Old Samuels appeared to look towards the east. Then a small brown boy slipped from the bush and touched Old Samuels’ hand. He shook it off. The boy turned. Old Samuels followed, exactly two paces behind until the woods reclaimed them.

  “Your Papa got a nose for the wind,” he said whenever Papa went off with Acorn or Sounder. “Hunting’s no good here now. Not like the olden days. They go all the way to Chatham, I guess, to find any bucks this time of year.”

  Lil wanted to know more about Chatham but Mama began coughing and she had to take the soup in. When she got back, she saw it was no use: Old Samuels had lit up his pipe, stuffed with aromatic tobacco. “White Mens’ tobacco no good,” he would say. “Not like the olden days.” But when he got smoking, he didn’t talk.

  Lil may not have known much about Chatham yet, or any other town – Port Sarnia, Sandwich, London – but she was seven and she had travelled some miles into the bush with Papa when he trapped in the winter; she had seen the other farms along the line north of them. She could read the blazes on the trees and find the faint paths through the bush that would open suddenly upon sun-lit beaver meadows, some of them as big as the East Field. Beyond the Millar’s farm she had seen the ‘road’ that was said to meander all the way to Port Sarnia, and from there to London hundreds and thousands of miles to the east. She knew too that a great river swept by them no more than half-a-day’s walk from their own doorstep.

  Someday Papa would take her with him.

  “Yes, little-blond-one-with-doe’s-feet, your Papa he likes Chatham very much. Not like it used to be. I was there a long time ago when the Yankees come across and my brothers all died in the field there by the antler river. All changed now. Full of niggers now.”

  Lil knew it was futile to ask but did so anyway. Old Samuels surprised her. “Black men”, he said. “Come from where the Yankees live. Niggers is afraid of the Yankees. The Yankees takes their land, their houses, their women. They run away, a thousand days journey, all the way to Chatham.”

  “Do the white people there help them?”

  Old Samuels paused. Then he began to laugh. Since he was blind, Lil was used to watching, not his blank eyes, but his mouth and nostrils. The laughter started with a trembling of the latter, spread to the wrinkling corners of the lips and shook without mercy the flaps of flesh below his chin.

  Lil waited.

  “Niggers run away. Ojibwa and Attawandaron just stands around and wonders what’ll happen next. Once we get some place, we don’t like to leave.”

  Lil wasn’t sure what he meant, but she found herself laughing along with him. “Make me laugh, little one. Good for the rheumatism.”

  2

  Lil was not prepared for the Frenchman’s place. The customary procedure for the homesteader in the new territory was to clear room for his cabin near the front ‘line’ of the property, then proceed in a systematic fashion to open up ‘fields’ to the north, east and south. When at last Lil was allowed to accompany Anatole back to his place to fetch some garden greens for Mama, she was surprised to find their house somewhere near the centre of several haphazard ‘fields’ of no determinate shape. Several nut trees had been left standing, in random wonder, amidst the fledgling wheat and enthusiastic if undisciplined vegetable garden. All trees were to be cut down: that was the unspoken code here, one of the unarticulated motives that drove the homesteaders to the mutual service and support they required to survive.

  The Frenchman’s cabin had begun life as a log structure of the typical rectangular design, but time, weather, whim and exigency had added their intentions to the original. Rooms of planks and split logs – packed with mortar and straw – jutted out, sagged, or lay half-built and dazed where the Frenchman’s imagination or optimism had failed him. No windows looked in or out. Against the east wall, roughly speaking, a lean-to of sorts had been erected wherein the ox-team of Bessie and Bert found little comfort at day’s end among the resident pigs and visiting barred rocks.

  Much of the cooking and indeed family life took place outside the murky interior of the homestead. LaRouche, using the trade he had abandoned for farming after the war against the States, had built a fine stone oven-and-fireplace protected from the rain by a canvas affair rigged out of army tenting, deer-hides and one old sail salvaged, according to its owner, from the Battle of Put-In Bay. Here Madame LaRouche – referred to as Maman by her brood of eleven and as Fluffy by her husband in undisguised admiration for her three hundred pounds of flesh, sturdiness and good health – presided over hearth and oven with a temper that alternated between wheezing cheeriness and tongue-biting pique.

  Lil could not for an instant take her eyes off Maman. She watched in awe as Maman punched and tormented the sourdough as if she were beating the belly of an obdurate husband, her great breasts rolling and protesting beneath the homespun smock she wore night and day. Lil shuddered whenever Maman’s hand, operating on its own, would shoot out or back to stun the cheek of anyone who ventured too close or dared too much. Later, she would see that same child comfortably housed in Maman’s lap, drifting into secure sleep.

  In return for offerings from Papa’s hunting expeditions, Maman LaRouche made much of the staple food during the times when Mama was in bed. Preserves, jams, greens from her garden in season, salt-port and ‘bully beef’ from the venison Papa brought home. While the Frenchman himself did not hunt – having given up guns following his service – he usually went along on the shorter excursions to supply encouragement, unsolicited advice, and refreshments from his still in the bush. The older boys did not share their father’s pacifism.

  Often, then, Lil was left alone with Maman and her youngest children, all boys except for Madeleine who was just six and now the only girl. Maman soon took Lil “under wing”. She was teaching her to cook and spin and sew – all of which Lil had a talent for though not as much persistence and application as Maman would have hoped. But then Lil was not French. Often Maman sang while she worked – wistful melodies in her Norman tongue that seemed more sweetly fragile because they sailed towards serenity out of such an unnavigable bulk. Although Maman did not tell conventional stories, she had opinions on everyone and everything.

  “Those Millars,” she said with the usual hushed stridency reserved for such remarks, “they’re gonna be trouble, wait and see. Scotch, the both of ’em. Give me the Irish any day, even your kind.”

  For good measure, Lil smiled back.

  “An’ you keep away from that Ol’ Sams,” she said daily in another more sinister tone. “That carrot of his may be shrivelled up but it’s still got juice in the root. You mind them hands too, little chickadee; believe-you-me, Maman knows all about them kind of paws.”

  Lil of course paid little direct attention to any of this, but she nodded and queried and did all she could to get Maman going.

  “A pretty, fair thing like you oughta get away from this place
as soon as you can. That’s Maman’s advice. Go to the city. Go to Chatham or Sandwich. They’re real nice places. Lots of people.”

  Then Maman would be launched on a description of her brief but dazzling courtship with Corporal LaRouche of Malden, of the clapboard house they lived in, the dances they went to, the clothes they wore, the times they had before the Yankees came and the world collapsed. “I said to Gaston, I’ll go with you to the bush, I’ll have your babies, I’ll clean your shit, but I’m not about to die out there without a priest at my side, prayin’ in my ear and rubbin’ my head with holy oil an’ smoothin’ my slide into Heaven.”

  Lil swallowed her gooseberry tart.

  “I told him I don’t care if he has to hop to Sandwich on one snowshoe in a blizzard – a promise is a promise.” Maman surprised the pastry dough with a sucker-punch to the gut.

  “What’s a priest?” Lil ventured, at last.

  A priest, it turned out, was a kind of preacher. Papa didn’t like preachers. Once, last summer, when Lil had been on her own in the withered garden near the ‘line’, watching the black ants ooze in and out of their honeycomb, she heard the crack of a twig along the Frenchman’s path. She looked up in time to see before her a large florid man dressed all in black. He was still puffing from the exertion of his trek through the bush. His blue eyes bounced like agates in his puffed face before they came to temporary rest on the rims of his cheeks. His smile was as broad as his belly.

  “Good afternoon, little elf.” The sound boomed, echoed, receded.

  Lil stared.

  “I am a man of God.”

  “I’ve come all the way from London.”

  “Just to see you.”

  “Do you know who God is, little one?”

  “Would you kindly tell your pa that the Methodist man is here.”

  Lil did not have to tell Papa. He had heard, even in the North Field, and had come striding past the cabin towards them. Lil knew enough to run. She heard Papa’s voice raised the way it was when he cursed Bert and Bessie or a stubborn ironwood. His axe flashed in the sun. However, the preacher was already scuttling like a duck into the safety of the Lord’s bush.

  Lil wanted to ask Papa who God was.

  Mama did not hate preachers as much. Sometimes, after being in her bed for several days, when some colour had come back into her eyes, she would reach under the little bed Papa had built especially for her and pull out the large, dark book she called the Bible. Lil watched, poised and alert, as Mama’s fingers made the pages, thin as bee’s wings, flutter and settle.

  “There are the words God gave us.”

  “Read me some of them, Mama.”

  “Not today, my sweet. Mama’s just a bit too tired. Tomorrow.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  Then, seeing the look in her child’s eye, she would close the book and in a reedy quaver begin to sing the spinning song, which reached Lil’s ear in this form:

  Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o

  Hi diddly iddly, hi diddle air-o

  Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um

  At first Lil would hum along, then gradually pick up the exotic, tongue-tumbling syllables one at a time, like stitches, giving to them whatever meaning the emotions of the moment allowed.

  3

  Papa was not back. Lil had been able to find enough small logs to keep the fire alive overnight though it was not banked properly, the cabin became suffocating in the late August heat. She made some tea, warmed up the soup and went into Mama’s room.

  Mama spilled most of the soup. Lil held her hand to guide the tin cup to her lips. Mama closed her eyes.

  The morning outside was beautiful. The sun, sensing the loss of its powers, steeped the windless air over the fields. High in the pines and arching elms, cicadas announced noon.

  When Lil came in, Mama was sitting in the rocker Papa had fashioned for her out of cedar. She gave Lil a wan smile and said: “Would you help Mama with her hair?” As her mother watched her in tender, wordless encouragement, Lil managed to heat a kettle of water and get it foaming with some of the soap Maman said she bought off the pedlar Papa had chased away. Mama leaned over, her brow at rest on the arm of the chair, her long hair caressing the floor. For a moment she seemed to be asleep, but when Lil began to pour the soft warm water over her, letting it fall gently back into the kettle, she murmured and her hand reached out to squeeze some part of Lil’s. How beautiful Mama’s hair was, its former glory regained as she lay back in the rocker and let the afternoon sun kindle and hearten and scatter praise where it would, and Lil took her mother’s bone-brush and stroked and stroked, and Mama’s eyes brightened before entering some dream where beauty was still possible. A long time after she said, “Let’s have tea, little one.”

  Lil, excited, got out the china pot and the two tiny tea-cups with their matching blue saucers, stirred the slumbering fire and prepared tea just as she remembered Mama doing it. She even fetched the last of the little blueberry cakes Maman LaRouche had given them. But best of all Mama began to talk – in brief whispered phrases, the pauses like hours or seasons between them.

  “The place we come from, your Papa and me, is a long ways across the biggest ocean in the world. We were married there. We were very happy. But it wasn’t a happy land. The priests and the preachers didn’t get along. The crops failed, many times. We were hungry. Papa got angry and decided to leave. You were already tucked inside my belly. We went on a sailing ship three times bigger than this house. We packed everything we owned into two trunks they put in the hold.”

  The odour of hot ash and decay hung in the humid air outside the cabin and in the room itself, as if a whole summer’s burning was spreading like fungus in the thickening heat. Blue-bottles buzzed, unappeased.

  “I figured we’d die on that ship, but we didn’t. We made it because we loved one another, we wanted happiness or death. Then after we got onto another ship, a smaller one, we sailed along the big lake just south of here, and a storm struck us down. The boat come apart in the waves near the long point. Dozens of people drowned. Papa and me were in the only boat that got to shore. We lost everything but our lives. Even the tools Papa bought for us in Quebec.”

  The room darkened steeply, the sun was eclipsed by the high horizon of the trees. Gently Lil unwound Mama’s fingers from the blue tea-cup, hearing her deep, anxious breathing. How Lil wished that Old Samuels would slip in unnoticed, and be in the mood to tell a long story. Mama could just rock there and listen and smile.

  “Before the White Mens come, this was a magic place,” he would say, that ambiguous twinkle ever at the edge of his voice. “The gods of the Mohawk and the gods of the Huron fought their great battles here among the spirits of my own people, the Attawandaron. In them days, the bears were as big as hickory trees.” Pause: for the power of that image to take root. “When the foreign gods left, they took all of the Hurons and most of my brothers with them. But the souls of my ancestors stayed right here where they been for a thousand generations. Attawandaron don’t run; they hang round, like Old Samuels and Sounder and Acorn. Even when them silly Ojibwa sells this land they don’t own to the White Mens, Old Samuels just laugh. And smoke his pipe – with White Mens’ tobacco stolen from our gods who gave it as a gift to all men.”

  Old Samuels did not come. The smoke of early evening drifted in, adhered. Lil decided to let the fire go out; the air was already too warm. Leaving her mother asleep in the chair, Lil started up the ladder to the loft.

  “Lil. Don’t go up. Sleep with Mama tonight.”

  Barely able to contain her excitement, Lil scrambled back down and then helped her mother towards her curtained-off cubicle. Her arms were thin as willow, the flesh draped over the bones. Lil slipped out of her cotton dress and under the sheet with Mama.

  “Open this, please,” Mama said. In her hand, in the fading light, Lil could see a small box made of aromatic, in-laid woods. It was the most beautiful object she had ever seen. With her ni
mble fingers she tripped the slim gold latch, and the lid opened.

  Mama held out a cameo pendant with a silver chain that shimmered in the gloaming. Fortuitously the last log in the fire burst into brief and final flame, and Lil was able to see that there was, beneath the cameo’s glaze, the merest sketch of a woman’s head: two or three quick but telling strokes. With a start, Lil recognized her own eyes.

  “Lily. Your grandmother.”

  Mama’s eyes filled with tears. She reached into the box again. “I saved this, out of the storm.” She held up a gold chain on the end of which dangled a slender cross no more than half an inch long. Instinctively Lil leaned forward and the crucifix settled on her throat as if it had always expected to be there.

  Then Mama fell back against her pillow. She crooked her left arm and Lil, as she had seen Maman LaRouche’s little ones do so often, slid into the embrace and held herself there as if the world would leave if she blinked.

  Lil had left the curtain open. In the dark, the embers of the fire glowed, blood-red, and succumbed without a murmur. The night-air, remembering that it was almost September, turned as chill and sharp as the sabre-shaped moon guiding it. The season’s heat and smoke and ash rose with it: distilled, crystalline, translated.

  When Lil woke, the sun was already above the tree-line, sifting through the east window and toasting her feet. She had been kept warm throughout the night by the final, fierce heat of her mother’s will. Beside her now, that flesh lay as cold as the ice that clenched the streams of mid-December.

  3

  1

  Sometimes Lil tried hard to remember Mama exactly as she was before she took to her bed and left. It wasn’t easy. In summer, the wheat in the East Field turned golden brown under the lazing sun. The LaRouche boys came over to help them cut and thresh it. Lil sat in the shade of the big maple near the house and let the kernels whisper through her fingers like Indian beads. Papa smiled. Luc and Jean-Pierre watched her as they worked. When she turned her own gaze back on them, they looked away sharply. Lil felt something fresh, unruly and alien surge up through her chest: she wondered at it but gave it no name or image. In the fall, the trees that were not pine gave forth their second bloom – brighter and more prodigal than the green gifts of April: like a rush of blood against the sudden foreboding of cold. The leaves swam – dizzying, breathless – and drowned in pools of their own composition. For a while even the bush relented a little: the eye could meander now, reconnoitre, improvise, surprise the sun here and there in hollows of snow, loiter among shape and shadow where the winter light married the dark configurations of trees. In the winter you breathed out more than in.