Lily's Story Read online

  All the fires were out when Lil woke with a strange feeling inside her even stronger than before. Her friend had placed a blanket over her and rolled another one as a pillow for her head. She got up and, as if impelled by some force both familiar and inscrutable, stepped straight into the darkness behind the circle of dwellings. A slice of moon, as it sailed through ragged cloud, was glinting streaks of light – enough for Lil to be able to pick her way past the vines and overripe melons into the pitch of the bush itself. If she were following a sound she was not conscious of hearing it; and nothing could be seen ahead but the denser shadow of the tree-trunks themselves.

  Lil stopped, in a bit of a clearing. Overhead the moon popped out like a glass eye in a jelly jar. A bat brushed its bachelor wing against the sky. In the nearest pine, a Massassauga stuttered against bark. Owl’s eye flicked shut.

  Lil was already watching them. The Indian girl, the one named Petta-song (Rising Sun) who had led Sounder into her wigwam, was tipped over backwards on the ground. Her hair, unbraided, parroted the lolling motion of her face lathered with moon-sweat. Papa was kneeling between her bare legs like the Frenchman when he prayed, though he wore no clothes. Papa’s hands were gripping her breasts as if they were axe-handles, and his whole body was bunched and aimed at hers as it was when he had marked a pine-tree for chopping. With each blow Petta-song whimpered and Papa sighed, until at last the girl flung both legs at the moon and let out a shriek that shook the melons out of their sleep and roused the embering campfires, that sounded like some virgin giving birth to a god. To which news the axeman responded with the seasoned groan of a man bearing the word of his own demise.

  4

  1

  From her sanctuary in the loft Lil could see – through the new glass window Papa had installed in honour of her eleventh birthday – the stars, the quarter moon, the black rampart of trees, and the outlines of a genuine road to the west, now that they were officially a county. Behind her the deer-mice pretended to skulk and cower, the swallows dozed with their new brood under the eaves. Very clearly Lil saw the two figures detach themselves from the road and walk purposefully towards the cabin. They walked like no farmer Lil had ever seen. Just as they knocked, doffed their hats and entered, the candlelight caught their red hair, slick lapels, polished boots.

  As soon as Lil heard them speak she knew they were Scotch. She was very good at voices. One spoke smoothly, the other with a sort of hitch or kink somewhere in every sentence.

  “Yes, thank you very much, but just a thimbleful if you don’t mind: good for the gout my doctor says.”

  A gurgle of whiskey escaping.

  “I’ll join you as well. I-er-haven’t got the gout, but of course I’m anticipatin’ it.”

  They both laughed.

  “Bein’ a gentleman who gets out and around, you’ll know all about the new county and the marvelous – could I say miraculous – improvements it’s bringin’ its citizens, whatever their race or beliefs.”

  “Or, uh, colour,” added Kinky.

  “Citizenship in Her Majesty’s kingdom is colour-blind, I thank the Good Lord.”

  “To Her Majesty!”

  “What sorta changes do you have in mind for me?” Papa asked, evenly.

  “Well now, they aren’t really, they don’t exactly apply to you, specifically or –”

  “What my cousin is sayin’ is that we are merely servants, appendages of the council who in turn must carry out the laws duly passed by the Legislative Assembly to which – may I remind you – we all sent the Honourable Mr. MacLachlan.”

  “We got snowed in,” said Papa.

  “Precisely why the new road is bein’ expedited.”

  “No citizen will be disenfranchised by a…by the weather.”

  “What laws?”

  “You’ll recall that the survey of ’43, lamentable though it was, served us well enough, but a new one has been made necessary by certain irregularities discovered in the original.”

  “They had, after all, only the, ah, crudest of instruments and the Indians, we are told, ah, pulled up the markers as fast as they could be laid.”

  “Done, I’m assured, in all innocence.”

  “This ain’t my land, then?”

  “Dear sir, please, uh, please –”

  “– don’t leap to such dire conclusions. We’re here on a mission of mercy, as it were. To be blunt, and to allay any apprehension on your part, let me say straightway that I have been authorized by the duly elected council of Lambton County to inform you that several small errors were made, back in ’43, in the lot alignments along this particular strip of Moore Township.”

  “Very small errors, I assure you.”

  Papa’s chair emitted a sudden groan.

  “Infinitesimal.”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  After a pause, Smoothie said: “Your property is too far east, sir. That is why the road out there runs so far from your cabin-line. Your farm should front almost on the road.”

  “Five yards from it accordin’ to the, ah, lawful survey.”

  “But that still leaves more than thirty yards –”

  “Thirty-three to be precise. Ninety-nine feet, three inches.”

  “More than half my East Field!”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “Calm yourself, sir.”

  “In technical terms it means that you do not own a half of your East Field. And, correspondingly, you own a hundred feet of land to the west –”

  “Covered in bush!”

  “There’s no need for, uh, that sort of tone.”

  “Donald is right. You’ll have every opportunity to buy that improved field. No plans exist for a second line of farms behind this in the immediate future. We’re movin’ south with the new road, and the crossroad will continue from Millar’s farm to the east.”

  “I’d say you have four – even five – years to buy that field.”

  “What with?” Papa’s question went unanswered.

  There was a long silence broken only by the pouring of a single glass of whiskey.

  “There is, I’m afraid, one more point to be made.”

  “A very wee one,” Kinky said.

  “But pertinent. Accordin’ to your contract you were to make a specific number of improvements within ten years, excludin’ your first winter here.”

  “Very reasonable demands, I’m told.”

  “I’ve met them, every one of ’em.”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  “A moral sense, you might say.”

  “But with the technical loss of your East Field, you have, uh, technically –” Smoothie’s smoothness began to fail him.

  “You’ll need, sir, to clear another ten acres.”

  “But not by fall. That’s why we’ve been sent here. The council is quite willin’ to accept either solution: the immediate purchase of the cleared field –”

  “On reasonable terms you may, uh, be certain.”

  “Or the clearing of ten acres by a year from September.”

  “No one wants to see you lose this farm or be cheated of the, uh, fruits of your labour. All of us are here to build a better country than the one we’ve known, in a spirit of, uh, co-operation.”

  “And love and harmony, free from prejudice.”

  “And republicanism.”

  “I ain’t got the cash. You know that. So does MacLachlan. I’d need cash to get help to clear a new field. I owe everybody in the district – time and dollars. I got no sons, you know. I got no wife.”

  Papa drank. “I’m no goddam squatter, you know!”

  The Scotch gentlemen’s fancy clothes brushed restlessly against the coarse deal of the chairs.

  “Perhaps the Lord will help you, sir.”

  “God damn the Lord!”

  Gasps, scraping of chairs, rustle of coats, quick double-steps to the doorway.

  A little distantly and in a quiet voice that came from a diffe
rent, darker part of the soul, Smoothie said: “We both know where you can get cash, anytime you want it. Your comings an’ doings have not gone unobserved. Good night, sir.”

  Papa did not reply. Lil could not see below, but she heard his laboured breathing. As the night visitors passed by her birthday window and turned onto the path towards the county’s road, she heard their parting comments.

  “The man’s a – a republican!”

  “He’s a fuckin’ Irishman, that’s what he is!”

  In the darkness below her, Papa was sobbing. Lil was frightened. A cold rage constricted her throat. Bee-bee, the deer-mouse, was edging expectantly up her arm. She swung her other fist at him, savagely. He fled, untouched. She should go down to Papa. He had no son. He had no wife. On the beam above, she saw Bee-bee, puzzled and hurt. She didn’t go down.

  2

  By that summer of 1851, while the hand-axe still challenged each oak and ash, and the crops surprised themselves by flourishing, the machinery that would soon transform the countenance of Lambton was already in motion. Road-gangs of disenchanted rustics and dispossessed natives hacked their way east to London and south to Wallaceburg. Surveyors with their sextants and their unbounded faith in Euclid – their chiseling eye straightening bog and bend – roamed the back bush like Queen’s spies on the most precious of missions. To the east and south, barely out of earshot, the first locomotives soon would chuff and clang through morning mists undisturbed since the granite and peat and leafage rose triumphant from the steaming glaciers. Crows, more ancient than the myths that impelled them, shook the soot from their evening wings and stared. Eagles along the Erie cliffs followed the spiral of smoke and steam, unable to break its code. The politicos in Port Sarnia, dreaming their mercantilist dream, strained to hear the chorus.

  In the midsummer heat with only a smock on, the sudden lustiness of a cooling breeze felt good on the calves, arms, neck, the stretch of inner thigh. And if you crouched down and looked out at a certain level, the wind seemed to be coaxing ripples out of the wheat as it rolled, resisted and sighed into acquiescence. Lil watched the waves, like the shadows of hands, settle and reach, settle and reach for some far shore beyond the forest’s edge. In the twilight the wheat shone, blue as flax.

  “Your Papa now, he’s gone and surprised us all,” Maman LaRouche said, showing Lil how to pick the potato bug off his perch and squeeze him between thumb and forefinger just enough to split his seam. “Everybody ’round here says ‘he’ll run off to the bush for sure now’, or ‘cain’t run a farm without a woman and a crop of kids’ an’ so forth an’ so on. Your Papa now, he ain’t no ordinary Joe. Ow!” One of the victims had bitten back. “Goddam maudit bugs! I don’t know why anybody’d want to hang ’round this hell-hole. I tell you, little flower, I ain’t dyin’ out here all by myself. I sure ain’t. If that calice pot-belly’s got to skate on his ass all the way to – Here now, you go ahead an’ try it, ma petite.”

  Papa had indeed disappointed them all, especially the Millars with their thirty cleared acres, their crossroad and their planked facade, white-washed and all. Following the trip to Port Sarnia, Papa had thrown himself into work. The North and East Fields were both fully cultivated; there was a vegetable garden guarded against the wild pigs by a split-rail fence, a small shed for housing the oxen when they were visiting, and, surprise of surprises, a root cellar on the north side of the house. Papa took special care with this. He and the elder LaRouche boys spent several days digging a cavernous hole in the ground. Lil was curious, being only nine then, about what lay in or below the earth, and when she wasn’t helping Maman with the meals, she peered across their broad, bare, sweating backs wherein the muscles churned like trapped weasels, and watched the pit grow larger and darker. Soon, however, a roof and plank walls covered it, and a little set of stairs appeared behind a fresh door. Lil was the first to try them out. They led down to a platform of sorts, and when you turned right you saw a cave with shelves across it and an earthen floor below where the canning and the potatoes and turnips would find a cozy berth, summer and winter. Lil felt the dampness exuded by the violated ground and the slats of sunlight caroming through the planking of the east wall.

  Old Samuels attended the launching of the ‘new room’, politely refusing the proffered drink, feeling the marvel of the deal planks and the cold metal eyes of the spikes that secured them. But he refused to enter the cellar itself.

  “Bad spirits in there,” he muttered theatrically.

  “In here, ya’ means,” said Gaston LaRouche, shaking the jug and winking at the others.

  “White Mens always tries to fix up Nature,” he persevered, searching the planking with his fingers for those icy arrowheads.

  Nonetheless, Papa continued to be away a great deal of the time. Fewer were the occasions when he returned with a deer or a bear to share among the neighbours. Some mornings Sounder and Acorn would be standing before the dead fire when Lil came down, guns in their hands, peering around in puzzlement. “Your Papa not hunt today?” Sounder would say. “Got too many venisons already, I guess.”

  “Off to Chatham if you ask me,” Maman would announce, asked or not. “That place is full of darkies, I hear tell. A decent body can’t walk the streets.” But despite any disapproval, she would invariably send little Marcel along to check the pig and help out with the chopping.

  Sometimes when Papa came home from Chatham he would be tired but whistling, his eyes aglow. Other times he would be very sad, you couldn’t talk to him for hours or look him straight in the eye. “It’s a hell of a world out there, little one. We’re better off right here.”

  Once she saw a letter on the table. “Can you read, Papa?” He looked stung, as if she’d struck him with an axe-handle. “Uh huh. A little.” “Can you write?” “Not too good.” “Can you teach me?” He looked at her, confused, as if seeing someone else in her place. “You’ll get to read, an’ write too. Real soon. When you’re a little older.” Lil sensed it would be some time yet. But the thought of it, the mere promise, was enough.

  “Little White-Women’s smart,” Old Samuels said, “up here,” pointing to a spot just above the shutters of his eyes. “And here,” he added, indicating his ears. He meant of course that she had picked up, from him and his chattering nephew, quite a bit of the Pottawatomie tongue. At first she would carry on full conversations only with Sounder, grilling him constantly for new words. Finally Old Samuels took over her ‘education’, correcting much of the folly prompted by his nephew, and delighting in the increasingly extended exchanges with this waif, this orphan of the forests.

  “There’s hope, maybe, for White Mens,” he would say to his ancestors when she had mastered some grammatical intricacy he felt to be untransferable to the simple mind of the intruders. In the darkest, deepest winter-dens of his mind, he could hear the blurred echoes of his mother’s Attawandaron, and the regret would be so overwhelming he would have to get up and leave the cabin quickly lest he weep in front of the child.

  Papa, it seemed, had overheard Maman’s advice, for in the winter that Lil was nine he brought home with him, one day, a woman. Lil knew who she was, for she had at last seen the squatter’s camp in the back bush, not nearly so far away as she had imagined and much dirtier and sadder than she’d ever expected. No wonder Old Samuels liked to spend his day along ‘the line’. Squalling papooses, yapping dogs, quarrelling squaws amid the smelly, humid habitation of makeshift wigwams that possessed none of the redeeming dignities she had witnessed at Port Sarnia. Among the squaws was a pretty young woman with eyes like polished chestnuts, whose sinewy beauty was already softening towards sumptuousness. Her name was Penaseweushig, or Birdsky, and she brought with her a four-or-five-year-old son of somewhat mixed blood (his hair was brown and curly), the incidental offspring of some heated, casual lust between the girl and any one of a dozen drifters happy to oblige and vanish. Birdsky, being herself a Chippewa, gave him the name Waupoore or Rabbit. From Birdsky and Rabbit, Lil, among other thin
gs, learned to speak yet another tongue. The first time they came they stayed only a couple of months, until the snows melted – when mother and child simply disappeared one morning. Papa said nothing. He never said anything about Birdsky to Lil. Indeed, even though they could converse haltingly in English or fluently in Ojibwa, they talked little, in the manner of the Indians themselves. Birdsky was very kind. She did much of the cooking and cleaning, deferring to Lil whenever necessary. When she returned with Papa later that summer, she pitched in with Lil and Maman to harvest the potatoes and turnips, and helped Maman ‘do down’ her pickles and jams. Maman clucked a great deal about Birdsky’s presence and moderate dexterity, but was kind to her, and, Lil began to suspect, genuinely fond of her company. In December one of her relatives from the camp came by and she went off with him. They didn’t see her until that spring. Papa was away and when he got back he looked immediately for her, but said nothing to Lil, nor could she read anything in his face. He’s getting to be like Old Samuels on one of his taciturn days, she thought.

  Lil slept in the loft. She had slept there as long as she could remember anything. Rabbit was put in the small bed that Mama had used before she passed on. That bothered Lil for a while. But she liked Rabbit: he laughed at her antics, he believed everything she told him, and he kept the prowling Luc off-guard and at bay. Papa and Birdsky shared the big bed almost below her.

  She never tried, through the flimsy partition, to watch what they did at night. The image of that drama was still vivid in her mind and her dreams. She could not help hearing though. And the sounds became, willy nilly, attached to parts of the pictures flashing before her in the resilient darkness between gable and eave. Not once did Birdsky ever cry full-out, either in anguish or jubilation. Her hushed thrashings were pitted with mewling, aborted sighs, ambiguous gasps, and the hiss of air through teeth desperate for release. Papa’s heavy plunging was accomplished with a grim silence that was broken, near the end, only by a staccato wheeze of relief accompanied on rare occasions by a lurching, crippled soprano cry that never took flight fully into pleasure or despair.