Lily's Story Read online

  There was no need to tell. Solomon’s pain was enough. Lil looked straight through it and saw in a single second, in one terrible tableau, the entire narrative of his travail. Whether she fell into a trance and dreamed it whole or whether Solomon himself entered that dream to relate his story in the wordless epigrams of that state, she never knew. She only knew what she saw, and would never forget. She saw Solomon’s master, that worthy of Hertford County, glorying in his notoriety as a ‘nigger-breaker’, daunted by the very presence of a young man named Solomon whose stamina and moral courage were a threat to a whole way of life, to God’s ordained ordering. She saw him stripped and lashed a hundred times, roped to stanchions like a steer, his skin flayed to make him utter cries that never came, till the master himself slashed his head open with his cane, breaking it even though it was a gift from his daughter, and when he could not break the black man’s spirit, he had him measured by the smith for fetters that tore open his flesh till scab healed over ruptured scab, scars multiplied over scars, and out of desperation, despair, longing for some kind of ending, he fled into the woods, dragging his chain with him, and found some unexpected measure of contentment among the foraging mammals and the morning birds who sang as sweet in hunger as in plenty. She felt the shock of his betrayal at the hands of a coloured man who didn’t need the ten dollars, and wasn’t present when the gang of white boys trailed him through the swampland and just before the dogs got him put a bullet through his thigh and dragged him, hounds lapping up the spoor of blood behind him, back to his master, who, chagrined, sent him off to the auction block to be sold to the killing grounds of New Orleans, but landed instead in Memphis, Tennessee, where he suffered two years of ordinary slavery; no beatings, no starvation, just minute to minute humiliation, labour dawn-to-dusk, nights of muscle-ache, mosquitoes, sexual gropings paralyzed by fatigue, brutalized by congestion, contiguity and the absence of hope. She felt the momentary joy of their union when Solomon gathered Mary to him and together they struggled to keep their love private and aimed, somehow, towards a farther day, until one morning in March he was hauled away without warning to the slave-pen in mid-town to be groomed for auction. Filled with a rage and terror beyond even his own imagining he battered his way through the roof of the cell and dragging his chains with him leaped from the roof into the featureless dark below. He was running as he struck the ground, straight back to his master’s, which saved him of course because the guards did not even put the hounds’ noses in that direction. So Solomon in the mist of the dawn slipped into a blacksmith’s shop at the edge of town, stole a rasp (he later returned through his benefactors) and filed off his chains. He found Mary – beaten a hundred times with the elm paddle – ready to run anywhere, to Canada, to Heaven, to the tender fires of Hell itself. She saw then in rapid sequence the six-week’s trek to the North, a hundred and thirty miles through swamp and bush, the bloodhounds giving up after a week, Mary having to be carried much of the way, food running out, the swamps disgorging mosquitoes and adders, the bounty hunters alerted, watching all exit points as owls wait so knowing in the dark, until at last with spring dawning on the Ohio they crossed into Cairo and were found dazed and despairing in a field by a white man who said, ‘Come with me.’ And so, as Lil saw, they were fed, rested, and pointed to the next village up the line, the string of safe houses that would eventually, past the North Star itself, end in a sanctuary known only as Canada. Between each town, though, lay the bush of southern Ohio and Illinois, and when the night skies clouded over, North was elusive, they staggered off-course, slept by day in caves or hollow logs, sometimes daring to follow the sun, coming to the edge of an unknown village (Sparta? Centralia?) dozing in its own hearth-smoke, so peaceful, so welcoming as domestic voices carried into the sunrise. Many times they sat on a hill looking down for hours on end, too terrified to knock on the first door, too starved to head back into the bush, till at last Solomon would walk up to the kindest-looking white gentleman he could find and say, ‘I’se lookin’ fer mas’ so-and-so livin’ on such-and-such street,’ and wait, heart hammering for the response that spelled life or death. More than a dozen times was this scene re-enacted, and each time Solomon’s voice failed him worse than the previous time till it was often only the look in his eye that prompted the reply, ‘You a runaway? Come with me.’ Until that day in Centralia when, exhausted after getting lost and heading as far west as the Mississippi River, threading their way back by starlight, living and eating and sleeping like animals, they collapsed at the doorstep of their safe house. To find two children there who seemed kind and well accustomed to such occurrences, giving them food and salves for their scrapes and bites and telling them to rest until their Papa returned. Lil shuddered as she saw the boy slip out of the house, the reward notice in his hand while the girl sat on her pink bedspread and wept. Then Mary’s screams, as if she were being dragged into Hell still alive, woke Solomon but by the time he got to the window Mary was already being carried by a posse of bounty-men towards the railroad station where she was bound, gagged and slung aboard a south-bound train like a piece of stray baggage. Solomon, out of instinct, was into the bush in a minute, lost his pursuers easily and arrived at the station in time to see the train pull out in a cloud of soot that took ten minutes to settle into the silence at the centre of Solomon’s heart. He took little notice of the man who found him there and arranged to have him put aboard a cattle-car on the Illinois Central headed that night for Chicago. They were very kind to him there, consoling, holding out the bitter promise of freedom only two or three days away. It was decided to send Solomon by the lesser-used northern route via rail through Schoolcraft, Lansing, almost to Port Huron before which town he was smuggled off, numb and submissive as if he were placing his body gratefully into the hands of a caring undertaker, and led through the forest to a secret point on the St. Clair River and thence rowed across to the liberated shore he greeted with dismay and a terror unadulterated by fear, memory or hopelessness. Dashing straight into the bush as if it were composed not of separate trees but a monolithic weld of blackness, he gave himself up to the dark at the heart of the world.

  As Lil was leaving, she snapped the lock shut but did not loop it through the hasp on the door-frame.

  4

  Lil, thinking it was Papa, was half-way across the dooryard towards the road before she stopped to stare at the pedlar. It was not Lame Peter, from the north.

  “’Afternoon!” he called jauntily, tying the donkey’s halter-rope to a nearby birch and ambling towards her.

  Lil waited, uncertain. He was a wiry man, all legs and arms with a long neck and a tiny bobbing head that made him look a bit like a tom-turkey combing gravel for tidbits. His blue trousers, scarlet shirt and smudged yellow bandana shone in the hot, high sun. A cherry-wood case, or valise, dangled from two fingers of his right hand. When he saw that Lil was not about to move, he stopped a few feet away and set the case down.

  “A mighty fine Ju-ly afternoon it is, young lady.”

  Lil waited, feeling she should say something normal.

  “You the lady of the house?” he asked with a smile that was all teeth. She saw that though his skin was leathery and his brown beard unkempt, he was not an old man at all. The eyes were as black and lively as two tadpoles. They looked through her and beyond, taking in, in a single cast, the cabin, garden and distant fields.

  “Yes,” said Lil finally.

  “Mama home?”

  “Mama’s up there,” said Lil waving in the general direction of the mounded gravesite.

  “Mighty sorry to hear that.”

  “Died ’bout four years back.”

  “The Lord’s will. So be it.” After a pause he grinned with his enthusiastic teeth and said, “You sure appear to be a young lady could look after her Papa, all right.”

  Lil looked at the ground.

  “Papa home?” he asked, bending down to his case.

  She was about to say ‘no’ when something made her tell an outright l
ie. “He’s over to the Frenchman’s, just past the North Field there, a-helpin’ with a stump, he said. Be back home any minute. I was just fixin’ some coffee for him.”

  The pedlar didn’t even glance up. “Name’s Jones,” he said. “Spartan Jones.” He was fidgeting with the clasp on his case.

  “You’re not regular,” Lil said. She’d caught a strange twang in the accent; it wasn’t one she could place right off, but it was definitely foreign.

  “Nope. Come up from the south. Chatham way. Bobby and me tramped over the bush trail to the new road. Fresh territory, eh?”

  Lil glanced over at Bobby who was chomping contentedly at the twitch-grass near the edge of the woods. “You a Yankee?”

  “Yessiree,” he laughed. “Same as half this here province is Yankee. My Pa come over after the war. Been here ever since.”

  “Windsor?”

  “Nearby. Say now, I got here, just for a pretty young lady of the house like yourself, a whole box-ful of tiny wonders: needles and coloured thread, and baubles and barrettes.”

  “I couldn’t look at them unless Papa was here,” Lil said. “Besides, we ain’t got cash for that kind of foolishness,” she added in her best Madame LaRouche tone.

  “But you ain’t seen it yet,” he said, lifting the lid on his treasure trove. “Can’t hurt nothin’ just to have a peek at it, can it now?”

  Lil looked hard at his face. He was smiling, the beads of his eyes danced and held her but gave nothing away. He was not much taller than Lil. The donkey brayed and the pots on his back tinkled.

  “Why don’t we go inside out of this here heat, and just have a quick peek at the goodies? If your Papa comes back, then maybe he’ll buy you a barrette to tie up all that pretty yellow hair you’re sportin’ for the boys, I expect.”

  Lil wondered what was in the cherry-wood case.

  “If’n your Papa don’t come back, I gotta move on anyways. Gotta be in Corunna by dark. Bobby don’t take to night travellin’, he don’t.”

  Lil turned and the pedlar picked up his wares and followed her. They didn’t go into the cabin.

  “You can set it on this,” Lil said, pointing to one of the stools she always placed along the south-west corner during the day – partly in sun, partly in shade. If he were disappointed, the pedlar didn’t show it. Under Lil’s tense gaze, he put the case on a stool and flung it open with a theatrical wave of his arm. Lil saw how nimble, how strong he must be under that loose blouse.

  “There you are, lass! Tools for the industrious, cosmetics for the hopeful, temptations for the bold!” he said with another over-rehearsed flourish. His eyes did a Cajun two-step.

  Lil did stare, despite her vows. She saw a silver locket with a link chain so delicate she could feel it like a feather on her throat exposed by the upsweep of her barretted tresses.

  “Jumpin’ Judas but it’s hot here!” said the pedlar, mopping his brow. “Got a cool cup of water inside?”

  Lil came out of her reverie quickly enough to skip around the corner and return with a dipper full of water from the bucket she always kept in the shade of the cabin’s west wall.

  “Fresh outta the spring, ’bout an hour ago,” she said.

  For a second he looked hard at her, not changing his ever-friendly expression but focussing it in a slightly different way. It was as if the temperature had dropped a degree or so. Noisily and with obvious relish he drank from the dipper and then splashed the remainder of the water over his face. His beard went limp. Lil saw the scar just below the cheek at the line of the beard, like a stretched maggot.

  “I hav’ta go now. Hate to leave off conversin’ with a young lady as pretty as you, all grown-up an’ lookin’ after her Papa and, I’ll bet, fendin’ off the boys ’round here – but Bobby’s gettin’ anxious.”

  “Thank you for comin’” Lil heard her grown-up voice say.

  He was only three steps away from Lil when he turned very casually and said, off-hand, “Will you let me give you a present, lass?”

  “Papa wouldn’t –”

  “Just a trifle. Got me some bolt ends of cloth on Bobby there, no good to me now. I reckon, though, they’d make a pretty scarf or two. In the hands of a young lady that could sew,” he added, with a wink as big as a rooster’s swallowing corn.

  Lil waited for the pedlar to leave. He stayed where he was, unsure of himself for the first time since his arrival. Lil noticed that he was staring over her right shoulder towards the north-west corner of the house. Could he see the root-cellar shed from that angle? Why would he want to? She knew she must not glance in that direction. She had to get him to leave. Without the slightest suspicion.

  “Perhaps Papa wouldn’t mind, if they’re real small pieces,” Lil said, starting towards Bobby.

  “Trifles,” the pedlar grinned. “But on you –”

  Lil was ahead of him, half-skipping towards the donkey whose indifference seemed absolute. The pedlar came at a bow-legged trot close behind. Lil stopped a few feet from Bobby, leaving ample room for the pedlar to sidle up to the beast and display his special wares. Lil was closest to the cabin, and she was fleet of foot.

  “I reckon the scarlet would go nicest against that lily-white skin of yours, girl,” he said, flipping the swatch of cloth from its pouch and letting it alight across Lil’s shoulder only partly covered by the sack-cloth smock she wore all summer. His voice seemed suddenly to have dropped an octave, and it was full of razors. Lil was already bent to flee when his left hand grabbed her wrist and wrenched it with such unexpected force that Lil felt herself twist and collapse into the weeds, her skirt flung up over her thighs.

  “No use a-cryin’ out, ya sweet little bitch, nobody’s gonna hear ya. Your pa’s a long ways from here, and besides, you’re about to get the surprise of yer life if I ain’t mistaken, an’ if I am, then we’ll both enjoy ourselves.”

  Lil did not cry out, though she was sure her arm was broken. She was simply stunned for the moment, unable to grasp the import of what had just happened or comprehend the flow of opprobrium from the pedlar.

  “Quit squirmin’, ya little snake, I’ll bust yer other arm. Now let’s see what we got ’neath all this cotton.”

  He was tearing at her underwear and trying at the same time to get his braces over his elbows – hopelessly contradictory moments that gave Lil time to re-establish her breathing and feel the impact of her terror. “Fuckin’ nigger-lovin’ hoo-ers, the lot of ya! You let them darkies taste that pink twat of yers, eh? Eh?” The underpants came apart with a shriek of their own, jerking Lil forward and up, a motion which she merely continued with accelerated determination, and with either the deepest of instincts or mere good fortune, she rammed her head like a ballpeen on his pope’s nose.

  With an explosion of wind resembling a death-rattle he folded, and fell into the grass. Lil was up in a wince and headed on a line towards the cabin where, under the big bed, a loaded fowling piece was kept at the ready. Clutching his wounded parts, the pedlar came after her in a sort of wobbly turkey-trot, his lust consumed temporarily by rage. Lil would have made it easily to the gun and shot the pedlar dead without compunction, had she not stumbled and fallen no more than a dozen feet from the cabin. When she tried to get up, she cried out – once, sharply – and toppled back to the grass. Her right ankle was sprained, and this time the pain swept unfettered through her whole body.

  The pedlar, seeing this, slowed his agonizing pace. When he came to Lil, she was whimpering and shuffling backwards towards the house. He laughed, watching her pathetic retreat for several moments with grim satisfaction. Suddenly Lil stopped. She sat up as best she could, biting her lip to hold back the breakers of pain rolling up the back of her throat. She stared up at her tormentor.

  He was taken aback by this unexpected response, sensing a loss of piquancy to his revenge, but the fire in his groin had little abated. “I’ll soon have ya whimperin’ again,” he seethed, pulling his braces, somewhat belatedly, all the way off. “A bit of buckle acr
oss the arse’ll do it all right,” he muttered while Lil remained motionless. He came around behind her, his back to the cabin, expecting her to squirm away or at least cover herself. She did neither. She remained bolt-upright, swallowing her pain, forcing her eyes open.

  “I’m gonna whip yer butt an’ then feed it somethin’ it’ll never forget.”

  Lil braced herself against an invisible wall of air. The pedlar’s braces came down randomly like a loose flail, metal slicing into her shoulders and arms, leather burning two diagonal strips across her back. The pain was just about to register from the first blow when she heard the whistle of leather drawn back for the second. It never came. Lil heard another sound and turned in time to see the water bucket bounce back from the pedlar’s head with a crunch of flesh, maple and angle-iron. The pedlar’s eyes popped skyward, his tongue flopped out of the gasp his mouth made, and he pitched forward onto the dooryard in a tangle of blood and grass.

  “I’se killed him! I’se killed a white man!” Solomon was in a sorry state. He was pacing in circles, trying not to see the motionless body with its head caved in, sprawled in plain daylight at the cabin door.

  “Nobody saw, nobody saw nothin’,” Lil kept saying, trying to catch the whirligig of his hand and stay on her one good foot. When she touched him, he stopped moving as if lightning had singled him out. He collapsed on the stool, staring away from the corpse towards the bush now deepening with late-day shadow.

  “I jus’ hears ya call out, jus’ like... an’ I comes runnin’ through dat door an’ I sees de man with de whips an’ I jus’ go crazy. Doan even ’member pickin’ up dat bucket, I doan.” He shook his head, then stared again at the bush beyond. “Yo hurt, littl’ un?