Lily's Story Read online

  “No,” Lil said. “He didn’t hurt me none.” The stout flour-bag cotton of her smock had absorbed some of the lashing, though the buckles had left two stinging but superficial cuts. Her arm was sore but undamaged, and though her ankle was swelling, she found she could hobble satisfactorily.

  “Well, I’se sho’ glad he dead, if’n I have to go hang an’ to hell for it. Guess I was wishin’ to do dat to somebody fo’ a long time now. A long, long time,” he said.

  “Papa’ll be home soon, everything’ll be fine,” Lil said without much conviction, trying to stop her body from shaking head-to-toe and make her voice do what it was told.

  Solomon heard her teeth start to chatter. From the bush something warm and sable was singing to him. “You best lock me up in de shed, missy. You best lock me in dere good.”

  Leaning on his arm, Lil led him to the shed. Holding onto his hand a second longer than necessary, she watched him ease down into whatever comfort darkness afforded him. “Everything’ll be all right,” she said, suppressing the quiver in her tongue, “I promise.”

  “Jus’ bolt up dat door,” he said. “Please, Miz Lil, ma’am.”

  Reluctantly Lil – overcome by a second wave of shakes – closed the door to the cellar. As she clicked the lock into place she noted that both the hinges had been knocked more than half-way out of their moorings. In his frenzy to save her, the black man, thinking the door locked, had hurled his body almost through it. She pushed the screws back into place.

  If he wants to go, Lil thought, nothing will keep him there.

  She knew exactly what she ought to do. Papa often got home just before dark. The sun was just about to sink below the tree-line, which left about two hours of hazy daylight. Lil ought to act the full measure of her eleven years and drag that man’s body into the brush. She ought to throw dirt on the blood and mess to hide it. She ought to bring the donkey to the empty hut reserved for Bert and Bessie. She ought to fetch the fowling gun and have it ready for use. She ought to be able to stop the treachery of her own body which would not cease its shivering.

  She did none of these. She hobbled, hopped and crawled into the undergrowth where the new South Field would be someday soon, and hid herself. She closed her eyes tight enough to squeeze even the dreams out. But the image persisted of the pedlar prone in their dooryard in the stiffening afternoon breeze, the eyes jammed shut, the blood oozed from his clamped jaw like an adder’s tongue skinned and raw in the dust. Around her, shadows strengthened, the haze lost heart, the whippoorwill’s cry was inconsolable. Owl unshuttered the moons of his eyes.

  Papa would not be home. She knew it. She thought she knew why. She couldn’t stay here. There was just enough light left for her to see the outline of the cabin. From that direction came a sudden intermittent moaning. Terrified, she strained through the dusk to see a corner of the cellar shed on the north side of the cabin. The moan grew louder, but it wasn’t coming from the cellar. Lil turned in time to see the dead man raise his head a few inches off the ground, groaning piteously all the while. In a moment he propped himself up to his elbows so that he could peer anxiously, inquisitively, about him. He appeared to be trying to think. Lil never moved a hair. The pedlar flopped to the left; Lil was about to cry out but he was just turning over so that he could sit up and get his bearings. Then he did a strange thing. He put two fingers to his lips and whistled softly. To Lil’s surprise, Bobby, pulling free from his loose tether, stepped leisurely over to the pedlar, now evidently returned from the dead. The pedlar pulled on the halter, Bobby sank shakily to his knees, and his gravely injured master with a scuff and rattle of pans rolled onto his loyal back. Then donkey and burden moved into the near-dark where the north-road lay. They turned neither north nor south, however; instead they continued due west, probably following the ancient deer-trail that wound its way eventually to the River.

  Lil waited until the mosquitoes had become unbearable before she inched her way, the wrenched ankle still tender, to the cabin. She no longer shook. She was, rather, consumed by a dread that was worse than any feeling she had felt before: a silent, impending apprehension that would not name itself. The image she carried across the clearing at that moment was a strange one: Maman LaRouche’s pudgy-strong grip ripping turnips out of the stunned ground, her sickle slicing green from root before the plant could gasp, as Maman’s sturdy foot, surging forward, buried itself cosily in the unresisting gash.

  5

  All that night Lil sat at the table facing the window and door on the south side, the fowling piece lying before her, cocked and expectant. When she had first entered the house, she had rapped in code on the far wall and heard, after a while, the mutually reassuring response from Solomon somewhere below. Determined to remain awake to face whatever grim retributors might appear, Lil – fast asleep – dreamed she was awake, and very brave.

  What woke her was the sound of horses. She recalled that peculiar atonal drumming from the races that day on the Reserve. Never had such sounds penetrated this far into the bush. With a start she came fully awake. The gun jumped too but held its peace. Though muffled by the heavy foliage and the heat haze above it, the pounding was nonetheless deafening as it moved towards the spot occupied by Lil. Forgetting the weapon, she ran to the door and flung it open. In the disfiguring light of the false-dawn, Lil saw three mounted creatures, two of them already in the dooryard, the third frozen behind them in the opening before the road. The horses snorted and jangled – bloated and blurred and sweating. Lil felt the pent-up power in them as the wave of their heat washed over her.

  The two men dismounted with a certain practised grace. Behind them, unsuccessfully camouflaged by the brush, Lil noted the third arrival: still mounted, the swath of bloody bandages on his head beaming like a Turk’s turban across the clearing.

  “Mornin’, ma’am,” said the taller of the two in a strange accent, mellifluous as honey on green apples. “Beggin’-your-pardon for disturbin’ you this early in the day, but we’re-all here on pressin’ business.”

  The other one nodded but said nothing, glancing nervously around.

  “What’s your business with us,” Lil said, trying to shake the sleep out of her voice. She wished she’d brought the gun with her.

  “Your Papa and me’s made a certain transaction, ma’am.”

  “What kind of...transaction?” Shorty was edging towards the north-east corner of the cabin, holding his hat in his hand, nodding and trying to look casual.

  The tall one brought out a leather purse; Lil heard the clink of coins inside. Her heart froze.

  “My job is to bring you this here payment in return for certain goods you have in hand.”

  “This ain’t a store,” Lil said. Shorty had slipped around the corner.

  The tall one put the purse into Lil’s hand and as he did so grasped her gently but firmly by the wrist. “No need to get riled up, missy. We ain’t in the habit of hurtin’ decent folk. Beauregard and me are businessmen, that’s all.”

  Lil was about to attempt a knee to the groin when Shorty’s voice pierced the dead-quite of the pre-dawn. “The son-of-a-bitch’s gone! He’s flown the coop!” Breathless, he reappeared from the rear of the cabin.

  “You sure?” snapped his partner, tightening his grip.

  “Goddam right. The door’s busted half off. They had him holed up like a polecat back there, but he’s done beat it to the bush!”

  “You let him out, gal?”

  “Fuck no, I tell ya, Sherm, the door’s lyin’ in pieces. That big buck just blew outta there!”

  “Cut the cursin’,” Sherm said, more calmly. He loosened his hold on Lil’s arm. “No call for that. Either your Daddy’s cooked up this little treachery or that nigger’s lit out on his own. Either way, we’re gonna get him.” He pulled the purse from their mutual grip. “You won’t have need of this no more.”

  “We goin’ into the bush after the nigger?”

  “Yes, we are. Tell that pedlar to vamoose. We don’t nee
d him no more.” He turned to Lil. She saw in the growing light that he had the kindly face of a father but one that could change, with little warning, to that fierce, inexplicable parental anger she had suffered in her own childhood. “You tell your Daddy to stay out of our way. Nobody’s out for revenge so long’s we get our hands on the nigger. Good mornin’ to you.”

  They mounted and cantered as far as their enswaddled accomplice. Sherm spoke sharply to him, and Bobby wheeled and loped southward, towards Chatham. They watched him for fully ten minutes, then circled and headed north in the direction they assumed Solomon had fled after brushing aside the hingeless door.

  It must have been mid-morning when Papa came home. Lil had returned to her vigil at the table, the gun an inch away but untouched. She was no longer scared. Her ankle no longer hurt. The dread which had so possessed her had finally divulged it names, and her soul longed for some relief beyond dreaming.

  Lil didn’t know how long Papa had been standing in the doorway when at last she looked up and saw him there. He turned his face away wearily and slumped on the stool before the spent fire. His flesh appeared to be too heavy for his bones.

  “He got away,” Lil said.

  “They hurt you any?” he asked, rising and taking the hunting rifle from its place, not looking at Lil.

  “None.”

  “An’ that pedlar?” His sudden stare burned through her.

  “Solomon, he run him off. Then he went, too.”

  Bullets clicked coldly in Papa’s pouch.

  “I turned my ankle just a bit.”

  “Keep an eye out,” Papa said. “I’ll be back.”

  After him, in a voice that made her skull-bones hum, Lil shouted Why? Why? Why? Papa of course did not hear. He had turned south. Towards Chatham.

  It was dusk when he came home once again. Lil had dreamed of something farther than death. She opened her eyes to catch Papa’s face bending towards hers. It was sad; she saw her Mama in it.

  “I’m sorry, princess. We’re gonna have to leave this place.”

  5

  1

  Seven days later they were packed and ready to go. Papa of course had planned to get away at dawn, but he hadn’t counted on the goodbyes that needed to be said. Maman surprised everyone by not weeping openly. Instead she braved a smile for Lil, hugging her fiercely as if she might transfer to those sapling limbs some of the bruised strength from her own decades of travail. She may have seen in the sad, trudging reluctance of departure some sign of her own leave-taking, so close at hand. The Frenchman and his boys touched their caps and mumbled au voir with exaggerated politeness, except for Luc whose heart was irreparably broken and shamed itself with silent, unconcealed tears.

  Lil knew it was pointless to ask Papa why they had to leave, but she was certain it was due to more than their troubles with the Scotsmen and the pedlar. Papa would not give up the homestead, would not abandon Mama’s grave to the winds and seasons, would not tear his little girl away from the only life, the only world, the only people she had ever known – not for a mere Scotsman or a pedlar with a cracked head. Somehow – she did not know how – it had more to do with Solomon and the look Papa gave her when she woke to find him staring from the doorway, the shed door in back of them protesting as it swung on one precarious hinge.

  “We’re goin’ to live near Port Sarnia,” was all he said, “with your Aunt Bridie.”

  Who was news to Lil. From Mama she had gleaned a little now and then about her relatives – enough to conclude that Papa came from a large family, her own being mostly dead, but never had she put a name on any of them though it was obvious she sometimes wished to. Instead she told stories only about long-gone relatives, all of whom apparently were squires or beauties or gawains of the first order. Mama’s stories were like her songs – a kind of lullaby. Bridie was no lullaby. She was a real, living aunt with a name as durable as a fieldstone. Lil wanted to ask about an uncle for Bridie but restrained herself.

  “I wrote her a letter a while back,” he said some days later, seeing Lil seated near the ripening wheat of the East Field and staring across its tender, involuntary undulations towards the red-blue granite on which one of Old Samuels’ nephews had chipped the name ‘Kathleen’. “Chester and her been wantin’ us to come up there ever since your Mama passed on.”

  Chester? Lil came out of her brown study.

  “Land’s mostly cleared up there. We’ll help ‘em out at first. Then get our own place.” Lil wanted so badly to believe the enthusiasm now in his voice. She wanted to ask about Chester but held back, hoping for more.

  “We’ll bring your Mama up there, too; some day,” he added with effort, his hands trying to be light and consoling on her shoulders.

  Mama wasn’t up there, Lil knew, but could find no words to help Papa understand. She’s here – in these trees, the wheat, the undug stones, in the birdsong enticing shadows towards dawn, in the wind that lives in these special places only, in that part of the sky she shared with us and that brings such joy to the guardian gods. Lil’s quiet weeping made Papa’s hands shake, and he turned back to the cabin, confused. Lil licked her own tears with her tongue, savouring them.

  It was a regular road now running abreast of the line of a dozen farms north of theirs. The new neighbours, above Millar’s, came out to watch them leave: whole families lined up at the edge of their land and waved curiously, tentatively, uncertain of the meaning of what they were witnessing. When Lil and Papa passed the last farm – with only its doorway cleared, and stumps and tree branches smoking behind the unchinked log hut (where the new road abruptly became the old slashed trail again) – Lil did one of the things she promised herself she would not do on this day: she glanced back. Standing in the middle of the road a hundred feet behind them were the unmistakable silhouettes of Old Samuels and his favourite nephews. A few days before all three had materialized one morning, unannounced, and stayed the entire day, helping Papa with some of the packing and dismantling but never once mentioning the fact of their leaving. Sounder chattered and laughed, Acorn smiled with his soft eyes, and Old Samuels puffed his pipe and talked exclusively to Lil in Pottawatomie. “White Mens always coming and going,” he said several times, unprompted, “Attawandaron stays.” Once he added, not without charity, “’Course, White Mens still young, got a lot to learn before this world ends.” At dusk they left, saying no formal goodbyes but carrying Papa’s old sow in their arms as graciously as they could manage. Lil knew she wouldn’t see them again.

  Even now it was only their darker shadows in the constant early morning that she saw as she peered back over her shoulder. Acorn was as still as his name; Sounder was hopping and gesticulating beside Old Samuels as if describing for him exactly what he was seeing and feeling, like a honey-bee’s dance of direction; Old Samuels had his face aimed at Lil’s diminishing figure, his posture giving nothing away of sadness or hope, resignation or complaint, certain only that he did not need his eyes to see what was happening under them nor many other things life had reputedly reserved for the sighted.

  Lil then broke her second vow. Fortunately Papa, who was now several strides ahead of her, didn’t hear.

  They followed the well-tramped trail north for several hours. The sun warmed them with its mid-day welcome. Wild Phlox and amber columbine nodded jauntily from the verges. In the pines, tanagers and siskins tumbled and iridesced. A fox snake yawned his whole length in the heat kept cozy by the trail.

  They were travelling light, of course. Papa had a backpack with food and overnight utensils, a water bottle, rifle and hatchet. In a harness neatly rigged by Acorn, Lil carried two blankets and some goodies secretly slipped to her at the last moment by Maman. In the beaded pouch given her by Sounder and belted to her waist, she had carefully placed Mama’s cameo pendant, the gold cross, and the rabbit’s foot Old Samuels had rubbed almost smooth in thirty years of not worrying. There was no need for anything more: they had packed their few belongings – clothing, trappings, utensils,
tools – in two large wooden cases about the size of a child’s coffin. Luc, in a rush of altruism, had promised to hitch Bert and Bessie up to Mr. Millar’s cart as soon as they were free from their summer stumping, and deliver the trunks to Port Sarnia.

  So it was only the weight of the day itself that bore heavily on them as they trudged step by step away from all they had become a part of. Indeed whenever the little eddy of excitement (which Lil had been suppressing all morning) bubbled up on its own, she felt an acute sense of having betrayed something secret and previous. I will hate Bridie, I will, was her less-than-satisfactory antidote.

  There would have been no eddy of anticipation if Lil had known it would be sixty years before her feet again touched this ground – now so sacred, so indistinguishable from herself. And she would learn, only much later, that before the coming winter was out Maman LaRouche would, only partly against her will, succumb to the engorged, mutinous thing fattening itself inside her. And Monsieur, who had seen death routinely in the War and on the stark faces of babes ravaged by cholera and worse, would not recognize it in the pleading eyes of his wife until she herself begged for the priest. Then, as he had so often vowed, LaRouche strapped on his snowshoes and headed north for Port Sarnia through the maze of deer-trails he thought he knew well. Confused and exhausted he stumbled into the Partridges at Corunna three days later. Partridge suggested a horse, which the weeping, grateful man accepted before he realized that while he had fed and groomed horses for Colonel Baby during the War, he had never actually gotten around to riding one. The priests at St. Joseph’s naturally assumed that it was LaRouche himself who required the last rites, and it was almost an hour before the matter was straightened out and Father McAllister tucked the babbling man into the cutter beside him and started on the return journey. At Partridges a Chippewa lad was attached to the entourage to guide them to the interior of the township. However, when they reached Millar’s corner at nightfall, the old man was dreaming that he and Mathilde – his Mattie, his Fluffy – were whirling at the centre of the governor’s reel under the candelabras of the demi-royal salon as the fiddles and drums applauded their bravado, their panache, and Mattie’s eyes glowed like chestnuts set in the sweetest, deepest cherrywood flesh. The hubbub of the sleigh’s arrival at the cabin woke the dreamer too abruptly and, not quite realizing the transition that had taken place, he flung his partner wide, skipped intricately to his place in the ‘set’ – to wondrous applause – and keeled over in the snow, half-in and half-out of the cutter. His leg snapped like a cornstalk.