Lily's Story Page 9

  Madame was dead. She had died with as much dignity as the engulfing pain and the absence of God would allow. The ground was frozen during this coldest of winters. LaRouche, in his grief and his own pain, announced that she would be buried properly in sanctified ground at St. Joseph’s in Port Sarnia. Father McAllister, doing what he could, returned there the next day with some doubts about the wisdom of God’s suffering so many of the French to come unto Him. Meanwhile the boys were despatched to Brown Creek to cut ice. Luc paused long enough to stare piteously at the McGee girl who had arrived with her family that fall to occupy the forsaken farm and who, before donning winter garb, could do little to disguise the wayward curing of her flesh. Maman’s body, wrapped in the linen shroud she had brought with her from Sandwich, was packed in ice in the ox-shed, where it remained until spring.

  Despite the most professional ministrations of an itinerant quack, LaRouche’s leg did not set properly. He suffered constant pain which made it impossible for him to grieve the loss of his life’s mate as he should. By March and the first signs of break-up, it was clear that gangrene had set in. Millar sent his eldest boy for a legitimate doctor from Port Sarnia. When he arrived a week later, frost-bitten and muddy, he pronounced gangrene and offered either amputation (in the town, of course, after a jaunt across the spring ‘roads’) or opium. LaRouche cursed him in English and joual, and had him escorted to Millar’s corner.

  The old man’s cries ceased the spring nights, silencing the whipoorwills and bob-whites, piercing the deepest, fatigue-driven sleep of his neighbours for a mile around. He was saved from the final agonies of a gangrenous death when, in the midst of the first warm rain of the season, he contracted tetanus, which pursued him faster than the green venom in his leg. Propped on his bed near the pure-glass window, he watched the last of the snows disintegrate in the rain, exposing as they did the maidenhair mist of his autumn wheat. Over in the ox-shed the last of the ice-blocks was melting.

  LaRouche rose in his bed like an unrepentant Job, foam and blood boiling through his seized jaws, his leg right up to his spent loins burning as if someone by mistake had dropped it into a campfire and forgot to apologize. With his last breath he attempted to hurl maledictions at the God who claimed responsibility for all this, to fling at chaos one perfect curse, one jarring repudiation of the sham and hypocrisy he had acquiesced in: coward that he was he would spit in God’s face.

  His sons drew back in the room at the horror they saw, bracing themselves. Madeleine plugged her ears. Nothing came. The eyes bulged with speech, the clamped jaws ground and held, blooded spittle shot out in garbled strings staining Maman’s quilt. LaRouche died sitting up in seething silence. Outside, the rains continued their soft benediction.

  As luck would have it, a Methodist man on his quarterly circuit happened to be in the area scouting converts. At the boys’ behest he presided over the double interment, offering comfort to the dead and the surviving. Later on, proper headstones were erected. They rested not more than forty feet from the granite one of their neighbour.

  There were now two routes to Port Sarnia. The sort of lumber trail they were now on led north-east to where it met the main road running south-east from the town towards Enniskillen, the undisturbed heart of the Lambton bush. Twenty miles to the west, hugging the River, a trunk road – parts of it already planked – took the circuit rider and carpetbagger all the way to Wallaceburg and thence to Chatham. A number of Indian trails – blazed only – would take them to this latter marvel of the age. Sometime during the mid-afternoon, Papa veered left into the bush, leaving the sun above them.

  2

  Neither father nor daughter was aware that the frenetic surveying and road-building through the undeveloped townships of Plympton, Enniskillen and Brooke was prompted in part by recent upheavals in Europe and their cataclysmic fallout. In half-a-dozen countries upstart peasants and workers and a few middle-class dreamers had decided – without consulting their betters – to make a home of the lands they had laboured on for generations. They failed. And even as Lil bent to pick a sprig of columbine clinging to a patch of sun-lit grass, the suppressors were wreaking their revenge in the ritual rapine and domestic terrorism indigenous to the race. Thousands more were being added daily to the earth’s dispossessed. In Ireland, encouraged by some whimsy of the wind or season, potato blight deposited its indelible pennies on the summer’s crop, and hunger happily joined the avengers. Starved and hopeless, a hundred thousand Irish crammed themselves into stinking cargo-ships and sailed for the world’s end where, some of them believed, a plot of arable ground lay undespoiled by human intercourse. One contemporary report describes their plight in these terms: “From Grosse Isle, the great charnel-pit of victimized humanity, up to Port Sarnia and all along the borders of our magnificent river; upon the shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie – wherever the tide of emigration has extended – are to be found the final resting places of the sons and daughters of Erin; one unbroken chain of graves where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in one commingled heap without a tear bedewing the soil or a stone marking the spot.”

  Lil was annoyed with herself, but she couldn’t seem to help it. She was slowing them down. Her head began to spin, probably from too much sun earlier on the open road. She lingered behind a bit to vomit secretly in the underbrush, but Papa’s hand was soon on her arm. He wiped her mouth with his flannel hanky. He gave her the last of the water. He sat down and in the healing shade they rested a while. Lil was thirsty so Papa went off in search of a good spring. He took a long time. When they started up again, moving carefully from blaze to blaze under Papa’s practiced eye, they stopped every half-hour or so. They rested and drank the cool spring-water. Lil felt better but very weak. When she rose to signal she was ready to go, Papa touched her shoulder with one finger, and sat down. Just before supper she shamed herself utterly by drifting off to sleep.

  When she woke she saw that Papa had built a small fire and in the only pot he had brought had boiled some tea, which made their dried beef and biscuits taste much better.

  “Why don’t you have one of Maman’s cookies?” Papa said.

  Lil did.

  As a result of Lil’s pokiness, a trek of four hours or so took much longer. The shadows around them thickened and grew aggressive. So did the mosquitoes. Papa paused to examine a configuration of blazes on a huge hickory tree.

  “The river road’s only a half-mile away,” Papa said, not to himself as he often did, but to Lil. “It’s too late an’ we’re too tired to walk the other five miles up to the Partridges,” he continued. “We’ll make camp right here on the high ground.”

  Lil was sure she could hear the River tuning up for its nightsong.

  With his swift, sharp hatchet Papa cut down several saplings, bent them into a frame and covered it with cedar boughs. The lean-to was just big enough for two, with a sturdy elm-bole to rest your back against. More boughs were spread on the ground to serve as a bed when they were ready for sleep. But not just yet. In the opening of the lean-to, Papa built three small fires ringed by stones, two of which he smudged with damp evergreens, leaving the middle one to flicker brightly below the steaming coffee. Papa and Lil were scrunched inside with the blanket over their shoulders, the cozy smoke keeping the mosquitoes at bay, and Maman’s raspberry tarts sweetening on their tongues. Papa’s left arm was raised and Lil snuggled in against him, relishing the smokiness of his rough shirt. Lil was about to slide down into sleep when she realized that Papa was talking.

  “Bridie was the eldest. Eighteen and a local beauty. To us, she was a second mother. Then one day, just like that, Pa announces she is gonna be married up with an older man, a crony of his. Bridie says no in that sweet, iron-willed way she had. There was a terrible row, I can tell you. Ma hid in the stairwell cupboard. Next day without sayin’ good-day-to-you or by-your-leave, she’s gone. ‘She’ll come back,’ I said to Ma, ‘she loves us.’ ‘Let the harridan be and be damned!’Pa rants and raves for
three days, ‘She’s no kin of mine.’ ‘But sure an’ she’s off in a ditch or a bog somewhere, injured an’ callin’ out for our help,’ Ma says whenever she can stop her cryin’. Pa says nothin’. The case is closed. He refuses to say her name an’ forbids us to. She’s drummed out of the tribe. Dead.”

  Papa lit his pipe. A mosquito was biting Lil’s neck but she was not about to slap it. For a few moments Papa breathed through his pipe.

  “I felt terrible,” he said in a lower, different kind of voice. “I felt she’d abandoned me. When you’re only twelve, somethin’ like that seems like a betrayal. You put all your trust in one person an’ then, like that, it’s gone.”

  The mosquito perished in its own blood. Papa drew the blanket around Lil’s head. She snuggled close again, gripping his left hand with both of hers.

  “It was two years later, Ma was quite sick, an’ this letter arrives addressed to her. We all recognize Birdie’s writing. She was a beautiful writer. She taught me to read, as best she could. So I read the letter, after Pa had headed for one of his meetins’, of course. Bridie was in a place called Toronto, Upper Canada. She was well. She was goin’ off to a town somewheres in the bush to work as a domestic and as a tutor to some little boy. She didn’t name the town. She said we wasn’t to bother tryin’ to find out, she loved all of us dearly but she just had to do things this way as it was the only way for her. When I grew up, I knew what she meant. Back then, I hated her even more.”

  The moon slipped out from behind one of the high, breezy clouds – feigning interest in the world’s affairs.

  “When your Mama an’ me come out here some years later, we made no attempt at findin’ her. As you’re gonna see soon, this is a big country. But nobody ever put one over on Bridie, not even Pa with all his political shenanigans and bluster. Just after you was born we got a letter hand-delivered from Port Sarnia. From Bridie. She welcomed us to the county an’ said we was welcome in her house anytime. We always intended to go up there but your Mama was never well enough. We thought it best, for a while, not to get your hopes up. Then things just went on as they often do, an’ nothin’ ever really gets done. Some important things just don’t get done, ‘cause we go on as we are, day after day.”

  He poked at the smudges, scattering the swarms.

  “’Course that’ll all be rectified soon. You’re gonna see your Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester at last, you are.” Papa gave her an extra squeeze. And the little boy? She thought.

  “Yes, my precious, you’re gonna have the time of your life up there. We’ll help out Aunt and Uncle for a while, then we’ll buy ourselves a chunk of that cleared land with the cash we get for the homestead, an’ before you know it we’ll have a white clapboard house to live in. We’ll only be a mile from the town, too, with stores and mills and meetin’ halls. First thing I’m gonna do is take you into town to Cameron’s emporium and buy you your first store-bought dress – calico or lawn or kendall, take your pick, you’ll be as pretty as a butterfly in a flax field in August.”

  Papa squeezed again. Lil gripped his hand to let him know she was still awake. The main fire was in its mellow, amber phase.

  “Naturally your Aunt Bridie, bein’ an’ educated woman herself, will want you to have some proper schoolin’. They’ve got a school in Port Sarnia where anybody can go to learn readin’ and other things. You’re gonna grow into a genuine young lady, I reckon: there’ll be no stoppin’ you once you reach that town.”

  Are there lots of Scotsmen there? Lil wanted to ask.

  Papa took his arm from her shoulder, shook the fire vigorously until the flames jumped again, and then reached into his pack. In his hands he held something small and leather. A book.

  “I don’t want your Aunt Bridie thinkin’ your Mama an’ me didn’t bring you up properly,” he said, as Lil for the first time looked directly up into his face where the flame-induced shadows fluttered irresolutely. “This here’s a New Testament, a Bible. It was a gift, long ago, from my mother. I wrote an inscription to you in the front cover. My spellin’s not too good so I had Mr. Millar write down the actual words. Someday real soon you’ll be able to read it, an’ the Bible, too. I want you to keep it an’ treasure it, no matter what happens to you in this awful, tryin’ world.”

  Papa had to stop to clear his throat. Lil reached out and took the Testament, its covers carrying the warmth of Papa’s hands into hers.

  “I’ll tell you what it says, for now,” he went on. Once again he cleared his throat like an actor before an entrance. “To my dearest princess, the Lady Fairchild, from your Papa who loves you forever.”

  Lil tucked the precious object into her secret pouch, and slipped drowsily into the care of Papa’s arms. Tiny tremors shook her, gently, to sleep.

  She dreamt that Mama and Papa were seated on a scarlet sofa before a roaring fire: Papa was talking and talking, and Mama – curled beside him – listened with love.

  The sun, well above the tree-tops, woke Lil with a start. She was not in the least surprised, however, to look over and see that she was alone.

  3

  Papa had left her the food, water and utensils. And a note. On folded, thick, yellow-white paper. Lil did not open it. I can’t read. I can’t read. But another voice said: you’re grown up now; the new road is a twenty-minute walk across a blazed trail; there will be travellers on that road; they will help. Mrs. Partridge is five miles up that road; she will remember. Everyone in Port Sarnia will know who Bridie is. I have nothing to fear. Papa loves me; he expects me to go to my Aunt Bridie.

  But then maybe he’s gone off to scout the new road? Besides good folk, there are pedlars and bounty-hunters to beware of. It would be terrible if I wandered off and Papa came back to find me gone. He’d be so worried, he’d be so disappointed in me. I must stay here till he comes for me. That’s why he left the food and water. He thinks I’m sick. He loves me. It says so in this little book, it’s written there, forever.

  When she finished the last of the water, Lil began to worry. It was past five o’clock. Papa was not coming. (It would be much later before Lil would learn that the abolitionist man – who had rowed Papa to safety across the River and who was to return before dawn to lead her north to Port Sarnia – had got caught in a whirlpool on his way back, ran aground and lay unconscious for half a day before he awoke to find his leg broken in three places.) He expected her to get to that road and find the Partridges. Still feeling dizzy and very weak (what was wrong with her? she thought), Lil gathered her belongings and looked westward for the next blaze. The shadows were massing even now, and it was not easy to pick out the year-old slashes from trunk to trunk or the modest impressions left on the trail by its mocassined patrons. An hour or so later Lil admitted reluctantly that she was lost. She was not scared of being alone in the woods; she never had been. The mosquitoes were bad but she had matches, she could make a camp of sorts. What concerned her was that she didn’t know where she was. Nor would she be able to find her bearings in a terrain bereft of familiar landmarks. Desperately she tried to keep to the westward by the sun but it disappeared, even as a hovering light, for minutes at a time in the closed canopy one hundred and fifty feet overhead.

  When she stumbled into a beaver meadow, she looked up and saw in despair that it was now fully night-time. The stars winked invitations at her. Then she saw the dipper – the Silver Gourd – shining clear in its northern berth. She turned due left into the mosquito-fed darkness. Ten minutes later she emerged from the dense forest onto the roadway. The fresh planking hummed beneath her feet. Inside she hummed too and did a little jig. She looked northward up the forty-foot width of the highway. She was exhausted. A sort of numbness was starting to spread up the calves of her legs. She couldn’t make it to the Partridges. She really couldn’t.

  She was also very thirsty. She knew she shouldn’t sleep without drinking. Then she remembered: this was the River Road. To her left she saw that the bush was thin and intermittent, smallish pines in a sandy soil th
at glittered in the starlight. She listened, forcing her breath in. Though the night was still, her River poured its restless, endless energy onward. What a wonderful sound, Lil thought aloud. Slowly but with more certainty than she had felt all day, Lil eased her way through the pine grove towards the beckoning music of the great waterway. There would be some breeze there, and open space: she could sleep undisturbed in the sandy bank. In the morning everything would be all right. Papa would be proud of her.

  Just as the muted roar of the River was beginning to build in her ears, Lil came to a tiny feeder stream. Bending, she scooped the fresh, chill water to her face, drinking and cleansing simultaneously. The breeze off the water ahead was cool on her cheeks. She could see the moon plainly through the last trees between her and her goal. She was about to step out onto the sandy bank when she froze. The first warning she had of danger was the waver of firelight above the shoreline; then came the smell of burnt meat; then the voices; and their unmistakable accents.