Lily's Story
Authors: Don Gutteridge
Tags: #historical fiction, #american history, #pioneer, #canadian history, #frontier life, #lambton county
Lily’s Story
By Don Gutteridge
Published by Bev Editions at
Smashwords
ISBN:
978-0-9916798-9-8
Copyright 2013 Don
Gutteridge
Smashwords Edition, License
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GUTTERIDGE /
Lily’s Story
LILY’S STORY
A Novel
by
Don Gutteridge
Bev Editions
For my Aunt and Uncle
Betty and Bob Gutteridge
of Point Edward
In loving memory
Table of Contents
St. Vitus Dance
Lily
Moore Township, 1845
Something stirred in the darkness ahead. It
made no sound, as yet. But it was present, and alive, or coming
alive: she always knew. She did. The breath from a fawn’s cough
could tease her skin – like this ripple of shaded wind against her
cheek – long before her ear caught the sound and recorded it. Lil
was glad once again to be in the comfort of the trees’ canopy. It
was cozy here, like the cabin with Papa’s fire blazing out of icy
logs, when Mama was not in her bed. Lil wasn’t afraid of the dark.
Mama sometimes shivered in the dark at night, the rare night when
Papa “was off” and Lil was beckoned to press her thighs and chest
and swan’s belly against her mother’s clenched form. She dreamt she
was a moth spinning a cocoon of silver words about them both, full
of charms to drive the gremlins from Mama’s eyes, while outside,
heard only by her, the snow sang to the wind and no one in the
world was lonely.
It was never lonesome in the bush. Here
things bulged and endured in the dappled undergrowth – ferns and
worts and fungi and mosses, and, in the few random spots freckled
by sun, surprised violets. They made their voices known. Lil could
hear them already though she was moving with short quick steps
towards the deepest cove of the back bush, the place forbidden by
Mama, the home of the almost-sound that vibrated the air with
furred bat-wings and no eyes. She stopped. Beyond, a branch
stretched, umbilical and biding. Ferns sighed in currents only they
could feel. A thrush untangled his song: pastel and longing. Lil
set her face against the tiny drafts of air raised by her own
body-heat. A snakeskin combed the grass; she heard a birdwing flex
and fold, a deermouse scuttle and freeze, a caterpillar dissecting
a resistant leaf. The sound had stopped.
You stay away from the Indians, you hear?
Mama said so every day. Mama hated Indians. They were the cause of
everything. They took whiskey; they went crazy and hurt people;
they never did a lick of work; they went off hunting
god-knows-where in the back bush, taking good men with them, so’s
the trees didn’t get cut. And them squaws, Mama would say in a
special voice, her eyes getting fiery and pure, why they – she’d
look at Lil and stop, and the passion would ebb from her face.
Well, they’re wicked, Lil, they take whiskey and – dance and do bad
things with men… Lil would be trembling with anticipation at seeing
her mother’s pale flesh puff out with some kind of necessity beyond
self-preservation. Lil wanted to ask, not about the bad things, but
about the dancing. Though she never did. It was after one of these
bouts that Mama often took to her bed.
But Lil knew where they stayed. Many nights,
curled in the straw of her loft, she heard the drumbeats come
across the tree-tops from miles away and settle into their clearing
as if they had been aimed there. They were not like her heartbeat,
back and forth, nor like the sprightly songs Mama sang in her other
language when she was “feeling better” and sitting before her
spinning wheel in the bright sun of the garden she had helped to
clear. It was a pounding, repetitive music that set her heart ajar,
that made her dream of strange creatures who preferred breathing in
the dark, that made her long to know what words would be sung to
such cadence, what dances would find their feet in such grooved
frenzies. She wanted to see these women, how they moved in the
firelight that twisted above the black roof of the bush, what their
eyes did when they danced in their smoky, burnished,
mosquito-driven dark.
An axe rang against a
tree-trunk, clear as a church bell.
Papa’s
back
. Lil recognized the signature of his
chopping: two vicious slashes, the second slightly more terrifying
than the first, followed by two diminished, tentative ‘chunks’.
Maybe Mama would hear it and leave her bed. He was in the North
Field. That was good. He’d only “gone off” as far as the
Frenchman’s. Sometimes one of the Frenchman’s boys came back with
him and helped Papa. Lil hated them, all three of them. They
watched her all the time with the edges of their eyes. And Papa
would shout at her to go away. Sometimes though he brought Thérese
back. Lil liked Thérese though she talked crooked and had an ugly
belly that poked out in front of her like an old melon. Thérese
cooked soup, made bread in the mornings, and laughed. She was
happy.
Thérese showed Lil how to skip. She put a
small tin instrument to her mouth and made music. She laughed when
Lil hopped and jigged, and then Papa came along and took her by the
hand and swung her about in the midst of the music, and laughed
from the back of his throat. “Well, my Lady Fair Child, so you can
dance, eh? We’ll have to take her down to London to see the Queen,
won’t we, Thérese?”
Thérese got pains in her ugly belly, though,
and had to go back to the Frenchman’s.
“
She’s dead,” Papa said,
that evening, standing in the open doorway, his hands helpless.
“The babe, too.”
“
All for the best,” Mama
whispered from her bed. “Whose was it?”
“
Luc’s I guess. The
eldest.” Papa did not see Lil at his knee peering up with the
question “What’s dead?” on her lips. “
God
damn them all, may they rot in hell,
” he
hissed in a voice that came from nowhere inside him Lil had ever
known.
Papa was back. Every day he swore he would
“kill that damn Frenchman”, but all the same he went over there.
Though Mama didn’t mind too much. It was the Indians she hated.
Whenever Papa “went off” in that direction – through the East Field
to the back bush, where Lil was at this very second – Mama got
mean. So Lil would look for berries along the edges of the cleared
area, and when she got back Mama would be in her own bed in the
curtained-off area to the right of the fire, her body folded on the
straw pallet, rigid as a pin.
For a moment Lil thought she ought to go
over to the North Field. The place where the Indians were was
forbidden. The strange sound she thought she had heard had stopped,
or never been. Papa might be in a good mood. She listened carefully
to the desperate repetition of Papa’s axe against the grained flesh
of the tree. He was at one of the hardwoods again. She would not
go. Though she wanted so to dance for him again, the way Thérese
had showed her, to have Papa laugh and say “Lady Fair Child, may I
have the pleasure of the next dance?”
Suddenly the axe-blows ceased. Lil held her
breath. Then she heard the thunderous, sustained shriek of
disbelief and betrayal as the two-hundred-year-old walnut came
crashing through the forest to stun the ground with its abrupt
goodbye. Lil sat for a while in the sun-lit beaver meadow below the
creek and listened to the tree’s dying reverberate through the
earth.
She hated him. He trapped rabbits in the
east corner, their strung-up bodies stiffened by the night air, the
warmest morning could not thaw them. He nailed the head of the
dear-with-no-eyes above the fireplace, where it stared down at them
pretending to see like Old Samuels, the blind Indian who sometimes
sat in the sun in the dooryard, telling stories to the Frenchman’s
boys and twitching his white head about from person to person as if
it could perceive the smiles and nods of an audience. She hated
Papa. He made Thérese “be dead”.
