Lily's Story (10 page)

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
fin
e 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 lie. “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 across 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?

“
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.