Lily's Story (12 page)

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.

T
hey 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.

T
here 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.

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.