Lily's Story (2 page)

Lil laughed. A butterfly,
yellow as honey, was tilting the breeze on one wing, then the
other, before a thistle rescued it. When Lil stretched out a
finger, it gratefully accepted the offer. She could feel the wind’s
ripple flow down the golden sails of its wings, shudder through its
stiff rigging and hum against her fingertips. Then she saw its ugly
mouth-parts, scissoring and askew. A hand pounced. The sails
exploded. She was about to regret something when the premonition of
the sound came again. From the grove just beyond the clearing. This
time she felt it. She
knew
.

There were two sounds. The strongest was a
tearing, pent-up sensation she felt somewhere in her groin, forcing
its way upwards towards her throat, an inchoate cry of pain in
which anguish and joy were equally mixed, as if something precious
was fighting to be liberated and lost, welcomed and regretted.
Lil’s stomach twisted with the urgency of her need as she waited
for its full articulation to reach her ears. At which point she
felt the presence of the second voice, in her lungs and swelling
through her heart and up behind her eyes where she often measured
the echoes of Thérese’s music – a cry not nearly so loud or anxious
as the first but somehow stronger, not yet formed but ripe with
confidence and possibility.

Lil’s bones rang like tuning forks.
Something alive and dangerous lay in the forbidden place where the
Indians dwelt, where they drummed and sang. Tremors of pure fright
shook her body. She was scared; she was alive; she wanted to dance;
she wanted to know where Thérese lived. She stepped into the gloom
ahead. She saw before she heard.

The tableau that materialized in front of
her could not have lasted more than a few seconds, yet was vivid
and detailed, illuminated as it was by that curious half-glow which
thrives in the underbrush, relishes its kinship with the mushroom
dark, and is more defining to the eye in tune with its motives than
the most glaring sunlight.

Though the images came almost as one, Lil
picked out the doe’s eyes, fear afloat in them; a dishevelled mane
of black hair electric around them; then a mouth, attached to
nothing but the tongue whose cry it seemed desperate to swallow.
The shriek from that disembodied instrument struck the pine-boles
behind Lil at the very instant she felt its incredible agony burst
up through her own throat and enter the air. In the increasing
light, Lil saw the stems of a woman’s breasts aimed upward and knew
she was witnessing someone or something “going dead”. Her instinct
now was to run, to save something precious and violable inside her
from annihilation. Instead, she watched the woman’s hands thrash,
independent of each other, against the unresisting air, and waited
for the next, the final, cry.

Then Lil saw that the eyes, hair, tongue,
hands and nipples were connected to a single body, were even
curiously coordinated to some mysterious purpose. The bronze skin,
utterly vulnerable to the air, told her she was seeing, for the
first time, an Indian woman in her own place. She was lying on her
back, braced now on her elbows, her legs flung or pulled wide, in a
sort of protected hollow in the brush that looked as if it had been
prepared for this chance event in some way. Even before the next
wrenching cry came out of her, Lil herself heard the second voice
and gazed, in horror and delight, as a tiny head, like a
water-logged walnut, battered against the woman’s opening, timing
its own assaults with the latter’s convulsive flinching, till at
last its gleaming skull burst forth in a halo of blood whose petals
spun at Lil’s feet, whose medallions dripped from the slow leafage.
Behind the blood-slick head a brown vermiform trunk thrashed and
strove, till its dormant extremities kicked clear. As the babe slid
onto the carpet of the forest floor, the little head twisted
sunward, then turned to reveal a miniature face with eyes that
looked straight at Lil.

They were as black as Thérese’s.

2

1

Mama was in her bed again. She went there
quite a lot now. Yesterday she had smiled at Lil and said, “Well,
little one, it’s time we went down to see this North Field of
ours.” Pale and tine, occasionally clutching at Lil’s shoulder, she
picked her way past the charred stumps of last year’s
slash-and-burn, careful to avoid the ripening wheat of the older
East Field, and coming at last out of the shadow of the huge pines
to a point where she could see, at a glance, the five acres of
cleared land to be called forever after the North Field. The odour
of ash and singed wood and languishing smoke struck their nostrils.
Mama breathed it in, like an elixir. In the distance Papa turned,
stood still, and then waved. “Pick some raspberries this side of
the creek,” she said to Lil. “I’ll make a pie.”

There was no pie. The berries had shrivelled
a month before and Mama had one of her coughing spells. Papa as
usual took some day-old soup in to her. Lil listened, as she always
did, to catch the slightest whisper of a word between them. There
was none. Though Papa stayed a long while, until the haze of
evening grew like a moss along the sills and Mama’s breathing
became regular again, heavy with exhaustion.

This morning he “went off”. “Gotta have meat
for that soup,” he used to say to Lil, taking down his gun and
putting on the buckskin he’d gotten from Old Samuels. Lately he
just went off. “Probably,” Mama said, her voice shaking with
effort, “with that Acorn fellow.” Acorn, one of Old Samuels’
nephews, never came near the house, sometimes standing for hours
(Lil had seen him at the edge of the East Field) just waiting,
before slipping back into the bush.

But Lil was ‘a help’ now. She was seven. If
Papa set the pot on the irons and started the fire, she could cut
the turnips up and toss them in, and stir the soup with its tiny
rabbit bones disconnected and afloat. Papa had made a lovely stone
oven at one side of the fireplace, and Lil would take the sourdough
prepared by Maman LaRouche, and doing exactly what she had been
shown, make bread for Papa’s supper. Next spring Papa was going to
get them a pig. Already he’d built a pen for it against the east
wall.

“
Plenty pigs in the bush,”
Old Samuels would chortle. “Only White Mens builds him a house and
grows him food.” Then he would shake his head in mock bewilderment
at the folly of his hosts. Nonetheless, he would wait with the
patience of his seventy-odd years till Lil or Papa reached into the
stew and offered a respectfully large morsel. Mama didn’t like the
way Old Samuels came into the main room without announcing his
arrival. Sometimes Lil would be working over the fire, humming one
of Mama’s songs, and when she turned, Old Samuels would be no more
than five feet behind her, the black pennies where his eyes should
have been giving nothing away. “You gonna be a good cook, like the
Frenchman’s woman.”

Occasionally he would stay all day, sitting
on his knees to the left of the fire where he could detect any cool
draft from the curtained doorway, saying nothing. Sometimes he
would talk to Lil, raising his thin voice just enough to include
Mama, willing or no, in the one-way conversation. Old Samuels told
long stories, most of which began, “Wasn’t like that here in the
olden days” and ended “and that’s the truth, and I know ‘cause I
seen it, I seen it before these eyes of mine withered up on me.”
When Papa made the slightest demurral, he’d say, “Besides, blind
men don’t lie.”

“
He’s got the manners of a
ghost,” Mama used to say, but not once did she ask him to
leave.

“
How does he get here if he
can’t see?” Lil asked Papa. “He says he’s lived here so long he
knows every bush and beetle in the territory,” Papa said. And it
seemed to be true, as Lil would watch him enter their land at the
far corner of the East Field just past the Brown Creek (that went,
they said, all the way to the Indian camp in the back bush), and
then thread his way through the maze of stumps and ash-heaps, never
once stepping on the haphazard swirls of wheat between.

“
Redmen smells his way in
the bush,” he told Lil. “Don’t need eyes. Redmen sniffs the air
currents like the white-tail.” He demonstrated. “Raspberry jam,” he
announced, “from the Frenchman’s woman.”

“
Yes,” said Lil, duly
amazed.

Last week, though, after the Frenchman and
his three eldest – Luc, Jean-Pierre and Anatole – had finished
piling and burning the last log in the North Field, and after some
firewater had been consumed by all, Lil saw Old Samuels weave his
way towards the back bush, teetering and righting himself as he
went. At the corner of the East Field, he paused. The sounds of the
men parting in the other direction diminished and died. Old Samuels
appeared to look towards the east. Then a small brown boy slipped
from the bush and touched Old Samuels’ hand. He shook it off. The
boy turned. Old Samuels followed, exactly two paces behind until
the woods reclaimed them.

“
Your Papa got a nose for
the wind,” he said whenever Papa went off with Acorn or Sounder.
“Hunting’s no good here now. Not like the olden days. They go all
the way to Chatham, I guess, to find any bucks this time of
year.”

Lil wanted to know more about Chatham but
Mama began coughing and she had to take the soup in. When she got
back, she saw it was no use: Old Samuels had lit up his pipe,
stuffed with aromatic tobacco. “White Mens’ tobacco no good,” he
would say. “Not like the olden days.” But when he got smoking, he
didn’t talk.

Lil may not have known much about Chatham
yet, or any other town – Port Sarnia, Sandwich, London – but she
was seven and she had travelled some miles into the bush with Papa
when he trapped in the winter; she had seen the other farms along
the line north of them. She could read the blazes on the trees and
find the faint paths through the bush that would open suddenly upon
sun-lit beaver meadows, some of them as big as the East Field.
Beyond the Millar’s farm she had seen the ‘road’ that was said to
meander all the way to Port Sarnia, and from there to London
hundreds and thousands of miles to the east. She knew too that a
great river swept by them no more than half-a-day’s walk from their
own doorstep.

Someday Papa would take her with him.

“
Yes,
little-blond-one-with-doe’s-feet, your Papa he likes Chatham very
much. Not like it used to be. I was there a long time ago when the
Yankees come across and my brothers all died in the field there by
the antler river. All changed now. Full of niggers now.”

Lil knew it was futile to ask but did so
anyway. Old Samuels surprised her. “Black men”, he said. “Come from
where the Yankees live. Niggers is afraid of the Yankees. The
Yankees takes their land, their houses, their women. They run away,
a thousand days journey, all the way to Chatham.”

“
Do the white people there
help them?”

Old Samuels paused. Then he began to laugh.
Since he was blind, Lil was used to watching, not his blank eyes,
but his mouth and nostrils. The laughter started with a trembling
of the latter, spread to the wrinkling corners of the lips and
shook without mercy the flaps of flesh below his chin.

Lil waited.

“
Niggers run away. Ojibwa
and Attawandaron just stands around and wonders what’ll happen
next. Once we get some place, we don’t like to leave.”

Lil wasn’t sure what he meant, but she found
herself laughing along with him. “Make me laugh, little one. Good
for the rheumatism.”

2

Lil was not prepared for the Frenchman’s
place. The customary procedure for the homesteader in the new
territory was to clear room for his cabin near the front ‘line’ of
the property, then proceed in a systematic fashion to open up
‘fields’ to the north, east and south. When at last Lil was allowed
to accompany Anatole back to his place to fetch some garden greens
for Mama, she was surprised to find their house somewhere near the
centre of several haphazard ‘fields’ of no determinate shape.
Several nut trees had been left standing, in random wonder, amidst
the fledgling wheat and enthusiastic if undisciplined vegetable
garden. All trees were to be cut down: that was the unspoken code
here, one of the unarticulated motives that drove the homesteaders
to the mutual service and support they required to survive.

The Frenchman’s cabin had begun life as a
log structure of the typical rectangular design, but time, weather,
whim and exigency had added their intentions to the original. Rooms
of planks and split logs – packed with mortar and straw – jutted
out, sagged, or lay half-built and dazed where the Frenchman’s
imagination or optimism had failed him. No windows looked in or
out. Against the east wall, roughly speaking, a lean-to of sorts
had been erected wherein the ox-team of Bessie and Bert found
little comfort at day’s end among the resident pigs and visiting
barred rocks.

Much of the cooking and indeed family life
took place outside the murky interior of the homestead. LaRouche,
using the trade he had abandoned for farming after the war against
the States, had built a fine stone oven-and-fireplace protected
from the rain by a canvas affair rigged out of army tenting,
deer-hides and one old sail salvaged, according to its owner, from
the Battle of Put-In Bay. Here Madame LaRouche – referred to as
Maman by her brood of eleven and as Fluffy by her husband in
undisguised admiration for her three hundred pounds of flesh,
sturdiness and good health – presided over hearth and oven with a
temper that alternated between wheezing cheeriness and
tongue-biting pique.