Lily's Story (4 page)

They put Mama’s body – carefully wrapped in
a white sheet of the softest cotton from Maman LaRouche’s cedar
chest – in the ground on a slight knoll where the East Field was
about to join the North one. Jean-Pierre and Anatole dug the hole;
Maman sent everyone out of the house while she dressed Mama’s body.
Papa and the Frenchman and Luc sat in the lean-to shed sipping from
a jug, murmuring occasionally in low voices, but mostly staring
straight ahead into the bush. Once Lil thought she heard her
mother’s name spoken – ‘Kathleen’ – like a sort of unintentional
exhalation of breath, but she wasn’t sure. The best part was when
Maman surrounded her with her generous arms, clapped her close and
fast, and crooned some soothing French lament just for her. After a
time she was able to cry.

Old Samuels came with his nephews Sounder
and Acorn and, to Lil’s astonishment, a tribe of wives and children
who stayed well behind them with heads down, though still
resplendent in their skins, secret furs and black-and white
featherage. The Millars and even the two new families from the
North section came also. Lil had never before seen so many people
gathered in one place. She held Papa’s hand tightly, and he
squeezed back, hurting her, gently. Her heart reared through its
sadness.

Mr. Millar stepped forward, opened a black
book, read some words from it that the wind caught with ease and
carried off. Maman suddenly burst into sobs which she made no
effort to staunch. They rose and fell drowning the Bible words of
Mr. Millar, vanquishing the wind-sound in the pines, and Lil knew
even then that Maman LaRouche was weeping for them all.

Old Samuels began to hum from somewhere deep
in his body, letting the music of it find its own course and pace.
The gravesite became quiet; the wind shrank. Old Samuels’ mouth
opened and the music of his lamentation found syllables and eerie
repetitions that might have been words though no one present had
ever heard the language they had borrowed. His blank eyes like
death’s pennies began to shuffle in time with the rising/falling
cadences of his song. He turned his ancient face upward, and the
syllables rolled in his mouth as in water, muted and infinitely
mysterious. His whole frame tensed, expectant, as if he had been
asking some question over and over. He turned and looked towards
Papa and Lil. He smiled as only a man without eyes can smile: with
every feature of his face. In English he said: “The gods are
listening; that is all we can ask.”

Many times, of course, during that long
winter when Papa was away trapping or hunting, Lil asked who God
was, thinking of Mama lying unattended in that cold oven under the
snow. But Maman used the question to get herself started on her
obsessive musing about priests and the promises of faithless
husbands. Papa, who was always too tired to talk after his
journeys, would just grunt in an almost hurting tone, “Go ask that
Millar, he knows all about everythin’.” Then he would be off.

“
Off to Chatham,” Old
Samuels would shake his head sadly. “Plenty bad people in Chatham,
for sure.” Or when Papa sometimes pointedly picked up his gun,
leather pouches and haversack, and said to Lil, “Better tell them
lady deer to stay back in the bush, darlin’, your Papa’s comin’,”
Old Samuels would whisper after him, “Your Papa’s gone to Chatham
to hunt
bucks
,”
and chortle.

On the subject of God, though, Old Samuels
was eager and loquacious. “White Mens has the silliest ideas about
the gods. It takes us Indians a day to stop laughin’ when we hear
about it. For sure. First they say there’s only one god. If that’s
true then the white god must fight with himself. Anybody with ears
and eyes” (he’d always pause here for a tiny ironic smile) “knows
about the god in the thundercloud whose voice speaks blackly to the
quiet gods in the lake and the summer creeks. And the god of the
gentle winds has no love for the god of the blizzard that tears the
trees in half and buries the earth. Anybody knows there’s the good
gods and the wicked gods, the guardian spirits and the demons that
lurk everywhere. We must listen to the good gods to keep them on
our side: they will help those who listen for them. Remember that,
little one. But we must also help the gods. Sometimes the demons
are too strong and the good gods go into hiding. That is a sad time
for the world.”

When Lil mentioned that Maman LaRouche told
her that Mama was in heaven, Old Samuels chuckled bitterly. “That
woman talks silliness. I tell her I come to her funeral and dance
on her grave, and she throws a pot at me. Me, a man with no eyes.
The gods made her miss, for sure.”

“
What about
heaven?”

“
Your Mama, who was the
dearest White Womens in this world, is not in heaven, little
dancing one. That Millar, he tells me heaven is a pretty house with
beads and ornaments on it up over the moon and the stars. That is
silliness. The good gods would not build their house up there, they
live here in the green world and in the stars themselves. Your
Mama’s body is under the earth, but the guardian gods have taken
her spirit with them. Wherever they are, she will be also. If your
eyes and ears are listening to the good gods, you will hear her
voice among theirs. In that way she will always be near you. You
must not listen to the silliness of that Millar.”

“
How do you know the good
gods’ll speak to me?”

“
Ah, that is easy. Because
you sing their song, and you dance, and you are happy even when
you’re sad. And you make Old Samuels happy.”

“
I can’t dance,” said
Lil.

Old Samuels paused to light his pipe. Lil
thought he was finished talking for the day. “But you can. I hear
dancing in your voice; every day.”

Lil did not like to be teased. For a while
she sulked and hated Old Samuels. She waited in the woods by the
gravesite for a demon to whisper something outrageous to her. The
old man took no notice. He stayed his usual time and without saying
goodbye made his way across the field towards his great-nephew at
the edge of the bush.

One night, alone in her loft, Lil woke to
the harvest moon igniting the straw at her feet. She caught herself
humming:

Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o

Hi diddly iddly, hi diddle air-o

Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um

Soon she felt the presence of a second part
in flawless harmony with her own. She stopped. Her mother’s voice
continued, as elfin and crystal as the moon’s.

Lil was often alone. But then she had been
as long as she could remember, even when Mama was here. She was not
lonely though. She could sit beside her father while he chopped
wood or cursed after Bert and Bessie – for hours without the need
to speak. Often she hummed, sang songs or made them up as she
watched whatever rhythmic, repetitive scenes were being played out
before her. By herself in the fields she would lie on her back and
dream the clouds into shapes of her wishing, or follow, minute by
minute, the extravagant exit of the sun as it boiled and dissolved
or tossed itself on the antlered tree-line and uttered its blood.
The few acres that demarcated her world pulsated with sights,
sounds, smells; with minute dramas of birth, struggle and demise.
And now there were the guardians and the demons to listen for, the
good gods in their hiding to be touched and revealed.

“
This bush don’t go on
forever,” Old Samuels said that spring, sensing restlessness in the
girl. “Half a day’s walk towards the sunset and you’ll come to the
River of Light that’s been flowin’ there since the last time the
wild gods stirred the earth like a soup and started it over again.
Two days walk towards the North Star where that river begins and
there’s the Freshwater Sea of the Hurons, bigger than the lakes on
the moon. Someday you’ll get to see them. For sure.”

I already have, thought Lil. She had been
dreaming of water ever since the first snow had widened the woods
in October. In the midst of the bush, beyond the last blazed trail,
she would suddenly see before her a stretch of blue, unrippled
water, without edges or end, clear as cadmium and silent as if
waiting for the wind to be invented or a sun to come birthing out
of it. Then a crow would caw and the snow-bound trees pop back into
view. In the early spring the bubbling of Brown Creek below the
East Field would unexpectedly become magnified as if it were a
torrent ripping out the throat of a narrows, roaring triumph and
terror until Lil stopped her ears, knowing somehow that she had
transgressed, that the demons had indeed inherited part of the
earth.

“
You’re like Old Samuels,
little one. Sometimes you know.”

“
I’ll ask the guardian to
bring back your eyes,” Lil said.

“
So I can see all the
wickedness and all the silliness again? It’s not like olden times
any more. Two days walk south of here and they say you’ll come to
roads chopped through the bush, and White Mens drives his wagons on
roads made of dead trees, and Chatham is bigger than ten Ojibwa
villages and the niggers prowls at night with eyes as white as a
cat’s.”

“
Why does Papa go
there?”

“
I like your Papa. He’s a
good White Mens. He gave me my name: Old Samuels. I tell him my
name is
Uhessemau
,
he says ‘I can’t say that so I’ll just call you Old Samuels, all
right?’ I like the name Old Samuels, so I keep it. Redmen don’t
fuss about names; we have many names before we die. If I die with
Old Samuels, well that’s okay with me.” The old man puffed on his
pipe and thought about the many names he had lived
through.

Lily was only half-surprised , then, when
Papa appeared that evening at dusk, his haversack full of
store-bought bacon and sausages, and said: “Start packin’, little
one, we’re goin’ up to Port Sarnia to watch the ceremonies.”

2

It was Indian summer. The leaves had turned
but not fallen. No wind disturbed their shining in a sun that
blazed with more hope than heat. Along the forest track, purged of
summer’s mosquitoes, autumnal shadows stretched and stilled,
preserved in light. Air in the lungs was claret, flensing. Lil
breathed and strode. Papa measured his own practiced stride to
hers; she floated in his grateful wake. She was holding his hand as
surely as if they were touching.

They had left home while the sun was still a
promise in the east, and the path linking the four farms to the
north was sullen with shadow. Lil had never been north of Millar’s
farm; Lil had never seen the River. In the absence of birdsong this
day, her heart fluttered and drummed. The beaten path, so familiar
to their feet, disappeared. The sun had risen but not above the
tree-line; there was just enough light to see the blazes, newly
slashed, that marked the bush-trail ahead. They were going north,
through nowhere to somewhere. At last.

Just as the sun bested the
tree-line far to their right, they were joined by Old Samuel’s
nephews –
Metagomin
or Acorn, and
Pwau-na-shig
or Sounder. They slipped behind Lil without a
word. Only when they stopped much later for a drink from a shallow
spring and a brief rest did she notice that they were not in their
hunting attire. Their red and blue sashes against the white calico
of their
capots
were dazzling, even amongst the maples and elms. Like Papa
they carried haversacks stuffed with supplies. Sounder, as usual,
grinned broadly at Lil, giving her a glimpse of the merriment that
must have once quickened the eyes of Old Samuel himself. Acorn,
according to his custom, nodded at Lil without changing the
impassive, set features of his face. Lil stared at the grimace of
the black squirrel peering out of the fur on Acorn’s
shoulder.

To Papa they spoke in Pottawatomie, the
speech (according to Old Samuels) their parents had adopted when to
utter Attawandaron or Petun meant death. No one was alive now who
remembered those sweet/sharp sounds. Lil thought sadly of her
mother’s lullaby tongue. Sounder was chattering away to Papa like a
jay in the soprano range. Already Lil could pick out some words;
the pitch of rising excitement was plain. She detected “presents”
(several times), “white soldier”, “big river” and “village”. Papa
replied laconically, half listening as he did with Lil. But he was
happy. His large hands cradled the back of his head, his eyes
glowed with something remembered and anticipated. Lil found herself
beside him. She put her hand on his knee.

Sounder had switched to English.
“Little-maiden-with-the-goldenrod-hair is a brave walker, no?”

The ghost of a hand bent over hers…

“
Big white general only
give presents to squaws with black hair. White generals plenty
fussy ’bout presents.”

…
brushed and
settled.

“
Sounder like all squaws;
give presents to everybody.” His eyes danced at the thought. “Even
Acorn,” he laughed, and did a little jig around his unimpressed
cousin. The squirrel seemed curious.

“
Ready to move?” Papa said,
in Acorn’s direction.

Some time after noon, they turned
north-west, still following the blazed trail. To the west lay the
River. Lil strained to hear its voice. The bush was awesomely
silent. The odd crow, unmated, cawed in complaint; a bear crumpled
the dry brush nearby, seeking the late berries, the crab-apple
windfalls, a sour-cherry unravaged by headlong flocks. Unobserved,
squirrels broke open the chestnut, hazel, beech, walnut, acorn. In
the pines, steadily diminishing now, chickadees tumbled out of
tune. More and more, there were large natural clearings – beaver
meadows or sandy patches where the hundred-foot oaks and pines had
given in to be replaced by clans of cherry, crab and snow-apple
which, though silent and satiate now, in the spring must have
emblazoned the bush with immaculate flame.