Lily's Story (5 page)

Mostly, though, they heard their own
footfalls in sunny glade or pillared gloom. Sounder, impatient with
Papa’s considered pace, scooted off into the semi-dark and popped
up in front of them with a red squirrel in his hand kicking out the
last of its life.

“
For supper,” he explained,
setting off again, guided by his own compass.

They came not to the River but to a genuine
road, a fifteen-foot swath cut through the bush, the stumps pulled
out and smoothed over with sand. Across the myriad streams
trickling west towards the river, bridges of demi-logs had been
crudely constructed. Lil realized that a horse and cart could
travel here. No vehicle approached. They followed the road due
north until the sun began to tilt sharply to their left. It will
sink soon, right in the River, Lil thought.

“
Are we near the water?”
she said, no longer able to keep this feeling to herself. How she
wished she were Sounder, able to dance sideways and chatter
jay-like to any tree that would listen.

Papa increased his pace. Acorn muttered his
disapproval. After a while Sounder said quietly to Lil: “River of
Light is just through the trees there; we been following it; but no
path, even for a brave walker.”

Lil looked longingly through the trees to
her left but saw only black irregular columns fluted by the sun
behind them. Her disappointment was interrupted by Sounder’s
exclamation.

“
Here’s the
farms.”

Never had Lil seen such an expanse of open
space unimpeded by trees. To the east of the road the bush had
been, in typical pioneer fashion, denuded of all timber, all brush.
Not even a windbreak separated one farm from another. The stumps of
the slain trees had been piled lengthwise to create makeshift
fences demarcating fields, properties, gardens, dooryards. At first
such angularity seemed alien to Lil, even painful to look at. But
the sight of cabins, several of them the largest buildings she had
ever seen, ranged neatly back from the road in neighbourly view of
one another, was overwhelming. She barely noticed that the sun was
fading quickly, the dusk rising from the newly ploughed fields
already burgeoning with fall wheat, its fern-green haze lending the
last of its light to this miraculous community.

The others were apparently impervious to
miracles for they had moved well ahead of her and were stopped,
waiting for her, in front of the third cabin, the smoke from its
fieldstone chimney lingering and friendly in the motionless air. It
was only when Lil came up to them that she glanced away from the
farms to the west again and discovered that the bush had, for a
stretch of two or three hundred yards, been cleared all the way
down to what could only be called the River.

“
This way,” Papa commanded
as she stood staring into the scarlet, gouged eye of the
sun.

Mrs. Partridge was really very kind to her.
She bathed Lil’s blistered feet in soda water, rubbed them with
ewe’s grease, and put into her moccasins little pads of the softest
cotton in the world. “Store-bought at Cameron’s,” she said with
restrained pride, “up to Port Sarnia.” After the meal of quail
roasted in a genuine iron stove, potatoes, squash, corn-bread with
molasses, tart apple-pie and mugs of warm goat’s milk, the men
slouched together by the fire, lit up their pipes, and conversed
partly in English and partly in Pottawatomie. They were soon joined
by two sturdy neighbours with buffed red cheeks and flaming hair.
Mrs. Partridge and her two elder daughters sat near the stove in
the kitchen, one carding wool, the other preparing to ‘full’
several man-sized macintoshes. Lil had many questions to ask but no
sentences in which to express them. She listened, though, her eye
never leaving the printed calico dresses of the elder daughters and
the rounded, urgent flesh so restless beneath them.

The Partridges had a small shed where you
went to relieve yourself. Lil left the door ajar; the moon poured
its amber warmth through the wedge in the tree-line. Lil did not go
back to the cabin right away; she walked past it and straight onto
the moon’s carpet. She heard the River just ahead in the darkness
behind the beam of light. Strange sand-grasses caressed her bare
legs. She came to the edge. The voice of the River filled her ears.
On either side of the brilliant filament she could see only a
blackness deeper and more resonant than the darkest sky in January.
The weight of the moon was a feather on its face. It roared with
the hoarse breath of a stag plunging through blood-soaked snow
towards absolute cold. In it, Lil thought she detected longing,
anticipation, and the joyous ache of seeking what always lay a
handspan ahead. Under the circling stars, Lil listened for the
language it used, but it was no tongue she had ever

heard.

From her cot near the board wall that
separated the sleeping area from the main room, Lil tried to catch
the meaning of the scattered words spoken by the men.

“
Them surveyors was through
here again last week, Michael.”

“
I heard,” said Papa’s
voice, barely recognizable.

“
Rumours floatin’ about, up
an’ down the line. Talk of makin’ this here territory a county,
they say.”

“
White fella draws lines in
the bush,” said Sounder, making no attempt to disguise his disdain
for the irremediable folly of the intruders.

Lil dozed. Dreamed of water bigger than
counties, borderless and infinitely serene.

“
It’s all right, I reckon
they’re all asleep by now.”

“
Went to the meetin’ down
at Chatham. Things is gettin’ worse, we hear tell. Some new law
comin’ in over there about returnin’ the poor devils. All
legal-like, too.”

“
Sun-in-bitch Yankees,”
Sounder added.

“
Over a hundred come across
since August. We’re lookin’ for a new route, Harry. Them raiders is
gettin’ smarter by the hour. New houses, too. Reckon things could
get real bad by summer.”

“
The committee can count on
us.”

“
Damn right. None of us
forgets what it was like to be a Highlander under George’s boot.
What do you want us to do?”

“
Sun-in-bitch
English!”

Lil was swimming, her hair fanned out like a
parasol in the blue wind.

Once again they rose and were well on their
way before sunrise. But this time Lil knew more about what lay
ahead. From various overheard conversations at the Partridges she
learned that the village of Port Sarnia sat less than two hours
walk along River Road to the north; and that one was not to be
surprised by periodic farms in lee of the road, though the spread
of a dozen at what the locals called Bloomfield was the largest
group below the Port itself. Here and there slash-roads were cut
eastward through the woods so that one could imagine not merely
strips of humanity but blocks or successive waves challenging the
hidden heart at the centre of the territory, known only to the
natives and the hibernating bears said to rule there unmolested. At
the end of River Road the bush would relent and they would come to
a huge clearing where the river eased into a wide bay, the site of
the new town, and behind it to the south and east the Ojibwa, or
Chippewa, Reserve where several thousand Indians lived in scattered
equanimity. What they were heading towards, what Sounder couldn’t
stop dancing about, was the arrival of the government ship for the
annual dispersal of the presents given in exchange for lands of
which the aboriginal owners had already been dispossessed. And Lil
watched it all come about amidst the wonder of being eight.

3

Just moments before Lil and
the others emerged from the bush into the misty dawn-light, the
steamer
Hastings
weighed anchor and slipped from its overnight mooring in the
bay towards the river bank below the town. Major John Richardson,
of literary and military fame, who had joined the official
expedition at Windsor on October 9, 1948, has left a vivid account
of those gift-giving ceremonies at the Reserves on Walpole Island
and at Port Sarnia. The weather was flawless: the sky unscarred by
cloud, the sun brilliant as a rubbed coin, the wind at ease in the
sea-grasses along the shoreline. As if the whole enterprise had
been choreographed beforehand, dozens of parties of Indians, large
and small, materialized from the forest of their Reserve at various
spots along the two-mile curve that formed a parallel to the
natural bend of the bay. Most walked, single file, the women and
children behind; some, more resplendent, rode the motley ponies
bred on the Island. At some undetectable signal, the Government
contingent marched down a single plank to the shore – a sort of
colour guard dazzling in blue and red and white, breaking off and
standing crisply at attention while a larger platoon of regulars
from the Canadian Rifles wheeled southerly just ahead of the
navvies freighted with the Queen’s largesse. At the same moment
five dignified Indians, obviously chiefs, moved towards the colour
guard, stopped dead-still, and waited. Major Richardson, wan and
aged beyond his years but impeccably turned out, stepped forward
with Captain Rooke. While Her Majesty’s gifts were being carefully
laid out in predetermined rows, neatly bound in fleece-white
blankets tied at the four corners, White Man and Indian exchanged
formal greetings, then sat down nearby at the doorway to a huge
skin tent that had magically arisen – the officers awkwardly, the
chiefs elegantly – and passed the ceremonial pipe. Major Richardson
was seen to talk animatedly in Ojibwa to several of the chiefs
whose smiles were all-encompassing. Meanwhile the
more-than-one-thousand natives who had now reached the plain began
to pick up their presents. The bundles were not marked in any way,
but each individual or group knew, from custom and tradition, which
kind of bundle was intended, and deserved. There was no rush, no
confusion even though the scattered actions of the numerous
families and several tribes appeared to be random. Bundles were
carried off to the edges of the plain where most families had set
up their cooking apparatus and blankets for the events of the day
ahead. Fires sprang up, smoke lifted and hung, cards and dice
gathered attention, fresh calico was paraded, Cavendish proffered
and puffed; babies complained and were content. The Great White
Mother had wafted her attention and grace across the world-sea and
blessed them with this day.

Only one element seemed out
of place on a morning described by Richardson as having ‘all of the
softness of mellowed autumn.’ One of the chiefs, a wrinkled and
scarred veteran of the Battle of the Thames who had stood beside
Tecumseh as the Yankee bullets ruptured the great man’s heart, did
not smile, did not sit, did not sip peace with his brothers, did
not take the gifts offered, did not bend his gaze away from the
badges and brass before him. He was
Shaw-wah-wan-noo
, the Shawnee or
Southener, the only one of his race known to inhabit these tragic
grounds so long after those cataclysmic events. Richardson, at an
age when romanticizing is either foolish or profound, says that
this man ‘notwithstanding five and thirty years had elapsed since
Tecumseh’s fall, during which he had mixed much with the whites,
suffered not a word of English to come from his lips. He looked the
dignified Indian and the conscious warrior, whom no intercourse
with the white man could rob of his native independence of
character’.

Lil was dizzy. She had to sit down near the
fire-pit and close her eyes. Never had she seen such an open space,
so many variegated objects in that space, and so much colour and
motion freed from necessity. The Indians’ regalia took two forms:
the outlandish harlequin suits of many of the younger Chippewa –
complete with scarlet sashes, blue leggings, black and white
ostrich feathers, and an English-made beaver hat; and the
traditional deerskins, rabbit furs and eagle feathers of the older
males and of most of the Pottawatomies. At first Lil could look
only at the natives, since, when she had stepped out of the bush
that morning, the plain was dotted with them. Only later did she
venture forth behind the slow-paced Acorn towards the bay and the
ceremonial party. Here she saw the soldiers she had heard about
only vaguely from the tales of the Frenchman who had been in the
War. Their scarlet uniforms caught the mid-morning sun, imprisoning
it; the bright steel and gilt of the swords flashed and darted at
any who dared look their way. Never had she seen men – uniformly
attired – prance in step, swing their arms unnaturally high in
unison, let their motion be driven by the panicked hammering of
drums. She saw too the sleek rifles carried by some of them and the
bayonets thin as a wish-bone: these weapons, she knew, were not for
hunting.

About noon-time Lil found enough courage to
go down to the River. The paddle-wheel steamer blocked her view.
From its iron stack clots of soot shot periodically upwards,
smudging the sky. Several men were tossing whole logs into a square
stove-like affair; the flame inside blew white and venomous.
Suddenly a man in a blotched uniform gave a shout; a metallic thing
whined, the wooden sides of the boat shivered, something
almost-animal shrieked as if mortally wounded, and, beating
frantically at the calm water, lurched northward along the bayshore
towards the townsite.