Lily's Story (6 page)

After a while, Lil opened her eyes. The
River was now hers. She could see the other side, but the trees
over there were faded and shapeless, so vast was the blue torrent
pouring past them. To the south she could trace its surge for miles
as it swept through the bush with power and disdain. This was no
creek, however magnified in imagination. No shadow touched its
translucent face save that of the welcome herring-gull or
fish-hawk; it was forever open to the sun and the stars; there was
an eternal earth-light in that blue tidal twisting – even in the
depths. It was the enemy of darkness. It diminished whatever it
touched. It rejoiced in its flowing.

To the north, beyond this brief inlet, the
near-bank bent slightly west, and Lil strained to see through the
autumn haze the place where the Freshwater Sea of the Hurons fed
its own waters into the River. She felt its mammoth presence behind
the mist. I will be back. I will see you. I will. In the direction
the boat had gone Lil saw the outlines of what she knew was a
genuine town. Like Chatham. Perhaps there were even black people
with charred faces and cavernous eyes. From here she could see only
the white splotches that were cottages, not cabins. Tendrils of the
purest smoke rose from their stone chimneys. Somewhere amongst them
was Cameron’s store. For the first time she was aware of her
sack-cloth chemise, her improvised leggings, her straggling
reddish-blond hair unadorned by flower or feather. She sat down by
the fire-pit, in the midst of laughter and joyous commotion, and
wept.

She did not hear Acorn squat beside her.
When she had stopped crying, she became aware of his presence, and
noticed he had been holding out his hand towards her.

“
For you, little fawn,” he
said, averting his eyes.

It was a gift. A buckskin jacket with
intricate configurations of beading that might have been inspired
by the Big Dipper or the Pleiades.

Papa spent a lot of time talking with the
officers and other white men from the boat and the town. Many times
he laughed, out loud. Sometimes his eyes would cloud over the way
they did when he talked about Mama. Twice his gaze had searched Lil
out among the comings and goings, looked relieved, and then
twinkled. Sounder hopped and skittered, chattered and horse-traded,
threw the dice and snoozed beside her in the afternoon grass.

I’ll give you a half-dollar for it, ancient
one.” The officer held the piece up to the sun as if it were a
jewel or a talisman. The old Pottawatomie chief followed its
flight, tempted. His hands unconsciously rubbed the black walnut
warclub they had polished with their affection these many years
since the wars ended.

“
This club belong to my
father,” he said, more to himself than to the pot-bellied Canadian
before him.

“
Two half-dollars,
then.”

The old one looked momentarily puzzled, then
hurt. Finally he said, “One half-dollar,” letting the officer reach
across and draw the club from its accustomed grip.

Papa was about to step forward when
something in the Indian’s expression made him pause. Papa watched
him put the silver coin into his pouch without examining it, and
turn towards the river. Lil saw the look on Papa’s face; it was the
one he used just before he swung the hatchet at the beaver or
muskrat not drowned by the trap.

“
Sun-in-bitch Canadian,”
said Sounder behind them. Then, after a decent interval: “They
start dancing now.”

The dancers were not human. Against the
squandered tangerine sun they were silhouettes freed from gravity,
embodiment, the etching of light. They moved to the will of the
drum only. You could see the dancers’ feet strike the ground like
the skin of a living tom-tom, like the heartbeat of the hunted,
like the music bones make when breaking. The air above the
performers shook with their cries. They danced towards enchantment,
expiation, communion – but the sun flattened and gave out behind
them. The drum ceased.

Lil’s heart was like a sparrow’s. She
skipped across the field, letting it flit and sail at will. She
squeezed her eyes shut and dared the earth. She reached their spot,
unscathed.

“
We’ve been asked over to
the Reserve,” Papa said, ignoring her exhilaration. As they packed
up their few belongings, Lil turned for a final look at her River.
No doubt she observed the last image recorded by Major Richardson
as the
Hastings
swung round in the bay to head south: the old Pottawatomie
seated on the river-bank, unmoving, his single eagle’s feather
brittle against the horizon. The Major waves. The figure remains
still. The Major, remembering Tecumseh and the mist of blood along
the Thames, waves again. It is too dark to see whether the shadow
has responded.

4

The Indians’ homes were scattered across the
fifteen square miles of their allotted territory. The wigwams were
grouped in threes and fours as family size or friendship dictated.
The area that Lil, Papa, Sounder and Acorn were led to was probably
the largest of such communities with six ample bark-and-skin
wigwams arranged in a rough circle with some cleared space behind
each dwelling for the gardens, still swollen with late pumpkins,
squash and marrow. This was the home of the Pottawatomie clan,
whose fathers had taken in the dispossessed Attawandaron and then
themselves been driven off their lands.

Small fires were lit in the wigwams and a
large one in the circle among them. The night closed in, quick and
black. No stars, no moon. Each fire held its adherents captive;
food was heated, shared, consumed; brave talk floated over the
pipe-smoke, languished and was revived. Lil dozed against a
shoulder. She was dreaming. Her fingers detached themselves from
her hands, and without her consent began to tap upon her belly,
filling it with distant music.

She opened her eyes, squinting through the
smoke-haze. The air quivered. There were tom-toms singing out of
the dark spots – not the steady war-dance of the daylight hours but
the wild, a-rhythmic, celebratory beat of the all-conquering. This
time everyone was dancing, it seemed, whenever the moment called
for it. Lil caught the frayed outlines of men, women, children
twisted into grotesque forms by the uncertain flames, made
insubstantial by the sculpturing smoke, lifted to momentary frenzy
by the intoxicant drum.

Lil rose, drawn into the melee, and felt her
feet take off, seeking out the cadence, finding it with astonished
ease, letting her body sail over them, swing free, the heart
launched like a swallow at dawn.

Dizzy, coughing, and exhausted from the
physical effort of the past two days, Lil groped her way to one of
the wigwams. She crept to the rear of it and retched into the
ragweed. Chills ran up and down the length of her body, though she
could still feel the sweat pouring off her chin. A few feet away
she heard a sort of mellow grunt. As her eyes grew used to the
dark, she saw, in the weeds, the outlines of what could have been
several bodies – unclothed, fastened together, it seemed, like a
pair of earthworms after a sudden rain, sweat like a mucous bonding
them to some mutual appetite. Lil took little notice. She felt the
night-air cooling her. She was glad she had danced. She had never
felt anything so wonderful. Not even the sound of her River.

She crawled back into the firelight. Papa
was nowhere to be seen. Nor Acorn. Sounder had gone into one of the
wigwams right after their arrival. She was alone, and very tired.
She would find a blanket and sleep – anywhere. Out there, the
dancing was diminishing as the participants retired, mostly in
twos, to a wigwam or to some sheltered place behind the circle
out-of-earshot.

A strange feeling came over Lil. Her eyes
came wide open. All fatigue magically drained from her.

A huge shadow passed between her and the
nearest fire. Someone was beside her, still and silent. No words
were exchanged. After a while a small group of Pottawatomies came
out of the next wigwam. From their laughter Lil guessed they had
been drinking some of the whiskey brought in by two or three of the
Chippewas from the town. They appeared to be members of a single
family – a somewhat pudgy mother and father, some grown sons and a
slender girl on the brink of puberty. As they gathered near the
central fire, the news spread and several dozen others stopped to
watch what was about to happen. Two of the girl’s brothers or
cousins stood, one on either side of her, gently lowering her to
her knees. The girl showed no sign of fear; her face was, if
anything, radiant with sweat and reflected flame, her eyes alert to
every movement around her. The tom-tom had stopped. At a signal
from the girl’s father it started up again, subdued and throbbing.
Stepping towards the kneeling girl, he placed a garland of some
sort on her head. She looked up and out – straight at Lil. Her eyes
had devoured last night’s moon.

The father, responding to the increased
tempo of the drum, began a long incantatory song in Pottawatomie.
Lil could catch none of the words, but she knew it was a joyous
chant, full of affection and hope.

“
She has changed her name,
little dancer.” It was the voice of Southener, the Shawnee, seated
beside her. “Her name was White Blossom. Tonight she’s no longer
White Blossom. She is Seed-of-the-Snow-Apple. It has been
proclaimed before all of the tribe. Now she must strive to live up
to the name bestowed upon her.”

Not once did Southener look over at her. He
said nothing else, as the ceremony ended and the fires grew smoky
and fickle. But Lil knew all she had to do was let her head droop
onto a waiting shoulder. And she did.

All the fires were out when Lil woke with a
strange feeling inside her even stronger than before. Her friend
had placed a blanket over her and rolled another one as a pillow
for her head. She got up and, as if impelled by some force both
familiar and inscrutable, stepped straight into the darkness behind
the circle of dwellings. A slice of moon, as it sailed through
ragged cloud, was glinting streaks of light – enough for Lil to be
able to pick her way past the vines and overripe melons into the
pitch of the bush itself. If she were following a sound she was not
conscious of hearing it; and nothing could be seen ahead but the
denser shadow of the tree-trunks themselves.

Lil stopped, in a bit of a clearing.
Overhead the moon popped out like a glass eye in a jelly jar. A bat
brushed its bachelor wing against the sky. In the nearest pine, a
Massassauga stuttered against bark. Owl’s eye flicked shut.

Lil was already watching
them. The Indian girl, the one named
Petta-song
(Rising Sun) who had led
Sounder into her wigwam, was tipped over backwards on the ground.
Her hair, unbraided, parroted the lolling motion of her face
lathered with moon-sweat. Papa was kneeling between her bare legs
like the Frenchman when he prayed, though he wore no clothes.
Papa’s hands were gripping her breasts as if they were axe-handles,
and his whole body was bunched and aimed at hers as it was when he
had marked a pine-tree for chopping. With each blow
Petta-song
whimpered and
Papa sighed, until at last the girl flung both legs at the moon and
let out a shriek that shook the melons out of their sleep and
roused the embering campfires, that sounded like some virgin giving
birth to a god. To which news the axeman responded with the
seasoned groan of a man bearing the word of his own
demise.

4

1

From her sanctuary in the loft Lil could see
– through the new glass window Papa had installed in honour of her
eleventh birthday – the stars, the quarter moon, the black rampart
of trees, and the outlines of a genuine road to the west, now that
they were officially a county. Behind her the deer-mice pretended
to skulk and cower, the swallows dozed with their new brood under
the eaves. Very clearly Lil saw the two figures detach themselves
from the road and walk purposefully towards the cabin. They walked
like no farmer Lil had ever seen. Just as they knocked, doffed
their hats and entered, the candlelight caught their red hair,
slick lapels, polished boots.

As soon as Lil heard them speak she knew
they were Scotch. She was very good at voices. One spoke smoothly,
the other with a sort of hitch or kink somewhere in every
sentence.

“
Yes, thank you very much,
but just a thimbleful if you don’t mind: good for the gout my
doctor says.”

A gurgle of whiskey escaping.

“
I’ll join you as well.
I-er-haven’t got the gout, but of course I’m anticipatin’
it.”

They both laughed.

“
Bein’ a gentleman who gets
out and around, you’ll know all about the new county and the
marvelous – could I say miraculous – improvements it’s bringin’ its
citizens, whatever their race or beliefs.”

“
Or, uh, colour,” added
Kinky.

“
Citizenship in Her
Majesty’s kingdom is colour-blind, I thank the Good
Lord.”

“
To Her
Majesty!”

“
What sorta changes do you
have in mind for me?” Papa asked, evenly.

“
Well now, they aren’t
really, they don’t exactly apply to you, specifically or
–”

“
What my cousin is sayin’
is that we are merely servants, appendages of the council who in
turn must carry out the laws duly passed by the Legislative
Assembly to which – may I remind you – we all sent the Honourable
Mr. MacLachlan.”