Lily's Story (7 page)

“
We got snowed in,” said
Papa.

“
Precisely why the new road
is bein’ expedited.”

“
No citizen will be
disenfranchised by a…by the weather.”

“
What laws?”

“
You’ll recall that the
survey of ’43, lamentable though it was, served us well enough, but
a new one has been made necessary by certain
irregularities
discovered in the
original.”

“
They had, after all, only
the, ah, crudest of instruments and the Indians, we are told, ah,
pulled up the markers as fast as they could be laid.”

“
Done, I’m assured, in all
innocence.”

“
This ain’t my land,
then?”

“
Dear sir, please, uh,
please –”

“–
don’t leap to such dire
conclusions. We’re here on a mission of mercy, as it were. To be
blunt, and to allay any apprehension on your part, let me say
straightway that I have been authorized by the duly elected council
of Lambton County to inform you that several small errors were
made, back in ’43, in the lot alignments along this particular
strip of Moore Township.”

“
Very small errors, I
assure you.”

Papa’s chair emitted a sudden groan.

“
Infinitesimal.”

“
Tell me the
truth.”

After a pause, Smoothie said: “Your property
is too far east, sir. That is why the road out there runs so far
from your cabin-line. Your farm should front almost on the
road.”

“
Five yards from it
accordin’ to the, ah, lawful survey.”

“
But that still leaves more
than thirty yards –”

“
Thirty-three to be
precise. Ninety-nine feet, three inches.”

“
More than half my East
Field!”

“
That’s
correct.”

“
What does this
mean?”

“
Calm yourself,
sir.”

“
In technical terms it
means that you do not own a half of your East Field. And,
correspondingly, you own a hundred feet of land to the west
–”

“
Covered in
bush!”

“
There’s no need for, uh,
that sort of tone.”

“
Donald is right. You’ll
have every opportunity to buy that improved field. No plans exist
for a second line of farms behind this in the immediate future.
We’re movin’ south with the new road, and the crossroad will
continue from Millar’s farm to the east.”

“
I’d say you have four –
even five – years to buy that field.”

“
What with?” Papa’s
question went unanswered.

There was a long silence broken only by the
pouring of a single glass of whiskey.

“
There is, I’m afraid, one
more point to be made.”

“
A very wee one,” Kinky
said.

“
But pertinent. Accordin’
to your contract you were to make a specific number of improvements
within ten years, excludin’ your first winter here.”

“
Very reasonable demands,
I’m told.”

“
I’ve met them, every one
of ’em.”

“
In a sense,
yes.”

“
A moral sense, you might
say.”

“
But with the technical
loss of your East Field, you have, uh, technically –” Smoothie’s
smoothness began to fail him.

“
You’ll need, sir, to clear
another ten acres.”

“
But not by fall. That’s
why we’ve been sent here. The council is quite willin’ to accept
either solution: the immediate purchase of the cleared field
–”

“
On reasonable terms you
may, uh, be certain.”

“
Or the clearing of ten
acres by a year from September.”

“
No one wants to see you
lose this farm or be cheated of the, uh, fruits of your labour. All
of us are here to build a better country than the one we’ve known,
in a spirit of, uh, co-operation.”

“
And love and harmony, free
from prejudice.”

“
And
republicanism.”

“
I ain’t got the cash. You
know that. So does MacLachlan. I’d need cash to get help to clear a
new field. I owe everybody in the district – time and dollars. I
got no sons, you know. I got no wife.”

Papa drank. “I’m no
goddam
squatter
,
you know!”

The Scotch gentlemen’s fancy clothes brushed
restlessly against the coarse deal of the chairs.

“
Perhaps the Lord will help
you, sir.”

“
God damn the
Lord!”

Gasps, scraping of chairs, rustle of coats,
quick double-steps to the doorway.

A little distantly and in a quiet voice that
came from a different, darker part of the soul, Smoothie said: “We
both know where you can get cash, anytime you want it. Your comings
an’ doings have not gone unobserved. Good night, sir.”

Papa did not reply. Lil could not see below,
but she heard his laboured breathing. As the night visitors passed
by her birthday window and turned onto the path towards the
county’s road, she heard their parting comments.

“
The man’s a – a
republican!”

“
He’s a fuckin’ Irishman,
that’s what he is!”

In the darkness below her, Papa was sobbing.
Lil was frightened. A cold rage constricted her throat. Bee-bee,
the deer-mouse, was edging expectantly up her arm. She swung her
other fist at him, savagely. He fled, untouched. She should go down
to Papa. He had no son. He had no wife. On the beam above, she saw
Bee-bee, puzzled and hurt. She didn’t go down.

2

By that summer of 1851, while the hand-axe
still challenged each oak and ash, and the crops surprised
themselves by flourishing, the machinery that would soon transform
the countenance of Lambton was already in motion. Road-gangs of
disenchanted rustics and dispossessed natives hacked their way east
to London and south to Wallaceburg. Surveyors with their sextants
and their unbounded faith in Euclid – their chiseling eye
straightening bog and bend – roamed the back bush like Queen’s
spies on the most precious of missions. To the east and south,
barely out of earshot, the first locomotives soon would chuff and
clang through morning mists undisturbed since the granite and peat
and leafage rose triumphant from the steaming glaciers. Crows, more
ancient than the myths that impelled them, shook the soot from
their evening wings and stared. Eagles along the Erie cliffs
followed the spiral of smoke and steam, unable to break its code.
The politicos in Port Sarnia, dreaming their mercantilist dream,
strained to hear the chorus.

In the midsummer heat with only a smock on,
the sudden lustiness of a cooling breeze felt good on the calves,
arms, neck, the stretch of inner thigh. And if you crouched down
and looked out at a certain level, the wind seemed to be coaxing
ripples out of the wheat as it rolled, resisted and sighed into
acquiescence. Lil watched the waves, like the shadows of hands,
settle and reach, settle and reach for some far shore beyond the
forest’s edge. In the twilight the wheat shone, blue as flax.

“
Your Papa now, he’s gone
and surprised us all,” Maman LaRouche said, showing Lil how to pick
the potato bug off his perch and squeeze him between thumb and
forefinger just enough to split his seam. “Everybody ’round here
says ‘he’ll run off to the bush for sure now’, or ‘cain’t run a
farm without a woman and a crop of kids’ an’ so forth an’ so on.
Your Papa now, he ain’t no ordinary Joe.
Ow
!” One of the victims had bitten
back. “Goddam
maudit
bugs! I don’t know why anybody’d want to hang ’round this
hell-hole. I tell you, little flower, I ain’t dyin’ out here all by
myself. I sure ain’t. If that
calice
pot-belly’s got to skate on
his ass all the way to – Here now, you go ahead an’ try it,
ma petite
.”

Papa had indeed disappointed them all,
especially the Millars with their thirty cleared acres, their
crossroad and their planked facade, white-washed and all. Following
the trip to Port Sarnia, Papa had thrown himself into work. The
North and East Fields were both fully cultivated; there was a
vegetable garden guarded against the wild pigs by a split-rail
fence, a small shed for housing the oxen when they were visiting,
and, surprise of surprises, a root cellar on the north side of the
house. Papa took special care with this. He and the elder LaRouche
boys spent several days digging a cavernous hole in the ground. Lil
was curious, being only nine then, about what lay in or below the
earth, and when she wasn’t helping Maman with the meals, she peered
across their broad, bare, sweating backs wherein the muscles
churned like trapped weasels, and watched the pit grow larger and
darker. Soon, however, a roof and plank walls covered it, and a
little set of stairs appeared behind a fresh door. Lil was the
first to try them out. They led down to a platform of sorts, and
when you turned right you saw a cave with shelves across it and an
earthen floor below where the canning and the potatoes and turnips
would find a cozy berth, summer and winter. Lil felt the dampness
exuded by the violated ground and the slats of sunlight caroming
through the planking of the east wall.

Old Samuels attended the launching of the
‘new room’, politely refusing the proffered drink, feeling the
marvel of the deal planks and the cold metal eyes of the spikes
that secured them. But he refused to enter the cellar itself.

“
Bad spirits in there,” he
muttered theatrically.

“
In here, ya’ means,” said
Gaston LaRouche, shaking the jug and winking at the
others.

“
White Mens always tries to
fix up Nature,” he persevered, searching the planking with his
fingers for those icy arrowheads.

Nonetheless, Papa continued to be away a
great deal of the time. Fewer were the occasions when he returned
with a deer or a bear to share among the neighbours. Some mornings
Sounder and Acorn would be standing before the dead fire when Lil
came down, guns in their hands, peering around in puzzlement. “Your
Papa not hunt today?” Sounder would say. “Got too many venisons
already, I guess.”

“
Off to Chatham if you ask
me,” Maman would announce, asked or not. “That place is full of
darkies, I hear tell. A decent body can’t walk the streets.” But
despite any disapproval, she would invariably send little Marcel
along to check the pig and help out with the chopping.

Sometimes when Papa came home from Chatham
he would be tired but whistling, his eyes aglow. Other times he
would be very sad, you couldn’t talk to him for hours or look him
straight in the eye. “It’s a hell of a world out there, little one.
We’re better off right here.”

Once she saw a letter on the table. “Can you
read, Papa?” He looked stung, as if she’d struck him with an
axe-handle. “Uh huh. A little.” “Can you write?” “Not too good.”
“Can you teach me?” He looked at her, confused, as if seeing
someone else in her place. “You’ll get to read, an’ write too. Real
soon. When you’re a little older.” Lil sensed it would be some time
yet. But the thought of it, the mere promise, was enough.

“
Little White-Women’s
smart,” Old Samuels said, “up here,” pointing to a spot just above
the shutters of his eyes. “And here,” he added, indicating his
ears. He meant of course that she had picked up, from him and his
chattering nephew, quite a bit of the Pottawatomie tongue. At first
she would carry on full conversations only with Sounder, grilling
him constantly for new words. Finally Old Samuels took over her
‘education’, correcting much of the folly prompted by his nephew,
and delighting in the increasingly extended exchanges with this
waif, this orphan of the forests.

“
There’s hope, maybe, for
White Mens,” he would say to his ancestors when she had mastered
some grammatical intricacy he felt to be untransferable to the
simple mind of the intruders. In the darkest, deepest winter-dens
of his mind, he could hear the blurred echoes of his mother’s
Attawandaron, and the regret would be so overwhelming he would have
to get up and leave the cabin quickly lest he weep in front of the
child.

Papa, it seemed, had
overheard Maman’s advice, for in the winter that Lil was nine he
brought home with him, one day, a woman. Lil knew who she was, for
she had at last seen the squatter’s camp in the back bush, not
nearly so far away as she had imagined and much dirtier and sadder
than she’d ever expected. No wonder Old Samuels liked to spend his
day along ‘the line’. Squalling papooses, yapping dogs, quarrelling
squaws amid the smelly, humid habitation of makeshift wigwams that
possessed none of the redeeming dignities she had witnessed at Port
Sarnia. Among the squaws was a pretty young woman with eyes like
polished chestnuts, whose sinewy beauty was already softening
towards sumptuousness. Her name was
Penaseweushig
, or Birdsky, and she
brought with her a four-or-five-year-old son of somewhat mixed
blood (his hair was brown and curly), the incidental offspring of
some heated, casual lust between the girl and any one of a dozen
drifters happy to oblige and vanish. Birdsky, being herself a
Chippewa, gave him the name
Waupoore
or Rabbit. From Birdsky and
Rabbit, Lil, among other things, learned to speak yet another
tongue. The first time they came they stayed only a couple of
months, until the snows melted – when mother and child simply
disappeared one morning. Papa said nothing. He never said anything
about Birdsky to Lil. Indeed, even though they could converse
haltingly in English or fluently in Ojibwa, they talked little, in
the manner of the Indians themselves. Birdsky was very kind. She
did much of the cooking and cleaning, deferring to Lil whenever
necessary. When she returned with Papa later that summer, she
pitched in with Lil and Maman to harvest the potatoes and turnips,
and helped Maman ‘do down’ her pickles and jams. Maman clucked a
great deal about Birdsky’s presence and moderate dexterity, but was
kind to her, and, Lil began to suspect, genuinely fond of her
company. In December one of her relatives from the camp came by and
she went off with him. They didn’t see her until that spring. Papa
was away and when he got back he looked immediately for her, but
said nothing to Lil, nor could she read anything in his face. He’s
getting to be like Old Samuels on one of his taciturn days, she
thought.