Moore Township, 1845
Something stirred in the darkness ahead. It made no sound, as yet. But it was present, and alive, or coming alive: she always knew. She did. The breath from a fawn’s cough could tease her skin – like this ripple of shaded wind against her cheek – long before her ear caught the sound and recorded it. Lil was glad once again to be in the comfort of the trees’ canopy. It was cozy here, like the cabin with Papa’s fire blazing out of icy logs, when Mama was not in her bed. Lil wasn’t afraid of the dark. Mama sometimes shivered in the dark at night, the rare night when Papa “was off” and Lil was beckoned to press her thighs and chest and swan’s belly against her mother’s clenched form. She dreamt she was a moth spinning a cocoon of silver words about them both, full of charms to drive the gremlins from Mama’s eyes, while outside, heard only by her, the snow sang to the wind and no one in the world was lonely.
It was never lonesome in the bush. Here things bulged and endured in the dappled undergrowth – ferns and worts and fungi and mosses, and, in the few random spots freckled by sun, surprised violets. They made their voices known. Lil could hear them already though she was moving with short quick steps towards the deepest cove of the back bush, the place forbidden by Mama, the home of the almost-sound that vibrated the air with furred bat-wings and no eyes. She stopped. Beyond, a branch stretched, umbilical and biding. Ferns sighed in currents only they could feel. A thrush untangled his song: pastel and longing. Lil set her face against the tiny drafts of air raised by her own body-heat. A snakeskin combed the grass; she heard a birdwing flex and fold, a deermouse scuttle and freeze, a caterpillar dissecting a resistant leaf. The sound had stopped.
You stay away from the Indians, you hear? Mama said so every day. Mama hated Indians. They were the cause of everything. They took whiskey; they went crazy and hurt people; they never did a lick of work; they went off hunting god-knows-where in the back bush, taking good men with them, so’s the trees didn’t get cut. And them squaws, Mama would say in a special voice, her eyes getting fiery and pure, why they – she’d look at Lil and stop, and the passion would ebb from her face. Well, they’re wicked, Lil, they take whiskey and – dance and do bad things with men… Lil would be trembling with anticipation at seeing her mother’s pale flesh puff out with some kind of necessity beyond self-preservation. Lil wanted to ask, not about the bad things, but about the dancing. Though she never did. It was after one of these bouts that Mama often took to her bed.
But Lil knew where they stayed. Many nights, curled in the straw of her loft, she heard the drumbeats come across the tree-tops from miles away and settle into their clearing as if they had been aimed there. They were not like her heartbeat, back and forth, nor like the sprightly songs Mama sang in her other language when she was “feeling better” and sitting before her spinning wheel in the bright sun of the garden she had helped to clear. It was a pounding, repetitive music that set her heart ajar, that made her dream of strange creatures who preferred breathing in the dark, that made her long to know what words would be sung to such cadence, what dances would find their feet in such grooved frenzies. She wanted to see these women, how they moved in the firelight that twisted above the black roof of the bush, what their eyes did when they danced in their smoky, burnished, mosquito-driven dark.
An axe rang against a tree-trunk, clear as a church bell. Papa’s back. Lil recognized the signature of his chopping: two vicious slashes, the second slightly more terrifying than the first, followed by two diminished, tentative ‘chunks’. Maybe Mama would hear it and leave her bed. He was in the North Field. That was good. He’d only “gone off” as far as the Frenchman’s. Sometimes one of the Frenchman’s boys came back with him and helped Papa. Lil hated them, all three of them. They watched her all the time with the edges of their eyes. And Papa would shout at her to go away. Sometimes though he brought Thérese back. Lil liked Thérese though she talked crooked and had an ugly belly that poked out in front of her like an old melon. Thérese cooked soup, made bread in the mornings, and laughed. She was happy.
Thérese showed Lil how to skip. She put a small tin instrument to her mouth and made music. She laughed when Lil hopped and jigged, and then Papa came along and took her by the hand and swung her about in the midst of the music, and laughed from the back of his throat. “Well, my Lady Fair Child, so you can dance, eh? We’ll have to take her down to London to see the Queen, won’t we, Thérese?”
Thérese got pains in her ugly belly, though, and had to go back to the Frenchman’s.
“She’s dead,” Papa said, that evening, standing in the open doorway, his hands helpless. “The babe, too.”
“All for the best,” Mama whispered from her bed. “Whose was it?”
“Luc’s I guess. The eldest.” Papa did not see Lil at his knee peering up with the question “What’s dead?” on her lips. “God damn them all, may they rot in hell,” he hissed in a voice that came from nowhere inside him Lil had ever known.
Papa was back. Every day he swore he would “kill that damn Frenchman”, but all the same he went over there. Though Mama didn’t mind too much. It was the Indians she hated. Whenever Papa “went off” in that direction – through the East Field to the back bush, where Lil was at this very second – Mama got mean. So Lil would look for berries along the edges of the cleared area, and when she got back Mama would be in her own bed in the curtained-off area to the right of the fire, her body folded on the straw pallet, rigid as a pin.
For a moment Lil thought she ought to go over to the North Field. The place where the Indians were was forbidden. The strange sound she thought she had heard had stopped, or never been. Papa might be in a good mood. She listened carefully to the desperate repetition of Papa’s axe against the grained flesh of the tree. He was at one of the hardwoods again. She would not go. Though she wanted so to dance for him again, the way Thérese had showed her, to have Papa laugh and say “Lady Fair Child, may I have the pleasure of the next dance?”
Suddenly the axe-blows ceased. Lil held her breath. Then she heard the thunderous, sustained shriek of disbelief and betrayal as the two-hundred-year-old walnut came crashing through the forest to stun the ground with its abrupt goodbye. Lil sat for a while in the sun-lit beaver meadow below the creek and listened to the tree’s dying reverberate through the earth.
She hated him. He trapped rabbits in the east corner, their strung-up bodies stiffened by the night air, the warmest morning could not thaw them. He nailed the head of the dear-with-no-eyes above the fireplace, where it stared down at them pretending to see like Old Samuels, the blind Indian who sometimes sat in the sun in the dooryard, telling stories to the Frenchman’s boys and twitching his white head about from person to person as if it could perceive the smiles and nods of an audience. She hated Papa. He made Thérese “be dead”.
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.