1
Sometimes Lil tried hard to remember Mama exactly as she was before she took to her bed and left. It wasn’t easy. In summer, the wheat in the East Field turned golden brown under the lazing sun. The LaRouche boys came over to help them cut and thresh it. Lil sat in the shade of the big maple near the house and let the kernels whisper through her fingers like Indian beads. Papa smiled. Luc and Jean-Pierre watched her as they worked. When she turned her own gaze back on them, they looked away sharply. Lil felt something fresh, unruly and alien surge up through her chest: she wondered at it but gave it no name or image. In the fall, the trees that were not pine gave forth their second bloom – brighter and more prodigal than the green gifts of April: like a rush of blood against the sudden foreboding of cold. The leaves swam – dizzying, breathless – and drowned in pools of their own composition. For a while even the bush relented a little: the eye could meander now, reconnoitre, improvise, surprise the sun here and there in hollows of snow, loiter among shape and shadow where the winter light married the dark configurations of trees. In the winter you breathed out more than in.
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.
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.
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.