1
Seven days later they were packed and ready to go. Papa of course had planned to get away at dawn, but he hadn’t counted on the goodbyes that needed to be said. Maman surprised everyone by not weeping openly. Instead she braved a smile for Lil, hugging her fiercely as if she might transfer to those sapling limbs some of the bruised strength from her own decades of travail. She may have seen in the sad, trudging reluctance of departure some sign of her own leave-taking, so close at hand. The Frenchman and his boys touched their caps and mumbled au voir with exaggerated politeness, except for Luc whose heart was irreparably broken and shamed itself with silent, unconcealed tears.
Lil knew it was pointless to ask Papa why they had to leave, but she was certain it was due to more than their troubles with the Scotsmen and the pedlar. Papa would not give up the homestead, would not abandon Mama’s grave to the winds and seasons, would not tear his little girl away from the only life, the only world, the only people she had ever known – not for a mere Scotsman or a pedlar with a cracked head. Somehow – she did not know how – it had more to do with Solomon and the look Papa gave her when she woke to find him staring from the doorway, the shed door in back of them protesting as it swung on one precarious hinge.
“We’re goin’ to live near Port Sarnia,” was all he said, “with your Aunt Bridie.”
Who was news to Lil. From Mama she had gleaned a little now and then about her relatives – enough to conclude that Papa came from a large family, her own being mostly dead, but never had she put a name on any of them though it was obvious she sometimes wished to. Instead she told stories only about long-gone relatives, all of whom apparently were squires or beauties or gawains of the first order. Mama’s stories were like her songs – a kind of lullaby. Bridie was no lullaby. She was a real, living aunt with a name as durable as a fieldstone. Lil wanted to ask about an uncle for Bridie but restrained herself.
“I wrote her a letter a while back,” he said some days later, seeing Lil seated near the ripening wheat of the East Field and staring across its tender, involuntary undulations towards the red-blue granite on which one of Old Samuels’ nephews had chipped the name ‘Kathleen’. “Chester and her been wantin’ us to come up there ever since your Mama passed on.”
Chester? Lil came out of her brown study.
“Land’s mostly cleared up there. We’ll help ‘em out at first. Then get our own place.” Lil wanted so badly to believe the enthusiasm now in his voice. She wanted to ask about Chester but held back, hoping for more.
“We’ll bring your Mama up there, too; some day,” he added with effort, his hands trying to be light and consoling on her shoulders.
Mama wasn’t up there, Lil knew, but could find no words to help Papa understand. She’s here – in these trees, the wheat, the undug stones, in the birdsong enticing shadows towards dawn, in the wind that lives in these special places only, in that part of the sky she shared with us and that brings such joy to the guardian gods. Lil’s quiet weeping made Papa’s hands shake, and he turned back to the cabin, confused. Lil licked her own tears with her tongue, savouring them.
It was a regular road now running abreast of the line of a dozen farms north of theirs. The new neighbours, above Millar’s, came out to watch them leave: whole families lined up at the edge of their land and waved curiously, tentatively, uncertain of the meaning of what they were witnessing. When Lil and Papa passed the last farm – with only its doorway cleared, and stumps and tree branches smoking behind the unchinked log hut (where the new road abruptly became the old slashed trail again) – Lil did one of the things she promised herself she would not do on this day: she glanced back. Standing in the middle of the road a hundred feet behind them were the unmistakable silhouettes of Old Samuels and his favourite nephews. A few days before all three had materialized one morning, unannounced, and stayed the entire day, helping Papa with some of the packing and dismantling but never once mentioning the fact of their leaving. Sounder chattered and laughed, Acorn smiled with his soft eyes, and Old Samuels puffed his pipe and talked exclusively to Lil in Pottawatomie. “White Mens always coming and going,” he said several times, unprompted, “Attawandaron stays.” Once he added, not without charity, “’Course, White Mens still young, got a lot to learn before this world ends.” At dusk they left, saying no formal goodbyes but carrying Papa’s old sow in their arms as graciously as they could manage. Lil knew she wouldn’t see them again.
Even now it was only their darker shadows in the constant early morning that she saw as she peered back over her shoulder. Acorn was as still as his name; Sounder was hopping and gesticulating beside Old Samuels as if describing for him exactly what he was seeing and feeling, like a honey-bee’s dance of direction; Old Samuels had his face aimed at Lil’s diminishing figure, his posture giving nothing away of sadness or hope, resignation or complaint, certain only that he did not need his eyes to see what was happening under them nor many other things life had reputedly reserved for the sighted.
Lil then broke her second vow. Fortunately Papa, who was now several strides ahead of her, didn’t hear.
They followed the well-tramped trail north for several hours. The sun warmed them with its mid-day welcome. Wild Phlox and amber columbine nodded jauntily from the verges. In the pines, tanagers and siskins tumbled and iridesced. A fox snake yawned his whole length in the heat kept cozy by the trail.
They were travelling light, of course. Papa had a backpack with food and overnight utensils, a water bottle, rifle and hatchet. In a harness neatly rigged by Acorn, Lil carried two blankets and some goodies secretly slipped to her at the last moment by Maman. In the beaded pouch given her by Sounder and belted to her waist, she had carefully placed Mama’s cameo pendant, the gold cross, and the rabbit’s foot Old Samuels had rubbed almost smooth in thirty years of not worrying. There was no need for anything more: they had packed their few belongings – clothing, trappings, utensils, tools – in two large wooden cases about the size of a child’s coffin. Luc, in a rush of altruism, had promised to hitch Bert and Bessie up to Mr. Millar’s cart as soon as they were free from their summer stumping, and deliver the trunks to Port Sarnia.
So it was only the weight of the day itself that bore heavily on them as they trudged step by step away from all they had become a part of. Indeed whenever the little eddy of excitement (which Lil had been suppressing all morning) bubbled up on its own, she felt an acute sense of having betrayed something secret and previous. I will hate Bridie, I will, was her less-than-satisfactory antidote.
There would have been no eddy of anticipation if Lil had known it would be sixty years before her feet again touched this ground – now so sacred, so indistinguishable from herself. And she would learn, only much later, that before the coming winter was out Maman LaRouche would, only partly against her will, succumb to the engorged, mutinous thing fattening itself inside her. And Monsieur, who had seen death routinely in the War and on the stark faces of babes ravaged by cholera and worse, would not recognize it in the pleading eyes of his wife until she herself begged for the priest. Then, as he had so often vowed, LaRouche strapped on his snowshoes and headed north for Port Sarnia through the maze of deer-trails he thought he knew well. Confused and exhausted he stumbled into the Partridges at Corunna three days later. Partridge suggested a horse, which the weeping, grateful man accepted before he realized that while he had fed and groomed horses for Colonel Baby during the War, he had never actually gotten around to riding one. The priests at St. Joseph’s naturally assumed that it was LaRouche himself who required the last rites, and it was almost an hour before the matter was straightened out and Father McAllister tucked the babbling man into the cutter beside him and started on the return journey. At Partridges a Chippewa lad was attached to the entourage to guide them to the interior of the township. However, when they reached Millar’s corner at nightfall, the old man was dreaming that he and Mathilde – his Mattie, his Fluffy – were whirling at the centre of the governor’s reel under the candelabras of the demi-royal salon as the fiddles and drums applauded their bravado, their panache, and Mattie’s eyes glowed like chestnuts set in the sweetest, deepest cherrywood flesh. The hubbub of the sleigh’s arrival at the cabin woke the dreamer too abruptly and, not quite realizing the transition that had taken place, he flung his partner wide, skipped intricately to his place in the ‘set’ – to wondrous applause – and keeled over in the snow, half-in and half-out of the cutter. His leg snapped like a cornstalk.
Madame was dead. She had died with as much dignity as the engulfing pain and the absence of God would allow. The ground was frozen during this coldest of winters. LaRouche, in his grief and his own pain, announced that she would be buried properly in sanctified ground at St. Joseph’s in Port Sarnia. Father McAllister, doing what he could, returned there the next day with some doubts about the wisdom of God’s suffering so many of the French to come unto Him. Meanwhile the boys were despatched to Brown Creek to cut ice. Luc paused long enough to stare piteously at the McGee girl who had arrived with her family that fall to occupy the forsaken farm and who, before donning winter garb, could do little to disguise the wayward curing of her flesh. Maman’s body, wrapped in the linen shroud she had brought with her from Sandwich, was packed in ice in the ox-shed, where it remained until spring.
Despite the most professional ministrations of an itinerant quack, LaRouche’s leg did not set properly. He suffered constant pain which made it impossible for him to grieve the loss of his life’s mate as he should. By March and the first signs of break-up, it was clear that gangrene had set in. Millar sent his eldest boy for a legitimate doctor from Port Sarnia. When he arrived a week later, frost-bitten and muddy, he pronounced gangrene and offered either amputation (in the town, of course, after a jaunt across the spring ‘roads’) or opium. LaRouche cursed him in English and joual, and had him escorted to Millar’s corner.
The old man’s cries ceased the spring nights, silencing the whipoorwills and bob-whites, piercing the deepest, fatigue-driven sleep of his neighbours for a mile around. He was saved from the final agonies of a gangrenous death when, in the midst of the first warm rain of the season, he contracted tetanus, which pursued him faster than the green venom in his leg. Propped on his bed near the pure-glass window, he watched the last of the snows disintegrate in the rain, exposing as they did the maidenhair mist of his autumn wheat. Over in the ox-shed the last of the ice-blocks was melting.
LaRouche rose in his bed like an unrepentant Job, foam and blood boiling through his seized jaws, his leg right up to his spent loins burning as if someone by mistake had dropped it into a campfire and forgot to apologize. With his last breath he attempted to hurl maledictions at the God who claimed responsibility for all this, to fling at chaos one perfect curse, one jarring repudiation of the sham and hypocrisy he had acquiesced in: coward that he was he would spit in God’s face.
His sons drew back in the room at the horror they saw, bracing themselves. Madeleine plugged her ears. Nothing came. The eyes bulged with speech, the clamped jaws ground and held, blooded spittle shot out in garbled strings staining Maman’s quilt. LaRouche died sitting up in seething silence. Outside, the rains continued their soft benediction.
As luck would have it, a Methodist man on his quarterly circuit happened to be in the area scouting converts. At the boys’ behest he presided over the double interment, offering comfort to the dead and the surviving. Later on, proper headstones were erected. They rested not more than forty feet from the granite one of their neighbour.
There were now two routes to Port Sarnia. The sort of lumber trail they were now on led north-east to where it met the main road running south-east from the town towards Enniskillen, the undisturbed heart of the Lambton bush. Twenty miles to the west, hugging the River, a trunk road – parts of it already planked – took the circuit rider and carpetbagger all the way to Wallaceburg and thence to Chatham. A number of Indian trails – blazed only – would take them to this latter marvel of the age. Sometime during the mid-afternoon, Papa veered left into the bush, leaving the sun above them.
2
Neither father nor daughter was aware that the frenetic surveying and road-building through the undeveloped townships of Plympton, Enniskillen and Brooke was prompted in part by recent upheavals in Europe and their cataclysmic fallout. In half-a-dozen countries upstart peasants and workers and a few middle-class dreamers had decided – without consulting their betters – to make a home of the lands they had laboured on for generations. They failed. And even as Lil bent to pick a sprig of columbine clinging to a patch of sun-lit grass, the suppressors were wreaking their revenge in the ritual rapine and domestic terrorism indigenous to the race. Thousands more were being added daily to the earth’s dispossessed. In Ireland, encouraged by some whimsy of the wind or season, potato blight deposited its indelible pennies on the summer’s crop, and hunger happily joined the avengers. Starved and hopeless, a hundred thousand Irish crammed themselves into stinking cargo-ships and sailed for the world’s end where, some of them believed, a plot of arable ground lay undespoiled by human intercourse. One contemporary report describes their plight in these terms: “From Grosse Isle, the great charnel-pit of victimized humanity, up to Port Sarnia and all along the borders of our magnificent river; upon the shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie – wherever the tide of emigration has extended – are to be found the final resting places of the sons and daughters of Erin; one unbroken chain of graves where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in one commingled heap without a tear bedewing the soil or a stone marking the spot.”
Lil was annoyed with herself, but she couldn’t seem to help it. She was slowing them down. Her head began to spin, probably from too much sun earlier on the open road. She lingered behind a bit to vomit secretly in the underbrush, but Papa’s hand was soon on her arm. He wiped her mouth with his flannel hanky. He gave her the last of the water. He sat down and in the healing shade they rested a while. Lil was thirsty so Papa went off in search of a good spring. He took a long time. When they started up again, moving carefully from blaze to blaze under Papa’s practiced eye, they stopped every half-hour or so. They rested and drank the cool spring-water. Lil felt better but very weak. When she rose to signal she was ready to go, Papa touched her shoulder with one finger, and sat down. Just before supper she shamed herself utterly by drifting off to sleep.
When she woke she saw that Papa had built a small fire and in the only pot he had brought had boiled some tea, which made their dried beef and biscuits taste much better.
“Why don’t you have one of Maman’s cookies?” Papa said.
Lil did.
As a result of Lil’s pokiness, a trek of four hours or so took much longer. The shadows around them thickened and grew aggressive. So did the mosquitoes. Papa paused to examine a configuration of blazes on a huge hickory tree.
“The river road’s only a half-mile away,” Papa said, not to himself as he often did, but to Lil. “It’s too late an’ we’re too tired to walk the other five miles up to the Partridges,” he continued. “We’ll make camp right here on the high ground.”
Lil was sure she could hear the River tuning up for its nightsong.
With his swift, sharp hatchet Papa cut down several saplings, bent them into a frame and covered it with cedar boughs. The lean-to was just big enough for two, with a sturdy elm-bole to rest your back against. More boughs were spread on the ground to serve as a bed when they were ready for sleep. But not just yet. In the opening of the lean-to, Papa built three small fires ringed by stones, two of which he smudged with damp evergreens, leaving the middle one to flicker brightly below the steaming coffee. Papa and Lil were scrunched inside with the blanket over their shoulders, the cozy smoke keeping the mosquitoes at bay, and Maman’s raspberry tarts sweetening on their tongues. Papa’s left arm was raised and Lil snuggled in against him, relishing the smokiness of his rough shirt. Lil was about to slide down into sleep when she realized that Papa was talking.
“Bridie was the eldest. Eighteen and a local beauty. To us, she was a second mother. Then one day, just like that, Pa announces she is gonna be married up with an older man, a crony of his. Bridie says no in that sweet, iron-willed way she had. There was a terrible row, I can tell you. Ma hid in the stairwell cupboard. Next day without sayin’ good-day-to-you or by-your-leave, she’s gone. ‘She’ll come back,’ I said to Ma, ‘she loves us.’ ‘Let the harridan be and be damned!’Pa rants and raves for three days, ‘She’s no kin of mine.’ ‘But sure an’ she’s off in a ditch or a bog somewhere, injured an’ callin’ out for our help,’ Ma says whenever she can stop her cryin’. Pa says nothin’. The case is closed. He refuses to say her name an’ forbids us to. She’s drummed out of the tribe. Dead.”
Papa lit his pipe. A mosquito was biting Lil’s neck but she was not about to slap it. For a few moments Papa breathed through his pipe.
“I felt terrible,” he said in a lower, different kind of voice. “I felt she’d abandoned me. When you’re only twelve, somethin’ like that seems like a betrayal. You put all your trust in one person an’ then, like that, it’s gone.”
The mosquito perished in its own blood. Papa drew the blanket around Lil’s head. She snuggled close again, gripping his left hand with both of hers.
“It was two years later, Ma was quite sick, an’ this letter arrives addressed to her. We all recognize Birdie’s writing. She was a beautiful writer. She taught me to read, as best she could. So I read the letter, after Pa had headed for one of his meetins’, of course. Bridie was in a place called Toronto, Upper Canada. She was well. She was goin’ off to a town somewheres in the bush to work as a domestic and as a tutor to some little boy. She didn’t name the town. She said we wasn’t to bother tryin’ to find out, she loved all of us dearly but she just had to do things this way as it was the only way for her. When I grew up, I knew what she meant. Back then, I hated her even more.”
The moon slipped out from behind one of the high, breezy clouds – feigning interest in the world’s affairs.
“When your Mama an’ me come out here some years later, we made no attempt at findin’ her. As you’re gonna see soon, this is a big country. But nobody ever put one over on Bridie, not even Pa with all his political shenanigans and bluster. Just after you was born we got a letter hand-delivered from Port Sarnia. From Bridie. She welcomed us to the county an’ said we was welcome in her house anytime. We always intended to go up there but your Mama was never well enough. We thought it best, for a while, not to get your hopes up. Then things just went on as they often do, an’ nothin’ ever really gets done. Some important things just don’t get done, ‘cause we go on as we are, day after day.”
He poked at the smudges, scattering the swarms.
“’Course that’ll all be rectified soon. You’re gonna see your Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester at last, you are.” Papa gave her an extra squeeze. And the little boy? She thought.
“Yes, my precious, you’re gonna have the time of your life up there. We’ll help out Aunt and Uncle for a while, then we’ll buy ourselves a chunk of that cleared land with the cash we get for the homestead, an’ before you know it we’ll have a white clapboard house to live in. We’ll only be a mile from the town, too, with stores and mills and meetin’ halls. First thing I’m gonna do is take you into town to Cameron’s emporium and buy you your first store-bought dress – calico or lawn or kendall, take your pick, you’ll be as pretty as a butterfly in a flax field in August.”
Papa squeezed again. Lil gripped his hand to let him know she was still awake. The main fire was in its mellow, amber phase.
“Naturally your Aunt Bridie, bein’ an’ educated woman herself, will want you to have some proper schoolin’. They’ve got a school in Port Sarnia where anybody can go to learn readin’ and other things. You’re gonna grow into a genuine young lady, I reckon: there’ll be no stoppin’ you once you reach that town.”
Are there lots of Scotsmen there? Lil wanted to ask.
Papa took his arm from her shoulder, shook the fire vigorously until the flames jumped again, and then reached into his pack. In his hands he held something small and leather. A book.
“I don’t want your Aunt Bridie thinkin’ your Mama an’ me didn’t bring you up properly,” he said, as Lil for the first time looked directly up into his face where the flame-induced shadows fluttered irresolutely. “This here’s a New Testament, a Bible. It was a gift, long ago, from my mother. I wrote an inscription to you in the front cover. My spellin’s not too good so I had Mr. Millar write down the actual words. Someday real soon you’ll be able to read it, an’ the Bible, too. I want you to keep it an’ treasure it, no matter what happens to you in this awful, tryin’ world.”
Papa had to stop to clear his throat. Lil reached out and took the Testament, its covers carrying the warmth of Papa’s hands into hers.
“I’ll tell you what it says, for now,” he went on. Once again he cleared his throat like an actor before an entrance. “To my dearest princess, the Lady Fairchild, from your Papa who loves you forever.”
Lil tucked the precious object into her secret pouch, and slipped drowsily into the care of Papa’s arms. Tiny tremors shook her, gently, to sleep.
She dreamt that Mama and Papa were seated on a scarlet sofa before a roaring fire: Papa was talking and talking, and Mama – curled beside him – listened with love.
The sun, well above the tree-tops, woke Lil with a start. She was not in the least surprised, however, to look over and see that she was alone.
3
Papa had left her the food, water and utensils. And a note. On folded, thick, yellow-white paper. Lil did not open it. I can’t read. I can’t read. But another voice said: you’re grown up now; the new road is a twenty-minute walk across a blazed trail; there will be travellers on that road; they will help. Mrs. Partridge is five miles up that road; she will remember. Everyone in Port Sarnia will know who Bridie is. I have nothing to fear. Papa loves me; he expects me to go to my Aunt Bridie.
But then maybe he’s gone off to scout the new road? Besides good folk, there are pedlars and bounty-hunters to beware of. It would be terrible if I wandered off and Papa came back to find me gone. He’d be so worried, he’d be so disappointed in me. I must stay here till he comes for me. That’s why he left the food and water. He thinks I’m sick. He loves me. It says so in this little book, it’s written there, forever.
When she finished the last of the water, Lil began to worry. It was past five o’clock. Papa was not coming. (It would be much later before Lil would learn that the abolitionist man – who had rowed Papa to safety across the River and who was to return before dawn to lead her north to Port Sarnia – had got caught in a whirlpool on his way back, ran aground and lay unconscious for half a day before he awoke to find his leg broken in three places.) He expected her to get to that road and find the Partridges. Still feeling dizzy and very weak (what was wrong with her? she thought), Lil gathered her belongings and looked westward for the next blaze. The shadows were massing even now, and it was not easy to pick out the year-old slashes from trunk to trunk or the modest impressions left on the trail by its mocassined patrons. An hour or so later Lil admitted reluctantly that she was lost. She was not scared of being alone in the woods; she never had been. The mosquitoes were bad but she had matches, she could make a camp of sorts. What concerned her was that she didn’t know where she was. Nor would she be able to find her bearings in a terrain bereft of familiar landmarks. Desperately she tried to keep to the westward by the sun but it disappeared, even as a hovering light, for minutes at a time in the closed canopy one hundred and fifty feet overhead.
When she stumbled into a beaver meadow, she looked up and saw in despair that it was now fully night-time. The stars winked invitations at her. Then she saw the dipper – the Silver Gourd – shining clear in its northern berth. She turned due left into the mosquito-fed darkness. Ten minutes later she emerged from the dense forest onto the roadway. The fresh planking hummed beneath her feet. Inside she hummed too and did a little jig. She looked northward up the forty-foot width of the highway. She was exhausted. A sort of numbness was starting to spread up the calves of her legs. She couldn’t make it to the Partridges. She really couldn’t.
She was also very thirsty. She knew she shouldn’t sleep without drinking. Then she remembered: this was the River Road. To her left she saw that the bush was thin and intermittent, smallish pines in a sandy soil that glittered in the starlight. She listened, forcing her breath in. Though the night was still, her River poured its restless, endless energy onward. What a wonderful sound, Lil thought aloud. Slowly but with more certainty than she had felt all day, Lil eased her way through the pine grove towards the beckoning music of the great waterway. There would be some breeze there, and open space: she could sleep undisturbed in the sandy bank. In the morning everything would be all right. Papa would be proud of her.
Just as the muted roar of the River was beginning to build in her ears, Lil came to a tiny feeder stream. Bending, she scooped the fresh, chill water to her face, drinking and cleansing simultaneously. The breeze off the water ahead was cool on her cheeks. She could see the moon plainly through the last trees between her and her goal. She was about to step out onto the sandy bank when she froze. The first warning she had of danger was the waver of firelight above the shoreline; then came the smell of burnt meat; then the voices; and their unmistakable accents.
In the shimmering glow around her, Lil saw that she was standing, still hidden by the pines, slightly above a sort of cove where the stream entered the River, a gravelly indentation really that formed a beach four or five feet below the main line of the bank. A pit-fire was in full bloom; two figures were seated on stumps, roasting something that might have been rabbit. A longish bundle of something lay rumpled in the shadows behind them. On the point formed by the cove, tied to a boulder, a row-boat rocked and complained.
“Goddammit, I figure we oughta haul his black arse across while the gettin’s good.”
“I’m hungry. So are you.”
“Hungry for two thousand dollars, I am.”
“Besides, I don’t like that moon. It’s gonna cloud over afore midnight. Eat.”
“This shit’s all burnt.”
“Suits you then, don’t it.”
Without realizing it Lil had backed off so that she was fully shielded by a tall pine. Neither man was looking in her direction; they faced the south-west where the moon sat, unclouded. Something icy and alien gripped her. She could not flee; she could not even close her eyes. Hence, she was the first to see the rumpled bundle flinch, stretch, and assemble itself. Solomon was sitting up, his hands bound behind him with rope. Another rope dangled loosely from an ankle. Somehow he had worked his legs free. Without once taking his eyes off the backs of his captors, he rose to his full height without the slightest sound and edged towards the boat fifteen feet away.
“Sometimes, Sherm, you talk to me’s if I was no better’n that nigger.”
Sherm let the opportunity pass.
“Matter-of-fact, think I’ll feed some of this here charcoal shit to him right now. Cain’t have him lookin’ too lean an’ all, can we?” Beau turned. “Christ! He’s after the boat.”
Both men jumped instantly, but Solomon was already there. He placed one foot over the gunwale, the other on the rock next to the painter, and gave a tremendous shove. Lil could hear the whoosh of air leave his lungs as he did so. The painter rope popped free and the boat shot out into the swift current. Solomon fell face-down into the aft section with a clatter of wood and bone. Unruddered, the boat spun slowly – caught in a momentary eddy.
“What the fuck you doin’, you stupid nigger! You cain’t row that thing with your hands tied up. Come on back here!”
“We’ll get him downstream,” Sherm said, already heading back for his gun. “If not, he’ll end up on the other side. They always do.”
But Beau wasn’t listening. “Oh Jesus! Jesus!” he screamed as if his soul had been seared. “He’s goin’ over!”
Solomon was standing upright; his powerful six-foot frame burned black against the pre-harvest moon behind him. He was standing on one of the thwarts staring down into the current that was just catching the boat and swinging it, it seemed, southward to safety, and freedom. But Solomon leaped high and northward, as if his fugitive eye lay still upon the gourd of the North Star. His figure, abandoned by the boat, arced across the horizon and entered the welcoming water face-first. The eddy of bubbles, which was all that marked his exit, was soon swept away.
“I never seen the like o’ that, never. Did ya see the stupid fucker, Sherm. Jumps right in there an’ takes our two thousand bucks with him. I tell ya, I’ll never figure out a nigger if I live a hundred years.”
Sherm was throwing water on the fire and gathering their things together. “We better get lookin’ for another boat. This ain’t exactly friendly territory, you know.”
Beau continued to stare out over the foaming torrent, wild with the weight of the glacial seas behind it, and yelled to that portion of the universe he could see: “Why’d ya go an’ do that, ya stupid, ignorant son-of-a-bitch?”
“Why?”
No echo came back.
“Maybe we can get the body,” Sherm said.
4
Long after the bounty-hunters had left – their fire doused, the sky clouded over and menacing, the wind rushing to keep up with the river’s urgency – Lil stood where she was and wrestled with the dark angels of her imagination. Once again she saw Solomon hunted through the unending nights, fleeing further and further into the forest. Later in her life she would know that he fled not because he feared capture or bondage or humiliation – these he had known and borne already – but because he needed to find, in these woods, a nightmare more horrific than his own, to stare it straight in the eye, and whisper oblivion to it.
How welcome those waters must have felt, she thought, how sweet the tender descent, how soft the bottom-sands sifted and cleansed by centuries of seeking, how loving the icy currents that would let the flesh float unrotted from the bones that would drift, inch by hour, seaward over time – they eyes in the blanched, purged skull titled forever towards light.
Lil knew she must get to Corunna as soon as possible at whatever cost. She had no idea how much time she had spent staring out at the River. The night wind was up; the sky was covered and threatening. She was shivering with fright or, worse, fever. She couldn’t feel her feet against the road as she turned north, stumbling in the dark on jagged boards, patches of logs and branches. Then the rain came, lashing and cold, blending with the blood running down her calves
She fell. She rolled onto her side, partly screened by some underbrush, numb and shivering, peering curiously at the silver imbedded in her right hand. Her eyes closed. No dream forestalled her slow falling away.
Even though she had not yet opened her eyes, Lil was awake. She was warm. Her shivering had subsided. She was propped up against something soft and inviting. A wooly shawl curled affectionately over her shoulders. She had slept. Someone had found her and brought her to a warm, safe place. Nearby a dampened fire radiated heat and welcome. Papa! She opened her eyes and looked over at the crouched figure across from her.
“Ah, the little one wakes up.”
“Have you seen Papa?” she asked, faintly, in Pottawatomie.
Southener, his kindly eyes scrutinizing her, said: “I made you drink the tamarack tea; I am sorry if I hurt you. You were shaking with the swamp fever.”
Lil felt too weak to move, but Southener noted her anxious glances about the campsite, which was deep in one of the pine groves.
“They are safe, little one,” he smiled, his skin as rough as hickory bark, his sable hair flecked with gray and tied behind with a leather barrette, his gnarled warrior’s hands too large now for the uses to which they were put and turning restlessly in upon themselves. “I found them near you when I picked you up, soaking and hot, on that pitiful roadway.” He reached down and produced Lil’s drenched pack and the pouch with the sacred treasures of her life in it.
“Thank you,” Lil whispered, keeping to his language.
“You’re young and very strong,” he said, stirring the fire a little to give more light to their conversation. “Already the fever is gone. By morning you’ll be ready to go north.”
Did he know?
“When I started to dry out your things after the rain stopped, I found this map,” he said unfolding for her Papa’s letter which she could not read. “It will tell you where to go.”
So Papa had not left her a note after all. Lil tried to think of what that meant, but she could not think at all, she was drifting into sleep again, relieved even to feel the jagged pain in her right hand. When her eyes once more opened, the glow of false-dawn was visible through the pines overhead. Southener was awake, watching her as if she were some sort of wooden idol whose very presence would bring the news he was waiting for. He was beside her, with steaming tea at the ready. As she sipped at its fragrance, Southener washed the cuts on her legs with a piece of flannel and then stuck some tiny leaves on each of them. The stinging was not unpleasant.
“As soon as the sun comes up, I must leave you. There’s meat in your pack; eat it if you can. You’re safe here. When you feel like walking, the road is directly east of us; the morning sun over the tree-line will take you right there.”
“I remember you, Southener,” Lil said. “I’m much bigger now.”
“You were the best dancer,” Southener said. “I watched you all day. You let the elves loose in your legs. You let the trolls decide for themselves. Now your tongue tells the true story.”
“Old Samuels taught me,” Lil said, wide awake now, every nerve alert.
“You have made me happy in my age,” he went on in a hushed tone that Lil had already come to recognize and revere, perfectly aware that both of them were, in a special sense, listeners. “I am almost at the end of my exile. I have little use any more for the magic amulet that has shielded me from my enemies and rescued me from my own folly many-a-time.”From a pouch at his waist he drew a pebble of blood-red jasper that glowed even in the dull dawn-light, that pulsed as if quick with hope and memory, whose indistinct oval had been rubbed over generations to resemble – if you looked long and rightly enough – the vibrant, plasmic bubble of a baby’s heart. Southener let it lie in his open palm, let it breathe the fire’s flame for a while.
“This will bring you luck all your days,” he said. “Not happiness, as you already know, for they do not wear the same colour. It will make your life a good one, with enough joy to keep you from despair, enough hurt to keep you loving. It will help you find a home, here and in the hereafter. It has helped me do all these things, fivefold. I am nearing the end of a journey that’s bigger than I am. I received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as such by generation upon generation of tribes who have dwelt in these woods and waters and passed on, as we all do. I ask only two things in return. The days of its guardianship are almost over; there is little magic left in the forests and the streams, older now than our legends; the locomotives of the white man’s soul are on their way. You will hear them soon. So, when you have no more use for the stone’s powers, I ask that you return it to the sacred grove whence it came, to the gods of that place who lent their spirit to it. I have looked at the map your Papa left, and I know when the proper time comes, you will be close to it. There is no way of marking such a place on a map, for the penitent must feel its presence before he can see it. You will know when you are standing on it, though, because it resides beneath the protecting branches of a giant hickory on a knoll just where the forest begins, and when you look west and north you will be able to see, at the commencement of summer, the joining of the Lake and the River set perfectly on a line to the North Star, whom we call the Eye of Wendigo.”
Lil was watching the miniature heart, absorbing light like blood.
“Secondly, I am nearing my own end. My people have been scattered like chaff before the flail. There is no home for us to rest our souls in. Save one. North of the town your father has chosen for you lies the military reserve, a boggy swampland no one, not even the rapacious whites, will ever want. Above the main bay, just past the point where lake and river meet, is a small cove among the sand dunes, and here, unobserved among the grasses and snakeweed, is an ancient Indian cemetery which bears the remains of hundreds of souls who could find no burial place with their own people. It’s a graveyard for wanderers, for the lost, and for the permanently dispossessed. If the military knew it was there they would perhaps allow the spirits to remain undisturbed, but certainly they would let no new dead be interred there. So it is that we few remaining outcasts must have our corpses carried there in the dark and secretly and unceremonially buried in that consecrated earth. My request to you is to keep that ground holy in your mind, protect it with your life, and once in a while honour it with your presence and prayers. If you see a freshly-turned mound among the milkweed and rustling poplar, know that I lie under it, wanting, like all of us, to be remembered.”
With that he placed the talisman in Lil’s left hand and rolled her fingers gently over it. Some part of its potency must have been immediately transferred for when Southener looked up to check the wonder in Lil’s face, she was blissfully asleep.
The instructions the map gave were sharp and ineluctable. Lil was good at drawing and pictures. With her pendant, crucifix, rabbit’s foot, Testament and Southener’s amulet tucked lovingly in their leather sachet, Lil began the long walk north moments after sunrise.
She did not stop at the Partridges nor acknowledge, if she saw it, the wave of greeting and farewell anxiously offered. She walked steadily, purposefully, and to any one of the startled onlookers in the booming hamlet of Froomfield below the Reserve, almost serenely. “She’s in a daze or a reverie,” was one unsolicited opinion. “Nobody passes through this town and ignores our windmill,” was another. If Lil saw or heard the creaking, anomalous replica of its Dutch cousin that intercepted the north-west blows from the Lake, she gave no sign.
Through the Reserve, six miles long, the road meandered and rested, but the wisp of a figure of a girl kept its pace – noticed and unaccosted – sights set on what a map held out. Just before noon, with the sun in full stretch, Lil walked into her first town.
In her head Papa’s map hovered like a detached palm-print, a legacy in code. Her boots, worn thin, cracked on the town’s singular macadam. Lil was tempted neither left nor right. It was possible that she did not see Cameron’s Emporium with its checker-glass windows a-glitter with frill and frumpery; did not smell the dust and wheeze from Blaikie’s Foundry, home to the famous Blaikie Patent Steam Engine; did not sniff at the delectables from two bakeries nor the acrid smarting of Hall’s tannery in the weighted, standing heat of summer; did not hear the torturing of wood nor the grinding of ill-matched gears in Flintoft’s steam-mill; did not respond to her own reflection in the coppery mirror of Durand’s pond where the little walking-bridge crossed the canal from Perch Creek, nor laugh at the gleeful whoop and water-slap of near-naked youths emancipated by summer; did not cross herself or say a grateful prayer on passing the seven chapels dedicated – each in its own fervent, unecumenical manner – to the indivisibility of the Divine Spirit; did not smile, in passing, at Crampton’s “Double-N-One” tavern for wayfaring tipplers who, if they stood on their heads, could discern the sign INN as it was meant to appear to the sober and upright. Indeed, no-less-than-three respectable ladies and one irrespectable gentleman nodded to her out of concern or curiosity, and received no decipherable recognition of their magnanimity.
As Lil left the last of the ordered pathways, her eyes set upon the red-pine forest to the west of the Errol Road, the one o’clock factory whistle at Blaikie’s shrilled and beckoned, and out in the blue bays of Lake Huron just beyond the pine-ridge the steamer Ben Franklin hooted cheerily and democratically as it pointed itself north to the fresh-water oceans of the Cree and Ojibwa. A mile up this high road Lil noticed the break in the forest wall. For the first time in many hours her heart jumped in its stirrups. The map was real. She could read. Something vital with a future waited for her at the end of this lane. Although her exhausted feet made no distinctive shift in their cadence, Lil was sure she was skipping. A melody disarranged itself in her head and sailed like a loose trapeze.
At the end of the lane, set in two pockets of cleared pine, lay the farms. Small one to the left with a log hut and sheds; large one to the right with the whitewashed, split-log house and the sideboard barns and the emerald grapevines and the pond with Sunday-white geese on it.
For a while she just stood at the point where the lane branched into paths, waiting for something to happen. Some large creature let out a muffled sneeze; hens, unseen, clicked pebbles into their craws; a sow wallowed, setting off a sequence of squeals and oozing. Above the stone chimney on the white-washed cottage, a bubble of pale smoke lifted in expectation, then stalled. Above it a red-tailed squirrel hung and craned, feigning patience.
At the last moment Lil remembered to knock on the firmly latched, blue-trimmed door set in the exact centre of the facing wall. She felt the shadow of the overhanging eave cool her cheek. She pulled tightly the bridle on her heart, and waited.
The door was pulled inward slowly, guardedly. Lil saw the strong woman’s-hand, red from the sun, gripping the sash before the face and figure were disclosed.
“Yes?”
“Aunt Bridie?”
“An’ who might you be, if I may ask?”
“I’m...Lil.”
“What do you want here, girl? State your business or leave a body in peace.”
“Papa sent me.”
The hand dropped from the sash, the door sagged fully open, untended.
Sensing the bewilderment in the woman’s face, Lil’s heart sank. She fought against the faintness and vertigo as best she could, but it felt as if her bones had melted outright in a treacherous sun. As she slumped onto the doorstep, she was certain she heard herself say, “I’m Lily. Lily Fairchild.”