Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  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 s
he 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 ap
ple-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