Читать книгу Lily Fairchild - Don Gutteridge - Страница 5

Mama was in her bed again. Yesterday she had smiled at Lily and proposed they venture out to pick some raspberries for a pie. But they were too late for the berries, shriveled weeks before, and Mama had one of her coughing spells before they were back at the cabin. Papa as usual took some day-old soup in to her. Lily listened, as she always did, to catch the slightest hint of conversation between them. There was none, though Papa stayed a long while, until the haze of evening settled like a moss along the sills and Mama’s breathing became regular, heavy with exhaustion.

This morning he left again. “Gotta have meat for that soup,” he used to say to Lily, taking down his gun and putting on the buckskin he’d gotten from Old Samuels, the blind Indian who was an exception to Mama’s suspicions. Lately Papa simply departed without a word. “Probably,” Mama said, her voice shaking with effort, “with that Acorn fellow.” Acorn, Metagomin, was one of Old Samuels’ nephews; the other was Pwau-na-shigor Sounder.

But Lily was a help now; she was all of seven. If Papa set the pot on the irons and started the fire, she could cut up the turnips and toss them in, and stir the soup until its tiny rabbit bones surrendered their meat. There was a stone oven at one side of the fireplace; Lily would take the sourdough prepared by Madame LaRouche, and follow her instructions to make bread for Papa’s supper. Next spring Papa was going to get them a pig. Already he’d built a pen for it against the east wall.

“Plenty pigs in the bush,” Old Samuels would chortle. “Only White Mens builds him a house and grows him food.” Then he would shake his head in mock bewilderment at the folly of his white neighbours. Nonetheless, he would wait with the patience of his seventy-odd years till Lily or Papa reached into the pot and offered a respectfully large morsel. Sometimes Lily would be working over the fire, humming one of Mama’s songs, and when she turned, Old Samuels would be no more than five feet behind her, the black pennies where his eyes should have been giving nothing away. “You gonna be a good cook, like the Frenchman’s woman.”

Mama didn’t like Old Samuels’ habit of entering their cabin without announcing his arrival. Occasionally he would stay all day, sitting on his knees to the left of the fire where he could detect any cool draft from the curtained doorway, saying nothing. Sometimes he would talk to Lily, raising his thin voice just enough to include Mama, willing or no, in the one-way conversation. Old Samuels told long stories, most of which began, “Wasn’t like that here in the olden days” and ending with, “and that’s the truth, and I know ’cause I seen it, I seen it before these eyes of mine withered up.” When Papa made the slightest demurral, he’d say, “Blind men don’t lie.”

“Before the White Mens come, this was a magic place,” he would tell them. “The gods of the Mohawk and the gods of the Huron fought their great battles here among the spirits of my own people, the Attawandaron. In them days, the bears were as big as hickory trees.” Pause for the power of that image to take root. “When the foreign gods left, they took all of the Hurons and most of my brothers with them. But the souls of my ancestors stayed right here where they been for a thousand generations. Attawandaron don’t run; they hang round, like Old Samuels and Sounder and Acorn. Even when them Ojibwa sells this land they don’t own to the White Mens, Old Samuels just laugh. And smoke his pipe – with White Mens’ tobacco stolen from our gods who gave it as a gift to all men.”

“He’s got the manners of a ghost,” Mama often said, but not once did she ask him to leave.

“How does he get here if he can’t see?” Lily asked Papa.

“He’s lived here so long he knows every bush and beetle in the territory,” Papa said. And it seemed to be true, as Lily would watch him enter their property at the far corner of the East Field just past the Brown Creek, the stream that flowed, they said, all the way to the Indian camp in the back bush, and then thread his way through the maze of stumps and ash-heaps, never once stepping on the haphazard swirls of wheat between.

“Redmen smells his way in the bush,” he told Lily. “Don’t need eyes. Redmen sniffs the air currents like the white-tail.” He demonstrated. “Raspberry jam,” he announced, “from the Frenchman’s woman.”

“Yes,” said Lily, duly amazed.

Last week, though, after LaRouche and his three eldest sons, Luc, Jean-Pierre and Anatole, had finished piling and burning the last log in the North Field, and after some firewater had been consumed by all, Lily saw Old Samuels weave his way towards the back bush, teetering and righting himself as he went. At the corner of the East Field, he paused. The sounds of the men parting in the other direction diminished and died. Old Samuels appeared to look towards the east. Then a small brown boy slipped from the bush and touched Old Samuels’ hand. He shook it off. The boy turned, and Old Samuels followed, exactly two paces behind until the woods reclaimed them.

“Your Papa’s got a nose for the wind,” he said whenever Papa went off with Acorn or Sounder. “Hunting’s no good here now. Not like the olden days. They go all the way to Chatham, I guess, to find the bucks this time of year.”

Lily wanted to know more about Chatham but Mama began coughing in her bed and Lily rose to attend to her. By the time she returned, Old Samuels had lit up his pipe, stuffed with aromatic tobacco. When he got to smoking, he didn’t talk.

Lily may not have known much about Chatham or any other nearby town – Port Sarnia, Sandwich, or London – but she had travelled some miles into the bush with Papa when he trapped in the winter. She had seen the other farms along the line north of them. She could read the trail-marking blazes on the trees and find the faint paths through the bush that would open suddenly upon sun-lit beaver meadows, some of them as wide as the East Field. Beyond the Millars’ farm she had seen the crude road that was said to meander all the way to Port Sarnia, and from there to London, immeasurable miles to the east. She knew too that a great river swept by them no more than half-a-day’s walk from their own doorstep. Someday Papa would show it to her.

Lily was not prepared for the Frenchman’s farm, the home of LaRouche, his wife, and their brood of children. The usual procedure for a homesteader in the new territory was to clear room for a cabin near the front “line” of the property, then proceed in a systematic fashion to open up fields to the north, east and south. When at last Lily was allowed to accompany Anatole back to his place to fetch some garden greens for Mama, she was surprised to find their house set near the centre of several haphazard plots of no particular shape. Several nut trees had been left standing amidst the fledgling wheat and undisciplined vegetable garden. All trees were to be cut down: that was the unspoken code here, one of the necessities that drove the homesteaders to the mutual service and support they required to survive.

LaRouche’s cabin had begun life as a log structure of typical rectangular design, but time, weather, and exigency had added their influences to the original. Rooms of planks and split logs, packed with mortar and straw, jutted, sagged, or lay half-built where the Frenchman’s imagination or optimism had failed him. No windows looked in or out. Against the east wall, a lean-to of sorts had been erected wherein the ox-team of Bessie and Bert found comfort at day’s end among the resident pigs and visiting barred rocks.

Much of the cooking and indeed family life took place outside the murky interior of the homestead. Using the trade he had abandoned for farming after the war against the States, LaRouche built a fine stone oven-and-fireplace protected from the rain by a canvas affair of army tenting, deer-hides and one old sail salvaged, according to its owner, from the Battle of Put-In Bay. Here Madame LaRouche – referred to as Maman by her brood of eleven and as Fluffy by her husband in undisguised admiration for her three hundred pounds of flesh, sturdiness and good health – presided over hearth and oven with a temper that alternated between wheezing cheeriness and tongue-biting pique.

Lily could not take her eyes off Maman. She watched in awe as the woman punched and tormented the sourdough as if she were beating the belly of an obdurate husband, her heavy bosom rolling beneath the homespun smock she wore night and day. Lily shuddered whenever Maman’s hand shot out to stun the cheek of a child who ventured too close or dared too much. Later, she would see that same youngster comfortably housed in Maman’s lap, drifting into secure sleep.

In return for offerings from Papa’s hunting expeditions, Madame LaRouche provided welcome staples during the times when Mama was in bed: preserves, jams, greens from her garden in season, salt-port and “bully beef” from the venison Papa brought home. While the Frenchman himself did not hunt, having given up guns and wars following his service, he usually went along on the shorter excursions to supply encouragement, advice, and refreshments from his still in the bush. The older boys did not share their father’s pacifism.

When her own mother slept or rested, Lily was left to spend hours with Maman and her youngest children, all boys except for Madeleine who was just six. Maman happily schooled Lily in cooking and sewing, all of which Lily had a talent for, though not as much persistence and application as Maman would have hoped. But then Lily was not French, Maman teased. She sang while she baked – wistful melodies in her Norman tongue that seemed all the more serene because they sailed out of such an unnavigable source. Although Maman did not tell conventional stories, she had opinions on everyone and everything.

“Those Millars,” she said with the hushed stridency reserved for such remarks, “they’re gonna be trouble, wait and see. Scotch, the both of ’em. Give me the Irish any day, even your kind.”

“An’ you keep away from that Ol’ Sams,” she said in a more sinister tone. “That carrot of his may be shrivelled up but it’s still got juice in the root. You mind them hands too, little chickadee; believe-you-me, Maman knows all about them kind of paws.”

Lily of course paid little serious heed to any of this, but she smiled and nodded and did all she could to encourage Maman’s chatter. “A pretty, fair thing like you oughta get away from this place as soon as you can. That’s Maman’s advice. Go to the city. Go to Chatham or Sandwich. They’re real nice places. Lots of people.”

Then Maman would launch on a description of her brief but dazzling courtship with Corporal LaRouche of Malden, of the clapboard house they’d lived in, the dances they attended, the clothes they wore, the times they had before the Yankees came and the world collapsed. “I said to Gaston, I’ll go with you to the bush, I’ll have your babies, I’ll clean your house, but I’m not about to die out there without a priest at my side, prayin’ in my ear and rubbin’ my head with holy oil an’ smoothin’ my slide into Heaven.”

Lily swallowed her gooseberry tart.

“I told him I don’t care if he has to hop to Sandwich on one snowshoe in a blizzard – a promise is a promise.” Maman surprised the pastry dough with a punch to the gut.

“What’s a priest?” Lily ventured, at last.

A priest, it turned out, was a kind of preacher. Papa didn’t like preachers. Once, last summer, when Lily had been hoeing on her own in the garden near the “line”, she heard the crack of a twig along the path to the LaRouches’. She looked up in time to see a large florid man dressed all in black, still panting from the exertion of his trek through the bush. His blue eyes bounced like agates in his puffed face before they came to rest on the rims of his cheeks. His smile was as broad as his belly.

“Good afternoon, little elf,” his voice boomed. “I am a man of God. I’ve come all the way from London. Just to see you.”

Lily stared.

“Do you know who God is, little one?”

No response.

“Would you kindly tell your pa that the Methodist man is here.”

Lily did not have to tell Papa. He had heard, even in the North Field, and had come striding past the cabin towards them. Lily knew enough to leave. She heard Papa’s voice raised the way it was when he cursed Bert and Bessie or the trunk of a stubborn ironwood. His axe flashed in the sun. The preacher was already scuttling like a duck into the safety of the Lord’s bush.

Lily wanted to ask Papa who God was; Mama tried to tell her.

Sometimes, after being in her bed for several days, when some colour had come back into her cheeks, Mama would reach under the bed and pull out the large, dark book she called the Bible. Lily watched, poised and alert, as Mama’s fingers made the pages, thin as bee’s wings, flutter and settle.

“These are the words God gave us.”

“Read me some of them, Mama.”

“Not today, my sweet. Mama’s just a bit too tired. Tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Then, seeing the longing in her child’s eyes, she would close the book and in a reedy quaver begin to sing the spinning song,

Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o

Hi diddly iddly, hi diddle air-o

Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um

At first Lily would hum along, then gradually pick up the tongue-tumbling syllables one at a time, like stitches, giving to them whatever meaning the emotions of the moment allowed.

As sometimes happened, Papa did not return by day’s end. Lily had been able to find enough small logs to keep the fire alive overnight, though it was not banked properly and the cabin became suffocating in the late August heat. She made some tea, warmed up the soup, and went into Mama’s room. Lily held her hand to guide the tin cup to her lips. After a few reluctant sips, Mama closed her eyes.

The morning outside was beautiful and Lily bent to her chores in the garden and yard. High in the pines and arching elms, cicadas soon announced noon. By then, Mama was sitting in the rocker Papa had fashioned for her out of cedar. She gave Lily a wan smile and asked: “Would you help Mama with her hair?” As her mother watched in wordless encouragement, Lily managed to heat a wide kettle of water and get it foaming with soap. Mama leaned over, her brow resting on the arm of the chair, her long hair reaching almost to the floor. For a moment she seemed to be asleep, but when Lily began to pour the soft warm water over her, letting it fall gently back into the kettle, she murmured and her hand reached out to squeeze Lily’s. How beautiful Mama’s hair was, its former glory regained as she sat back in the rocker and let the afternoon sun scatter praise where it could. Lily took her mother’s bone-brush and stroked and stroked. A while later she said, “Let’s have tea, little one.”

Lily, excited, brought out the china pot and two tiny cups with matching blue saucers. She stirred the slumbering fire and prepared the tea just as she remembered Mama doing, then fetched the last of the blueberry cakes Maman LaRouche had given them. Mama began to speak softly, but insistently. “The place we come from, your Papa and me, is a long ways across the biggest ocean in the world. We were married there. We were very happy. But it wasn’t a happy land. The priests and the preachers didn’t get along. The crops failed, many times. We were hungry. Papa decided we should leave. You were already tucked inside my belly. We went on a sailing ship three times bigger than this house. Everything we owned was packed into two trunks they put in the hold.”

The odour of hot ash hung in the air outside the cabin and in the room itself, blue-bottles buzzed, unappeased.

“I figured we’d die on that ship, but we didn’t. We made it because we loved one another, we wanted happiness or death. At Quebec Papa bought tools and we got onto another ship, a smaller one, and sailed along the big lake just south of here. There a storm struck us down. The ship came apart in the waves near the long point. Dozens of people drowned. Papa and me were in the only boat that got to shore. We lost everything but our lives.”

The room darkened steeply, the sun eclipsed by the high horizon of the trees. Lily carefully unwound Mama’s fingers from the tea-cup, hearing her shallow breathing. How Lily wished that Old Samuels would arrive just now, slip in unnoticed, and be in the mood to tell a long story. Mama could just rock there and listen.

But Old Samuels did not come. The dusk of early evening drifted in, adhered. Lily decided to let the fire go out; the air was already too warm. Leaving her mother asleep in the chair, she started up the ladder to the loft.

“Don’t go up, Lily. Sleep with Mama tonight.”

Eagerly, Lily scrambled back down and then helped Mama towards her curtained cubicle. Her arms were thin as willow, the flesh draped over the bones. Lily slipped out of her cotton dress and under the sheet.

“Open this, please,” Mama said. In her hand was a small box made of in-laid woods. It was the most beautiful object Lily had ever seen. With her nimble fingers she tripped the slim gold latch and the lid lifted. Mama brought out a cameo pendant with a silver chain that shimmered in the gloaming. Fortuitously the last log in the fire burst into brief flame, and Lily was able to see that there was, beneath the cameo’s glaze, the merest sketch of a woman’s head: two or three quick but telling strokes. With a start, Lily recognized her own eyes.

“Your grandmother.”

Mama’s eyes filled with tears. She reached into the box again. “I saved this, out of the storm.” She held up a gold chain on the end of which dangled a slender cross no more than half an inch long. Instinctively Lily leaned forward and the crucifix settled on her throat as if it had always expected to be there. Then Mama fell back against her pillow. She crooked her left arm and Lily, as she had seen Maman LaRouche’s little ones do so often, slid into the embrace and held herself there as if the world would end if she blinked.

Lily had left the bed curtain open. In the dark, the embers of the fire glowed, then succumbed without a murmur. The night-air, remembering that it was almost September, turned as chill and sharp as the sabre-shaped moon guiding it. When Lily woke, the sun was already above the tree-line, sifting through the east window. She had been kept warm through the night by the final, fierce heat of her mother’s will. Beside her now, that flesh lay as cold as the ice that clenched the streams of mid-winter.