Читать книгу Lily Fairchild - Don Gutteridge - Страница 6

Maman LaRouche sent everyone out of the house while she dressed Mama’s body. Papa, Gaston LaRouche, and Luc had sat in the lean-to shed sipping from a jug, murmuring occasionally in low voices, but mostly staring straight ahead into the bush. Once Lily thought she heard her mother’s name spoken–“Kathleen”– like an exhalation of breath, but she wasn’t sure. They put Mama’s body, carefully wrapped in a white sheet of the softest cotton from Maman’s cedar chest, in the ground on a slight knoll where the East Field joined the North. Jean-Pierre and Anatole had dug the hole.

Old Samuels came to the grave with his nephews, Sounder and Acorn; to Lily’s astonishment, a tribe of wives and children followed behind them with heads down, though still resplendent in their furs and black-and white featherage. The Millars and the two new families from the North section arrived. Lily had never before seen so many people gathered in one place. She held Papa’s hand tightly, and he squeezed back, almost hurting. Her heart reared through its sadness. Mr. Millar stepped forward, opened a black book, and read some words from it that the wind caught with ease and almost carried off. Maman LaRouche suddenly burst into sobs which she made no effort to staunch, fully drowning his eulogy. Lily understood even then that Maman 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 fell. His lamentation found syllables and sounds that might have been words, though no one present had ever heard the language they made. His blank eyes, like death’s pennies, began to flutter in time with the rising and falling cadences of his song. He turned his ancient face upward, and his whole frame tensed, expectant, as if he had been asking some question over and over. He looked towards Papa and Lily. He smiled as only a man without eyes can smile, with every other feature of his face. In English he said: “The gods are listening; that is all we can ask.”

Many times during the long winter following, when Papa was away trapping or hunting, Lily asked Maman who God was, thinking of Mama lying unattended in that cold grave under the snow. But Maman used the question to launch into another rant about priests and the promises of faithless husbands. Papa, who was always too tired to talk after his excursions, would just grunt in a dismissive tone, “Go ask Millar, he knows all about those things.” Then he would go silent or out the door.

“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 Lily, “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. 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. 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.”

“What about heaven?” Lily asked, remembering Maman’s assurance that her mother dwelled there.

“Your Mama, who was the dearest White Womens in this world, is not in heaven, little 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.”

“How do you know the good gods will 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 Lily.

Old Samuels paused to light his pipe. Lily thought he was finished talking for the day. “But you can. I hear dancing in your voice every day.”

Lily did not like to be teased. For a while she sulked and avoided 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 clear and crystal as the moon’s.

Lily was often alone, and had been as long as she could remember, even when Mama was alive. She was not lonely though. She could sit close by her father for hours while he chopped wood or repaired tools without the need to speak. Often she hummed, sang songs or made them up as she watched whatever scenes were 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 gave up its its blood in sunset. The few acres that defined her world pulsated with sights, sounds, smells, with the 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 heeded and helped.

“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 and created 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.” Lily 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 imagine before her a stretch of blue, unrippled water, without edges or end, clear as cadmium. 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 in her mind as if it were a torrent ripping out the throat of a narrows, roaring until Lily stopped her ears, fearing that she had somehow 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 guardians to bring back your eyes,” Lily said.

“So I can see all the wickedness and foolishness 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”

“Why does Papa go to Chatham?”

“I like your Papa. He’s a good White Mens. I tell him my name is Uhessemau, but he says ‘I can’t say that so I’ll just call you Old Samuels.’ 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, but he didn’t answer Lily’s question.

One evening Papa returned at dusk, his haversack full of store-bought bacon and sausages. The fresh provisions were not for storing though. “Start packin,’ Lily. We’re goin’ up to Port Sarnia to watch the ceremonies.”

It was Indian summer. The leaves had turned but not fallen. No wind disturbed their glow in a sun that blazed with more hope than heat. Along the forest track, purged of summer’s mosquitoes, autumnal shadows stretched and stilled. Air in the lungs was claret, bracing. Papa measured his practiced stride to hers, and she floated gratefully in his wake.

They had left home while the sun was still a promise in the east, following the line that linked the four farms to the north. Lily had never been north of Millars’ farm, never seen the River. The beaten path, so familiar to their feet, soon disappeared. 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 Acorn and Sounder. The young men slipped behind Lily 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 hunting attire. Their red and blue sashes against the white calico of their capotswere dazzling, even amongst the maples and elms. Like Papa they carried haversacks stuffed with supplies. Sounder, as usual, grinned broadly at Lily, 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 her impassively, with no change of expression. Lily stared at the grimace of the black squirrel peering out of the fur on Acorn’s shoulder.

To Papa they spoke in Pottawatomie, the language their parents had adopted when, according to Old Samuels, to utter a word in Attawandaron or Petun meant death. There was no one alive now who remembered those sweet, sharp sounds. Lily thought sadly of her mother’s forgotten lullaby tongue. While they rested, Sounder chattered away to Papa like a jay. Already Lily could pick out some words; the pitch of rising excitement was plain. She detected “presents,”“white soldier”, “big river” and “village”. Papa replied laconically, half listening as he did with Lily. But he was happy. His large hands cradled the back of his head, his eyes glowed with something remembered and anticipated. Lily found herself beside him and put her hand on his knee.

Sounder 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 womans with black hair. White generals plenty fussy ’bout presents.”

…brushed and settled.

“Sounder like all womans; give presents to everybody.” His eyes danced at the thought. “Even Acorn,” he laughed, and did a little jig around his unimpressed cousin. “Ready to move?” Papa asked, in Acorn’s direction.

Sometime after noon, they turned north-west, still following the blazed trail. To the west lay the River. Lily strained to hear its voice. The odd crow, unmated, cawed in complaint; a bear crumpled the dry brush nearby, seeking the late berries; a crab-apple dropped its sour fruit. Increasingly they passed through large natural clearings, beaver meadows or sandy patches where the hundred-foot oaks and pines had given way to clans of cherry, snow-apple, and sumac.

Mostly, though, they heard their own footfalls. 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 well-established road, a fifteen-foot swath cut through the bush, the stumps pulled and the surface smoothed over with sand. Across the myriad streams trickling west towards the River, bridges of demi-logs had been crudely constructed. Lily realized that a horse and cart could travel here, though no vehicle approached them. They followed the road due north until the sun began to tilt sharply to their left. It will sink soon, right into the River, Lily thought.

“Are we near the water?” she asked, no longer able to contain her curiosity. How she wished she were Sounder, able to dance ahead and explore unfettered. Papa increased his pace; Acorn muttered his disapproval. After a while Sounder said quietly to Lily: “River of Light is just through the trees there. We been following it, but no path, even for a brave walker.” Lily looked longingly to her left but saw only the black silhouettes of trees, fluted by the sun behind them. Her disappointment was interrupted by Sounder’s cry, “Here’s the farms!”

Before them was an immense expanse of open space unimpeded by trees. To the east of the road the bush had been denuded of all timber, all brush, in typical pioneer fashion, Not even a windbreak separated one farm from another. The stumps of the slain trees had been piled lengthwise to create makeshift fences, demarcating properties, fields, gardens, and dooryards. At first such angularity seemed alien to Lily, even painful to look at. But the sight of cabins, several of them larger than any in her settlement and ranged neatly back from the road in neighbourly view of one another, was overwhelming.

The others were apparently impervious to grandeur, for they had moved well ahead and were stopped, waiting for her, in front of the third cabin. The smoke from its fieldstone chimney lingered in welcome in the still air. It was only when Lily joined them that she glanced away from the farms to the west again and discovered that the bush had been cleared for a stretch of two or three hundred yards, all the way down to what could only be the River. “This way,” Papa commanded, ushering her into the home of the Partridges.

Mrs. Partridge was surprisingly kind. She bathed Lily’s blistered feet in soda water, rubbed them with ewe’s grease, and put into her moccasins little pads of the softest cotton. “Store-bought at Cameron’s,” she said with restrained pride, “up at Port Sarnia.” After a 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 buff 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. Lily had many questions to ask but no words with which to express them. She listened, though, her eye never leaving the printed calico dresses of the elder daughters and the rounded bodies so restless beneath them.

The Partridges had a small shed that served as an outhouse. Lily left the door ajar, allowing the moon to pour its amber warmth through a wedge in the tree-line. She did not return to the cabin right away, instead walking past it and straight across 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. At last she came to the water’s edge and the voice of the River filled her ears. It roared with a hoarse breath, and in it, Lily thought she detected longing, anticipation, and the ache of seeking what always lay ahead, just out of sight. Under the circling stars, Lily listened for the language it used, but it was no tongue she had ever heard.

Later, from her cot near the board wall that separated the sleeping area from the main room, Lily tried to catch the scattered words of the men.

“Them surveyors was through here again last week, Michael.”

“I heard,” said Papa’s voice. “Rumours floatin’ about, up an’ down the line. Talk of makin’ this territory a county.”

“White fella draws lines in the bush,” said Sounder, making no attempt to disguise his disdain for the folly of the intruders.

Lily dozed, dreaming of water bigger than counties, borderless and infinitely serene.

“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. 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!”

Lily was swimming, her hair fanned out like a parasol in a blue river.

Next day they rose and were well on their way before sunrise. But this time Lily 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 settlement, but successive waves challenging the hidden heart at the centre of the territory, known only to the natives and the hibernating bears who were 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 there to witness, what Sounder couldn’t stop dancing about, was the arrival of the government ship for the annual dispersal of gifts given in exchange for land ‒ territory of which the native owners had already been dispossessed.

Just moments before Lily and the others emerged from the bush into the misty dawn-light, the steamer Hastingsweighed anchor and slipped from its overnight mooring in the bay towards the river bank below the town. On board was Major John Richardson, who had joined the official expedition at Windsor on October 9, 1948, and who was carefully recording the events surrounding the 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, 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 the natural bend of the bay. Most walked, single file, with the women and children behind. Others, 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, 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, neatly bound in fleece-white blankets tied at the four corners, were being carefully laid out in predetermined rows, White Man and Indian exchanged formal greetings, then sat down at the entrance to a huge skin tent 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 select 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 actions of the several families and tribes appeared to be spontaneous. Bundles were carried off to the edges of the plain where families had set up their cooking apparatus and blankets for the events ahead. Fires sprang up, cards and dice appeared, fresh calico paraded, Cavendish proffered and puffed. 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 later 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 when the Yankee bullets ruptured the great man’s heart, did not smile, did not sip peace with his brothers, did not take the gifts offered, did not bend his gaze 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 still inhabit these grounds so long after those cataclysmic events. Richardson, at an age when romanticizing is either foolish or profound, wrote in his account 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.”

Lily was made dizzy by the colour and the crowds. 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 Lily could observe only the natives since, when she had stepped out of the bush that morning, the plain was dotted with them. Later she followed the slow-paced Acorn towards the bay and the ceremonial party. There she saw the soldiers she had heard about from Gaston LaRouche and his war stories. Their scarlet uniforms caught the mid-morning sun, imprisoning it; the bright steel and gilt of their swords dazzled all who dared look their way. Never had she seen men uniformly attired, prancing in step, swinging their arms high in unison, marching to the panicked hammering of drums. She saw too their sleek rifles and the bayonets thin as a wish-bone: these weapons, she knew, were not for hunting.

There were a few white women in the throng too, whose tailored jackets and fancy bonnets she could only gawk at. Since observing the Partridges, mother and daughters, she was all too aware of her sack-cloth chemise, her improvised leggings, and her unadorned reddish-blond hair. She sat down by the fire-pit, the better to hide from notice. She did not hear Acorn squat beside her in the commotion, but then became aware of his presence. He held out an offering.

“For you, little fawn,” he said, averting his eyes. It was a gift, a buckskin pouch bearing an intricate configuration of beading that might have been inspired by the stars.

About noon-time, Lily ventured down to the River. The paddle-wheel steamer blocked her view until, from its iron stack, clots of soot shot upwards, smudging the sky. Several men tossed whole logs into a square stove-like affair and the flame inside blew white and venomous. Suddenly a man in a dirty uniform gave a shout. A metallic rod whined, the wooden sides of the boat shivered, and the wheel beat frantically at the calm water, sending the steamer northward towards the townsite.

The River was now hers. She could see the other side, but the trees there were faded and shapeless, so vast was the blue torrent flowing past them. To the south she could trace its surge for miles as it swept through the bush. This was no creek, however magnified in imagination. No shadow touched its translucent face save that of the 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 rejoiced in its flowing.

To the north, beyond this brief inlet, the near-bank bent slightly west, and Lily 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.

Papa spent much time talking with the officers and other white men from the steamer and Port Sarnia. Many times he laughed out loud; other times, his eyes clouded over, the way they did when he talked about Mama. Twice his gaze had searched out Lily among the throngs, looked relieved to find her, and then twinkled. Sounder hopped and skittered, threw dice and horse-traded, and finally snoozed beside her in the afternoon grass.

“I’ll give you a half-dollar for it, ancient one.” The officer held the coin up to the sun as if it were a jewel or a talisman. The old Pottawatomie chief eyed it, tempted. His hands unconsciously rubbed the black walnut war club 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 military man 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 lift 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. Lily saw the look on Papa’s face; it was the same he wore just before he swung the hatchet at the beaver or muskrat not drowned by the trap.

“Sun-in-bitch soldier,” said Sounder behind them. Then, after a decent interval: “They start dancing now.”

Against the tangerine sun, the Indian dancers were silhouettes freed from gravity, moving at the will of the drum. Their feet struck the ground as if beating the stretched hide of the earth itself. The air above shook with their cries. They danced towards enchantment, expiation, communion. Lily was drawn into the melee and felt her feet take off, seeking out the cadence, finding it with astonished ease, letting her body swing free. She danced until exhaustion overtook her and she moved to the edge of the circle to sit and watch once again.

After a while a small group of Pottawatomies approached the central fire. They appeared to be members of a single family, a mother and father, some grown sons and a slender girl perhaps a few years older than Lily. The drum dance had stopped, but at a sign from the father it started again, subdued but insistent. His daughter knelt before him as he placed a garland of some sort on her head and began a long incantatory song in Pottawatomie. Lily 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 becomes 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.”

Southener said nothing else, as the ceremony ended and the fire grew smoky and fickle.

Suddenly very tired, Lily dropped her head to his soft shoulder. Papa would find her there, safe and sleeping beside the old Shawnee.