Читать книгу Lily Fairchild - Don Gutteridge - Страница 7

In honour of Lily’s eleventh birthday, Papa had installed a glass window in her loft sanctuary. From there she could see the quarter moon, the black rampart of trees, the outlines of the new road to the west, and the figures of two men walking purposefully towards the cabin. They knocked, doffed their hats at Papa’s greeting, and entered, the candlelight catching their red hair, slick lapels, and polished boots.

As soon as Lily heard them speak she knew they were Scots. One spoke smoothly, the other with a sort of hitch, a kink somewhere in every sentence.

“Yes, thank you very much, but just a thimbleful if you don’t mind. Good for the gout my doctor says.”

A gurgle of whisky escaping.

“I’ll join you as well. I haven’t got the gout, but of course I’m anticipatin’ it.”

They both laughed.

“Bein’ a gentleman who gets out and around, you’ll know all about our new county status and the marvelous – could I say miraculous – changes it’s bringin’ to our citizens, whatever their race or beliefs.”

“Or, uh, colour,” added Kinky.

“Citizenship in Her Majesty’s kingdom is colour-blind, I thank the Good Lord.”

“To Her Majesty!”

“What sorta changes do you have in mind for me?” Papa asked, evenly.

“Well now, they aren’t really, they don’t exactly apply to you, specifically or –”

“What my cousin is sayin’ is that we are merely servants, appendages of the council who in turn must carry out the laws duly passed by the Legislative Assembly to which – may I remind you – we all sent the Honourable Mr. MacLachlan.”

“We got snowed in,” said Papa.

“Precisely why the new road is bein’ expedited.”

“No citizen will be disenfranchised by a…by the weather.”

“What laws?”

“You’ll recall that the survey of ’43, lamentable though it was, served us well enough, but a new one has been made necessary by certain irregularitiesdiscovered in the original.”

“They had, after all, only the, ah, crudest of instruments and the Indians, we are told, ah, pulled up the markers as fast as they could be laid.”

“Done, I’m assured, in all innocence.”

“This ain’t my land, then?”

“Dear sir, please, uh, please –”

“– don’t leap to such dire conclusions. We’re here on a mission of mercy, as it were. To be blunt, and to allay any apprehension on your part, let me say straightaway that I have been authorized by the duly elected council of Lambton County to inform you that several small errors were made, back in ’43, in the lot alignments along this particular section of Moore Township.”

“Very small errors, I assure you.”

Papa’s chair emitted a sudden groan.

“Infinitesimal.”

“Tell me the truth.”

After a pause, Smoothie said: “Your property is too far east, sir. That is why the road out there runs so far from your cabin-line. Your farm should front almost on the road.”

“Five yards from it accordin’ to the, ah, lawful survey.”

“But that still leaves more than thirty yards –”

“Thirty-three to be precise. Ninety-nine feet, three inches.”

“More than half my East Field!”

“That’s correct.”

“What does this mean?”

“Calm yourself, sir.”

“In technical terms it means that you do not own a half of your East Field. And, correspondingly, you own a hundred feet of land to the west –”

“Covered in bush!”

“There’s no need for, uh, that sort of tone.”

“Donald is right. You’ll have every opportunity to buy that improved field. No plans exist for a second line of farms behind this in the immediate future. We’re movin’ south with the new road, and the crossroad will continue from Millar’s farm to the east.”

“I’d say you have four – even five – years to buy that field.”

“What with?” Papa’s question went unanswered.

“There is, I’m afraid, one more point to be made.”

“A very wee one,” Kinky said.

“But pertinent. Accordin’ to your contract you were to make a specific number of improvements within ten years, excludin’ your first winter here.”

“I’ve met them, every one of ’em.”

“In a sense, yes.

But with the technical loss of your East Field, you have, uh, technically –” Smoothie’s smoothness began to fail him.

“You’ll need, sir, to clear another ten acres.”

“But not by fall. That’s why we’ve been sent here. The council is quite willin’ to accept either solution: the immediate purchase of the cleared field –”

“On reasonable terms you may, uh, be certain.”

“Or the clearing of ten acres by a year from September.”

“No one wants to see you lose this farm or be cheated of the, uh, fruits of your labour. All of us are here to build a better country than the one we’ve known, in a spirit of, uh, co-operation.”

“And love and harmony, free from prejudice.”

“I ain’t got the cash. You know that. So does MacLachlan. And I’d need money to hire help to clear a new field. I owe everybody in the district – time and dollars. I got no sons, you know. I got no wife.”

Papa drank. “I’m no goddam squatter!”

The Scotch gentlemen’s fancy clothes brushed restlessly against the coarse deal of the chairs.

“Perhaps the Lord will help you, sir.”

“God damn the Lord!”

Gasps, scraping of chairs, rustle of coats, quick double-steps to the door.

In a quiet voice that came from a different, darker part of the soul, Smoothie said: “We both know where you can get cash, anytime you want it. Your comings an’ doings have not gone unobserved. Good night, sir.”

Papa did not reply, bidding goodbye with a sharp slam of the door. Though Lily could not see below, his agitation was palpable. She should go down to him, but hesitated. He had no son, he had no wife. As the night visitors passed beneath her window towards the county road, she heard their parting exchange.

“The man’s a – a republican!”

“He’s a fuckin’ Irishman, that’s what he is!”

By that summer of 1851, while the hand-axe still challenged every oak and ash, and the crops surprised themselves by flourishing, the machinery that would transform the countenance of Lambton County was well in motion. Road-gangs of disenchanted rustics and dispossessed natives hacked their way east to London and south to Wallaceburg. Surveyors bearing sextants roamed the back bush like spies, their chiseling eyes straightening bog and bend. To the east and south, barely out of earshot, the first locomotives would soon chuff and clang through morning mists undisturbed since the granite and peat and leafage rose triumphant from the retreating glaciers. And in Port Sarnia, the politicos, dreaming their mercantilist dream, strained to hear the chorus.

In the midsummer heat, the sudden lustiness of a cooling breeze felt good on the calves, arms, and neck. Lily watched the wind coax ripples out of the wheat as it rolled, resisted and sighed into acquiescence. It was at such moments that she tried hard to remember Mama as she had been before she took to her bed and left them. Yet summer days left little time for reminiscence. When the East Field turned golden brown, the LaRouche boys would be over the help them cut and thresh it. Luc and Jean-Pierre watched her as they worked, but when she turned her open gaze on them, they looked away sharply. In the vegetable garden, her own labour never ceased, with planting, weeding, staking and harvesting imposing a regimen from May until October.

“Your Papa now, he’s gone and surprised us all,” Maman LaRouche said, showing Lily how to pick a potato bug off its perch and squeeze it between thumb and forefinger just enough to split its seam. “Everybody said, ‘he’ll run off to the bush for sure now’, or ‘can’t run a farm without a woman and a crop of kids,’ an’ so forth an’ so on. Your Papa, he ain’t no ordinary Joe. Ow!” One of the victims had bitten back. “Goddam mauditbugs! I don’t blame anybody for wanting out of this this hell-hole.”

Papa had indeed surprised his neighbours, possibly even disappointed the Millars with their thirty cleared acres, their crossroad and their planked façade. Following the trip to Port Sarnia, Papa had thrown himself into work. The North and East Fields were both fully cultivated. The garden was protected from wild pigs by a split-rail fence; a small shed housed the oxen, Bessie and Bert, when they were visiting; and, wonder of wonders, a root cellar was dug on the north side of the house. Papa took special care with this. He and the elder LaRouche boys spent several days excavating a cavernous hole in the ground, then covered it over with low planking and an angled roof. A door set in the roof at knee level lead to a set of narrow, crudely constructed stairs. Lily was the first to try them out. They led down to a platform of sorts and, to its right, an earthen floor cave with shelving. There the canning and the potatoes and turnips would find a cozy berth, summer and winter. Lily felt the dampness exuded by the violated ground and the faint warmth of sunlight caroming through the planks of the roof and side walls.

Old Samuels attended the christening of the “new room,” politely declining the proffered drink, feeling the marvel of the deal planks and the cold metal eyes of the spikes that secured them. But he refused to enter the cellar itself.

“Bad spirits in there,” he muttered theatrically.

“In here, ya’ means,” said Gaston LaRouche, shaking the jug and winking at the others.

“White Mens always tries to fix Nature,” he persevered, searching the planking with his fingers for those icy arrowheads.

Papa continued to be away a great deal of the time. Fewer were the occasions when he returned with a deer or a bear to share among the neighbours. Some mornings Sounder and Acorn would be standing before the dead fire when Lily came down, guns in their hands, waiting patiently. “Your Papa not hunt today?” Sounder would say. “Got too many venisons already, I guess.”

“Off to Chatham if you ask me,” Maman would announce, asked or not. But despite any disapproval, she would invariably send little Marcel along to help Lily with the hoeing.

Sometimes when Papa came home from Chatham he would be tired but whistling, his eyes aglow. Other times he would brood; she couldn’t talk to him for hours or look him straight in the eye. “It’s a hell of a world out there, little one. We’re better off right here.”

Once she saw a letter on the table. “Can you read, Papa?”

He looked stung, as if she’d thrown a stone. “Yes, a little.”

“Can you write?”

“Not too good.”

“Can you teach me?” He looked at her, momentarily confused. “You’ll get to read an’ write , real soon. When you’re a little older.”

Lily sensed it would be some time yet. But the thought of it, the mere promise, was enough.

“Little White-Women’s smart,” Old Samuels said, “up here,” pointing to a spot just above the shutters of his eyes. “And here,” he added, indicating his ears. He meant of course that she had picked up, from him and his chattering nephew, quite a bit of the Pottawatomie tongue. At first she would attempt full conversations only with Sounder, grilling him for new words. Then Old Samuels took over her education, correcting the errors of his nephew, and delighting in his increasingly lengthy exchanges with this orphan of the forests.

“There’s hope, maybe, for White Mens,” he would say to his ancestors when she had mastered some grammatical intricacy that he would have thought incomprehensible to the simple mind of the intruders.

Papa, it seemed, had heeded Maman’s advice, for in the winter that Lily was nine, he brought home a woman. Lily knew who she was. She had seen the Indians’ camp in the back bush, not nearly so far away as she had imagined and much dirtier and sadder than she’d ever expected. No wonder Old Samuels liked to spend his day along ‘the line’. Squalling papooses, yapping dogs, and quarrelling women amid the habitation of makeshift wigwams possessed none of the dignities she had witnessed at Port Sarnia. Among the inhabitants was a pretty young woman with eyes like polished chestnuts, whose sinewy beauty was already softening towards sumptuousness. Her name was Penaseweushig, or Birdsky, and she brought with her a four-or-five-year-old son of mixed blood (his hair was brown and curly), the incidental offspring of some heated, casual lust between the girl and any one of a dozen drifters happy to oblige and vanish. Birdsky, being a Chippewa, gave him the name Waupooreor Rabbit. From Birdsky and Rabbit, Lily learned, among other things, to speak yet another tongue.

The first time they came they stayed only a couple of months, until the snows melted, when mother and child simply disappeared one morning. Papa said nothing. Indeed, even though they could converse haltingly in English or fluently in Ojibwa, Papa and Birdsky spoke little, in the manner of the Indians themselves. Birdsky was easy to like. She did much of the cooking and cleaning, careful to defer to Lily if the moment demanded. When she returned later that summer, she willingly pitched in to help harvest the vegetables, and “do down” Maman’s pickles and jams. Maman clucked a great deal about Birdsky’s presence, but was kind to her and, Lily began to suspect, was genuinely fond of her company. In December one of her relatives from the camp came by and she went off with him. Papa was away and when he got back he looked immediately for her, but said nothing to Lily, nor could she read anything in his face. He’s getting to be like Old Samuels on his quiet days, she thought. Birdsky returned again, unremarked, in the spring.

Rabbit was put in the small bed that Mama had used before she passed on. That bothered Lily for a while. But she enjoyed Rabbit: he laughed at her antics, he believed everything she told him, and he kept the prowling Luc off-guard and at bay. Papa and Birdsky shared the big bed almost below her.

She never tried, through the flimsy partition, to watch what they did at night. She could not help hearing though. Not once did Birdsky ever cry full-out, either in anguish or jubilation. Her hushed thrashings were pitted with mewling, aborted sighs, ambiguous gasps, and the hiss of air through teeth desperate for release. Papa’s heavy plunging was accomplished with a grim silence that was broken, near the end, only by a staccato wheeze of relief accompanied on rare occasions by a lurching, crippled soprano cry that never took flight fully into pleasure or despair. That, and Maman’s ribald asides, fed her imagination.

The first winter with Birdsky in residence, Lily cried herself to sleep most nights, though she had no idea why. She was happy that Papa had someone to hold and whisper to. She liked to watch Rabbit molding his myth-creatures out of blue clay from the dug cellar. She knew that being an adult meant coming together like that in pleasure and pain. Still, she cried, as quietly as she could.

By the second winter, some things had changed. She felt strange stirrings in her own body, as if invisible limbs were stretching in preparation. On her chest she watched in consternation as her breasts swelled around the blossom-heads she’d always known. Her leg-bones ached with growth. Luc’s eyes fastened like beads on hooks to the bumps on her chest as she whirled and gambolled at the edges of his wretchedness. After, she would feel contrite, though furious at her own innocence and her inability to read what lay behind Luc’s glances. As she lay above Papa and Birdsky, she took their muted, ambivalent passion and made her own translations in all the languages she had learned. She hoped they were as happy as the lovers in her dreams.

Lily was watching the bees in the basswood near the house. Birdsky’s mama was sick so she and Rabbit were gone for a while. Old Samuels had not come around for days. Maman had asked her to stay over while Papa was off, but she was ashamed to be too near Luc. Here she wasn’t lonely, but with the chores done, she was a little bored. The bees, however, were up to something. They were gathered into a single, swarming cloud that rolled and oozed, then miraculously began to lift itself into the air. It staggered, gained momentum and rose against the sky. Lily followed the swarm with her eyes, and was about to move to see where its new home might be when she heard a twig crack behind her.

A bear? No, the tread was too light, too cautious. Curious, she turned to the tree-line in front of the cabin, saw nothing, and waited. She was about to set off after the homing swarm when, quite distinctly, she heard a human sigh – the exhalation of someone either utterly exhausted or stunned by despair. She scanned the underbrush, more than curious now. Nothing moved. “Who’s there?”

Silence. Breathing, then, constricted but deep. A man’s.

“You hurt in there? You want me to come in after you?”

Panic, very clear, to the left, behind the wild raspberries picked clean by the starlings. Lily walked in that direction. She was not afraid, though the fixed intensity of her stare might have suggested so.

“I won’t hurt you…”

She heard the body turn over. It was down in the twitch-grass, and struggling to rise. Lily moved quickly through the raspberries into the afternoon shadow of the tree-line. The figure had collapsed face-down, its head in the shade, its shoulders and body in the sunny grass. The body was motionless except for the steep breathing.

No sign of injury or wounds, no blood. The man, for so he definitely was, was clothed in rags, mere strips of cloth that might have been a shirt and trousers. No shoes at all; the feet were blistered and scarred. And the fellow was incredibly dirty; he must have slept in ploughed fields. Through the holes in his shirt Lily saw what appeared to be more scars on the back, like livid vipers twisted in some foul congregation.

His entire body began to tremble, the way a child’s lower lip might quiver just before it bursts into tears. Maybe he had some terrible disease, cholera or fever. She saw the sweat bead on his almost bare shoulders. Holding her breath, she gently touched his arm to bid him turn over. “Please, sir, let me help you.”

“I’se past help,” came the voice, fatigued yet vivid and deep. Wearily, one limb at a time, the man rolled over in the grass. He was not dirty. He was black.

“His name is Solomon Johnson,” Papa told her later. “He run away from us soon as we touched shore.” Papa shook his head slowly. “Wouldn’t believe he was in Canada; he thought we meant to trick him.” He was talking more to himself than to Lily, who sat rigid beside him. “Poor bugger…”

Papa had not explained much that afternoon when he came home to find the black man in his bed being tended to by Lily. But it was more than she had ever heard before about what he had been doing on all those hunting trips. Papa and some men from the township had rowed Mr. Johnson across the River in the moonless dark. Solomon was a slave in the United States, Papa said, a life to be pitied. But once safe in Chatham, he would be free forever. Right now some bad men were chasing him, trying to take him back to his chains. Lily tried to imagine chains that could bind a human limb; all she could picture were the teeth on the muskrat trap, like a skeleton’s smile.

After talking a long time with the black man, Papa helped him to his feet and led him outside and around the cabin to the root cellar. Lily followed, at Papa’s prompting. They descended the little steps. Papa held up his hand. They stopped. Then he reached down and pulled the platform that served as a floor up on its hidden hinges. Lily gasped at the revelation of an even deeper pit below. Without hesitating, the black man stepped down into the dark and disappeared. A matched flared, then a flickering candle revealed a miniature bedroom about five-by-six and six-feet high. A pallet of blankets served as a bed. There was a stool and a bench to hold the candle or other necessities.

The black man looked up at them, exposing his huge, sad eyes. Then he smiled the widest smile Lily had ever seen. “How c’n I thank yo’all?” he said.

“Lily will bring you your food. You can stay up here long’s nobody comes ’round. You need somethin’, you just tap on this wall,” Papa said, demonstrating.

“If’n you doan mind, suh, I prefers to stay down here. Down here I feels safe.”

Papa didn’t reply. He turned to leave. “I got a sturdy lock on this shed door,” he said. “Lily’s gonna lock it every time she brings you what you need. Nobody’ll get in here. You’ll be safe. I gotta go to Chatham, to the Committee. Won’t be more than a day or so. We’ll work out a safe route once we know where those Yankee bastards are or if they’ve gone back where they belong.”

“I’se gon’ stay right here, Mistuh Cor’cran, suh. I’se gon’ be all right now. I be no more trouble, no suh.”

“I’ll be back in two or three days. You just keep your hopes up, Mr. Johnson. My Lily will take good care of you.”

Papa showed Lily how to fit the key in the lock and open it. She felt trusted, like a grown-up, and charged with excitement. She wanted to learn more about the black men they brought across the River, about slavery, and these Yankee bastards who were chasing Solomon. But now was not the time, it seemed. While she prepared some cold beef, greens, and biscuits for Solomon’s supper, Papa prepared to leave again.

Lily watched him reach the road that lead south, but instead of wheeling left he paused and looked up the line as if he were waiting for someone to catch up. Even from this distance Lily could tell that the jauntiness and intensity of purpose that had earlier quickened his gait and given an edge to every action, was now completely gone.

The voices hailing Papa were recognizable long before the figures emerged against the fading light. This time, though, the Scotch cousins were accompanied by a third man who, despite his powerful, squarish slope, trod a respectful distance behind his betters. An official of some kind, Lily thought. Old Smoothie greeted Papa, and together the entourage continued at a ruminative pace towards Chatham.

I’ll never tell anyone he’s down there, thought Lily. Ever.

Two days passed with no sign of Papa. Lily rehearsed what she would say when Old Samuels or one of the LaRouche boys came over. No one appeared. The sun shone, and the bees settled nicely in their new hive. Lily and Solomon had the homestead to themselves.

The first two or three times that Lily brought around his food, Solomon said nothing except “Thank yuh, Miz Lil, ma’am,” his eyes downcast or averted.

“Why don’t you eat up here? The sun’s comin’ through.”

Solomon, below, devoured his food noisily.

“I can fetch a chair from the house, with a back on it.”

The empty tin plate and clean spoon rose through the trap-door. “Thank yuh, Miz Lil, ma’am.”

“Did you like the pickles, Solomon? Maman and me made them last fall.”

A hand, seemingly detached, reached up and pulled the trap-door down like a mouth snapping shut. Reluctantly Lily gathered the utensils and with difficulty locked the outside door. She could feel him waiting to hear the comfort of its click.

“Tell me what it’s like in the United States.”

“Well, Miz Lil,” Solomon replied, finishing the last of the dills from his noon dinner and settling back a little on Papa’s chair. “Yuh wouldn’ wanna go dere, no ma’am. It’s an evil place, a wicked, wicked place –’da devil hisself don’t wanna dere.”

“Is that why you left?”

“Cain’t talk ’boud dat, Miz Lil. Jus’ cain’t.” He looked at the cellar floor.

“It’s nice in Chatham. Maman says they got brick houses there. And board sidewalks. And schools for little children.”

“Long’s they ain’t got no slaveholders, Ol’ Solomon be happy.”

Lily was accustomed to posing many questions in exchange for few answers, but she barely noticed that as the afternoon eased westward and Solomon showed no inclination to escape, she was doing more talking than she ever had. It appeared Solomon was a good listener, unfailingly alert and eager for her words. So attentive an audience was entirely new to her; even Solomon’s sadness and hair-trigger jumpiness seemed to abate.

She told him all the things she knew that were interesting and that he might need to know when he got his freedom down in Chatham. He got an earful about the LaRouches and the war against the Yankees, about Old Samuels and his miraculous all-day pipe; about the quilting bee at Maman’s last summer when the Frenchman drank too much hooch and dressed up like a priest in one of his wife’s black slips and scared the ladies out of their wits; about Maman then going after him with the skillet, ruining a whole pan of perch. “Now you tell me a story,” she said with gentle urgency.

“Solomon jus’ like to listen, Miz Lily, ma’am. I’se accustomed ta jus’ listenin’. A body get used to it, he do.” She thought she caught the hint of jest in his eye.

“But how am I to know a person if they don’t tell about themselves,” Lily said.

“Nothin’ ta tell. My life ahead of me, missy. Got nothin’ behind me ’tall.”

“But you were born. You had a mama and a papa. You lived somewheres.”

“Had no papa, no ma’am; had me a wonderful mama, but no papa ever come round us.”

“Why’d your mama give you a funny name like Solomon?” she said.

“T’ain’t funny,” he said. “Come right from da Bible. Doan yo’all know da Lord’s Book in dese parts? What kinda place I come to?”

“What kind of place did you come from?”

“Hertford County, North Carolina, nigh Murfreesboro,” he said as if responding to an interrogator. “Work fer Mastah Cartwright. In da fields. I’se his slave, all da time.”

Lily ached to know more, but prod as she would, she could get nothing further out of him. Indeed his original suspicion poured back into his face and demeanour as soon as she switched from telling to questioning.

Later that day, after a shared but quiet supper, Lily reached over to pick up the plate and mug. Solomon’s left hand lay on the stool beside them. Lily let the petal of her right hand whisper to the ebony of his. Solomon jerked his entire body back as if he’d been lashed. The plate and cup clattered on the platform.

When Lily recovered from her surprise, she said “Are you hurtin’ there, Solomon?”

Solomon could not reply. He was trembling head to toe, a cottontail before the weasel struck blood.

“I’ll let you be,” Lily said.

As she turned the key in the lock, she heard him squeeze into his ground-hole.

On the third morning he took his breakfast only after Lily had retreated. But at noon with the bright midsummer sun lancing into the upper cell, she found him seated in Papa’s chair. She stood watch as he went into the woods to relieve himself. On the way back he scuttled like a crab across the twenty feet of open space, not knowing whether to look ahead or behind or everywhere at once. Lily wanted to leave the cellar door ajar to catch as much light as possible, but she closed it as soon as he squeezed past her. He sat down – embarrassed, ashamed, seething with irresolvable passions. Sweat sizzled on his brow until he got his desperate breathing under control. Lily did not leave. Nor did Solomon retreat to his burrow.

They ate together. The tea was cold but refreshing in the heat. When the black man lifted the mug to his lips and tossed his head back, he seemed to drown the room with his presence, his substance and shadow. In contrast, Lily’s porcelain arms seemed to float free from their trim body like swan’s wings. Lily’s hair was for a moment indistinguishable from the sun’s rays.

“Where’s your wife?” Lily heard herself say.

Solomon looked up in disbelief. Terror and wonder passed simultaneously over his face. Lily could see plainly that he wanted to tell her the story of his wife and their grief, that he was overwhelmed with the need of someone to confide in and share the full horror of his ordeal. But he did not. Tears washed out of his doe’s eyes, yet nothing could erase the anguish harboured behind them. There was no need to tell. Lily looked straight through Solomon’s pain and saw in a single moment, the entire narrative of his travail. Whether she fell into a trance and dreamed it whole, or whether Solomon himself entered that dream to reveal his story, she never knew. She only knew what she saw, and would never forget.

She saw the master, that worthy of Hertford County who gloried in his notoriety as a ‘nigger-breaker’, challenged by the very presence of a young man named Solomon whose stamina and courage were a threat to God’s ordained order. She saw Solomon stripped and lashed a hundred times, roped to stanchions like a steer, his skin flayed to make him cry out his submission. When the master could not break the black man’s spirit, he had him measured by the smith for fetters that tore open his flesh till scars multiplied over scars. Out of desperation, longing for some kind of ending, Solomon fled into the woods, dragging his chains with him, only to be tracked by hounds and returned to his master, who, counting his losses, sent him off to the auction block. Solomon landed in Memphis, Tennessee, where he suffered two years of ordinary slavery: no beatings, no starvation, just dawn-to-dusk labour, nights of unrelieved muscle-ache, and the absence of hope.

Lily felt the momentary joy of union when Solomon gathered Mary to him and together they struggled to keep their love private and aimed, somehow, towards a better day. Then one morning in March he was hauled away without warning to the slave-pen in mid-town to be groomed again for auction. Filled with a rage beyond even his own imagining, he battered his way to an escape, returned for Mary, and together they ran. Lily saw then the six-week trek to the North, a hundred and thirty miles through swamp and bush, Mary having to be carried much of the way, food running out, the bounty hunters alerted. With spring dawning on the Ohio, they crossed into Cairo and were found dazed and despairing in a field by a white man who said, ‘Come with me.’ And so they were fed, rested, and pointed to the next village up the line, the string of safe houses that would eventually end in a sanctuary known as Canada.

Between each town, though, lay the bush of southern Ohio and Illinois, and when the night skies clouded over, North was elusive. They staggered off-course, slept by day in caves or hollow logs, spent nights guessing where the safe house could be found. Many times they were too terrified to knock on the first door, too starved to head back into the bush, till at last Solomon would walk up to the kindest-looking white gentleman he could find and say, ‘I’se lookin’ fer mas’ so-and-so livin’ on such-and-such street,’ and wait, heart hammering for the response that spelled life or death. ‘You a runaway? Come with me.’

Until that day in Centralia when they collapsed at the doorstep of their safe house. To find two children there who seemed kind and well accustomed to such occurrences, giving them food and salves for their scrapes and bites and telling them to rest until their father returned. Lily shuddered as she saw the boy slip out of the house, the reward notice in his hand. Mary’s screams woke Solomon but by the time he got to the window, Mary was already being carried by a posse of bounty-men towards the railroad station where she was bound and slung aboard a south-bound train like a piece of stray baggage. Solomon, out of instinct, was into the bush in a minute, lost his pursuers easily and eventually made his way to Chicago where he once again he had to put his trust in strangers. They were good to him there, consoling, holding out the bitter promise of freedom only two or three days away. It was decided to send Solomon by the lesser-used northern route, by rail through Schoolcraft, Lansing, almost to Port Huron where he was smuggled off, numb and submissive, and led through the forest to a secret point on the St. Clair River. Once delivered to the far shore, he bolted straight into the bush, beyond hope or memory or self-preservation, and gave himself up to the dark at the heart of the world.

As Lily was leaving, she snapped the lock shut but did not loop it through the hasp on the door-frame. How could she imprison him again?

Lily was half-way across the dooryard towards the road before she stopped to stare at the pedlar. It was not Lame Peter, from the north, as she expected.

“Afternoon!” he called jauntily, tying the donkey’s halter-rope to a nearby birch and ambling towards her.

Lily waited, uncertain. He was a wiry man, all legs and arms with a long neck and a tiny bobbing head that made him look a bit like a tom-turkey combing gravel for tidbits. His blue trousers, scarlet shirt and smudged yellow bandana shone in the hot, high sun. A cherry-wood valise dangled from two fingers of his right hand. When he saw that Lily was not about to move, he stopped a few feet away and set the case down.

“A mighty fine July afternoon it is, young lady.”

Lily waited, feeling she should say something customary.

“You the lady of the house?” he asked with a smile that was all teeth. She saw that though his skin was leathery and his brown beard unkempt, he was not an old man at all. The eyes were as black and lively as two tadpoles. They looked through her and beyond, taking in, in a single cast, the cabin, garden and distant fields.

“Yes,” said Lily finally.

“Mama home?”

“Mama’s up there,” said Lil waving in the direction of the mounded gravesite.

“Mighty sorry to hear that. The Lord’s will. So be it.”

After a pause he grinned with his enthusiastic teeth and said, “You sure appear to be a young lady could look after her Papa, all right.”

Lily looked at the ground.

“Papa home?” he asked, bending down to his case.

She was about to say ‘no’ when something made her tell an outright lie. “He’s over to the Frenchman’s, just past the North Field there, a-helpin’ with a stump. Be back home any minute. I was just fixin’ some coffee for him.”

The pedlar didn’t even glance up. “Name’s Jones,” he said. “Spartan Jones.” He was fidgeting with the clasp on his case.

“You’re not regular,” Lily said. She’d caught a strange twang in his accent, not one she could place right off. “Nope. Come up from the south. Chatham way. Me and Bobby”– indicating the donkey –“tramped over the bush trail to the new road. Fresh territory, eh?”

Lily glanced over at Bobby who was chomping contentedly at the twitch-grass near the edge of the woods.

“Say now, I got here, just for a pretty young lady of the house like yourself, a whole boxful of tiny wonders: needles and coloured thread, and baubles and barrettes.”

“I couldn’t look at them unless Papa was here,” Lily said. “Besides, we ain’t got cash for that kind of foolishness,” she added in her best Madame LaRouche tone.

“But you ain’t seen it yet,” he said, lifting the lid on his treasure trove. “Can’t hurt nothin’ just to have a peek, can it now? Tools for the industrious, cosmetics for the hopeful, temptations for the bold!” he said with another over-rehearsed flourish.”

Lily looked hard at his face. He was smiling, the beads of his eyes danced and held her but gave nothing away. He was not much taller than Lily. Still, she steeled herself and said nothing.

“Jumpin’ Judas but it’s hot here!” said the pedlar, mopping his brow. “Got a cool cup of water inside?”

Lily was relieved to break his gaze and hurried around the corner to retrieve a dipper of water from the bucket she always kept in the shade of the cabin’s west wall.

“Fresh outta the spring, ’bout an hour ago,” she said.

For a second he looked hard at her, not changing his ever-friendly expression but focussing it in a slightly different way. It was as if the temperature had dropped a degree or so. Noisily and with obvious relish he drank from the dipper and then splashed the remainder of the water over his face. His beard went limp. Lily saw the scar just below the cheek at the line of the beard, like a stretched maggot.

“I hav’ta go now. Hate to leave off conversin’ with a young lady as pretty as you, all grown-up an’ lookin’ after her Papa and, I’ll bet, fendin’ off the boys ’round here – but Bobby’s gettin’ anxious.”

“Thank you for comin’” Lily heard her grown-up voice say.

He was only three steps away from her when he turned very casually and said, off-hand, “Will you let me give you a present, lass?”

“Papa wouldn’t –”

“Just a trifle. Got me some bolt ends of cloth on Bobby there, no good to me now. I reckon, though, they’d make a pretty scarf or two. In the hands of a young lady that could sew,” he added, with a wink as big as a rooster’s swallowing corn.

Lily waited for the pedlar to turn towards the donkey but he stayed where he was, unsure of himself for the first time since his arrival. Lily noticed that he was staring over her right shoulder towards the north-west corner of the house. Could he see the root-cellar shed from that angle? Why would he be interested? She knew she must not glance in that direction. She had to get him to leave. “Perhaps Papa wouldn’t mind, if they’re real small pieces,” Lily said, starting towards Bobby.

“Trifles,” the pedlar grinned. “But on you –”

Lily was ahead of him, half-skipping towards the donkey whose indifference seemed absolute. The pedlar came at a bow-legged trot close behind. Lil stopped a few feet from Bobby, leaving ample room for the pedlar to sidle up to the beast and unpack his special wares. Lily was closest to the cabin, and she was fleet of foot.

“I reckon the scarlet would go nicest against that lily-white skin of yours, girl,” he said, flipping the swatch of cloth from its pouch and letting it alight across Lily’s shoulder only partly covered by the sack-cloth smock she wore all summer. His voice seemed suddenly to have dropped an octave, and it was full of razors. Lily was already bent to flee when his left hand grabbed her wrist and wrenched it with such unexpected force that she felt herself twist and collapse into the weeds, her skirt flung up over her thighs.

“No use a-cryin’ out, sweetheart, nobody’s gonna hear ya. Your pa’s a long ways from here, and besides, you’re about to get the surprise of yer life if I ain’t mistaken, an’ if I am, then we’ll both enjoy ourselves.”

Lily did not cry out, though she was sure her arm was broken. She was simply stunned for the moment, unable to comprehend the sudden vitriol from the pedlar.

“Quit squirmin’, ya little snake, I’ll bust yer other arm. Now let’s see what we got ’neath all this cotton.”

He was tearing at her underwear and trying at the same time to get his braces over his elbows –contradictory tasks that gave Lily a few seconds to catch her breath and think.

“Fuckin’ nigger-lovin’ hoo-ers, the lot of ya!” The underpants came apart with a shriek of their own, jerking Lily forward and up, a motion which she merely continued with accelerated determination. Thanks either to deep instincts or good fortune, she rammed her head like a ballpeen into his crotch.

With an explosion of wind resembling a death-rattle, he folded and fell into the grass. Lily was up in a wince and headed on a line towards the cabin where, under the big bed, a loaded fowling piece was kept at the ready. Clutching his wounded parts, the pedlar came after her in a wobbly trot, his lust consumed temporarily by rage. Lily would have made it easily to the gun and shot the pedlar without compunction, had she not stumbled and fallen no more than a dozen feet from the cabin. When she tried to get up, she cried out sharply and toppled back to the grass. Her right ankle was sprained, and this time the pain swept unfettered through her whole body.

The pedlar, seeing this, slowed his agonized pace. “I’ll soon have ya whimperin’ again,” he seethed, pulling his braces, somewhat belatedly, all the way off. “A bit of buckle across the arse’ll do it all right,” he muttered while Lily sat bolt-upright, swallowing her pain, forcing her eyes open.

He came around behind her, his back to the cabin, expecting her to squirm away or at least try to protect herself. She did neither.

“I’m gonna whip yer butt an’ then feed it somethin’ it’ll never forget.”

The pedlar’s braces came down randomly like a loose flail, metal slicing into her shoulders and arms, leather burning two diagonal strips across her back. The pain was just about to register from the first blow when she heard the whistle of leather drawn back for the second. It never came. Lily heard another sound and turned in time to see the water bucket bounce back from the pedlar’s head with a crunch of flesh, maple and angle-iron. The pedlar’s eyes popped skyward, his tongue flopped out of the gasp his mouth made, and he pitched forward onto the dooryard in a tangle of blood and grass.

“I’se killed him! I’se killed a white man!” Solomon was in a sorry state. He was pacing in circles, trying not to see the motionless body with its bloodied head, sprawled in plain daylight at the cabin door.

“Nobody saw, nobody saw nothin’,” Lily kept saying, trying to catch the whirligig of his hand and stand on her one good foot. When she touched him, he stopped moving as if lightning had singled him out. He collapsed on the stool, staring away from the corpse towards the bush now deepening with late-day shadow.

“I jus’ hears ya call out, jus’ like... an’ I comes runnin’ through dat door an’ I sees de man with de whips an’ I jus’ go crazy. Doan even ’member pickin’ up dat bucket, I doan.” He shook his head, then stared again at the bush beyond. “You hurt, Miz Lil?”

“No,” Lil said. “He didn’t hurt me.” The stout flour-bag cotton of her smock had absorbed some of the lashing, though the buckles had left two stinging but superficial cuts. Her arm was sore but undamaged, and though her ankle was swelling, she found she could hobble satisfactorily.

“Well, I’se sho’ glad he dead, if’n I have to go hang an’ to hell for it. Guess I was wishin’ to do dat to somebody fo’ a long time now. A long, long time,” he said.

“Papa’ll be home soon, everything’ll be fine,” Lil said without much conviction, trying to stop her body from shaking head-to-toe and make her voice do what it was told.

Solomon heard her teeth start to chatter. “You best lock me up in de shed, missy. You best lock me in dere good.”

Leaning on his arm, Lily led him to the cellar. Holding onto his hand a second longer than necessary, she watched him ease down into whatever comfort darkness afforded him. “Everything’ll be all right,” she said, suppressing the quiver in her tongue, “I promise.”

“Jus’ bolt up dat door,” he said. “Please, Miz Lil, ma’am.”

Reluctantly, Lily closed the door to the cellar, almost overcome by a second wave of shakes. As she clicked the lock into place she noted that both the hinges had been knocked more than half-way out of their moorings. In his frenzy to save her, the black man, thinking the door locked, had hurled his body almost through it. She pushed the screws back into place. If he wants to go, Lily thought, nothing will keep him there.

She knew exactly what she ought to do. Papa often got home just before dark. The sun was just about to sink below the tree-line, which left about two hours of hazy daylight. Lily ought to act the full measure of her eleven years and drag that man’s body into the brush. She ought to throw dirt on the blood and mess to hide it. She ought to bring the donkey to the empty hut reserved for Bert and Bessie. She ought to fetch the fowling gun and have it ready for use. She ought to be able to stop the treachery of her own body which would not cease its shivering.

She did none of these. What if Papa did not come home? She hobbled, hopped and crawled into the undergrowth where the new South Field would be someday be planted, and hid herself. Against what, she could not imagine; perhaps only to sooth her ankle and regain her level head. There was just enough light left for her to see the outline of the cabin. From that direction came a sudden intermittent moaning. Terrified, she strained to check the corner of the cellar shed on the north side of the cabin. The moan grew louder, but it wasn’t coming from the cellar. Lily turned in time to see the pedlar raise his head a few inches off the ground, groaning piteously all the while. In a moment he propped himself up to his elbows so that he could peer about him. Lily didn’t breathe. He flopped to the left, turning over so that he could sit up and get his bearings. Then he put two fingers to his lips and whistled softly. To Lily’s surprise, Bobby pulled free from his loose tether and stepped unhurriedly over to the pedlar, now evidently returned from the dead. The pedlar pulled on the halter, Bobby sank shakily to his knees, and his injured master rolled onto his stout back. Then donkey and burden moved into the near-dark where the north road lay. They turned neither north nor south, however; instead they continued due west, following the ancient deer-trail that wound its way eventually to the River.

Lily waited until the mosquitoes had become unbearable before she limped to the cabin. She no longer shook, but she was consumed by a dread that was worse, an apprehension that would not name itself. The image she carried across the clearing at that moment was a strange one: Maman LaRouche’s strong grip ripping turnips out of the ground, her sickle slicing green from root before the plant could gasp, as Maman’s sturdy foot, surging forward, buried itself cosily in the unresisting gash.

All that night Lily sat at the table facing the window and door on the south side, the fowling piece lying before her, cocked and expectant. When she had first entered the cabin, she rapped in code on the far wall and heard, after a while, the mutually reassuring response from Solomon somewhere below. Determined to remain awake to face whatever grim retribution might appear, Lily – fast asleep – dreamed she was awake, and very brave.

She awoke with a start to the sound of horses. The gun jumped too but held its peace. Forgetting the weapon, she ran to the door and flung it open. In the disfiguring light of the false-dawn, Lily saw three mounted men, two of them already in the dooryard, the third stopped behind them in the opening before the road. The horses snorted and jangled, sweating from exertion. Their heat washed over her.

The two men dismounted with a certain practised grace. Behind them, the third arrival remained on his steed, the swath of bandages on his head beaming like a Turk’s turban across the clearing.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” said the taller of the two in a strange accent, mellifluous as honey. “Beggin’your pardon for disturbin’ you this early in the day, but we’re-all here on pressin’ business.”

The other one nodded but said nothing, glancing nervously around.

“What’s your business with us,” Lily said, trying to shake the sleep out of her voice. She wished she’d picked up the gun.

“Your Papa and me’s made a certain transaction, ma’am.”

“What kind of...transaction?” Shorty was edging towards the north-east corner of the cabin, holding his hat in his hand, nodding and trying to look casual.

The tall one brought out a leather purse; Lily heard the clink of coins inside. Her heart froze.

“My job is to bring you this here payment in return for certain goods you have in hand.”

“This ain’t a store,” Lily said. Shorty had slipped around the corner.

The tall one put the purse into Lily’s hand and as he did so grasped her gently but firmly by the wrist. “No need to get riled up, missy. We ain’t in the habit of hurtin’ decent folk. Beauregard and me are businessmen, that’s all.”

Lily was about to attempt a knee to the groin when Shorty’s voice pierced the quiet of the pre-dawn. “The son-of-a-bitch’s gone! He’s flown the coop!” Breathless, he reappeared from the rear of the cabin.

“You sure?” snapped his partner, tightening his grip.

“Goddam right. The door’s busted half off. They had him holed up like a polecat back there, but he’s done beat it to the bush!”

“You let him out, gal?”

“Fuck no, I tell ya, Sherm, the door’s lyin’ in pieces. That big buck just blew outta there!”

“Cut the cursin’,” Sherm said, more calmly. He loosened his hold on Lily’s arm. “No call for that. Either your Daddy’s cooked up this little treachery or that nigger’s lit out on his own. Either way, we’re gonna get him.” He pulled the purse from their mutual grip. “You won’t have need of this no more.”

“We goin’ into the bush after him?”

“Yes, we are. Tell that pedlar to vamoose. We don’t need him any more.” He turned to Lily. “You tell your Daddy to stay out of our way. Nobody need be hurt so long’s we get our hands on the nigger. Good mornin’ to you.”

They mounted and cantered as far as their waiting accomplice. Sherm spoke sharply to him, and Bobby wheeled and loped southward, towards Chatham. They watched him for fully ten minutes, then circled and headed north in the direction they assumed Solomon had fled.

It must have been mid-morning when Papa came home. Lily had returned to her vigil at the table, the gun an inch away but untouched. She was no longer scared. Her ankle no longer throbbed. The dread which had so possessed her had finally divulged its name, and her soul longed for some relief beyond dreaming.

Lily didn’t know how long Papa had been standing in the doorway when at last she looked up and saw him there. He turned his face away wearily and slumped on the stool before the spent fire. His flesh appeared to be too heavy for his bones.

“He got away,” Lily said.

“They hurt you any?” he asked, rising and taking the hunting rifle from its place, not looking at her.

“None.”

“An’ that pedlar?” His sudden stare burned through her.

“Solomon, he run him off. Then he went, too.”

Bullets clicked coldly in Papa’s pouch.

“Keep an eye out,” Papa said. “I’ll be back before dark.”

After him, in a voice that made her skull-bones hum, Lily shouted Why? Why?Papa of course did not respond. He had turned south towards Chatham.

It was dusk when he came home. Lily opened her eyes to catch Papa’s face bending towards hers. It was sad; she saw her Mama in it.

“I’m sorry, princess. We’re gonna have to leave this place.”