Читать книгу Lily Fairchild - Don Gutteridge - Страница 8

Seven days later they were packed and ready to go. Papa had planned to get away at dawn, but he hadn’t counted on the goodbyes that needed to be said. Maman surprised everyone by not weeping openly. Instead she braved a smile for Lily, hugging her fiercely as if she might transfer to those sapling limbs some of the bruised strength from her own decades of travail. Gaston and his boys touched their caps and mumbled au voirwith exaggerated politeness, except for Luc whose heart was irreparably broken and shamed itself with silent, unconcealed tears.

Lily knew it was pointless to ask Papa why they had to leave, but she was certain it was due to more than their troubles with the Scotsmen and the pedlar. Papa would not give up the homestead, would not abandon Mama’s grave to the winds and seasons, would not tear his little girl from the only world, the only people she had ever known – not for a mere Scotsman or a pedlar with a cracked head. Somehow it had more to do with Solomon and the look Papa gave her when she woke to find him staring from the doorway, the shed door in back of them protesting as it swung on one precarious hinge.

“We’re goin’ to live near Port Sarnia,” was all he said, “with your Aunt Bridie.”

Whose existence was news to Lily. From Mama she had gleaned a little about her relatives – enough to know that Papa came from a large family, that Mama’s was mostly dead – but never had she had names to attach to any of them. Instead Mama told stories only about long-ago ancestors, all of whom apparently were squires or gawains or beauties of the first order. Mama’s stories were like her songs, a kind of lullaby. But Bridie was no lullaby. She was a real, living aunt with a name as durable as a fieldstone. “I wrote Bridie a letter a while back,” Papa said some days later, seeing Lily seated near the ripening wheat of the East Field and staring across to the red-blue granite on which one of Old Samuels’ nephews had chipped the name ‘Kathleen’.

“Chester and her been wantin’ us to come up there ever since your Mama passed on.”

Chester?

“Land’s mostly cleared up there. We’ll help ’em out at first. Then get our own place.” Lily wanted so badly to believe the enthusiasm now in his voice.

“We’ll bring your Mama up there, too, some day,” he added with effort, his hands trying to be light and consoling on her shoulders.

Mama wasn’t up there, Lily knew, but could find no words to help Papa understand. She’s here – in these trees, in the undug stones, in the birdsong and the wind, in that part of the sky she shared with us and that brings such joy to the guardian gods. Lily’s quiet weeping made Papa’s hands shake, and he turned back to the cabin.

It was a regular road now running abreast of the line of a dozen farms north of theirs. The new neighbours, above Millar’s, came out to watch them leave, whole families lined up at the edge of their land waving curiously, uncertain of the meaning of what they were witnessing. When Lily and Papa passed the last farm, with only its entrance cleared, and stumps and tree branches smoking behind the log hut, the new road abruptly became a slashed trail again. Lily could not help but glance back. Standing in the middle of the road a hundred feet behind them were the unmistakable silhouettes of Old Samuels, Acorn and Sounder.

A few days before all three had materialized one morning, unannounced, and stayed the entire day, helping Papa with some of the packing and dismantling, but never once mentioning the fact of their leaving. Old Samuels puffed his pipe and talked exclusively to Lily in Pottawatomie. “White Mens always coming and going,” he said several times, unprompted, “Attawandaron stays.” Once he added, not without charity, “’Course, White Mens still young, got a lot to learn before this world ends.” At dusk they left, saying no formal goodbyes but carrying Papa’s sow in their arms as graciously as they could manage. Lily did not expect to see them again.

Papa and Lily followed the well-tramped trail north for several hours. The sun warmed them with its mid-day welcome. Wild phlox and amber columbine nodded jauntily from the verges. In the pines, tanagers and siskins tumbled and irridesced. A fox snake yawned his whole length in the heat kept cozy by the trail.

They were travelling light, of course. Papa had a backpack with food and overnight utensils, a water bottle, rifle and hatchet. In a harness neatly rigged by Acorn, Lily carried two blankets and some tarts slipped to her at the last moment by Maman. In the beaded pouch given her by Acorn and belted to her waist, she had carefully placed Mama’s cameo pendant, the gold cross, and the rabbit’s foot Old Samuels had rubbed almost smooth in thirty years of not worrying. There was no need for anything more: they had packed their few belongings – clothing, trappings, utensils, tools – in two large wooden cases about the size of a child’s coffin. Luc, in a rush of altruism, had promised to hitch Bert and Bessie to Mr. Millar’s cart as soon as they were free from their summer stumping, and deliver the trunks to Port Sarnia.

So it was only the weight of the day itself that bore heavily on them as they trudged away from all they had become a part of. Indeed whenever the little eddy of excitement which Lily had been suppressing all morning bubbled up on its own, she felt an acute sense of having betrayed something precious. I will hate Bridie, I will, was her less-than-comforting antidote.

There were now two routes to Port Sarnia. The lumber trail they were on led north-east to a junction with the main road running south-east from the town towards Enniskillen, the undisturbed heart of the Lambton bush. Twenty miles to the west, hugging the River, a trunk road – parts of it already planked – took the circuit rider and carpetbagger all the way to Wallaceburg and thence to Chatham. A number of Indian trails – blazed only – would take them to this latter marvel of the age. En route, they would stop at Corunna and visit with Mrs Partridge. Sometime during the mid-afternoon, Papa veered left into the bush, leaving the sun above them.

That season there was frenetic surveying and road-building through the undeveloped townships of Plympton, Enniskillen and Brooke, prompted in part by recent upheavals in Europe and their cataclysmic fallout. In half-a-dozen countries, upstart peasants and workers and a few middle-class dreamers had attempted – without consulting their betters – to make a home of the lands they had laboured on for generations. They failed, and paid the price exacted by their oppressors in the ritual rapine and domestic terrorism indigenous to the race. Thousands more were added daily to the earth’s dispossessed. In Ireland, potato blight deposited its indelible pennies on the summer’s crop, and hunger happily joined the scourge. A hundred thousand starving Irish crammed themselves into stinking cargo-ships and sailed for the world’s end where, some of them believed, a plot of arable ground lay unspoiled by human greed.

Lily was annoyed with herself; she was slowing them down. Her head was spinning, probably from too much sun on the open road. She lingered behind a bit to vomit quietly in the underbrush, but Papa’s hand was soon on her arm. He wiped her mouth with his flannel hanky and offered the last of the water. He sat down and in the healing shade they rested a while. Lily needed water, so Papa went off in search of a good spring. When they started up again, moving carefully from blaze to blaze under Papa’s practiced eye, they stopped every half-hour or so. Lily felt better but very weak. When she rose to signal she was ready to go, Papa touched her shoulder with one finger, and sat down. Just before their midday meal she shamed herself utterly by drifting off to sleep. A trek of four hours stretched much longer. The shadows around them thickened and grew aggressive. So did the mosquitoes. Papa paused to examine a configuration of blazes on a huge hickory tree.

“The river road’s only a half-mile away,” Papa said. “But it’s too late an’ we’re too tired to walk the five miles after that to the Partridges,” he continued. “We’ll make camp right here on the high ground.”

Lily was sure she could hear the River tuning up for its nightsong.

With his swift, sharp hatchet Papa cut down several saplings, bent them into a frame and covered it with cedar boughs. The lean-to was just big enough for two, with a sturdy elm-bole to rest their backs against. More boughs were spread on the ground to serve as a bed when they were ready for sleep. But not just yet. In the opening of the lean-to, Papa built three small fires ringed by stones, two of which he smudged with damp evergreens, leaving the middle one to flicker brightly below the steaming tea. Papa and Lily were scrunched inside with the blanket over their shoulders, the smoke keeping the mosquitoes at bay and Maman’s raspberry tarts sweetening on their tongues. Papa’s left arm was raised and Lily snuggled in against him, relishing the muskiness of his rough shirt. She was about to slide down into sleep when she realized that Papa was talking.

“Bridie was the eldest. Eighteen and a local beauty. To us, she was a second mother. Then one day, just like that, Pa announces she’s gonna be married up with an older man, a crony of his. Bridie says noin that iron-willed way she had. There was a terrible row, I can tell you. Ma hid in the stairwell cupboard. Next day without sayin’ good-day-to-you or by-your-leave, she’s gone. ‘She’ll come back,’ I said to Ma, ‘she loves us.’ Pa ranted and raved for three days, ‘Let the harridan be and be damned! She’s no kin of mine.’ The case is closed. He refuses to say her name an’ forbids us to. She’s drummed out of the tribe. Dead.”

Papa lit his pipe. “I felt terrible,” he said in a lower, different kind of voice. “I felt she’d abandoned me. When you’re only twelve, somethin’ like that seems like a betrayal. You put all your trust in a person an’ then, like that, they’re gone.”

Papa drew the blanket around Lily’s head. She snuggled close again, gripping his left hand with both of hers.

“It was two years later, Ma was quite sick, an’ this letter arrived addressed to her. We all recognized Birdie’s writing. She was a beautiful writer. She taught me to read, as best she could. So I read the letter, after Pa had headed for one of his meetins’, of course. Bridie was in a place called Toronto, Upper Canada. She was well. She was goin’ off to a town somewheres in the bush to work as a domestic.. She didn’t name the town. She said we wasn’t to bother tryin’ to find out, she loved all of us dearly but she just had to do things this way as it was the only way for her. When I grew up, I knew what she meant. Back then, I hated her even more.”

The moon slipped out from behind one of the high, breezy clouds feigning interest in the world’s affairs.

“When your Mama an’ me come out here some years later, we made no attempt at findin’ her. As you’re gonna see soon, this is a big country. But nobody ever put one over on Bridie, not even Pa with all his political shenanigans and bluster. Just after you was born we got a letter hand-delivered from Port Sarnia. From Bridie. She welcomed us to the county an’ said the door was open to her house anytime. We always intended to go up there but your Mama was never well enough. We thought it best, for a while, not to get your hopes up.”

He poked at the smudges, scattering the swarms.

“’Course that’ll all be rectified soon. You’re gonna see your Aunt Bridie and Uncle Chester at last, you are.” Papa gave her an extra squeeze. “Yes, my Lady Fair Child, you’re gonna have the time of your life up there. Before you know it we’ll have a chunk of that cleared land and a white clapboard house to live in. We’ll only be a mile from the town, too, with stores and mills and meetin’ halls. First thing I’m gonna do is take you into town to Cameron’s emporium and buy you your first store-bought dress – calico or lawn or kendall, take your pick, you’ll be as pretty as a butterfly in a flax field in August.”

Papa squeezed again. Lily gripped his hand to let him know she was still awake. The main fire was in its mellow, amber phase.

“Naturally your Aunt Bridie, bein’ an’ educated woman herself, will want you to have some proper schoolin’. They’ve got a school in Port Sarnia. You’re gonna grow into a genuine young lady, I reckon: there’ll be no stoppin’ you once you reach that town.”

Papa took his arm from her shoulder, shook the fire vigorously until the flames jumped again, and then reached into his pack. In his hands he held something small and leather-covered, a book.

“I don’t want your Aunt Bridie thinkin’ your Mama an’ me didn’t bring you up properly,” he said, as Lily looked directly up into his face. “This here’s a New Testament, a Bible. It was a gift, long ago, from my mother. I wrote an inscription to you in the front cover. My spellin’s not too good so I had Mr. Millar write down the actual words. Someday real soon you’ll be able to read it, an’ the Bible, too. I want you to keep it an’ treasure it, no matter what happens to you in this awful, tryin’ world.”

Papa had to stop to clear his throat. Lily reached out and took the Testament, its covers carrying the warmth of Papa’s hands into hers.

“I’ll tell you what it says, for now,” he went on. Once again he cleared his throat. “To my dearest princess, the Lady Fair Child, from your Papa who loves you forever.”

Lily tucked the precious book into her pouch, and slipped drowsily into the care of Papa’s arms. He rocked her, gently, to sleep.

The sun, well above the tree-tops, woke Lily with a start. She was not in the least surprised to look over and see that she was alone. Papa had left her the food, water and utensils. And a note, on folded, thick, yellow-white paper. Lily did not open it. I can’t read.It must be for Bridie.

Another voice said: the new road is a twenty-minute walk across a blazed trail; there will be travellers on that road; they will help. Mrs. Partridge is five miles up that road; she will remember me and everyone in Port Sarnia will know who Bridie is. I have nothing to fear. Papa loves me; he expects me to go to Bridie’s.

But then maybe he’s gone to scout the new road? Besides good folk, there are pedlars and bounty-hunters to beware of. It would be terrible if I wandered off and Papa came back to find me gone. He’d be so worried. I’ll stay here till he comes for me. That’s why he left the food and water. He thinks I’m sick. He loves me. It says so in this little book, it’s written there, forever.

When she finished the last of the water, Lily began to worry. It was past five o’clock. Papa was not coming. He expected her to get to that road and find the Partridges. Still feeling dizzy and very weak (what was wrong with her? she thought), Lily gathered their belongings and looked westward for the next blaze. The shadows were massing even now, and it was not easy to pick out the year-old slashes from trunk to trunk or the modest impressions left on the trail by its mocassined patrons. An hour or so later Lily admitted reluctantly that she was lost. She was not scared of being alone in the woods; she never had been. The mosquitoes were bad but she had matches, she could make a camp of sorts. What concerned her was that she didn’t know where she was. Nor would she be able to find her bearings in a terrain bereft of familiar landmarks. Desperately she tried to keep to the westward by the sun but it disappeared for minutes at a time in the closed canopy one hundred and fifty feet overhead.

When she stumbled into a beaver meadow, she looked up and saw in despair that it was now fully night-time. The stars winked invitations at her. Then she saw the dipper – the Silver Gourd – shining clear in its northern berth. She turned due left into the darkness. Ten minutes later she emerged from the dense forest onto the roadway. The fresh planking hummed beneath her feet. Inside she hummed too and did a little jig. She looked northward up the forty-foot width of the highway. She was exhausted. A sort of numbness was starting to spread up the calves of her legs. She couldn’t make it to the Partridges. She was also very thirsty. She knew she shouldn’t sleep without drinking. Then she remembered: this was the River Road. To her left she saw that the bush was thin and intermittent, smallish pines in a sandy soil that glittered in the starlight. She listened, forcing her breath in. Though the night was still, her River poured its restless energy onward. What a wonderful sound, Lily said aloud. Slowly but with more certainty than she had felt all day, Lily eased her way through the pine grove towards the beckoning music of the great waterway. There would be some breeze there, and open space: she could sleep undisturbed in the sandy bank. In the morning everything would be all right. Papa would be proud of her.

Just as the muted roar of the River was beginning to build in her ears, Lily came to a tiny feeder stream. Bending, she scooped the fresh, chill water to her face, drinking and cleansing simultaneously. The breeze off the water ahead was cool on her cheeks. She could see the moon plainly through the last trees between her and her goal. She was about to step out onto the sandy bank when she froze. The first warning she had of danger was the waver of firelight above the shoreline; then came the smell of burnt meat; then the voices and their unmistakable accents.

In the shimmering glow around her, Lily saw that she was standing, still hidden by the pines, slightly above a cove where the stream entered the River, a gravelly indent that formed a beach four or five feet below the main line of the bank. A pit-fire was in full bloom; two figures were seated on stumps, roasting something that might have been rabbit. A longish bundle lay rumpled in the shadows behind them. On the point formed by the cove, tied to a boulder, a row-boat rocked and complained.

“Goddammit, I figure we oughta haul his black arse across while the gettin’s good.”

“I’m hungry. So are you.”

“Hungry for two thousand dollars, I am.”

“Besides, I don’t like that moon. It’s gonna cloud over afore midnight. Eat.”

“This shit’s all burnt.”

“Suits you then, don’t it.”

Lily backed off so that she was fully shielded by a tall pine. Neither man was looking in her direction; they faced the south-west where the moon sat, unclouded. Something icy and alien gripped her. She could not flee; she could not even close her eyes. Hence, she was the first to see the rumpled bundle flinch, stretch, and assemble itself. Solomon was sitting up, his hands bound behind him with rope. Another rope dangled loosely from an ankle. Somehow he had worked his legs free. Without taking his eyes off the backs of his captors, he rose to his full height without the slightest sound and edged towards the boat fifteen feet away.

“Sometimes, Sherm, you talk to me as if I was no better’n that nigger.”

Sherm let the opportunity pass.

“Matter-of-fact, think I’ll feed some of this here charcoal to him right now. Can’t have him lookin’ too lean, can we?” Beau turned. “Christ! He’s after the boat.”

Both men leapt toward the boat, but Solomon was already there. He placed one foot over the gunwale, the other on the rock next to the painter, and gave a tremendous shove. The painter rope popped free and the boat shot out into the swift current. Solomon fell face-down into the aft section with a clatter of wood and bone. Unruddered, the boat spun slowly, caught in a momentary eddy.

“What the fuck you doin’, you stupid nigger! You can’t row that thing with your hands tied up. Come on back here!”

“We’ll get him downstream,” Sherm said, already heading back for his gun. “If not, he’ll end up on the other side. They always do.”

But Beau wasn’t listening. “Jesus!” he screamed as if his soul had been seared. “He’s goin’ over!”

Solomon was standing upright, his powerful six-foot frame black against the pre-harvest moon behind him. He was standing on one of the thwarts staring down into the current that was just catching the boat and swinging it, it seemed, southward to safety, and freedom. But Solomon jumped high and northward, as if his fugitive eye lay still upon the gourd of the North Star. His body, abandoned by the boat, arced across the horizon and entered the water face-first. The eddy of bubbles, which was all that marked his exit, was soon swept away.

“I never seen the like o’ that, never. Did ya see the stupid fucker, Sherm? Jumps right in there an’ takes our two thousand bucks with him.”

Sherm was throwing water on the fire and gathering their things together. “We better get lookin’ for another boat. This ain’t exactly friendly territory, you know.”

Beau continued to stare out over the foaming torrent, reluctant to leave.

“Maybe we can get the body,” Sherm said.

Long after the bounty-hunters had left – their fire doused, the sky clouded over and menacing, the wind rushing to keep up with the river’s urgency – Lily stood where she was and wrestled with the dark angels of her imagination. Once again she saw Solomon hunted through the unending nights, fleeing further and further into the forest.

Or did he welcome those River waters, she wondered, the tender descent, the soft bottom-sands sifted and cleansed by centuries of seeking, the icy currents that would carry his bones seaward over time.

She must get to Corunna as soon as possible; the night wind was up; the sky, threatening. How long had she been staring at the River? She was shivering with fright or worse, fever. There was no feeling in her feet as she turned north, stumbling in the dark on debris and branches. Then the rain came, lashing and cold.

She fell and rolled onto her side, partly screened by some underbrush. Too numbed to rise, she could only peer curiously at the silver imbedded in her right hand. No dream forestalled her slow falling away.

Even though she had not yet opened her eyes, Lily was awake. She was warm, a wooly shawl curled around her shoulders, and her shivering had subsided. Someone had found her and brought her to a safe place. Nearby a dampened fire radiated heat and welcome. Papa?She opened her eyes and looked to the crouched figure across from her.

“Ah, the little one wakes up.”

“Where is Papa?” she asked, faintly, in Pottawatomie.

Southener, his kindly eyes scrutinizing her, said: “I made you drink the tamarack tea; I am sorry if I frightened you. You were shaking with swamp fever.”

Lily felt too weak to move, but Southener noted her anxious glances about the campsite, which was deep in one of the pine groves.

“Your possessions are safe, little one,” he smiled, his skin as rough as hickory bark, his sable hair flecked with gray and tied back with a leather thong. “I found them when I picked you up, soaking and hot, on that pitiful roadway.” He reached down and produced Lily’s drenched pack and the beaded pouch. “Thank you,” Lily whispered. “You’re young and very strong,” he said, stirring the fire a little to give more light to their conversation. “Already the fever is gone. By morning you’ll be ready to go north.”

Did he know?

“When I started to dry out your things, I found this map,” he said unfolding for her Papa’s unread note. “It will tell you where to go.”

So Papa had not left her a letter after all. Lily tried to think what that meant, but she could not think at all, she was drifting into sleep again. After another short rest, she took some of the tea Southener has prepared and allowed him wash the cuts on her legs and treat them with tiny leaves. The stinging was not unpleasant.

“As soon as the sun comes up, I must leave you. There’s meat in your pack; eat it if you can. You’re safe here. When you feel like walking, the road is directly east of us; the morning sun over the tree-line will take you right there.”

“I remember you, Southener,” Lily said.

“You were the best dancer,” Southener said. “I watched you all day. You let the spirits loose in your legs. Now your tongue tells the true story.”

“Old Samuels taught me,” Lily said, wide awake now, every nerve alert.

“You have made me happy in my age,” he went on in a hushed tone that Lily had already come to recognize and revere. “I am almost at the end of my exile. I have no use for the magic amulet that has shielded me from my enemies and rescued me from my own folly many a time.”

From a pocket he drew a pebble of blood-red jasper that glowed even in the dull dawn-light. In his palm, it seemed to pulse as if quickened by the fire’s flame, alive with hope and memory. Its irregular oval shape suggested a living infant’s heart.

“This will bring you luck all your days,” he said. “Not happiness, as you already know, for they do not wear the same colour. But it will make your life a good one, with enough joy to keep you from despair, enough hurt to keep you loving. It will help you find a home, here and in the hereafter. It has done all of these things for me, fivefold.

“I received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as such by generation of tribes who have dwelt in these woods and passed on, as we all do. I ask only two things in return. The days of its guardianship are almost over; there is little magic left in the forests and the streams. So, when you have no more use for the stone’s powers, I ask that you return it to the sacred grove whence it came, to the gods of that place who lent their spirit to it. I have looked at the map your Papa left, and I know when the proper time comes, you will be close to it. There is no way of marking such a place on a map, for the penitent must feel its presence before he can see it. You will know when you are standing on it, though, because it resides beneath the protecting branches of a giant hickory on a knoll just where the forest begins, and when you look west and north you will be able to see, at the commencement of summer, the joining of the Lake and the River set perfectly on a line to the North Star, whom we call the Eye of Wendigo.”

“Second, I am nearing my own end. My people have been scattered like chaff before the flail. There is no home for us to rest our souls in. Save one. North of the town your father has chosen for you lies the military reserve, a boggy swampland no one, not even the rapacious whites, will ever want. Above the main bay, just past the point where lake and river meet, is a small cove among the sand dunes, and here, unseen among the grasses and snakeweed, is an ancient Indian cemetery which bears the remains of hundreds of souls who could find no burial place with their own people. It’s a graveyard for wanderers, for the lost, and for the permanently dispossessed. If the military knew it was there they would perhaps allow the spirits to remain undisturbed, but certainly they would let no new dead be interred there. So it is that we few remaining outcasts must have our corpses carried there in the dark and secretly buried in that sacred earth. My request to you is to keep that ground holy in your mind, protect it with your life, and once in a while honour it with your presence and prayers. If you see a freshly-turned mound among the milkweed and rustling poplar, know that I lie under it, wanting, like all of us, to be remembered.”

With that he placed the talisman in Lily’s left hand and rolled her fingers gently over it.

The map’s instructions were sharp and ineluctable. With her pendant, crucifix, rabbit’s foot, Testament and Southener’s amulet tucked lovingly in their leather sachet, Lily began the long walk north moments after sunrise.

She did not stop at the Partridges, but walked steadily, almost serenely, through the booming hamlet of Froomfield. Through the Reserve, six miles long, the road meandered and invited rest, but Lily kept her pace, noticed but unaccosted, until just before noon she walked into Port Sarnia.

Her boots, worn thin, cracked on the town’s singular macadam. Lily was tempted neither left nor right, indifferent to Cameron’s Emporium with its checker-glass windows a-glitter with frill and frumpery; undistracted by the fragrances of two bakeries and a tannery, undeterred by no less than seven churches. A mile up this high road Lily noticed the break in the forest wall. For the first time in many hours her heart jumped in its stirrups. The map was real. She could read it. Something vital with a future waited for her at the end of this lane.

There, set in two pockets of cleared pine, lay the farms. A small one to the left with a log hut and sheds; a larger one to the right with a whitewashed, split-log house, sideboard barns, and a pond with Sunday-white geese on it.

At the last moment Lily remembered to knock on the firmly latched, blue-trimmed door set in the exact centre of the white-washed cottage. She felt the shadow of the overhanging eave cool her cheek. She pulled tightly the bridle on her heart, and waited.

The door was pulled inward slowly, guardedly. Lily saw the strong woman’s-hand, brown from the sun, gripping the sash before the face and figure were disclosed.

“Yes?”

“Aunt Bridie?”

“An’ who might you be?”

“I’m...Lily.”

“What do you want here, girl? State your business or leave a body in peace.”

“Papa sent me.”

Sensing the bewilderment in the woman’s face, Lil’s heart sank. She fought against the faintness and vertigo as best she could, but it felt as if her bones had melted outright in a treacherous sun. As she slumped onto the doorstep, she was certain she heard herself say, “I’m Lily.” And, thinking of her father, added, “Lily Fairchild.”