Lily's Story (14 page)

How welcome those waters must have felt, she
thought, how sweet the tender descent, how soft the bottom-sands
sifted and cleansed by centuries of seeking, how loving the icy
currents that would let the flesh float unrotted from the bones
that would drift, inch by hour, seaward over time – they eyes in
the blanched, purged skull titled forever towards light.

Lil knew she must get to Corunna as soon as
possible at whatever cost. She had no idea how much time she had
spent staring out at the River. The night wind was up; the sky was
covered and threatening. She was shivering with fright or, worse,
fever. She couldn’t feel her feet against the road as she turned
north, stumbling in the dark on jagged boards, patches of logs and
branches. Then the rain came, lashing and cold, blending with the
blood running down her calves

She fell. She rolled onto her side, partly
screened by some underbrush, numb and shivering, peering curiously
at the silver imbedded in her right hand. Her eyes closed. No dream
forestalled her slow falling away.

Even though she had not yet
opened her eyes, Lil was awake. She was warm. Her shivering had
subsided. She was propped up against something soft and inviting. A
wooly shawl curled affectionately over her shoulders. She had
slept. Someone had found her and brought her to a warm, safe place.
Nearby a dampened fire radiated heat and welcome.
Papa!
She
opened her eyes and looked over at the crouched figure across from
her.

“
Ah, the
little one wakes up.”

“
Have you seen
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 hurt you. You were shaking with the swamp fever.”

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

“
They are
safe, little one,” he smiled, his skin as rough as hickory bark,
his sable hair flecked with gray and tied behind with a leather
barrette, his gnarled warrior’s hands too large now for the uses to
which they were put and turning restlessly in upon themselves. “I
found them near you when I picked you up, soaking and hot, on that
pitiful roadway.” He reached down and produced Lil’s drenched pack
and the pouch with the sacred treasures of her life in
it.

“
Thank you,”
Lil whispered, keeping to his language.

“
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 after the rain stopped, I found this
map,” he said unfolding for her Papa’s letter which she could not
read. “It will tell you where to go.”

So Papa had not left her
a note after all. Lil tried to think of what that meant, but she
could not think at all, she was drifting into sleep again, relieved
even to feel the jagged pain in her right hand. When her eyes once
more opened, the glow of false-dawn was visible through the pines
overhead. Southener was awake, watching her as if she were some
sort of wooden idol whose very presence would bring the news he was
waiting for. He was beside her, with steaming tea at the ready. As
she sipped at its fragrance, Southener washed the cuts on her legs
with a piece of flannel and then stuck some tiny leaves on each of
them. 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,” Lil said. “I’m much bigger now.”

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

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

“
You have made
me happy in my age,” he went on in a hushed tone that Lil had
already come to recognize and revere, perfectly aware that both of
them were, in a special sense, listeners. “I am almost at the end
of my exile. I have little use any more for the magic amulet that
has shielded me from my enemies and rescued me from my own folly
many-a-time.”From a pouch at his waist he drew a pebble of
blood-red jasper that glowed even in the dull dawn-light, that
pulsed as if quick with hope and memory, whose indistinct oval had
been rubbed over generations to resemble – if you looked long and
rightly enough – the vibrant, plasmic bubble of a baby’s heart.
Southener let it lie in his open palm, let it breathe the fire’s
flame for a while.

“
This will
bring you luck all your days,” he said. “Not happiness, as you
already know, for they do not wear the same colour. 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 helped me do all these things,
fivefold. I am nearing the end of a journey that’s bigger than I
am. I received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as
such by generation upon generation of tribes who have dwelt in
these woods and waters 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, older
now than our legends; the locomotives of the white man’s soul are
on their way. You will hear them soon. 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.”

Lil was watching the miniature
heart, absorbing light like blood.

“
Secondly, 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, unobserved 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 and
unceremonially buried in that consecrated 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 Lil’s left hand and rolled her fingers gently over it.
Some part of its potency must have been immediately transferred for
when Southener looked up to check the wonder in Lil’s face, she was
blissfully asleep.

T
he instructions the
map gave were sharp and ineluctable. Lil was good at drawing and
pictures. With her pendant, crucifix, rabbit’s foot, Testament and
Southener’s amulet tucked lovingly in their leather sachet, Lil
began the long walk north moments after sunrise.

She did not
stop at the Partridges nor acknowledge, if she saw it, the wave of
greeting and farewell anxiously offered. She walked steadily,
purposefully, and to any one of the startled onlookers in the
booming hamlet of Froomfield below the Reserve, almost serenely.
“She’s in a daze or a reverie,” was one unsolicited opinion.
“Nobody passes through
this
town and ignores
our windmill,” was another. If Lil saw or heard the creaking,
anomalous replica of its Dutch cousin that intercepted the
north-west blows from the Lake, she gave no sign.

Through the Reserve, six miles
long, the road meandered and rested, but the wisp of a figure of a
girl kept its pace – noticed and unaccosted – sights set on what a
map held out. Just before noon, with the sun in full stretch, Lil
walked into her first town.

In her head Papa’s map
hovered like a detached palm-print, a legacy in code. Her boots,
worn thin, cracked on the town’s singular macadam. Lil was tempted
neither left nor right. It was possible that she did not see
Cameron’s Emporium with its checker-glass windows a-glitter with
frill and frumpery; did not smell the dust and wheeze from
Blaikie’s Foundry, home to the famous Blaikie Patent Steam Engine;
did not sniff at the delectables from two bakeries nor the acrid
smarting of Hall’s tannery in the weighted, standing heat of
summer; did not hear the torturing of wood nor the grinding of
ill-matched gears in Flintoft’s steam-mill; did not respond to her
own reflection in the coppery mirror of Durand’s pond where the
little walking-bridge crossed the canal from Perch Creek, nor laugh
at the gleeful whoop and water-slap of near-naked youths
emancipated by summer; did not cross herself or say a grateful
prayer on passing the seven chapels dedicated – each in its own
fervent, unecumenical manner – to the indivisibility of the Divine
Spirit; did not smile, in passing, at Crampton’s “Double-N-One”
tavern for wayfaring tipplers who, if they stood on their heads,
could discern the sign INN as it was meant to appear to the sober
and upright. Indeed, no-less-than-three respectable ladies and one
irrespectable gentleman nodded to her out of concern or curiosity,
and received no decipherable recognition of their
magnanimity.

As Lil left
the last of the ordered pathways, her eyes set upon the red-pine
forest to the west of the Errol Road, the one o’clock factory
whistle at Blaikie’s shrilled and beckoned, and out in the blue
bays of Lake Huron just beyond the pine-ridge the steamer
Ben Franklin
hooted cheerily and democratically as it pointed
itself north to the fresh-water oceans of the Cree and Ojibwa. A
mile up this high road Lil 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. Something vital with a future
waited for her at the end of this lane. Although her exhausted feet
made no distinctive shift in their cadence, Lil was sure she was
skipping. A melody disarranged itself in her head and sailed like a
loose trapeze.

At the end of the lane, set in
two pockets of cleared pine, lay the farms. Small one to the left
with a log hut and sheds; large one to the right with the
whitewashed, split-log house and the sideboard barns and the
emerald grapevines and the pond with Sunday-white geese on it.

For a while she just stood at
the point where the lane branched into paths, waiting for something
to happen. Some large creature let out a muffled sneeze; hens,
unseen, clicked pebbles into their craws; a sow wallowed, setting
off a sequence of squeals and oozing. Above the stone chimney on
the white-washed cottage, a bubble of pale smoke lifted in
expectation, then stalled. Above it a red-tailed squirrel hung and
craned, feigning patience.

At the last moment Lil
remembered to knock on the firmly latched, blue-trimmed door set in
the exact centre of the facing wall. 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. Lil saw the strong woman’s-hand, red from the
sun, gripping the sash before the face and figure were
disclosed.

“
Yes?”

“
Aunt
Bridie?”

“
An’ who might
you be, if I may ask?”

“
I’m...Lil.”

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

“
Papa sent
me.”

The hand dropped from the sash,
the door sagged fully open, untended.

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. Lily
Fairchild.”

6

1

Saturday was Lily’s favourite day. Summer
and winter, spring and fall, Saturday was the day of deliverance.
Even though the late June sun had lifted barely half a brow over
the forest rim in the distant east, Lily felt liberated; and she
conveyed her mounting sense of excitement to Benjamin, the Walpole
‘paint’ who jogged happily over the rough road towards the village.
Soon-to-be an official town, Lily recalled. A Saturday in June was
particularly magical.