Lily's Story (3 page)

Lil could not for an instant take her eyes
off Maman. She watched in awe as Maman punched and tormented the
sourdough as if she were beating the belly of an obdurate husband,
her great breasts rolling and protesting beneath the homespun smock
she wore night and day. Lil shuddered whenever Maman’s hand,
operating on its own, would shoot out or back to stun the cheek of
anyone who ventured too close or dared too much. Later, she would
see that same child comfortably housed in Maman’s lap, drifting
into secure sleep.

In return for offerings from Papa’s hunting
expeditions, Maman LaRouche made much of the staple food during the
times when Mama was in bed. Preserves, jams, greens from her garden
in season, salt-port and ‘bully beef’ from the venison Papa brought
home. While the Frenchman himself did not hunt – having given up
guns following his service – he usually went along on the shorter
excursions to supply encouragement, unsolicited advice, and
refreshments from his still in the bush. The older boys did not
share their father’s pacifism.

Often, then, Lil was left alone with Maman
and her youngest children, all boys except for Madeleine who was
just six and now the only girl. Maman soon took Lil “under wing”.
She was teaching her to cook and spin and sew – all of which Lil
had a talent for though not as much persistence and application as
Maman would have hoped. But then Lil was not French. Often Maman
sang while she worked – wistful melodies in her Norman tongue that
seemed more sweetly fragile because they sailed towards serenity
out of such an unnavigable bulk. Although Maman did not tell
conventional stories, she had opinions on everyone and
everything.

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

For good measure, Lil smiled back.

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

Lil of course paid little direct attention
to any of this, but she nodded and queried and did all she could to
get Maman going.

“
A pretty, fair thing like
you oughta get away from this place as soon as you can. That’s
Maman’s advice. Go to the city. Go to Chatham or Sandwich. They’re
real nice places. Lots of people.”

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

Lil swallowed her gooseberry tart.

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

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

A priest, it turned out, was a kind of
preacher. Papa didn’t like preachers. Once, last summer, when Lil
had been on her own in the withered garden near the ‘line’,
watching the black ants ooze in and out of their honeycomb, she
heard the crack of a twig along the Frenchman’s path. She looked up
in time to see before her a large florid man dressed all in black.
He was still puffing from the exertion of his trek through the
bush. His blue eyes bounced like agates in his puffed face before
they came to temporary rest on the rims of his cheeks. His smile
was as broad as his belly.

“
Good afternoon, little
elf.” The sound boomed, echoed, receded.

Lil stared.

“
I am a man of
God.”

“
I’ve come all the way from
London.”

“
Just to see
you.”

“
Do you know who God is,
little one?”

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

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

Lil wanted to ask Papa who God was.

Mama did not hate preachers as much.
Sometimes, after being in her bed for several days, when some
colour had come back into her eyes, she would reach under the
little bed Papa had built especially for her and pull out the
large, dark book she called the Bible. Lil watched, poised and
alert, as Mama’s fingers made the pages, thin as bee’s wings,
flutter and settle.

“
There are the words God
gave us.”

“
Read me some of them,
Mama.”

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

“
Promise?”

“
Promise.”

Then, seeing the look in her child’s eye,
she would close the book and in a reedy quaver begin to sing the
spinning song, which reached Lil’s ear in this form:

Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o

Hi diddly iddly, hi diddle air-o

Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um

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

3

Papa was not back. Lil had been able to find
enough small logs to keep the fire alive overnight though it was
not banked properly, the cabin became suffocating in the late
August heat. She made some tea, warmed up the soup and went into
Mama’s room.

Mama spilled most of the soup. Lil held her
hand to guide the tin cup to her lips. Mama closed her eyes.

The morning outside was beautiful. The sun,
sensing the loss of its powers, steeped the windless air over the
fields. High in the pines and arching elms, cicadas announced
noon.

When Lil came in, Mama was sitting in the
rocker Papa had fashioned for her out of cedar. She gave Lil a wan
smile and said: “Would you help Mama with her hair?” As her mother
watched her in tender, wordless encouragement, Lil managed to heat
a kettle of water and get it foaming with some of the soap Maman
said she bought off the pedlar Papa had chased away. Mama leaned
over, her brow at rest on the arm of the chair, her long hair
caressing the floor. For a moment she seemed to be asleep, but when
Lil began to pour the soft warm water over her, letting it fall
gently back into the kettle, she murmured and her hand reached out
to squeeze some part of Lil’s. How beautiful Mama’s hair was, its
former glory regained as she lay back in the rocker and let the
afternoon sun kindle and hearten and scatter praise where it would,
and Lil took her mother’s bone-brush and stroked and stroked, and
Mama’s eyes brightened before entering some dream where beauty was
still possible. A long time after she said, “Let’s have tea, little
one.”

Lil, excited, got out the china pot and the
two tiny tea-cups with their matching blue saucers, stirred the
slumbering fire and prepared tea just as she remembered Mama doing
it. She even fetched the last of the little blueberry cakes Maman
LaRouche had given them. But best of all Mama began to talk – in
brief whispered phrases, the pauses like hours or seasons between
them.

“
The place we come from,
your Papa and me, is a long ways across the biggest ocean in the
world. We were married there. We were very happy. But it wasn’t a
happy land. The priests and the preachers didn’t get along. The
crops failed, many times. We were hungry. Papa got angry and
decided to leave. You were already tucked inside my belly. We went
on a sailing ship three times bigger than this house. We packed
everything we owned into two trunks they put in the
hold.”

The odour of hot ash and decay hung in the
humid air outside the cabin and in the room itself, as if a whole
summer’s burning was spreading like fungus in the thickening heat.
Blue-bottles buzzed, unappeased.

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

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

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

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

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

Barely able to contain her excitement, Lil
scrambled back down and then helped her mother towards her
curtained-off cubicle. Her arms were thin as willow, the flesh
draped over the bones. Lil slipped out of her cotton dress and
under the sheet with Mama.

“
Open this, please,” Mama
said. In her hand, in the fading light, Lil could see a small box
made of aromatic, in-laid woods. It was the most beautiful object
she had ever seen. With her nimble fingers she tripped the slim
gold latch, and the lid opened.

Mama held out a cameo pendant with a silver
chain that shimmered in the gloaming. Fortuitously the last log in
the fire burst into brief and final flame, and Lil was able to see
that there was, beneath the cameo’s glaze, the merest sketch of a
woman’s head: two or three quick but telling strokes. With a start,
Lil recognized her own eyes.

“
Lily. Your
grandmother.”

Mama’s eyes filled with tears. She reached
into the box again. “I saved this, out of the storm.” She held up a
gold chain on the end of which dangled a slender cross no more than
half an inch long. Instinctively Lil leaned forward and the
crucifix settled on her throat as if it had always expected to be
there.

Then Mama fell back against her pillow. She
crooked her left arm and Lil, as she had seen Maman LaRouche’s
little ones do so often, slid into the embrace and held herself
there as if the world would leave if she blinked.

Lil had left the curtain open. In the dark,
the embers of the fire glowed, blood-red, and succumbed without a
murmur. The night-air, remembering that it was almost September,
turned as chill and sharp as the sabre-shaped moon guiding it. The
season’s heat and smoke and ash rose with it: distilled,
crystalline, translated.

When Lil woke, the sun was already above the
tree-line, sifting through the east window and toasting her feet.
She had been kept warm throughout the night by the final, fierce
heat of her mother’s will. Beside her now, that flesh lay as cold
as the ice that clenched the streams of mid-December.

3

1

Sometimes Lil tried hard to remember Mama
exactly as she was before she took to her bed and left. It wasn’t
easy. In summer, the wheat in the East Field turned golden brown
under the lazing sun. The LaRouche boys came over to help them cut
and thresh it. Lil sat in the shade of the big maple near the house
and let the kernels whisper through her fingers like Indian beads.
Papa smiled. Luc and Jean-Pierre watched her as they worked. When
she turned her own gaze back on them, they looked away sharply. Lil
felt something fresh, unruly and alien surge up through her chest:
she wondered at it but gave it no name or image. In the fall, the
trees that were not pine gave forth their second bloom – brighter
and more prodigal than the green gifts of April: like a rush of
blood against the sudden foreboding of cold. The leaves swam –
dizzying, breathless – and drowned in pools of their own
composition. For a while even the bush relented a little: the eye
could meander now, reconnoitre, improvise, surprise the sun here
and there in hollows of snow, loiter among shape and shadow where
the winter light married the dark configurations of trees. In the
winter you breathed out more than in.