Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ deep in his body, letting the music of it find its own course and pace. The gravesite became quiet; the wind fell. His lamentation found syllables and sounds that might have been words, though no one present had ever heard the language they made. His blank eyes, like death’s pennies, began to flutter in time with the rising and falling cadences of his song. He turned his ancient face upward, and his whole frame tensed, expectant, as if he had been asking some question over and over. He looked towards Papa and Lily. He smiled as only a man without eyes can smile, with every other feature of his face. In English he said: “The gods are listening; that is all we can ask.”

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

      “Off to Chatham,” Old Samuels would shake his head sadly. “Plenty bad people in Chatham, for sure.” Or when Papa sometimes pointedly picked up his gun, leather pouches and haversack, and said to Lily, “Better tell them lady deer to stay back in the bush, darlin’, your Papa’s comin’,” Old Samuels would whisper after him, “Your Papa’s gone to Chatham to hunt bucks,” and chortle.

      On the subject of God, though, Old Samuels was eager and loquacious. “White Mens has the silliest ideas about the gods. It takes us Indians a day to stop laughin’ when we hear about it. First they say there’s only one god. If that’s true then the white god must fight with himself. Anybody with ears and eyes ‒” he’d always pause here for a tiny ironic smile ‒“knows about the god in the thundercloud whose voice speaks blackly to the quiet gods in the lake and the summer creeks. And the god of the gentle winds has no love for the god of the blizzard that tears the trees in half and buries the earth. Anybody knows there’s the good gods and the wicked gods, the guardian spirits and the demons. We must listen to the good gods to keep them on our side: they will help those who listen for them. Remember that, little one. But we must also help the gods. Sometimes the demons are too strong and the good gods go into hiding. That is a sad time for the world.”

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

      “Your Mama, who was the dearest White Womens in this world, is not in heaven, little one. That Millar, he tells me heaven is a pretty house with beads and ornaments on it, up over the moon and the stars. That is silliness. The good gods would not build their house up there; they live here in the green world and in the stars themselves. Your Mama’s body is under the earth, but the guardian gods have taken her spirit with them. Wherever they are, she will be also. If your eyes and ears are listening to the good gods, you will hear her voice among theirs. In that way she will always be near you.”

      “How do you know the good gods will speak to me?”

      “Ah, that is easy. Because you sing their song, and you dance, and you are happy even when you’re sad. And you make Old Samuels happy.”

      “I can’t dance,” said Lily.

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

      Lily did not like to be teased. For a while she sulked and avoided Old Samuels. She waited in the woods by the gravesite for a demon to whisper something outrageous to her. The old man took no notice. He stayed his usual time and without saying goodbye made his way across the field towards his great-nephew at the edge of the bush.

      One night, alone in her loft, Lil woke to the harvest moon igniting the straw at her feet. She caught herself humming:

      Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o

      Hi diddly iddly, hi diddle air-o

      Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um

      Soon she felt the presence of a second part in flawless harmony with her own. She stopped. Her mother’s voice continued, as clear and crystal as the moon’s.

      Lily was often alone, and had been as long as she could remember, even when Mama was alive. She was not lonely though. She could sit close by her father for hours while he chopped wood or repaired tools without the need to speak. Often she hummed, sang songs or made them up as she watched whatever scenes were played out before her. By herself in the fields she would lie on her back and dream the clouds into shapes of her wishing, or follow, minute by minute, the extravagant exit of the sun as it boiled and dissolved or tossed itself on the antlered tree-line and gave up its its blood in sunset. The few acres that defined her world pulsated with sights, sounds, smells, with the dramas of birth, struggle and demise. And now there were the guardians and the demons to listen for, the good gods in their hiding to be heeded and helped.

      “This bush don’t go on forever,” Old Samuels said that spring, sensing restlessness in the girl. “Half a day’s walk towards the sunset and you’ll come to the River of Light that’s been flowin’ there since the last time the wild gods stirred the earth and created it over again. Two days walk towards the North Star where that river begins and there’s the Freshwater Sea of the Hurons, bigger than the lakes on the moon.” Lily had been dreaming of water ever since the first snow had widened the woods in October. In the midst of the bush, beyond the last blazed trail, she would suddenly imagine before her a stretch of blue, unrippled water, without edges or end, clear as cadmium. Then a crow would caw and the snow-bound trees pop back into view. In the early spring the bubbling of Brown Creek below the East Field would unexpectedly become magnified in her mind as if it were a torrent ripping out the throat of a narrows, roaring until Lily stopped her ears, fearing that she had somehow transgressed, that the demons had indeed inherited part of the earth.

      “You’re like Old Samuels, little one. Sometimes you know.”

      “I’ll ask the guardians to bring back your eyes,” Lily said.

      “So I can see all the wickedness and foolishness again? It’s not like olden times any more. Two days walk south of here and they say you’ll come to roads chopped through the bush, and White Mens drives his wagons on roads made of dead trees, and Chatham is bigger than ten Ojibwa villages”

      “Why does Papa go to Chatham?”

      “I like your Papa. He’s a good White Mens. I tell him my name is Uhessemau, but he says ‘I can’t say that so I’ll just call you Old Samuels.’ I like the name Old Samuels, so I keep it. Redmen don’t fuss about names; we have many names before we die. If I die with Old Samuels, well that’s okay with me.” The old man puffed on his pipe, but he didn’t answer Lily’s question.

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

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

      They had left home while the sun was still a promise in the east, following the line that linked the four farms to the north. Lily had never been north of Millars’ farm, never seen the River. The beaten path, so familiar to their feet, soon disappeared. There was just enough light to see the blazes, newly slashed, that marked СКАЧАТЬ