Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge

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      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.

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