Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge

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СКАЧАТЬ for White Mens,” he would say to his ancestors when she had mastered some grammatical intricacy that he would have thought incomprehensible to the simple mind of the intruders.

      Papa, it seemed, had heeded Maman’s advice, for in the winter that Lily was nine, he brought home a woman. Lily knew who she was. She had seen the Indians’ camp in the back bush, not nearly so far away as she had imagined and much dirtier and sadder than she’d ever expected. No wonder Old Samuels liked to spend his day along ‘the line’. Squalling papooses, yapping dogs, and quarrelling women amid the habitation of makeshift wigwams possessed none of the dignities she had witnessed at Port Sarnia. Among the inhabitants was a pretty young woman with eyes like polished chestnuts, whose sinewy beauty was already softening towards sumptuousness. Her name was Penaseweushig, or Birdsky, and she brought with her a four-or-five-year-old son of mixed blood (his hair was brown and curly), the incidental offspring of some heated, casual lust between the girl and any one of a dozen drifters happy to oblige and vanish. Birdsky, being a Chippewa, gave him the name Waupooreor Rabbit. From Birdsky and Rabbit, Lily learned, among other things, to speak yet another tongue.

      The first time they came they stayed only a couple of months, until the snows melted, when mother and child simply disappeared one morning. Papa said nothing. Indeed, even though they could converse haltingly in English or fluently in Ojibwa, Papa and Birdsky spoke little, in the manner of the Indians themselves. Birdsky was easy to like. She did much of the cooking and cleaning, careful to defer to Lily if the moment demanded. When she returned later that summer, she willingly pitched in to help harvest the vegetables, and “do down” Maman’s pickles and jams. Maman clucked a great deal about Birdsky’s presence, but was kind to her and, Lily began to suspect, was genuinely fond of her company. In December one of her relatives from the camp came by and she went off with him. Papa was away and when he got back he looked immediately for her, but said nothing to Lily, nor could she read anything in his face. He’s getting to be like Old Samuels on his quiet days, she thought. Birdsky returned again, unremarked, in the spring.

      Rabbit was put in the small bed that Mama had used before she passed on. That bothered Lily for a while. But she enjoyed Rabbit: he laughed at her antics, he believed everything she told him, and he kept the prowling Luc off-guard and at bay. Papa and Birdsky shared the big bed almost below her.

      She never tried, through the flimsy partition, to watch what they did at night. She could not help hearing though. Not once did Birdsky ever cry full-out, either in anguish or jubilation. Her hushed thrashings were pitted with mewling, aborted sighs, ambiguous gasps, and the hiss of air through teeth desperate for release. Papa’s heavy plunging was accomplished with a grim silence that was broken, near the end, only by a staccato wheeze of relief accompanied on rare occasions by a lurching, crippled soprano cry that never took flight fully into pleasure or despair. That, and Maman’s ribald asides, fed her imagination.

      The first winter with Birdsky in residence, Lily cried herself to sleep most nights, though she had no idea why. She was happy that Papa had someone to hold and whisper to. She liked to watch Rabbit molding his myth-creatures out of blue clay from the dug cellar. She knew that being an adult meant coming together like that in pleasure and pain. Still, she cried, as quietly as she could.

      By the second winter, some things had changed. She felt strange stirrings in her own body, as if invisible limbs were stretching in preparation. On her chest she watched in consternation as her breasts swelled around the blossom-heads she’d always known. Her leg-bones ached with growth. Luc’s eyes fastened like beads on hooks to the bumps on her chest as she whirled and gambolled at the edges of his wretchedness. After, she would feel contrite, though furious at her own innocence and her inability to read what lay behind Luc’s glances. As she lay above Papa and Birdsky, she took their muted, ambivalent passion and made her own translations in all the languages she had learned. She hoped they were as happy as the lovers in her dreams.

      Lily was watching the bees in the basswood near the house. Birdsky’s mama was sick so she and Rabbit were gone for a while. Old Samuels had not come around for days. Maman had asked her to stay over while Papa was off, but she was ashamed to be too near Luc. Here she wasn’t lonely, but with the chores done, she was a little bored. The bees, however, were up to something. They were gathered into a single, swarming cloud that rolled and oozed, then miraculously began to lift itself into the air. It staggered, gained momentum and rose against the sky. Lily followed the swarm with her eyes, and was about to move to see where its new home might be when she heard a twig crack behind her.

      A bear? No, the tread was too light, too cautious. Curious, she turned to the tree-line in front of the cabin, saw nothing, and waited. She was about to set off after the homing swarm when, quite distinctly, she heard a human sigh – the exhalation of someone either utterly exhausted or stunned by despair. She scanned the underbrush, more than curious now. Nothing moved. “Who’s there?”

      Silence. Breathing, then, constricted but deep. A man’s.

      “You hurt in there? You want me to come in after you?”

      Panic, very clear, to the left, behind the wild raspberries picked clean by the starlings. Lily walked in that direction. She was not afraid, though the fixed intensity of her stare might have suggested so.

      “I won’t hurt you…”

      She heard the body turn over. It was down in the twitch-grass, and struggling to rise. Lily moved quickly through the raspberries into the afternoon shadow of the tree-line. The figure had collapsed face-down, its head in the shade, its shoulders and body in the sunny grass. The body was motionless except for the steep breathing.

      No sign of injury or wounds, no blood. The man, for so he definitely was, was clothed in rags, mere strips of cloth that might have been a shirt and trousers. No shoes at all; the feet were blistered and scarred. And the fellow was incredibly dirty; he must have slept in ploughed fields. Through the holes in his shirt Lily saw what appeared to be more scars on the back, like livid vipers twisted in some foul congregation.

      His entire body began to tremble, the way a child’s lower lip might quiver just before it bursts into tears. Maybe he had some terrible disease, cholera or fever. She saw the sweat bead on his almost bare shoulders. Holding her breath, she gently touched his arm to bid him turn over. “Please, sir, let me help you.”

      “I’se past help,” came the voice, fatigued yet vivid and deep. Wearily, one limb at a time, the man rolled over in the grass. He was not dirty. He was black.

      “His name is Solomon Johnson,” Papa told her later. “He run away from us soon as we touched shore.” Papa shook his head slowly. “Wouldn’t believe he was in Canada; he thought we meant to trick him.” He was talking more to himself than to Lily, who sat rigid beside him. “Poor bugger…”

      Papa had not explained much that afternoon when he came home to find the black man in his bed being tended to by Lily. But it was more than she had ever heard before about what he had been doing on all those hunting trips. Papa and some men from the township had rowed Mr. Johnson across the River in the moonless dark. Solomon was a slave in the United States, Papa said, a life to be pitied. But once safe in Chatham, he would be free forever. Right now some bad men were chasing him, trying to take him back to his chains. Lily tried to imagine chains that could bind a human limb; all she could picture were the teeth on the muskrat trap, like a skeleton’s smile.

      After talking a long time with the black man, Papa helped him to his feet and led him outside and around the cabin to the root cellar. Lily followed, at Papa’s prompting. They descended the little steps. Papa held up his hand. They stopped. Then he reached down and pulled the platform that served as a floor up on its hidden hinges. Lily gasped at the revelation of an even deeper pit below. Without hesitating, the black man stepped down into the dark and disappeared. A matched flared, then a flickering candle СКАЧАТЬ