For Colm O’Sullivan
Teacher, Scholar, Friend
In Memoriam
1
Moore Township, 1845
Something stirred in the darkness ahead. It made no sound, but it was present and alive. For as long as she could remember, she knew. The breath from a fawn’s cough could tease her skin – like this ripple of shaded wind against her cheek – long before her ear caught the sound and identified it.
Lily was glad to be in the comfort of the trees’ canopy. It was cozy here, like the cabin with Papa’s fire blazing, when Mama was not in her bed. Lily wasn’t afraid of the dark, though Mama sometimes shivered fearfully at night, especially those nights when Papa had “gone off” and Lily was beckoned to press her child’s body against her mother’s clenched form. She dreamt she was a moth spinning a warm cocoon around them both, full of charms to drive the uncertainty from Mama’s eyes. While outside, heard only by her, the snow sang to the wind and no one in the world was lonely.
It was never lonesome in the bush. Here living things emerged and endured in the dappled undergrowth – ferns and worts and fungi and mosses, and, in the few random spots freckled by sun, surprised violets. Lily could sense the creatures’ presence even as she took short quick steps towards the back bush, a place forbidden by Mama. She stopped to acknowledge them: a thrush untangled his song; a snakeskin combed the grass; a deermouse scuttled and froze.
“You stay away from the Indians, you hear?” Mama said so often. She seemed to hate them: they never did a lick of work; they drank whiskey, then went crazy and hurt people; they went hunting god-knows-where, taking good men with them, so the farms were neglected. And their women, they’re wicked too, and dance and do bad things…. Lily wanted to ask, not about the bad things, but about the dancing, though she never did.
Lily knew where the Indians lived. Many nights, curled in the straw of her loft, she heard the drumbeats come across the tree-tops from miles away and settle into their clearing as if aimed there. They were not like her soft heartbeat, nor like the sprightly songs Mama sang at her spinning wheel. Theirs was a pounding, repetitive music that set her heart ajar, that made her long to know what words could be sung to such a rhythm, what dances would find their feet in such a frenzy. She wanted to see those women, how they moved in the firelight that twisted above the black roof of the bush, what their eyes said when they danced in the smoky, burnished, mosquito-riven dark.
An axe rang against a tree-trunk, clear as a church bell. Papa’s back. Lily recognized the signature of his chopping: two vicious slashes, the second slightly more terrifying than the first, followed by two diminished, tentative “chunks.” Maybe Mama would hear them too and leave her sick bed. Papa was in the North Field; that was good. He’d only “gone off” as far as the Frenchman’s. Sometimes one of the LaRouche boys came back with him to help with the stumps or the burning. All three boys watched her with the edges of their eyes until Papa shouted at her to go away.
Papa had returned and that was enough to deter her from the bush and the forbidden terrain beyond the East Field, carefully planted now with wheat. She turned towards the North Field, five acres of newly cleared and fire-ravaged land where the Indians were not allowed to camp or hunt. Papa might be in a good mood. She listened carefully to the determined repetition of Papa’s axe against the grained flesh of the tree. He was at one of the hardwoods again. Abruptly the axe fell silent. Lily held her breath. Then she heard the thunderous, sustained shriek as a two-hundred-year-old walnut came crashing through the forest to stun the ground with its sudden goodbye. She paused and listened to the tree’s dying reverberate through the earth.
She would surprise Papa at his work, celebrate another tree felled, and laugh when he swept her up and twirled her around, saying . “Lady Fair Child, may I have the pleasure of this dance?”
2
Mama was in her bed again. Yesterday she had smiled at Lily and proposed they venture out to pick some raspberries for a pie. But they were too late for the berries, shriveled weeks before, and Mama had one of her coughing spells before they were back at the cabin. Papa as usual took some day-old soup in to her. Lily listened, as she always did, to catch the slightest hint of conversation between them. There was none, though Papa stayed a long while, until the haze of evening settled like a moss along the sills and Mama’s breathing became regular, heavy with exhaustion.
This morning he left again. “Gotta have meat for that soup,” he used to say to Lily, taking down his gun and putting on the buckskin he’d gotten from Old Samuels, the blind Indian who was an exception to Mama’s suspicions. Lately Papa simply departed without a word. “Probably,” Mama said, her voice shaking with effort, “with that Acorn fellow.” Acorn, Metagomin, was one of Old Samuels’ nephews; the other was Pwau-na-shigor Sounder.
But Lily was a help now; she was all of seven. If Papa set the pot on the irons and started the fire, she could cut up the turnips and toss them in, and stir the soup until its tiny rabbit bones surrendered their meat. There was a stone oven at one side of the fireplace; Lily would take the sourdough prepared by Madame LaRouche, and follow her instructions to make bread for Papa’s supper. Next spring Papa was going to get them a pig. Already he’d built a pen for it against the east wall.
“Plenty pigs in the bush,” Old Samuels would chortle. “Only White Mens builds him a house and grows him food.” Then he would shake his head in mock bewilderment at the folly of his white neighbours. Nonetheless, he would wait with the patience of his seventy-odd years till Lily or Papa reached into the pot and offered a respectfully large morsel. Sometimes Lily would be working over the fire, humming one of Mama’s songs, and when she turned, Old Samuels would be no more than five feet behind her, the black pennies where his eyes should have been giving nothing away. “You gonna be a good cook, like the Frenchman’s woman.”
Mama didn’t like Old Samuels’ habit of entering their cabin without announcing his arrival. Occasionally he would stay all day, sitting on his knees to the left of the fire where he could detect any cool draft from the curtained doorway, saying nothing. Sometimes he would talk to Lily, raising his thin voice just enough to include Mama, willing or no, in the one-way conversation. Old Samuels told long stories, most of which began, “Wasn’t like that here in the olden days” and ending with, “and that’s the truth, and I know ’cause I seen it, I seen it before these eyes of mine withered up.” When Papa made the slightest demurral, he’d say, “Blind men don’t lie.”
“Before the White Mens come, this was a magic place,” he would tell them. “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 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.”
“He’s got the manners of a ghost,” Mama often said, but not once did she ask him to leave.
“How does he get here if he can’t see?” Lily asked Papa.
“He’s lived here so long he knows every bush and beetle in the territory,” Papa said. And it seemed to be true, as Lily would watch him enter their property at the far corner of the East Field just past the Brown Creek, the stream that flowed, they said, all the way to the Indian camp in the back bush, and then thread his way through the maze of stumps and ash-heaps, never once stepping on the haphazard swirls of wheat between.
“Redmen smells his way in the bush,” he told Lily. “Don’t need eyes. Redmen sniffs the air currents like the white-tail.” He demonstrated. “Raspberry jam,” he announced, “from the Frenchman’s woman.”
“Yes,” said Lily, duly amazed.
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