“Yes,” said Lily finally.
“Mama home?”
“Mama’s up there,” said Lil waving in the direction of the mounded gravesite.
“Mighty sorry to hear that. The Lord’s will. So be it.”
After a pause he grinned with his enthusiastic teeth and said, “You sure appear to be a young lady could look after her Papa, all right.”
Lily looked at the ground.
“Papa home?” he asked, bending down to his case.
She was about to say ‘no’ when something made her tell an outright lie. “He’s over to the Frenchman’s, just past the North Field there, a-helpin’ with a stump. Be back home any minute. I was just fixin’ some coffee for him.”
The pedlar didn’t even glance up. “Name’s Jones,” he said. “Spartan Jones.” He was fidgeting with the clasp on his case.
“You’re not regular,” Lily said. She’d caught a strange twang in his accent, not one she could place right off. “Nope. Come up from the south. Chatham way. Me and Bobby”– indicating the donkey –“tramped over the bush trail to the new road. Fresh territory, eh?”
Lily glanced over at Bobby who was chomping contentedly at the twitch-grass near the edge of the woods.
“Say now, I got here, just for a pretty young lady of the house like yourself, a whole boxful of tiny wonders: needles and coloured thread, and baubles and barrettes.”
“I couldn’t look at them unless Papa was here,” Lily said. “Besides, we ain’t got cash for that kind of foolishness,” she added in her best Madame LaRouche tone.
“But you ain’t seen it yet,” he said, lifting the lid on his treasure trove. “Can’t hurt nothin’ just to have a peek, can it now? Tools for the industrious, cosmetics for the hopeful, temptations for the bold!” he said with another over-rehearsed flourish.”
Lily looked hard at his face. He was smiling, the beads of his eyes danced and held her but gave nothing away. He was not much taller than Lily. Still, she steeled herself and said nothing.
“Jumpin’ Judas but it’s hot here!” said the pedlar, mopping his brow. “Got a cool cup of water inside?”
Lily was relieved to break his gaze and hurried around the corner to retrieve a dipper of water from the bucket she always kept in the shade of the cabin’s west wall.
“Fresh outta the spring, ’bout an hour ago,” she said.
For a second he looked hard at her, not changing his ever-friendly expression but focussing it in a slightly different way. It was as if the temperature had dropped a degree or so. Noisily and with obvious relish he drank from the dipper and then splashed the remainder of the water over his face. His beard went limp. Lily saw the scar just below the cheek at the line of the beard, like a stretched maggot.
“I hav’ta go now. Hate to leave off conversin’ with a young lady as pretty as you, all grown-up an’ lookin’ after her Papa and, I’ll bet, fendin’ off the boys ’round here – but Bobby’s gettin’ anxious.”
“Thank you for comin’” Lily heard her grown-up voice say.
He was only three steps away from her when he turned very casually and said, off-hand, “Will you let me give you a present, lass?”
“Papa wouldn’t –”
“Just a trifle. Got me some bolt ends of cloth on Bobby there, no good to me now. I reckon, though, they’d make a pretty scarf or two. In the hands of a young lady that could sew,” he added, with a wink as big as a rooster’s swallowing corn.
Lily waited for the pedlar to turn towards the donkey but he stayed where he was, unsure of himself for the first time since his arrival. Lily noticed that he was staring over her right shoulder towards the north-west corner of the house. Could he see the root-cellar shed from that angle? Why would he be interested? She knew she must not glance in that direction. She had to get him to leave. “Perhaps Papa wouldn’t mind, if they’re real small pieces,” Lily said, starting towards Bobby.
“Trifles,” the pedlar grinned. “But on you –”
Lily was ahead of him, half-skipping towards the donkey whose indifference seemed absolute. The pedlar came at a bow-legged trot close behind. Lil stopped a few feet from Bobby, leaving ample room for the pedlar to sidle up to the beast and unpack his special wares. Lily was closest to the cabin, and she was fleet of foot.
“I reckon the scarlet would go nicest against that lily-white skin of yours, girl,” he said, flipping the swatch of cloth from its pouch and letting it alight across Lily’s shoulder only partly covered by the sack-cloth smock she wore all summer. His voice seemed suddenly to have dropped an octave, and it was full of razors. Lily was already bent to flee when his left hand grabbed her wrist and wrenched it with such unexpected force that she felt herself twist and collapse into the weeds, her skirt flung up over her thighs.
“No use a-cryin’ out, sweetheart, nobody’s gonna hear ya. Your pa’s a long ways from here, and besides, you’re about to get the surprise of yer life if I ain’t mistaken, an’ if I am, then we’ll both enjoy ourselves.”
Lily did not cry out, though she was sure her arm was broken. She was simply stunned for the moment, unable to comprehend the sudden vitriol from the pedlar.
“Quit squirmin’, ya little snake, I’ll bust yer other arm. Now let’s see what we got ’neath all this cotton.”
He was tearing at her underwear and trying at the same time to get his braces over his elbows –contradictory tasks that gave Lily a few seconds to catch her breath and think.
“Fuckin’ nigger-lovin’ hoo-ers, the lot of ya!” The underpants came apart with a shriek of their own, jerking Lily forward and up, a motion which she merely continued with accelerated determination. Thanks either to deep instincts or good fortune, she rammed her head like a ballpeen into his crotch.
With an explosion of wind resembling a death-rattle, he folded and fell into the grass. Lily was up in a wince and headed on a line towards the cabin where, under the big bed, a loaded fowling piece was kept at the ready. Clutching his wounded parts, the pedlar came after her in a wobbly trot, his lust consumed temporarily by rage. Lily would have made it easily to the gun and shot the pedlar without compunction, had she not stumbled and fallen no more than a dozen feet from the cabin. When she tried to get up, she cried out sharply and toppled back to the grass. Her right ankle was sprained, and this time the pain swept unfettered through her whole body.
The pedlar, seeing this, slowed his agonized pace. “I’ll soon have ya whimperin’ again,” he seethed, pulling his braces, somewhat belatedly, all the way off. “A bit of buckle across the arse’ll do it all right,” he muttered while Lily sat bolt-upright, swallowing her pain, forcing her eyes open.
He came around behind her, his back to the cabin, expecting her to squirm away or at least try to protect herself. She did neither.
“I’m gonna whip yer butt an’ then feed it somethin’ it’ll never forget.”
The pedlar’s braces came down randomly like a loose flail, metal slicing into her shoulders and arms, leather burning two diagonal strips across her back. The pain was just about to register from the first blow when she heard the whistle of leather drawn back for the second. It never came. Lily heard another sound and turned in time to see the water bucket bounce back from the pedlar’s head with a crunch of flesh, maple and angle-iron. The pedlar’s eyes popped skyward, his tongue flopped out of the gasp his mouth made, and he pitched forward onto the dooryard in a tangle of blood and grass.
“I’se killed him! I’se killed a white man!” Solomon was in a sorry state. He was pacing in circles, trying not to see