Lily didn’t know how long Papa had been standing in the doorway when at last she looked up and saw him there. He turned his face away wearily and slumped on the stool before the spent fire. His flesh appeared to be too heavy for his bones.
“He got away,” Lily said.
“They hurt you any?” he asked, rising and taking the hunting rifle from its place, not looking at her.
“None.”
“An’ that pedlar?” His sudden stare burned through her.
“Solomon, he run him off. Then he went, too.”
Bullets clicked coldly in Papa’s pouch.
“Keep an eye out,” Papa said. “I’ll be back before dark.”
After him, in a voice that made her skull-bones hum, Lily shouted Why? Why?Papa of course did not respond. He had turned south towards Chatham.
It was dusk when he came home. Lily opened her eyes to catch Papa’s face bending towards hers. It was sad; she saw her Mama in it.
“I’m sorry, princess. We’re gonna have to leave this place.”
5
Seven days later they were packed and ready to go. Papa had planned to get away at dawn, but he hadn’t counted on the goodbyes that needed to be said. Maman surprised everyone by not weeping openly. Instead she braved a smile for Lily, hugging her fiercely as if she might transfer to those sapling limbs some of the bruised strength from her own decades of travail. Gaston and his boys touched their caps and mumbled au voirwith exaggerated politeness, except for Luc whose heart was irreparably broken and shamed itself with silent, unconcealed tears.
Lily knew it was pointless to ask Papa why they had to leave, but she was certain it was due to more than their troubles with the Scotsmen and the pedlar. Papa would not give up the homestead, would not abandon Mama’s grave to the winds and seasons, would not tear his little girl from the only world, the only people she had ever known – not for a mere Scotsman or a pedlar with a cracked head. Somehow it had more to do with Solomon and the look Papa gave her when she woke to find him staring from the doorway, the shed door in back of them protesting as it swung on one precarious hinge.
“We’re goin’ to live near Port Sarnia,” was all he said, “with your Aunt Bridie.”
Whose existence was news to Lily. From Mama she had gleaned a little about her relatives – enough to know that Papa came from a large family, that Mama’s was mostly dead – but never had she had names to attach to any of them. Instead Mama told stories only about long-ago ancestors, all of whom apparently were squires or gawains or beauties of the first order. Mama’s stories were like her songs, a kind of lullaby. But Bridie was no lullaby. She was a real, living aunt with a name as durable as a fieldstone. “I wrote Bridie a letter a while back,” Papa said some days later, seeing Lily seated near the ripening wheat of the East Field and staring across to the red-blue granite on which one of Old Samuels’ nephews had chipped the name ‘Kathleen’.
“Chester and her been wantin’ us to come up there ever since your Mama passed on.”
Chester?
“Land’s mostly cleared up there. We’ll help ’em out at first. Then get our own place.” Lily wanted so badly to believe the enthusiasm now in his voice.
“We’ll bring your Mama up there, too, some day,” he added with effort, his hands trying to be light and consoling on her shoulders.
Mama wasn’t up there, Lily knew, but could find no words to help Papa understand. She’s here – in these trees, in the undug stones, in the birdsong and the wind, in that part of the sky she shared with us and that brings such joy to the guardian gods. Lily’s quiet weeping made Papa’s hands shake, and he turned back to the cabin.
It was a regular road now running abreast of the line of a dozen farms north of theirs. The new neighbours, above Millar’s, came out to watch them leave, whole families lined up at the edge of their land waving curiously, uncertain of the meaning of what they were witnessing. When Lily and Papa passed the last farm, with only its entrance cleared, and stumps and tree branches smoking behind the log hut, the new road abruptly became a slashed trail again. Lily could not help but glance back. Standing in the middle of the road a hundred feet behind them were the unmistakable silhouettes of Old Samuels, Acorn and Sounder.
A few days before all three had materialized one morning, unannounced, and stayed the entire day, helping Papa with some of the packing and dismantling, but never once mentioning the fact of their leaving. Old Samuels puffed his pipe and talked exclusively to Lily in Pottawatomie. “White Mens always coming and going,” he said several times, unprompted, “Attawandaron stays.” Once he added, not without charity, “’Course, White Mens still young, got a lot to learn before this world ends.” At dusk they left, saying no formal goodbyes but carrying Papa’s sow in their arms as graciously as they could manage. Lily did not expect to see them again.
Papa and Lily followed the well-tramped trail north for several hours. The sun warmed them with its mid-day welcome. Wild phlox and amber columbine nodded jauntily from the verges. In the pines, tanagers and siskins tumbled and irridesced. A fox snake yawned his whole length in the heat kept cozy by the trail.
They were travelling light, of course. Papa had a backpack with food and overnight utensils, a water bottle, rifle and hatchet. In a harness neatly rigged by Acorn, Lily carried two blankets and some tarts slipped to her at the last moment by Maman. In the beaded pouch given her by Acorn and belted to her waist, she had carefully placed Mama’s cameo pendant, the gold cross, and the rabbit’s foot Old Samuels had rubbed almost smooth in thirty years of not worrying. There was no need for anything more: they had packed their few belongings – clothing, trappings, utensils, tools – in two large wooden cases about the size of a child’s coffin. Luc, in a rush of altruism, had promised to hitch Bert and Bessie to Mr. Millar’s cart as soon as they were free from their summer stumping, and deliver the trunks to Port Sarnia.
So it was only the weight of the day itself that bore heavily on them as they trudged away from all they had become a part of. Indeed whenever the little eddy of excitement which Lily had been suppressing all morning bubbled up on its own, she felt an acute sense of having betrayed something precious. I will hate Bridie, I will, was her less-than-comforting antidote.
There were now two routes to Port Sarnia. The lumber trail they were on led north-east to a junction with the main road running south-east from the town towards Enniskillen, the undisturbed heart of the Lambton bush. Twenty miles to the west, hugging the River, a trunk road – parts of it already planked – took the circuit rider and carpetbagger all the way to Wallaceburg and thence to Chatham. A number of Indian trails – blazed only – would take them to this latter marvel of the age. En route, they would stop at Corunna and visit with Mrs Partridge. Sometime during the mid-afternoon, Papa veered left into the bush, leaving the sun above them.
That season there was frenetic surveying and road-building through the undeveloped townships of Plympton, Enniskillen and Brooke, prompted in part by recent upheavals in Europe and their cataclysmic fallout. In half-a-dozen countries, upstart peasants and workers and a few middle-class dreamers had attempted – without consulting their betters – to make a home of the lands they had laboured on for generations. They failed, and paid the price exacted by their oppressors in the ritual rapine and domestic terrorism indigenous to the race. Thousands more were added daily to the earth’s dispossessed. In Ireland, potato blight deposited its indelible pennies on the summer’s crop, and hunger happily joined the scourge. A hundred thousand starving Irish crammed themselves into stinking cargo-ships and sailed for the world’s end where, some of them believed, a plot of arable ground lay unspoiled by human greed.
Lily was annoyed with herself; she was slowing them down. Her head was spinning, probably from too much sun on the open road. She lingered behind a bit to vomit quietly in the underbrush, but Papa’s hand was soon on her arm. He wiped her mouth with his flannel hanky and offered