“Your Papa’s got a nose for the wind,” he said whenever Papa went off with Acorn or Sounder. “Hunting’s no good here now. Not like the olden days. They go all the way to Chatham, I guess, to find the bucks this time of year.”
Lily wanted to know more about Chatham but Mama began coughing in her bed and Lily rose to attend to her. By the time she returned, Old Samuels had lit up his pipe, stuffed with aromatic tobacco. When he got to smoking, he didn’t talk.
Lily may not have known much about Chatham or any other nearby town – Port Sarnia, Sandwich, or London – but she had travelled some miles into the bush with Papa when he trapped in the winter. She had seen the other farms along the line north of them. She could read the trail-marking blazes on the trees and find the faint paths through the bush that would open suddenly upon sun-lit beaver meadows, some of them as wide as the East Field. Beyond the Millars’ farm she had seen the crude road that was said to meander all the way to Port Sarnia, and from there to London, immeasurable miles to the east. She knew too that a great river swept by them no more than half-a-day’s walk from their own doorstep. Someday Papa would show it to her.
Lily was not prepared for the Frenchman’s farm, the home of LaRouche, his wife, and their brood of children. The usual procedure for a homesteader in the new territory was to clear room for a cabin near the front “line” of the property, then proceed in a systematic fashion to open up fields to the north, east and south. When at last Lily was allowed to accompany Anatole back to his place to fetch some garden greens for Mama, she was surprised to find their house set near the centre of several haphazard plots of no particular shape. Several nut trees had been left standing amidst the fledgling wheat and undisciplined vegetable garden. All trees were to be cut down: that was the unspoken code here, one of the necessities that drove the homesteaders to the mutual service and support they required to survive.
LaRouche’s cabin had begun life as a log structure of typical rectangular design, but time, weather, and exigency had added their influences to the original. Rooms of planks and split logs, packed with mortar and straw, jutted, sagged, or lay half-built where the Frenchman’s imagination or optimism had failed him. No windows looked in or out. Against the east wall, a lean-to of sorts had been erected wherein the ox-team of Bessie and Bert found comfort at day’s end among the resident pigs and visiting barred rocks.
Much of the cooking and indeed family life took place outside the murky interior of the homestead. Using the trade he had abandoned for farming after the war against the States, LaRouche built a fine stone oven-and-fireplace protected from the rain by a canvas affair of army tenting, deer-hides and one old sail salvaged, according to its owner, from the Battle of Put-In Bay. Here Madame LaRouche – referred to as Maman by her brood of eleven and as Fluffy by her husband in undisguised admiration for her three hundred pounds of flesh, sturdiness and good health – presided over hearth and oven with a temper that alternated between wheezing cheeriness and tongue-biting pique.
Lily could not take her eyes off Maman. She watched in awe as the woman punched and tormented the sourdough as if she were beating the belly of an obdurate husband, her heavy bosom rolling beneath the homespun smock she wore night and day. Lily shuddered whenever Maman’s hand shot out to stun the cheek of a child who ventured too close or dared too much. Later, she would see that same youngster comfortably housed in Maman’s lap, drifting into secure sleep.
In return for offerings from Papa’s hunting expeditions, Madame LaRouche provided welcome staples during the times when Mama was in bed: preserves, jams, greens from her garden in season, salt-port and “bully beef” from the venison Papa brought home. While the Frenchman himself did not hunt, having given up guns and wars following his service, he usually went along on the shorter excursions to supply encouragement, advice, and refreshments from his still in the bush. The older boys did not share their father’s pacifism.
When her own mother slept or rested, Lily was left to spend hours with Maman and her youngest children, all boys except for Madeleine who was just six. Maman happily schooled Lily in cooking and sewing, all of which Lily had a talent for, though not as much persistence and application as Maman would have hoped. But then Lily was not French, Maman teased. She sang while she baked – wistful melodies in her Norman tongue that seemed all the more serene because they sailed out of such an unnavigable source. Although Maman did not tell conventional stories, she had opinions on everyone and everything.
“Those Millars,” she said with the hushed stridency reserved for such remarks, “they’re gonna be trouble, wait and see. Scotch, the both of ’em. Give me the Irish any day, even your kind.”
“An’ you keep away from that Ol’ Sams,” she said in a more sinister tone. “That carrot of his may be shrivelled up but it’s still got juice in the root. You mind them hands too, little chickadee; believe-you-me, Maman knows all about them kind of paws.”
Lily of course paid little serious heed to any of this, but she smiled and nodded and did all she could to encourage Maman’s chatter. “A pretty, fair thing like you oughta get away from this place as soon as you can. That’s Maman’s advice. Go to the city. Go to Chatham or Sandwich. They’re real nice places. Lots of people.”
Then Maman would launch on a description of her brief but dazzling courtship with Corporal LaRouche of Malden, of the clapboard house they’d lived in, the dances they attended, the clothes they wore, the times they had before the Yankees came and the world collapsed. “I said to Gaston, I’ll go with you to the bush, I’ll have your babies, I’ll clean your house, but I’m not about to die out there without a priest at my side, prayin’ in my ear and rubbin’ my head with holy oil an’ smoothin’ my slide into Heaven.”
Lily swallowed her gooseberry tart.
“I told him I don’t care if he has to hop to Sandwich on one snowshoe in a blizzard – a promise is a promise.” Maman surprised the pastry dough with a punch to the gut.
“What’s a priest?” Lily ventured, at last.
A priest, it turned out, was a kind of preacher. Papa didn’t like preachers. Once, last summer, when Lily had been hoeing on her own in the garden near the “line”, she heard the crack of a twig along the path to the LaRouches’. She looked up in time to see a large florid man dressed all in black, still panting from the exertion of his trek through the bush. His blue eyes bounced like agates in his puffed face before they came to rest on the rims of his cheeks. His smile was as broad as his belly.
“Good afternoon, little elf,” his voice boomed. “I am a man of God. I’ve come all the way from London. Just to see you.”
Lily stared.
“Do you know who God is, little one?”
No response.
“Would you kindly tell your pa that the Methodist man is here.”
Lily did not have to tell Papa. He had heard, even in the North Field, and had come striding past the cabin towards them. Lily knew enough to leave. She heard Papa’s voice raised the way it was when he cursed Bert and Bessie or the trunk of a stubborn ironwood. His axe flashed in the sun. The preacher was already scuttling like a duck into the safety of the Lord’s bush.
Lily wanted to ask Papa who God was; Mama tried to tell her.
Sometimes, after being in her bed for several days, when some colour had come back into her cheeks, Mama would reach under the bed and pull out the large, dark book she called the Bible. Lily watched, poised and alert, as Mama’s fingers made the pages, thin as bee’s wings, flutter and settle.
“These are the words God gave us.”
“Read me some of them,