Lily's Story by Don Gutteridge Page A

have not gone unobserved. Good night, sir.”
    Papa did not reply. Lil could not see below,
but she heard his laboured breathing. As the night visitors passed
by her birthday window and turned onto the path towards the
county’s road, she heard their parting comments.
    “ The man’s a – a
republican!”
    “ He’s a fuckin’ Irishman,
that’s what he is!”
     
     
     
    In the darkness below her, Papa was sobbing.
Lil was frightened. A cold rage constricted her throat. Bee-bee,
the deer-mouse, was edging expectantly up her arm. She swung her
other fist at him, savagely. He fled, untouched. She should go down
to Papa. He had no son. He had no wife. On the beam above, she saw
Bee-bee, puzzled and hurt. She didn’t go down.
     
     
     
    2
     
    By that summer of 1851, while the hand-axe
still challenged each oak and ash, and the crops surprised
themselves by flourishing, the machinery that would soon transform
the countenance of Lambton was already in motion. Road-gangs of
disenchanted rustics and dispossessed natives hacked their way east
to London and south to Wallaceburg. Surveyors with their sextants
and their unbounded faith in Euclid – their chiseling eye
straightening bog and bend – roamed the back bush like Queen’s
spies on the most precious of missions. To the east and south,
barely out of earshot, the first locomotives soon would chuff and
clang through morning mists undisturbed since the granite and peat
and leafage rose triumphant from the steaming glaciers. Crows, more
ancient than the myths that impelled them, shook the soot from
their evening wings and stared. Eagles along the Erie cliffs
followed the spiral of smoke and steam, unable to break its code.
The politicos in Port Sarnia, dreaming their mercantilist dream,
strained to hear the chorus.
     
     
     
    In the midsummer heat with only a smock on,
the sudden lustiness of a cooling breeze felt good on the calves,
arms, neck, the stretch of inner thigh. And if you crouched down
and looked out at a certain level, the wind seemed to be coaxing
ripples out of the wheat as it rolled, resisted and sighed into
acquiescence. Lil watched the waves, like the shadows of hands,
settle and reach, settle and reach for some far shore beyond the
forest’s edge. In the twilight the wheat shone, blue as flax.
    “ Your Papa now, he’s gone
and surprised us all,” Maman LaRouche said, showing Lil how to pick
the potato bug off his perch and squeeze him between thumb and
forefinger just enough to split his seam. “Everybody ’round here
says ‘he’ll run off to the bush for sure now’, or ‘cain’t run a
farm without a woman and a crop of kids’ an’ so forth an’ so on.
Your Papa now, he ain’t no ordinary Joe. Ow !” One of the victims had bitten
back. “Goddam maudit bugs! I don’t know why anybody’d want to hang ’round this
hell-hole. I tell you, little flower, I ain’t dyin’ out here all by
myself. I sure ain’t. If that calice pot-belly’s got to skate on
his ass all the way to – Here now, you go ahead an’ try it, ma petite .”
    Papa had indeed disappointed them all,
especially the Millars with their thirty cleared acres, their
crossroad and their planked facade, white-washed and all. Following
the trip to Port Sarnia, Papa had thrown himself into work. The
North and East Fields were both fully cultivated; there was a
vegetable garden guarded against the wild pigs by a split-rail
fence, a small shed for housing the oxen when they were visiting,
and, surprise of surprises, a root cellar on the north side of the
house. Papa took special care with this. He and the elder LaRouche
boys spent several days digging a cavernous hole in the ground. Lil
was curious, being only nine then, about what lay in or below the
earth, and when she wasn’t helping Maman with the meals, she peered
across their broad, bare, sweating backs wherein the muscles
churned like trapped weasels, and watched the pit grow larger and
darker. Soon, however, a roof