Lily's Story by Don Gutteridge Page B

and plank walls covered it, and a
little set of stairs appeared behind a fresh door. Lil was the
first to try them out. They led down to a platform of sorts, and
when you turned right you saw a cave with shelves across it and an
earthen floor below where the canning and the potatoes and turnips
would find a cozy berth, summer and winter. Lil felt the dampness
exuded by the violated ground and the slats of sunlight caroming
through the planking of the east wall.
    Old Samuels attended the launching of the
‘new room’, politely refusing the proffered drink, feeling the
marvel of the deal planks and the cold metal eyes of the spikes
that secured them. But he refused to enter the cellar itself.
    “ Bad spirits in there,” he
muttered theatrically.
    “ In here, ya’ means,” said
Gaston LaRouche, shaking the jug and winking at the
others.
    “ White Mens always tries to
fix up Nature,” he persevered, searching the planking with his
fingers for those icy arrowheads.
    Nonetheless, Papa continued to be away a
great deal of the time. Fewer were the occasions when he returned
with a deer or a bear to share among the neighbours. Some mornings
Sounder and Acorn would be standing before the dead fire when Lil
came down, guns in their hands, peering around in puzzlement. “Your
Papa not hunt today?” Sounder would say. “Got too many venisons
already, I guess.”
    “ Off to Chatham if you ask
me,” Maman would announce, asked or not. “That place is full of
darkies, I hear tell. A decent body can’t walk the streets.” But
despite any disapproval, she would invariably send little Marcel
along to check the pig and help out with the chopping.
    Sometimes when Papa came home from Chatham
he would be tired but whistling, his eyes aglow. Other times he
would be very sad, you couldn’t talk to him for hours or look him
straight in the eye. “It’s a hell of a world out there, little one.
We’re better off right here.”
    Once she saw a letter on the table. “Can you
read, Papa?” He looked stung, as if she’d struck him with an
axe-handle. “Uh huh. A little.” “Can you write?” “Not too good.”
“Can you teach me?” He looked at her, confused, as if seeing
someone else in her place. “You’ll get to read, an’ write too. Real
soon. When you’re a little older.” Lil sensed it would be some time
yet. But the thought of it, the mere promise, was enough.
    “ Little White-Women’s
smart,” Old Samuels said, “up here,” pointing to a spot just above
the shutters of his eyes. “And here,” he added, indicating his
ears. He meant of course that she had picked up, from him and his
chattering nephew, quite a bit of the Pottawatomie tongue. At first
she would carry on full conversations only with Sounder, grilling
him constantly for new words. Finally Old Samuels took over her
‘education’, correcting much of the folly prompted by his nephew,
and delighting in the increasingly extended exchanges with this
waif, this orphan of the forests.
    “ There’s hope, maybe, for
White Mens,” he would say to his ancestors when she had mastered
some grammatical intricacy he felt to be untransferable to the
simple mind of the intruders. In the darkest, deepest winter-dens
of his mind, he could hear the blurred echoes of his mother’s
Attawandaron, and the regret would be so overwhelming he would have
to get up and leave the cabin quickly lest he weep in front of the
child.
     
     
     
    Papa, it seemed, had
overheard Maman’s advice, for in the winter that Lil was nine he
brought home with him, one day, a woman. Lil knew who she was, for
she had at last seen the squatter’s camp in the back bush, not
nearly so far away as she had imagined and much dirtier and sadder
than she’d ever expected. No wonder Old Samuels liked to spend his
day along ‘the line’. Squalling papooses, yapping dogs, quarrelling
squaws amid the smelly, humid habitation of makeshift wigwams that
possessed none of the redeeming dignities she