LITMIR.BIZ

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      “You have made me happy in my age,” he went on in a hushed tone that Lily had already come to recognize and revere. “I am almost at the end of my exile. I have no use for the magic amulet that has shielded me from my enemies and rescued me from my own folly many a time.”

      From a pocket he drew a pebble of blood-red jasper that glowed even in the dull dawn-light. In his palm, it seemed to pulse as if quickened by the fire’s flame, alive with hope and memory. Its irregular oval shape suggested a living infant’s heart.

      “This will bring you luck all your days,” he said. “Not happiness, as you already know, for they do not wear the same colour. But it will make your life a good one, with enough joy to keep you from despair, enough hurt to keep you loving. It will help you find a home, here and in the hereafter. It has done all of these things for me, fivefold.

      “I received this magic stone on a sacred ground, long known as such by generation of tribes who have dwelt in these woods and passed on, as we all do. I ask only two things in return. The days of its guardianship are almost over; there is little magic left in the forests and the streams. So, when you have no more use for the stone’s powers, I ask that you return it to the sacred grove whence it came, to the gods of that place who lent their spirit to it. I have looked at the map your Papa left, and I know when the proper time comes, you will be close to it. There is no way of marking such a place on a map, for the penitent must feel its presence before he can see it. You will know when you are standing on it, though, because it resides beneath the protecting branches of a giant hickory on a knoll just where the forest begins, and when you look west and north you will be able to see, at the commencement of summer, the joining of the Lake and the River set perfectly on a line to the North Star, whom we call the Eye of Wendigo.”

      “Second, I am nearing my own end. My people have been scattered like chaff before the flail. There is no home for us to rest our souls in. Save one. North of the town your father has chosen for you lies the military reserve, a boggy swampland no one, not even the rapacious whites, will ever want. Above the main bay, just past the point where lake and river meet, is a small cove among the sand dunes, and here, unseen among the grasses and snakeweed, is an ancient Indian cemetery which bears the remains of hundreds of souls who could find no burial place with their own people. It’s a graveyard for wanderers, for the lost, and for the permanently dispossessed. If the military knew it was there they would perhaps allow the spirits to remain undisturbed, but certainly they would let no new dead be interred there. So it is that we few remaining outcasts must have our corpses carried there in the dark and secretly buried in that sacred earth. My request to you is to keep that ground holy in your mind, protect it with your life, and once in a while honour it with your presence and prayers. If you see a freshly-turned mound among the milkweed and rustling poplar, know that I lie under it, wanting, like all of us, to be remembered.”

      With that he placed the talisman in Lily’s left hand and rolled her fingers gently over it.

      The map’s instructions were sharp and ineluctable. With her pendant, crucifix, rabbit’s foot, Testament and Southener’s amulet tucked lovingly in their leather sachet, Lily began the long walk north moments after sunrise.

      She did not stop at the Partridges, but walked steadily, almost serenely, through the booming hamlet of Froomfield. Through the Reserve, six miles long, the road meandered and invited rest, but Lily kept her pace, noticed but unaccosted, until just before noon she walked into Port Sarnia.

      Her boots, worn thin, cracked on the town’s singular macadam. Lily was tempted neither left nor right, indifferent to Cameron’s Emporium with its checker-glass windows a-glitter with frill and frumpery; undistracted by the fragrances of two bakeries and a tannery, undeterred by no less than seven churches. A mile up this high road Lily noticed the break in the forest wall. For the first time in many hours her heart jumped in its stirrups. The map was real. She could read it. Something vital with a future waited for her at the end of this lane.

      There, set in two pockets of cleared pine, lay the farms. A small one to the left with a log hut and sheds; a larger one to the right with a whitewashed, split-log house, sideboard barns, and a pond with Sunday-white geese on it.

      At the last moment Lily remembered to knock on the firmly latched, blue-trimmed door set in the exact centre of the white-washed cottage. She felt the shadow of the overhanging eave cool her cheek. She pulled tightly the bridle on her heart, and waited.

      The door was pulled inward slowly, guardedly. Lily saw the strong woman’s-hand, brown from the sun, gripping the sash before the face and figure were disclosed.

      “Yes?”

      “Aunt Bridie?”

      “An’ who might you be?”

      “I’m...Lily.”

      “What do you want here, girl? State your business or leave a body in peace.”

      “Papa sent me.”

      Sensing the bewilderment in the woman’s face, Lil’s heart sank. She fought against the faintness and vertigo as best she could, but it felt as if her bones had melted outright in a treacherous sun. As she slumped onto the doorstep, she was certain she heard herself say, “I’m Lily.” And, thinking of her father, added, “Lily Fairchild.”

      6

      Saturday was Lily’s favourite day. Summer and winter, spring and fall, Saturday was the day of deliverance. Even though the mid-summer sun had lifted barely half a brow over the forest rim in the distant east, Lily felt liberated; and she conveyed her excitement to Benjamin, the Walpole ‘paint’ who jogged happily over the rough road towards the village of Part Sarnia. This June Saturday was particularly magical.

      Aunt Bridie had rejected Uncle Chester’s plea for a genuine birthday cake –“You’ll spoil the child silly, you old coot”– but she had baked a strawberry pie special for the occasion and even wrapped the newly-made linen blouse and plain calico skirt in tissue as if it were a real surprise. Chester applauded when Lily opened it; Bridie gave him one of her quartering glances but said nothing. Later, as they sat outside on wicker chairs in a garden perfumed with wild hedge roses, their widower neighbour Bill walked over, and through his shy grin – made more prominent by the absence of all but two mismatching front teeth – presented Lily with a blue hair ribbon that might have been made of silk.

      “Ma bought it for my daughter, Violet, way back, but she don’t wear it,” he explained. Lily kissed him on the cheek, which either frightened or scandalized him into a hasty departure. When he had gone, Bridie mumbled about such “fool things” as hair ribbons, so Lily, though tempted by the encouragement in Chester’s eye, hid the gift away with her other precious mementoes. In the weeks after her arrival, she had thought she ought to reveal to Bridie the sacred objects in her treasure-pouch, but even then something told her to hold back, that a lady as angular and opinionated as Aunt Bridie would not likely be impressed by a native talisman or even one of God’s Testaments. So they remained secreted in her room to be taken out on those few occasions when she had felt unhappy here, or homesick for what she’d left behind.

      Which was not often. And certainly never on Saturdays. She reined in Benjamin as they neared Exmouth Street, the edge of the cleared plain that was soon to be an official town, a county seat. It was a new split-log road and dangerously rough. She glanced back at her cargo of eggs and fresh raspberries – so neatly packed in the boxwood containers Chester had tacked together with guarded precision. They rested in a market wagon he had customized with double-leather springs and straw padding, and fitted with snug compartments for Bridie’s eggs and seasonal specialties.

      Lily had no reason in this world to be sad. She loved her aunt and uncle and she was loved by them. Bridie, her flame-red hair so earnestly harnessed during the day, would come to Lily at bedtime, her hair loose and haphazard, her ice-blue eyes weakened by fatigue, and bending over, bless Lily’s cheek with a dry, well-meant kiss. “Thank your maker for makin’ you and givin’ you such a day,” she would invariably murmur before snuffing the candle. It was the only religious sentiment that ever passed her lips. Bridie did not, it seemed, believe in

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