LITMIR.BIZ

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mauditbugs! I don’t blame anybody for wanting out of this this hell-hole.”

      Papa had indeed surprised his neighbours, possibly even disappointed the Millars with their thirty cleared acres, their crossroad and their planked façade. Following the trip to Port Sarnia, Papa had thrown himself into work. The North and East Fields were both fully cultivated. The garden was protected from wild pigs by a split-rail fence; a small shed housed the oxen, Bessie and Bert, when they were visiting; and, wonder of wonders, a root cellar was dug on the north side of the house. Papa took special care with this. He and the elder LaRouche boys spent several days excavating a cavernous hole in the ground, then covered it over with low planking and an angled roof. A door set in the roof at knee level lead to a set of narrow, crudely constructed stairs. Lily was the first to try them out. They led down to a platform of sorts and, to its right, an earthen floor cave with shelving. There the canning and the potatoes and turnips would find a cozy berth, summer and winter. Lily felt the dampness exuded by the violated ground and the faint warmth of sunlight caroming through the planks of the roof and side walls.

      Old Samuels attended the christening of the “new room,” politely declining 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 Nature,” he persevered, searching the planking with his fingers for those icy arrowheads.

      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 Lily came down, guns in their hands, waiting patiently. “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. But despite any disapproval, she would invariably send little Marcel along to help Lily with the hoeing.

      Sometimes when Papa came home from Chatham he would be tired but whistling, his eyes aglow. Other times he would brood; she 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 thrown a stone. “Yes, a little.”

      “Can you write?”

      “Not too good.”

      “Can you teach me?” He looked at her, momentarily confused. “You’ll get to read an’ write , real soon. When you’re a little older.”

      Lily 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 attempt full conversations only with Sounder, grilling him for new words. Then Old Samuels took over her education, correcting the errors of his nephew, and delighting in his increasingly lengthy exchanges with 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 that he would have thought incomprehensible to the simple mind of the intruders.

      Papa, it seemed, had heeded Maman’s advice, for in the winter that Lily was nine, he brought home a woman. Lily knew who she was. She had seen the Indians’ 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, and quarrelling women amid the habitation of makeshift wigwams possessed none of the dignities she had witnessed at Port Sarnia. Among the inhabitants was a pretty young woman with eyes like polished chestnuts, whose sinewy beauty was already softening towards sumptuousness. Her name was Penaseweushig, or Birdsky, and she brought with her a four-or-five-year-old son of mixed blood (his hair was brown and curly), the incidental offspring of some heated, casual lust between the girl and any one of a dozen drifters happy to oblige and vanish. Birdsky, being a Chippewa, gave him the name Waupooreor Rabbit. From Birdsky and Rabbit, Lily learned, among other things, to speak yet another tongue.

      The first time they came they stayed only a couple of months, until the snows melted, when mother and child simply disappeared one morning. Papa said nothing. Indeed, even though they could converse haltingly in English or fluently in Ojibwa, Papa and Birdsky spoke little, in the manner of the Indians themselves. Birdsky was easy to like. She did much of the cooking and cleaning, careful to defer to Lily if the moment demanded. When she returned later that summer, she willingly pitched in to help harvest the vegetables, and “do down” Maman’s pickles and jams. Maman clucked a great deal about Birdsky’s presence, but was kind to her and, Lily began to suspect, was genuinely fond of her company. In December one of her relatives from the camp came by and she went off with him. Papa was away and when he got back he looked immediately for her, but said nothing to Lily, nor could she read anything in his face. He’s getting to be like Old Samuels on his quiet days, she thought. Birdsky returned again, unremarked, in the spring.

      Rabbit was put in the small bed that Mama had used before she passed on. That bothered Lily for a while. But she enjoyed Rabbit: he laughed at her antics, he believed everything she told him, and he kept the prowling Luc off-guard and at bay. Papa and Birdsky shared the big bed almost below her.

      She never tried, through the flimsy partition, to watch what they did at night. She could not help hearing though. Not once did Birdsky ever cry full-out, either in anguish or jubilation. Her hushed thrashings were pitted with mewling, aborted sighs, ambiguous gasps, and the hiss of air through teeth desperate for release. Papa’s heavy plunging was accomplished with a grim silence that was broken, near the end, only by a staccato wheeze of relief accompanied on rare occasions by a lurching, crippled soprano cry that never took flight fully into pleasure or despair. That, and Maman’s ribald asides, fed her imagination.

      The first winter with Birdsky in residence, Lily cried herself to sleep most nights, though she had no idea why. She was happy that Papa had someone to hold and whisper to. She liked to watch Rabbit molding his myth-creatures out of blue clay from the dug cellar. She knew that being an adult meant coming together like that in pleasure and pain. Still, she cried, as quietly as she could.

      By the second winter, some things had changed. She felt strange stirrings in her own body, as if invisible limbs were stretching in preparation. On her chest she watched in consternation as her breasts swelled around the blossom-heads she’d always known. Her leg-bones ached with growth. Luc’s eyes fastened like beads on hooks to the bumps on her chest as she whirled and gambolled at the edges of his wretchedness. After, she would feel contrite, though furious at her own innocence and her inability to read what lay behind Luc’s glances. As she lay above Papa and Birdsky, she took their muted, ambivalent passion and made her own translations in all the languages she had learned. She hoped they were as happy as the lovers in her dreams.

      Lily was watching the bees in the basswood near the house. Birdsky’s mama was sick so she and Rabbit were gone for a while. Old Samuels had not come around for days. Maman had asked her to stay over while Papa was off, but she was ashamed to be too near Luc. Here she wasn’t lonely, but with the chores done, she was a little bored. The bees, however, were up to something. They were gathered into a single, swarming cloud that rolled and oozed, then miraculously began to lift itself into the air. It staggered, gained momentum and rose against the sky. Lily followed the swarm with her eyes, and was about to move to see where its new home might be when she heard a twig crack behind her.

      A bear? No, the tread was too light, too cautious. Curious, she turned to the tree-line in front of the cabin, saw nothing,

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