Lily's Story (116 page)

Afterwards Sam Stadler told her: “We’ve got
some Indian blood in us from way back, and the old fellow likes to
have his dreams.” Then perhaps as if he had gone further than he
intended, he added, “Some of the things he talks about were
true.”

Towards the end of April with only the base
completed and part of the memorial section, the town council
proudly announced that the Governor-General, Lord Byng, and his
wife, Baroness Byng, would take time out of their busy schedule to
visit the Point and consecrate a cornerstone of the cenotaph. Sam
Stadler was hastily contracted to make a suitably engraved tablet,
which became the first stone to be set in place upon the pedestal.
The whole town went into a flutter of anticipation. And even though
their Excellencies would spend less than an hour in the village –
the rest of their hectic day to be apportioned among the various
functions devised by the Sarnia-city elite – the visit was
generally held to be a matter of civic pride, and not-a-little
boasting here and there. The veterans were to escort Lord Byng of
Vimy from Bayview Park to the site of the cenotaph where patriotic
speeches would be delivered, a bouquet of flowers presented to the
Baroness by Harry Hitchcock’s little girl, Susie, and a blessing
uttered over the sacred cornerstone.

Granny heard the blare of bugles bent by the
wind, and the tramp of military boots on pavement. The shadows of
the restless throng around the site (some of them crowded back onto
her lawn) flickered on the far wall. She heard the sparrow-chatter
of children and the ooh’s and aah’s of their elders as the royal
train approached. Although the words of the speeches – by Deputy
Reeve Hitchcock and the Commanding Officer himself – were
inaudible, Granny knew what platitudes they would employ, what
pauses would be made so that the visiting press could capture each
cliché intact and uncorrupted by novelty. Somewhere in the middle
of an invocation or doxology by one of the innumerable local
reverends, Granny drifted far enough into unconsciousness to enter
the world of her own thought. She was thinking of Eddie and the
time just after Arthur died when they went for a Sunday drive in
Ralph’s father’s automobile, down into Moore Township.

2

Eddie was being especially cheerful,
regaling her with stories of Bart’s outrageous behavior last
semester and showing off his driving prowess whenever the road
widened sufficiently. They were taking the gravel highway that
hugged the River south all the way to the county’s end. The water
lolled by them, midsummer blue. Iron-clad lake-steamers churned
upstream or coasted down, no more than a hundred feet away. They
looked for a schooner’s sail but did not see one. To the east of
the road the farms ran back from the riverfront for several miles,
all neatly fenced; the forest was shaved clean around them except
for a few anomalous spinneys, wispy on the far horizon. Wheat and
oats and corn and green fallow gave proof of unremitting labour,
steady progress and certain prosperity. Whatever the people in
these clapboard or brick houses with the tall barns believed in, it
was beneficient. They stopped for tea in Courtright. When Granny
asked the elderly proprietress if she knew where ‘Millar’s Corners’
might be, Eddie was surprised but asked no questions. Instead, he
listened carefully as the woman, after recovering from her own
surprise, gave them brief instructions.

“
Do you know if there are
any of the Partridge family still livin’ in this area?” Granny
asked as they were about to leave.

The woman peered at her as if she were a
ghost likely to tell indecent stories on its return. Then she
smiled dubiously. “I’m a Partridge. By marriage.”

Eddie’s cheeriness was replaced by
respectful silence. Two concessions south of Courtright he turned
east. The rectangular farms continued on either side. They passed a
sugar bush. In one of the pastures Holsteins grazed as if in a
dream of themselves. Metal mailboxes greeted the road at every
gate. The houses, tidy and spare, were set back from the gates at a
daunting distance, and spaced evenly apart every half mile or so.
The heat shimmered, untouched, in the vacancy between. A boy, no
more than ten, sat on a split-rail with his bare legs tucked under
and stared at their passing. Nothing else moved.

The first time they went right past the sign
and Eddie stopped the car about a mile to the east of it. He shut
off the engine, and they sat in the sharpened silence of the
afternoon heat and just listened for a long while. A song sparrow,
two meadowlarks and a chorale of grasshoppers identified
themselves. Eddie touched the back of Granny’s hand on the seat
beside him. “I think we passed it back there,” he said.

Engrimed with seasons of dust and grit, the
sign had been kicked over into a shallow ditch, and, unheeded by
anyone anymore, had not been re-erected. If Millar’s Corners had
had hopes of expanding beyond a postal drop and a family’s
ambition, they had not been seriously entertained for many decades.
Nevertheless, the castaway sign did mark one of the oldest
crossroads in the township, and the sideroad that ran south of it
was itself of ancient origin.

“
Well,” Eddie said,
pointing to the mailboxes as they passed by, “
some
of the Millars stuck
around.”

“
They were like that,”
Granny said, but did not elaborate.

Nothing was recognizable. Not a single
memory could be reconstructed from these ruins, so complete was the
transformation. The sickly clumps of trees were all second growth.
The road itself was as straight as the ruler used to draw all the
lines and sideroads on the flat map of the county. She scanned the
names on mailboxes, and gave up. She tried to imagine a small girl
walking along the shoulder, with a few curves secretly added, all
the way home from the big cabin of the Millars. She counted trees,
steps, invisible minutes.

“
Stop here,
Eddie.”

He shut off the engine but did not follow
her as she waded across the grassy ditch, slipped through a rail
fence and walked towards a brick farmhouse situated on a slight
rise to the east. Somewhere behind it, a creek lapped against low
stones. She went up into the shade on the north side of the house,
newly built, she could see, on some old site. A barn rose proudly
on her left and she walked past it, measuring something in her
mind, sealing her eyes now and then, ears alert for the sound of
water. She did not go right up to the creek, knowing it would not
resemble anything she would remember, but stood thirty or forty
feet from it, listening to the timbre of its midsummer lament with
the zeal of an adjudicator. Then she turned and stared at the knoll
on which the house stood.

Sometime later a voice said: “You all right,
missus?”

Granny looked up to see a red-cheeked farmer
smiling uncertainly at her. “Where that new house of yours is,” she
said,” was there every anyone buried there?”

“
You sure you’re all
right?”

“
I used to live here, a
long while back.”

“
We been here an awful long
time ourselves,” he said. “And yes, there was a couple of
gravestones just about where our kitchen would be now. I remember
them still bein’ there when I was a kid and we had the old house
further down the lane. Relatives of yours?”

“
What happened to
them?”

“
Well now, I couldn’t tell
you exactly when, but they was dug up an’ moved off here about 1880
or so, when the township started to collect all those kind of
graves an’ put them in proper cemeteries. You know.”

“
Where did they take
them?”

“
More than likely up to the
public cemetery near Corunna. Just off the highway.”

“
Do you remember the names
on them?”

He paused. “That’s a long ways back, but I
do remember because when the county men came to fetch them, they
couldn’t read a word on either of the stones. The names weren’t
scraped on there too good, you see, an’ by the time they got here
there wasn’t a letter you could recognize. So they took the bodies
up to Corunna an’ buried ’em all with the others that didn’t have
names.” Unable to read the look on her face, he added, “They’re
real nice graves up there.”

When Granny came back across the field
towards the car, Eddie waved to her.

3

Work had started again on the monument. The
immanence of the royal visitation had begun to fade and wax
fantastical. Sam Stadler took up his tasks as if nothing much had
happened. He was pleased when Granny herself returned in a few
days, with tea and Mrs. Savage’s muffins.

Old Jack was at the boys again, sensing a
coeval and possibly sympathetic ear nearby and wishing she could
speak on his behalf as eloquently as her eyes intimated she wished
to.

“
You can’t change your
blood, you know. Blood is kin and those bonds are unbreakable.
They’re written on the inside of your bones. So a person can put on
all the fancy clothes he likes, he can cut his hair like a dude’s
and sprinkle perfume all over his shaved face and he can talk like
all the White Mens talk, but he can’t change what’s buried in his
blood and bones and what he’s got an obligation to pass along to
his sons. The White Mens killed the woods and the deer went with
it; the White Mens brought us smallpox and rifles and cannon and
now we take them up and get ourselves blown to bits in a White
Mens’ war, and I say we’re getting what we deserve, it’s our own
punishment for pretending to be White Mens and putting up these
false idols –”

“
That’s enough, old man,”
Sam Stadler said sharply, jarring the two boys awake.

Uncle Jack snapped something back at him. It
was not English. Sam Stadler returned the compliment in kind. The
argument may well have continued had not Granny got up from her
place, walked between the two men, both of them now standing, and
placed her hand on the old fellow’s shoulder. He stayed bone-still
as she scrutinized every line in his face, every crevice of light
in his expressive, aged eyes. Then his jaw began to drop as he
heard her straining towards speech, a throttled gargle bulging up
and jamming its coherence against her teeth, her stubborn
tongue.

“
Waupoore.”
The
double-syllable entered the air, released from its dumbfounding.
The old man reeled back as if struck by his mother’s fist; he sat
down on a stone slab and tried to catch his breath. He looked to
Sam Stadler for help, but Sam was peering in disbelief at the old
woman, at the contortions of her mouth out of which no subsequent
word could be uttered to qualify or explain. The hoarse expulsion
of enjambed sounds from her throat had reduced both boys to a
silent stare as they sat fixed to the ground. After a minute or so,
the rattle eased and Sam Stadler took Granny’s arm in a reassuring
grip.

Uncle Jack had recovered. In
the language that was not English he cried, “Yes, I’m Waupoore, the
Rabbit!” He was hopping up and down and looking beseechingly at Sam
Stadler and then at Granny, and finally at the boys who were
staring with detached fascination at the scene.

S
am Stadler sat beside
Granny while she sipped her tea and they both waited for Rabbit to
settle down long enough for her to write on the pad in front of her
these words: Rabbit, Birdsky, Michael Corcoran, Lil, Old Samuels.
Rabbit seized on them singly, holding up his hand to slow their
effect, and after each he gave out a wincing smile as, somewhere
within, a bulb of memory burst into dim bloom. As Granny watched
him, she remembered the shy dance he had perfected for the world,
amazed at how little it had diminished with age and
heartbreak.

“
You’re Lil,”
he said. “Oh, how I worshipped the ground you walked
on.”

Yes, I was Lil – once.

W
hile Sam Stadler
measured with his jeweller’s squint the wedges of stone to fit the
tapering column and cut them with his watchmaker’s touch, while he
whetted and polished the flat tablets on which the names of the
battlegrounds appeared one letter at a time as if some mist-of-dawn
were lifting to reveal the spellbound runes of a legendless people,
while Sam Stadler’s sturdy sons erected the scaffolding from which
the separate parts of the obelisk would be successively fitted into
place and he was free to sip tea in the shade of the great hickory
and saviour the blue wind over the far bay – Granny gathered the
pieces of Rabbit’s story.

When Birdsky realized
that Papa had left for good, she took up with a former lover, a
Chippewa man who persuaded her, when the squatters’ camp broke up,
to come to the Muncey Reserve near London, where it was rumoured
there was plenty of land and lots of work in the bush. Old Samuels
and his family went north to the Sarnia Reserve, and Rabbit never
saw them again. Old Samuels was very sick with a cough which he
blamed entirely on the inferior quality of the ‘White Mens’ black
tobacco. Soon after they settled at Muncey, Birdsky’s man died
under a felled tree, and within a month she married an Oneida named
Doxtader. Rabbit took his name but resisted for a long time the
imposition of ‘Jack’ which his step-father demanded when they moved
to London and entered the white man’s domain. Since his native name
covered both cottontails and jackrabbits, Birdsky always laughed
and said that ‘Jack’ was at least half-rabbit. For many years they
lived in the nether-world below the white man’s, completely cut off
from the Reserve and its native traditions, attenuated though they
might be. They drifted. Of the numerous brothers and sisters born
after him, only one boy survived, Joe, ten years his junior. With
Rabbit and Joe and their sisters, Birdsky returned to Muncey after
her husband died. They made a great effort to recapture whatever it
was they thought they had lost. But too much had passed by them.
Joe, black-haired and brown-skinned, his full-blooded hatchet-face
the envy of Rabbit with his suspiciously brown hair and light skin,
was wretchedly discontent. Though he retained some of the Ojibwa
language his mother had preserved for him, the English words were
more tailored to his lips and more native to his deepest feelings.
Joe left the Reserve when we was sixteen and never returned. He
married a white woman and got a job as a bricklayer. Sam was their
firstborn. When he was only two or three, about 1880, Birdsky died,
and for a time Rabbit clung to the Reserve where he had no
relatives and few friends. Finally he was persuaded to live in
London, first with one of his sisters and finally with his brother
Joe. After a while he even got used to being called Uncle Jack by
his nephews and nieces. He embarrassed himself by telling stories
better in English than he had rehearsed them in Ojibwa in his head,
though only Birdsky who never left his right shoulder really
noticed, and she adored him too much to scold. Young Sam was good
with his hands. He made bows and arrows under his uncle’s tutelage,
he carved out the emblems of Michebou, the Great Hare. He had a
good ear and Rabbit whispered into it enough of the sacred words to
keep his spirit afloat until it could be claimed. Later when Sam
got back from the war in South Africa, he took up the craft of
masonry and tombstone sculpture. He drew white men’s angels on
their monuments. He changed his name to Stadler. When Rabbit’s
brother Joe died, it hurt Rabbit very much. It hurt even worse to
have to move in with Sam and be treated as if he
mattered.