“Promise.”
Then, seeing the longing in her child’s eyes, she would close the book and in a reedy quaver begin to sing the spinning song,
Hi diddle dum, hi diddle dare-o
Hi diddly iddly, hi diddle air-o
Hi diddle diddly, hi diddle um
At first Lily would hum along, then gradually pick up the tongue-tumbling syllables one at a time, like stitches, giving to them whatever meaning the emotions of the moment allowed.
As sometimes happened, Papa did not return by day’s end. Lily had been able to find enough small logs to keep the fire alive overnight, though it was not banked properly and the cabin became suffocating in the late August heat. She made some tea, warmed up the soup, and went into Mama’s room. Lily held her hand to guide the tin cup to her lips. After a few reluctant sips, Mama closed her eyes.
The morning outside was beautiful and Lily bent to her chores in the garden and yard. High in the pines and arching elms, cicadas soon announced noon. By then, Mama was sitting in the rocker Papa had fashioned for her out of cedar. She gave Lily a wan smile and asked: “Would you help Mama with her hair?” As her mother watched in wordless encouragement, Lily managed to heat a wide kettle of water and get it foaming with soap. Mama leaned over, her brow resting on the arm of the chair, her long hair reaching almost to the floor. For a moment she seemed to be asleep, but when Lily began to pour the soft warm water over her, letting it fall gently back into the kettle, she murmured and her hand reached out to squeeze Lily’s. How beautiful Mama’s hair was, its former glory regained as she sat back in the rocker and let the afternoon sun scatter praise where it could. Lily took her mother’s bone-brush and stroked and stroked. A while later she said, “Let’s have tea, little one.”
Lily, excited, brought out the china pot and two tiny cups with matching blue saucers. She stirred the slumbering fire and prepared the tea just as she remembered Mama doing, then fetched the last of the blueberry cakes Maman LaRouche had given them. Mama began to speak softly, but insistently. “The place we come from, your Papa and me, is a long ways across the biggest ocean in the world. We were married there. We were very happy. But it wasn’t a happy land. The priests and the preachers didn’t get along. The crops failed, many times. We were hungry. Papa decided we should leave. You were already tucked inside my belly. We went on a sailing ship three times bigger than this house. Everything we owned was packed into two trunks they put in the hold.”
The odour of hot ash hung in the air outside the cabin and in the room itself, blue-bottles buzzed, unappeased.
“I figured we’d die on that ship, but we didn’t. We made it because we loved one another, we wanted happiness or death. At Quebec Papa bought tools and we got onto another ship, a smaller one, and sailed along the big lake just south of here. There a storm struck us down. The ship came apart in the waves near the long point. Dozens of people drowned. Papa and me were in the only boat that got to shore. We lost everything but our lives.”
The room darkened steeply, the sun eclipsed by the high horizon of the trees. Lily carefully unwound Mama’s fingers from the tea-cup, hearing her shallow breathing. How Lily wished that Old Samuels would arrive just now, slip in unnoticed, and be in the mood to tell a long story. Mama could just rock there and listen.
But Old Samuels did not come. The dusk of early evening drifted in, adhered. Lily decided to let the fire go out; the air was already too warm. Leaving her mother asleep in the chair, she started up the ladder to the loft.
“Don’t go up, Lily. Sleep with Mama tonight.”
Eagerly, Lily scrambled back down and then helped Mama towards her curtained cubicle. Her arms were thin as willow, the flesh draped over the bones. Lily slipped out of her cotton dress and under the sheet.
“Open this, please,” Mama said. In her hand was a small box made of in-laid woods. It was the most beautiful object Lily had ever seen. With her nimble fingers she tripped the slim gold latch and the lid lifted. Mama brought out a cameo pendant with a silver chain that shimmered in the gloaming. Fortuitously the last log in the fire burst into brief flame, and Lily was able to see that there was, beneath the cameo’s glaze, the merest sketch of a woman’s head: two or three quick but telling strokes. With a start, Lily recognized her own eyes.
“Your grandmother.”
Mama’s eyes filled with tears. She reached into the box again. “I saved this, out of the storm.” She held up a gold chain on the end of which dangled a slender cross no more than half an inch long. Instinctively Lily leaned forward and the crucifix settled on her throat as if it had always expected to be there. Then Mama fell back against her pillow. She crooked her left arm and Lily, as she had seen Maman LaRouche’s little ones do so often, slid into the embrace and held herself there as if the world would end if she blinked.
Lily had left the bed curtain open. In the dark, the embers of the fire glowed, then succumbed without a murmur. The night-air, remembering that it was almost September, turned as chill and sharp as the sabre-shaped moon guiding it. When Lily woke, the sun was already above the tree-line, sifting through the east window. She had been kept warm through the night by the final, fierce heat of her mother’s will. Beside her now, that flesh lay as cold as the ice that clenched the streams of mid-winter.
3
Maman LaRouche sent everyone out of the house while she dressed Mama’s body. Papa, Gaston LaRouche, and Luc had sat in the lean-to shed sipping from a jug, murmuring occasionally in low voices, but mostly staring straight ahead into the bush. Once Lily thought she heard her mother’s name spoken–“Kathleen”– like an exhalation of breath, but she wasn’t sure. They put Mama’s body, carefully wrapped in a white sheet of the softest cotton from Maman’s cedar chest, in the ground on a slight knoll where the East Field joined the North. Jean-Pierre and Anatole had dug the hole.
Old Samuels came to the grave with his nephews, Sounder and Acorn; to Lily’s astonishment, a tribe of wives and children followed behind them with heads down, though still resplendent in their furs and black-and white featherage. The Millars and the two new families from the North section arrived. Lily had never before seen so many people gathered in one place. She held Papa’s hand tightly, and he squeezed back, almost hurting. Her heart reared through its sadness. Mr. Millar stepped forward, opened a black book, and read some words from it that the wind caught with ease and almost carried off. Maman LaRouche suddenly burst into sobs which she made no effort to staunch, fully drowning his eulogy. Lily understood even then that Maman was weeping for them all.
Old Samuels began to hum from somewhere deep in his body, letting the music of it find its own course and pace. The gravesite became quiet; the wind fell. His lamentation found syllables and sounds that might have been words, though no one present had ever heard the language they made. His blank eyes, like death’s pennies, began to flutter in time with the rising and falling cadences of his song. He turned his ancient face upward, and his whole frame tensed, expectant, as if he had been asking some question over and over. He looked towards Papa and Lily. He smiled as only a man without eyes can smile, with every other feature of his face. In English he said: “The gods are listening; that is all we can ask.”
Many times during the long winter following, when Papa was away trapping or hunting, Lily asked Maman who God was, thinking of Mama lying unattended in that cold grave under the snow. But Maman used the question to launch into another rant about priests and the promises of faithless husbands. Papa, who was always too tired to talk after his excursions, would just grunt in a dismissive tone, “Go ask Millar, he knows all about those things.” Then he would go silent or out the door.
“Off to Chatham,” Old Samuels would shake his head sadly. “Plenty bad people in Chatham, for sure.” Or when Papa sometimes pointedly picked up his gun, leather pouches and haversack, and said to Lily, “Better tell them lady deer to stay back in the bush, darlin’, your Papa’s comin’,” Old Samuels would whisper after him, “Your Papa’s gone to Chatham to hunt bucks,” and chortle.
On