Lily's Story (8 page)

Lil slept in the loft. She had slept there
as long as she could remember anything. Rabbit was put in the small
bed that Mama had used before she passed on. That bothered Lil for
a while. But she liked 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. The image of that drama
was still vivid in her mind and her dreams. She could not help
hearing though. And the sounds became, willy nilly, attached to
parts of the pictures flashing before her in the resilient darkness
between gable and eave. 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.

The first winter Lil 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 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 that summer, as
if invisible limbs were stretching in preparation. On her chest she
watched in consternation and satisfaction 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 sorry, contrite, and furious at
her own innocence, her inability to read what lay inside Luc’s
manic glance, what feelings shot uninvited through her own
increasingly alien flesh. That winter as she lay above Papa and
Birdsky, she took their smothered, muted, ambivalent passion and
made her own translations in all the languages she had learned till
now. Perhaps in the weird adult world they inhabited they were as
happy as she, though not once did they hear the open descant of her
joy when the lovers in her dreams, however vaguely, meshed and grew
harmonic.

Lil was watching the bees in the basswood
near the house. Birdsky’s mama was sick so she and Rabbit were gone
for a while. Lil was annoyed that Old Samuels had not come around
for days and days. She was alone. Maman had asked her to stay over,
but she was ashamed to be too near Luc. Here she wasn’t really
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 blob that rolled and oozed, then miraculously began to
lift itself into the air. It staggered, gained momentum and rose
against the sky. Lil followed the swarm with her eyes, and was
about to move after it to see where the 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, and waited. She was about to set off after the
homing swarm when, quite distinctly, she heard a human sigh – the
exhalation of someone either utterly exhausted or stunned by
despair. She scanned the underbrush, more than curious now. Nothing
moved. No more sounds.

“
Who’s there?”

Silence. Breathing, then, constricted but
deep. A man’s. A large man’s.

“
You hurt in there? You
want me to come in after you?”

Panic, very clear – to the left, behind the
wild raspberries picked clean by the starlings. Lil walked in that
direction. She was not afraid, though the fixed intensity of her
stare might have suggested so.

“
I won’t hurt you. I’m Lil.
See, I’m just a girl.”

She heard the body turn over. It was down,
in the twitch-grass, and struggling without energy to rise. Lil
moved quickly through the raspberries into the afternoon shadow of
the tree-line. The figure had collapsed face-down, its head in the
shade, its shoulders and body in the sunny grass. The body was
motionless except for the steep breathing.

No sign of injury or wounds; no blood. The
man, for so he definitely was, was clothed in rags, mere strips of
cloth that might have been a shirt and trousers. No shoes at all;
the feet were blistered and scarred. And the man was incredibly
dirty; he must have slept in ploughed fields. Through the holes in
his shirt Lil saw what appeared to be further scars on the back,
like livid vipers twisted in some foul congregation.

The entire body began to tremble, the way a
child’s lower lip might just before it bursts into tears. For the
first time Lil was a bit scared. Maybe he had some terrible
disease, cholera or something. She saw the sweat bead and quiver on
his almost bare shoulders. Holding her own breath, she gently
touched his arm to bid him turn over. “Please, sir, let me help
you.”

“
I’se past help,” came the
voice, fatigued yet vivid and deep. Wearily, one limb at a time,
the man rolled over in the grass. He was not dirty. He was
black.

3

“His name’s Solomon Johnson,” Papa
explained. “He run away from us soon as we touched shore.” Papa
shook his head slowly. “Wouldn’t believe he was in Canada; he
thought we was attemptin’ to trick him.” He was talking more to
himself than to Lil, who sat rigid beside him. She was certain of
this when he muttered, “Poor bugger…”

Lil filled his mug with coffee from the
dipper. Papa had not told her much that afternoon when he came home
to find the black man in his bed being tended to by Lil. But it was
more than she had ever heard before about what he had been doing on
all those ‘hunting’ trips. Papa and some men from the township had
rowed Mr. Johnson across the River in the moonless dark. He was ‘a
slave’ Papa said, to be pitied, but here, once he got safe to
Chatham, he would be free forever. Right now some bad men were
chasing him, trying to take him back to his chains. Lil tried to
imagine chains that could bind a human limb; all she could picture
was the teeth on the muskrat trap, like a skeleton’s smile.

After talking a long time with the black
man, Papa helped him to his feet and led him outside and around the
cabin to the root cellar. Lil followed, certain from Papa’s
movements that he wished her to. They descended the little steps.
Papa held up his hand. They stopped. Then he reached down and
pulled the platform that served as a floor up on its hidden hinges.
Without hesitating the black man stepped into what appeared to be a
black pit. He disappeared. Lil shuddered. Suddenly the flare of a
match shot across the darkness. The flickering, homey light of a
candle revealed before them a miniature bedroom about five-by-six
by six-feet high. A pallet with blankets served as a bed. There was
a stool and a sort of bench to hold the candle or other
necessities.

The black man looked up at them, exposing
his huge, sad eyes. Then he smiled the wildest smile Lil had ever
seen. “How c’n I thank yo’all?” he said.

“
Lil here will bring you
your food. You can stay up here long’s nobody comes ’round. You
need somethin’, you just tap on this here wall,” Papa said,
demonstrating.

“
If’n you doan mind, suh, I
prefers to stay down here. Down here I feels safe.”

Papa didn’t reply. He turned to leave. “I
got a sturdy lock on this shed door,” he said. “Lil’s gonna lock it
every time she brings you what you need. Nobody’ll get in here.
You’ll be safe here. I gotta go to Chatham, to the Committee. Won’t
be more than a day or so. We’ll work out a safe route once we know
where those bastards are or when they’re gonna go back where they
belong.”

“
I’se gon’ stay right here,
mistuh Cor’cran, suh. I’se gon’ be all right now. I be no more
trouble, no suh.”

“
I’ll be back in two or
three days. You just keep your hopes up, Mr. Solomon Johnson. My
Lil here will take good care of you.”

The black man peered past the candle at his
temporary abode.

“
Jus’ like home,” he
said.

Papa showed Lil how to put the key in the
lock and open it. In an hour the sun would be draped and dying on
the western tree-line. It would be dark down there, not like the
shadowed, shifting, motley dark of the woods under the stars, but
the opaque, impenetrable pitch of the rabbit’s den, day or night,
with only the intermittent trembling of the ground above to mark
the predator’s advance.

“
You’all got dat lock on
now?”

Lil was charged with excitement. Never had
anything so interesting happened to her before. She felt trusted.
She wanted to throw her arms around Papa and kiss him like a
grown-up. She wanted to make him coffee and sit with him near the
fire and listen to him tell all the stories she knew were stored up
inside his head, stories of the strange country he and Mama had
fled, the brothers and sisters and cousins she knew he must have
there still, all of them with faces and lives and tales to be told
in front of fires. She wanted to learn more about the black men
they rowed over the River, and what this slavery was, about who
these Yankees were, and why some of them, like the bastards chasing
Solomon, were so bad. Lil realized, with a deep sigh, that she
wasn’t even sure what ‘bad’ really was, though both Mama and Maman
had used the word liberally. And she had a feeling – preparing some
cold beef, greens and biscuits for Solomon’s supper and watching
Papa walk toward the trail that led south – that she was about to
find out a lot more about it.

Papa reached the road, visible through the
trees from this angle, but instead of wheeling left he paused and
looked up the line as if he were waiting for someone to catch up.
Even from this distance Lil saw the tell-tale sag of the shoulders,
the large bearded slouch to the right – the jauntiness, the
intensity of purpose which this afternoon had sharpened his glance
and given an edge to every action, was gone. Just like that.

Lil recognized the voices hailing Papa long
before the figures emerged as silhouettes against the fading light.
This time, though, the Scotch cousins were accompanied by a third
man who – despite his powerful, squarish slope – trod a respectful
distance behind his betters. An official of some kind, Lil thought.
Old Smoothie linked his arm with Papa’s, and together the entourage
continued at a ruminative pace towards Chatham.

I’ll never tell anyone he’s down there,
thought Lil. Ever.

Two days passed with no signs of Papa. Lil
rehearsed how she would talk and what she would say when Old
Samuels or one of the LaRouche boys came over. No one showed up.
The sun shone. The bees settled nicely in their new hive. Lil and
Solomon had the homestead to themselves.

The first two or three times that Lil
brought around his food, Solomon said nothing except “Who’s dat?”
at the first rattle of the key in the lock and “Thank yuh Miz Lil,
ma’am,” his eyes downcast or averted.

“
Why don’t you eat up here?
The sun’s comin’ through.”

Solomon, below, devoured his food
noisily.

“
I can fetch a chair from
the house, with a back on it.”

The tin plate with the spoon undeployed
appeared through the trap-door. “Thank yuh Miz Lil, ma’am.”

“
Did you like the pickles,
Solomon? Maman and me made them last fall. Maman’s been all the way
to Chatham. A long while back.”

A hand, seemingly detached, reached up and
pulled the trap-door down like a mouth snapping shut. Reluctantly
Lil gathered the utensils and with difficulty locked the outside
door. She could feel him straining to hear the comfort of its
click.

“Tell me what it’s like in the United
States.”

“Well, Miz Lil,” Solomon replied, finishing
the last of the dills from his noon dinner and settling back a
little on Papa’s chair. “Yuh wouldn’ wanna go dere, no ma’am. It’s
an ebbel place, a wicked, wicked place – ’da debbel hisself doan go
dere, no how.”

“
Is that why you
left?”

“
Cain’t
talk
’boud dat, Miz
Lil.
Jus’ cain’t.” He looked
at the cellar floor.

“
It’s nice in
Chatham. Maman says they got brick houses there. And board
sidewalks. And schools for little children.”

“
Sound’s if’n
yuh been dere yuhself.”

“
And, Maman
says, plenty of dark people like you.”

“
Long’s they
ain’t no slaveholders dere, Ol’ Solomon be happy.”

Lil was so used to asking many
questions and getting few answers that she barely noticed that as
the afternoon eased westward and Solomon showed no inclination to
escape, she was doing more talking than she ever had (except when
Rabbit avidly trailed her every word and move around the farm, and
that didn’t count, though it helped). It appeared that Solomon was
a good listener. Every once in a while in mid-sentence she would
toss a glance in his direction only to find him alert and gazing
wondrously at her as no one before ever had. Ever. Even his
habitual sadness and the animal jumpiness seemed to abate, at least
to Lil’s satisfaction.