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.
Sam 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.
While 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.
One day towards the middle of June, Sam and his sons hoisted the last section of the obelisk into place and fitted the bust of the unknown soldier on top of it. It had rained all morning, keeping the curious villagers at bay. When the weather unexpectedly brightened in mid-afternoon, Sam got up from his nap under the hickory and signalled for the work to begin immediately. Thus it was that Granny was the only observer that day when the monument was completed. While his boys dismantled the rough scaffolding which still marred any appropriate view of the finished object, Sam and Granny walked across the street and stood in the yard of her new house. He did not speak, and there was no need. They were both looking west, and waiting. Young Pat pulled the last timber away from the base and dragged it to the edge of the lot. He peered over at them, grinning. Harry was on the other side. Rabbit was still asleep in the shade.
The four o’clock sun was just visible above the roof of the hickory, burning down over its steaming green and striking with glorious force the upthrust altars of the village memorial, its elegant pedestals as pure and sudden as Athenian light, the limestone obelisk with the weight of the village dead on its facades soared aloft into the vivid air as if it had been carved whole from a pictographic-cliff high above Superior and anchored to the granite of the earth.
“I wanted to see it from here, with the trees behind it and the sun along the solstice line. It will be beautiful in the mornings as well. The shadow of the column will fall along the trunk of the tree.”
Granny wanted to touch his arm but she dare not.
“Uncle Jack thinks we’ve sold out our heritage,” Sam Stadler said in a voice that was clearly meant to have her remain within the ambience of the wonder they were sharing. “But that happened a long time ago, before Rabbit himself was born. When I came here, I knew right away this place had once been a magic ground. I felt the ghosts all around me. When I was a boy, Rabbit told me that magic was the hardest thing in the world to kill. Well, the old ways are gone for good. But that don’t mean we have to forget them, do we?”
4
That night when Granny woke from a dream she didn’t care to recall, she went over to her chair by the window and stared into the darkness until she was safely awake. Darkness as she knew was never an absolute quality, and soon the play of shadow on shadow arrested her deliberate misattention. The stars were etched like Braille on the infinite black, and somewhere behind her a low moon began to scatter a random light. Across the road the pillar of the monument glowed as if it had absorbed the sun all day and was now relinquishing it, like radium. The words inscribed there were more visible now that they were filled with night-shadow, and she strained to be able to read them, to be able to read one of them. Suddenly the whole facade of the memorial tablet went dark, as if a bat’s wing had flicked over it. The slow light leaked back. She chanced a quick look to the right and left but nothing moved in the blackness behind. No wind touched the young leaves high in the hickory. But somewhere she could hear singing, not a human voice but one very like it, a horn simulating a perfect soprano so real you could almost whisper the near-words it devised to tantalize and tempt the forsaken. This time the shadow that flickered across the scroll of the dead was as diaphanous as an angel’s wing, you could blow your breath through it. It dissolved, then came again, not actually touching the face of the stone but brushing it with the urgency of the singing that rose and fell in time with it. The singing stopped. The veil, which could have been a wing or a scarf, was, it was now clear, a sleeve with an arm in it and a tiny white hand unfolding out of it and fluttering. Granny followed the arm to the edge of the column where it ceased,
though a spill of flaxen hair – unripened hair, a little girl’s hair – fell absently over the sleeved limb now stretching, as if on tiptoe, towards the engraved sad letters. The fingers paused, then began tracing their way over one of the names in a fevered, amateur way – as a blind child might finger the face of a smiling stranger.
No, no, she heard the cry deep in her, and rose up with its surge. She struck her head sharply on the sash and fell back into the chair. When the dizziness subsided, she looked out again. The moon was down. Nothing moved, or shone.
Silly, silly woman. You must stop this. You must stop these foolish tears. The old ways are gone for good.
57
“It’s goin’ to look beautiful for the opening ceremonies, now isn’t it,” Sunny Denfield said. Granny tilted her head slightly in agreement. “By then the sod’ll be somewhat stitched together, an’ your delphinium an’ poppies’ll be in their glory back there.”
She accepted the compliment, knowing it was well-meant, and she was, she had to admit, secretly pleased that most of the flower-beds she had planted for Arthur had been left in their natural state, at least until next year. All the hedges except the one adjoining the Carpenter property had been dug up and the whole area around the monument turned into lawn and park. By autumn both monument and greenery would have taken hold, and who would there be to remember that they did not always belong to this place?
“We’ve set the date,” he said. She held her teacup rigid. “The first of July at eleven o’clock.”
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