Lily Fairchild. Don Gutteridge
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and the marvelous – could I say miraculous – changes it’s bringin’ to our citizens, whatever their race or beliefs.”
“Or, uh, colour,” added Kinky.
“Citizenship in Her Majesty’s kingdom is colour-blind, I thank the Good Lord.”
“To Her Majesty!”
“What sorta changes do you have in mind for me?” Papa asked, evenly.
“Well now, they aren’t really, they don’t exactly apply to you, specifically or –”
“What my cousin is sayin’ is that we are merely servants, appendages of the council who in turn must carry out the laws duly passed by the Legislative Assembly to which – may I remind you – we all sent the Honourable Mr. MacLachlan.”
“We got snowed in,” said Papa.
“Precisely why the new road is bein’ expedited.”
“No citizen will be disenfranchised by a…by the weather.”
“What laws?”
“You’ll recall that the survey of ’43, lamentable though it was, served us well enough, but a new one has been made necessary by certain irregularitiesdiscovered in the original.”
“They had, after all, only the, ah, crudest of instruments and the Indians, we are told, ah, pulled up the markers as fast as they could be laid.”
“Done, I’m assured, in all innocence.”
“This ain’t my land, then?”
“Dear sir, please, uh, please –”
“– don’t leap to such dire conclusions. We’re here on a mission of mercy, as it were. To be blunt, and to allay any apprehension on your part, let me say straightaway that I have been authorized by the duly elected council of Lambton County to inform you that several small errors were made, back in ’43, in the lot alignments along this particular section of Moore Township.”
“Very small errors, I assure you.”
Papa’s chair emitted a sudden groan.
“Infinitesimal.”
“Tell me the truth.”
After a pause, Smoothie said: “Your property is too far east, sir. That is why the road out there runs so far from your cabin-line. Your farm should front almost on the road.”
“Five yards from it accordin’ to the, ah, lawful survey.”
“But that still leaves more than thirty yards –”
“Thirty-three to be precise. Ninety-nine feet, three inches.”
“More than half my East Field!”
“That’s correct.”
“What does this mean?”
“Calm yourself, sir.”
“In technical terms it means that you do not own a half of your East Field. And, correspondingly, you own a hundred feet of land to the west –”
“Covered in bush!”
“There’s no need for, uh, that sort of tone.”
“Donald is right. You’ll have every opportunity to buy that improved field. No plans exist for a second line of farms behind this in the immediate future. We’re movin’ south with the new road, and the crossroad will continue from Millar’s farm to the east.”
“I’d say you have four – even five – years to buy that field.”
“What with?” Papa’s question went unanswered.
“There is, I’m afraid, one more point to be made.”
“A very wee one,” Kinky said.
“But pertinent. Accordin’ to your contract you were to make a specific number of improvements within ten years, excludin’ your first winter here.”
“I’ve met them, every one of ’em.”
“In a sense, yes.
But with the technical loss of your East Field, you have, uh, technically –” Smoothie’s smoothness began to fail him.
“You’ll need, sir, to clear another ten acres.”
“But not by fall. That’s why we’ve been sent here. The council is quite willin’ to accept either solution: the immediate purchase of the cleared field –”
“On reasonable terms you may, uh, be certain.”
“Or the clearing of ten acres by a year from September.”
“No one wants to see you lose this farm or be cheated of the, uh, fruits of your labour. All of us are here to build a better country than the one we’ve known, in a spirit of, uh, co-operation.”
“And love and harmony, free from prejudice.”
“I ain’t got the cash. You know that. So does MacLachlan. And I’d need money to hire help to clear a new field. I owe everybody in the district – time and dollars. I got no sons, you know. I got no wife.”
Papa drank. “I’m no goddam squatter!”
The Scotch gentlemen’s fancy clothes brushed restlessly against the coarse deal of the chairs.
“Perhaps the Lord will help you, sir.”
“God damn the Lord!”
Gasps, scraping of chairs, rustle of coats, quick double-steps to the door.
In a quiet voice that came from a different, darker part of the soul, Smoothie said: “We both know where you can get cash, anytime you want it. Your comings an’ doings have not gone unobserved. Good night, sir.”
Papa did not reply, bidding goodbye with a sharp slam of the door. Though Lily could not see below, his agitation was palpable. She should go down to him, but hesitated. He had no son, he had no wife. As the night visitors passed beneath her window towards the county road, she heard their parting exchange.
“The man’s a – a republican!”
“He’s a fuckin’ Irishman, that’s what he is!”
By that summer of 1851, while the hand-axe still challenged every oak and ash, and the crops surprised themselves by flourishing, the machinery that would transform the countenance of Lambton County was well in motion. Road-gangs of disenchanted rustics and dispossessed natives hacked their way east to London and south to Wallaceburg. Surveyors bearing sextants roamed the back bush like spies, their chiseling eyes straightening bog and bend. To the east and south, barely out of earshot, the first locomotives would soon chuff and clang through morning mists undisturbed since the granite and peat and leafage rose triumphant from the retreating glaciers. And in Port Sarnia, the politicos, dreaming their mercantilist dream, strained to hear the chorus.
In the midsummer heat, the sudden lustiness of a cooling breeze felt good on the calves, arms, and neck. Lily watched the wind coax ripples out of the wheat as it rolled, resisted and sighed into acquiescence. It was at such moments that she tried hard to remember Mama as she had been before she took to her bed and left them. Yet summer days left little time for reminiscence. When the East Field turned golden brown, the LaRouche boys would be over the help them cut and thresh it. Luc and Jean-Pierre watched her as they worked, but when she turned her open gaze on them, they looked away sharply. In the vegetable garden, her own labour never ceased, with planting, weeding, staking and harvesting imposing a regimen from May until October.
“Your Papa now, he’s gone and surprised us all,” Maman LaRouche said, showing Lily how to pick a potato bug off its perch and squeeze it between thumb and forefinger just enough to split its seam. “Everybody said, ‘he’ll run off to the bush for sure now’, or ‘can’t run a farm without