Act of Injustice

by Argyle, Ray

  “Daddy, it hurt, why did he do that?”

  James held his daughter close to him, and cried. The tears of the two mingled, springing from a shared bitterness. “It’s all right, Rosannah,” he told her. “You don’t have to go back to that church anymore. But don’t tell your Mother why. It would kill her.” He knew it would be useless to complain about the priest. His anger grew within him and one day, when he could no longer contain his hatred, he went to the Church. He intended to beat Father Quinn, and perhaps even kill him. When he got there he found a new priest had arrived in Vandeleur just that morning. Father Quinn had been sent to Toronto.

  When the census taker arrived in 1871, James put himself down as having no religion. He made his desertion irrevocable when he applied for membership in the Loyal Orange Order, the Protestant organization brought to Canada from County Armagh in Ireland.

  On the morning of Rosannah’s death, James was on a ladder fitting a final spar into place for the roof of Pat Burns’s new barn. He’d barely begun the task when his boy Billy ran into the farmyard. It was a little after seven o’clock.

  “What’s the matter, lad?” James asked when he saw Billy standing below him, breathless and tearful.

  “Something awful’s happened to Rosannah. I think she’s died. Ma says she’s been poisoned. She says to come home right away.”

  * Now called Sharon

  Chapter 5

  THE FIRST WITNESS

  Morning, November 3, 1884

  Molly Leppard, mother of the murdered Rosannah, was the first witness to testify at the trial of Cook Teets. Leonard Babington saw this as a clever strategy on the part of the Crown. Molly’s testimony on the events surrounding her daughter’s death would be sure to harden the attitude of the jury toward the accused. The Crown’s careful preparation of the case against Cook Teets would make his conviction a certainty, Leonard thought. He was satisfied there was no chance of himself being called, as he’d seen Rosannah only that one time since his return from Toronto.

  When the clerk Angus McMorrin called Molly’s name, she rose from her seat and made her way to the witness box. Leonard leaned forward at the press table, eyeing her intently. Although more than a year had passed since Rosannah’s death, Molly was dressed for mourning. Her black wool dress sagged loosely on her body, revealing little of a figure that was still shapely despite forty-eight years of hard living and many pregnancies. On her head she wore a small black hat bearing a limp artificial flower. A tattered veil descended over her eyes. After Angus McMorrin had sworn her in, Bible in hand, Molly settled into the witness box. It was large and ornately carved. Once seated, she made the ritual Sign of the Cross, lifted her veil, and adjusted her spectacles.

  Alfred Frost, a towering figure at six foot five, took up his position in front of Molly, rocking slightly on his heels. He was said to have acquired the habit when he’d worked as a youth on the boats sailing out of Owen Sound. Leonard, who was good at ferreting out information, had learned this was the first murder trial of Frost’s career. There were reports he and Judge Armour were old friends and that they’d articled together at a law firm in Cobourg, down on Lake Ontario. The prosecutor paused in his rocking, as if to set his feet more solidly, and addressed Molly in a voice designed to convey kindness toward her.

  “Now, Mrs. Leppard, the court would like to hear in your own words all you know of what transpired the night your daughter Rosannah died. You were with her at that time, the night of the thirty-first of October of last year?”

  “That’s right, she was at home with me on the farm.”

  “And how old was Rosannah at the time of her death?”

  “Twenty-five years of age on the twelfth of July, the same year she died.”

  Twenty-five years of love and sorrow gone in a few hours of horror, Leonard thought. Molly had worked alongside her husband, James, during desperately hard times. She’d helped trim the logs that went into their house, dug and planted a garden year after year, pulled weeds, and chased off unwelcome animals. She’d put up vegetables and crab apples for the winter, and made flour sacks into dresses for her girls. All that time, growing more tired and weary, she’d tried to raise her children in the faith she’d absorbed back in Ireland.

  Alfred Frost was keenly interested in hearing everything that Molly could remember about how Rosannah had become entangled with Cook Teets.

  “What do you know of your daughter’s marriage to the prisoner?” he asked.

  Molly took off her glasses, sighed, and hesitated before answering. Leonard thought the prosecutor’s question would allow Molly to share the distress that she, as a good mother, felt over her lively daughter’s decision to take up with a much older man of a different religion, and blind.

  “I know a little something,” she finally said. “I tried to keep an eye on Cook whenever he came around. One morning, I saw them together at the fence. He’d been pressing her to give him an answer about getting married.”

  The fence Molly was referring to was the zigzag split rail fence that James had thrown across the back of their property. It kept the cow in the meadow and deer out of the garden.

  “Where did they go to live after their marriage?”

  “They ran off so quick Cook hadn’t gotten around to finding a place to live. He remained at his mother’s house and she remained with me.”

  Her answer seemed to perplex Judge Armour. He leaned over his dais, a quizzical look on his face, to ask Molly, “How far is it from your place to where the prisoner lived?”

  “There are two ways. By the road it would be five or six miles but by the path that crosses the river and goes through the bush, it would be about three and a half.”

  Judge Armour nodded, causing a flutter in the tangle of long white hair that tumbled onto his shoulders. Leonard judged him to be well into his fifties, a little on the heavy side, like most prosperous men. Molly bowed her head when Judge Armour spoke, as if she were afraid to look at this commanding figure in his black judicial robe.

  By now, Molly was beginning to jerk her head as she spoke. It was a mannerism she fell into when she was nervous. She’d say a few words, pause, then jerk her head, as if she’d been surprised by something.

  Alfred Frost asked Molly how long Rosannah and Cook had continued their separate living arrangements.

  “From the day of their marriage until her death, except for the time they went visiting his folks in Michigan.”

  Leonard was impressed with Molly’s answer, mainly because he knew she found it difficult to pin down an exact time for just about anything. He wondered if she’d been rehearsed. He remembered how she would get confused when different things were talked about at the same time. They got jumbled up together. She relied on her husband to tell her when it was time to slaughter the hogs, or kill a turkey for Thanksgiving.

  Leonard knew the Leppards went without many things, but that didn’t seem to matter to Molly. She had told him, in the days when he used to visit Rosannah, that their place had a coziness that even her home in County Mayo had lacked. The single room of their cabin had two windows, both facing the front. For the longest time, neither held glass; a luxury James could not afford. Molly had covered them with animal hides she had boiled and beaten with her shillelagh and a stone until they were porous enough to allow light through. Hand-hewn boards eventually replaced the dirt floor. Their furniture consisted of a table, a stove, an ancient armoire, a long bench that sat next to one wall, and beds that were separated by blankets hung from the ceiling.

  To Leonard, the cabin gave off a miasma of unpleasant smells – dried sweat, dirty garments and cooking fumes. At one end of the room a loft held discarded tools and a few sacks of potatoes. Except for a Bible, there was not a book in the place. Molly had told Leonard the Leppards were a story in themselves. It was clear to him she was aware many folks looked down on them, as they did on anyone who cooked, ate and slept all in one room. Still, such intimacy didn’t seem to bother her. Family was everything
, Molly used to say. She found pride in her family’s ability to overcome hardship and survive a crop lost to frost or flattened by hail.

  As these thoughts were running through Leonard’s mind, Alfred Frost shifted his questioning from Rosannah’s marriage to how long the Leppards had known Cook Teets.

  “Oh, a long time,” Molly said. She added that various Teets had visited the farm while her children were growing up. Lately, she said, Cook had come alone with his dog Cromwell. It was a Labrador Retriever that went everywhere with him. Cook’s blindness didn’t stop him from wandering the roads around Vandeleur as long as he had that dog, Molly added.

  Alfred Frost listened patiently. “Now, Mrs. Leppard,” he interjected, “can you tell the court when it was that you became aware of Cook’s interest in Rosannah?”

  “It was after he came to ask Rosannah if she would be willing to go up to the Teets’s place and work for his mother,” she said between jerks of her head. “I’m sorry I ever allowed it. If my oldest, Tom, had been around, he’d have kept Cook in his place. It’s hard for a decent woman to raise a family. People around here don’t have no morals at all.”

  “I’m sure many would agree,” the prosecutor responded. “But just tell us what happened the day Cook came to hire Rosannah.”

  “I saw Cook coming up the trail from the little footbridge over the river. It was muddy and I saw his boots and overalls were dirty. I didn’t want him in the house. I said to my husband, ‘The way that man gets around, you’d think he could see.’” Her head jerked to one side. Leonard thought she was having a nervous reaction to the pressure of being on the witness stand.

  Molly said Cook had stopped when he got to the fence and called to ask if he could come in. He said he wanted to speak to Rosannah. By then, Rosannah was at the door watching Cook. Rosannah called out to ask him what he wanted.

  “He said his mother needed help. Cook said the house was too much for her since Mr. Teets died, so he wanted to know if Rosannah could come up and help her. He allowed, of course, that she’d have to move to their place.”

  “It didn’t surprise you that Mrs. Teets needed someone to help out,” Alfred Frost said.

  Molly said she wasn’t a bit surprised. “She’s going on for ninety and she was alone in the house except for Cook.” Molly added that everyone knew her other children had gone off and set up their own families. Her eldest son Nelson ran the sawmill and employed three or four men at the Teets’s furniture shed.

  “And what was Rosannah’s reaction to all this?”

  “Oh, she was excited. Especially when she heard he’d pay her five dollars a month. She said if she could leave the babies with me, she could do a real good job for Mrs. Teets. She said she would use the money for things the children needed.”

  “Rosannah didn’t mind leaving the children with you?”

  Molly snorted at the prosecutor’s question, and jerked her head.

  “Mind? She was glad to get away from them. I don’t mean she didn’t love them. Sure she did. But she never got any help from their fathers, and I think she thought it would be like a holiday, going up to the Teets’s.”

  Molly added that Rosannah claimed to have been married to David Rogers, the father of her youngest, but they were divorced. Molly didn’t believe this. If there’d been a divorce, she said, it was one of those Queen’s Bush divorces.

  Hearing this, Alfred Frost smiled. “Whatever do you mean, Mrs. Leppard, a Queen’s Bush divorce?”

  “You know,” she said, “when people just walk away from each other. If the law don’t work for you, folks around here just ignore it.”

  Leonard had heard the expression. He knew it took an Act of Parliament to register a divorce and no one in Vandeleur would spend money on a piece of paper to say they’re no longer married. If you were a Catholic, you wouldn’t get a divorce even if you did have the money.

  Alfred Frost parried Molly’s explanation. He changed the subject, asking her, “You raised no objection to her taking the job with Mrs. Teets?”

  “Wasn’t any point. I said to my husband, may as well let her go. I have to take care of those kids anyway. Rosannah was all happy, said she’d go anytime Mrs. Teets needed her.”

  Cook came for Rosannah the next morning, Molly said. He arrived in a four-wheeled buggy driven by Homer Jessup. Rosannah and Cook climbed together into the back seat.

  Molly told Alfred Frost that Rosannah returned home every few days to visit her children and help with a few household chores. It seemed she was happy working for Mrs. Teets. Molly was surprised, therefore, when Rosannah came home after a month to announce she had left the Teets household.

  “That old woman didn’t really need me,” Molly said Rosannah told her. “Rosannah said Cook’s mother didn’t like the way she did things. She kept telling her she would cook and clean herself. Rosannah said Mrs. Teets couldn’t get used to having someone take charge of her house.”

  “Did you believe her?” Alfred Frost asked. Molly said she wondered if there was any other reason. She thought Mrs. Teets should have been glad to have somebody relieve her of sweeping, cleaning and cooking.

  Alfred Frost summed up what they’d heard so far. “So Rosannah has spent a few weeks with the Teets’s, and now she’s back home. Can you tell the court if she continued to see Cook?”

  “They couldn’t leave each other alone,” Molly said. “Cook came around almost every day. I couldn’t see why Rosannah would want to encourage him, an old man like that, blind and all. And he wasn’t a Catholic. Rosannah knew I wanted her to marry a Catholic.”

  “You didn’t want Cook calling on Rosannah?”

  “No, I didn’t. I used to watch them, sitting close together on the bench beside the stove. Whispering all the time.” Another jerk of her head.

  “Did you have words with Rosannah about this?”

  Molly lifted a wisp of hair that had fallen onto her face. She paused before answering. Leonard thought she must be debating what to say.

  “We had words,” Molly admitted. “I was fixing the fire one day and I figured the time had come to lay down the law. I told her, you go off and get yourself pregnant again and I’ll have another brat to look after. I reminded her I was her mother, and I was putting my foot down. I told her that if she saw him one more time I’d disown her.”

  Leonard imagined the scene. He knew Molly had a sharp temper and he remembered Rosannah telling him how, when she was little, her mother had used a wooden spoon to spank her and her sisters. There would have been a good deal of screaming back and forth.

  Alfred Frost asked Molly if she could explain the cause of her daughter’s disobedience. Leonard thought he’d like to have an answer to that, as well.

  “I can’t explain it,” Molly said. “Except that Cook must have made her all kinds of promises. Must have said he’d buy her anything she wanted. His brother always gave him money.”

  Molly fell silent. Watching her, Leonard wondered if she was thinking back on Rosannah’s life, perhaps trying to understand what it was that had brought her and Cook together. Molly stared around the courtroom before jerking her head toward Judge Armour. She took up her testimony, hesitating every few words.

  “Cook came back the next morning,” Molly said. “Rosannah went outside to talk to him. They were out there for quite a while before she brought him into the house.” Molly hesitated, tried to speak, but seemed to be choking up. “That was when Rosannah told us what they’d decided,” she said. She was sobbing now. “Rosannah said she and Cook were going to get married.”

  Everyone in the courtroom could see that Molly’s emotions had gotten the best of her. Judge Armour told Alfred Frost that his witness might wish a chance to regain her composure. “Recess for fifteen minutes,” the judge announced, rising from his seat.

  Chapter 6

  THE ELOPEMENT

  Recess, November 3, 1884

  Molly was grateful for the few moments she had been allowed to pull herself together. Think
ing about the testimony she had given, it seemed her whole life had been a series of misfortunes and blows of various sort. First the famine in Ireland when many of her relatives had died. The awful voyage across the Atlantic and the fever that had broken out followng their arrival in Canada. After she married James, there was one baby after another. She’d grown tired of the sex that marriage required and after four or five babies, she was exhausted by all that fucking. There, I’ve said it, Molly thought. Dear God, how I hate that word. And what kind of life would Rosannah have had to endure if she’d lived?

  Molly could not forget how Rosannah’s announcement of her intention to marry Cook Teets had hung in the air. The day had begun beautifully, a glorious spring morning, the first of June, 1883. Cook had arrived at about noon, and before Molly had the chance to serve him dinner, Rosannah blurted out their intentions. Everyone needed time to take it in. She had turned to her husband, showing surprise and shock on her face.

  James Leppard was the first to speak.

  “Cook, aren’t you married already?” he asked.

  “I was, but Ann Jane left me. We’re divorced now.”

  Molly knew of Cook’s marriage to Ann Jane Sargent, a farm girl from the next township. Divorce? Another one of those Queen’s Bush divorces, of course. He’d only have to go to a different church in another town to get married again.

  James kept at Cook, wanting to make sure how things stood between he and Ann Jane. At least James wants to know they’re all finished, Molly thought.

  “Are you sure it’s all over between you?”

  “She’s gone up to Owen Sound. Haven’t seen her for over a year.”

  James turned to Rosannah to ask if she really wanted to marry Cook.

  “Now Rosie, are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself in for? Do you really want to marry him?”