by Argyle, Ray
She turned and went inside. The door fell shut behind her. For a second time, Rosannah had locked him out of her life. Their baby’s life as well. It’s not as if she couldn’t use the money. But for now, there was nothing more to be said. He turned for home. He’d figure out something.
News of the execution of George Bennett came a few days later. The trial jury had debated only two hours before finding him guilty, and he was hanged at the Don jail. “Death was painless and easy,” the Globe reported.
Leonard spent the month helping his father with a new herd of Shorthorn cattle. Erasmus drove twenty head from Flesherton and hired three men to build new fences. The market for Canadian beef in England was growing and he intended to take advantage of it.
“I might take a load over myself,” Erasmus said. “A chance to show them how we’ve kept up the good family name in Canada.”
Leonard found it was becoming harder to enjoy being with his father. Erasmus lived by a stern code of ethics – perhaps a reaction to the loose ways of his youth – that he now seemed determined to impose on his son. No dancing, no gambling, no smoking, no drinking, no casual conversation with women of the village. It was a frame of mind, Leonard knew, that was strengthened by the sermons of travelling evangelists every Sunday at the Methodist Church.
Leonard saddled Sugar Loaf and rode aimlessly into the Beaver Valley. This ride was not like the wild one he’d had the last day of school. The horse drank at the river and after awhile, Leonard found himself outside Munshaw’s Hotel. He was hot and thirsty. An ale would taste good, and give him a chance to think about what he should do.
There were half a dozen people in the hotel‘s dimly lit saloon. The innkeeper Aaron Munshaw, a couple of grizzled farmers, a carefully dressed man who must be a travelling salesman, a slatternly girl, and – in a far corner – Tom Winship. Tom waved at him and Leonard moved to his table. He signaled the innkeeper for drinks.
“Did you ever look up Rosannah?” Tom asked.
Tom’s constant questions about Rosannah troubled Leonard. Could he never get her out of his mind? He told Tom he was finished with Rosannah, she didn’t want his help, and she wouldn’t say if her child was his.
“I don’t think I can stick around Vandeleur with things the way they are,” Leonard said. “What the hell am I going to do?”
Tom laughed, as if he found Leonard’s fix something to make fun of.
“If she don’t want your help, to hell her with her,” Tom said. “You’re damn lucky. And if the old man’s causing you grief, you better come along with me. There’s work on the boats in Georgian Bay. I’m going up to Owen Sound to be a fireman. Hard and dirty work. But what the hell, pay’s good and just a boss to deal with, no woman or old man trying to mess up your life.”
Leonard and Tom got off the train at the station on Stephens Street in Owen Sound and walked the quarter mile to the head office of the Georgian Bay Shipping Company. They passed the Mechanic’s Institute, several foundries, and assorted ship’s chandlers. The docks were filled with stevedores carting goods, passengers waiting for their sailings, and peddlers hawking food and clothing.
Leonard and Tom signed on with the Georgian Bay Shipping Company as firemen for the Australasia, the new sidewheel steamer built in Owen Sound. It was mid-August, halfway through the shipping season, and their jobs were available because some of the farm boys who had signed on earlier were needed at home for the harvest. She was setting records for fast trips to Collingwood, Port Arthur, and Chicago. Four hundred and sixty tons, a beautiful ship, gleaming white, one hundred and eighty feet long, cabins and deck space for a hundred passengers and crew A thirty-foot smokestack, tall enough so that smoke and embers belching from its wood-fired engine blew harmlessly away, above the heads of first-class passengers enjoying the promenade deck.
Captain William Craig had the final word on hiring crew and he shook his bearded head in dismay when he saw Tom and Leonard.
“If I wasn’t so short of men I’d never take you two,” he said. Tom, who’d always been ready for a second slice of his mother’s pie, had a plump, apple-cheeked look about him. Leonard, in contrast, was so thin he might have been an icicle in the last stages of a March thaw.
Feeling reduced to the level of awkward adolescents, Leonard and Tom were put to work pushing wheelbarrows of hardwood up the gangplank and into the Australasia’s boiler room.
The ship was to sail for Collingwood at one-thirty. Its boilers would need a ton of wood for the return journey, six hours each way. The chief fireman, Harold Dorsey, warned Tom and Leonard of the need to maintain a steady supply of steam to power the ship’s twin paddlewheels, one on each side of the vessel.
“Keep your eye on the steam gauge. When she falls below the blue line, pour on more wood, boys, or we’ll end up a drifting hulk out there somewhere around Christian Island.”
Leonard found the heat in the furnace room almost unbearable. He felt light-headed and staggered with each armload of wood he carried from the hold. Tom had promised it would be a hard and dirty job. The heat and smoke escaping from the firebox drove all other thoughts from his mind. Grab the wood, heave it into the inferno, slam the fire door, stick your head outside for a breath of fresh air. It took every ounce of his energy to stay on his feet.
Leonard had been aboard only a few days when Harold Dorsey sought him out. He had a warning for him.
“There’s all kinds of queers on these lake boats. If I was a good-looking young man like you, I’d carry a knife. Let those bloody hermaphrodites know you’re not one to be interfered with.”
“I’ve had no trouble,” Leonard answered.
“You will, mark my word.”
That night, Leonard told Tom about the warning.
“Don’t listen to that shit,” Tom said. “Else you’ll never make no friends on these boats.”
Leonard forgot the warning as his muscles firmed and his waistline tightened while he heaved wood and tended the Australasia’s boiler. He relished Captain Craig’s slow and careful navigation of the channel off Manitoulin Island and through the shoal-infested St. Marys River into Lake Superior. The insatiable maw of the furnace was less hungry and Leonard was able to catch his breath and look out at the shoreline.
Days of smooth midsummer sailing left Leonard unprepared for the rough waters that autumn winds brought to Georgian Bay. Storms blew up quickly, lashing the deck with rain as waves tossed the Australasia in and out of troughs forty feet deep. He learned what sea sickness meant. It was not until well into his second season that Leonard became accustomed to the torment of rough water. All around, ships were getting into trouble, running aground on shoals, or sinking in bitter storms, sometimes with all hands on board.
As treacherous as open waters, Leonard learned, were the frequent fights among dockworkers and boatmen. He saw black eyes and broken noses aplenty in the saloons he frequented with Tom. Leonard avoided barroom battles but Tom, with a shorter fuse and more likely to object to some slighting remark, incurred the wrath of one of the meanest men on the docks. His name was Orville Compton and Leonard thought him a big sonofabitch, as ugly as he was ill tempered.
Leonard blamed himself for their fight in the saloon at the Georgian Inn. It had been his idea to stop there – the grungiest of the four in Damnation Corners. Tom had wanted to go straight on to supper. They were on their first ale when Compton came by and asked Tom who his “girl friend” was. In a minute, Tom and Compton were struggling on the floor. Both were bloodied – Compton from a lost tooth and Tom from a cut nose and a black eye. The fight surprised Leonard. Tom and Compton had gotten on well before that night. Leonard couldn’t understand why the two were now such enemies.
Leonard extracted the truth from Tom during a long night of drinking. Tom had refused that night to go with Leonard to Branningham Grove, the famous whorehouse run by old Meg Matthews. “Guess you still don’t like girls,” Leonard said. “Come to think of it, you and that Orville Compton were pretty friendl
y there for awhile. What happened?”
“I went too far with him once,” Tom admitted. “You know what I mean. After that, he wanted me to be his boy. But I didn’t really like him. I told him to bugger off.” Leonard remembered their night in the forest long ago. He and Tom had kissed. Leonard worried that it was his fault that Tom liked being with men.
On payday, Leonard put a five-dollar bill in an envelope and addressed it to Rosannah in Eugenia Falls. He enclosed a note giving his address, and asking her to write to him. No answer ever came, and Leonard sent no more money to her.
On an afternoon in their second summer on the Australasia when it was Tom’s job to push wheelbarrows of hardwood up the gangplank and into the boiler room, Leonard noticed Orville Compton had come on board. He led a gang of dockworkers who were hoisting kegs of cargo onto the main deck. Leonard was piling Tom’s wood into orderly rows when he heard a shout, “Watch out below.” Then he heard the dull thud of a heavy keg hitting the gangplank, and the sound of wood being shattered. A short, sharp scream was followed by a loud splash, and then silence.
Leonard rushed to the door of the boiler room. The gangplank lay twisted and smashed and the wheelbarrow was on its side, partly in the water. Leonard saw Tom trapped under the wheelbarrow. His body was crushed and bleeding.
With the help of Chief Dorsey, Leonard managed to drag Tom up the broken gangplank and into the hold. Tom’s eyes were open and seemed to be focused on some distant object. Leonard wrapped his arms around him and felt for a heartbeat. “Get ashore for a doctor,” he shouted to Chief Dorsey.
“I don’t think there’s any need of that,” Dorsey said. “Can’t you see, he’s dead?”
“He’s not dead, he can’t be,” Leonard protested. He put his ear to Tom’s chest. Hearing nothing, he began to massage his chest. “Tom. Keep breathing, don’t die on me.”
“That’ll do you no good,” Leonard heard a voice say. It was Captain Craig. “Here now, let me get you out of this mess.” Leonard moaned and muttered, but allowed himself to be dragged out from under Tom. He sat stunned and silent, his face and chest smeared with blood, as two of the crew carried out Tom’s body. Others began a cleanup of the mess and started hammering together a new gangplank.
“We were loading ten barrels of steel rods,” Captain Craig said. “The cable snapped. Nobody knows why.”
Was it an accident? Or the result of a murderous jealousy? Compton said he had no idea how the cable had come loose. Leonard had not forgotten Harold Dorsey’s warning and he sought out the chief fireman to ask him what he thought had happened.
“I knew something bad was going to come of your friend’s foolishness,” Dorsey said. “I’ve seen it before. I had a brother who went that way. Dead now, too. I always wondered if there was something deep inside him that made him turn the way he did.”
It was left to Leonard to put Tom’s body on the train for home. Dispirited, he felt Tom’s death had been his fault and he wondered whether he should stay on the boats. It worried Leonard all that week, and for long after. He was alone and was sorry he’d not made friends of the other lake sailors. He wrote a long letter to Tom’s parents. He told them how easily Tom had made friends but remained silent on their son’s choice of companions. Leonard had not been able to stop from sobbing as he wrote the letter. When he pasted the one-cent stamp to the envelope, he felt his head begin to clear. He realized that writing the letter had been a kind of catharsis that helped ease his guilt. Leonard decided there would be no more running away. Not from his memories of Rosannah, not from the stupid mistake he had made at the Globe, and certainly not from the boats.
Chapter 13
THE STORM
September 7, 1882
Captain Craig eyed black clouds scudding across the horizon when he docked the Australasia in Owen Sound a little before noon. Weather permitting, he was scheduled for a return run to Collingwood later in the day. Below decks, Leonard Babington looked out a porthole and saw trees on shore bend and break as they were buffeted by the wind. All afternoon, he waited for word from the engineer to throw more wood onto the fire, now banked and awaiting its chance to flare into life. Just before supper, an order came down from Captain Craig: “Cancel the sailing, boys. It’s too damn rough to go out there tonight.”
The storm raged that night and then all day. The Australasia was riding easily at anchor the next morning when Captain Craig received orders to make his run to Collingwood. The return trip was uneventful and they were back in Owen Sound when Leonard heard a commotion on deck. He found the first mate and the engineer crowded into the pilothouse. Captain Craig had news for them. Reports were coming in of ships damaged and lost. A telegraph gave them details of the sinking of the S.S. Asia. She’d left Owen Sound about midnight and was known to have floundered in mountainous seas. The telegraph said a single lifeboat had carried the only two survivors, a teenaged boy and a girl, to shore. An Indian found them and took them to Parry Sound in his canoe. One hundred and twenty-three passengers and crew had drowned.
“Damn shame,” Captain Craig declared. “Bloody want of judgment, leaving port in the face of that storm.”
The sinking reminded Leonard of the risks of boating on the lakes and he thought of his parents and how they would have worried about him. He went to the telegraph office and sent them a wire to say he was safe. He felt relieved he’d done the right thing.
As the Australasia was getting up steam the next morning, a messenger came aboard with a telegram for Leonard. He opened the neat buff envelope and read with shock and surprise:
THOUGHT YOU HAD DROWNED. FATHER INJURED. COME HOME. MOTHER.
On the train that afternoon, Leonard wondered what had happened to his father. In a silent Vandeleur Hall he found Erasmus in the back bedroom, heavily bandaged and lying on his back, a light blanket covering an emaciated frame. He thought his father had shrunk, he looked so vulnerable and helpless. Leonard sat with him all afternoon and into the evening. When Erasmus opened one eye and saw Leonard beside the bed, a slight smile crept across his lips.
“I prayed you’d come,” Erasmus whispered. “We were blasting stumps. They told me you’d drowned. It shocked me pretty bad. I didn’t pay attention to what I was doing.”
“That’s all right, father. You need to rest now. Don’t worry about a thing.”
“Promise me you’ll stay for good,” Erasmus pleaded.
“Hell, Father, I can’t guarantee that. But Mother and I will look after you.”
Leonard left the bedroom and found his mother in the kitchen. “How in the world did he blow himself up?”
“Erasmus always hated that job, dynamiting stumps. It was so dirty and dangerous. They were out there when Jamie Ross showed up from the Henderson store. He said they’d had word the Australasia had sunk. All aboard supposedly lost.”
She turned her face away and wiped her eyes with a towel.
“Erasmus must have been so shocked he forgot what he was doing. Sam Mellon was helping him. He says Erasmus just stood there. He forgot he’d lit a fuse. When the dynamite went off, he was standing right beside the stump. It threw him over on his back. Tore an eye right out of his head.
“It wasn’t until Dr. Griffin got here that we found out it was all a mistake. He said it was the Asia, not the Australasia, that had sunk. He laughed and laughed. Told Jamie he would have to examine his ears.”
Leonard returned to his father’s room. He was feeling even more gloomy, convinced that what had happened was not his father’s fault, but his own. His father had always been afraid something would happen to Leonard, but it was Erasmus who has come close to killing himself.
Leonard saw a tear trickle down his father’s cheek. Erasmus tried to speak but his words were no more than a whisper. “Tell me you forgive me, Leonard, for trying to keep you home. I’ve loved you more than life itself.”
“I know, Father, I know.” Leonard let his head drop into his hands. He had no doubt his father loved him. He realized
their struggle was borne out of his father’s wish to mold him into something Leonard could never be.
Sitting with his father, Leonard thought about why his parents had chosen to abandon the England of Queen Victoria and settle in this isolated corner of Canadian backcountry. He remembered having long talks with his mother, and one day having come across a stack of letters packed away in a trunk. Between what he’d been told and what he read, he gradually assembled the true reason for their having come to Vandeleur.
Bit by bit, the story emerged that Erasmus, scion of an eminently respectable family in Derbyshire, knew that as a younger son he could never inherit his father’s estate. He had the choice of two occupations: the clergy or the army. Neither appealed to him. While he contemplated his future, he enjoyed carousing with friends in the pubs of Derby and gambling at the tables of the Erewash Club. He took a wife, the estimable Esther Brandreth, a pretty girl who knew much of literature and poetry but little of homemaking. They would have lived splendidly on her income had Erasmus’s gambling debts not risen to more than five thousand pounds.
“We have decided you must go abroad,” Erasmus was told. “You can count on receiving an annual remittance. I have arranged to clear your debts, but you must never return to England.”
“Father, you can’t do this to me,” Erasmus protested. “I will lose Esther. Honest to God, I’ll never gamble again.”
His father insisted that all the arrangements had been made and that nothing could be changed. Erasmus was given a choice between Canada and Australia. He chose Canada, thinking, as he one day confessed to Leonard, that because it was closer, he would stand a better chance of some day returning home. On a spring day in 1852, Erasmus and Esther, who had agreed to stay with him and take their chances in Canada, sailed for Montreal. They were on their way to the Queen’s Bush in Canada West where a grant of fifty acres, once part of lands inhabited by the Ojibway Indians, had been secured for them in the Township of Artemesia, County of Grey.