Act of Injustice

by Argyle, Ray

  It seemed to Leonard that Esther had accepted banishment with less complaint than his father. “Splendid, just splendid,” she had exclaimed the first time she saw the Beaver Valley. She and Erasmus stood at the brow of a hill facing the Escarpment, the height of land that ran like a spine through the Queen’s Bush, all the way to the tip of the Bruce Peninsula in Georgian Bay. To the east rose a line of hills dappled in sunlight and deep shadows, their gentle shapes testament to thousands of years of glacial erosion. A vast tableland that had once been the bed of a tropical sea stretched behind them to the western horizon. At their feet lay the valley of the Beaver River, which fell over the escarpment into a deep rift at a point known as Eugenia Falls. There, joined by the waters of a smaller stream, the Boyne River, it flowed placidly north to Georgian Bay.

  Erasmus freely admitted to his son that he had known nothing of the new land of Canada or what it would take to draw sustenance from the fifty stony acres ceded to him. His remittance brought him money for the family’s essential needs, with enough left over to hire settlers to build a log cabin. Eventually, Erasmus mastered farming well enough to assemble one hundred acres that he stocked with diary cattle and planted to wheat, oats and barley. He became a devout parishioner of the Wesleyan Methodist church on the Beaver Valley Road, a stone’s throw from the Vandeleur School. Their families in England did not forget them. From time to time Leonard’s granddmother sent out fancy ball gowns that had been worn the mandatory single occasion. Esther stuffed them into a trunk and never put them on.

  At last, Leonard realized, he had begun to understand the difficult relationship of a father and his son. He noticed that his father had awakened, and Leonard began to speak now of his feelings. “Your whole life’s gone into building up Vandeleur Hall,” he said. “It’s all you cared about – the land, the crops, the house. You wanted to prove to yourself that what happened in England was something that occurred when you were young and foolish. So you tried to instill the same desire in me – to make a glorious thing of this piece of wilderness. But I was born here. I took it as I found it. It was the natural world for me – the forest, the streams, the wild animals.”

  Leonard waited for his father to say something, but there was no response. Leonard tried to explain how his thirst for fresh experience had driven him to explore the world outside Vandeleur.

  “Everyone has to find their own place. You found yours here, four thousand miles from home. I don’t have to travel that far to get to know this new country we’re building. Canada is young, not even as old as me. I’m going to grow old with it.”

  Whether it was the shock of seeing his son, of hearing Leonard’s refusal to promise to stay in Vandeleur, or simply the exhaustion of staying alive until his son had come home, the breath of life was ebbing from Erasmus. He sighed, closed his remaining eye, and let an arm slip over the edge of the bed.

  Leonard’s mother had come into the room as he was talking. She flung herself onto the bed and embraced her husband. Leonard let her cry for a few minutes, then gently raised her to her feet and took her to the big bed that Erasmus had brought from Philadelphia. He put a blanket over her. Leonard sat up most of the night, reflecting on the past and thinking of his future.

  He dreaded the funeral. “I wish we didn’t have to do this,” he told his mother. He visited the Methodist minister in Vandeleur, Richard Orgell, to ask him to conduct the service. After hearing a half hour of sermonizing on God’s will in life and death, Leonard left the manse feeling more dejected than ever. Worse than the grief he felt at the loss of his father, was the guilt that he once again carried in his mind. His thoughts were of all the slights and disagreements that had come between he and his father. He had been an ungrateful son.

  When the service began at the Vandeleur Methodist Church, nearly every pew was full. Reverend Orgell was a thin and tired-looking man and Vandeleur was his fifth or sixth charge, evidence that his spiritual skills were either very much or very little in demand. The service marched with disciplined precision, from the recitation of John 11.25, “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies,” through the singing of a hymn from the Methodist song book, and into a prayer commending the soul of Erasmus to God’s care.

  The words of the minister didn’t mean very much to Leonard. His grief had brought on disdain, not for his father but for the sermon he had heard, for the man who mouthed it, and perhaps for the church in which it was delivered. It was his father he had come to honour; nothing he’d heard bore any resemblance to the reality of the parent he’d known. He stood at the end of the service, embraced his mother, and walked out with the four pallbearers carrying his father in his coffin.

  All stood with heads bowed as the coffin was lowered into a grave behind the church. Jamie Ross, who had carried the false news of Leonard’s sinking to Erasmus, apologized for what he had done. Leonard considered that Jamie had been a fool not to have known the difference between Leonard’s Australasia and the Asia, but he saw no point in berating him. “You couldn’t help it, Jamie, you were just repeating what you’d been told.” Later, neighbours brought food to the house and everyone talked late into the night.

  Leonard did his best to help his mother overcome her worries about keeping up Vandeleur Hall. She was uncertain for the future of their property and hoped Leonard would take up where his father had left off. “Who will do the work, see the cattle are attended to, and keep us going?” Leonard promised he would not leave Vandeleur Hall without hiring all the help his mother would need. “We’ll get one of the neighbours to manage the fields and look after the cattle,” he promised. “I’ll get a housekeeper for you and I’ll try to come home once a month to make sure you’re all right. I’m really not cut out to stay and run the farm. Your books and stories have filled my head with all kinds of ideas. I’m glad they did, but I’ll never be content to live the life of a farmer.”

  Chapter 14

  THE CHRONICLE

  October 20, 1882

  Leonard Babington put the finishing touches to the death notice he had prepared about his father, shortening a sentence here and adding a word there. He kept it brief, mentioning only his father’s birth in England, his arrival in Canada, his accident, and the large turnout for the funeral. The day was pleasant and he set out to walk the mile to the office of the Vandeleur Chronicle to ask Charlie Ibbotson, the proprietor, to put the announcement in the next issue. Leonard had rarely read the local paper. He thought it a poorly printed and haphazardly edited sheet, content to record the most inconsequential of neighbourhood occurrences. The death of a prominent citizen like Erasmus Babington ranked as major news in a place like Vandeleur.

  When Leonard arrived at the Chronicle he found Charlie Ibbotson packing letters, paper, an ink well, pencils, and a printer’s apron into a cardboard box. Leonard told him he had brought in his father’s death notice. “I hope you can put it in this week’s paper,” he said.

  “There’s not going to be a paper this week,” Ibbotson replied. “Nor next week, either.” He was a little man, his head perched forward on his shoulders like a bird’s, the result of years spent brooding over cabinets of type. “These old eyes are getting too weak to read a stick of type, and I’ve been feeling poorly for about a year now. Think I’ll just close ‘er down. People won’t miss it, anyway.”

  Leonard looked around the office and tried to imagine what it had been like for Ibbotson, working here alone most of the time. He pictured himself amid the mess and disorder of this dusty office, thinking it a poor comparison with his working space at the Globe. The thought was a fleeting one, and he pushed it to the back of his mind.

  “That’s too bad, can’t you get someone to take on the paper?” Leonard asked.

  “I’d give it away if I could,” Ibbotson answered.

  Leonard decided he would take his father’s obituary to the Flesherton Advance, the paper that people in Vandeleur would read once the Chronicle stopped printing. He wished Ibbotson well and returned h
ome, intending to travel to Flesherton the next day. He arrived home in time to help his mother serve tea to Sam Bowles, a neighbour who had agreed to look after planting and harvesting and give care to the animals in return for a share of the crop. His daughter Sarah would come around every day to help look after the house.

  “The Chronicle is closing down,” Leonard announced. “Sam Ibbotson says he can’t keep it up anymore. I thought of taking it over, but what’s its future?”

  “Oh Leonard, what a wonderful idea. You must do it.”

  “I know you’d like me to stay home, Mother, but I’d have to be sure I could make a go of the paper.” They talked about it all evening. Long after Sam Bowles had left, Leonard agreed to have another discussion with Charlie Ibbotson. He found the publisher at his house on the East Back Line the next day. A deal was struck. Five hundred dollars would buy the Chronicle, assets and liabilities all in hand.

  On his first visit to the Chronicle as its new owner, Leonard reflected on how his new status would be received by people in the district, especially the Leppards. He doubted if Rosannah ever saw the Chronicle, nor her parents, either. It took him only a few minutes to make a circuit of the small office. Idly, he opened the top drawer of a wooden cabinet that stood at the back of the printing room and found it filled with a jumble of tiny brass letters. They were all mixed together, and would have to be arranged alphabetically in their own compartments. Once he got them back in order, he’d learn to pluck them out letter by letter to assemble lines of type. Old pages sat in metal frames on the printing stone. The Washington Press tucked into the corner oozed a mess of black ink. A pile of newsprint sheets gathered dust. Dust was everywhere; there’d been no rain for weeks and from the road a cloud of powdered clay arose every time someone went by. He felt as addled as the day he first went on board the Australasia.

  Vandeleur, the community served by the Chronicle, took itself seriously and its civic leaders addressed themselves to matters of the gravest import: securing railway connections, celebrating in proper manner the Queen’s birthday on the 24th of May, and delivering due respect to the clergy and to men of the law and medicine. Merchants flourished, children were educated, and politicians became entrenched. Men voted Conservative even when high tariffs pushed up the price of farm implements. When they looked for wives, they preferred girls of Protestant families with roots in the north of Ireland or the east of Scotland.

  The Chronicle occupied a decrepit shack on the Beaver Valley Road. A vacant lot separated it and the Methodist church. There was a small front office, a cubicle for the editor, and a printing room at the back. After straightening out the type Leonard began to clean up the mess of old papers and unopened mail. From the floor beside the editor’s desk he retrieved an armful of empty whisky bottles. A few people dropped in that afternoon – a man who complained there’d been no paper for two weeks, and Mr. Heard, the wagon maker from Flesherton who came to pay his advertising bill. It was from Mr. Heard that Leonard learned about the printer’s devil, the apprentice to Mr. Ibbotson. Young Tyler Thompson was a smart lad, the wagon maker said, and Leonard should get him back on the job.

  That evening Leonard saddled Sugar Loaf and rode down the East Back Line to the Thompson place. Tyler was a fair-headed, blue-eyed lad of fourteen, done with school but fed up with the Chronicle because he hadn’t been paid the past two months. “I wasn’t treated right by Mr. Ibbotson,” the boy complained. “I think I should get what’s owed me.”

  Leonard decided to be forthright with Tyler. “I need your help. Somebody who knows how Mr. Ibbotson did things.” Everything was settled in a few minutes; Tyler would get five dollars in back wages with a guarantee of a dollar fifty a week in the future, paid each and every Saturday. Tyler’s father told Leonard he could count on the boy being at work the next day.

  It took two weeks for Leonard to get out his first issue. He decided to use the time to read back copies to find out what had been happening in Vandeleur. A larger paper would never publish most of what passed for news in the Chronicle. “Somebody broke a pane of glass in the front window of Smith’s harness shop. Mr. R. Cook, agent for the celebrated Ontario Iron Harrow, has sold 25 sets of these splendid devices in Vandeleur. Mrs. R. T. Wilson has a fine brood of young Plymouth Rock chickens just hatched, the first of the season.”

  Leonard also read more serious news. The Warden of Grey County, it was alleged, had taken advantage of his office to have county workers clear brush on his property. There were several items about Cook Teets, an eccentric blind man Leonard vaguely recalled having seen at the post office. He’d been fined five dollars after Constable Field had arrested him for wandering down the Beaver Valley Road, shouting drunkenly. On another occasion it was alleged he had struck a woman he’d been drinking with at Munshaw’s Hotel. The charge was dismissed when she failed to turn up to testify.

  Many of the paper’s ads, Leonard was glad to note, were the same every week. He’d just repeat them in the next issue. That would give him more time to get out and meet folks. Munshaw’s and the Commercial Hotel in Priceville were regulars. The Vandeleur Brick and Stove Works had a nice ad that ran every week, as did the butcher, Joseph Greene, and the Union Carriage Works from Markdale. Then there were the “national” ads that came from Toronto: “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. A positive cure for all those painful complaints and weaknesses so common to our best female population.”

  Within a few days, the office had been cleaned up and Tyler had explained Mr. Ibbotson’s routine in getting out the paper. Ads had to be collected, news gathered, stories set into type, and the old press had to be wiped down before it could be trusted to churn out another issue.

  Leonard soon realized Tyler knew much more than he did about getting out a paper. One night he dreamt of dropping the page forms and scattering type all over the floor. He’d struggled that afternoon to put letters in his typestick and it took him hours to fill half a column. It was a far cry from the Globe, where he’d simply handed his copy to an editor; he’d had only to write clearly so the typesetters would not make errors. And there was the matter of printing the Chronicle. He knew he needed more help than Tyler could offer, and he went looking for it.

  If Leonard needed a reason to take his mind off Rosannah and her baby, he found it in his new adventure as a country editor. The logical place to recruit someone to help him get out the paper, Leonard thought, was another newspaper and so he went to Flesherton where he introduced himself to Andy Fawcett, the proprietor of the Advance. Fawcett, a curt and unsmiling type, told Leonard he knew of a printer who had come to town looking for work. He had no need of him, but he thought Leonard might find him across the street at the saddler’s shop. “Goes by the name of Harte,” Mr. Fawcett added.

  The man Leonard encountered at the saddler’s shop looked about forty years old and was well dressed, with a slight smile on his face, as if to indicate he was a friendly type. But what Leonard mostly noted was his height – over six feet – and the lanky way he stood waiting to be recognized as someone important. More like a banker than a printer.

  “Charles T. Harte at your service,” the man said when Leonard introduced himself. With that pronouncement he chuckled slightly. Leonard took it as further evidence of the stranger’s desire to demonstrate a good nature. He explained he had just taken over the Vandeleur Chronicle and he needed help to get out the paper.

  “I’m a journeyman printer,” Charles Harte told him. “I did two months subbing at the Owen Sound Advertiser and now I’m on my way to Cleveland. Vandeleur, you say? I wouldn’t mind seeing your village.”

  Leonard realized he was talking to a tramp printer, one of the thousands of wandering craftsmen who worked their way from paper to paper and print shop to print shop, often riding freight trains to their next destination. He’d heard of such men at the Globe although George Brown would never hire any; he preferred men with family obligations and liked them even better if they were in debt.

  The
most valued possession of the tramp printers, Leonard had heard, was their membership card in the International Typographical Union. Most drank hard liquor and enjoyed life to the full. Harte, Leonard was to learn, was no exception. Leonard agreed to pay him five dollars a week, supply him with at least one bottle of whisky, and give him a bed in the hired man’s cottage at Vandeleur Hall.

  Harte proved to be a skilled typesetter and a proficient pressman. He worked with lightning speed to collect letters from the type case, assemble them into lines in a composition stick, and gracefully transfer the column into the forms that made up each page. Leonard worked alongside him, at one tenth the speed. Harte showed Leonard how to tighten the quoins that held the type in its page. “It’s like your mother’s clothes pin,” he told him, demonstrating how to use a key to tighten the grips. Then he inked the form with a roller, laid a sheet of paper on it, and tapped it firmly with a wooden mallet to produce a proof for Leonard’s inspection.

  During that first week, Harte lectured Leonard on the ways of business he’d observed in the dozens of places he’d worked. Leonard asked why, with all his skills, Harte had chosen to roam from town to town.

  “The freedom. I ship my stuff ahead by express, put on my oldest clothes, and go down to the rail yard for a free ride to the next town.” He said he stayed away from women – they only tied a man down. He found a change of scenery a welcome relief when he ran into bad conditions – places filled with lead fumes from a hellbox of discarded metal, or where the smell of urine, sometimes used to clean the presses, got into the pores of anyone who stayed in one place too long.

  “A printer’s life can be rough” Harte said. He claimed to have watched Mark Twain almost get himself crushed when Twain worked on his brother’s paper in Hannibal, down in Missouri. “Flywheel flew off the press. Just missed Mark, and smashed a hole in the wall straight into the tavern next door. Brother decided to put a door where the hole was. Wouldn’t have to go outside for a refreshment.”