by Cecily Ross
With the recent thaw, Mr. Traill visits every other day or so to see that we are all right. I’m sure my sister sends him—anything to give herself a break from the oppressiveness of his despondency, and in hopes the walk over here may raise his spirits. My brother-in-law is wretched indeed, and talks only of his wish to leave the bush. He would sell his farm in an instant, but land values have plummeted even further since the rebellion, and he speculates it is worth far less than the money he has already put into it. In this we are all similarly affected.
Kate, too, is expecting another baby this summer, her fourth. And Harry only eight months old. Traill’s mental lethargy prevents him from most heavy labour, and because, like us, they can no longer afford to pay wages, the lion’s share of the field work falls to my sister and whatever help Sam can provide. She confided in me that she does not see how Mr. Traill can endure another winter in the bush, but it is obvious she too is worn to the bone.
“A Loyal Song” has appeared in the Literary Garland. Mr. Lovell wrote to say it is the ninth reprint (!) of a poem that, dare I say it, has captured the nationalist pulse of the era. Twenty pounds it has brought me already, and Lovell has also accepted “Otonabee,” my poetic tribute to the mighty river that flows south from Lake Katchewanooka. I have instructed Mr. Traill on his next trip to Peterborough to pay the miller what we owe him, and there will be enough left over to purchase tea and sugar.
MARCH 4, 1838
Sam has brought me the wonderful news that my fungus paintings are much admired by the regimental wives living in Peterborough. These are creations of my own imagination. All winter, I have been painting birds and butterflies on the surface of the large growths that can be found attached to the trunks of the beech and maple trees. My brother has sold a few and now informs me a certain wealthy officer’s wife has ordered two dozen to send home to friends and family in England. At one shilling each, the paintings will enable me to buy shoes for the children.
A letter today from Moodie, who complains of the bad food and the prolonged ennui of military life: “Our only exercise is a leisurely stroll each morning to ‘patrol’ the shores of Lake Erie on the lookout for marauding rebels and Yankees, of which there has been no sign in all the time we have been here.”
Morale is very low, he wrote, a sure product of giving a group of restless young men little to do and not enough to eat. Rumours proliferate.
“They say Mackenzie and his rabble have headed west, determined to find new frontiers wherein to sow the seeds of their discontent. And so we wait and fulminate, growing more discontented ourselves with every day that passes.”
He relayed the news that Westminster has recalled the Lieutenant-Governor. Bond Head is being held responsible for fostering the unrest that led to the recent rebellion.
“The men here say Head and the Tories stole the election of 1836 by using bribery and intimidation,” Moodie wrote. “They say there were Orangemen running up and down the streets, crying, ‘Five pounds for a Reformer,’ and if any man blocked their way, he was knocked down.” My husband has come to see Head as an “incompetent scoundrel,” who did nothing during his tenure to encourage immigration to Canada, or to improve the lot of settlers such as ourselves.
I have written, teasing him about his newfound political views. “I do believe you will be calling yourself a Reformer before long.”
We can only hope the new man, Sir George Arthur, will prove a better governor.
After a fortnight of boiling, we have six gallons of the sweetest syrup, twelve pounds of fine, soft sugar, and six gallons of excellent vinegar.
MAY 23, 1838
The spring planting is nearly done. Jenny Buchanan’s energy is like a blast of warm air blowing us into action. Every morning, she arises in the dark, a sturdy Venus in homespun, and after feeding the livestock, stoking the fire and fetching water for cooking and washing, she rouses us to our porridge (now adorned with heavenly syrup). After breakfast, it’s out to the fields. Jenny hitches the oxen and ploughs the thin soil, while I follow, dropping seed potatoes into the carefully tilled furrows. Kate and the little boys make piles of the rocks that spring from the dirt in the plough’s wake like fish rising from the sea. Oh, that stone soup could nourish us through the winter, so plentiful are these fruits of the grudging earth. And while we work, Addie slays imaginary dragons with a tree branch or sits sulking under a bush.
Every evening, after the little ones are asleep, I do my best to produce crops of the literary kind in the hopes the effort may bring me a few extra dollars. I wish I had more energy left over to attend to Katie’s lessons. She and Addie, and the boys too, will eventually need to go to school if they are to prosper. But how? And where? In low moments, I can’t help but wonder of what benefit education will be to the lives they are likely to lead. And I confess that sometimes the sight of neatly hoed rows of corn at the end of the day arouses in me more satisfaction than a perfectly wrought line of verse.
How strange it is that since we have been apart these many months, I feel more united with my dear husband than ever before. Could it be that absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, or is it that finally he and I are united in a single purpose, and that is to find a way out of this hopeless wilderness, this unending poverty? I only know that my desire, my need for him grows stronger with every passing week. At night, alone in my bed, I weep for want of him, as though a part of me is missing and I will not be whole again until it is returned. To think that all through these difficult years, I have chafed in the harness of matrimony, like a carriage horse condemned to pull a plough. To think that in my discontent, I have been blind to his goodness, to the light that his enduring love shines on me. And now I see we are like a team of oxen, yoked forever to one another, pulling in the same direction, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. We will survive, and we will do it together.
JULY 2, 1838
I have learned in a letter from my editor Mr. Fothergill that the new Lieutenant-Governor, Sir George Arthur himself, has admired my poems, remarking that the “national enthusiasm” therein “is an elixir certain to hearten and encourage the loyalist spirit throughout the colony.” Mr. Fothergill relates that Sir George has spoken to him highly of “the Strickland sisters and their literary accomplishments” and said that he follows my career with great interest.
I am almost embarrassed to acknowledge the effect this trickle of praise has had upon me. If I had been a wounded soldier dying of thirst and someone had handed me a cup of clear, cold water, I could not have been more grateful. How pitiful that a few words of encouragement should be as nourishing to the spirit as the most lavish feast is to the body. The idea, too, that my voice has reached beyond this prison of trees and rocks and is being heard in the wider world affirms my existence as something more than a beast of burden.
It would be foolish not to take advantage of such notoriety as I have achieved, and so I have written to the Lieutenant-Governor, asking for his help. I told him about everything, all the setbacks, the hardships—the crop failures, the fevers, the worthless steamboat shares, the Yankee hucksters and recalcitrant servants. I begged him to find Moodie a civil position, saying that a gentleman of my husband’s stature is demeaned by the brutishness of this farming enterprise. I said that the patriotic poems he so admires were composed by me in a rough log cabin by the light of rags dipped in tallow, with sleeping babies in my lap.
“My children have no shoes, our clothes are in tatters, all winter long we subsist on pork fat and potatoes. If you admire my writing as much as you say, if you feel that my verses, brought forth in the midst of suffering and deprivation, have in any way contributed to order and the Loyalist cause, then I beg you to help us.”
I feel no shame in this. Desperation drives me to it.
My dearest one is coming home; he will be here to welcome our fifth child after all. His regiment has been disbanded, the danger of rebellion apparently over. The children are mad with excitement.
As joyful as I am at the thought of Moodie’s return, I wonder how we will survive without his militia pay. The thought of another winter with no income other than what little my scribblings will yield is impossible to contemplate. I pray for a good harvest, knowing even that will not be enough.
A fourth child for Kate: a little girl called Anne Fotheringhame after Mr. Traill’s first wife, who died ten years ago on this very day.
OCTOBER 20, 1838
While Moodie and Jenny manage the other children, I swoon over our four-day-old son, John Strickland Moodie, drinking him in, his downy forehead and blistered lips, his blue-veined eyelids, the labyrinth of his ears, his little fingers spreading on my breast, the unspeakably soft soles of his feet. I can scarcely explain it, but I feel in my heart that this child is destined for an extraordinary life. Last night, I dreamed he had grown into a handsome young man with dark hair and deep blue eyes. Through a cloudy window, I watched him as he strode down a twisted path away from me toward the lake. He was wearing a red tunic with gold buttons, and he said nothing, just smiled and waved. I called to him to come back, but my cries were carried away like feathers in the wind, floating upward and turning into white gulls that balanced above him in the gusty air. When I tried to run after him, my legs, leaden and inert, refused to take me, and all I could do was watch mutely as he stepped out onto the surface of the water and disappeared over the horizon.
OCTOBER 31, 1838
I had just finished tightening the lid on the last jar of pickled beets when Moodie came up behind me and, placing his hands on my shoulders, began massaging the tightness that lives there like a coiled snake.
“Well, Mother, will your work never be done? Can you not spare even a few hours for your poor neglected spouse?”
I wriggled out of his embrace, irritated at first by his playfulness when there is so much to be done—always, always more to do: carrots to dig, cows to milk, bread to bake, children to feed, clothes to mend, wood to chop. Sometimes I find myself moving through my days like an augur through a tree trunk: grim, purposeful, unfeeling, with only a dull anger fuelling the grinding effort.
And then I gave in to it; I let his thumbs knead the knotted flesh down the sides of my neck, at the top of my spine. My knees felt weak. Before I could protest, he slipped the loop of my apron over my head, took my hand and led me outside into the soft October sunshine. The day buzzed with a warmth made melancholy by the certainty of winter. A blue jay wheedled from a spruce tree. The lake shimmered in the determined sunlight.
“Indian summer. We must make the most of it,” Moodie said, pulling me toward the water. “All summer long, while I brooded over the passive, grey Erie, it was this, our little lake, that stirred my heart. Let’s go for a sail. It’s been such a long time.”
And so, leaving the babies with Jenny, we raised the canvas on our canoe and launched into the afternoon. A steady breeze blew us across water that rippled like the belly of a whale. Moodie sat in the stern, manning the makeshift tiller and handling the mainsheet, while I knelt in the bow and, bracing myself on the gunnels, leaned into the breeze. I’m sure I presented a rough-and-ragged figurehead, more crone than mermaid. We made a steady broad reach up the length of the lake to where it narrows toward Young’s Point, and pulling our boat onto the rocks, we clambered a hundred feet or so over the sun-warmed stones to the cranberry bog Mrs. Peter showed Kate last year. In less than twenty minutes, we had a small bucketful.
“Now if we only had a turkey to go with them,” I said, a gentle jab at my husband’s thus far futile attempts to bring down one of the birds. Though wild turkeys are plentiful this time of the year, fat from gorging on the leavings of wheat and oats scattered in the clearings, the ungainly creatures have an uncanny ability to fly into the tallest treetops at the merest sign they are being hunted.
“I, for one, am dreaming of your succulent squirrel pie,” said Moodie as we sat in the sun, warming our reddened feet and ankles on the limestone shelf. “Indeed,” he said, “I spied a pair of likely candidates scurrying up the hemlock by the woodshed just this morning.”
We were silent then for a while. How long had it been since we had time like this away from the children, since we were free, if only briefly, from the urgency of daily life? And yet there was nothing I wanted to say. To dwell on the past only brings on nostalgia and recriminations. To contemplate the future is to peer down a long tunnel in search of a light, and a dim one at that.
And then my husband, unable to still the writhings of his overactive mind, began relating his latest scheme, one that I foolishly thought he had forgotten. He has offered to write a book for the Texas Land Company in exchange for passage and property there. I took a deep breath.
“What kind of book?”
“Oh, you know, Susie, a book about Texas: the scenery, the climate, the opportunities there for men of action who want to prosper in America. And for every settler my book draws, of course I would receive a commission. Money I could use to buy more land to sell to other settlers.”
“But you’ve never been to Texas. You’ve no idea what it’s like.”
Moodie ignored this, waving my words away like so many midges suspended in the air. He sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees.
“I didn’t tell you because I thought nothing might come of it, but I responded to that advertisement that appears every year in The Albion, you remember.” He got to his feet. “I made an offer to Dr. Beales of the Texas Land Company: a book for land. And he has replied, Susie. With enthusiasm. I have asked for a salary . . .”
He reached out to take my hands, to pull me to my feet, but I turned away and covered my ears.
“For God’s sake,” he said. “I don’t understand you. You know what this means? We can leave this place. Start over somewhere warm, where the soil is fertile and our children will—”
I stood up and waded into the water beside the canoe. The cold only fuelled my anger.
“Do not,” I said, “do not talk to me of starting over. I will not move to Texas. A book, passage, commissions, a salary? I do not believe you.”
We paddled home in silence, and Moodie has not raised the matter since, but he spent this evening poring over the maps and pamphlets the speculator Beales has sent.
NOVEMBER 10, 1838
Texas is forgotten. A letter bearing the Lieutenant-Governor’s coat of arms and signed by His Excellency’s secretary came from Toronto today, announcing my husband’s appointment as paymaster for the militia units protecting the north shore of Lake Ontario. He will be based in Belleville! (I have said nothing to Moodie about my letter to George Arthur; a man’s pride is sacrosanct, after all. Let him strut and preen and take credit for what I pray amounts at last to a reversal of our fortunes.)
It is a temporary posting, but we have great hopes it will be extended, and surely one such posting can only lead to another. The salary is £325, which is beyond anything I could have dreamed of and gives us some hope of paying off our debts. My prayers have been answered.
We have discussed whether the children and I should go with him and have decided it would be best for us to stay here until Moodie is settled and the future more certain. Another winter alone with Jenny and the children. I have done it before; I can do it again.
Flushed with pride at his sudden elevation in status, Moodie was magnanimous with his praise this evening, confident that I will manage without him.
“I do believe that for a member of the fairer sex, your agricultural skills are quite impressive, my dear,” he said, raising a celebratory glass of rum in salute. “Even better than my own, I dare say.” He chuckled. “Though that would not be saying much for a professional soldier such as I. Farming is simply not in my blood.”
I accepted the compliment, such as it was, without comment. But the implication rankles: that my husband considers himself above all this, but that it is good enough for me. Does he think of me as little more than a common drudge? I am not a farmer either; I am a wri
ter, and though I would not dream of telling him, Moodie’s new career is a direct result of my literary efforts.
He is to report for duty December 1. So soon.
DECEMBER 25, 1838
Now, as I contemplate the possibility of leaving this place, a vein of sadness runs through me. (Sheer perversity, I know.) But this evening, this Christmas night, as Jenny and I rode home from Westove along the narrow road through the ghostly woods—the three little boys sleeping, Kate and Addie flushed with exhaustion and full stomachs, old Bones straining at his traces, eager to be home—on this night of Christ’s birth, our old sledge might as well have been the finest horse-drawn sleigh and we, ladies and gentlemen returning from the ball. A million stars danced about a gibbous moon, and the night was so still, it seemed to be holding its breath. For once I was not afraid.
Without Moodie, our feast was bittersweet. A goose stuffed with wild rice. A pudding made from currants and dried apples. And while the children—nine of them now, including the babies, Johnny and Annie—spent hours sliding down a bank of snow until their faces shone with brisk joy, Kate and I indulged in memories of Christmases past, sweet thoughts of Reydon Hall. The bitter possibility we will never return was seasoned by the firm belief that we were, at that moment, as alive in our mother’s and sisters’ thoughts as they in ours. And I truly felt, as I used to as a girl, their presence in the very fact of their absence.
Mr. Traill’s despondency worsens, especially in the wake of my own husband’s good fortune. They have only Traill’s half pension since his term as justice of the peace ended. Feeling sorry for my brother-in-law, I sat with him for a while and tried to engage him in the book talk he loves so well. But my cheerful observations about Milton’s views on republicanism were met with a faded smile. I offered to read to him from a mouse-nibbled copy of The Winter’s Tale, but he waved me away and resumed his contemplation of the fire. My sister watched, twisting her apron strings into desperate corkscrews, as I tried to coax her husband from his sorrowful fugue. Finally, she sighed and went back to her work.