by Cecily Ross
Seeing Moodie again after so long set up a confusion in me that I cannot explain. How do I feel about this man whom I have promised to honour and obey? Whose children I have borne? With whom I have shared everything?
The sight of him riding up to the door a week ago, his short legs straddling the broad back of the sturdy chestnut cob he had borrowed from Baron de Rottenburg, made me want to laugh and cry together. The children ran to meet him at the edge of the clearing, and he pulled all three, Kate, Dunnie and Donald, up in front and behind him, the accommodating horse making no complaint about the additional passengers. They trotted toward Johnny and me, a squirming mass of shrieking delight. I laughed at the touching spectacle of a family reunited, and tears of pent-up anxiety flowed then like poison from an infected breast.
Moodie brought with him the best possible news: he is to be sheriff of the newly formed Victoria District, taking up his post this fall. We are to move to Belleville as soon as he has found suitable lodgings and we can sell this godforsaken farm.
Strange, now that it has finally happened, I am more wistful than elated. It is what I have dreamed of for so long. And yet, and yet . . . something in me is broken. I cannot find complete joy, not even in this, only a lightness in my chest like the emptiness that follows a long crying jag.
Moodie seems oblivious to my reserve and dances and plays his flute like the benevolent pied piper he is, enveloping us all in a cloud of unconcern, concocting grandiose schemes for our future as civilized gentle folk, raising the spectre of riches and the certainty of unalloyed happiness forever and ever amen. I do not contradict him; there is no point. Marriage demands much in the way of self-suppression and tolerance. I am learning. His worst qualities are also his best. It is mostly a matter of perspective.
The only blemish on the happy complexion of our reunion was the absence of Addie. The morning after he got back, Moodie rode to the Hagues’ to claim his estranged daughter, who on her return greeted her poor relatives with all the condescension and contempt of a little duchess. I have missed my noisy harridan terribly these last months, but absence creates a kind of forgetting. I was soon reminded what a stubborn and wilful wee thing she is. Moodie adores her.
“I will not let her go. She reminds me too much of you, Susanna.” I scoffed at this, but I know there is more than a little truth in it. Addie is like me. Too much. Not enough. Is that why we clash so terribly? Do I inflict a hatred of myself upon her? I only know how glad I am to have her back.
The alteration in our fortunes has changed my husband. The pall of failure that has clung to him these last few years, a cloud I was barely aware of until it lifted like mist in sunlight, is gone. He stands straighter, is quieter, less irritable and defensive. In the darkness, his ardour is undiminished, but his advances have acquired a forthrightness that was not there before. He comes to me now almost defiantly. In the light of day, his affection is full of good-natured teasing, friendly condescension, manly superiority. Our marriage is a conspiracy of all we have shared. We are as loving as stablemates, grateful for the warm bedding and the nosebag full of oats.
But last night, lying together in the darkness, we were equals. “It hasn’t been all bad, Susie. Remember that.” I nodded. And then he whispered into the night, “‘Our hut is small, and rude our cheer, / But love has spread a banquet here . . .’ You wrote those lines.”
He could not see the astonishment on my face.
“Yes,” I said, “my poem ‘The Sleigh-Bells.’” Moodie quoting my poetry?
“There will be more. Much more,” he said. It was an acknowledgement. He was saying he has heard me, that he sees me as I am.
This morning, I watched him ride away again, back to Belleville. His absence is nothing now that I know it is nearly over. In three months, as soon as the snow comes and the frozen roads can bear the load, we will slide out of these woods like sleepers slowly waking from a dream.
OCTOBER 11, 1839
It must be the time of year, the gold-and-bronze haze, the cool rippling air, the hush of autumn. They fill me with an invigorating sadness. I go about my daily routine with a lighter step, seeing everything—this clearing, the cabin, our shining lake—in a new way, already bathed in the forgiving glow of nostalgia. I will never forget these years of hunger and drudgery, of cold and despair. I will not forget them, but perversely, I will clothe all the misery and wasted anguish, every crust of coarse bread and scrawny chicken, in a fine, soft mantle of wistfulness. Already, I anticipate the way it will all blur into the misty realms of good times past. But I must harden myself; I must not be seduced by the ameliorating effects of time. I must remember it as it really was.
The harvest has been indifferent. It does not matter. The farm is sold—to Reverend Wolseley. It is as though an iron yoke has been lifted from my shoulders. I do not have to care. There is corn enough and wheat to last until the snow falls. We will eat the seed potatoes and the chickens. I have sold the plough, the hoes, the axes, the livestock to the reverend. We are starting over: a new place, a new life. A life I can scarcely contemplate.
When I imagine myself in the society of town people, the picture will not coagulate. In my mind’s eye, there are my new neighbours, turned out in frock coats and gowns, in polished boots and lace caps, smooth-cheeked, bright-eyed, hands soft and composed, voices measured and polite. But I am not among them. I am crouched on the staircase with Kate, watching the festivities, clad in a thin nightgown, shivering. It has been eight years since I danced, since I tasted champagne, since I sparkled in the diamond light of clever banter. I am old now, and I have forgotten how to be among people such as I used to be. I have seen another kind of life, and it has changed me in ways I will not fully comprehend until I behold myself in the mirror of their civilized eyes. I do not relish the idea.
Today, I took my little Johnny (walking already, though he is less than a year old; a sweet, happy soldier, he is the finest of all my children with his blond curls and ready smile) and walked down past the cedar swamp to where the Chippewa have been camped all summer. I brought a few old pots, a child’s sled, one of my hand-painted fungi, a broken mirror. Mrs. Peter accepted these paltry cast-offs with gratitude. Standing stiffly, my shoulders hunched inside the entrance to the low-ceilinged wigwam, I explained as best I could that we would be leaving soon, moving away to the place of many houses by the big water. A murmur radiated like a rising breeze through the gathering of women and children sitting in the shadows. Mrs. Peter stepped closer and pulled me into a tight embrace. She smelled of animal fat and mint. It was the first time an Indian had ever touched me, and I did not flinch as I surely would have when I first came to the backwoods. I felt as sad then as I have ever felt at leaving friends. A small entourage rose and escorted us back to the clearing, and we shed many tears before they finally turned and silently made their way back along the narrow path to the lake’s edge.
OCTOBER 17, 1839
I have just returned from visiting my sister at Ashburnham. Whatever happens now, at least Kate and I have made our peace. I think finally we have learned to understand one another without judgment.
The Traills are renting a modest frame house in the village, and although it is small, they and the four children seem comfortable enough. It has a mature orchard and Kate has planted a large garden, which she says yielded enough carrots, potatoes and turnips to see them through the winter. They have about thirty chickens.
Sam dropped me off on his way to Peterborough, saying he would return the following day. He even managed to coax a reluctant Mr. Traill into accompanying him on his errands, leaving Kate and me alone for the last visit we may have for a long while. It is the first time since becoming a mother that I have been away from all my children for more than a few hours—and Johnny barely a year old. The sensation of being without them was odd at first, like venturing outdoors wearing only a petticoat. I kept hearing their voices on the wind, feeling the tug of their little hands on my skirts. But as the hours passed, I grew
accustomed to an old lightness of being that I had completely forgotten since becoming a mother.
My sister’s two youngest were quite ill with a recurring fever that Kate says they can’t seem to shake, and James (six years old already) has a persistent eye infection, so a lot of our time together was spent nursing the babies. I didn’t like to say anything because she is so proud, but I wonder if any of them is getting enough to eat. They have only Mr. Traill’s half pension, which, as I well know, is not enough to live on. The village school she started in September in her front room was suspended after only a few weeks because Kate was too ill to teach. Ever cheerful, she says she has managed to earn a few dollars for her services as a midwife, successfully delivering her first baby last week. She also anticipates a lively trade in selling herbal remedies for every physical complaint known to womankind. She is working on another book, for which she has high hopes. And then there’s the egg money.
But it is obvious that Traill has no prospects, that his despair is slowly sinking them all, and that Kate herself is weak from the relentless chores and sleepless nights caring for her children’s constant illnesses. A whiff of destitution hangs over the household. And, she told me with somewhat forced enthusiasm, she is pregnant again. There was some part of me that wanted to admonish my sister for finding herself in such circumstances, as though I myself have never been in dire straits. But then, after we had settled the children briefly and I made her a cup of the tea I had brought with me, Kate let fall the scrim of optimism that persistently blurs the facts of her life.
“I feel as though I have failed, Susanna. I thought if I worked hard and believed, I could overcome anything, that I could coax wheat from the stony soil, that I could put light back into my husband’s eyes. But I could not.” There was resignation in her voice, and I thought this might be a good thing, that by acknowledging her limitations she might begin to find a way around them.
“Acceptance is not necessarily defeat,” I said.
“Is that what you have done, Susie? Accepted defeat?” “Oh, Katie, I don’t think I ever expected to win.”
She smiled. “You were always like that. Certain everything was hopeless.”
“But it’s not, is it?”
“I was just going to allow that you might be right.” She smiled at the irony in that.
From the other room, a child began to whimper. Kate took a deep breath and started to rise from her chair. Had it come to this, our roles reversed: me full of hope for the future, Kate cast down? I wanted to say something to cheer her up. Me.
“I have tried so hard to love this country,” I said. “I felt I should. But you really do. And slowly, your vision is becoming mine.
“To you,” I continued, “everything is a garden. But to me . . .” I struggled to find an apt analogy. “It’s mostly bush.”
“Can’t it be both?”
“A bush garden?”
At this, my sister sat back in her chair, and we laughed together, laughed hard enough that for a moment or two we drowned out the baby’s cries. She pulled herself to her feet. “Promise me one thing, Susanna. Promise me you will write about all this one day. The truth. Beyond wildflowers and bread recipes. It needs to be told.”
The next day, while Sam quieted a team of horses eager to be on their way, my sister and I embraced briskly. Her composure had reasserted itself—a skiff of ice on a still pond, brittle, beautiful. For once, I found this reassuring.
“Just think,” she said, “a sheriff’s wife. “You will prosper. I know it.”
“You are home to me,” I said, and we held each other tight.
But as the wagon jolted north over the corduroy road that runs beside the rushing Otonabee, through swamps and forests linking the clearings to one another like uneven beads on a necklace, I realized that this too is home. Though I have fought hard against it, this landscape, this Canada, is part of me now. I accept it. And that is a kind of victory.
DECEMBER 12, 1839
The boys scan the raw grey skies, looking eagerly for signs of the snow that will cover the roads and smooth the path to our new life. They miss their father. His letters are full of grandiose tales of fine carriages and white horses, of shops filled with sweet buns and toys, of plank walks and milk that comes in bottles, of steepled churches and stone houses. These last, my children cannot comprehend.
“Houses made of stone? Won’t they be cold as ice?” asked Katie. When I told her that in Belleville, the inside walls of the houses are as smooth as a tabletop and covered with beautiful flowered paper or painted in soft colours, her brown eyes widened; she shook her head and placed a tiny hand on the abrasive logs that are the only walls she has ever known.
The job of sheriff is proving to be a snake pit, but one my husband relishes. “The battle lines are immutable,” he wrote. “Reformer or Tory. Nothing in between. Choose your pistol and fight to the death. But I will not take sides no matter how they tighten the noose. A sheriff must be as neutral as he can be. Dear God, it won’t be easy.” And then: “If we have another son, we will call him George Arthur. What do you think?”
I fill my days sewing proper school clothes for the children from the bolts of cloth Moodie has sent. And I wait.
DECEMBER 31, 1839
Today, Sam and I loaded everything but the beds onto two sleighs. The frozen roads, bare and rutted, are still impassable except on foot or horseback. When the weather turns, my brother and James Caddy will drive the children and me and old Jenny to meet Moodie. Sam was quiet as we worked. But after he had tightened the last rope holding the contents of my life in place, he looked up at the brooding late-afternoon sky and shivered. “Not long now,” he said. He was about to mount his horse, then he stopped and grinned. “I nearly forgot.” He came back and put his arms around me, kissing the top of my head. “I’m proud of you, Susanna. You almost did it,” he said, swinging into the saddle.
“Did what?”
“Learned to see in the dark,” he said.
It was my turn to shiver. Those amber eyes. A little longer and these woods, they might have become me. But not now. I am already gone.
And as I watched him ride away, it began to snow.
AFTERWORD
Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna Moodie’s account of her life in the backwoods, was published in London in 1852, twelve years after she and her family moved to the town of Belleville on the shores of Lake Ontario. The book was an immediate success and brought her fame (if not fortune) during her lifetime, on both sides of the ocean.
While life in town was easier than farming in the wilderness, the Moodies’ troubles were far from over. A sixth child, George Arthur, died within weeks of his birth in the summer of 1840. The following winter, the house they were renting burned to the ground. Although, happily, another son, Robert, was born in 1843, tragically just one year later, Susanna’s favourite of all her children, six-year-old Johnny, drowned in the Moira River.
For the next twenty years, the Moodies’ lives were caught up in the partisanship, political infighting and social machinations that characterized Upper Canada at the time. And the couple was chronically in debt.
John Moodie retired as sheriff of Victoria County in 1863. He died six years later, aged seventy-three, leaving Susanna bereft emotionally and with no means of support. She spent the remaining years of her life moving between her son Robert’s home in Seaforth, Ontario, and her daughter Catherine’s in Toronto. She never returned to her native England. In 1885, Susanna Moodie, her mind ravaged by dementia, slid into a coma and died. She was eighty-two. Her beloved sister Catharine was by her side.
FACT AND FICTION
As nearly as possible, this fiction is consistent with what we already know about Susanna Moodie’s life, both from her letters and novels, particularly her most famous work, Roughing It in the Bush, and from the extensive research of historians Michael Peterman, Elizabeth Hopkins and others. I am inexpressibly grateful to Charlotte Gray for her wonderful 1999 biography of
Susanna and her sister Catharine Parr Traill, Sisters in the Wilderness. That book is the essential inspiration for this one.
However, in the interests of fashioning her life into a compelling narrative, I have taken some liberties. There is no evidence, first of all, that Susanna kept a diary. As well, her encounter with Mary Shelley is completely fictional, but also, I believe, entirely plausible, since they were close to the same age and living in London around the same time.
In the interests of economy, certain individuals who played a role in Susanna’s life do not appear (James Bird and Emma Bird, George Seaton, for instance). Others are composites: Thomas Harral is a composite of several publishers and editors who mentored the Strickland sisters, and Chief and Mrs. Peter stand in for the many Chippewa who helped the Moodies survive. Their daughter Ayita is a fictional character. I have included just six of the steady parade of servants and hired hands who came through the Moodie household over the years, but there were many more. And in the soul of Hector the dog reside the loyal hearts of many other canine friends.
Susanna wrote two slave narratives, those of Ashton Warner and Mary Prince. Only the latter is mentioned here. There were two terrible cabin fires that the Moodies survived; I have written about only one. And I have filled the many gaps in what we know of her life with imagined incidents too numerous to mention here.
While it goes without question that John Moodie was the love of Susanna’s life, I have characterized the couple’s years in the wilderness as the test they surely would have been to any marriage. I have also cast Susanna’s relationship with Emilia Shairp as embodying the type of close friendship that I imagine would have arisen in such difficult circumstances. And I have portrayed Susanna’s connection to her beloved sister Kate as fraught with the inevitable tensions that I know from experience can arise between sisters. The same applies to her feelings about her second child, Agnes.