By Ebenezer’s time the families lived in real cabins, with a cavity for a root cellar, a stone fireplace, floors of hewn planks, and furniture of a sort. Roads had been opened and covered bridges thrown across rivers and streams. There were grog-shops, saw and grinding mills, general stores, a doctor (struck off the register in Montreal) who could be sent for, churches, newspapers, a whorehouse, and plenty of homebrew whisky. But some things remained the same. For six months the settlers endured isolated and savage winters, enlivened only by the occasional brawl or suicide or axe-murder. They stumbled out of bed at four A.M. to tramp through the snow to milk their cows. Then there were spring floods and black flies and mosquitoes and work from sunup to sundown, and after that the accounts to be done. Usually they were obliged to plant late, because the fields were frozen hard as cement until the end of May. Often they never got to harvest what they planted, because there was an unseasonal hailstorm or the frost struck late in June again, or the fierce summer sun withered the corn in the fields. Idiots and malformed children were plentiful in villages, where marriage among first cousins was the rule rather than the exception. The women who didn’t die in childbirth were old before their time, what with all the cooking and canning and sewing and milking and churning and weaving and candle-making. The men who rose before dawn to clear their poor hilly fields of rocks and stumps and tend to their crops and livestock had to start chopping winter wood in May. The harder they worked, the deeper they seemed to sink into debt. No wonder, then, that they welcomed a prophet who offered them an end to the only world they knew.
Brother Ephraim, consulting with the Reverends Litch and Green, went back to his calculations, leaning heavily on the Book of Daniel, and came up with a brand new date, March 1, 1852, which was happily not too far off. Yet again he exhorted his flock to cleanse itself. So more Millenarians signed over their holdings. Neglecting their farms, they flocked into the Magog Town Meeting Hall once more and were stood up once more. A headline in The Townships Bugle ran:
HUNDREDS IN TOWNSHIPS ARE PLUNGED INTO DIFFICULTIES
Brother Ephraim set a new and irrevocable date: February 26, 1853. More property was signed over. While the Millenarians were preparing for the World’s End, however, a twice-disappointed, despondent Ebenezer Watson slid back into drinking, clearing the kitchen shelf of his wife’s supply of the Rev. N.H. Downs’ Vegetable Balsamic Elixir, highly recommended for the cure of neuralgia, rheumatism, headache, toothache, colic, cholera-morbus, and diarrhoea. Once again Ebenezer became a fixture at Crosby’s Hotel.
“Hey, Eb, when you get there if there are no blizzards or bankers or pig shit, would you be kind enough to drop us a note?”
Understandably fed up with ridicule and impatient for the end, Ebenezer one morning consumed a jug of homebrew, donned his ascension robes and climbed to the roof of his barn. At exactly twelve noon he jumped, heading for heaven solo. He didn’t make it. Instead he fell, slamming into a boulder jutting out of the snow, dying of a broken neck.
Ebenezer left his wife and six children no more than the original eighty-acre farm, which, through a fortunate oversight, he had neglected to sign over to the Millenarian Trust. And that night, even as the Watsons grieved, lakeside residents were wakened by the yapping of dogs. They figured that Brother Ephraim was going out to check his traplines on the Cherry River, but he was never seen in Magog again.
Ascension, without Brother Ephraim, was not going to be much fun, so only seventy-odd Millenarians turned up at the Town Meeting Hall on February 26. When they were grounded for a third time, they turned on the Reverends Green and Litch. Both men of God were beaten and tarred and feathered and then driven out of Magog on a sled. News of the swindle was reported with glee in the Montreal Witness, the writer enjoying a good laugh at the expense of the yokels. The next thing the dispossessed Millenarians knew was that three middle-aged strangers, obviously men of substance, came all the way out from Montreal. The strangers put up at Magog House, keeping to themselves, whispering together. They ate dinner with “Ratty” Baker, the local banker, studying surveyors’ maps and consuming a good deal of wine, especially the plump, red-faced fellow, a lawyer.
The next morning the Millenarians were invited to a meeting by the lawyer, who offered to represent their interests in court, saying it was a dead cinch he could recover their property. Pausing to sip from a sterling silver flask, he assured them that they were looking at a grandson of a tiller of God’s green acres himself. He understood what land meant and how it got into a man’s blood. Often, he went on to say, even as he argued a case successfully in the supreme court of the land, he wished he were back on his grandaddy’s farm, cutting hay, the sweetest smell in creation. But even before he began talking nonsense to them, Russell Morgan, QC, just wasn’t the sort to gain the Townshippers’ confidence. He wore a beaver coat and spats and sported a silver cigar cutter, riding a big bouncy belly.
“Yeah, but if you got our land back the mortgages would come with it you betcha.”
“No, sir,” he said, refreshing himself from his flask. Before quitting town Ephraim Gursky—for that, he told them, was the Hebrew scoundrel’s proper name—had paid off all the mortgages with gold nuggets the size of which the bank had never seen before.
The lawyer’s two confederates, Darcy Walker and Jim Clarkson, seated at the back of the hall, immediately grew restive. One of them pulled out an enormous linen handkerchief and did not so much blow his nose as honk it. The other one banged his cane against the plank floor.
“Mind you,” Russell Morgan, QC, added hastily, betrayed only by a rush of blood to his jowls, “Gursky certainly didn’t find those nuggets in Township streams. He brought them with him.”
“He wasn’t a Hebrew,” a boy called out. “He was a Four by Two.”
“That happens to be Cockney argot for Jew, young fella, and Ephraim Gursky is one of the worst of that nefarious race. He is not only wanted by the police here, but also by the authorities in England and Australia.”
A murmur rose among the Millenarians, a murmur that a gratified Russell Morgan, QC, took for outrage, but was actually prompted by naked admiration.
“No shit!”
“Tell us more.”
“Ephraim was transported from London, England, to Van Diemen’s Land in 1835, a forger of official documents. The rest is understandably murky. We don’t know how he came to this great land of ours.”
“What would your services cost us, Mister Man?”
“Why not a penny, sir.”
“We may be stupid,” Abner Watson said, “but we ain’t crazy. How much?”
Russell Morgan, QC, explained that if he lost the case, which was unthinkable given his brilliant record and fabled courtroom eloquence, then his services—much sought after, he needn’t point out—would come to them pro bono publico.
“Come again?”
“Free”
But if he proved to be their saviour, all the timber land adjoining the Cherry River—including mineral rights, he put in quickly—would be signed over to him.
Once saved, twice shy, the Millenarians began to walk out one by one, drifting over to Crosby’s Hotel. Watching from a window, they saw Russell Morgan endure a tongue-lashing from his two confederates, one of whom actually reached into a pocket of Morgan’s beaver coat, yanked out the sterling silver flask, and flung it into a snowbank. As a contrite Morgan retrieved his flask, “Ratty” Baker rushed up, said something, and the three Montrealers immediately set out for Sherbrooke. On arrival, they repaired to the bar of the Prince of Wales Hotel, and there they discovered a short fierce man with hot eyes and an inky black beard drinking alone at a table in a dim corner. They did not so much approach the table as surround it.
“What can I do for you, my good fellows?”
Morgan wagged a finger at him. “You are Ephraim Gursky!”
The fierce little man, his eyes darting, tried to rise from his chair but was quickly knocked back, wedged into place, the three men ha
ving joined him at his table. Morgan, charged with glee, took his time lighting an Havana, watching the little wretch begin to sweat. Cornered, they were all the same. That lot. Laughing aloud, his belly bouncing, Morgan blew smoke in his face. “I am trying to decide,” he said, “whether to escort you back to Magog, where you would undoubtedly be hanged from the nearest tree, or whether I should show you a modicum of Christian charity and merely hand you over to the authorities. What do you think, Hugh?”
“Oh, heavens, what a conundrum.”
“Please,” a tearful Ephraim whined just before he slumped forward in a faint.
The waiter was hastily summoned. “I’m afraid,” Morgan said, “that our companion has overindulged himself. I assume that he is a guest of your establishment.”
Darcy retrieved the room key from the desk and the three men, supporting Ephraim between them, led him back to his room, dumped him in a chair and slapped him awake.
“Well, my little man,” Morgan said, “I’d say, not to put too fine a point on it, that you are a rat caught in a trap.”
Darcy began to go through Ephraim’s suitcase. Hugh searched the bureau drawers.
“What little money I’ve got is under the mattress. You can have it, if you let me go.”
“Now isn’t that rich, boys. He takes us for common thieves.”
“You are obviously gentlemen of quality. But I don’t know what you want with me.”
“Possibly we wish to buy your illicitly gained properties on the Cherry River.”
“They’re worthless, sir.”
“Oh, why don’t we just take him back to Magog and be done with it?”
Ephraim watched, his eyes bulging with anguish, as Darcy pulled out a heavy pine chest from under the bed. “It’s locked,” Darcy said.
“The keys, Gursky.”
“Lost.”
Morgan dug the keys out of Ephraim’s jacket pocket.
“I collect rocks,” Ephraim said. “It’s a passion of mine.”
“That’s rich. That’s very rich. I should tell you that Mr. Walker is a geologist, and Mr. Clarkson a mining engineer.”
The pine box unlocked, the rock samples lay bare.
“You will find a gold nugget or two in there,” Ephraim said, “but I swear they do not come from any creek near here.”
“Where from, then?”
“The north, my good fellows.”
The men passed the rocks from hand to hand.
“You can beat me,” Ephraim suddenly lashed out. “You can turn me over to the police or take me back to Magog to be hanged, but unless I’m offered a fair price I will not sign over deeds to properties that took me three long years of hard work to accumulate.”
THE MILLENARIANS, their properties lost, were in a hallelujah mood. Brother Ephraim, who had promised to save them, had been as good as his word so far as they were concerned. No sooner did the snows melt than most of the dispossessed packed their wagons and headed south. Free free. Free at last. Free to put the unyielding wintry land behind them. Some struck out for Texas, which they had read so much about in dime novels, but others made it no further than the “Boston-States”, where eight years later a few accepted money to replace rich Yankees in the Union Army.
One of the volunteers, Hugh McCurdy, had been related to Strawberry on his mother’s side. A letter of his survived on threecoloured newspaper from a Magnus Ornamental and Glorious Union Packet. It had been written on the eve of the battle of Shiloh, where McCurdy fell, and one night Strawberry brought it to The Caboose to show Moses.
Dear Bess,
Bess, there is grate prospect of my Being Called into Battle Tomorrow—And for fear of it and not knowing how I may come out I will incloes 15 dollars and in Cayse of my Being Short of Money, which I may be, I will rite you if Necessary. You better give Father the little pocket Charm in Cayse only if its necessary. Tell Amos to Be a good boy and take Care of him Self, and I advise him as a Brother never to inliss for this is not a place for him. Tell Luke to Be Contented where he is and never to inliss and Battle all day. Bess! will you kiss little Frankie for me for I may never have that ocasion to do so my Self. I don’t think of Enything more very important. This is from Your Dear Husban,
HUGH MCCURDY
The next morning Moses had hiked to Strawberry’s house on the hill and together they had rooted through an attic trunk, surfacing with other intriguing items, among them a traveller’s account, from an 1874 issue of Harper’s Magazine, of a trip through the Lake Memphremagog country following its short-lived mining boom. “From Knowlton to South Bolton extends a wilderness. Small bears have been seen, foxes are often killed and the trout brooks yield up their treasures. From there we moved on to Cherry River. Gold was once thought to be abundant in the streams feeding the Cherry River, a Magog banker having displayed several large nuggets as evidence. But sadly for the many investors in New Camelot Mining & Smelting this turned out not to be the case. Therein, however, lies a tale. We sought out Sir Russell Morgan at his Peel Street residence in Montreal, the proud family coat-of-arms emblazoned over the portico. We hoped Sir Russell might enlighten us over what still remains a subject of some controversy. Unfortunately, he was unavailable.”
New Camelot Mining & Smelting was the rock on which three considerable Montreal family fortunes were founded, that of the Morgans, the Clarksons and the Walkers. The mining stock, originally issued at 10¢, soared to $12.50 before it crashed. Radical members of parliament called for an inquiry at the time, arguing that Morgan and his partners had sold before the bubble burst, but nothing came of the protestations.
Sir Russell Morgan, in his privately printed autobiography, A Country Gentleman Remembers, dwelled at length on his progenitors, whom he had no difficulty tracing back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, even though—or just possibly because, some wags ventured—surnames had not yet been introduced in England. But he devoted only two paragraphs to the short, febrile life of New Camelot Mining & Smelting, the company he had founded in partnership with Senator Hugh Clarkson and Darcy Walker, MP. The three of them had been misled in the first place, he noted, by an Israelite renegade who had assured them that the hills were veined with gold. He deeply regretted that many investors had endured a beating. Mining, alas, was a risky business. Mind you, he added, he had never heard so much as a peep from the many more who had made money trading the stock or from those who had profited on his later ventures, but—he reflected—c’est la vie, as our charming habitant friends are so fond of saying.
Two
Hungover, unable to concentrate, Moses reckoned the day would not be utterly lost if he put the books in his cabin into some kind of order, beginning with those scattered on the floor. The first book he picked up was The Unquiet Grave; A Word Cycle by Palinurus. “The more books we read,” it began, “the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked!”
Well, flick you, Cyril, Moses thought, flinging the slender volume across the room and then, because he held Connolly in such high regard, promptly retrieving it. There was a Blackwell’s sticker on the first page and a notation in his own handwriting: “Oxford, 1956.”
That, of course, was the year Moses caught his first glimpse of the fabulously rich Sir Hyman Kaplansky, seated at Balliol’s High Table, chattering with two of the most tiresome of the dons. Several weeks passed before Moses ran into Sir Hyman again, this time in Blackwell’s bookshop, a malacca cane tucked under the old man’s arm. Sir Hyman introduced himself. “I read your essay on Yiddish etymology in Encounter,” he said. “Excellent, I thought.”
“Thank you.”
“So I hope you won’t take offence if I point out a small error. I fear you missed the mark on the origin of ‘kike’. Mind you, so did Partridge, who cites 1935 as th
e year of its first usage in English. As I’m sure you know, Mencken mentioned it as early as 1919 in his American Language.”
“I thought I said as much.”
“Yes. But you suggest the word was introduced by German Jews as a pejorative term for immigrants from the shtetl, because so many of their names ended in ‘sky’ or ‘ski.’ Hence ‘ky-kis’ and then ‘kikes’. Actually the word originated on Ellis Island, where illiterates were asked to sign entry forms with an ‘X’. This the Jews refused to do, making a circle or a ‘kikel’ instead, and soon the inspectors took to calling them ‘kikelehs’ and finally ‘kikes’.”
Another month passed before there came the summons from Sinai.
“There’s no accounting for taste,” Moses’s history tutor said, “but it seems that Sir Hyman Kaplansky has taken a fancy to you.”
Sir Hyman, the tutor explained, was a collector of rare books, primarily Judaica, but also something of an Arctic enthusiast. He owned one of the largest private collections of manuscripts and first editions dealing with the search for the Northwest Passage. A Canadian university, the tutor said, McGill, if memory served, had asked to exhibit his collection on loan. Sir Hyman acquiesced and now required somebody to compile a catalogue. “I imagine,” the tutor said, “that you could manage the job nicely in a fortnight. He will pay handsomely, not that you were about to inquire.”
On his next trip down to London, Moses made directly for Sam Birenbaum’s office in Mayfair. Sam, overworking as usual, if only to prove himself to the network, had barely time for a quick pint and shepherd’s pie in the pub section of the Guinea. Then, back at the office, he had the librarian feed Moses the thick file on Sir Hyman.
Solomon Gursky Was Here Page 19