Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  Brent and I bailed just this way one dark evening, and when I crawled back out of the snowbank I was struck right across the side of my head by Winnie Trainor’s umbrella. She’d been watching from her kitchen window and had dressed and come out to put an end to such “nonsense.” She hit me once, twice, and as I crouched, continued to beat on my back with the big, black, still-furled umbrella, pausing only to whack Brent a couple of times as he dived and slid on his mukluks out of reach and quickly slipped away into the dark night. “Your mother is going to hear about this, young man!”

  But I was smarter than Winnie. I raced home, in tears, and immediately confessed everything before Miss Winnifred Trainor could call, naturally blaming most of the sorry episode on Brent.

  But Miss Trainor proved to be even smarter.

  The phone never rang.

  I have spent half a century trying to square the Winnie I knew slightly with the Winnie I could know even less—the young Winnie who fell in love with Tom Thomson and, I have to believe, with whom Tom Thomson fell in love. That the two Winnies seem so different should come as no surprise, as I myself am much different from who I was as a boy, when she died. I carry this image of her as dark, large, sharp-tongued, eccentric, to be feared, yet capable of great charm and surprising humour when she chose to deploy those characteristics. I have sought out the few available photographs of her as a young woman: tall, slim of waist; perfectly erect; a smile teasing her lips; high cheekbones; soft, dark eyes that seem to challenge and welcome the world at the same time, the barely tamed dark hair. There is no hurt yet in those eyes: these photographs were all taken before the summer of 1917. Yet in knowing what was to come, it is impossible to look at the pictures of young Winnie and not feel great sadness for her.

  In 1961 Winnie Trainor fell ill again and Dr. Pocock sent her to a local internist, Dr. Lynn Sargeant. Sargeant wrote to Pocock on August 16th, reporting on the health of “Miss Winnifred Trainor (age 76).” He called her a “friendly, elderly lady” who was seen in the small Huntsville hospital in mid-July. She was given a full battery of tests, and Sargeant reported back that she was overweight at 170 pounds and had a slight heart murmur but was otherwise fairly healthy. She was taking medication to control her high blood pressure and also to help her sleep. As her late sister, Marie, had suffered from diabetes, Winnie was tested and found to be diabetic as well, but the condition was nothing that could not be “controlled quite nicely” through prescription.

  In the fall of that year, a quiet burial took place at the Trinity United Church Cemetery. Little Cora Shay was laid to rest. She had been living in Chatham with her sister, Florence, and had come down with pneumonia. Nothing was said of Princess Coritta or the miniature train or the performances before royalty. Cora was described as the daughter of an original pioneer, Allan Shay. If the newspaper knew of her glorious past, it said nothing. Most likely, she had simply been forgotten.

  On March 14, 1962, my mother took a long-distance telephone call from North Bay. Her father, former chief ranger Tom McCormick, was dead at seventy-eight from a stroke. I was thirteen, perhaps the worst possible time to understand the death of someone who had always seemed so indestructible. His many grandchildren saw him as both a god and a good friend—a man who, in uniform, commanded the respect of everyone he met but who, out of uniform, had a child’s gift of absurdity. Even into his seventies, he could hike all morning through the park trails, split wood all afternoon and still be available for play in the evenings. His death stunned us all. The funeral was held at All Saints’ Anglican Church in town, and the Department of Lands and Forests sent six uniformed rangers to serve as pallbearers. They saluted his coffin. I do not know if I have ever been so proud.

  On August 12, 1962, the world went into shock as it learned that the Soviet Union had successfully launched the “Soviet Space Twins”: Major Andrian Nikolayev, in Vostok III, and Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Popovich, in Vostok IV. They were travelling so close they could see each other, the two spaceships whipping around the world every eighty-eight minutes.

  Back on earth, Winnie Trainor’s world came to a complete stop. She had suffered a stroke and been sent to the North Bay hospital by Dr. Pocock, who regretted that he could not accompany her and oversee her treatment. While there, she suffered a massive stroke and died. Again, my mother got the news by telephone. No wonder she was forever wary when answering a long-distance ring.

  What he viewed as his failure to be there for his friend continued to haunt Dr. Pocock. But his circumstances were difficult too: his wife was in the last stages of the cancer that would kill her. “Another doctor cared for her [Winnie’s] terminal illness,” Pocock wrote to me. “I have always been very sorry for the circumstances that denied me my chance to be of help to her, because I shall never forget this remarkable woman and most loyal and lovable friend.”

  “There weren’t very many at her funeral,” Jean McEown remembered. “We were pretty upset to think that for a woman who’d lived in this town for so long and knew so many people that so few would turn out.”

  The Forester ran her obituary in the August 16, 1962, edition. It mentioned her time at Huntsville Public School and at the business academy in Lindsay. She had worked as a bookkeeper at Tudhope’s grocery store halfway down Main Street on the north side, the obituary continued, and then at Stephenson and Anderson’s Store farther up the street on the same side. From 1918 to 1931, she’d worked for Shortreed Lumber Co. in Kearney, Ontario, as secretary and bookkeeper. “Her summers were spent on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park.”

  Not a single mention was made of Tom Thomson.

  Her will, dated January 2, 1957, was simplicity itself. Dr. Wilfred T. Pocock would serve as executor. Annie Winnifred Trainor left everything—Minerva Street property, Canoe Lake cottage, Tom Thomson sketches and all contents of the buildings—to her youngest nephew, Terence Trainor McCormick, then married and a college science teacher in Binghampton, New York. Provision was made in the will for an annual floral offering for the altar at All Saints’ Anglican Church in honour of her parents and herself, a tribute that continues to this day.

  Terry McCormick retired from teaching and still lives near Binghampton. It is believed he has, over the years, put most, if not all, of the inherited sketches on the market. His family continues to cottage at Canoe Lake in the old Trainor cabin.

  The settling of Winnie’s estate, however, was not as simple as she would have wished. Dr. Pocock felt he should have been included in the distributions of her property, perhaps given one of the sketches he said he could have had at any time previously. He said she had several times offered him sketches as a gift but that he’d never taken her up on the offers. He was quite surprised to have been left out of the will. He said she had not always paid her medical bills to him and so owed him money at the time of her death. It angered him that everything went to Terry and nothing to him.

  “She said, ‘Never mind,’ he told me a decade later, “ ‘even if I do owe you a whole lot, I’ll look after you in my will.’ But I guess she was too sick to ever bother. And Terence never bothered. Terence should be thankful that I did nothing to support her intention to change the will in one of her moods.”

  Upset as he was by the contents of the will, Pocock nonetheless served faithfully as her executor. The legal details were handled by Douglas Bice, Kearney trapper Ralph Bice’s son, who later became a provincial court judge. Once the bills had been paid, Pocock said, there was about $1,000 left in cash. He battled her heir for that amount, and according to Pocock, they settled for “about $500.” By the end of the proceedings, he had grown quite bitter about the financial reckoning.

  Terry gave some of Winnie’s clothing and a couple of photographs of his aunt to the town museum, and they were later switched over to the Huntsville Pioneer Village, now known as the Muskoka Heritage Centre.

  The following summer, 1963, Terry and I spent weeks cleaning out the old Minerva Street home. As previously mentioned, some of the furnitu
re was sold off but the greatest part of the contents—yellowed newspapers, old magazines, trinkets from Winnie’s few trips—ended up being taken to the town dump. We also emptied out the shed on the Centre Street edge of her large town property, known as “the barn.” Again, apart from a few keepsakes and some items taken to the town museum, most were tossed.

  The Canoe Lake cottage was cleaned up but few things from that property were thrown away. Terry, who now had the Thomson sketches, returned to his home in upstate New York and said very little in the subsequent years to those who showed interest in the Tom Thomson story and, by extension, the untold story of Winnie Trainor. When William Little was doing research, he contacted Terry, who indicated that his aunt had been engaged to Tom Thomson. He also said there were letters to prove this, but Little did not see any actual correspondence.

  In the end, we are left with an image of Winnifred Trainor that is woefully inadequate. The “Winnie Trainor” photograph that has been presented as her so many times—the one certain biographers have even used to imagine what she might have been thinking—turns out to be of some other woman we cannot trace. And where are her letters—or at least those that were not, as she said, lost in a fire? And given the times, even if we had letters, would they even hint at anything that might or might not have taken place that long winter she and her mother spent “with friends near Philadelphia”?

  What would she have said when she promised to “tell all” in that letter written so long ago to Tom Harkness, Tom Thomson’s brother-in-law and executor?

  And why did the Thomson family quickly shut her out after they had so willingly taken up her offer to arrange the exhumation? Why did the Thomsons never make an effort to contact her to discover what she had to “tell”—if only they could meet face to face? Why did some of them later feel they had to brand her as mentally unstable and invent a nonexistent “guardian” as proof of her not being in her right mind when, according to all available evidence, including my own memories of her, she remained very much in her right mind to the end of her long life?

  And beyond the Thomson family, why did the great art patron, Dr. MacCallum, refuse to listen to Daphne Crombie when she went to him knowing what Annie Fraser had told her about Tom Thomson’s demise and the possibility of a child being left behind? Why did Thomson’s artist friends, the future Group of Seven, fail to seek answers to the questions that had been raised in the Canoe Lake community from the moment Thomson’s body had surfaced? Instead, they chose to embrace J.E.H. MacDonald’s silence for one and all. They always acted as if they were protecting their friend, but it seems they were also protecting their own reputations—and in MacCallum’s case, his investments as well.

  Tom Thomson left behind few letters of his own, but he did leave us his paintings, vivid portrayals of a beauty he saw that others did not, but that now all Canadians are able to enjoy. He left behind his friends and the stories they told, as well as the ones they could not or would not tell. And he left behind a mystery that, thanks to the passage of time and the passing of all connected individuals, is more compelling today than ever.

  Winnie Trainor left behind a sad and tragic life story that can be only partially pieced together and must be largely imagined. She was the eccentric woman so many, including many of her relatives, preferred to avoid when possible. She was the lonely old woman who died alone, to whose funeral almost no one came. But she was also the young woman who might once have believed that she had everything she would ever want. And then lost almost everything. She lost the opportunity to marry and have a life she had only been dreaming of until she met and fell in love with Tom Thomson. She might or might not have lost their baby. She lost the paintings to which she might have had a legitimate claim or at least a partial claim.

  We do have one letter from Winnifred Trainor that remains to this day—containing the single most revealing thing she ever had to say about Tom Thomson and herself. Harry Orr McCurry of the National Gallery in Ottawa had contacted her, politely inquiring about her relationship with the famous artist. Usually, she would never even have acknowledged such a request, but in this case she decided to answer McCurry.

  “I do not know what to write,” she began, “as Tom Thomson was the man that made me happy then vanished. If I saw you I could say things that I will never write—His friendship to me was as true as ever when he went on to the great beyond—I still have his small pictures (gifts)—and what I gave up for him I should have had some of his others—but I was not treated fair, and had nothing to do with his death—now my time will soon be in too.”

  She never did get to say the things that she would never write.

  And yet, in this one ninety-three-word paragraph, she said it all.

  NINETEEN ICON

  “Someday they will know what I mean,” Tom Thomson said not long before his untimely death in the summer of 1917. But even in the painter’s wildest imaginings he could not have guessed what “someday” would bring.

  Perhaps no one saw the future as clearly as his sister Minnie Henry, who wrote to her aunt Henrietta Matheson, who was still living in the Thomson family home in Owen Sound, two weeks after Tom’s body had been found. “I can see you yet stroking his hair when he was only a growing lad,” Minnie wrote, “and you always had such hopes that he would do something great and as usual you were right. He not only did great things, but he lived such a big grand life.”

  Bigger and grander than even his aunt had dreamed. Thanks largely to Dr. James M. MacCallum, the self-appointed “patron” of the late Tom Thomson, sales of Thomson’s works continued on, though hardly with the wild fanfare that would mark each sale nearly a century on. “I’m only a bum artist, anyway,” Thomson supposedly once said to MacCallum, but MacCallum would prove critical to ensuring that no one else would ever dare suggest, let alone reach, such a conclusion.

  First came the buffing of the then-unknown Tom Thomson persona, and it began in the fall of 1917, when Tom’s friends constructed the cairn at Hayhurst Point and Jim MacDonald inscribed those poetic words on the bronze plaque: “… He lived humbly but passionately with the wild. It made him brother to all untamed things of nature.…”

  To those more familiar with life in the bush, Thomson would have seemed more than adequate in the wild and eager to learn, but there were others who—perhaps through envy, perhaps because they disagreed with a lifestyle that seemed to them to be based on work avoidance—openly disparaged his skills with paddle and fishing rod. My own sense is that he was just fine as a woodsman and, by comparison with others moving about Algonquin Park in those years with canoe and backpack, he was an excellent swimmer. Many park visitors could not swim at all.

  Still, there was a romancing of Tom Thomson, some justified, some strained, that continues to this day. One of the most familiar photographs of the artist—which appears on the cover of this book—is often identified as Thomson “tying a fly” when, in fact, it is clear to anyone who has done much fishing in this part of the country that he is merely attaching a heavy trout lure, known as a “spoon,” to his line. Fly fishing, with its artistic swirls and its own poetic language, is much more esoteric than simply dropping a weighted, triple-hooked, metal lure off the back of a boat or canoe and hauling it about the deep waters in hopes of a strike. Fly fishing, however, which lends itself magnificently to the cowslip-shouldered streams of Britain and the wide, shallow rivers of Atlantic Canada, is largely a futile exercise. The small hooks of flies that must be tossed back and forth would become hopelessly tangled in the tangle of vegetation that encroaches on Algonquin waterways and surrounds the deep lakes where the lake trout hide. Had Norman Maclean been writing about trolling, rather than fly fishing, in A River Runs Through It, it’s doubtful that he would ever have found a publisher—and unimaginable that Robert Redford and Brad Pitt would have turned the book into a classic movie.

  But once the wilderness hagiography of Tom Thomson was launched, it was soon set in stone as surely as MacDonald’s fanciful
words on Hayhurst Point. The rather condescending full-time guides and rangers thought Thomson showed “average” ability as a canoeist and fisherman, and this would have been a generous and inclusive compliment to a man who spent his winters back in the city. But there was never a chance that he would be regarded by most as simply average. “He knew the woods as the Red Indian knew them before him,” F.B. Houser wrote in A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven, published nine years after Thomson’s death. The myth was already well under way.

  Arthur Lismer, writing in the McMaster Monthly in 1934, called his late friend “the manifestation of the Canadian character.” A decade after Lismer’s comment was published, Lawren Harris claimed, “There was nothing that interfered with Tom’s direct, primal vision of nature. He was completely innocent of any of the machinery of civilization and was happiest when away from it in the north.” Eighty-five years after Thomson’s death, this mythology was put into perspective by artist and curator Andrew Hunter in the lavish 2002 art book, Tom Thomson, which accompanied a major Thomson exhibition presented by the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The myth, Hunter said, was so carefully groomed by all that everyone eventually bought into the notion that Thomson was “untrained, at one with nature, innocent.”

  The artistic legend had taken hold as early as 1930, when the renowned artist David Milne, himself a Canadian infatuated with the landscapes of the North, suggested that Canadian art “went down in Canoe Lake. Tom Thomson still stands as the Canadian painter: harsh, brilliant, brittle, uncouth, not only most Canadian but most creative. How the few things of his sticks in one’s mind.”