This gives Davidson the opening he needs to raise a delicate matter. He tells them that a petition was sent to Governor Carleton, dated January 13, protesting the old settlers’ use of the marshlands and also claiming that they were usurping all the fishing on the river. The signatories described themselves as the new settlers, and among those whose names were attached were John Murdoch and Charlotte Blake.
“Are you now calling yourself a new settler, Charlotte?”
She is furious. “I did not fix my signature to that petition, Mr. Davidson. Nor did I know of its existence.”
Davidson hushes her. “I can’t imagine you would have, Charlotte, but you need to know how your name is being used in some quarters.”
After he’s gone, Charlotte tries to figure out who would forge her signature on a petition so contrary to her interests.
“I fear we now live with liars and cheats, William.”
He gives her his wariest dark-eyed glance. “Maybe it’s time to leave this place and find somewhere else to settle.”
To leave Blake Brook? Truly that is an option Charlotte has never considered.
IN SPRING, as soon as the trail through the woods is passable, she hikes to the Indian camp with baby William tethered to her back. She hasn’t been there since freeze-up. To her great surprise, she finds Wioche standing by the fire pit at the centre of the camp, as though he has been waiting for her through the four seasons that have separated them. Everyone crowds around to have a look at the boy baby—“ulbadooses,” the women murmur. Charlotte finds she can’t yet lift her eyes to meet his.
“Welain?” he asks.
“Yes, I am well,” she replies and finally meets his glance. After the ritual tea and visit with the women, Wioche suggests they walk with the baby to the river’s edge.
SETTLED ON THE BANK in a grove of scraggy pines, Wioche builds a small fire from sweetgrass and waits for the smoke to billow into smudges. She knows what will happen next and unwraps her little boy from his bunting as they sit in the sun, leaning to kiss his fat little thighs as he kicks. Wioche smiles down at the boy, then leans down to pick him up. He holds an eagle feather aloft in one hand, as he cradles the baby in the crook of his other arm, and begins the chant she knows from the bay, the same one Chief Julian sent up after Elizabeth was born. Wioche calls on the North, the East, the South and West winds, on Mother Earth and the Great Spirit to bless this child. The familiarity of the chant is comforting, but there’s melancholy too, a reminder to Charlotte that the guileless days at the bay are long gone, for the Mi’kmaq, for Wioche and for the young woman who once stayed there and is now a wife, two times over, and a mother of five.
On her way back to the cabin, she’s lost in reverie, the wafts of sweet-grass smoke clinging to William and her own tresses, the sound of the river gurgling in the patches of open ice near the shore. If the Great Spirit is watching over her as well, perhaps the ships arriving come spring will bring with them a response from her father.
WILLIAM HAS BEEN AWAY for an unusually long time. When he returns late one afternoon, she and Elizabeth are carrying supper to the table. She’s glad to see him, and very curious about what he’s been up to. But he shushes her questions. “Let’s eat, my lass, and I’ll tell you all about it after the children are tucked up in their beds.”
True to his word, when everyone but them is safely sleeping, he stokes the fire and settles beside Charlotte in front of the hearth. “There is a place called Tabisintack,” he begins. “I found it by sailing along the north side of the bay on the other side of the shoals and carrying on north where the bay runs into the ocean. You pass a collection of islands and coves that separate Tabisintack from the sea, and you think there are two rivers there, but there is only one. Funnily enough, Charlotte, the Indians call it the Taboosimgeg River, which means ‘two are here.’ It’s an easy shore to land a boat on, and there’s a point of land there that contains great marshlands for farming.” He tells her the sea is teeming with fish, great sturgeons as long as six feet, and on the meadows, geese and ducks flock in such numbers they turn the earth the colour of their feathers. “I’ve never told you this, but I have been there two or three times now. The wind blows softly, low to the land. It’s a fair place, Charlotte, away from the quarrels we know on the Miramichi.”
“I’ve heard of this place, called Taboosimgeg … don’t the Micmac have a camp there?”
“Yes, but there’s no white men there, save for a character named Robert Beck. He once was an Irish marine, who it’s said lives wild like the Indians. A story is told that he once cracked the head of an Indian, killed him on board the Viper.”
“John Blake was on the Viper that day and he recounted that tale to me himself.”
They sit on by the fire, dreaming aloud about what it would be like to settle on their own in such a place and end up discussing the troubles on the Miramichi, so brutally compounded by rum. It’s used as wages for men’s work, to trade, to warm one’s innards in the cold and to bolster bravado. Charlotte wonders if she’s the only woman on the river who has used it to ease birth pains. She has seen plenty of it at the Indian camp. Some men begin to crave it daily; others binge drink, even arriving inebriated at the meetings the settlers hold, making no sense at all when they speak. Fisticuffs are common now, largely due to rum-filled men acting out their anger and frustration.
Such talk leads to mention of one of the new settlers in particular, Philip Hierlihy, who is often in the middle of the fighting. Charlotte has met him at meetings, an abrasive man with intense brown eyes, a permanently furrowed brow and the bearing of a soldier. “He’s not so bad when he hasn’t been drinking,” William says, “but rum does light a flame to him.” Hierlihy is always raging about the unfair treatment that soldiers loyal to England got when they came to the Miramichi after the war. He resents the fact that the old settlers were granted lots with a half-mile frontage on the river, while the likes of Hierlihy have to settle for two-hundred-acre lots with sixty rod of frontage, about half the size. Then there is the issue of the marshlands—supposedly settled. But the new settlers are still determined to get their share of it.
More than two hundred souls are living along the river now. Whether rum-induced or not, the battle for the land is intensifying. Charlotte hopes Davidson was sincere when he said his task as representative was to bring order to the river. And the place called Tabisintack begins to play like music in her mind.
SHE’S IMAGINING the vast marshland and its bordering dark forest the next night as she sits by lamplight sewing. For weeks she’s been cutting and stitching together pants for the boys and William and skirts for the girls and herself. Tonight she snips pieces of embroidered cloth from her worn-out bodices and unravels wool from ragged vests to knit new ones. The children gather around and listen to the stories she tells about what ladies in London wear and how some of them turned up on the river still wearing their fancy clothes. What a sight they made.
“Old Mrs. Cort used to dress in her best silks with beautiful plumed hats and a dainty parasol,” Charlotte recounts. “Then she’d sit herself in a canoe and instruct the Indian man who worked for her family to paddle her out to meet an arriving ship.” The children howl with delight at the image. “Mrs. Murdoch, our neighbour, arrived with velvet gowns, riding habits and plumed hats as well, but she soon learned it was best to leave such fine things in her trunks.”
The children ask her how she used to dress before she came to the Miramichi. “Women were so painted and hidden behind all manner of costume for every occasion, Parliament finally passed a law against vanity,” she tells her avid audience. “They made their skin whiter than white with powdered lead, and put red paint on their lips, and used lampblack to darken their eyelashes. Don’t look at me that way, young Elizabeth. I was only fifteen years old at the time and wore no paint at all. Nanny made me write out the law into my schoolbook. Here, I’ll prove it.” She rises to retrieve the old notebook from her precious stack of reading materia
ls.
“‘All women whatever age, range, profession, whether virgins, maids, or widows,’” she reads aloud, “‘that shall from and after such an Act, impose upon, seduce, betray into matrimony, any of His Majesty’s subjects by scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanours and that the marriage, upon conviction shall stand null and void.’” The children laugh themselves silly while their usually stern mother prances about the room mimicking the ladies of London, swooshing imaginary hoops.
At bedtime, they beg for another story—their favourite tale—of Gluskap and the Boy in the Birchbark Box. “Tell us about the magic arrow,” John Junior asks pleadingly. Settling them all around her chair by the fire, she begins.
“A long, long time ago, Gluskap found a couple weeping in the woods. He asked what was wrong, and they told him their disobedient son had run away because he didn’t like their rules. He was only twelve winters old, and they didn’t know in which direction he’d gone and were worried sick that he would meet a wild animal or other dangers and be hurt or killed. Taking pity on them, Gluskap drew a magic arrow from his quiver, nocked it to the bow, aimed it skyward and let it fly. He knew that the direction in which it fell would be the way the boy fled. For seven days, he followed the arrow, sending it skyward again and again, until he sensed he was getting close to the missing boy.”
She goes on to recount the wiles of a wicked sorcerer, the moans of a pitiable old crone, the threat of a giant horned serpent and, of course, the rescue by Gluskap. Then it is time for bed. With Robert pretending to be a wicked sorcerer and Polly slithering into bed like a snake, they frighten baby William, who starts howling his little lungs out. It’s another hour before the storyteller finds quiet by the hearth. And then it’s her turn to ask for a story.
“William, tell me more about Tabisintack.”
CHARLOTTE HAS BEEN HOPING in vain that a teacher will come to start a school on the Miramichi. When one does not materialize by the fall, she invites some of the children from nearby lots to join her own four and Jimmy in her makeshift home classroom. The older children copy sonnets and poems onto slates William has fetched from Liverpool. The younger ones learn their letters and numbers. She teaches them mostly by way of story, telling about the history of the river. And Mi’kmaq tales find their way into the mix. “You wouldn’t find words such as bear, moose or Gluskap in my old nanny’s school books,” she quips to her husband. Even in snowstorms the settler children trek to the Wishart place on Blake Brook, and in such a manner the whole family staves off cabin fever that long winter.
In mid-May the next year, William sails away with a heavy load of logs destined for the sawmill started up by Benjamin Stymiest at Bettvin on the other side of the shoals. He likes the man, who came from New York with his wife and five children, chased out by the rebels. He’s one of the few Loyalists William has time for. “He wants to get a grant for his land and he won’t start the mill as a proper business until he’s guaranteed ownership of the lot. But nonetheless he saws wood for many men.” After William drops the load intended for lumber, he plans to take the prized white pines he cut during the winter on to Liverpool to sell to the shipbuilders.
A week goes by and William hasn’t returned. Charlotte finds herself glancing up the river several times a day waiting to see him sail into sight. But there’s no sign of him.
After ten days, she asks out loud, several times an hour, “Where could he be?” And soon she grows angry. “Why does he go off like this without telling me when he’s coming back?” She contemplates a dozen reasons why he might be delayed, and tries them out on Jimmy, who has his own reasons to be upset with William Wishart—he wanted to go with him, not stay back with the women and children. “He’s likely found a business opportunity. Or he’s waiting for a ship to arrive with a special cargo—perhaps a spinning wheel, such as the one John Murdoch brought for Janet. Or maybe he’s met up with his fellows from the Quebec campaign in Liverpool and they’ve lost track of time with their reminiscing. Or maybe he’s gone up again to Tabisintack. What do you think, Jimmy?”
Jimmy doesn’t know what to think, or how to answer his mistress.
When the two-week mark passes, her thoughts turn dark. “He’s fallen sick and is unable to sail. Or maybe he’s just run off, wanting respite from this crowded cabin. Maybe the ship is in need of repair and I worry needlessly.”
She’s relieved when Janet Murdoch asks her to come with her to visit the Indian camp, and on the walk there and back, Janet enumerates all the likely good reasons for the delay.
But when May turns into June, she knows something has gone terribly wrong. The children have become anxious, clinging to her as though tangled in the vibrations that are seeping out of her bones. The entire household has one eye on the river from morning to night. Polly cries in her sleep and comes into bed with her. Elizabeth tiptoes around the house as though a noise might cause them to miss the welcome sound of his return.
It is John Murdoch who finally comes to the cabin. When Charlotte opens the door to find him standing there, the crushing feeling in her chest tells her before he speaks that all the wishing and hoping and praying for the safe return of William Wishart has been for naught.
“I went myself over the shoal to Bettvin,” he begins. “William had been there to the sawmill and dropped off his timber. He was last seen sailing up the north side of the bay toward open water.”
She thinks, “He really was going to Tabisintack.”
Murdoch continues, in his softest voice. “But he did not deliver his pine to Liverpool. For these last many weeks, the boys on the ships have been keeping an eye out for him. There’s been no sign. Charlotte, we can only conclude that William is lost at sea.”
He reaches for her hands, pats them, lets go. “Charlotte, I won’t stop now. You see to the children, and I’ll look in on you tomorrow, with Janet.”
She watches his sturdy back as he strides across the clearing and into the trees. She’s shocked, surely, but didn’t she know this? William was not John, gone wandering for months at a time. Likely he wanted to revisit the place they had been talking about obsessively, to make sure it was a safe place to settle. He was probably going to bring her home some evidence that the fantasy was attainable, and became lost somehow on the way.
She closes her door and goes to sit by the fire. The younger children tug on her hands, trying to haul her up, asking that she go find William herself. The older ones remember all too vividly the last time this happened. She can see it in their faces, the scars of losing their provider for the second time in the space of two years. She gathers them around her and once again promises she will take care of them, that together the family will survive. But in her heart she protests: this can’t be true.
That night, she lies tossing in the dark. Finally she wanders out into the main room and leans to light a taper in the fire. Then she picks up her diary:
Surely we are cursed. I can’t bear thinking about what became of William. Did he struggle? Was it drowning? Did he cling to the remains of his ship hoping for rescue and die of exposure? Did he find the shore only to die of hunger or is he wandering yet? No, I have to believe he would have found his way. I hope it is the distant place of Tabisintack that he was seeking on his fateful journey and that his spirit will abide over the land that he sought.
All around me brothers, fathers and sons go to sea, some never to return. Other men are killed in the felling of a tree, or suffer the mean fate of John Blake, who died for lack of a doctor. And now it is William.
THREE MEN DEAD, twice widowed, Charlotte now has five children, two lots of land and the determination of Job to survive her latest calamity.
William Davidson comes to the cabin as soon as he hears the terrible news. “Aye, Charlotte, ’Tis a trial you live. It’s another husband you’ll be needing and many a man o
n this river who’d be lucky to have ye.” The thickened brogue brings the commodore to mind; this is the nearest thing to sympathy she has known and as close as a riverman can get to kindness.
But kindness won’t feed her family. The very next day, Charlotte packs her husband’s coins into her pocket and canoes herself up the river to the tilt of John Humphrys to buy Lot Fifty-three from him, assuring herself in such manner that she’ll have enough hay to feed the livestock come winter. Then she goes home to sort out her life as a widow once again.
While people all around her assume that Charlotte is as strong and sensible as she looks—and that since widows with property are a prize possession in the colony, she’ll soon have a new husband—the fact that William’s body hasn’t been found haunts her. And many evenings she walks down to the water to watch for his return, even though she knows he is not coming back.
AT A MEETING later that season called by Marston to try to bring peace between the Miramichi belligerents, Charlotte listens impatiently to Philip Hierlihy complaining again about the size of the lots granted to the old settlers. He’s an annoying bulldog, she reckons, and with a reputation for laying about with his fists while under the influence, so that no one is willing to take him down a peg. The Widow Wishart-once-Blake feels no such compunction and tears into him. “First it’s the entire river you want, Philip Hierlihy, and to be rid of us who were here first, so you puffed-up soldiers can take what you think is owed you. Now it’s the size of your plots that has got you steaming. Why didn’t you go to Antigonish with that brother of yours? You have no hold here. Spare me your British loyalty, your sense of entitlement and your high-handed attitude.”
The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor Page 27