Lot Five was officially granted to Elizabeth and Duncan on May 4. The pair and their children will travel with them and take a lot in Tabisintack, but need to return to the Miramichi before winter and stay there until their lot can be sold. The prospect of this separation from her mother, possibly for all of the long winter, sends Elizabeth into heart-rending tears. Charlotte is amazed by what a sentimental woman her first-born has become.
John Blake will stay behind to protect the ownership of the three family lots on the Miramichi but will take a lot at The Point as well and begin clearing it that fall in order to claim ownership. Polly and Duncan McCraw will also take a lot, but they too must stay behind on Lot Seven until it is sold.
That leaves seven children, only two of them over the age of ten, and Charlotte and Philip as the first occupants of the house at The Point for the winter, but the entire clan will make the trip to settle them in.
The next item to calculate is the livestock. David Savoy is turning out to be a veritable font of information. He has suggested that moving the animals is not wise as the loss of animals en route—a very distinct possibility, given their means of transport—would be grave. He suggests that they leave the livestock with John, who can slaughter them just before freeze-up and transport the carcasses to The Point. Come spring they can get all the livestock they need. “Laying hens and goats for milking can be had for the winter and the trail from Negowack is well tramped for pulling a wagon,” Savoy says. Although prejudice toward the French hangs on among many settlers, Charlotte accepts David’s advice with alacrity.
They’ve decided that they will have to travel overland, a daunting prospect. But none of the clan owns horses or a wagon. Then Chief John Julian comes to the rescue—she suspects Wioche has had something to do with it. She’d always known that Francis Julian’s brother was chief of the Mi’kmaq hereabouts, and that he lived in a well-appointed camp by the forks, but she has never laid eyes on him in all the years she has lived at Blake Brook. He arrives to see her one fine late-August morning, and for a moment Charlotte thinks it is Francis Julian come all the way from the bay.
Chief John is the image of his brother—as dignified and as tall, his bronzed and angular face wrinkled with age, as she assumes Francis Julian’s would now be. Even though his power in this region is greatly diminished, he is the owner of a sturdy wagon and a team of horses. And he has an offer for the Englishwoman who takes the time to visit the women at one of his camps. In exchange for half of the hay she will harvest from her share of the local marshland, he will loan her a driver, his horses and wagon for the move. Since they will only need enough hay to feed the livestock until November, she tells him he’s welcome to half and whatever else is left after her eldest son slaughters their animals.
On the morning of September 15, dories assemble at the landing on Blake Brook to ferry their household goods to the north side of the river where they will be packed on the wagon. The loading is a sight to behold. Tables, chairs, beds and quilts; moosehide sacks of clothing, bear skins and pelts of every sort. Hearth utensils clatter along beside earthen pots that in turn bump against the prized salamander and Philip’s beer barrels. Perched on the top of the heap is Charlotte’s spinning wheel, which William Wishart had promised to procure and Philip has finally delivered.
By the time the wagon is loaded, Philip is both impatient and worried. “The horses will be dead before they can haul that cargo to The Point or we’ll be dead from waiting for them.”
Before the wagon pulls away to begin its two-day trek over the barely broken trail to Tabisintack, Chief Julian has a last word of advice for John and Robert, who are going to share the driving chores. Then he beckons to Charlotte. “Go safely to Taboosimgeg,” he says. “The Great Spirit will watch over you.” She thanks him for his kindness, and he slaps the hip of the horse and says, “Siawasi.” The wagon, with the better part of their worldly goods, lurches away into the trees.
As Charlotte climbs into the dory to row back across the river, Philip wryly comments, “Well, Mrs. Hierlihy, we have the French fixing the livestock at one end and the Indians fixing the wagon at the other. It’s a fine pair of breeds you choose.”
She replies tartly, “We would be nowhere without such friends, as you know, and others around these parts are ignorant on this subject.” Then she turns her head toward the far shore, leaving her husband chuckling at her feistiness. When they land, Charlotte takes up the task of organizing the loading of the two dories and two canoes that will ferry the family to its new home.
She carries her own most precious items tied in a cotton scarf: the pins and combs, the sketch of the garden at home rolled carefully into a tube, the braid of sweetgrass now as dry as tinder and her diary and her precious books.
The departure is noisy, chaotic, joyful—fourteen of them, children, husbands and wives, crammed into four boats, paddle down the Miramichi bound for the new land. It takes six hours by water before the Blakes, Wisharts and Hierlihys are relocated at The Point. The Robertsons and McCraws are also part of the convoy that brilliant fall day. They arrive in the late afternoon and together begin the mission that has been Charlotte and Philip’s dream—to settle Tabisintack.
It’s two more nights and days before the wagon arrives like some great ship, its mast askew, sailing out of the woods and mooring its awkward, top-heavy load at The Point. All hands are employed in the off-loading. Even the little girls—Honnor now five and Charlotte Mary only three—carry parcels into the house. The bedchambers are readied, the dry cellar is stocked, the hearth is lit, and by suppertime, the family has gathered around the old table enjoying a homecoming feast. There are boiled lobsters (pulled out of the ocean right in front of their dock) and baked salmon, potatoes and string beans. And three apple-crumble pies that Elizabeth has baked. Philip opens a keg of beer for the men, Charlotte is so happy she fills a flagon for herself and her two grown daughters. After supper they all spill out to walking through the ripening garden, across the meadow to the saltwater marsh and down to the river’s edge to watch the sun set over their new lives.
Before going to sleep that night, Charlotte takes the oil lamp to the wall beside the hearth and carves Home, 1798 into the log wall. Then she goes to her bedchamber, the first room she and Philip have slept in without a child beside them. As she falls asleep, she thinks, now that we’ve truly settled this place it is finally time to pen our petition to the governor for title to our land.
THEY ALL MUST HURRY to the rhythm of autumn as it ticks down to winter. Before he heads back to the river, John treks with Robert to Negowack to fetch the laying hens and a pair of milking goats. Charlotte directs her small army to bring in the harvest. The cellar is filling with the fruits of the summer’s labour. She kneels in the potato patch, gathering the potatoes she has spaded out of the dark damp earth, keeping an eye on the direction David and Jacques came from, wanting their report about Will; vexed by the notion that there is a message she may have missed.
Philip fishes mere yards off the shore, hauling in vast quantities of salmon and cod for drying, salting and storing. When it rains, they find the leaks in the roof and chink the holes again. The wind is something they all have to get used to. It seems to blow constantly, sometimes like a whisper, close to the land. Other times it roars out of the northeast or the northwest with such force, she tells the men to examine the beams of the house to make sure it’s sturdy enough to withstand these powerful blows. They’ll be much harder indeed when they are pushing a blizzard’s worth of snow.
At the first opportunity, she rows across the river to the Indian camp and asks after Wioche. He is travelling the district, the women tell her. She knows he moves from camp to camp all the way from the Baie de Chaleur to the southern tip of Mi’kmaq territory at Kouchibouguac, but she decides this is as good a time as any to make proper acquaintance with the women at the camp. They already know her name and, seemingly, every aspect of the family’s arrival at The Point. She’s invited to consult on
the health of the pregnant women here—clearly Wioche is not the only one to have heralded her arrival. She feels like a bit of a sham as a midwife, but she knows her advice on hygiene—a sterilized knife for cutting the cord, and boiled linens for stanching the woman’s bleeding—is sound. She also has great sympathy for any woman who has survived a difficult labour, knowing how close every woman comes to death as she brings new life into the world.
In return, the women offer her advice about the climate here, which is especially harsh in winter, with punishing storms blowing straight off the Atlantic. She also asks the women to explain to her the origins of the name Taboosimgeg. The eldest among them, Akkie, says, “You must sit awhile to hear this story, Miss Charlotte.” And the other women laugh. Charlotte laughs too, expectantly. Akkie’s full name, it turns out, is Aktapaak, which means midnight, and it is obvious that she has seen many moons. Her back is bent, she has only a single prominent front tooth left and her hands are so gnarled they look like tree roots. Akkie settles a blanket around her shoulders and tucks her moccasined feet under her deerskin skirts. Then she pats the ground beside her, motioning for Charlotte to sit, and begins her tale.
“There are two stories about the origins of the name Taboosimgeg,” she says. “One from a legend, and the other from a mistake. The legend says that two chiefs fought to the death on this river—right over there by that rock that pokes above the tide.” Akkie points. “Before the Europeans came, the Iroquois Chief Gwetej attacked the Mi’kmaq chief.” As she describes the mortal combat, she gestures up the river in the direction the Iroquois came, mimics their war whoops and swings an imaginary axe, to the delight of her audience. “The head of the Iroquois chief was split in half and the rock is the spirit where he died.”
Akkie, exhausted, gestures to a younger woman to tell Charlotte the other, much less gruesome story. “When you paddle here from the ocean, you think you see two rivers,” she says. “One is only a cove, but at first you are fooled. So we call it ‘taboosimgeg’ because two are there.”
After cups and cups of tea and stories about the children, she bids them farewell and promises to visit again. “The water between us is narrow and easy to cross—in both directions,” she tells them, making it clear that she too expects visitors. But it turns out that this is the last contact they’ll have before spring.
WINTER CATCHES THEM completely by surprise. It isn’t even All Saints’ Day, the settlers’ usual measure of the end of fall, when the temperature plummets, the ground freezes and fierce cold grips The Point. It comes so fast John hasn’t arrived with the slaughtered meat from the Miramichi. It begins with a nor’easter.
At the outset, she knows it will be a three-day storm, nor’easters always are. But the intensity of this one, the sound of the rising wind and the groaning in the trees is frightful. Hours pass uneasily as they huddle close to the hearth, watching the smoke draft backward from the chimney, feeling the house shudder in the fury of the storm.
At last, the wind dies away as if whining about the demise of its strength. Philip and the boys struggle through drifts to the shore and find that the boats are destroyed, bits of slats strewn over the slabs of ice already lining the beach. What’s more, the rising tides, swelled by the northeast wind, have ripped chunks of the shoreline clean away. The embankment is gashed with gaping wounds; shredded pine trees have been cleaved from their lacerated roots and seagrass-covered hunks of earth and rocks as big as a child have been tossed along the frozen beach.
Charlotte opens the hatch to the dry cellar to find the entire harvest floating in frigid, muddy water. The first order of business is to try to retrieve the soaked stores of food. Man, woman and child pitch in to carry the soggy stockpile to the hearth—the dried fish and berries, the potatoes, turnips and corn—until the whole main floor is covered with drying vegetables. The fish and berries are better frozen, Philip decides, and are buried outside in the snow. Partway through the rescue mission, Charlotte beats a path through the snow to the shed where the hens and goats are housed, wondering if they have survived the storm. Miraculously, they are tucked into the hay and still alive. She scatters extra meal and returns to the fray.
When Charlotte takes stock that first night, she knows rations are going to be meagre until John turns up with the meat.
But John doesn’t arrive. And winter doesn’t let up. It snows and blows relentlessly. The roof fails to keep the winter out; the planks are pulling apart and leaving gaps for snow to billow down on the children in their beds. They’re grateful for Charlotte’s hoarded surplus of animal skins, and tack them over the holes in the roof. The entire first winter at The Point is one of patching, calculating, stretching their supplies and trying to stay warm.
Month after month they endure endless blizzards, two more nor’easters and winds that start to play on their minds. The moaning of the creaking timbers and eerie whistling of the wind feel like harbingers of doom to Charlotte. The children can rarely get outside, she’s got cabin fever, and Philip is unrelieved of his bad temper. By February, they are reduced to bannock and tea, and salted, dried, then frozen fish cooked over the fire. The hens have ceased to lay and the goats don’t let down their milk, husbanding their energies to stay alive in the cold.
Every day, one or the other of them wonders aloud why John has not managed to find a way to get the slaughtered meat to them. Charlotte grows angry with him, irrationally: on some level she knows that the Miramichi must be suffering the same siege.
Then, as quickly as it caught them by surprise when it struck, winter quits The Point in early April. A week goes by with no snow.
On one bright morning, Charlotte walks out her front door, lifts her face up to the sky and exclaims, “There’s heat in that sun!”
Spring surges onto The Point, melting the snowbanks, budding the trees and warming their bones. All of them go outside at every excuse and soak up the sun like survivors. The ice in the river cracks and heaves in its springtime dance and is quickly washed out to sea.
But as much as the weather is shining upon the family, they are still desperately hungry. Charlotte is just about to lead a march to Negowack in search of food they can buy with their coin when she sees a sight nothing short of redemption. Two canoes are paddling around the bend in the river and in them are Elizabeth and Duncan, Polly and Duncan McCraw, and John Blake. They beach their boats and tumble straight into the arms of their hungry, pale, emaciated kin.
Parcels of salted meat, dried apples, fresh bread and a hefty jug of rum are opened before they’re even back at the house. Settled at the table, they all eat until they’re full, sharing stories about the brutal winter. Elizabeth sits with tears running down her face at the sight of them. “I worried all winter! We couldn’t move because of the storms on the river, but we knew they would be hitting you worse!” Several times John prepared to travel by foot, bringing what he could, but he would have to abandon the plan when yet another stormy blast hit the river. When the ice broke up in the Miramichi just yesterday, they packed all the food that would fit in two canoes and came to the rescue.
Elizabeth is very firm on one subject, despite her tears. She, for one, is not going to stay on the Miramichi for another anxious winter. Before the impromptu feast is cleared away, and the rest of the supplies are hauled into the larder, they’ve agreed that whether the lots are sold on the Miramichi this season or not, Elizabeth, Duncan and their children, along with the very pregnant Polly and her Duncan, will come live at The Point. The only one of her children who wants to stay on at Blake Brook is John, who says he will look after all of their interests there. His mother suspects it has something to do with a settler’s daughter he has been courting, but she doesn’t press the issue.
THAT SUMMER, young Robert beats his oldest brother to the altar and marries Ann Jamieson from the Miramichi, and brings her to live at The Point. Charlotte applies every ounce of fierce will to planning for the winter. They plant aiming for a surplus. They breed livestock looking to gr
ow a herd. Not willing to put her faith in the dry cellar, Charlotte herself digs a pit in the ground on the south side of the house near the river. Come fall she buries her potatoes, turnip, carrots, squash, corn in layers of dry sand and insulates them with hay from the meadow.
They now know what to expect, and they’ll all face it together. It’s the only way they’ll survive, let alone prosper.
CHAPTER 12
The Point
1802
The mystery around Will MacCulloch remains unsolved. Neither David Savoy nor Jacques Breaux can find any further trace of him, or of anyone who seems to have encountered MacCulloch after he stopped at the Baie de Chaleur. By the fire of an evening, Charlotte occasionally finds herself daydreaming scenes of reunion and forgiveness with her father, and then kicks herself for being so foolish. Never in her life has she worried about such things. The thing she loved most from the moment she stepped off the commodore’s boat was that here you could make your life and not inherit it or have to accept your place in it.
In the four years since Charlotte’s family had passed their first winter in Tabisintack, other settlers had built homesteads too. Twenty families in all, counting the farms and homesteads inland along the river. She lobbies the province to send a teacher to the new settlement and, as is her wont, makes a few enemies in the process. Though she knows that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, she can’t help but accuse the neighbours who won’t sign her petitions of neglecting their children’s future. She has always been bothered that her own children, schooled at home, have only the most rudimentary reading and writing skills. But it is the next generation, her grandchildren, she fights for now. At the supper table, she’s known to grumble: “In Frederick Town, they have a grammar school where they teach reading, writing and arithmetic and book-keeping too. Now they even have a college, which students from other areas attend. But children from here will never gain admittance because they haven’t got the proper foundation.”
The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor Page 30