That night when all is quiet on The Point, she picks up her diary:
The blackened earth is cooling now. This fire—is it man-made or God-delivered? There have been many here on this land, the Micmac, the Acadians, the French and the British. They’ve come from England, Scotland, Ireland, France and beyond, carrying their histories and quarrels and dreams. They’ve brought the religions denied them in the countries they fled, traditions they share with the people they meet, their sweat and determination to tame this wild land and make a future for their children. There’s a piece of everyplace else here—language, customs, traits, even recipes. My own hearth could be described as Acadian, British and Micmac!
There are those who see this land as nothing more than a piece of turf to own and rule and gain riches from. But for the most part, the people here are yoked to the sea, the tall trees and wild rivers, the plentiful fish and the flowering meadows.
The aftermath of the fire will be the test for everyone.
AS IT TURNS OUT, the Great Miramichi fire is a turning point for the people of New Brunswick. Faced with near ruin, they put their ploughs into the soil and till their way to prosperity. The shipbuilding industry is resurrected on the Miramichi. Enterprising young men with business plans for plants to pack and sell fish, create jobs. And the forests, their floors now fertile with post-fire ash, begin to grow again.
At The Point, the confounding mix of tragedy and blessedness is just the way life is, Charlotte thinks. Elizabeth’s Duncan drowns in the Tabisintack River, leaving her a widow with six of her sixteen children still under the age of twelve. The next year, Philip Hierlihy is married to Jane Lewis. Jane signs the marriage certificate with an X, which causes her new mother-in-law to complain once more about the lack of schools in the settlement. Her own daughters often select an X over the signatures she taught them.
Charlotte, now seventy-five, longs to see the sights her children exclaim about. But she’s tired more often than not. Even her sharp tongue has mellowed some. When William announces his betrothal to Elizabeth Johnston in June, she is actually pleased there will be a new chatelaine in her fine house. The marriage is set for November 22, and while others fuss with the cooking, she secretly makes plans for one last move.
CHAPTER 14
The Millstream
1830
A convoy of canoes paddles upriver on a particularly stunning autumn day in October 1830. James and William take the lead, with their mother, weakened by her failing heart, wrapped in blankets and cushioned in the middle of the canoe with a huge black bearskin. Her trunk is strapped to the second canoe, and draws curious glances from those on the shore, many of them her extended family.
When they round The Point, she looks out over the cultivated fields, the house in which she’s lived for thirty-two years and the water that nearly surrounds it. She can’t resist a glance to the open sea and spares a thought for William Wishart. She leans forward to tap his namesake on the shoulder and says, “I’d like for it now to be known as Wishart’s Point.” He nods his agreement, smiling back at her.
There are some rapids to be ridden about a mile before Stymiest Millstream, and as bad luck would have it, they catch the third canoe, dumping both James and Philip and all the contents into the drink. The water level is low, so the two are quickly up on their feet again, chasing baskets of clothing and the knickknacks that swirl around them on the current then snag on the rocks. “My frocks will be stiff with the brine,” Charlotte says. “But a bit of soap and water and a good breeze will make them right again.”
It takes all morning to paddle the ten miles to Stymiest Millstream, but Charlotte Mary is standing on the dock waiting when the entourage arrives as if she knows exactly when to expect them. She adores this renegade mother of hers, and is continually surprised and always amused by her stubborn refusal to kowtow to anyone. At thirty-nine, she is the youngest daughter, has a house full of children and welcomes the opportunity for them to learn at the knee of their grandmother. But she too is wondering what has propelled Charlotte to leave her beloved Point and come to the head of the tide on the river to live with them.
They off-load the canoes, laying the soggy bundles out to dry on the lawn, and settle Charlotte into her new quarters.
Despite the constant chatter of children and the hum of Benjamin’s sawmill, Charlotte tells her daughter soon after arriving, “The wind from the Point blows itself out some on its way through the woods. I find it peaceful here.”
She’s only been in her daughter’s house for a day when a canoe slips into the stream from the opposite bank and a man deftly strokes his way across the water. Wioche tells them the Indian camp on the opposite shore became his permanent home during the summer months. “I’m an old man now and cannot walk the Mi’kmaq district,” he jokes. But he can paddle a canoe and that’s what he and Charlotte do every day that the weather is fine.
“Not far, mind you,” Charlotte Mary tells her siblings. “Just a ways upriver and back. That pouch he carries—it has dried blueberry leaves in it. They make tea from the leaves and claim it eases the pain in their joints.”
They ply the waters like two ancient historians, their hair snowy white, hers fastened in a knot on top of her head, his tied in two plaits that fall over his shoulders, their faces tawny and weathered by the years of facing the elements, their eyes crinkled but sparkling yet.
“I wonder what they talk about,” Charlotte Mary muses each time the pair set out for their paddle.
IN THE DAYS after she arrives, Charlotte looks everywhere for the tattered old diary she’s kept since her nanny taught her the alphabet. She empties the trunk, where she usually kept it. Then she wonders whether it was in the canoe that tipped. She shakes out every item that survived the drenching—the dresses that have already been washed, the box with her brushes and combs—and then once more goes through the bag she had carried on her lap. But she knows, even while she rummages through her belongings, that her words are likely at the bottom of the Tabisintack River.
She sends word to William, who scours the house at Wishart’s Point to no avail. The family, duty bound to try to find the lost diary, send out the grandchildren to check the shores and scavenge the muddy river bottom. But they know before putting their paddles in the water that the precious old book is gone. Charlotte turns her thoughts to tasks that will camouflage her loss.
She spends time with Elizabeth, who has never really recovered from losing Duncan. She makes regular visits to Wishart’s Point, paddling down the river with Wioche for visits with William and his wife. But mostly she burrows in at Stymiest Millstream, and daydreams about her men, her children, her grandchildren, the ties that bind. The mighty forests and wild waters that stole her heart from the moment she encountered them, the fields she’s cleared and cultivated, the gardens that feed her flock, all tied to the story of her long pioneering life.
She remembers the trials too. The fights with the Loyalists on the Miramichi, the storm that wrecked nearly everything the first winter they spent at The Point. And she relishes recalling her attempts to outwit her adversaries—the journey she and Wioche made to Frederick Town to secure the deed to John Blake’s lot, the tumbledown shed she built with Jimmy to house a goat so that Elizabeth would have milk. The tally of her life comes out in her favour, she decides. But she has no respite from losses.
She is seventy-seven when her oldest son takes sick and dies. And for a time the loss of John defeats her. In all the years of brewing potions to nurse them through illnesses or waiting for them to return from the perils of logging, or the sea, or the hunt, she’s never lost one of them, never even come close. There’s something perverse about a mother mourning a child.
The family makes a floating procession down the river, through the sea and into the bay at the Miramichi and over the shoals to the burial ground, where John Blake is laid to rest next to his father. The very next day Robert and John’s widow, Catherine, sell part of Lot Eight to the county. It was their
father’s original 1777 Nova Scotia land grant. The deed names it as Black Brook. “It’s Blake Brook,” Charlotte complains, knowing it’s futile. The name is as lost as the man it was named for and his first-born son.
On the way back from the funeral, when they pass Burnt Church, the grandchildren in her canoe ask Charlotte how it came to have such a name. And Charlotte begins a story that isn’t finished until after the journey’s end.
“It used to be called Eskinwobudich, the Indian word for lookout. Long before I came here, when I was still a little girl in England, the village was attacked by British soldiers who wanted to be rid of the Indians and the Acadians both. They burned everything, including a stone church, the first church on the river. Afterwards, people started calling the place Burnt Church.” The children want to know why the soldiers did this. “Didn’t they like them?” Charlotte Mary’s youngest asks. Her grandmother says, “In my old trunk, I have a letter written by the colonel who directed the attack. John Blake, grandfather to some of you, was one of the soldiers in that raid and came upon the account written and brought it to me to read for him. He was a good man, John Blake, but he had some trouble with his letters.”
Back at home, the youngsters pester her to read them the colonel’s letter, and Charlotte retrieves it, fragile and sepia with age. It’s much too long to retain a child’s attention, so she scans it quickly, then selects a passage from the conclusion of Colonel Murray’s account. “This was written on the twenty-fourth of September, 1758,” she tells them:
In the Evening of the 17th in Obedience to your Instructions embarked the Troops, having two Days hunted all around Us for the Indians and Acadians to no purpose, we however destroyed their Provisions, Wigwams and Houses, the Church which was a very handsome one built with Stone, did not escape. We took Numbers of Cattle, Hogs and Sheep, and Three Hogsheads of Beaver Skins, and I am persuaded there is not now a French Man in the River Miramichi, and it will be our fault if they are ever allowed to settle there again, as it will always be in the Power of two or three Armed vessels capable of going over the Barr, to render them miserable should they attempt it.
Her assembled grandchildren are mesmerized. And little Benjamin knows just what to ask next: “Did the Indians and Acadians really go away? Uncle David is Acadian. Wioche is an Indian.” Charlotte tries to explain the history, fully aware of her own complicity in displacing both Acadian and Indian. Her whole life here, it seems, has been lived in the knowledge that everything she wished to secure for her family helped to undo the security of her friends.
The children never tire of their grandmother’s stories. When they walk with her in the winter, she tells them how the snow sparkles because of millions of crystals with different surfaces that reflect the light from the sun or the moon. And in spring she teaches them the lessons of planting. “Look, the buds on the poplars are near to bursting. When the new leaves are as big as a squirrel’s ear, that’s the time to plant the corn.”
When little Benjamin swings from an apple tree in full bloom, snapping the branch from the trunk, she reminds him, “There will be no apples on that branch come fall. You need to choose a branch that’ll hold you, so you’ll have food in the winter.”
Inevitably they ask her why she left her mother and father and came across the ocean.
“There was trouble in Britain at that time,” she says earnestly. “My father said there would be fewer opportunities for young men. People were angry and worrying. But the talk about the New World across the ocean was exciting. So this is where I wanted to be.” She’s explained herself this way to the children so many times by now she nearly believes it herself. The midnight flight from her home and the calamitous stop in the West Indies are foggy memories, overwritten with the passage of time.
She tells them about the kind of home she grew up in. “When I was a child, I was never allowed to go any place without my nurse. She was always with me. I remember my home, a very lovely stone house with a stone wall all around it and beautiful flowers and shade trees. I can still picture them in my memory. There was a sketch of the garden that I brought with me, but I fear it is lost now. Maybe it went into the river with my diary.”
SHE’S MORE THAN EIGHTY when she decides it’s time to retrieve the letter long stored in her old trunk. She dates it September 3, 1836. Then she asks the Justice of the Peace, William Ferguson, and her son James to be the witnesses when she signs, seals and delivers her will to deed all of her lands to William Wishart. No one argues. In fact, the only one who is surprised is Charlotte herself, when fall turns to winter then spring and she is still with them.
She celebrates her eighty-fifth birthday at Wishart’s Point, and an enormous crowd of well-wishers descends to honour the woman who was truly the beginning. More than seventy grandchildren, eight of them named Charlotte, and all of her grown sons and daughters but John, dead now for eight years, fete the woman who has played such an influential role in their lives. Most of the inhabitants of the now-flourishing Tabisintack settlement come to pay homage to “old Mrs. H.” The Mi’kmaq send woven baskets, a braid of sweetgrass and a fox pelt hat to keep her warm. They sing the most popular song in this settlement of Scot descendants, and when the end of the chorus—“We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne”—lifts up over The Point, Charlotte lets her gaze drift to the sea. The wind whispers through her white hair, pulling it out of the combs and blowing the strands over her face. It’s the last time she ever sees The Point.
THE WINTER takes its toll on her. Wioche, as old as she is, slides across the frozen river to sit with her by the fire while the storms outside nearly bury the cabin with snow. By the time spring announces itself, she isn’t able to leave her bed for his visits. “Tell me a story,” she asks Wioche. He begins, as he always does, with the creation myth, the one she loves best, about Gitchi Manitou sending Gluskap to Earth. About him digging holes to make valleys and piling the dirt to make mountains. As often as not, Charlotte is sleeping before the story ends.
On an early morning, April 25, 1841, when the sun is casting its glow along the river and the earth is bursting with blossoms, Charlotte Mary carries the strong black tea her mother prefers for breakfast into the bedchamber and finds her lying, eyes open, chest still. Charlotte Taylor Blake Wishart Hierlihy, the indomitable and daring matriarch, is dead.
A SERVICE IS ARRANGED for the cemetery in Tabisintack, on a grassy plain that stands watch above the river and looks out over Wishart’s Point. While Charlotte Mary and her family go ahead to the cemetery, three canoes line up at the Stymiest shore. Led by Wioche, Mi’kmaq women, wailing and chanting, gather the earthly remains of their friend, wrap her in their finest blankets and lay her in the canoe on a bed of otter skins. Then they turn to the south, the direction of woman, and give thanks to the creator for the life and good deeds of Charlotte Taylor.
“Nisgam wi la lin ugjit ula gelusit e’pit—Great Spirit, thank you for this good woman.”
Wioche paddles the canoe that carries Charlotte down the river. The women paddle on either side, chanting mournfully all the way to the cemetery where they deliver their beloved Charlotte to her descendants.
The Indians linger by the shore, as the family gathers around the grave, listening to the eulogy, the gospel reading and the singing. “Oh God, our help in ages past,” the mourners sing. “Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away; they fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”
After the last shovelful of earth is tamped into the grave, they drift away, on foot, by buggy, in boats and canoes.
The old Mi’kmaq man sits on the hill. From here he can see the mound of fresh brown earth that covers the new grave; to the east, the homestead at Wishart’s Point, now bathed in evening light; to the northwest, the sparkling river he plied so many times with Charlotte. From here he can feel the coastal winds that stirred her soul, and see the land she tried to tame.
Night settles in and birdsong announces vespers. Wioche st
ays there watching, remembering, making his farewell to the woman he has always loved, the impetuous and beautiful Charlotte Taylor. He’s still there when the moon rises and turns him into a silhouette. In the still of the night, the only sound that breaks the quiet is the song of the whippoorwill, a long, mournful call that echoes along the river, across the treetops, up to the heavens, calling, calling, again and again.
AFTERWORD
CHARLOTTE TAYLOR’S ROOTS were firmly planted in Tabusintac by the time she died. More than seventy grandchildren, eight of them called Charlotte, carried her pioneering style and her story to the next generation. Ten years after she died, on April 26, 1851, her son and heir William Wishart also passed away. Today, more than two thousand of her descendants gather every five years at Tabusintac’s Old Home Week.
I first attempted to write Charlotte’s story as a straightforward non-fiction account. I wanted to contribute to the early history of New Brunswick, as well as to augment the sparse chronicles of the women pioneers of that time. But even as I was researching, I also was caught up in the vivid reimagining of Charlotte’s life and frustrated by the missing links—I could not find out for certain how she wound up on the Miramichi or confirm the elusive relationship her descendants claim she had with a First Nations man. So I finally decided that my ancestor would have encouraged me to take liberties, crafting fictional bridges and scenes between the known facts in a historical reconstruction of her life.
We do know the names of her husbands, her children and her grandchildren—although no record was found for her marriage to William Wishart, nor a birth certificate for the child born during that marriage, William. Details about her neighbours on the Miramichi and Commodore George Walker are from archival data. So are the re-creations of the battles with the American patriots and the Indians, events such as the Great Miramichi Fire, and the petitions and land claims she sent to the government.
The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor Page 34