During all these troubles, Susanna learned a powerful lesson. Although she was not nearly as popular in the settlement as her sister, her neighbours rushed to help her. A wealthy and childless young Scots woman, Mary Hague, realized that five-year-old Agnes was getting on Susanna’s nerves with her constant singing and screaming, so she swept her off to her own house in Peterborough and kept her for the rest of that year. Aggie was soon skipping around in new shoes and a pretty dress, showing off newly acquired reading skills and visiting her mother only reluctantly. Susanna admitted to John, “My heart yearns for my poor noisy little pet,” but she was relieved to have her off her hands. Another neighbour, Hannah Caddy (mother of James, who had given Bond Head’s proclamation to Sam), took four-year-old Dunbar for a few weeks. Susanna’s friend Emilia Shairp, with whom she had walked to Dummer, moved into the Moodie cottage to help Susanna through her own sicknesses. And often, when the Moodie pantry was bare, a silent Indian would slip out of the woods and leave a brace of duck, or a haunch of venison, on the doorstep. “They [were] true friends to us in our dire necessity,” Susanna would recall in later years.
Common humanity, Susanna realized, was a far more attractive and useful quality than the class consciousness she had brought with her from England. “You must become poor yourself before you can fully appreciate the good qualities of the poor—before you can sympathise with them, and fully recognise them as your brethren in the flesh,” she wrote in Roughing It in the Bush, primly adding, “Their benevolence to each other, exercised amidst want and privation, as far surpasses the munificence of the rich towards them, as the exalted philanthropy of Christ and His disciples does the Christianity of the present day.” Never again would she bad-mouth Hannah Caddy, she promised John, for being a common old fusspot: “She is really a most generous affectionate woman, and I begin to be very sorry that I ever suffered my prejudices to overlook her real merit.” In Belleville, John worried incessantly about his little family and fretted about how he could ever repay so much kindness. “My Dear you quite distress me with the accounts of the kindness of my neighbours…. These things are enough to make me bankrupt in gratitude.”
The Traills did as much as they could for Susanna during these difficult months. But they had their own problems. Catharine had just had her fourth child, a second daughter she named Annie, who was a sickly baby. Thomas was nearly at the end of his tether, because he had been unable to follow John Moodie’s lead and secure a an officer’s commision in the Peterborough regiment. His creditors were pressing him for payment, and he was desperate to sell his farm. But land values had collapsed after the Rebellion. Susanna told John that she thought poor Thomas had “been treated very ill. I hope poor things they will get something soon.” The previous December, trying to help her brother-in-law in the same way that, she presumed, she had helped her own husband, she had written to Sir George Arthur, explaining that her sister’s circumstances “so nearly resemble my own that we may truly be called sisters in misfortune.” She reminded the Lieutenant-Governor that Catharine had done the colony a great service by encouraging immigrants with her “cheerful volume,” The Backwoods of Canada. “The work, which has brought great emolument to the publishers, has done little towards administering to the wants of the poor Author, who is struggling in the Backwoods with four infant children and contending with difficulties which would scarcely be credited by Your Excellency.” But still no appointments or commissions came Thomas’s way.
Perhaps Thomas Traill wasn’t offered a job because the threat of war had passed. Perhaps his age and his reputation as a thinker, rather than a doer, worked against him. Perhaps knowledge of his incapacitating depressions was now widespread. Susanna reported to John that her brother-in-law was “in wretched spirits.” As Catharine, almost single-handedly, kept the household going, she looked around desperately for a way out. She knew her husband could not take another year in the backwoods: they must move into a town, where he could mix with other educated gentlemen and perhaps secure a government job. When a newly arrived Anglican priest, the Reverend Henry Hulbert Wolseley, put in an offer of four hundred pounds for the Traill property, she urged Thomas to accept, it although it was small return for all the money they had invested. In March 1839, Thomas accepted the offer and finally escaped from the bush, and the family moved into Ashburnham, a village across the Otonabee River from Peterborough. But they still had no source of income other than Thomas’s military pension of about one hundred pounds a year, and Thomas’s petitions for an administrative appointment in the district also fell on deaf ears. Only the intercession of George Boulton, the wealthy Cobourg lawyer, prevented the bank from foreclosing on Thomas’s debts, which the four hundred pounds from the farm sale had scarcely dented.
The Traills’ move was a major wrench for both Susanna and Catharine. After five years, the mile-long path that linked their two homes in the forest had become so well-trodden that the roots of the pine trees along its margins stuck out of the ground, tripping up unwary travellers. Living as neighbours, each sister took for granted the availability of the other for casual chats and visits. “The insects were very troublesome coming through the wood from my sister Moodie’s,” noted Catharine in her journal in July 1836. A few days later she wrote, “Went up to my sister’s in the canoe. My sister gave me a nice [cranberry] pie.” Their children ran in and out of each other’s homes, and knew their cousins as well as they knew their own siblings. Whenever a letter arrived from Reydon Hall, telling of Agnes’s publications, their mother’s health or events in Southwold, the sisters would read it together over a cup of tea.
Eleven miles now separated the sisters. Weeks or often months would stretch between encounters. Indeed, for the rest of their lives they would live in different towns. On visits to each other, they could revive their old companionship. In letters, they could exchange news of their children, books and English sisters. But they never again had the day-to-day comfort of each other’s support.
In Peterborough, Catharine found someone to help fill the gap that Susanna had left in her life. She was able to resume her close friendship with Frances Stewart, the resourceful Anglo-Irish settler whom she’d met when she’d first arrived in Peterborough, and with whom she had kept up a lively correspondence about books and botany. But Catharine didn’t like to reveal to outsiders the truth of her husband’s lengthy depressions, which Susanna had seen first-hand. Catharine still loved Thomas for the gentle, graceful man he was in good times, but she yearned to have a family member close by to whom she might unburden her soul. “I seem to need some one to speak to and interchange friendly thoughts with from time to time,” she acknowledged.
The parting was much worse for Susanna, who would have to watch a stranger move into the log cabin where she had so often gone for comfort. After the Traills had piled all their possessions onto a hired sled, she wrote a poignant note to John: “The dear Traills are gone—I am doubly lonely now. Many tears have I shed for their removal, we have been on such happy terms all winter.” She had always enjoyed talking about books with Thomas, and had come to rely on his chivalry; he had been much more solicitous in hard times than Sam, her brusque brother. Whenever he’d been going into Peterborough, Thomas had checked whether Susanna needed anything. When he left Lake Katchewanooka, he brought her the stove out of the Traills’ cabin. The family “have been so kind to me, especially poor Traill. One knows not the value of a friend till one is left alone in this weary world. The poor children quite fret after their good Aunt.” But it was Susanna who longed most intensely for Catharine’s presence. Without her sister, Susanna “felt more solitary than ever” in “the green prison of the woods.”
Each month seemed to bring a new crisis. In March, the sheriff ’s officer turned up to seize the Moodies’ cattle, in payment of a debt that John had contracted years earlier in Cobourg. Susanna was both flustered and outraged. She first tried to dismiss the officer with all the hauteur she could muster by insisting (truthfully) that
the debt had been paid. When he wouldn’t budge from her doorstep, she flung a thick shawl round herself, picked up her baby and imperiously ordered the officer to accompany her to the house of her brother. Sam Strickland was a leading citizen in the area whose credit was a great deal better than his brother-in-law’s, and the officer didn’t want to offend him. So when Susanna, her spine stiff and her face flushed with rage, strode off through the woods, the officer meekly followed her across the Traill property to the Strickland farmhouse, two miles away. Luckily, Sam was home, and he agreed to guarantee the debt if the sheriff would back off for two weeks while payment was confirmed. “I hope you will lose no time in setting the affair to rights and write me as soon as possible to alleviate my anxiety,” Susanna wrote John. She was constantly being dunned by creditors. “Oh heaven keep me from being left in these miserable circumstances another year. Such another winter as the last will pile the turf over my head.”
In Belleville, John was wracked with guilt over the miseries of “my poor old widow in the bush.” He wrote: “I am grieved My Dearest to hear of your sufferings, and God knows how anxious I am that it might be in my power to relieve you from your comfortless situation.” In painstaking detail, he described his efforts to do a bang-up job on the regimental accounts, in the hopes of getting a permanent position. He continued to hope that the steamboat stock might finally increase in value, so he could get some cash for his shares. And he tried to cheer Susanna with optimistic schemes for their future. He was already planning to buy a two-hundred-acre farm on the Bay of Quinte, writing with his usual confidence, “This is the most desirable situation in Upper Canada in my opinion in every respect excepting the population which is very much disaffected.” He wrote to the Lieutenant-Governor, asking to be considered as a candidate for the newly established position of sheriff for the District of Hastings, based in Belleville. His hopes were raised when his letter was acknowledged with a promise that Sir George Arthur would consider him, “not only on your own account, but from the esteem and respect he entertains for Mrs. Moodie.” Ever the romantic, John also made the kind of gestures that always appealed to a woman who, despite her circumstances, loved pretty things. He bought her a soft woollen shawl (it cost six dollars they could ill afford). And he sent a parcel of new shoes, and bolts of fabric, so she could make their children some desperately needed clothes.
Susanna soldiered grimly on through the trials. She knew John was doing his best to get them out of the bush, so she rarely allowed the physical and emotional ordeals to trigger any reproaches to her absent husband. When the parcel of shoes and fabric arrived, she quickly acknowledged it: “You guessed the length of my foot exactly. No wonder—you know it so well, for surely if any man ever knew how to please a poor silly woman ’tis yourself.” She began to fantasize about co-editing, with John, a newspaper in a larger town: “I could take all the light reading Tales, poetry &tc. and you the political and statistical details.” Once again, her physical need for her husband ripples through the letter. “A state of widowhood does not suit my ardent affections… Oh do come soon—my heart aches to see you once again my own beloved one.”
With Catharine gone, Susanna had no one to talk to, no one to tell about how drained she felt at the end of the day. She was not the kind of woman who shared her problems with casual acquaintances. She was, however, a writer. The previous winter she had discovered that composing articles for the Literary Garland was “a great refreshment to me, instead of an additional fatigue. I forgot the hardships and privations of my lot whilst rousing into action, after long disuse, the powers and energies of my mind.” Now, during the harshest winter she would ever know, she burned to articulate her experience on paper, and explore her grief and fears within the discipline of the written word. She had to get her emotions out. So when loneliness overwhelmed her, and she felt her heart would burst with the need to tell John how she felt, she would get out of bed, light a candle and write a lengthy cri de coeur. By the time she had finished, the page would be crisscrossed with her outpourings and damp with tears. She would stare, mesmerized, at the pattern that her pen had made on the spongy homemade paper. After a deep, slow sigh, she would pick up her despondent litany and hold it over the guttering flame of the candle. The paper would blacken and flame up; then the sooty ashes would float down onto the table. With dry eyes, Susanna would return to her bed.
Only when there was a gap of more than a couple of weeks between her husband’s letters did her morale falter. She reread old letters, in which John described convivial evenings with his commanding officer, Baron de Rottenburg, at which everyone got drunk and “sundry missiles such as decanters, candlesticks, glasses &tc, were discharged.” Then her self-control broke, and the bitter reproaches erupted in letters that were sent. In July she wrote, “Surely dearest, we cannot have become indifferent to you that you should leave us in this dreadful state of uncertainty as to your plans and present situation.… Night comes, and no word from you, and I take poor little Johnnie into my arms and … bathe his innocent face with tears. Cruel Moodie, one short sentence which would tell me you are well [and] would remove this miserable state of anxiety.… While I had you to comfort and support me all trials seemed light, but left to myself, in this solitude, with only old Jenny to speak to and hearing so seldom of you makes a life a burden to me.”
John still had not secured a permanent position in Belleville, and by July, the separation had become too much for both of them. John returned home for a brief reunion, and to help his overworked wife with the harvest. But he was back in Belleville by September, desperately lobbying Baron de Rottenburg for a new position. Susanna knew that if she had to spend a third winter alone in the woods, she would go mad: “Another long separation from you would almost break my heart.” She clung to her belief that “God would provide for us, as He had hitherto done,” if she demonstrated enough faith.
Perhaps it was her faith that did the trick; perhaps it was John’s persistence. In October 1839, John wrote a euphoric letter home to tell her he had been appointed sheriff of Victoria District. “Come down as soon as I let you know that I have a house for you,” he wrote to Susanna. “I really long to kiss you all again.”
Conflicting emotions swept over Susanna as she held John’s letter in her hand. Her prayers had been answered, but she was not overjoyed. She always hated change: she had wept as she left Southwold, and she was miserable when they had left their first Canadian home, in Hamilton Township. John was always confident that every move would improve their situation, and this time, he assured her that she would thrive in the society of Belleville. But would she? She looked down at her shabby skirts and passed a chapped hand over her untidy, greying hair. During her years in the bush, she had rarely looked in a mirror. The backwoods had transformed her from a vivacious young lady into a capable, but haggard, matron. She had railed against her isolation in the bush, but now she told herself that she preferred solitude: “I did not like to be dragged from it to mingle in gay scenes, in a busy town, and with gaily-dressed people. I was no longer fit for the world.” John knew his Susie well enough to realize that she was anxious that she and her family would be regarded as ignorant yokels by the sophisticates of Belleville. He quickly sent her another parcel of fabric, so she could sew new clothes for herself and her children.
Susanna swallowed her doubts and began to organize the move. There was a lot to do, but as usual she systematically and efficiently accomplished the task. She sold their stock, implements and household furniture, disposed of the livestock and made the necessary arrangements to lease the farm and leave the backwoods. Then she and the children sat back and waited for the onset of winter. There had to be a good base of packed snow on the corduroy roads before the two sleighs that John had hired in Belleville could make their way north to collect her. They waited and waited, and no flakes fell. On Christmas Day, her eldest son Dunbar looked out the window at the bright sunshine glittering on the ice of Lake Katchawanooka and groaned, “W
inter never means to come this year! It will never snow again.”
It was six more days before a savage winter gale swept across the landscape. The following morning, Dunbar looked out at trees, lake and distant woods covered in a thick white mantle. The same afternoon, the Belleville sleighs arrived (the storm had hit the lakefront a few days earlier). Blowing on their frozen hands, Susanna and Jenny quickly loaded their belongings. In the midst of all the confusion, Sam Strickland arrived and announced that he would transport his sister and her children to Belleville in his well-sprung lumber sleigh, which meant they would have a much more comfortable journey. Susanna always relaxed around her large, noisy, capable brother. Soon they were both laughing as they watched Katie try to squeeze the old cat Peppermint into a basket. Sister and brother were convulsed when Jenny appeared, balancing on her head no fewer than four hats—a drawn silk bonnet, a calico cap, a beribboned straw sunhat and a grey beaver-fur hat. “For God’s sake take all that tomfoolery from your head,” Sam instructed her between guffaws. “We shall be the laughing stock of every village we pass through.” Faithful Jenny had stuck with the Moodies through all their tribulations, but as Susanna prepared to reenter “civilization,” the social gulf suddenly yawned between mistress and servant. Susanna sent Jenny ahead on the uncomfortable hired sleigh.
A last wave of nostalgia washed over Susanna as she took a final look back. She saw the log cabin in which she had given birth to her three sons; she gazed at the snake fence she had constructed with her own hands around her garden, and at the lonely lake beyond. She realized that her Chippewa friends had silently materialized in the clearing: with tears running down her cheeks, she kissed the women and their babies in an affectionate farewell. Daylight was nearly gone, and Sam had no time for his sister’s sentimentality. He hurried her onto the seat next to him, shot a quick glance backwards to make sure children, baskets and bags were safely stowed and gave a loud “Giddyup” to the horses.
Sisters in the Wilderness Page 16