Sisters in the Wilderness (38 page)

John was thrilled with the result. “This encouraged me to try my healing powers in other cases,” he wrote in the Spiritual Album, “and I have been successful beyond my most sanguine expectations.” Catharine must have enjoyed the sensation of spiritual healing because she was soon back for more. John next relieved the rheumatism in her shoulder and arm by laying his left hand on her bare shoulder while holding her hand in his right. John healed a neighbour's chronic rheumatism by gentle manipulation of his arm, and cured his neuralgia and sore eyes through massaging his eye sockets. When his daughter Agnes Fitzgibbon arrived from Toronto with a streaming cold and congested lungs, he drew his hands
“from her ears downward to her stomach, and passed them off outward several times. She felt as if warm water were running down one side of her lungs.” She was better in no time. “I can hardly tell how many cases of bilious and nervous headache I have relieved by similar means, in a few minutes,” John recorded with delight in his album.

What was going on? A large part of John's effectiveness as a healer was probably psychological: his subjects believed that he could cure them, and every success reinforced their belief. He himself acknowledged, in one of his lengthy letters to the
Spiritual Telegraph,
that faith was an essential ingredient. It is also likely that, by promoting drainage of the sinuses or the lymph system (in the neighbour with sore eyes, for instance), John was doing some good. John himself took his role as a healer very seriously: he recorded different techniques, homeopathic remedies and accounts of his activities in his Spiritual Album. Nevertheless, news that the sheriff spent his afternoons in darkened drawing rooms, “healing” some of the town's most respectable matrons, must have spread like wildfire through gossipy Belleville. It cannot have done John's reputation much good amongst the stony-faced Tory lawyers who met on the first Monday of every month at the Orange Lodge.

John's career as a spiritual healer didn't last long. Soon after it was launched, the sisters' interest in spiritualism began to nose-dive. Perhaps it was the local tittle-tattle. Perhaps it was because the claims of spiritualists were coming under increasingly rigorous scrutiny, and the pseudoscientific claptrap became too much for Susanna's and Catharine's more mainstream, modest Christian faith. Most likely, it was because both sisters had more pressing issues in their lives: Catharine's household was already engulfed in disaster, and John Moodie's position as sheriff was being challenged. For whatever reason, Catharine decided that she had been “under some peculiar influence of Animal magnetism during my so-called medium state,” and she summoned up “the mental courage to abandon all that sort of thing.” Susanna simply turned her back on the mumbo-jumbo.

By the end of the 1850s, the Moodies had largely abandoned their spiritualist activities. John continued to keep up his album for a few months, but he didn't have the energy for frequent submissions to the
Spiritual Telegraph,
or the money for more trips to see sweet Kate Fox in New York. And his children, particularly his eldest daughter, ridiculed him for indulging in sorcery. Katie Vickers, now a member of Toronto's social establishment, disapproved of her elderly father's tactile healing activities. Several years later, she destroyed over fifty pages of John's Spiritual Album, including those (she explained) that dealt with her father's “homeopathic medical prescriptions … all of which my dear Father lived to see the fallacy of.”

South of the border, spiritualism was rapidly falling out of fashion and its practice had become decidedly tacky. Some spirits turned out to be rather opinionated, radical folk. There were mediums who claimed that the spirits believed in free love; others who insisted that they endorsed votes for women; still others through whom the spirits lobbied for the abolition of slavery. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the mania for spiritualism disappeared. In Britain, Professor Michael Faraday subjected the movement to a barrage of withering contempt in the columns of the
Times.
The eminent scientist wrote that he was “aghast at the hold which the table-turning mania had gained on all classes of society, and at the loose thinking and presumptuous ignorance which the popular explanations revealed.” He described experiments that showed that the movements of tables and the “rappings” could be produced by unconscious muscular pressures exerted by the sitters. The novelist Charles Dickens was equally caustic: “I have not the least belief in the awful unseen being available for evening parties at so much per night.”

And in October 1888, before a sold-out audience at the New York Academy of Music, Maggie Fox publicly confessed that spiritualism, as far as she was concerned, had been nothing but a fraud from the start. She demonstrated that the mysterious “Rochester rappings” had been produced by an abnormality of her big toe, which she had developed
through assiduous practice. Kate Fox, who was sitting in a box overlooking the stage, confirmed her sister's statements. Susanna Moodie had been right all those years earlier when she had divined the source of Kate Fox's rappings as the cracking of toe and ankle joints.

Chapter 16

Tottering Slowly On

A
couple of hours after midnight on August 25, 1857, Catharine woke up and smelled smoke. Her stomach twisted with fear, and she pulled herself into a sitting position as she gathered her thoughts. Perhaps she was dreaming. Perhaps it was just the whiff of a bush fire a few miles away. But a second later, she heard an ominous crackle. She shook her husband, slumbering next to her. Her voice rising with panic, she told him to get up and wake their children, who were asleep on the floor above. Hurriedly, she swung her feet to the floor, groped for a shawl and felt for her moccasins with her feet. Oaklands was on fire. Catharine knew that an old log house with a shingle roof would burn like a tinderbox.

“I had barely time to awake the sleepers upstairs, and we got out a part of our bedding, wearing apparel, a few books, 3 chairs and 3 tables before the whole house was in a blaze,” recorded Thomas in a
journal he kept intermittently. “I am so thankful that all our lives were saved, particularly our dear Walter, whose room was full of smoke when he was called, that I hardly regret what is lost. Thanks to God for all his mercies.”

The Traills watched the blaze from beyond the snake fence round the property, where they were out of reach of the searing heat. But as the flames finally subsided, the family made a pathetic sight. They stood amidst the stubble as the sun rose and illuminated the smouldering wreck of their home with the cool light of dawn. Relief that they had all survived evaporated when they realized what they had lost. Thomas's maps and prints, and all save a handful of his books, were gone; the first-edition novels of Sir Walter Scott that he had so carefully transported from home to home were now just a pile of ash. All the beds, chests and stools were charred fragments, and the cooking pots and pans were bent and blackened. Catharine had lost everything she had carefully preserved for winter: dried apples, herbs, bottled vegetables and fruit, maple sugar and syrup, wild rice, bags of flour. Most of their clothing was gone, as were their candlesticks, plates, cutlery, rag rugs and Catharine's carefully worked quilts. The Traills had lost all records of their family history: letters from England and Scotland, drafts of Catharine's published books, all the treasures—antlers, pressed flowers, fossils, squirrel skins, awkward drawings—that recorded the children's upbringing in the bush. The only batch of papers that Catharine had manage to rescue were her botanical notes on ferns, flowers, trees and shrubs.

The Traills were left worse off than when they had first arrived in the colony twenty-five years earlier: they were now both homeless and penniless. Friends and relatives came to their aid. Sam Strickland gave them ten pounds to replace household goods, and a cheque for twenty pounds arrived from Agnes for “My poor unlucky Catharine.” For a few weeks, the whole family stayed at Thorndale, a nearby farmhouse in which Clinton Atwood, the young man from Gloucestershire, was now living. Catharine looked around for a new house. “I am very desirous to procure a home before the cold sets in as I cannot feel settled here,” she told
Ellen Dunlop. But Catharine had no money with which to rent a decent property, and the Traills were forced to scatter around the region, dependent on the kindness of others. Thomas and Catharine went to stay with Sam Strickland at Lakefield. Kate, now twenty-one, and nineteen-year-old Annie, the two eldest daughters, were taken in by friends at Gore's Landing. Mary Traill, a sixteen-year-old with fragile health, was invited to stay with Ellen Dunlop. Catharine's eldest son, James, was now married: he and his wife Amelia took in thirteen-year-old William and nine-year-old Walter. Twenty-year-old Harry stayed on with Clinton Atwood.

For Catharine, the fire was simply another crisis that God would help them overcome. “We trusted in Him and were helped.” She began to plan how they might restart their lives. “If we let our farm [land],” she wrote to Ellen, “we can live at a small expence and earn something in a quiet way by needle-work and knitting, pressing flowers and other matters.” She discussed with her sister Susanna the idea of taking in a couple of boarders. But for Thomas Traill, the fire was the last straw. He tried to play his part in getting the family ship afloat again, appealing for help from his first wife's brother, in the Orkneys: “We were poor enough before but the fire has made us of course still poorer.” As the winter of 1857–58 dragged on, however, he emerged less and less frequently from his bedroom. By now, both the sons he had left behind in Scotland had died. Thomas's health deteriorated; his cough became more and more pronounced. The following summer, Catharine moved her ailing husband to a cottage in the grounds of Frances Stewart's house, Auburn, on the outskirts of Peterborough. She nursed him devotedly, but Thomas had lost the will to live. He died on June 21, 1859.

Catharine had always loved her sweet, bewildered husband. She believed that it was her duty “as a wife, and now as a widow,” as she wrote in her journal, “[to] bear testimony to my husband's worth. With some foreign eccentricities of manner, and some faults of nervous irritability of constitution, he was a true hearted loyal gentleman, faithful in deed and word—a kind & benevolent disposition, a loving father,
husband and friend—a scholar and a true gentleman, whose virtues will be remembered long after his faults have been forgotten.” Susanna too had always had a soft spot for her brother-in-law, who was so painfully unsuited for roughing it in the bush. But as we consider his career today, we can't help wondering: could Thomas Traill ever have made a happy immigrant? If he had been able to settle in Toronto in 1832, where he might have taught at the newly founded Upper Canada College, might he have found his niche in the colony? Perhaps. But during most of the last century, immigrants who relied solely on their learning and social position in Britain rarely did well in the New World. Those who thrived in British North America were men far more ruthless, ambitious and brave than “a scholar and true gentleman” like Thomas Traill.

During the anguished months between the Oaklands fire and Thomas's death, Susanna Moodie reached out to Catharine as much as she could. Catharine spent several weeks with the Moodies in early 1858. (Catharine's son James had now moved to Belleville, and he and his wife Amelia had a son—Catharine's first grandchild—in January). Susanna fussed over her elder sister in a quite uncharacteristic way, dosing her with wild cherry balsam because she had a cough and trying to keep her in bed when she had bronchitis. It was during this visit that John “healed” Catharine's rheumatism by laying his hand on her shoulder. Catharine did not mention her adventures in spiritual healing in her letter to her own daughter Mary, but she did write, “Your Aunt … is much concerned at my illness.”

Susanna was probably glad to have her sister close, so she could confide her own concerns. John Moodie's long-running, corrosive and expensive battle with his Tory critics in Belleville was reaching a climax, and it did not augur well for the Moodie family.

For more than twenty years, Belleville's Tories (most of whom were active Orangemen) had made life difficult for John Dunbar Moodie, sheriff of Hastings County. In nineteenth-century Canada, the sheriff was responsible for collecting court-ordered debts on behalf of creditors. If for any reason the debtor did not pay, the unsatisfied creditor
could sue the sheriff on the grounds that it was the sheriff 's fault that the court action had failed. John's Tory critics, led by Thomas Parker (who still resented Moodie's appointment to the job he himself had wanted), had indulged in protracted “sheriff-baiting,” suing John for non-collection of debts, but protecting themselves from his counter-suits with legal tactics. John's income was eroded by all his legal bills, incurred as he tried to defend himself from his enemies. The sheriff 's prime source of income was drawn from the fines levied by the court, but John's income from this source had steadily fallen, because Parker and his friends made sure that most cases were settled in the lower courts, where John had no access to any fines levied. Susanna railed against the weasel tactics of lawyers: “They are a set of finished rascals, and swarm everywhere.”

The struggle to do his job despite Thomas Parker and his ilk had aged John. By the time his brother-in-law Thomas Traill died, sixty-one-year-old John was a white-haired, limping old man. He had lost the military swagger of his youth; thanks to the accident with the pioneer harrow just before the 1837 uprising, and a knee injury he had sustained in a fall in 1845, he dragged his left leg as he walked. Although he still loved to laugh, an expression of permanent anxiety had settled on his ruddy face. Life was getting harder, not easier.

Hastings County covered a large area, and John found himself travelling farther and farther, in the bitter cold of winter and the furious heat of summer, in order to supervise the administration of justice and collect what little income he could. It all got too much for him in the mid-1850s. So he agreed with the former district court bailiff, Dunham Ockerman, that if Ockerman, as deputy sheriff, took on the “outdoor work” in outlying parts of the county, John would allow him half the fees he collected. John took Ockerman off to a lawyer to have the legality of the arrangement checked and a formal agreement signed.