The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (28 page)

He walks to where she sits and puts his hands on her shoulders.

“I’ve heard all,” he says.

In those few words he somehow contrives to convey the depth of his devotion and the extent of his pride that he should be the husband of Charlotte Blake. And for her part, Charlotte takes the cue and says, “Come to bed, John Blake.”

C
harlotte is moved by the powerful beat of her life here on the river. She sits on the bank one afternoon while taking a break from her endless chores and notices sandpipers hopping along the shore, jittery little creatures that move as one when they take flight. She watches them soar over the river, their speckled bodies contrasting with the leaves that reflect in the water below and thinks this ever-changing river has become the rhythm of her life. Its morning mist rising like droplets, the sun’s rays turning them into sparkles like fairies playing in the haze. The dunes on the shore are forged and carved by the rising and falling tide. The river rolls and heaves, slips by her land, its waves winking in transit in summer, then freezing into a byway for laughing children snuggled in sleighs. It threatens and warns and sucks unsuspecting souls to its depths. It gives forth food and brings the far-flung world to its exiled shores. This Miramichi has seasons of stillness and vigour, of calm and commotion. It is enduring, suffering, timeless and sustaining.

She thinks back over the four years that have passed since she came here and how the seasons have shaped her.

When spring thawed the Miramichi, the fiddleheads would poke up along the banks of the creek and a new generation of blackflies would come out to torment the hapless harvesters eager for the first fruits of the year. The red-tailed hawks mated and made their nests in the pines and their chicks ate the mice that abandoned the settlers’ houses for the greater bounty of the fields and pastures. The bears woke up hungry and shambled to the river’s edge to gorge on salmon and stretched out on the grassy banks in the sun and watched their cubs like wardens. In the barns the cows’ ribs showed through their hides and their hollow eyes watched until the settlers led them at last to the pastures that sprouted shoots of sustenance.

In the spring of 1778, George Walker died and was buried in the Church of All Hollows, Barking-by-the-Tower. The news wound out from London via Liverpool, Nova Scotia, and on the distant Miramichi there was a woman who wept bitterly to receive it. After his return to England, Walker had always intended to look up General Taylor and plead reconciliation with his daughter but had never found the opportunity. His labours at Nepisiguit had gone largely unnoticed by the administrators in Halifax, and unrewarded by their loftier superiors in Whitehall. But like the proper pirate he was, he eluded his foes or took broadsides without sinking or found a treasure when all was lost and in the end succumbed to apoplexy and sailed off in his own bed.

That same spring, on a particularly soft evening, when John Blake was fishing off the bank, Charlotte had heard the sound of a whippoorwill in the woods above the cabin, and she had responded with her own best whippoorwill call and believed she
heard the bird call back. But whippoorwills will do that, she thought.

W
HEN SUMMER CAME
to the Miramichi, it would bring a rush of growth that was the botanical equivalent of insanity. The stern geometry of trunks and twigs, the curve of hillsides and the sharp edges of riverbanks were swept to bedlam by a mad surge of rebirth. Charlotte would hoe around the hills of André Landry’s potatoes, the offspring of the seedlings he had shyly passed to her as she said goodbye to the People that June day in 1776 and passed a last time down the trail to George Walker’s now vanished house. She would undertake to hoe as early in the morning as she could, but a woman with two children—one still nursing—could count on interruptions. When the sun had passed the meridian, she would still be in the patch, her clothes soaked with sweat, the deer flies gathered from miles around to buzz her head and whir in her masses of tangled hair. They were good potatoes, as André had assured her they would be, and would have been better if he and his hoe could only have followed them.

In the summer of 1778, Charlotte Blake gave birth to a child she called Mary Ann, whose hair was a blaze of red like her mother’s and soon grew to frame blue eyes that were born looking into the distance and were still looking there well into the following century.

That summer, too, Blake built another room on the cabin. Young Peter and George Henderson came across the river to saw lumber and help raise the beam. When they were finished, it was a pretty snug little addition, perhaps more solidly made than the house itself, and would provide a bedroom for the children as they grew.

In the summers, American privateers resumed their customary raiding along the coast. The river traffic brought news of every pillaging and burning, actual or feared. Many families were fled now, following Davidson and Cort, who had gone first, having the most to lose. But Alexander and William Wishart had returned to resume fishing. In the summer of 1779, Mi’kmaq from far upriver, not so easily cowed as had been thought, burned the Wisharts out. The brothers boarded the
Viper
for Quebec, where they were to take commissions under General Haldimand.

Late that same summer, the frantic ringing of a Henderson bell brought the Blakes to the shore at midnight. There were flames across the river at their farm. Blake gathered his weapons and set out by boat. By moonlight, Charlotte could see the boats of the Murdochs crossing too. But the Hendersons, as it transpired, were too many and too alert to lose all and Blake was back before dawn.

“These were no privateers,” he said.

A
UTUMNS ON THE
M
IRAMICHI
had the poignancy of autumns in all the northerly colonies: bursting with a riot of colour, the fields a bountiful gift of harvest, the time before freeze-up ticking loudly like a warning. Charlotte often thought of the burnished seduction of late fall as a whispering lover who proposed a few more hours together before he was gone forever. She stooked the dry hay in the field and carried it to the mound and stood with her husband when they were finished to assess whether it should keep a cow alive until Christmas. Inside the house, two casks of John Blake’s spruce beer sat bubbling in the larder and the shelves above them were heavy with tea and molasses and sugar loaves and flour and whale oil. Janet
Murdoch had learned cheese making at St. John Island and she in turn taught Charlotte. A dozen hard cheeses joined the other provisions.

When the hay was in and the wood was cut in the autumn of 1779, John Blake made a last venture with Daniel Ross to Liverpool on the sea coast southwest of Halifax. The hull of
Le Vairon
was filled with the best oak and here was a last bounty for the year and, provided they did not cross paths with privateers, a chance to buy better tools.

Wioche had appeared at dusk one day as though he had materialized from the earth. Charlotte had run to where he stood at the forest edge, had taken his two hands in hers but had not invited him into the cabin. Behind the cover of tall timbers, they had shared the events of their lives. She fingered the fresh braid of sweetgrass he had given her while he explained that the raids and attacks had been planned by the American privateers to rid the river of the settlers so they could claim the land for themselves. His people helped because they, too, had been attacked by the British and it was the wish of the grand council to even the score.

“There are many changes for the People,” he’d said. “The British are taking our land.” The moon was high over the river when he rose to leave and reminded her to watch for the signs—“the rabbit skin is thick, the air sacs on the fish are long, winter will be hard”—and then he’d added, “You won’t be alone.”

S
HE’D WATCHED
the seaward stretch of the river anxiously in the days that followed. Then on the second of October, the little ketch had appeared, its boat in tow. And John Blake paddled triumphantly to shore with a nanny goat in the cargo. “We shall have milk even if we lose the cow,” he’d told her.

Winters on the Miramichi made a dignified arrival when the land had given up its growth and lay still to await its fate. The air would seem suspended, motionless, as quiet as a settler family at grace until, as the Mi’kmaq tale allowed, Summer fulfilled her end of the bargain and the first skiffs of snow settled on the fields under grey skies. Blake Brook was always first to freeze, then the salty waters of the river took refuge under a thin sheet of ice that thickened every night. Finally, usually in December but some years much earlier, the snows would come and cover the land and everything on it.

Winter was a respite from hard labour and an invitation to gather in houses, sample one another’s beer and talk by the warmth of the fire. In the winter of 1779, such talk turned to the rebel war to the south, to the raids now suspended on account of weather, and of course to the Indians. One Dougal Shank, whose claim was that he had been a preacher in Scotland, had constructed a rough shelter on the north bank of the river not far upstream of the Hendersons. He was a humourless man, not easy to warm to, who neither traded nor farmed. His high, beetling brow and thin line of a mouth lent credence to the strictness of his religious beliefs.

“The Indian will come again,” he said. “Like the pharaohs of Egypt, we have earned the plague he brings. The Indian is God’s instrument.”

“The instrument of the rebels, more like,” interjected Peter Brown, who lived upstream on the south shore.

“It is not for me to say,” Shank intoned, “who deals with God and who with the devil.”

Blake turned a black glare on the man.

“It’s not for you to say anything, sir, until you have lived among us a season more.”

John Murdoch hastily cleared his throat.

“I’m disposed to think the Americans will soon carry the day,” he said. At this, many present who might have spoken out in indignation two years before now grunted assent. They knew the frail status of their own holdings and the weak links that connected the banks of the Miramichi with their rulers in Halifax.

Winter offered time to ruminate on the season to follow, on plans to assure that the coming year’s crop would diminish the last by comparison. The greatest and most important crop of all was the forest itself. It had to be cleared to make way for the plough, and the trees that the clearing produced meant cash for tools and livestock. In the end, though, the winter provided more opportunity for thought than any settler reasonably required. What would begin as a respite from toil would become a prison in which men and women could only wait in patience for reprieve.

T
HAT’S WHAT SHE’S THINKING
about this brilliant sunny day sitting by the river watching the sand pipers. She’s hoping as she does every year at this time that their lives will be less tumultuous in the year to come. It is not to be.

“There’s an ox gone,” John Murdoch tells John Blake. “And a calf last week.”

“You know well enough the import of that,” Blake says.

Their wives listen in silence. The two families had gathered as they often had at the Murdochs’ house, since it was the nearest house to the Blakes’ and the largest dwelling on the banks. They could all recall too clearly the events of 1777, then the animals and bedding stolen in 1779. Now a calf gone and—a more serious loss—an ox.

“Had we a governor of our own in this land,” John Blake says, “and not some indifferent fool in Halifax, we might seek some protection. But we have none. Better we attack their leaders, as we did but three years ago, than discover ourselves murdered in our beds.”

“I think it wicked that these rebels should employ the native people in this fashion and make them the objects of our revenge,” Charlotte says.

“Perhaps.” Her husband’s brow is creased in deep furrows. “But the wickedness of rebels will be no excuse for our neglect of ourselves.”

“Aye, John,” Murdoch says. He had been among the loudest in the opinion that the worst had passed and the best course of action—apart from the most pressing self-defence—remained no action at all. Now he seems doubtful. “Let us meet together, every settler on the banks, and agree how we shall best proceed.”

“Don’t parlay too long,” Blake mutters.

“H
ELP!
”

At first, the word was hardly distinct from the call of the seabirds that swooped down the river from the bay. Charlotte looks up from the woodpile to the darkening woods above the clearing. The rain had diminished. Being July, there is still an hour of daylight in the sky.

“Help!” The cry again, now more distinct. Mary Malcolm’s voice. The girl breaks from the woods and runs stumbling in her soaking skirts toward Charlotte. “Mrs. Blake! Help us! Come all! Come all and help us!”

“Oh goodness, Mary. Is it another cow?”

“They’ve taken all, Mrs. Blake. All! And set our barn and house afire!”

“God be merciful. Stay here, Mary.” She looks up to the woods to her right and sees her husband coming down, axe in hand.

“John! The Murdochs are attacked and their house on fire!”

Blake says not a word; he takes two buckets from the cabin and pushes off in the canoe as the quickest means to Murdoch’s Point. He rounds the curve to find the house engulfed in smoke but no visible flames. The family is running a water brigade from the shore in basins and buckets.

“The back! The back!” Janet calls. “John’s on the roof !” Several of her younger children are weeping helplessly as they struggle to pass the pails.

At the back of the house Malcolm is receiving and passing buckets to Murdoch, who stands on the remaining portion of the roof tipping water on the steaming timbers. The roof that covered the west half of the house is entirely gone. Part of the west wall appears to have been knocked out by force. The fire has made its way into the upstairs rooms.