The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (29 page)

Within ten minutes of Blake’s arrival, it is clear that the family’s shelter is saved. Thirty minutes later, only steam arises from the charred portions.

The attackers had struck when Murdoch and his son-in-law were on the water. They had chased the women from the house and carried off much of value before setting the roof ablaze. Murdoch had been within earshot and swiftly organized the defence. But it had been his decision to enter the burning structure with John Malcolm and together knock down portions of the walls and roof that had saved the rest.

He stands blackened and red-eyed beside Blake on the roof as they douse the last hot spots.

“Thank you, John. I have no other words.”

“You need not thank me. Your own quick-wittedness has saved you.”

“I regret most that they’ve stolen our muskets.”

Blake nods slowly.

“A loss indeed.”

He looks out toward the nearby encampment.

“No, John,” Murdoch says. “It was never this tribe beside us. They are mischief-makers, but they were not among our attackers. I must doubt that these were Indians at all.”

Blake grunts.

“Who then?”

“I canna tell. I canna tell.”

There’s nothing to do now but rebuild, the third time since their arrival here.

C
HARLOTTE IS AT HER WITS’ END
. “You’ll have to stay back from your voyage to the West Indies, John Blake. I cannot manage the children and the robbers on my own.” She felt they needed help to mind the place and the children, not to mention the daily chores that if left undone would see them starve.

He was scheduled to sail in early September, a last run to the islands with a fine cargo of lumber for a fair price. Charlotte suspects his “run” down the coast has more to do with battleships and having a share in the rebellion than trade with the islands but decides the ruse he creates must be for good reason.

Not a man to miss an opportunity or to suffer the wrath of Charlotte, he turns up one day after sailing to Liverpool with a stranger on board. Blake lowers the ladder to the dory and the first one down is a boy. She cannot imagine what her husband is doing with this small creature and as they pole the dory to the shore, she looks again, focuses on the face coming toward
her and wonders if maybe she is hallucinating in the late summer heat. There for all the world is young Tommy, the hapless boy whose body had been thrown overboard when he died on the ship that brought her to Jamaica. She is transfixed to this illusion when they come ashore. As triumphantly as you please, John says, “This is Jimmy, a fine lad for helping us.” Then he turns to the pale-faced, skinny boy and says, “And this is Mrs. Blake.”

Jimmy loses no time in making her acquaintance. He’s a bold, wiry scalawag, who nods at “Missus,” as he calls her while making a face at Elizabeth and poking young John in the belly. Charlotte is about to correct his behaviour when the toddlers begin to laugh at the antics of this strange half-grown man standing by their papa. “And what is it you’ll do for me?” Charlotte inquires.

He is as old as thirteen and as small as nine. He had run from a London orphanage and stowed away on a ship at Wapping. He had scarcely any notion of North America never mind the Miramichi, but he knew a better world when he saw one.

Blake saw the rambunctious young refugee as a salvation of sorts when he found him on Simeon Perkins’s wharf. So he offered him a home in exchange for helping his wife with the chores.

“You’ll need to get into the brook and clean the filth from yourself,” Charlotte demands, wondering what she can find to cover him while she scrubs the putridity from his clothes. Later, Blake teaches him how to stoke the fire and keep the embers burning for cooking while Charlotte tells him to fetch legumes from the garden and fill the water bucket for drinking at supper-time. While he darts nimbly from one chore to the next, he’s entertaining the children, hiding and pouncing, pulling faces and teasing. They are delighted with his antics. He calls the baby Polly.
“Her name is Mary Ann,” Charlotte says, thinking he misheard the child’s name. But Jimmy ignores her.

She’s wondering where she’ll put him to sleep when struck with the notion that the goat and Jimmy may serve each other and the family as well. “A wigwam would be the answer,” she thinks, but knowing Blake would be near to apoplexy at the very thought of such a contraption on his land, she puts her mind to fashioning a tilt that could stable a boy and a goat through winter.

Once Blake is on his way, she puts the plan to work. Poles, spruce boughs, logs and animal skins are the ingredients she needs. Jimmy is sent with an axe to fetch the poles, boughs and logs while Charlotte rummages through the parcels she carried from the Baie for the moose hide Blake had told her not to use in the cabin. It’s as stiff as bark but serviceable with a good greasing of bear liver, she thinks. Finding the liver of a bear is the baffling portion of the equation—“Wioche could solve this problem”—instead she picks up the musket and takes down a fat grouse in the bush behind the cabin. She slaughters the animal and uses its liver and sinew to rub the rigid mooseskin until it’s reasonably soft and pliable if somewhat bloodied and stinking. When all is ready they begin the task of hobbling the tilt together—low and small to keep the heat, she figures, while they angle the poles, slather the logs together with spruce gum, tie them with tough spindly roots and hope for the best.

When she decides the outer walls are about as good as they’ll be, she fastens the moose hide to the inside walls and digs a firepit in the floor under the hole in the roof where the smoke can escape. By the time Blake returns, the tilt is ready. “It’s the most primitive shelter on the Miramichi,” he declares.

“There’s talk of splitting the province into two parts,” he tells her. “Of having our own governor.”

“That may be the talk in Liverpool, John Blake, but it’s another addition we’ll be needing for this crowded cabin. You’ll be a father again come spring.”

The winter is harsh. All three children get sick. Influenza has been raging along the river, and inside the cramped tilt where the Blakes live they pass it one to the other. Charlotte nurses them with the potions John has carried up the river from Liverpool but mostly with bathing their feverish brows, keeping them warm and filling them with the blessed goat’s milk that Jimmy brings with him in the morning.

This pregnancy is unlike the others. She’s uncomfortable a lot of the time, her back aches, her belly takes a shape different to the other times she was with child. Charlotte’s sixth sense taps away in the back of her mind like the metronome on the piano in the parlour at home. She shares her apprehension with Janet Murdoch.

“These are fearsome signs,” Janet says.

“What ever do you mean by that?” Charlotte asks.

“The child may be upside down, hips first instead of head first. There’s not a thing you can do about it but pray that the child will make its way to the world alive without killing you in the process.”

She agrees to stay with Charlotte once the labour begins and sends John and the children to Murdoch Point, suspecting the delivery will be an agony for the eyes and ears of little ones. Jimmy insists that he stay with the women.

Her water had broken in the afternoon, two weeks before she thought it should and the contractions began immediately. By the time Janet arrives and the family departs, she feels her insides are being wrung out. She labours in such pain she tells Janet the cabin looks red. By midnight she’s baying like a
wounded animal. Janet is helpless save the hot linens and sympathy she offers.

“Rum, get rum,” Charlotte begs when by morning she is still arched with pains that rip up her back and pummel her groin. Janet is somewhat taken aback by the request, but Jimmy is out the door and down the path to John Blake’s still as though the devil himself is chasing him. He comes back with a jug of dark rum and spoons it over Charlotte’s parched lips hoping some of it will slide down her throat. She feels she’s being mauled when at last Janet sees a foot push its way out of the birth canal. She reaches in and grabs another slippery foot and pulls as hard as she can knowing there isn’t much time now or the baby will be born dead.

“Push, Charlotte, push with all your might,” she encourages while trying to turn the hips that are now presenting so the baby might slide the rest of the way through.

Charlotte is bleeding profusely, the torn flesh around the birth canal confusing Janet, who’s only seen a breached birth once before. “A dead mother and a breathing infant will be no end of trouble,” she tells Jimmy, who perches like an owl beside “Missus” waiting to be told what to do next.

Robert Blake is deathly still and as blue as the river when he finally makes it into the world. Janet sucks the mucus from his tiny mouth, rubs his scrawny body with her two hands and to her great relief sees him turn pink and begin to bawl. She pours an entire bucket of cold water from the brook over Charlotte’s wounds while Jimmy swaddles the baby and hands him to his mother.

“You little scrapper,” she says to her infant, “I’ll have to teach you to lead with your head and leave your feet to come along behind.”

Janet is flabbergasted. “The woman was near death just minutes ago,” she tells Jimmy, “so was this child and there she is telling him what’s good for him. Maybe it’s the rum.”

Jimmy is at Charlotte’s side with his own message. “Missus, ye called me Tommy all the night. Am no Tommy, am yer boy, Jimmy.” Janet tells Blake later that she thinks Charlotte is the most resilient woman she has ever known. Only a day later, she’s on her feet marking his birth—1781—Robert—on the wall and taking the tally of three children in one room, a baby’s cradle by her side and a boy and a goat in the tilt outside.

P
EACE COMES
to the river that summer by way of warring men. British soldiers who call themselves Loyalists are in retreat from the rebelling colonies in the south and settling by their dozens here on the Miramichi. The Wisharts return from the Quebec campaign and try to throw a squatter off their land but wind up living under the same roof. Even William Davidson comes back, claiming, “The river is in my blood.”

“It’s the prosperity that brings them,” Charlotte tells her husband while they haul wood from the lot they are clearing on the south side of the Blake property.

“It’s the prosperity that will start a new war,” he grumbles.

Indeed their ploughs sew the seeds of a bitter hostility. This one between the old settlers and the men calling themselves Loyalists.

“That Philip Hierlihy struts about the river as though he is general of the new Loyalist army,” she says.

“He’s a most disgruntled man as many of the Loyalists are,” Blake says. “He tells all who will listen that after such long devoted service to the King they are not awarded with tracts of land any better than we old settlers on the river.”

The talk about separating Nova Scotia into two provinces picks up now. While the war to the south is not entirely finished, for the Miramichi it might as well be. They haven’t seen a rebel in more than a year and the Indians have left them in peace as well. So the men have time now to plot their future—as men do, Charlotte decides.

In the meantime, Charlotte does some investigating of her own. She wants to visit the Indian camp on the other side of Murdoch’s place. It draws her like a current to its hilltop clearing. Leaving the children with Jimmy one day, she wraps the braid of sweetgrass around her neck and hikes along the trail that leads to the camp. When it comes into view, she hesitates, wondering if she should have come at all. Is it nostalgia for the camp she left at the Baie that draws her here or is it to seek information about Wioche? She’s still pondering her purpose when several women walk out to meet her and welcome her to the camp. They seem to know her name. Over tea and bannock they share stories about life on the river in a smattering of French and English. She tells them about her attempt to grease a moose hide without a bear’s liver for the job. They share their hardships as well, but mostly they speak of the dreadful sicknesses they are suffering—measles, smallpox, white man’s sicknesses. Charlotte expects that they have no immunity for the diseases and when they ask if she can help she replies, “Of course.” By now she has gathered more “white man’s” medicine from the supply ships, although she’s not convinced their efficacy is superior to the roots and leaves she mashed and boiled at the Baie.

When she leaves the camp after promising to return with medicine, she takes a troubling tableau with her. The poverty in the camp is beyond the burden of the pioneers. The shortages, the disarray, the despair are a long way from the spiritual, highly
organized camp she remembers on the Baie. The wigwams are worn out, so are the people who inhabit them. These once proud people are being beaten into retreat by the settlers who claim more and more lots of the land the Mi’kmaq once roamed freely and by the British authorities who dismiss their complaints as well as their needs. There are as many tilts as traditional wigwams at the camp, and there’s refuse scattered about the grounds. Mother Earth seems to have taken a back row to the stolen pickings of war, Charlotte thinks. It’s only been six years since she paddled away from the Baie—was her impression of Chief Julian’s camp distorted by her own anguish when she arrived there?

She’s still weaving her thoughts together on her way back to Blake Brook when she reaches Murdoch Point and decides to stop and share her concerns with Janet. No one on this river has suffered more at the hands of the Indians than Janet Murdoch, but she had said some months ago that she knew of the sickness in the camp and wanted to help.

Two days later, the two women and their assortment of apothecary jars go to the camp. Coincidentally, a woman is having a difficult labour when they arrive and when asked to help, the women look in on her and realize when they see a tiny foot at the opening of the birth canal that her baby is breech. “Upside down,” Charlotte says knowingly to the woman who pulled Robert feet first into the world. Fortunately they are able to help. The baby is born. The mother survives. And Charlotte and Janet are seen as saviours, not a title they sought in coming here. Later they distribute the salves and concoctions from their jars while sipping tea made from dried berries. Wioche’s name is never mentioned, but Charlotte is aware that they know about him and wonders how much they know about her.