The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (40 page)

Charlotte opens the hatch to the dry cellar to find the entire harvest floating in frigid, muddy water. The first order of business is to try to retrieve the soaked stores of food. Man, woman and child pitch in to carry the soggy stockpile to the hearth—the dried fish and berries, the potatoes, turnips and corn—until the whole main floor is covered with drying vegetables. The fish and berries are better frozen, Philip decides, and are buried outside in the snow. Partway through the rescue mission, Charlotte beats a path through the snow to the shed where the hens and goats are housed, wondering if they have survived the storm. Miraculously, they are tucked into the hay and still alive. She scatters extra meal and returns to the fray.

When Charlotte takes stock that first night, she knows rations are going to be meagre until John turns up with the meat.

But John doesn’t arrive. And winter doesn’t let up. It snows and blows relentlessly. The roof fails to keep the winter out; the
planks are pulling apart and leaving gaps for snow to billow down on the children in their beds. They’re grateful for Charlotte’s hoarded surplus of animal skins, and tack them over the holes in the roof. The entire first winter at The Point is one of patching, calculating, stretching their supplies and trying to stay warm.

Month after month they endure endless blizzards, two more nor’easters and winds that start to play on their minds. The moaning of the creaking timbers and eerie whistling of the wind feel like harbingers of doom to Charlotte. The children can rarely get outside, she’s got cabin fever, and Philip is unrelieved of his bad temper. By February, they are reduced to bannock and tea, and salted, dried, then frozen fish cooked over the fire. The hens have ceased to lay and the goats don’t let down their milk, husbanding their energies to stay alive in the cold.

Every day, one or the other of them wonders aloud why John has not managed to find a way to get the slaughtered meat to them. Charlotte grows angry with him, irrationally: on some level she knows that the Miramichi must be suffering the same siege.

Then, as quickly as it caught them by surprise when it struck, winter quits The Point in early April. A week goes by with no snow.

On one bright morning, Charlotte walks out her front door, lifts her face up to the sky and exclaims, “There’s heat in that sun!”

Spring surges onto The Point, melting the snowbanks, budding the trees and warming their bones. All of them go outside at every excuse and soak up the sun like survivors. The ice in the river cracks and heaves in its springtime dance and is quickly washed out to sea.

But as much as the weather is shining upon the family, they are still desperately hungry. Charlotte is just about to lead a march to Negowack in search of food they can buy with their coin when she sees a sight nothing short of redemption. Two canoes are paddling around the bend in the river and in them are Elizabeth and Duncan, Polly and Duncan McCraw, and John Blake. They beach their boats and tumble straight into the arms of their hungry, pale, emaciated kin.

Parcels of salted meat, dried apples, fresh bread and a hefty jug of rum are opened before they’re even back at the house. Settled at the table, they all eat until they’re full, sharing stories about the brutal winter. Elizabeth sits with tears running down her face at the sight of them. “I worried all winter! We couldn’t move because of the storms on the river, but we knew they would be hitting you worse!” Several times John prepared to travel by foot, bringing what he could, but he would have to abandon the plan when yet another stormy blast hit the river. When the ice broke up in the Miramichi just yesterday, they packed all the food that would fit in two canoes and came to the rescue.

Elizabeth is very firm on one subject, despite her tears. She, for one, is not going to stay on the Miramichi for another anxious winter. Before the impromptu feast is cleared away, and the rest of the supplies are hauled into the larder, they’ve agreed that whether the lots are sold on the Miramichi this season or not, Elizabeth, Duncan and their children, along with the very pregnant Polly and her Duncan, will come live at The Point. The only one of her children who wants to stay on at Blake Brook is John, who says he will look after all of their interests there. His mother suspects it has something to do with a settler’s daughter he has been courting, but she doesn’t press the issue.

T
HAT SUMMER,
young Robert beats his oldest brother to the altar and marries Ann Jamieson from the Miramichi, and brings her to live at The Point. Charlotte applies every ounce of fierce will to planning for the winter. They plant aiming for a surplus. They breed livestock looking to grow a herd. Not willing to put her faith in the dry cellar, Charlotte herself digs a pit in the ground on the south side of the house near the river. Come fall she buries her potatoes, turnip, carrots, squash, corn in layers of dry sand and insulates them with hay from the meadow.

They now know what to expect, and they’ll all face it together. It’s the only way they’ll survive, let alone prosper.

T
he mystery around Will MacCulloch remains unsolved. Neither David Savoy nor Jacques Breaux can find any further trace of him, or of anyone who seems to have encountered MacCulloch after he stopped at the Baie de Chaleur. By the fire of an evening, Charlotte occasionally finds herself daydreaming scenes of reunion and forgiveness with her father, and then kicks herself for being so foolish. Never in her life has she worried about such things. The thing she loved most from the moment she stepped off the commodore’s boat was that here you could make your life and not inherit it or have to accept your place in it.

In the four years since Charlotte’s family had passed their first winter in Tabisintack, other settlers had built homesteads too. Twenty families in all, counting the farms and homesteads inland along the river. She lobbies the province to send a teacher to the new settlement and, as is her wont, makes a few enemies in the process. Though she knows that you can
catch more flies with honey than vinegar, she can’t help but accuse the neighbours who won’t sign her petitions of neglecting their children’s future. She has always been bothered that her own children, schooled at home, have only the most rudimentary reading and writing skills. But it is the next generation, her grandchildren, she fights for now. At the supper table, she’s known to grumble: “In Frederick Town, they have a grammar school where they teach reading, writing and arithmetic and book-keeping too. Now they even have a college, which students from other areas attend. But children from here will never gain admittance because they haven’t got the proper foundation.”

Philip thinks she’s gone a little cracked on the subject, and takes every opportunity to point out that their own “ill-schooled” children are doing very well for themselves.

And even in this new settlement, people outside the family gossip about the way she dares to presume that her husband’s land is her own. Tongues also wag about her keeping company with an Indian. Her son William has made her a beautiful birch-bark canoe, under the careful direction of Wioche, and very occasionally the matriarch of The Point can be seen on the river, loitering of an afternoon, clearly in conversation with a man of the People, who paddles in the stern.

There’s tension, too, between Charlotte and her husband, who loves her tough fibre as long as it is pointed in a direction he favours, but who finds himself uncomfortable with his nonconforming wife as the settlement grows around them. When he tells her there are traditions to be honoured, she replies, “It’s one thing to preserve useful customs, but, Philip, many of these so-called honourable traditions are suffocating the aspirations of people who want to build this province.”

In response, he employs that dismissive air she dislikes so much. “Charlotte, I fought for King and country. Don’t be talking such nonsense to me. If I believed that cant, I would have fought for the other side and stayed in America.”

“But look how long we have to wait to get land grants or law enforcement. It’s as though the British officials in Frederick Town think we’re not worthy of their precious time.”

Surely he will agree with her here, as he is always anxious about their security. But his only response is, “All in due course.”

Charlotte isn’t through with him yet. “We were isolated on the Miramichi, bound by the river and the woods. Then you Loyalists arrived and saw this land as your own castle. Look at the men appointed in Frederick Town. They serve tea and scones to one another and know nothing about the way we have to live. The fine Anglicans of Britain have decided that Methodists and Baptists cannot even solemnize marriages here, though Anglican ministers don’t deign to rough it with us in the bush. Acadians can’t vote because they’re Catholic. And the Indians have a school, but we don’t because the governor thinks they are heathens who need to be civilized. Now, other settlers are saying that land-owning women such as me are to be disenfranchized again because we’re too delicate to know what government is about—after tilling the punishing soil, bearing your children and filling the pot on the hearth.”

The children trade knowing looks behind their parents’ backs during these disputes, but not one of them would openly argue with Charlotte. They’ve been schooled in her views on everything from noxious British tradition to Mi’kmaq legend.

L
ATE IN THE WINTER
of 1802, the family hears that a man called Dugald Campbell has been appointed to survey the
province. Her two sons-in-law know him, and served with him in the 42nd Regiment. His first report has brought home to the government that there’s not ten miles of road fit for wheeled carriage in the entire province. Outside of Frederick Town and the renamed Saint John (the union of Parr Town and Carleton, and the largest city in the province), the byways are nothing more than tramped paths made by settlers’ feet and horses’ hooves, and not all that many horses at that. Along the Miramichi, the trees have been cut so far back on the lots that hauling the wood to the river and then shipping it to the point of trade has become a time-consuming and costly proposition. Something has to be done to bring order to New Brunswick. The rebel colonies to the south are flourishing in trade, schooling and goods while New Brunswick is floundering.

In Charlotte’s own home, they are kept going by a hodgepodge of income—Philip’s pittance as a disbanded soldier, his meagre salary from the government office in Newcastle where he charts roads that he doubts will ever be built, cash money or barter from the wood the young men cut and carry down the river for sale. If they concentrated on clearing more land, they might make more money, but Charlotte’s sons love the life of the river. Both John and Robert have joined crews that assemble logs in massive booms and steer them from the forks to Miramichi Bay. The job is dangerous and daring, as tides and weather both threaten to shift the heavy booms and swamp the men who run them. They spend much of the season from spring thaw to freeze-up on the Miramichi, and the rest logging. The farming and the fighting for a school are left mostly to Charlotte.

That April the ice breaks up early, and the boys—rather, the young men, since John is now twenty-five, Robert is twenty-one and William is sixteen—are eager to quit the confines of their
mother’s household and head back to the lots on the river. Philip is just as anxious to quit the confines of the household and head to Newcastle, where he can collect his soldier’s half-pay and attend a meeting Dugald Campbell is holding to discuss the province’s roads and trade.

Charlotte, who once might have asked to be taken along, is relieved to have a few days on her own with the little ones for her ritualistic turning of the soil, which she’s begun to think of as her annual bargaining with the earth to give forth come fall. So on one unseasonably fine morning in April, the sun beating down and shooting sparks of light off the slurry of ice still floating in the river, she and the children go down to the landing to see the boys and their father away in the new dory William built over the winter. Even Akkie over at the Indian camp waves as the foursome row by, heading out to the open sea. Fourteen-year-old Philip watches after them till they’ve disappeared from view, clearly disappointed that his father wouldn’t take him along to Newcastle and that he’s been left to provide muscle for his mother. “They’ll be over the shoals and past Black Brook by midday,” he says when he straggles back up to join her in the garden plot. “Blake Brook,” Charlotte says with a sigh.

They need to take advantage of the day to air the linens and blankets, Charlotte decides, and the bearskins as well. And so for a time she and her five helpers shuttle in and out of the house spreading bedding over bushes and hanging linens from the long clothesline. Then she takes Philip and his spade and Charlotte Mary, now five years old, to the garden, Philip will dig and she will pull the withered stalks, which the little girl with gather up in her bucket and carry to the compost heap.