The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (43 page)

The next day she hitches up the wagon and rides with Honnor into Newcastle to have the letter witnessed by the Justice of the Peace.

When they get back to The Point, she sends for John Blake before she tells her other sons and daughters, or even the intended recipient, what she has decided.

It’s awkward between them, but she is glad when he comes.

“I want to talk to you about Lot Ten, John.”

He makes as though to rise from her table, but she reaches for his arm and holds him still.

“That lot was cleared by William Wishart, John. It rightfully belongs not to you, or even to me, but to your half-brother William. I’ve deeded it over to him. If you have quarrel with this decision, make it known to me now. Otherwise, I won’t hear another word of it.”

He stares at the table a long time, before he lifts his head to meet her eye. “No, Mother. You’ll hear no complaint from me.”

And Charlotte is pleased in the weeks and months that follow to see that the jealousy and resentments that had been brewing among her children seem to have eased. That fall, John Blake, his wife, Catherine, and their three children move permanently to his lot on The Point, and most Sundays the young Blake family joins Charlotte for dinner.

T
wo years pass, peacefully, after Charlotte’s fight with her oldest son. Though the renewed war with the United States rages in Upper and Lower Canada, none of its guns are fired on the Miramichi or at Tabisintack.

On a bright mid-September afternoon, Charlotte is at the end of the house closest to the river, admiring the abundance of hollyhocks—planted from the seeds that spent thirty-seven years in her trunk. They didn’t all germinate, of course, but slender stalks now lean like drunken soldiers against the wall of the house in sweet, nostalgic blooms of pink, yellow and purple—just like the ones in the garden sketch she’d carried with her from England.

Absent-mindedly she rubs at an ache in her left arm, wondering what’s she has lifted to strain it, but then shooting pain comes, numbing the arm and then clamping her jaw in a vise. She stands still for a moment trying to understand whether she should sit down where she is, or try for the house, when a
crushing weight grips her chest. She can’t catch her breath. She looks around for help. William is in the far field with horse and wagon, bringing in the sheaves of wheat. She cannot shout or even wave her arms, not that he’d see her or hear her from the distance. She slowly sinks to her knees clutching her chest. Her eyes won’t focus. Her stomach begins to heave. She’s still on her knees trying to pull air into her lungs past the intense pain when Honnor, and then William, are suddenly standing over her.

As luck would have it, the only doctor in northeastern New Brunswick, the kindly Dr. Bell, is less than half a mile away. He’s on his regular autumn rounds to see patients in Miscou, Nepisiguit, Tabisintack, Newcastle and Chatham before returning for the winter to Frederick Town. On this leg, he’s staying with Eleanor and her husband, David Savoy.

“Mother, I’m going to fetch the doctor. I don’t think we should move you until he sees you. Do you think if Honnor gets a blanket from the house and sits with you, you’ll be all right till I can get back?”

Charlotte nods. As Honnor runs for the house, William hops on to his horse’s bare back and gallops off to the Savoys, returning as quickly as he can with Dr. Bell behind him, and Eleanor and David in breathless chase.

The skin on Charlotte’s face seems transparent, her breath raspy and intermittent.

“It’s a heart seizure,” the doctor pronounces. “It’s all right to move her to the house—but go gently now.”

Once she’s laid on her bed, the doctor administers a dose of foxglove elixir.

“Now Mrs. H., you must rest until you are feeling better, and a little longer than that. I don’t want you leaving this bed until I say that you may.”

Her chest is still as tight as though a bear were sitting on it, and she makes no protest, but she gets a shock when she overhears the doctor talking to William and Honnor in the front room, “If she survives until morning, she’ll likely be out of danger. We can only wait and see.” If she survives? He clearly doesn’t know Charlotte.

Her children stand vigil, fetching water, making tea, imploring her to lie still. Once the suffocating pain has passed, she is impatient with the fuss and tells them to be off and do the work that has to be done while there’s still light to see the fields. Honnor is not to be put off so easily. “Mother, the doctor told us that it’ll be four or five days until he knows how badly your heart has been damaged, and he wants you in bed the whole time. So I’m staying put right here.” And she settles herself in a chair by the bedside, staring sternly at her mother, until Charlotte gives up complaining and realizes just how tired she feels.

Word passes quickly throughout the settlement that Charlotte is stricken. She is thoroughly surprised by the response to her illness from people she has worked with, fought with, schemed against and sometimes ignored.

“You’d think it was a wake,” Polly quips at the continuing stream of visitors, causing Charlotte to laugh. The women bring soup and fresh-baked bread. The men offer to help William with the harvest even though they need to get their own fields cut. The daughters of the fledgling community are sent by their mothers to do chores for Charlotte after completing their own at home. And the women from the Indian camp come every day with their medicinal concoctions and their loving concern.

Her sons leave their logging on the Miramichi as soon as they hear and paddle with dispatch to The Point. When she sees John, Robert, Philip and James all rushing through her
bedroom door, she prefers not to admit to the flood of emotions that their presence brings, especially John’s. Instead she gruffly says, “What are all of you doing here? I’ll be back in the fields in no time and you should be back on the river earning your keep.”

When they aren’t hovering over her, Charlotte’s offspring take long walks around the property to worry out of her earshot. Honnor, an introspective young woman, twenty-one years old and not yet married, is clearly frightened by the prospect of being alone in the house if her mother has another attack. William, still unmarried himself, decides that the best plan is for him to return to live at the family house until Charlotte is stronger.

They aren’t the only ones contemplating the consequences of another heart attack. The incident has left more than a scar on Charlotte’s heart muscle. Her days in bed have forced her to think to a future further away than the next harvest, the next lot of land. In her diary, she writes:

The next January, she writes another letter that eventually
she will send to the governor of the province.

She leaves it undated, though she presumes she may need to fill it in sooner rather than later. Then she folds the parchment
and stores it in her trunk leaving the signing and sealing to the time of her choosing when her holdings would be transferred to William.

I
T’S NOT AS THOUGH
Charlotte is ever alone with William and Honnor. By now she’s surrounded by two dozen grandchildren, sixteen of them belonging to Elizabeth. The noise and continual fuss they bring to her hearth are a source of joy she had never imagined. She wants them to know the history of this place where they run endlessly chasing cows, exasperating the men who are cutting the hay, and plucking raspberries as they please. One day, helping William dig a pit by the river for winter storage, they find the tip of a treasure in the upturned earth and after they dig it out, they drag it back to the house to ask their Grandmother what they’ve found. She gathers them together and tells them the story of the ancient Indian kettle, the same story Marie once told her.

“They didn’t have iron pots for cooking,” she begins. “Crafting a wooden kettle like this took a long time and a lot of work.” Using the marks on the kettle, she explains that they first had to find the stump of a big tree. It needed to be a tree that had already fallen over, as they didn’t have the tools to cut so large a tree down, and it had to be close to the camp because they didn’t have a means to carry the stump a long distance. They would use stone axes to cut a hole in the top of the stump. Then they’d make a fire in the hole. Once the stump was burned about four inches deep, they’d put out the fire and use sharpened bones and stones to hollow out the charred wood. They did that again and again until the kettle was deep.

“Now I’ll tell you how they cooked in this big kettle. They couldn’t put it on the open fire or it would burn! It was made of
wood, after all. So instead they put flat rocks in the fire and left them there until they were red-hot. They put water in the kettle along with whatever they wanted to cook. Then they would pick up the hot rocks with sticks and drop them into the water to make it boil. Other stones were kept in the fire and when the ones in the kettle lost their heat, they’d be replaced with hot rocks from the fire. They kept doing that until the meat or fish was cooked the way they liked it.”

The children, of course, want to cook something in the big kettle. And as is their grandmother’s habit, she immediately falls in with a plan, leading a procession down to the shore, instructing them to fetch flat rocks, collect wood for the fire and coax a nice fat fish from the water. Once the fire is blazing, she places the rocks in the fire—“You’ve brought me enough to cook a whale,” she teases them—and sets them to cleaning the fish while the rocks heat. By the time the filets are cut into chunks and the kettle has been scrubbed out—“Be ever so careful not to hurt the ancient thing,” she warns—the rocks are red hot and the experiment begins. They pour fresh water into the kettle, plop the fish in and watch their grandmother use two sticks to lift the rocks, one by one, and drop them in. They are delighted by the great sizzle and hiss and stand as close as they dare to the steam, watching the fish slowly turn opaque and finally white. The experiment is complete.

“So, children, how many rocks does it take to cook a fish.”

“Fifteen,” they shout in unison.

T
HERE ARE PLENTY
of hands to do the chores and the pantry is never empty. She marks her sixtieth birthday with a sense of calm and, after the harvest is in, she takes the winter months to sew and spend time with the books she’s read so
many times she thinks she can recite them. The bitter cold settles in her bones more than it used to so she stays closer to the fire. Her diary shows its age as well, the leather binding so cracked she has to be careful how she opens it.