The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (44 page)

Honnor shakes her shoulder gently. “Mama, you’ve fallen asleep in your chair. Come away to bed.” Charlotte closes her diary and carries the lamp to her room.

T
HE YEAR 1816
is known as the year without summer, the year the ice never fully leaves the rivers. In 1818, James Hierlihy is married to Louiza Urquhart, the granddaughter of Reverend John Urquhart, who started the first Presbyterian church on the Miramichi in 1804. Her grandmother, Margaret Milligan, is apparently a relative of John Quincy Adams, who according to the river gossip is being groomed to become president of the United States. The nuptials are the talk of the settlement.

In the years that follow, the Miramichi is transformed from a lawless, struggling, mostly forgotten outpost to a centre of commerce, with a new shipbuilding company started by Joseph Cunard, a postal system, a ferry service, a stagecoach that connects Frederick Town to Nepisiguit, and a steamboat service that links Halifax to Quebec. Although drunken brawling and duels—particularly between sailors weighing anchor on the Miramichi after long weeks at sea and the rowdier settlers along the closest shores—continue to be commonplace, Newcastle becomes a major trading town in the province. The new prosperity spills over to Tabisintack, where the Blake, Wishart and Hierlihy families reap the benefits of improved transportation for the lumber they cut and the fish they catch.

In 1822, Honnor, twenty-nine, marries John Murray, a local farmer who is as quiet and unassuming as she is. William, who is farming his own lot as well as Charlotte’s, continues to live with his mother, though she’s had no more heart trouble. Her life has become very pleasing to her, at last.

She and Wioche slip the canoe into the water on sunny afternoons to paddle along the Tabisintack River. “There goes Mrs. H and the Indian,” people comment as they float by, themselves part of the local colour now. They explore the coves and caves along the river, stop to walk in the meadows, in perpetual conversation. As Charlotte has found peace, Wioche’s world has become bleaker. He fears the People will become extinct at the hands of those who came to the New World in the name of greed.

This is harsh, and maybe accurate, but it hurts her nonetheless. “The Acadians didn’t come with greed in their hearts, Wioche. Nor did I. I wanted a life of my own. And look what I got: five decades of hard labour! And an oldest son who almost broke my heart by wanting the same thing.” They thoroughly debate with each other—she in the safety of a knowledgeable soulmate and he in a search for hope.

T
HE SUMMER OF 1825
is hot and drought-ridden. By August, there’s not been a drop of rain, the crops are wilting, the wells are running dry. Even the animals’ behaviour is bizarre. The moose vanish, so do the deer.

Halfway into autumn, the air is still scorching hot, the marsh sun-baked and cracked, the bog grass crisped to an unearthly yellow. In September, forest fires rage in the south, and Government House in Frederick Town burns to the ground. By early October, the fires reach the Miramichi.

Even in Tabisintack, the air is so hot, it’s like breathing embers; the woods are burning only an hour away from The Point. Strangers arrive with reports Charlotte can hardly believe. A refugee from Frederick Town says the fire came so fast, it turned everything in its path to cinders. “Giant flames shot into
heaven like an artillery barrage. The town looks like there’s been a volcanic eruption. The livestock were mad with fear and running amok through the streets. People were falling to their knees praying for deliverance.”

She and William are up before dawn on October 7 trying to soak everything they can with water when an explosion booms in the distance. Then another one, and a third. The sky is black with ash. Hot coals blow in a violent wind onto The Point. Cinders hiss when they hit the water. Smoke that has been hovering in the distance for days suddenly smothers them with thick soot.

By mid-afternoon, the river people start arriving with frightful tales. People in Newcastle have drowned trying to find respite in the water, or have been burned alive in their beds, or crushed by collapsing, blazing timbers. They describe the noise of the fire whooshing, exploding, rumbling incessantly; the sky dark as night, save the immense sheets of flame illuminating the heavens.

Through the night and all the next day, more survivors stagger to the shore. One chronicler, Robert Cooney, who had arrived on the Miramichi the year before to work at the newly established newspaper wrote, “The character of the scene was such that all it required to complete a picture of the General Judgment was the blast of a Trumpet, the voice of the Archangel and the resurrection of the Dead.”

The fire burns all around them and finally runs itself into the sea, steaming to an end. It does not touch The Point.

The destruction along the Miramichi River is enormous. Newcastle is in ruins. Of two hundred houses, only twelve remain standing and those are severely damaged. Chatham, across the river from Newcastle, is spared. Ships anchored
between the two towns are burned to crisps; others farther downstream are dashed into the rocks by hurricane winds fed by the heat. Of two thousand settlers, three hundred people are dead, six hundred buildings are destroyed and eight hundred and seventy-five cattle lost. Black heaps of ashes along the roadside turn out to be the remains of inhabitants. Most of the wildlife has perished. Salmon, bass and trout have suffocated and float bloated in the river.

Later Charlotte hears that it was five separate forest fires, started by drought and driven together by the wind, that collided in apocalyptic proportions. They consumed everything but a few tracts of land from Frederick Town to the Baie de Chaleur—four million acres of the best lumber in New Brunswick. When she realizes the magnitude of the destruction, Charlotte is humbled by their own escape. For as long as they live, they will never forget the Great Miramichi Fire.

That night when all is quiet on The Point, she picks up her diary:

A
S IT TURNS OUT
, the Great Miramichi fire is a turning point for the people of New Brunswick. Faced with near ruin, they put their ploughs into the soil and till their way to prosperity. The shipbuilding industry is resurrected on the Miramichi. Enterprising young men with business plans for plants to pack and sell fish, create jobs. And the forests, their floors now fertile with post-fire ash, begin to grow again.

At The Point, the confounding mix of tragedy and blessedness is just the way life is, Charlotte thinks. Elizabeth’s Duncan drowns in the Tabisintack River, leaving her a widow with six of her sixteen children still under the age of twelve. The next year, Philip Hierlihy is married to Jane Lewis. Jane signs the marriage certificate with an X, which causes her new mother-in-law to complain once more about the lack of schools in the settlement. Her own daughters often select an X over the signatures she taught them.

Charlotte, now seventy-five, longs to see the sights her children exclaim about. But she’s tired more often than not. Even her sharp tongue has mellowed some. When William announces his betrothal to Elizabeth Johnston in June, she is actually pleased there will be a new chatelaine in her fine house. The marriage is set for November 22, and while others fuss with the cooking, she secretly makes plans for one last move.

A
convoy of canoes paddles upriver on a particularly stunning autumn day in October 1830. James and William take the lead, with their mother, weakened by her failing heart, wrapped in blankets and cushioned in the middle of the canoe with a huge black bearskin. Her trunk is strapped to the second canoe, and draws curious glances from those on the shore, many of them her extended family.

When they round The Point, she looks out over the cultivated fields, the house in which she’s lived for thirty-two years and the water that nearly surrounds it. She can’t resist a glance to the open sea and spares a thought for William Wishart. She leans forward to tap his namesake on the shoulder and says, “I’d like for it now to be known as Wishart’s Point.” He nods his agreement, smiling back at her.

There are some rapids to be ridden about a mile before Stymiest Millstream, and as bad luck would have it, they catch the third canoe, dumping both James and Philip and all the contents
into the drink. The water level is low, so the two are quickly up on their feet again, chasing baskets of clothing and the knickknacks that swirl around them on the current then snag on the rocks. “My frocks will be stiff with the brine,” Charlotte says. “But a bit of soap and water and a good breeze will make them right again.”

It takes all morning to paddle the ten miles to Stymiest Millstream, but Charlotte Mary is standing on the dock waiting when the entourage arrives as if she knows exactly when to expect them. She adores this renegade mother of hers, and is continually surprised and always amused by her stubborn refusal to kowtow to anyone. At thirty-nine, she is the youngest daughter, has a house full of children and welcomes the opportunity for them to learn at the knee of their grandmother. But she too is wondering what has propelled Charlotte to leave her beloved Point and come to the head of the tide on the river to live with them.

They off-load the canoes, laying the soggy bundles out to dry on the lawn, and settle Charlotte into her new quarters.

Despite the constant chatter of children and the hum of Benjamin’s sawmill, Charlotte tells her daughter soon after arriving, “The wind from the Point blows itself out some on its way through the woods. I find it peaceful here.”

She’s only been in her daughter’s house for a day when a canoe slips into the stream from the opposite bank and a man deftly strokes his way across the water. Wioche tells them the Indian camp on the opposite shore became his permanent home during the summer months. “I’m an old man now and cannot walk the Mi’kmaq district,” he jokes. But he can paddle a canoe and that’s what he and Charlotte do every day that the weather is fine.

“Not far, mind you,” Charlotte Mary tells her siblings. “Just a ways upriver and back. That pouch he carries—it has dried blueberry leaves in it. They make tea from the leaves and claim it eases the pain in their joints.”

They ply the waters like two ancient historians, their hair snowy white, hers fastened in a knot on top of her head, his tied in two plaits that fall over his shoulders, their faces tawny and weathered by the years of facing the elements, their eyes crinkled but sparkling yet.

“I wonder what they talk about,” Charlotte Mary muses each time the pair set out for their paddle.

I
N THE DAYS
after she arrives, Charlotte looks everywhere for the tattered old diary she’s kept since her nanny taught her the alphabet. She empties the trunk, where she usually kept it. Then she wonders whether it was in the canoe that tipped. She shakes out every item that survived the drenching—the dresses that have already been washed, the box with her brushes and combs—and then once more goes through the bag she had carried on her lap. But she knows, even while she rummages through her belongings, that her words are likely at the bottom of the Tabisintack River.

She sends word to William, who scours the house at Wishart’s Point to no avail. The family, duty bound to try to find the lost diary, send out the grandchildren to check the shores and scavenge the muddy river bottom. But they know before putting their paddles in the water that the precious old book is gone. Charlotte turns her thoughts to tasks that will camouflage her loss.

She spends time with Elizabeth, who has never really recovered from losing Duncan. She makes regular visits to Wishart’s
Point, paddling down the river with Wioche for visits with William and his wife. But mostly she burrows in at Stymiest Millstream, and daydreams about her men, her children, her grandchildren, the ties that bind. The mighty forests and wild waters that stole her heart from the moment she encountered them, the fields she’s cleared and cultivated, the gardens that feed her flock, all tied to the story of her long pioneering life.

She remembers the trials too. The fights with the Loyalists on the Miramichi, the storm that wrecked nearly everything the first winter they spent at The Point. And she relishes recalling her attempts to outwit her adversaries—the journey she and Wioche made to Frederick Town to secure the deed to John Blake’s lot, the tumbledown shed she built with Jimmy to house a goat so that Elizabeth would have milk. The tally of her life comes out in her favour, she decides. But she has no respite from losses.

She is seventy-seven when her oldest son takes sick and dies. And for a time the loss of John defeats her. In all the years of brewing potions to nurse them through illnesses or waiting for them to return from the perils of logging, or the sea, or the hunt, she’s never lost one of them, never even come close. There’s something perverse about a mother mourning a child.