The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (23 page)

Being cautious to avoid falling into the bog and with one eye on Elizabeth, she uses a knife to cut out a square piece and sets it to dry near the cabin. On the way back to the house, she spots the familiar sleek canoes of the Mi’kmaq paddling by, flying the flag of the revolutionary patriots. She wonders how the people she knew at the Baie could be doing the things Blake speaks of here on the Miramichi. Her intuition tells her he’s right, while her heart wishes he were wrong. The other boats belonging to Davidson or the Wisharts, she presumes, that ply the water in front of their lot give no indication of stopping to visit.

The peat-moss experiment seems to work. Once it’s dry, she lights it and the smoke it produces rises a foot and smoulders for hours. It takes a whole day to cut the squares from the bog and arrange them around the plot. That night she lights each one before she retires. In the morning, the peat is still smoking. A triumph.

It’s a lonely life, though. Fog rolls along the river sometimes for days at a time, smothering her in an unsettling isolation. It’s so thick some mornings she meets it at the door and can’t see the river. Sometimes the sun burns it off by midday. Other times the soundless cloak is so consuming she thinks there’s nothing else out there, except maybe trouble. One day when the fog is gone and sparkling sunshine gives her a view up and down the Miramichi, she spies a dory cutting through the main channel toward Blake Brook. There’s a man rowing the little grey boat. With his back to the landing, he deftly strokes the boat to shore and slips in beside Blake’s canoe. He calls to her from the dory. “William Wishart,” he says by way of introduction.
“Welcome,” she calls, “I’m Charlotte Blake,” and walks to the shore to meet him.

“There have been more attacks on the river. I’m wondering how you and the wee bairn are faring,” he says.

“We’re fine. Only the squirrels are threatening our survival,” she says, hoping to explain the smoking peat that surrounds her plot.

“I can see you’re an inventive lassie. You’ll need to be. The war in the colonies is ever more fierce.”

“How do you learn these things?” she asks.

He explains a system that fascinates her, like the post being carried wave to wave along the river rather than by horse-drawn carriage as it is to her father’s home. “The ships all stop in Liverpool on the coast of Nova Scotia,” he begins. “Whether from the Baie de Chaleur or the West Indies or Britain, many trade their cargo on those docks. Simeon Perkins gathers the news and passes it to every ship’s company. He writes down all the comings and goings and gives the account to the ships that follow.”

“So this Perkins man is like the post master?” she inquires.

“Nay, Charlotte, he’s the commissioner of roads but keeps his office at the wharf. It’s Simeon who told me that Captain Blake had sailed away and that you were alone on his lot.”

She enjoys the visit, as she hasn’t set eyes on another adult since Blake sailed away more than three weeks ago. He’s tall, with hair as black as coal, searching dark eyes and oversized hands. He seems a calculating man, watching, listening and only sharing a portion of the story she’s sure he could tell. After a cup of tea and as much news as she can get from him, he turns to leave, promising to return with turnips from his own garden just as soon as they are ready for digging.

By the time Blake sails back to the brook, the garden is flourishing, the cabin is rearranged and an outdoor oven has been patched together. Charlotte is happy to see him. Happier still with the gifts he brings—spices from the West Indies—salt, pepper, cinnamon and ginger, as well as a tiny bracelet of beads that he slips on Elizabeth’s wrist and two barrels—one full of molasses, the other, sugar. It’s been a successful trip. She waits until supper is over and Elizabeth is sleeping to tell him her news.

“We will have a child, in February, I reckon,” she says. No reply.

“Have I encumbered you with my poor plain speech?” she asks, mimicking his remark to her when he asked her to be his wife.

He stares at her, speechless. The hard-driving bargain of the sea for a man who takes to the water has shaped him these eighteen years since sailing away from childhood. Now this woman sitting before him is telling him that his hearth will be tended, his home filled with family. He’d only ever hoped to avoid the worst. Now his expectations are high.

“It is very fine news, indeed,” he says.

He, too, has news, gathered from Simeon Perkins when his ship sailed into Liverpool on the way home.

“George Walker’s establishment at Nepisiguit is destroyed utterly.”

“How?”

“It’s the work of the American pirates and the Indians who think them friends. They say the loss is ten thousand pounds or more.”

Charlotte looks down to her feet and the beaded moccasins she wears.

“And, George, how does he fare?”

“He’s a wily old pirate himself, Charlotte. Escaped and safe. He’s one of those who is always standing when the smoke clears.”

More disturbing because of its proximity is the news that John Cort’s store had been ransacked, his cattle stolen and his house burned to the ground. “The privateers have us in their sights,” John warns. But autumn is upon them; anxiety about the onset of winter is greater for Charlotte than these robber barons of the sea. “Look,” she says while he continues his denunciation of the Indians, “the birds are flocking up; it’s as sure a sign as I know to be getting ready for the cold.”

Fall brings the months of dawn-to-dusk travail. The clock ticks against the coming freeze while she’s as industrious as the squirrels plucking their own moveable feast from whatever falls from the trees or is left in Charlotte’s garden and digging furiously to bury the bounty for later. The wood is cut and stacked. The slender cedar that sparks but gives no heat is good for kindling and goes in one pile while hard wood, especially maple that burns slowly and produces a fine heat, is stacked in another. Her husband brings nets full of fish when he returns from his piloting duties; she tries to remember how they were dried at the camp. She guts and cleans them, lifts out the backbone and soaks them in brine for half the day. Then she lays them on the flat side of wood John has cut and leaves them there all day, turning them so the cut side is down before the dew gathers at dusk. She repeats the chore every day until they are as stiff as the boards they lie on. Cod, salmon, mackerel are laid out like slivers of wood and stacked for winter. She worries about the livestock that never appeared. “We need a goat at least to have milk for Elizabeth when she leaves my breast,” she complains.

He’s away piloting a ship up the river when her ear is tuned to the call of the whippoorwill—it’s unmistakable. She is overjoyed to see Wioche, rushes to where he stands among the trees and stops herself from reaching out with her arms. She is tongue-tied, but a thousand messages pass between them in silence. He speaks first. “Charlotte, Elizabeth—good on Milamichi?” Her reply is so convoluted with bits about her life these last few months on the river, the baby’s antics and her questions about the camp on the Baie, Marie, Walker’s troubles, he’s soon laughing with the pleasure of connecting again with the unpredictable Charlotte.

“What brings you here?” she asks.

“Chief Francis Julian is visiting the Mi’kmaq camp in Taboosimgeg,” he says.

“Why would he travel there?”

“Trouble is coming. You must be careful. Your friend Commodore Walker is not safe. Many more privateers sail on the Baie.”

She tells him she knows and although wants to ask what part his people play in this trouble she asks instead about Marie. They walk toward the cabin while he tells her the news of the camp. He doesn’t stay long, explaining that he must join the chief at a grand council meeting that is bringing chiefs from all over the district together to talk about the warring colonies south of them. On his way out of the cabin, he smiles at the sleeping Elizabeth, notices the braid of sweetgrass hanging on the hearth and says softly, “Baie de Chaleur stays with you.” Then as though to put his own stamp on the land where she lives, he adds, “Here it is called Mtaoegenatgoigtog.” It means Black Brook—the word she thought appropriate when she first saw the ink-coloured brook that has become her water well,
wash basin and fresh-water fishing hole. Without another word, he is gone, having promised to bring a new braid when the sweetgrass grows again in the spring.

She’s unsettled as much by the brevity of the visit as the plain fact that John Blake would not have appreciated the Micmac man on his land. Feeling a pang of guilt, she decides to make a special dinner for her husband and throws herself into preparing pommes de terre rappée, a favourite repast of André’s Acadian family. She digs up a hill of potatoes grown from André’s seedlings and sets the pot to boil while she grates the earthy-smelling vegetables, mixes them with diced pork fat and rolls the mixture into balls that she drops into the boiling water. By the time he gets home, the hearth is as he likes it.

His tales of piloting ships up and down the Miramichi become daily thrillers. The journey is invariably fraught with potential mishaps—the changing tide, the treacherous shoals and the possibility of attack. The Blake cabin is above the submerged sandbank that separates Miramichi Bay from the river, so Charlotte can only imagine the tricky manoeuvres her husband tells her about. But she’s always relieved when he returns and relishes the stories he brings that knit the strands of their pioneering life together.

There’s something else she notices that plays like a subplot in his stories. He seems to know a lot about the patriots, even calling some of them by name. It makes her wonder from time to time if piloting ships is all he is doing out there on the water.

The cabin is readied for winter with extra boughs, and Charlotte suggests they line the walls with animal skins. “This is not a Micmac camp,” he says with more judgment than she cares to hear. Then he adds insult to injury by declaring, “The sweet-grass won’t keep you warm either.” She ignores the comment
and instead calculates the stores: potatoes and onions are buried in a deep pit at the back of the cabin. There are spices and tea, molasses and sugar and enough flour and oil, she thinks to see them through. He’s brought whale oil for the lamps and to use as butter as well. Blake reminds her that livestock cannot survive the winter on the river, they are usually slaughtered in the fall and unless she wants a goat living in the cabin, she better look to other sources of drink. There’s tea, rum, spruce beer that he makes himself in a still behind the cabin and the brook is a source of fresh water even if they have to cut through the ice to get to it.

The brook is the first to lock up, then the river; it freezes solid within a week of being covered with a thin layer of ice. The siege that is winter is upon them.

Save for the happy February day when the lusty cries of their first-born son—John Blake Jr.—fill the cabin, winter is long, harsh and punishing.

J
ohn Blake is away—again—sailing to the West Indies. And again Charlotte is left to bargain with the critters in the garden, the size of the woodpile and the threat of privateers, this time with two children at her side. It is a warm clear day when she spies a familiar dory crossing the river to her own small dock.

“Pray!” she calls to the approaching boat, “How does William Wishart do?”

He throws out the bow rope and she holds it as he climbs ashore. Together they pull the boat up.

“Well enough, I suppose, Charlotte. I hope
you
are well, and the wee children.”

“I am, William. But why do you answer me indirectly?”

“Och, Charlotte, let’s not speak of me. Where’s the new bairn?”

“Asleep in the house and let him remain so.”

“Indeed. A sleeping baby—a blessing to all mankind.”

“Indeed, indeed. Have you come to visit me?”

“I have, Charlotte, and I’ve brought you a few things.”

“What things?”

“Aye. Many things.” He leans into the boat, where two bulky hempen sacks lie on the boards. “And I’ve brought you news,” he says.

They sit in the kitchen, their voices softened on account of the baby.

“I’m afraid for you, Charlotte.”

“Are you so, faith?” She fans her cup with her hand and sips the tea cautiously. “What do you propose?”

“There is worry of an attack. I think you ought to join the Murdochs. Just awhile. Until John returns.”

“I see. And what do you propose I do with my own house, left open and unguarded? And my garden. What shall we eat, come winter?”

“It would not be easy, I know. But I’ve brought you a large store of potatoes and what onions and cabbage I have and a bushel or two of good turnips. These, with what you have, will make a contribution for your keep. You may work with Janet Murdoch, who has barely a notion of how to begin the business of settling a homestead.”

“William, if I were to follow this course, what would you and your brother eat? You cannot live by salmon alone.”

“Aye. That’s so. I’ve come to tell you, Charlotte, that we are leaving. We’ll go to Halifax for now, where Alexander has friends.”

Charlotte sits back in her chair.

“It’s as bad, then, as I feared.”

“New crops destroyed up and down the coast. Cattle stolen. And these losses are attended by events I will not describe. Men killed
and
women
and
children. Raids and burning these several weeks past even above us at the forks. There’s no one cares to
defend us, it seems. Even if this were not so, we cannot get our fish out in a regular way. Now we’ll take what we can, while our hides are still on our backs and our scalps on our heads.”

“I am sorry to hear all this.”

“And I’m sorry to see it. Sorrier still that John is not here to protect you.”

“He thought by this one adventure to give us what we need to prosper.”

“Aye. Prosper indeed, when a man returns to find his wife and children all dead.”