The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (30 page)

The river news is ripe with excitement. Every ship that docks brings edicts from the King’s Court in London. In early August, a paper dated 18th Day of June arrives and announces that the province is being divided.

Another dispatch announces that Thomas Carleton is to be the governor.

Western Nova Scotia becomes New Brunswick on June 18 but it’s November before Thomas Carleton arrives and takes his office as Governor at Parr Town on the Saint John River, a three-day canoe paddle from the Miramichi.

While others celebrate, Charlotte is consumed by two concerns. First, the licenses of land granted by the governor of Nova Scotia in 1777 need to be secured in the new colony. Second, the notice describing the election to be held the following year includes a voting procedure that restricts the vote to white men over the age of twenty-one who have lived in the colony for a minimum of three months and are willing to take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. Charlotte is furious.
She’d raised her hand, or not, in decisions taken along the river to mark off the lots, to share the marshland among the settlers, for example, and presumed she’d have the right to vote on provincial issues as well.

“According to this announcement, women cannot vote for this land they have settled beside the men,” she rails to her husband when he returns to the cabin.

“You’ll want to be governor next,” he says, then goes about the job of adding yet another addition to the cabin before winter drives them all indoors again.

It’s near to freeze-up when she opens the cabin door one morning and finds a huge bearskin left on the path by the brook. Beside it, a vessel containing the bear’s liver. She looks along the bank toward the Indian camp, recalls the story she shared about greasing a moose hide with the liver of a grouse because she didn’t have a bear’s liver for the job and thinks perhaps her angst about the pride and dignity of the Indians is unwarranted.

The snow comes early and as far as the settlers on the river can see, it’s neverending. The sun seems to have left with the geese. The drifts mound up over the cabins, blanket even the tall timbers and leave an immense panorama of white interrupted only by columns of smoke curling skyward as if begging relief.

The Blakes are confined to their cramped, claustrophobic household. Charlotte uses the time to assemble the children around the hearth and teaches the older ones their letters and numbers while Jimmy entertains Robert. John, ever the provider, can hardly push the door through the heaps of snow that pile against it by night and fill in the path as fast as he digs his way to the river each day. Between them they fetch water, retrieve food buried in the pit and replenish the firewood a dozen times a day.

“We make a good team, John Blake,” Charlotte tells him one evening while the family huddles around the hearth listening to his yarns, the tapping of her knitting needles and the crackling of the fire providing the acoustics to the lilt of the storyteller.

She has already marked the New Year on the wall when he first complains of a pain in his mouth. A toothache, they presume, common enough among the settlers. Within a few days the pain is intense, travelling from his upper jaw to his ear, eye, throat and pounding into the top of his head. His face is swollen, a boil on the gum beside the offending tooth is leaking pus and blood into his mouth and he is flush with fever.

They both know the tooth has got to be removed. He’s not the first to have to resort to mutilating his mouth to find pain relief so after dousing himself with rum, he takes a sharpened stick and amidst howls of pain tries to dig the throbbing structure from his jaw. It doesn’t budge. The children stay with Jimmy in the outer room while their Papa whacks a pointed rock into the tooth, breaking pieces away but failing to dislodge the root. Frantic with pain, he picks up a long sliver of whale bone and stabs it into the abscess and with an almighty wrench dislodges the tooth and the festering tissue it’s attached to. His mouth is a mass of blood, septic fluids and ragged tissue.

She eases him onto the bed and swabs his face and mouth with cold water, hoping the fearsome pain will subside and sits by his side until he mercifully succumbs to sleep. But the night brings more fever. By morning he’s vomiting blood and drooling thick green mucus, while pushing his fist into his cheek to deaden the pain in the palpitating wound.

Charlotte packs his cheek with snow; rubs ice over his brow. By midday he’s delirious, muttering warnings about Indians and privateers, calling for Charlotte who’s been by his side for more
than twelve hours, only leaving to fetch concoctions of medicines she’d put on the fire the night before. She tries every medicinal trick she knows from boiling wintergreen leaves into tea to spooning foul-tasting elixirs into his mouth.

With each passing hour he worsens. Angry red streaks track down his neck. Watery blisters glisten on his skin. She wonders if he has the pox or has poisoned his own blood with the hacking and stabbing at the wound. He loses consciousness. Her efforts to save him are to no avail. Captain John Blake dies in the back room of the home he built on the Miramichi just before nightfall on that dreadful January day.

C
harlotte sits beside the still body of her husband, staring at the wall where she’s marked the birthdates of her children. Dark thoughts whir like hornets. Is she cursed? A dead lover, a dead husband, and she is only thirty years old. Elizabeth is nine, John is almost eight, Polly is five and Robert three. And there’s Jimmy, of course, who has kept the four little ones occupied through her vigil. She looks at her husband’s ashen face—no serenity there, just the marks of his pain-filled last hours—and thinks, What am I to do with you? Then, What am I to do without you?

Finally she reaches to pick a blanket off the floor where it had fallen and gently covers him, then opens the bedroom door. Jimmy is there in a flash, the other children crowding behind him. Elizabeth hugs her as Charlotte crouches to the littler ones, John’s children. In her distress, she is blunter than she means to be.

“Your father has died.” Saying it out loud brings tears to her eyes, and for a moment she fears she will break down. If
that happens, she doesn’t know what she will do. “Let’s not give in to our sadness just now. We must do something for your father first. Before night falls, we have to find a place to keep him safe until we can take him to be properly buried come spring.”

Five sets of eyes look back at her solemnly.

Then Jimmy says, “Ma’am, the snow is deep out back by the tilt. Maybe we could dig into the snowbank and keep him there, safe from …” He doesn’t want to mention the creatures they need to keep John Blake’s mortal remains safe from. Charlotte manages to nod at his delicacy.

Polly begins to wail loudly, and Robert too, Elizabeth hushing them so their mother can think what to do.

“John Junior, please fetch our shovels and the pick, and come with me and Jimmy. We’re going to make a proper resting spot for your father. Elizabeth, bundle up Mary Ann and Robert. It may be that they want to help too.”

And thus, within an hour of John Blake’s death, Charlotte leads a solemn procession of young souls now dependent entirely on her out to the deepest snowbank behind the cabin. Though she and Jimmy do the heaviest part of the work, every child has a hand in creating a nest for their father.

“We have to dig it as deep as we possibly can,” Charlotte instructs them, hacking furiously at the icy layer at the bottom of a hole that is soon shoulder-height. “Jimmy, you and John go cut some spruce boughs to line his resting place.”

It’s nearly dark when the task is done. She leads the chilled and bedraggled children inside, instructing Elizabeth to put the kettle on and to help the younger ones thaw their feet and hands by the fire. She opens the bedroom door and stares at the still form on her marriage bed, wishing one last time for
this to be a dreadful dream from which Blake, and she too, will soon wake. For a moment she is tempted to lay the new bearskin on top of the boughs at the bottom of the snowy crypt, but then more reality sets in: her husband no longer needs the warmth and her children may perish without it. Instead she shrouds him in the blanket, and with Jimmy hoisting the shoulders, she carries John Blake to be packed into the snow until spring. Nothing has ever sounded as mournful to her as the light patter falling on his blanketed form as she and Jimmy hasten to fill in his grave. Not even Pad. When Pad died, even though she was pregnant, she had no idea of the burden of children.

When they return to the house, she shrugs off her coat, shakes the snow from her skirts and gathers her children to her. Mary Ann and Robert stare up at her as though she’s about to tell them a reassuring story. But what can she say to four children who are now fatherless?

“When the ice goes out of the river, we will take Papa to the cemetery. I will take care of you. We have enough to eat this winter, enough wood split. We will be warm and safe until spring is here. We will be all right, I promise.”

Their upturned faces tell her she still hasn’t found the answer they seek.
Your father died of a toothache and we’re all alone and who knows why
. Instead, she simply says, “Come, Elizabeth, we need to get the supper started.”

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
after she’s tucked all four of them, and Jimmy, into bed, she starts toward her own room, then stops at the threshold. Can she really lie down on the bed where Blake just died? Instead, she carries her diary and her lamp to the table, avoiding the chair her husband usually sat in:

Charlotte stares at the page for a minute, wanting very much to say something about her husband himself, and not her need of him. Finally she scratches out—inadequately, she feels—
You were a good man, John Blake
.

She closes the diary and goes to check on the children, who are curled up against one another and, mercifully, sound asleep.

She slumps into the chair by the hearth and there she sits, mourning, planning, wishing, and scheming through the night and all the next day, and the night and the day after that one. The
children crawl in and out of her lap while Jimmy tends to the fire and the food, with Elizabeth’s help. Like the smoke that lingers in layers around the hearth, the lives of those inside the cabin are suspended, drifting, waiting. At the end of the third day, Charlotte finally rises from her spot by the fire, shrugging out from under her bearskin and flicking invisible dust from her skirts. First she must get them all through this endless winter. And then she will address her plans for their future. What she absolutely cannot do any longer is sit still.

J
IMMY HAS SPREAD THE WORD
to the closest neighbours that John Blake is dead. The first to call is William Davidson. No one has been cordial with him since he returned to the river, accusing him, if not to his face, of abandoning the Miramichi during the bad times and returning to reap the harvest of the peace. But Charlotte has no bone to pick with him. As far as she is concerned, he built a fine business here, and when it faltered, he moved it elsewhere. When there was an opportunity to return, he took it. Having come along the river from the forks by horse-drawn sleigh to find out whether there is anything he can do for her, Davidson finds the lovely widow in full command of her children and her senses, with enough stores to last the winter and her husband safely secured until the river breaks up. Nevertheless, he vows that he’ll check on her again.

Next to trek through the woods to offer their condolences are John and Janet Murdoch. As Charlotte ushers them in, she allows herself for one moment to think, What took you so long? But she can see the answer in the looks on their faces: clearly they are both concerned for her, but she’s now a woman alone with four children and the Murdochs are having enough trouble feeding their own.

But that wasn’t all that they were thinking. Tromping back to their own cabin after tea and bannock with Charlotte, John Murdoch says out loud what his wife has scrupled to utter so soon after Blake’s death: “She’ll make a good prize for another husband soon.”