The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (38 page)

Then, to her amazement, Charlotte discovers she is with child again. Elizabeth and Polly tend her at the birth, which is complicated only by Charlotte’s weariness at the thought of raising another child.

But from the moment she’s born, this girl child, Charlotte Mary, is a treasure to the family. The Hierlihy offspring all share their father’s sandy-coloured hair and amber eyes. But this new baby has hair the colour of strawberries mixed with sunshine and eyes so blue they startle the onlooker. When Charlotte gazes at her, and her nine brothers and sisters, she feels a surge of pride. Five boys: John Junior, the serious older brother; Robert,
trying desperately to be as useful as John; William, sweet-faced and gentle; Philip, the relentless organizer of everything from the children’s chores to games of pirates down by the shore; James, the image of his ambitious, hot-headed father. And five girls: the beautiful and reliable Elizabeth; rambunctious Polly with auburn hair like her mother’s; Eleanor, the enigma, who is kind and stubbornly self-sufficient at once; Honnor who toddles in hot pursuit of the others; and now Charlotte Mary, a wee colleen with the look of the Irish all over her.

Charlotte is still staying close to the cabin, tired out by her labour and enchanted by the new baby, when she sees a canoe on the river. Wioche. She beckons him to land, carrying the baby down to greet him. “You’ll have a cup of strong, black tea with us,” she insists. What she means is it is high time he became a visitor to the Hierlihy cabin.

“Wioche, we want to settle at Tabisintack,” she tells him after she has settled him by the hearth with the promised cup. As was the scene so long ago now, her littlest ones cluster by her chair, peeking solemnly at the handsome Indian their mother seems on such good terms with.

“We call that place Taboosimgeg,” he replies. “It’s a good place, where wood, fish, marsh, game and wind come to Mother Earth.”

When she asks if it is near where he lives, he tells her there are three Indian camps at Taboosimgeg, one directly across river from where she and Philip paddled the canoe to the shore. “I saw you there once,” he says.

She’s flabbergasted. “You saw me there? Why didn’t I see you?”

“You nearly fell into the water when you climbed out of the boat.”

She laughs. She had forgotten how well the People know the bush, sniff out the scents, observe the changes.

Philip arrives home just then and can’t help but scowl as she introduces the Indian, even though in the tales of her life she’s shared with him, he knows that Wioche has been a true friend to her and her children.

That evening, Philip comes home staggering with drink from yet another settlers’ meeting, bloodied and cursing a man called William Donald. Charlotte throws cold water from the brook over his beaten face and gives him the sharpest edge of her tongue. “You’re the shame of this family with your bad temper and volatile behaviour. You can’t tell me that William Donald was the one to pick this fight.”

She’s startled when John Junior and Robert take Philip’s side, mulishly staring at her as though her anger is unreasonable. “Don’t look at me, my sons. This isn’t the first time your father has been the instigator of fisticuffs. But if he values his family, I hope it will be the last.”

Later she wonders whether the visit from Wioche has anything to do with Philip’s lapse. But she still won’t attend the Court of General Session in August when the trial of Philip Hierlihy is convened. Again, the older boys take his part. “They goad him and humiliate him into these quarrels,” John Junior argues, and Charlotte reads something in his eyes that dares her to ask him why. Is he implying that she is the cause? That Philip is defending her honour? Things have really come to a sorry pass along the river if that is true, though she knows that in some people’s minds her strong will, and many husbands, has made her notorious.

“Many other men exhibit the same behaviour, Mother. And you can’t doubt that he wants the best for this family,” John
insists. But she won’t go, and when the court finds Philip guilty and fines him ten shillings and costs, Charlotte refuses to speak to him for a week.

Meanwhile, the government continues to delay the official stamping of the 1777 deeds. “It’s like waiting for a storm,” Charlotte growls, knowing other men on the river are poised like snakes, waiting to strike at their lots if the deeds are denied. But the waiting goes on. So does the uneasiness, so do the hostilities.

The New Year brings the settlers together in the solidarity that comes with sadness. John Murdoch has been suffering for more than two years with horribly painful sores in his mouth. On January 11, in an agony his family can hardly bear to watch, he dies and Janet is left a widow.

“At least her children are mostly grown, and surely they’ll take care of her,” Charlotte confides to Philip on the way back to the cabin, where it feels like all they do now is wait—like hostages—for the decision from the capital about Miramichi Lots Eight, Nine and Ten.

I
T’S MARCH
4, 1798, before word comes that a runner has arrived with the deeds from Frederick Town. The old settlers gather at the Hendersons’ place to meet the courier; and there is an eerie silence as the names are called and the packets are delivered. To John Blake Junior, Lot Eight, settled by John Blake Senior, now deceased—161 acres. To Philip Hierlihy for service in the Prince of Wales American Regiment during the American Revolution, Lot Nine—160 acres. To Charlotte Hierlihy, widow of John Blake, Lot Ten—154 acres. Now it is official. She is a landowner in her own right.

The lots for her sons-in-law, Duncan Robertson and Duncan McCraw, are yet to be deeded. Leaving a lot without the security
of a deed is tantamount to giving it away to any number of poachers lurking along the river. The time is not yet right for her whole clan to move.

Two days later, Philip is due back in court. He has been accused yet again of fighting, this time the more serious charge of assault and battery, but he is remanded and asked to return in August. Charlotte is determined to get him out of here, to Tabisintack, a move she thinks will calm his temper or at least keep him away from the river ruffians she now blames for his troubles. The quarrelling and physical fighting and lawlessness have increased exponentially. New settlers are arriving weekly; the judiciary cannot keep up with the charges. She worries about her own older boys, who are now twenty-one, seventeen and thirteen, getting involved in a fracas that could cost them their lives. She can hardly wait to escape.

The river, once a proud artery running through pristine land, which challenged the humans who came here, is bleeding from the wounds made by wild men, becoming the byway to stripped forests and ugly lives. Their departure for Tabisintack can’t come too soon.

That summer, when they go again to Tabisintack, they discover the elusive Beck wandering the shores. Beck tells Philip he owns a lot on the south side of the river he’ll sell for fifteen British pounds. Philip snatches up the offer immediately and has the deed transferred to his own name, thanks to Duncan’s quick action in his position as attorney.

With that legal toehold, Philip decides that it’s safe to clear the plot where the house will stand, leaving a shelter of trees around it. The boys hand-hue the wood for the two-storey structure of Charlotte’s dreams. They dig a cellar for dry goods, line it with stones they haul from the fields and pack mud mixed
with straw around the base and between the stones to make a rock-hard wall.

They only stay a few days at a time, sleeping in makeshift shelters and coaxing the plan into being. Charlotte plants a garden in the meadow and asks Wioche, when he visits, how they can drain the salt marsh for more farmland. She knows the Acadians have created such plots, but Wioche pleads ignorance. And Charlotte is a little ashamed: why should he collaborate so directly in her taming of the land?

They return to Blake Brook exhausted and exhilarated, and then they do double duty, taking care of the lots on the Miramichi.

As the log walls rise on her new home, they chink the spaces between the timbers with seaweed and pieces of birchbark, a lesson Charlotte learned from the Mi’kmaq. Then they cover the outside walls with more bark.

And, as it turns out once Beck is gone, they are not the only white folks in this place they have started to refer to as The Point. One afternoon while the boys are hammering the second floor into place and Charlotte is pulling weeds and rocks from the garden plot, helped more or less by James, Eleanor, Honnor and Charlotte Mary, two men walk up to where they are working and introduce themselves. David Savoy and Jacques Breaux live down shore, on the other side of the saltwater marsh, and tell Charlotte, in accents that make it clear they are Acadians, that they abandoned the Miramichi in 1790.

They are offspring of Acadians originally from a place called Shepody, who were chased out in the expulsion, fled to the Baie de Chaleur and finally returned to Negowack. She knows the place. It’s an Indian word meaning “improperly situated,” on the north side of Miramichi Bay. But it’s the mention of her bay that catches her.

“I lived there when I arrived here in 1775,” she offers. It turns out they know all about her: they heard about the redheaded Englishwoman who came to the bay with Commodore Walker.

She wants to know what they have heard, and who they know on the bay—the Landrys?

“Bien sur,” says Savoy, a square-shouldered, black-haired man who manages to be handsome despite the gap between his two front teeth. “That’s how we heard about you.”

“And do you know Wioche, a Micmac from around there? His family has marriage ties with the Landrys.”

“Mais oui,” Breaux chimes in.

This vast wilderness isn’t so isolated after all, she thinks, wondering why it is that she’s hardly ever left her homestead on the river while others, such as the Acadians and the Indians, move about and stay in contact.

Breaux continues. “My father is Anselme Breaux. David’s mother is Anselme’s sister, so we are cousins. Do you not know the Breaux families in Negowack?”

She has to admit that she does not.

“Surely you know Otho Robichaud, known as Sieur?”

She knows the name, but her world till now hasn’t reached beyond Napan Bay in one direction and the forks in the other.

Their story holds her attention for much of the afternoon. The deprivation their families suffered, the struggle to survive, and their deft way of recounting some forty-three years of family history, reminding her of the way André Landry told tales around the fire at the camp on the bay. Time has flown by, her garden work neglected, and finally she glances at her untidy plot as a sign that she must get back to work.

Her neighbours take the hint. But before they go, they offer
her a little more detail about the place she has now chosen to settle.

“My father and his brother Victor passed three winters here hunting and trapping before moving to Negowack where they started a new settlement,” Breaux says. “It is a good place. You will be happy here.”

She says goodbye, entreating them to return to visit again, and they are away toward the river when Savoy calls back to her. “Madame, did the man who came to the bay looking for you, a Monsieur MacCulloch, did he ever find you?”

“Will MacCulloch?” An image flashes into her mind—the dashing Will staging his audacious plan to keep her in the Mi’kmaq camp while the Hanley sailed for Britain.

The children crowd around as their confident, hard-talking mother suddenly looks as though she’s about to dissolve in front of their eyes. “Who is Will MacCulloch, Mother?” Eleanor asks.

“Come back,” Charlotte calls, already running toward them. “What do you know of Mr. MacCulloch?”

“All I know is he was asking after you,” says Savoy. “But I’ll ask les gens when next I go to the Baie.”

She thanks him and waves as they head off again. She’s perspiring in the cool afternoon air, her face flushed. And her thoughts are hectic: When was Will here? Is this somehow connected to the memorial I sent to Papa?

As soon as David and Jacques are out of earshot, the children start asking questions.

“Mama, why do the men speak like that?” Eleanor, now a big girl of nine, asks.

Realizing how small their world has been on the Miramichi where English settlers and the Mi’kmaq have been their only acquaintances, Charlotte explains that David and Jacques are
French, Acadians actually, whose families have been here for a very long time. Philip asks when they came here. “Before the British. But they were sent away.” All three want to know why, so while Charlotte digs into the earth and the children pull on the weeds, ripping out the roots, she tells them the story, as she knows it, about the Acadians.

“They were the first to come here from Europe, from a country called France. But their government ignored them, left them to find their way, even though they were very loyal to their country and their Catholic religion. I met some Acadians when I lived with the People at the Baie de Chaleur, where Wioche also lived. They’re kind people, hard-working and very clever about surviving in the woods. When they were abandoned here by their homeland, they learned from the Indians, made clothes from the pelts of bear, beaver, otter, fox and marten. I was told that the early Acadian settlers loved the colour red and used to get garments from the British and cut them up, unravel them, spin them and weave strips of the red into their clothes.

“They had interesting customs too. They weren’t allowed to marry until the girl could weave and the boy could make a set of wheels. During the long winters they told stories, drank homemade wine and cider and kept warm by the fire. They were wonderful farmers too, and other settlers that came after envied them for it.

“But then there was war between Britain and France and when the British won, they sent all the Acadians away to punish them for not helping the British. And the British settlers took over their farms.”

“Where were they sent?” James wants to know.

“It was a terrible time. They had no quarrel with anyone but
were made to suffer. Families were separated, children lost their parents, husbands lost their wives and many died on the way to a place in the south, a French territory called Louisiana. Some refused to go and hid with the Indians. Many began to find their way back here about the same time that I arrived from England.”