The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (45 page)
The family makes a floating procession down the river, through the sea and into the bay at the Miramichi and over the shoals to the burial ground, where John Blake is laid to rest next to his father. The very next day Robert and John’s widow, Catherine, sell part of Lot Eight to the county. It was their father’s original 1777 Nova Scotia land grant. The deed names it as Black Brook. “It’s Blake Brook,” Charlotte complains, knowing it’s futile. The name is as lost as the man it was named for and his first-born son.
On the way back from the funeral, when they pass Burnt Church, the grandchildren in her canoe ask Charlotte how it came to have such a name. And Charlotte begins a story that isn’t finished until after the journey’s end.
“It used to be called Eskinwobudich, the Indian word for lookout. Long before I came here, when I was still a little girl in England, the village was attacked by British soldiers who wanted to be rid of the Indians and the Acadians both. They burned everything, including a stone church, the first church on the river. Afterwards, people started calling the place Burnt Church.” The children want to know why the soldiers did this. “Didn’t they like them?” Charlotte Mary’s youngest asks. Her grandmother says, “In my old trunk, I have a letter written by the colonel who directed the attack. John Blake, grandfather to some of you, was one of the soldiers in that raid and came upon the account written and brought it to me to read for him. He was a good man, John Blake, but he had some trouble with his letters.”
Back at home, the youngsters pester her to read them the colonel’s letter, and Charlotte retrieves it, fragile and sepia with age. It’s much too long to retain a child’s attention, so she scans it quickly, then selects a passage from the conclusion of Colonel Murray’s account. “This was written on the twenty-fourth of September, 1758,” she tells them:
In the Evening of the 17th in Obedience to your Instructions embarked the Troops, having two Days hunted all around Us for the Indians and Acadians to no purpose, we however destroyed their Provisions, Wigwams and Houses, the Church which was a very handsome one built with Stone, did not escape. We took Numbers of Cattle, Hogs and
Sheep, and Three Hogsheads of Beaver Skins, and I am persuaded there is not now a French Man in the River Miramichi, and it will be our fault if they are ever allowed to settle there again, as it will always be in the Power of two or three Armed vessels capable of going over the Barr, to render them miserable should they attempt it
.
Her assembled grandchildren are mesmerized. And little Benjamin knows just what to ask next: “Did the Indians and Acadians really go away? Uncle David is Acadian. Wioche is an Indian.” Charlotte tries to explain the history, fully aware of her own complicity in displacing both Acadian and Indian. Her whole life here, it seems, has been lived in the knowledge that everything she wished to secure for her family helped to undo the security of her friends.
The children never tire of their grandmother’s stories. When they walk with her in the winter, she tells them how the snow sparkles because of millions of crystals with different surfaces that reflect the light from the sun or the moon. And in spring she teaches them the lessons of planting. “Look, the buds on the poplars are near to bursting. When the new leaves are as big as a squirrel’s ear, that’s the time to plant the corn.”
When little Benjamin swings from an apple tree in full bloom, snapping the branch from the trunk, she reminds him, “There will be no apples on that branch come fall. You need to choose a branch that’ll hold you, so you’ll have food in the winter.”
Inevitably they ask her why she left her mother and father and came across the ocean.
“There was trouble in Britain at that time,” she says earnestly. “My father said there would be fewer opportunities
for young men. People were angry and worrying. But the talk about the New World across the ocean was exciting. So this is where I wanted to be.” She’s explained herself this way to the children so many times by now she nearly believes it herself. The midnight flight from her home and the calamitous stop in the West Indies are foggy memories, overwritten with the passage of time.
She tells them about the kind of home she grew up in. “When I was a child, I was never allowed to go any place without my nurse. She was always with me. I remember my home, a very lovely stone house with a stone wall all around it and beautiful flowers and shade trees. I can still picture them in my memory. There was a sketch of the garden that I brought with me, but I fear it is lost now. Maybe it went into the river with my diary.”
S
HE’S MORE THAN EIGHTY
when she decides it’s time to retrieve the letter long stored in her old trunk. She dates it September 3, 1836. Then she asks the Justice of the Peace, William Ferguson, and her son James to be the witnesses when she signs, seals and delivers her will to deed all of her lands to William Wishart. No one argues. In fact, the only one who is surprised is Charlotte herself, when fall turns to winter then spring and she is still with them.
She celebrates her eighty-fifth birthday at Wishart’s Point, and an enormous crowd of well-wishers descends to honour the woman who was truly the beginning. More than seventy grandchildren, eight of them named Charlotte, and all of her grown sons and daughters but John, dead now for eight years, fete the woman who has played such an influential role in their lives. Most of the inhabitants of the now-flourishing Tabisintack settlement come to pay homage to “old Mrs. H.” The Mi’kmaq
send woven baskets, a braid of sweetgrass and a fox pelt hat to keep her warm. They sing the most popular song in this settlement of Scot descendants, and when the end of the chorus—“We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne”—lifts up over The Point, Charlotte lets her gaze drift to the sea. The wind whispers through her white hair, pulling it out of the combs and blowing the strands over her face. It’s the last time she ever sees The Point.
T
HE WINTER
takes its toll on her. Wioche, as old as she is, slides across the frozen river to sit with her by the fire while the storms outside nearly bury the cabin with snow. By the time spring announces itself, she isn’t able to leave her bed for his visits. “Tell me a story,” she asks Wioche. He begins, as he always does, with the creation myth, the one she loves best, about Gitchi Manitou sending Gluskap to Earth. About him digging holes to make valleys and piling the dirt to make mountains. As often as not, Charlotte is sleeping before the story ends.
On an early morning, April 25, 1841, when the sun is casting its glow along the river and the earth is bursting with blossoms, Charlotte Mary carries the strong black tea her mother prefers for breakfast into the bedchamber and finds her lying, eyes open, chest still. Charlotte Taylor Blake Wishart Hierlihy, the indomitable and daring matriarch, is dead.
A
SERVICE IS ARRANGED
for the cemetery in Tabisintack, on a grassy plain that stands watch above the river and looks out over Wishart’s Point. While Charlotte Mary and her family go ahead to the cemetery, three canoes line up at the Stymiest shore. Led by Wioche, Mi’kmaq women, wailing and chanting, gather the earthly remains of their friend, wrap her
in their finest blankets and lay her in the canoe on a bed of otter skins. Then they turn to the south, the direction of woman, and give thanks to the creator for the life and good deeds of Charlotte Taylor.
“Nisgam wi la lin ugjit ula gelusit e’pit—Great Spirit, thank you for this good woman.”
Wioche paddles the canoe that carries Charlotte down the river. The women paddle on either side, chanting mournfully all the way to the cemetery where they deliver their beloved Charlotte to her descendants.
The Indians linger by the shore, as the family gathers around the grave, listening to the eulogy, the gospel reading and the singing. “Oh God, our help in ages past,” the mourners sing. “Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away; they fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”
After the last shovelful of earth is tamped into the grave, they drift away, on foot, by buggy, in boats and canoes.
The old Mi’kmaq man sits on the hill. From here he can see the mound of fresh brown earth that covers the new grave; to the east, the homestead at Wishart’s Point, now bathed in evening light; to the northwest, the sparkling river he plied so many times with Charlotte. From here he can feel the coastal winds that stirred her soul, and see the land she tried to tame.
Night settles in and birdsong announces vespers. Wioche stays there watching, remembering, making his farewell to the woman he has always loved, the impetuous and beautiful Charlotte Taylor. He’s still there when the moon rises and turns him into a silhouette. In the still of the night, the only sound that breaks the quiet is the song of the whippoorwill, a long, mournful call that echoes along the river, across the treetops, up to the heavens, calling, calling, again and again.
AFTERWORDC
HARLOTTE
T
AYLOR’S ROOTS
were firmly planted in Tabusintac by the time she died. More than seventy grandchildren, eight of them called Charlotte, carried her pioneering style and her story to the next generation. Ten years after she died, on April 26, 1851, her son and heir William Wishart also passed away. Today, more than two thousand of her descendants gather every five years at Tabusintac’s Old Home Week.I first attempted to write Charlotte’s story as a straightforward non-fiction account. I wanted to contribute to the early history of New Brunswick, as well as to augment the sparse chronicles of the women pioneers of that time. But even as I was researching, I also was caught up in the vivid reimagining of Charlotte’s life and frustrated by the missing links—I could not find out for certain how she wound up on the Miramichi or confirm the elusive relationship her descendants claim she had with a First Nations man. So I finally decided that my ancestor would have encouraged me to take liberties, crafting fictional
bridges and scenes between the known facts in a historical reconstruction of her life.We do know the names of her husbands, her children and her grandchildren—although no record was found for her marriage to William Wishart, nor a birth certificate for the child born during that marriage, William. Details about her neighbours on the Miramichi and Commodore George Walker are from archival data. So are the re-creations of the battles with the American patriots and the Indians, events such as the Great Miramichi Fire, and the petitions and land claims she sent to the government.
We also know that she left England with her lover, a man called Willisams, who was previously in the employ of her father’s household staff. But that is all we know about him.
Walker’s men, in particular Will MacCulloch, are fictional, inspired by tales of the real men who served in the Royal Marines and Royal Navy at that time.
As for Wioche, there are facts known about her bond with the Mi’kmaq. She was a midwife to the women; she trekked to Fredericton with an aboriginal man; when she died, the Mi’kmaq carried her to a canoe and paddled her to the cemetery in Tabusintac. But the story repeated by almost all of her descendants, about her lifelong relationship with a Mi’kmaq man, remained elusive despite my combing of record offices and searching for letters. To unravel this puzzle, I went to Gilbert Sewell, the Mi’kmaq storyteller in Big Cove, New Brunswick. He began at the end by telling me that if the Mi’kmaq took her to the burial ground, she would most certainly have held a special place in the band and would likely have been adopted by them. The question was when and why.
That required an examination of how Charlotte got to the Miramichi in the first place. Although there is no archival evidence
documenting her arrival in the New World, there are two stories that circulate among her descendants. One has her landing at Miscou Island in northern New Brunswick, after her lover drowned in the sea when their landing craft tipped between the ship and the shore. The other is that she went to the West Indies and that her lover died of yellow fever shortly after they arrived. I chose the latter version, partly because it would have been unlikely for a British ship to make a landing at Miscou in 1775. But mostly because of the story—widely believed by her descendants but unproven—that Mr. Willisams was a black man whose ancestors came to England from the West Indies.How she got to British North America from the West Indies was another puzzle. I chose her route by weighing the odds. John Blake plied the waters between the West Indies and the Miramichi and he worked with Commodore George Walker, who ran the only trading outpost in the vast northeast. Walker also sailed to the West Indies on trading missions. By examining the shipping schedules between May and October 1775, and the log of John Blake’s travels in the spring, summer and fall of that year—and then adding in the fact that Charlotte’s first child, Elizabeth, was born before that year was out—I surmised that her shepherd must have been George Walker. As a consequence, she would have begun her life in British North America at Alston Point. I also guessed that she would have sought the company of women for the birth of her child, and since there were no European women at Walker’s compound, the women she turned to would have been Mi’kmaq. Given her savvy about wilderness survival by the time she married Blake, I assumed she found shelter with the Mi’kmaq, who were friends of Walker’s and lived at a camp near Alston Point.
Was it possible that the Mi’kmaq man she trekked to Fredericton with was someone she met at Alston Point? Gilbert Sewell thinks so. He told me that the chief’s appointed traveller would have covered the Mi’kmaq district that included the Miramichi, and that his name would have been Wioche. The Wioche of this book, however, is a fictional character.
Charlotte’s progeny today—my generation of great-great-great-grandchildren—include writers and journalists, teachers and lawyers, doctors and farmers, bank executives and fishers, judges and Cabinet ministers, along with a few convicted felons. I imagine that Charlotte, the woman who turned her back on England at the tender age of twenty, would have been either proud of or intrigued by all of us, just as all of us are deeply intrigued by her.