The View from Castle Rock (12 page)

But there was a flaw. His father had not put into his head any idea of how he was to get the baby back there, other than carrying her all the way, travelling through the woods as he had done part of the way today. And then what? When it turned out that Becky Johnson didn’t have her, when it turned out in fact that Becky Johnson had never left home?

Something would come to him. It would have to. He could certainly carry the baby, now there was no choice. And keep far enough from them that they would not hear the crying. She would be hungry by then.

Could he figure out a way to steal some milk from the inn?

He could not continue with this problem because he noticed something.

The shack door was open, which he thought he had shut.

There was no crying, not a sound.

And there was no baby.

Most of the men staying at the inn had taken bedrooms, but a few, like Andrew, with his nephews James and John, were lying on mats on the wooden floor of the long porch.

Andrew was wakened sometime before midnight by the need to relieve himself. He got up and walked the length of the porch, glanced at the boys to see if they were asleep, then stepped down, and decided, for propriety’s sake, to walk behind the building, down to the field where he could see by the moonlight that the horses were asleep on their feet and munching in their dreams.

James had heard his uncle’s feet and closed his eyes, but he had not slept.

Either the baby had been really stolen this time, or it had been dragged off and mauled and probably half eaten by some animal. There was no reason that he himself should be involved, or in any way held to blame. Perhaps Becky Johnson might be blamed in some way, if he swore he’d seen her in the woods. She would swear she hadn’t been there but he would swear she was.

Because they’d go back, surely. They’d have to bury the baby if they ever found anything left of her, or even if they didn’t, they would have to have a funeral service, wouldn’t they? So what he had wanted to happen would be accomplished. His mother would be in a bad way, though.

Her hair might turn white overnight.

If this was his father’s present way of ordering or arranging things, it was a great deal more drastic than anything he would have thought of in the days when he was alive.

And operating in this pitiless or haphazard fashion, would his father even care that Jamie got the blame?

Also, his mother might see that he had something to do with it, something that he wasn’t telling. She could do that sometimes, though she had easily swallowed the lie about Becky Johnson. If she knew, or even suspected anything like the truth, she would hate him forever.

He could pray, if a liar’s prayers had any value. He could pray that the baby was taken by an Indian, though not Becky Johnson, and that she would grow up in an Indian camp, and one day come to the door trying to sell some Indian trinkets and would be very beautiful and be recognized at once by his mother who would cry out with joy and look the way she used to look before his father died.

Stop that. How could he think of anything so stupid?

Andrew walked into the barn’s shadow and stood there urinating. While he did so he heard a strange thin sound of distress. He thought it was some night animal, maybe a mouse in a trap. When he had buttoned himself up he heard it again, and now it was clear enough that he could follow it. Around the barn, across the barnyard, to an outbuilding which had a regular door, not a door for livestock. The sound was louder now and Andrew, the father of several children, recognized it for what it was.

He knocked on the door, twice, and when there was no answer he tried the latch. There was no bolt on, the door swung inwards. The moon shone in through a window and showed a baby. Sure enough, a baby. Lying there on a narrow cot made up with a rough blanket and a flat pillow that must be someone’s bed. Hooks on the wall held a few articles of clothing and a lantern. This must be where the stable boy slept. But he wasn’t home, he was still out—probably at the other, shabbier hotel, which sold beer and whiskey. Or mooning around with some girl.

In his place, on his bed, was this hungry baby.

Andrew picked it up, not noticing the bit of paper which fell away from its clothing. He had never paid a lot of attention to what Mary’s baby looked like and he did not do so now. There was not much chance of there being two babies missing in the same night. He didn’t fuss over it, but carried it confidently back to the hotel. It had stopped crying anyway, when it was picked up.

Nobody stirred on the porch when he mounted the steps, and he proceeded up the stairs to Mary’s room. She opened the door before he could knock, as if she had heard the child’s snuffling breathing, and he spoke at once, quietly, to stop her crying out.

“Is this the one you’re missing?”

The stable boy found the paper on the floor when he got back. He could read it, too.

A PRESENT from one of your SWEETHEARTS.

But no present, not even a joke of a present, that he could see, anywhere around.

Jamie had heard his uncle come up on the porch, then enter the inn. Now he heard him come out, he heard his deliberate and threatening footsteps coming this way, instead of the other way. His heart thumped with the steps. Then he knew that his uncle was standing there looking down on him. He wagged his head about and opened his eyes reluctantly, as if waking up.

“I just took your sister upstairs to your mother,” his uncle said matter-of-factly. “I thought I’d put your mind to rest.” And he turned around to go to his own sleeping spot.

So there was no need to turn back, and they continued their journey on in the morning. Andrew thought it just as well not to interfere with the story of the Indian woman, and gave it as his opinion that she had got scared and left the baby in the stable boy’s bed. He did not believe that the stable boy was in any way involved, and he did believe that James was, but he left the matter uninvestigated. The lad was sly and troublesome, but by the look of him in the night he might have learned a lesson.

Mary had been so glad to have the baby back that she didn’t much question what had happened. Did she still blame Becky? Or did she have more of an inkling than she wanted to let on about the tendencies of her eldest son?

Oxen are long-suffering and reliable beasts and the only real problem with them is that once they get an idea of where they want to go it is very hard to make them change their minds. If they spot a pond that reminds them of how thirsty they are and how pleasant water is, you might as well let them go to it. And that is what happened around midday after they had left the inn. The pond was a large one close to the road, and the two older boys took off their clothes and climbed a tree with an overhanging branch and dropped again and again into the water. The little boys paddled at the water’s edge and the baby slept in the long grass in the shade and Mary looked for strawberries.

A sharp-faced red fox watched them for a while from the edge of the woods. Andrew saw it but did not mention it, feeling that there had been enough excitement on this trip already.

He knew, better than they did, what lay ahead of them. Roads that were worse and inns rougher than anything they had seen yet, and the dust always rising, the days getting hotter. The refreshment of the first bit of rain and then the misery of it, with the mucky mess of the road and all their clothes soaked through.

He had seen enough of the Yankee people by now to know what had tempted Will to live among them. The push and noise and rawness of them, the need to get on the bandwagon. Though some were decent enough and some, and maybe some of the worst, were Scots. Will had had something in him drawing him to such a life.

It had proved a mistake.

Andrew knew, of course, that a man was as likely to die of cholera in Upper Canada as in the state of Illinois, and that it was foolish to blame Will’s death on his choice of nationality. He did not do so. And yet. And yet—there was something about all this rushing away, loosing oneself entirely from family and past, there was something rash and self-trusting about it that might not help a man, that might put him more in the way of such an accident, such a fate. Poor Will.

And that became the way the surviving brothers spoke of him until the day they died, and the way their children spoke of him. Poor Will. His own sons, naturally, did not call him anything but Father, though they too, in time, may have felt a pall, of sadness and fatedness, that hung around any mention of his name. Mary almost never spoke of him, and how she felt about him became nobody’s business but her own.

The Wilds of Morris Township

William’s children grew up in Esquesing, among their cousins. They were treated well. But money would not stretch to sending them off to grammar school or to college, if any of them had wanted or been judged to have the ability to go there. And there was no land coming to them. So as soon as they were old enough they set off for another wilderness. One of their cousins went with them, one of Andrew’s boys. He was named Big Rob because he had the same name as the third son of Will and Mary, who was now called Little Rob. Big Rob took up the family custom or duty of writing his memories down when he was an old man, so that the people left would know what things had been like.

On the third day of November, 1851, myself and my two cousins, Thomas Laidlaw now of Blyth, and his brother John, who went to B.C. several years ago, got a box of bed-clothes and a few cooking utensils into a wagon and started from the county of Halton to try our fortunes in the wilds of Morris Township.

We only got as far as Preston on the first day as the roads were very rough and bad across Nassagaweya and Puslinch. The next day we got to Shakespeare and the third afternoon arrived at Stratford. The roads were always getting worse as we went west, so we thought it best to get our bags and small things sent to Clinton by stage. But the stage had quit running, until the roads froze up, so we let the horses and the wagon turn back, as another cousin had come with us to take them back. John Laidlaw, Thomas and I, got our axes on our shoulders and walked to Morris. We got a place to board, though we had to sleep on the floor, with a quilt over us. It was a little cold as the winter was coming on, but we expected to have some hardships to endure and we made the best of them we could.

We began to underbrush a road to John’s place, as it was the nearest to where we boarded and then we cut logs for a shanty and big scoops to roof it. The man we boarded with had a yoke of oxen and he let us have them to draw the logs and the scoops. Then we got a few men to help raise the shanty, but they were very few, as there were only five settlers in the township. However, we got the shanty up alright and the scoops on it. The next day we began to fill up the cracks between the logs, where they did not lie very close together, with mud, and stuff moss in the cracks between the scoops. We got the shanty made pretty comfortable and, as we were getting tired of walking through the snow every night and morning and the bed being hard and cold, we went to Goderich to try to get work for a few days and see if our boxes and cooking utensils had come.

We did not meet with anyone who wanted help, though we were three good looking fellows. We met in with one man who wanted some cordwood cut but he would not board us, so we came to the conclusion that we would go back to Morris, as there was plenty of chopping to do there. We decided to batch it some way.

We bought a barrel of fish in Goderich and got part of it on our backs. As we came along through Coul-borne Township we got some flour from a man and as he was going to Goderich he said he would bring the rest of the fish and a barrel of flour for us as far as Manchester (now Auburn). We met him there and old Mr. Elkins ferried the fish and flour across the river and we had to carry them from there. I did not like carrying our provisions.

We went to our own shanty and got some hemlock branches for a bed and a big slab of elm for a door. A Frenchman from Quebec had once told John that in the lumber shanties the fire was in the middle of the shanty. So John said that he would have his fire in the middle of our shanty. We got four posts and were building the chimney on them. We built slats, house fashion, on top of the posts, intending to plaster them with mud, inside and outside. When we went to our hemlock bed, we put on a big fire and when some of us awoke through the night our lumber was all ablaze and some of the scoops were burning very briskly also. So we tore down the chimney and the scoops were not hard to put out as they were green basswood. That was the last we heard of building the fire in the middle of the house. And soon as daylight came we began to build the chimney in the end of the house, but Thomas often laughed at John and twitted him about the fire in the middle of the shanty. However we got the chimney up and it served its purpose well. We got along much better with the chopping, after the small trees and branches were cut out of the way.

Thus we plodded along for a while, Thomas doing the baking and cooking because he was the best of the three at it. We never washed any dishes and had a new plate every meal.

A man, by the name of Valentine Harrison, who was on the south end of Lot three, Concession 8, sent us a very large buffalo robe to spread over us in bed. We made a rough bedstead and got it woven together with withes instead of rope but the withes sagged down badly in the middle of the bed, and so we got two poles and put them lengthwise under the hemlock branches so that each of us had our own share of the bed, and did not roll in on the one in the middle. This made an improvement in the bachelor bed.

We plodded along in this way, until our chests and cooking utensils were brought to Clinton, and we got a man with his oxen and sleigh to bring them on from there. When we got our bedclothes we thought we were in clover, for we had slept on the hemlock branches for five or six weeks.

We cut down a large ash tree and split it into slabs and then hewed these for a floor to our shanty, and thus we were getting things into better shape.

It was about the beginning of February when my father brought John’s and Thomas’ mother and sister to stay with us. They had a pretty tough time coming in through Hullet, as there were no bridges over the many streams and they were not frozen over. They got to Kenneth Baines’, where Blyth now is, and my father left the horses and Aunt and Cousin there and came on, to get us three to pilot them the rest of the way. We got through with only one upsetting, but the horses were very tired, for the snow was so deep that they would stop every few rods of the way. At last we got to the shanty and got the horses into shelter, and as father had brought provisions with him we were fairly comfortable.

Father wanted to take a load of fish home with him, so we went to Goderich the next day and got the fish. The following day he started for his home.

I got back to Morris, where Aunt and Cousin had things fixed up in fine style. Thomas got his discharge from baking and cooking and we all felt the change to be for the better.

We worked on, getting some of the huge trees down, but we were not much accustomed to the work and snow being very deep again, the going was very slow. About the beginning of April, 1852, there was a very hard crust on the snow, so that a person could run on it, anywhere.

As I was to take up a lot for an old neighbour, we started on April 5th, to look at some vacant lots that were for sale. We were five or six miles from our shanty, when a heavy fall of snow came on, and the east wind caused the snow to cover up the blaze marks on the trees, and we had great difficulty finding our way home. Aunt and Cousin were very pleased to see us, when we arrived, for they thought we would surely become lost.

I did nothing on my place that winter, neither did Thomas. He and John worked together for some years. I went back to Halton in the spring and came back to Morris in the fall of 1852 and got my own shanty up, and a piece chopped down that winter. My cousins and I worked together with one another, wherever our work was most needed.

They helped me to log some, in the fall of 1853, and I was not in Morris again until the spring of 1857, when I got a wife to share my hardships, joys and sorrows.

I have been here (1907) for sixty years and have had some hardships and have seen many changes both in the inhabitants and the country. For the first few months we carried our provisions seven miles—now there is a railroad less than a quarter of a mile from us.

On the 5th of November, 1852, I cut down the first tree on my lot, and if I had the trees on it now, which were on it then, I would be the richest man in Morris Township.

James Laidlaw, oldest brother of John and Thomas, moved to Morris in the fall of 1852. John took on the job of building a shanty for James Waldie, who later became his father-in-law. James and I went to help John with the building, and as we were falling a tree, one of its branches was broken in the falling, and thrown backwards, hitting James on the head and killing him instantly.

We had to carry his body a mile and a quarter to the nearest house, and I had to convey the sad news to his wife, mother, brother and sister. It was the saddest errand of my life. I had to get help to carry the body home, as there was only a footpath through the bush, and the snow was very deep and soft. This was on April 5th, 1853.

I have seen many ups and downs since I came to Morris. There are only three on this Concession, who were first settlers on the land here, and the descendants of five others, who were first settlers. In other words, there are only eight families living on the lots that their fathers took up between Walton and Blyth, a distance of 7 and a half miles.

Cousin John, one of the three who came here in 1851, departed this life on April 11th, 1907. The old Laidlaws are nearly all gone. Cousin Thomas and I are the only ones now (1907) living of those who first came in to Morris.

And the place that now knows us, will soon know us no more, for we are all old frail creatures.

James, once Jamie, Laidlaw died like his father in a place where no reliable burial records yet existed. It is believed that he was put into a corner of the land that he and his brothers and cousin had cleared, then sometime around 1900 his body was moved to the Blyth Cemetery.

Big Rob, who wrote this account of the settlement in Morris, was the father of many sons and daughters. Simon, John, Duncan, Forrest, Sandy, Susan, Maggie, Annie, Lizzie. Duncan left home early. (That name is correct, but I am not absolutely certain of all of the others.) He went to Guelph, and they seldom saw him. The others stayed at home. The house was big enough for them. At first their mother and father were with them, then for several years just their father, and finally they were on their own. People did not remember that they had ever been young.

They turned their backs on the world. The women wore their hair parted in the middle and slicked tight to their heads, though the style of the day ran to bangs and rolls. They wore dark homemade dresses with skinny skirts. And their hands were red because they scrubbed the pine floor of their kitchen with lye every day. It shone like velvet.

They were capable of going to church—which they did every Sunday—and returning home without having spoken to a soul.

Their religious observances were dutiful but not in any way emotional.

The men had to talk more than the women did, doing their business at the mill or the cheese factory. But they wasted no words or time. They were honest but firm in all their dealings. If they made money it was never with the aim of buying new machinery, of lessening their labor or adding comforts to their way of living. They were not cruel to their animals but they had no sentimental feelings for them.

The diet of the household was very plain, and water was what they drank at meals, instead of tea.

So without any pressure from the community, or their religion (the Presbyterian faith was still contentious and cranky but did not lay siege to the soul as fiercely as it had done in Boston’s day), they had constructed a life for themselves that was monastic without any visitations of grace or moments of transcendence.

On a Sunday afternoon in the fall Susan looked out a window and saw Forrest walking back and forth in the big front field, where there was now only wheat stubble. He tramped hard. He stopped and judged what he was doing.

But what was that? She would not give him the satisfaction of asking.

It turned out that before the frost came he was set to dig a large hole. He worked by day and by lantern light. He went six feet down but the hole was much too large for a grave. It was in fact to be the cellar of a house. He brought the dirt up in a wheelbarrow, making use of a ramp he had built.

He hauled large stones from the stone pile into the barn, and there, after the winter closed in, he trimmed them with a stone chisel, for his cellar walls. He did not stop doing his share of the farm chores, but worked on this solitary project late into the night.

Next spring as soon as the hole was dry he mortared the stones in place to make the cellar walls. He put in the pipe for his drain and got the cistern built, then fashioned in plain view the stone foundation for his house. It could be seen that this was no two-room shanty he planned. It was a real and commodious house. It would require an entry road and a drainage ditch and would take up arable land.

His brothers spoke to him, finally. He said he would not dig the ditch till the fall when the crop was off and, as for the road, he had not thought of one and supposed he could walk over from the main house on a narrow path, not depriving them of any more grain than necessary.

They said there was still the house to be reckoned with, the land the house had taken from them, and he said yes, that was true. He would pay a reasonable sum, he said.

Where would he get it?

It could be worked out in terms of the labor he had done on the farm already, deducting living expenses. Also he was giving up his share in the inheritance and that altogether should make up for a hole in the field.

He proposed not to work on the farm anymore but to get a job at the planing mill.

They could not believe their ears, just as—until he fitted those massive and permanent stones in—they had not been able to believe their eyes. Well then, they said. If you want to set yourself up to be a laughingstock. Well then you must do it.

He went to work at the planing mill, and in the long evenings he put up the frame of his house. It was to be two stories high, with four bedrooms and a back and front kitchen and pantry and double parlor. The walls were to be planked, with a brick veneer. He would have to buy the bricks, of course, but the planks he planned to use for the walls underneath were those stacked in the barn, left over from the old drive shed he and his brothers had pulled down when they built the new banked barn. Were such planks his to use? Strictly speaking, they were not. But no other use for them had been planned and there was some uneasiness in the family about how people would judge them if they quarrelled and quibbled about things. Already Forrest was eating his supper at a hotel in Blyth because of remarks that Sandy had made about his eating at the family table, eating what the labor of the others provided. They had let him have the land for the house when he claimed it as his due because they did not want him passing around stories of their meanness, and in the same spirit now they let him have the planks.