The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor Page 13

  She heaves the last piece of wood on the fire and sits down on the cot exhausted. Wonderful heat radiates from the old stones and warms her where she sits. She lets her eyes close a moment. I am warm, Charlotte thinks and stares dully at the fire. Like beads of rubies, each with its own sun inside, little flames rise up the length of the chimney. It’s beautiful, she imagines. The fire will melt the snow. She looks at the brilliant flickers where the chimney pierces the roof and watches their progress along the underside of the thatching around the chimney. Then as if waking from a stupor, she screams, “My God, the house is on fire! The fire cannot stop the snow, and the snow cannot stop the fire. I cannot fly this place. I cannot stay!” The chimney now glows its whole length, a bright crimson tracery visible through every seam and crack. The flames fight to escape from their nest and make their way under the blanket of snow. Frantic, Charlotte grabs the basket from the wall, scoops snow from the floor and throws it at the flames that ring the chimney at the roof. The snow falls back in her face. She refills the basket, and once again throws snow at the flames. The flames crackle fiercely in the thatching. “I have to get out of here,” she cries. But the roofing has collapsed in front of the doorway, blocking her escape.

  Wioche takes off his left snowshoe and uses it to dig through the drift against the front wall of the hut. When he is halfway down, he kicks at the door.

  He drives his foot at the door again and again and when the ropes break he and the storm both tumble in. Charlotte Taylor lies on the floor before him, her hands over her eyes.

  “I am sorry,” she says.

  SHE AWAKES TO CALM, the comforting arch of the wigwam poles overhead, and intense sunlight slanting through openings in the birch bark making patterns on her furs. For quite a long time she lies there, listening to sounds outside. She hears the cawing of crows first, then the laughter of children, then the voices of women as they go about their work, muffled it seems in a great softness.

  Marie appears in the doorway carrying a steaming bowl. Charlotte smells squash soup and sits up so eagerly Marie smiles.

  Charlotte takes the extended bowl, with thanks, and props it on the ledge of her belly.

  She ladles the soup into her mouth voraciously; never had anything tasted so delicious.

  “You’ve been asleep for most of two days,” Marie says. “Through the rest of the storm. No wonder you are hungry.”

  Charlotte lowers the bowl. “I’m sorry, Marie,” she says.

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “For everything. For the destruction of the house you gave me.”

  “Your house is still there,” Marie says. “But I believe you should not stay in it.”

  “It didn’t burn?”

  “The men put out the fire.”

  “Wioche?”

  “He got you out and carried you here—this is his wigwam. Don’t worry,” Marie says, seeing Charlotte’s face. “He is staying with another family.”

  The door opens and Wioche steps in. A child cries in the distance. Marie rises from her place beside Charlotte and hurries past him.

  “It sounds like Josef has fallen off the woodpile again,” she says.

  Charlotte struggles to rise.

  “Stay seated, please,” Wioche says. “Now is a time for rest. You have enough labour ahead.” He speaks slowly, with care, the same way as he speaks his own language.

  She doesn’t know how to express how sorry she is for the trouble she has caused, or how grateful she is to him for saving her life.

  He sees her shame and obligation, and speaks first. “You fought to preserve your own life, Charlotte Taylor. It is we who thank you for that fight and we were the ones who placed you in such peril.”

  “No, that’s not true.”

  “We thought of you not as one of the English, which we knew you to be, but as one of the Acadians, who have lived among us for more than one hundred years. This was a great mistake, a great discourtesy. I am the one who is sorry.”

  Charlotte can think of nothing to say in the face of such generosity, and again Wioche saves her. Taking the bowl from her hands, he asks if she thinks she could eat some more. She nods and by the time he returns with another helping of soup, lazy steam curling from its rim, she has composed herself enough to thank him gravely.

  THE MI’KMAQ have no tradition of coddling an expectant mother, so Marie is pleased to see Charlotte shake off the aftereffects of the blizzard and join in again with the chores of the day.

  The next afternoon, which is milder and sunny, Wioche and three companions return from the woods with a large doe. A little later, he approaches her as she is adding an armload of wood to the main fire, holding two sets of webbed wooden nets.

  “Snowshoes?” she asks.

  “Yes. Come and learn this.”

  “Won’t I just sink with my belly so large?”

  “These are excellent snowshoes,” Wioche says. There is a lightness about his expression she is happy to see. “You won’t sink.”

  “I have work to do,” she protests again, though none too vigorously.

  “Here, I will help you strap them on.” And he squats to show her how it is done.

  Experimentally she takes one step and then another. One had only to lift one’s feet a little higher and keep them a little farther apart. As she follows him into the deep snow and slanting light of the woods, she feels a surge of exhilaration.

  He is a few strides ahead, his dog at his heel. “You cannot travel in winter without them,” he calls. “But with them, you go wherever you want.”

  “I want to go down there!” She is pointing down the slope toward the shore of the partially frozen bay. With her hair bundled under shawls and her shape unrecognizable under many layers, she isn’t worried about the men from Walker’s post.

  “Come,” Wioche says and turns in that direction. Charlotte trails after him, carefully setting her shoes in the firm impressions he makes.

  They cross the snow-drifted beach and he leads her to a sand dune that has been whipped into a natural shelter above the high tideline on the bay. Snuggled against the sand and watching the slushy water form ice crystals below them, they toss lumps of snow into the water, challenging each other for who can throw the farthest. Wioche seems boyish in his enthusiasm.

  Charlotte leans over to take off her snowshoes and sits up again, puffing from the exertion. The dog sits too. Wioche pats him, then draws a handful of hazelnuts from his pouch, already broken from their shells. He pours them into Charlotte’s hand.

  “I do love hazelnuts,” she says, smiling at him.

  His dog is looking at him beseechingly. “Atilq,” Wioche says. “You don’t like hazelnuts.”

  To Charlotte he says, “You learn the way of the People quickly.” Then he draws a circle in the sand and marks two long, straight lines through the left side of it. They are facing north. He says, “Do you know what that means?”

  “I confess I have no idea,” she replies.

  Wioche explains, “It says, meet you at west side of lake in two days.”

  Charlotte draws her own circle and says, “This says meet me at the north end of the camp tomorrow. Right?”

  For a time they sit without speaking, looking out on a distant stretch of shore.

  “I think, you do not much care for us English,” she says suddenly.

  He turns to her. She can’t read his expression, but the boyishness is gone.

  “No?”

  “I don’t think you do, no.”

  “Why do you say this?”

  “From what I hear you say, to others in the camp. And I remember your speech, when you so gallantly attempted to persuade Chief Julian that I should not be returned to Commodore Walker’s care.”

  “I don’t wish to speak against your people. Not to you, a guest in our village.”

  “Well, I shall do it for you if you like. But please, I would be grateful if you would speak your mind. I need to understand these things. Your distaste for the En
glish is not because we’re a white people—this I know. You seem to think kindly enough of our French cousins.”

  “I know little of the French, only of the Acadians.”

  “But they are French.”

  He looked at her as though she was missing an important distinction.

  “The children of the French,” he spells it out. “The forgotten children.”

  “Is that the reason you favour them?”

  He puts a hazelnut in his mouth and chews it slowly, staring away to the shore.

  “When they came—long, long ago—they were so few and we were so many. Our ancestors took pity on them and taught them what could be taught. They listened, but they would not come into the woods with us or cut the trees or hunt the deer. We thought them fools, but good fools.” He spits out a piece of bitter skin and scuffs it thoughtfully into the snow with his foot. “It was we who were the fools. The day came when others arrived who were not content to live along the shore.”

  “The English?”

  He makes a low sound in his throat and the smallest nod of his head.

  “They lived, those Acadians, as best they could, and they died. We died too, and more of us died than them. They lived here, only here, on these lands by the sea. They made their little fields in the marshes. They made their small boats. They learned from us and we learned from them. They planted gardens and apple orchards. They watered the land. They fished the waters. Each father had more sons than his father before him. Each mother had more daughters. But never did they do us harm. The People and the Acadians made no treaties. They fought no wars. We let them live and they brought us iron and wheat and rum and cloth.”

  “The English destroyed this?”

  “No. The English were far away. Sometimes, when wars went well for them, they said they owned this land. The French fathers were far away too—when wars went well for them, they said they owned it. But neither showed care for the Acadians. The Acadians paid no heed. They were no man’s friend or enemy. That was their way.

  “But that is not our way. We help our friends and fight our enemies. The English in the south were our enemies. We fought them and we killed them. My father, Amoq’t, killed many in Chebucto and Canso. I, too, have killed.”

  He sees that he has shocked her. “That is the face of war, Charlotte. The English kill, the French kill and the People kill too, each as he feels he must.”

  He looks at her and sees anger and something else in her eyes. For a long moment, he does not look away.

  They walk home together as night falls. George Walker is waiting for her. He wants reassurance that Charlotte has coped with the storm and that she is aware that winter will not let up for months to come. Back at her hut, he asks what preparations she has made for the baby and, finding scant evidence of any, begins to wonder if she is denying the facts she must confront. He suggests she come to his lodge for a few days. She accepts, reluctant to leave but feeling the need to preserve her friendship with Walker. She packs a sack of clothes and together they snowshoe back to the winter post.

  While they take tea and hot biscuits dripping with molasses, he fills her in on the increasingly bold moves of the privateers.

  “The river to the south, the Miramichi, is crawling with these disloyal brutes. They destroy everything they come upon and many say they do it with the help of the Indians. Have you heard such accounts at the camp?”

  She has but is hesitant about tattling to the commodore. So she decides to dodge his question by suggesting she is so busy trying to keep her own life in order she has no time to decipher the accounts of others. For now she tells him, all she wants is a hot bath.

  The time at Walker’s is restful as she feels his protective custody and enjoys it to a point, but she wants to get back to the camp.

  The little hut that had almost taken her life is waiting for her. In her absence, Marie, André, and Wioche had organized a work party that spent an entire day thatching, chinking, stacking branches, piling snow and hauling firewood. The interior has become an embarrassment of furs: bear, seal, rabbit, otter, beaver, fox.

  “I have more of these than the richest woman in London,” Charlotte declares. André has made a cradle and filled it with woollen and cotton coverlets that Marie stitched together from English blankets. Charlotte meanwhile busies herself during the daylight hours arranging and rearranging the few goods she has—by the fire, away from the fire, against her old trunk that Walker had delivered, by the walls. As the stocks of bannock and fish accumulate, she counts them a dozen times a day. She catches Marie staring at her knowingly from time to time.

  It’s past mid-December when she wakes before dawn and feels it in her back: not a pain, in fact, but a twinge, returning from time to time. It is not the ache of lifting firewood or hauling poles.

  Today, she thinks.

  Dawn is cold and windless. All morning she collects kindling. By noon she can feel a palpable tightening that lasts a few seconds. She continues to work. Marie comes out of her wigwam and walks across to the hut.

  She stands looking at Charlotte a moment. “I’m going to cut wood on the hill.”

  “Don’t,” Charlotte says.

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, Charlotte lies on her cot. Anne tends the fire. Marie makes tea and calls out the door to her children. Her mother, Militaw, comes by from time to time. Flat, smooth rocks are heating in the fire, firewood is piled as high as the roof. All is ready, but Marie can feel the trembling of the Englishwoman, who has never even seen a birth. Still, Marie thinks, there is heart there, and even fear weakens when the heart is strong.

  These women have all been here before me, Charlotte thinks. She is frightened, but beyond the fear, she feels an anticipation so consuming, she shakes continuously. Then, as the sun sinks through the trees, the rush of warm water between her legs announces the inevitability of labour. The Indian women call out excitedly.

  Afternoon turns to evening, becomes night. By then she cannot breathe hard enough to relieve the pain, can hardly catch her breath.

  “Perhaps something is amiss,” she whispers when she looks up to see Marie’s brown eyes near her own. Marie smiles.

  When an especially severe pain has passed, Anne crouches on the floor.

  “Like this,” she says. “Like this.”

  The women lift Charlotte in their arms and help her crouch by the bed. For a while the pain seems less.

  By midnight, she is struggling not to scream. If I could only rip this baby from my body, she thinks, and be done with it. Marie recognizes the signs and makes a lowing whistle like an owl at the door. Her mother, Militaw, comes with the bark of a dogwood tree, ground into a fine powder, lights it and urges Charlotte to inhale the smoke hoping its narcotic effect will take the edge off her pain. But she only coughs and moans, clinging so tightly to Marie’s hand, her fingernails draw blood. They boil water, add wild sarsaparilla; she swallows a little of the liquid, then stiffens again with pain. Both women know the baby will soon be born, and Charlotte needs to be able to push the child out. Marie goes back to the door and makes another whistling sound—the short, sharp call of the whippoorwill. A moment later, Wioche, his face furrowed, hands her a flagon.

  “Soon,” she says and shuts the door. When the rum courses down Charlotte’s throat, it dulls the stabbing pain. A few powerful contractions later, when she hears Marie saying, “Poussez, poussez,” she pushes with all her might, again, one more time. Her near delirium takes her thoughts to the dog Atilq and the webbing of snowshoes imprinting the snow, to Wioche and hazelnuts. And at that moment, her baby comes squalling into the world.

  “Elizabeth,” says Charlotte when they set the baby on her breast.

  WIOCHE ENTERS THE CABIN silently and stands by the door witnessing the tender bond of mother and child. He has a gift for the baby. A bunting bag he made from rabbit fur and lined with the delicate skin of a deer that he had rubbed with bird’s liver until it was as soft as fat. Marie shows her how to tie the bag to her body and
keep the baby close.

  The women in the camp bring food, make tea and tend to Charlotte and little Elizabeth. Commodore Walker turns up with more blankets, food supplies and a miniature sleigh his men have crafted so she can pull the baby through the snow. He’d been curious to know what this baby would look like but had seen several children in the West Indies who had been born to mixed-race parents so isn’t at all surprised by the light brown skin and the dark eyes of this newborn. Satisfied that baby and mother are healthy, he encourages Charlotte to come to the lodge for a visit and bids them goodbye.

  The rhythms of life rock gently for mother and child during the days that follow. For Charlotte, it is a time to nest, to discover motherhood, to be astonished by the ties that bound her to this baby.

  She hadn’t given a thought to Christmas when Marie tells her the wondrous eve is this night and that she should come with Elizabeth to the ceremony that will be held outside, around the fire. Charlotte tucks Elizabeth into her bunting bag and wraps a blanket around the two of them before they venture out into the frigid air.

  The firmament is a mass of blinking stars; the moon dusty with frost when the camp gathers to kindle the flame and light the darkness of Mother Earth. Like most customs here, there is a mix of Mi’kmaq and Acadian, Old World and New, the Indian creation story, the Catholic nativity. A great fire roars into the sky as Chief Julian holds up the eagle feather and gives prayers of thanks. Then they begin to chant.

  Nujjinen wa’so’q epin, jiptug teluisin

  Megite’tmeg, wa’soq ntlita’nen jiptug

  Ignmuieg ula nemu’leg ule’tesnen …

  Charlotte ferrets out the English meaning from Wioche. It is the Lord’s Prayer. To hear it chanted in this humble camp of birch bark and bearskins, of people drawing nigh, is a moment so divine, it touches her soul. She draws her baby close and feels the glory of the night. Then to her own surprise, she asks Chief Julian for the eagle feather, signalling that she wants to speak. In a voice as clear as the night air, she sings a carol, the one she sang with her family every year on Christmas Eve.