On the Head of a Pin (23 page)

“Nonsense,” said Betsy firmly the one time he voiced this opinion to her. “There's no question that you were always easier on your daughter than your sons, but Sarah was Sarah and she would have lived her life the way she did no matter what you had done. And Martha is Martha and she's not her mother. Stop taking so much on yourself, Thaddeus, and leave it to God to sort things out.”

As usual, it was good advice, and he prayed for wisdom in dealing with his children.

“What do you think?” he asked Betsy, after Martha's face and hands had been washed, her hair combed into braids, and she was tucked down into her little bed upstairs. “I've got a hankering again.”

She knew exactly what he meant. She looked at him with her clear grey eyes, the eyes she had passed on to both her daughter and her granddaughter. “I'll say to you the same thing I said the first time you talked to me about your ‘hankering.' Do what you need to do, and I'll stand by you.”

He felt a rush of love and gratitude to this woman who had stood by his side for so many years.

“There's only one thing I'll ask of you,” she went on. “Don't expect me to live with Will and Nabby. And if you're going to leave me on my own again, I'd as soon find one place and stay there. It would be better for Martha, too.”

“Agreed.” He sighed. “Speaking of which, I suppose I should check on Will. The year is up.”

“Don't get your hopes up, Thaddeus. I doubt there's been much change there.”

There wasn't. Or rather, things had changed in detail but not in substance. Nabby's baby, a boy, was a mewling little thing who was more or less ignored by his mother except when it was necessary to feed him — a task that she complained about bitterly. “It takes so much out of me,” she said. “I'm tired all the time.”

Will had hired a neighbour to help her, and as far as Lewis could see it was this girl who kept the household running, for Nabby still refused to have anything to do with the chickens or the kitchen garden — or the cooking or the cleaning either as far as he could see. The kitchen, which had been scrubbed and tidy when Betsy was there, was now muddy and cluttered with unwashed pots, muddy boots, and pieces of harness. It wasn't the hired girl's fault, he knew, because though she worked hard enough, she was trying to do the work of three.

The farm itself was in similar straits, for without the two younger boys, it was more than Will could manage, and there was not enough money for help in the fields and help in the house as well.

He stood, his hands thrust in his pockets and a scowl on his face as his father went over his accounts. Lewis tried not to let his anger show, but the figures in front of him didn't lie; he was now in debt to the tune of £100, an enormous sum that would take him years to repay.

“This can't go on, son.”

Will scuffed his boot against the floor and his scowl deepened. “I know,” he said. “I've a mind to take Nabby and the boy and try my hand somewhere over west. They say the land is still cheap enough.”

“What makes you think you could make a success there? You've taken a working farm and run it into the ground. Starting a farm from scratch would be even harder.”

He shrugged.

“And what about the money?”

“I can't pay it.”

“What? You're going to just walk away and leave me with this?”

He shrugged again. “There's nothing I can do about it.”

“I thought I raised you better than that. When you have a debt, you have to repay it.”

Will looked at his father defiantly. “Actually, no I don't. The farm's leased in your name, not mine.”

Lewis gave full vent to his anger then. “Listen, young man, if you'd taken a firm hand with that flibbertigibbet you married you wouldn't be in this state. You've spent money like a lord and never a thought as to who will have to make good on it all. You want to go west — then go. Pack up your wife and child and just go. But don't expect help from me, or from your mother either. From now on you can take responsibility for your own affairs and we'll see how well you do!”

“Don't you go blaming Nabby for all this.”

“I'm not blaming Nabby, I'm blaming you. You're the head of the household. Start acting like one.”

“I didn't ask you for this. It was all your idea. ‘Will, go be a farmer. Will, look after your mother. Will, support the whole family.' All I wanted to do was marry Nabby and I got burdened with everything else. I'll live up to my responsibilities, don't worry, but they'll be mine, not yours.”

With that he stormed out of the room, and Lewis could hear the wails from Nabby as he reported the conversation to her. For a brief moment he almost felt sorry for the poor spoiled thing, but then he looked down at the account book again and hardened his heart.

Betsy wept a little when he told her what had been decided. “That poor wee baby,” she said. “What's going to become of it?”

“Now don't go all broody,” he replied. “It's Will and Nabby's babe and they're going to have to learn how to raise it. You can't bring it here.” He knew his wife too well. Given half an opportunity she would scoop the child up and rear it herself. “You can't abide another baby, Bess. It would be the end of you.”

In fact, his one worry about returning to the circuit was Betsy's health, and he wondered briefly if he should stay at the school. He would be home every night, and although the pay was meagre, they were frugal enough to save from it — money that would now be sorely needed to pay off Will's debts.

She would have none of it when he offered. “You're a man of God. Go be one. I don't fancy living with you if you don't.”

However, Betsy's notion of staying put was a good one, he could see. The house in Bath was tiny and rented cheaply, and she could count on the help of the neighbours should she need it. His salary from the church was not an over-generous one, but combined with Luke's earnings, it would be enough to keep the family. Whatever marriage and christening fees Lewis gleaned from his circuit could be put against the debt. He felt comfortable enough with this arrangement, and put in a request to rejoin the itinerants.

But he wondered if he would ever see his oldest son again.

PART V
Brighton Circuit 1842

I

L
ewis was given an appointment on the Brighton Circuit. The feeling was that the duties were a little lighter there and would be less taxing. There were still enough Methodist families to offer firm support, but his presence would be required at fewer meetings. Now that the church union had dissolved and more itinerants were once again within the fold of the Methodist Episcopals, he could share the huge area with another preacher. This circuit seemed to divide itself east from west, rather than south from north, and his appointment plan showed that he would be ministering mostly to the communities that stretched from Port Brighton to the more scattered villages and hamlets that nestled in the rolling hills away from the front. Here the twangy speech of the older settlements was modified by a soft burr that spoke of Scottish descent, for the Scots had found the rounded hills and the green valleys much to their liking, as had many Irish, who added their own lilt to the conversations he overheard.

He was surprised, though, that in the short time he had been away from travelling, how quickly the little towns had contracted, especially the ones that had grown up around mills and were dependent on the custom that came from farmers in the surrounding country. The back townships had acquired an even more forlorn look. Here and there a farm appeared to be abandoned entirely — a stray chicken or two flapping hysterically around a coop, a door blown open by the autumn winds, swinging on its hinges. In other places it appeared that the march of improvement had ceased in mid-step — fences half-built, the log walls of cabins only partially covered by planking, the boards already weathered grey before the job could be completed. He had to be wary of the dogs that had been left behind to run wild in yapping packs. With no owners to control them, they had turned feral and ferocious and more than once a bitch with a brood had challenged his right to the road, snarling and daring him to pass. He had reined his nervous horse in, and simply waited until she led her pups back between the trees.

A stagnant economy and the uncertain political situ
–
ation had proved too much for too many. Families simply packed up and left their cabins and their debts behind. To compound the province's woes, immigration had dwindled to a mere trickle. The rebellion and the subsequent battles had frightened people away from Canada, and reports of crop failures and business difficulties in this isolated place made it an unattractive option.

Hard times fed his meetings, however, and they were usually well-attended, despite being held in whatever space came to hand. Lewis felt an enormous satisfaction that his appointment had come from the newly reconstituted Methodist Episcopal Church, and that local preachers were again given the authority they had earned — although women preachers continued to be notably absent in the new order of things. Any ambitions in that quarter had been firmly stifled by articles in
The Christian Guardian
that denigrated their past accomplishments and discouraged the notion that females could contribute to public life, or that their efforts would be recognized in any way. Instead they were encouraged to limit their influence to the establishment of Christian values in the home, to raise God-fearing children, and to defer to their husbands in all other matters as befitted their fragile, flighty natures. In other words, he thought, they were all to become like Nabby — sewing by the fire, the buzz of nothing where her thoughts should be.

He couldn't imagine what it would be like to have a wife who had no opinions, who never challenged, who never pointed out his errors and shortcomings and could let fly when she deemed it necessary and keep her own counsel when she thought it best. One would have thought that women would take encouragement from the new queen, the most powerful person in the British Empire after all. He couldn't imagine anyone telling the Queen that she had no right to an opinion and should limit herself to making sure all the palaces were clean.

But then she was just a slip of a thing and no doubt totally dependent on her ministers and advisers to tell her what to do. Then again, perhaps this was another of Ryerson's schemes to make the Canadian Methodist Church more acceptable, for if it fell in with a more fashionable doctrine there would be less about it to object to. Unfortunately the sentiments Ryerson expressed in
The Guardian
effectively segregated some of the church's most ardent supporters and made a mockery of early Methodists like Barbara Heck. To Lewis's thinking it was just another case of the Church playing politics, as though they hadn't done enough of that already.

Sometimes Isaac Simms fell in with him on his travels. This was the time of year when the weather could be counted on to render roads impassable or, at the very least, difficult. February had been too cold, and March too warm with violent storms and heavy rain, and as expected, all but the main roads were a muddy mess.

“I'm not sure it makes all that much difference,” Simms grumbled. “There's not much business along the front. The storekeepers are still strapped, but I tell you there's next to nothing at all in the backcountry. In fact, there are almost no people there anymore. It's astounding how many of them have pulled up stakes and left.”

It remained uncertain whether or not the unification of the two colonies would result in any lasting prosperity. Britain had offered to guarantee loans for the building of canals that would finally tame the St. Lawrence, and the employment offered by these projects would surely begin to generate a quickening in the new province, especially along the front, but this had not yet become evident. There was talk of a railroad that would connect Montreal and Toronto, but Lewis thought it unlikely that this would ever be realized. He had read that the huge engines lumbered along iron tracks belching smoke and sparks, but as massive as they appeared to be, it was reported that they still had difficulty pulling any great amount of cargo behind them. And how could they ever coax such behemoths through the forest? Surely the mud would drown them or the frost would heave the rail, and they would go careering off the track in a screeching, twisted wreck of metal. Besides, the cost of such a thing would be far too great for a government that couldn't even maintain a road or two, although the new Parliament had promised to address that question as well.

“I'm not sure I see the point of them trying to build a railroad,” Simms said. “There aren't enough people left in the colony to make it pay.”

“Where has everyone gone?” Lewis asked. “To the States?”

In contrast to Canada, the republic to the south seemed to be shaking off the financial woes of the past few years and its promise of unlimited opportunity was a siren call to the ambitious.

“Most of them have gone to the States. Some of them have given up trying to farm and have moved to the towns looking for jobs. The rest are just generally headed west, I guess, but I don't see how it's going to be any better out there, except for the fact that there's barely any government at all. If you're the independent sort, I suppose no government is better than one that hinders your every effort. If it weren't for mother and the girls, I'd pack up and go myself.”

“Why don't you go and take them with you? Women often seem to have better luck in the marriage department in places where there aren't so many of them. Men aren't so choosy when there's fewer to pick from.”

Simms snorted. “They'd never leave Belleville. And even if they did, they'd never lift a finger once they got there.” He sighed. “No, I'm afraid I'm here for the duration. Let's just hope things get better soon.”