Voyageurs

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘Our Friend may well find it hard to discern God's will in his present trial.’ The speaker was on the elders’ bench facing me: the dark, heavy-jowled man who'd told me his name was David Willson. He spoke with a good deal more eloquence than the simple farmers round him. I forgot that I was cold and tired and hungry, and began to be much moved. ‘Are we not called,’ he said at last, ‘to bring forth anew our ancient testimony to peace, and to raise it higher as an ensign to the nations? Is it not the will of God that Yonge Street runs through the very heart of our community? If we are to make the earth a fruitful paradise, if we are to be the children of peace as our Lord desires of us, is it not meet that our light should shine forth to the world as we bear witness against them that persecute us? I say that the road runs through our community so that we may stand by our testimony before the nations of the whole world. For is not this world rent by war from end to end, and delivered thereby into the hand of the Enemy? If our Lord Jesus Christ has sent us here to build his Kingdom of Peace upon earth, here in this place, then this must be our Suffering in the cause of Truth, and our Witness in these times of peril.’

  The ensuing silence was broken at last by a hesitant young voice. ‘Friends, we talk as if the country were at war. But the war is naught but rumour, apart from the troops going down Yonge Street and causing us distress. As yet there is peace between Upper Canada and the United States. Should we not be praying that there be no war, that this threat will pass away from us? Surely it's not the will of the Lord God of Peace that there be war in the land?’

  The next to minister seemed to me to set the last ministries aside, but no doubt it was not meant so. ‘It's true that Governor Isaac Brock is a soldier, but Friends, to our certain knowledge and experience, he's a fair man withal, and not hostile to our Society. We can help him by praying that the Lord may show him the right way. I make no doubt that his heart is set upon war, and as far as that goes we can't support him.’

  It was quite dark outside the windows now. The silence flowed, and ebbed. A new voice spoke.

  ‘Our Friend is right. We should speak to Isaac Brock, remembering that the true might, the peaceful dominion of the Lord God, is with us and among us. If any man can control the militia, Isaac Brock can. We're already being imprisoned for not paying war tax. The next thing we know, our young men will be seized from their homes. It'll be too late then to start arguing. We ignore the Road at our peril. We'll stand by our testimony of peace until death, if need be, and if we do that the Lord is with us to protect us. The law of our own land ought to protect us too. We must remind the Governor of that before war is declared, and before violent hands are laid upon us. We would be fools to do aught else.’

  Ripples of uncertainty spread through the long silence that ensued. Gradually they died away. I recognised the voice of Amos Armitage from the elders’ bench: ‘Friends, this was the first declaration concerning peace made by those who signed themselves “the harmless and innocent people of God, called Quakers”: Our principle is, and our Practice hath always been, to seek peace and ensue it and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare and doing that which tends to the peace of all. We know that wars and fightings proceed from the lusts of men, out of which lusts the Lord hath redeemed us, and so out of the occasion of war. All bloody principles and practices we, as to our own particulars, do utterly deny, with all outward war and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end and under any pretence whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world. ‘

  The silence gathered. I felt the peace of the Lord like a garment wrapped around, protecting us from the uncharted wilderness without. I leaned back against the wall and shut my eyes. I had walked nearly thirty miles that day, which would have been a small matter in my own country, but here the forest seemed to have thrust its way into my mind, so that when I shut my eyes I saw only the line of trees, the patch of sky above the road, and the shining puddles in the mud. In my mind I still trudged on and on, and when I came back to myself at last Amos Armitage had me by the shoulder and was shaking me. ‘Do the elders of Cumberland give a man leave to sleep in Meeting, Friend? But thee has travelled far, and may be forgiven. Come with me, and we shall see what we can do for thee.’

  CHAPTER 6

  THE NEXT MORNING I WAS SITTING OUTSIDE AMOS Armitage's cabin, scraping the mud off my boots, and thinking about what Amos had said to me at breakfast. He'd been frank about what he saw as the futility of my errand. Rachel was disowned, he said, and therefore out of the care of any Meeting. He respected my concern, however, and even advised me on ways and means. ‘But thee needn't go back to Montreal. Thee's already halfway to Mackinac. We know traders who use this road who could help thee on thy way.’ I explained about William Mackenzie, and the importance of following up my contacts in the North West Company. He said that the North West Company was concerned only with matters of worldly concern, and it behoved a Friend to keep apart from their militant practices. I tried to make him understand why I must follow the way that the Lord had opened up before me, and in the end I more or less prevailed with him.

  He returned just as I was lacing up my damp boots. A young woman was with him. Her grey hood was thrown back. Thick red curls had escaped from under her cap, and stood up like a halo all around her face. I realised I was staring, and I looked down; her plain dress proclaimed her a modest Quaker maid, but the adornments we are born with we must live with as we may, and none can blame us for that.

  ‘This is my niece Clemency Armitage,’ Amos said to me. ‘She and my nephew Thomas are offering to give thee lodging for the winter.’

  Clemency Armitage looked directly at me, and I saw that her cheeks and forehead were pitted with pockmarks; otherwise she'd have been pretty. She said to me, ‘Welcome to Yonge Street, Friend. Thy aunt Judith Scott stayed a winter in our house. Thee's very welcome to do the same.’

  ‘This is exceeding kind of thee,’ I said.

  ‘We're glad to have thee. Thomas does more than one man's work, and thee looks to be a strong fellow. It would be helpful if thee came with me now, for I have to take the bull back with me.’

  I liked her plain speaking, and I was glad to be useful. Since the day I'd boarded the Jane I'd too often felt out of my depth, a useless encumbrance to the working men around me. The bull was docile but ill to lead. Clemency Armitage lacked the weight to make him shift, so I led him by the nose, while she urged him with a switch to his flank, which to be honest I think he never noticed. Once we were away from the farm and walking through open fields, the bull walked quietly. I took covert stock of my companion. When we'd met I'd noticed how pale her face was against her fiery hair, but now her scarred cheeks were scarlet after our tussle with the bull. I kept my eyes away from her, and took note of the country. The trees were beginning to turn gold beyond the stubble fields, and the sky was eggshell blue above the wreathing ground mists.

  Presently Clemency opened a gate, a simple affair of a loose pole in the rail fence. ‘Now we're on our lot,’ she told me.

  We could walk side by side here across the stubble, which made it possible to converse.

  ‘I see thee had wheat in this field?’

  ‘Yes. We've been growing wheat four years now – second time in this field.’

  ‘Thee's not been here long, then?’ I asked. (There have been Greenhows at Highside upwards of three hundred years, they say.)

  She counted on her fingers, which made me smile. ‘Seven years. The first year we hadn't cleared enough stumps for grain, so we just grew turnips and potatoes.’ She kept glancing at me, quite discreetly, but I was much aware of it. ‘We bought our first cow, what, four – five – years ago? Obadiah Rogers lends us this fellow’ – she slapped the bull on the shoulder. ‘We have six cows now, and a fine heifer this year. Thee's a farmer, Friend?’

  ‘Ay.’ That sounded over-short, so I added, ‘No wheat. We're a hill farm: mainly sheep. A small herd of cattle. We grow a few oats,
enough potatoes and hay, and nowadays turnips for winter feed as well. I was noticing the fine turnips here.’

  ‘So thy farm is not like this?’

  ‘No.’ I was struggling with a mass of tangled thoughts; this place seemed so alien, so far from anything I knew. And yet things were the same – the great beast that walked between us had the same smell as cattle anywhere, and the tang of the bare fields, the colour of the autumn sky – seemed achingly familiar. I surprised myself by trying to explain to her, which was a thing words could not do, and inside myself I knew it. ‘The land here is so flat. Once thee cuts the forest and drains the marsh thee could cultivate every yard of it, I reckon. The sky is so big, but thee can't see out. There's no height of land; there's no rock. Thee can look straight across all thy lands at once, up to the edge of the forest over there, but then – nothing.’

  ‘Thee means “but then – Indian country”, Friend. That's the frontier. Thee is standing on the last farm in Upper Canada, thee should know!’

  ‘Are there Indians close by?’

  ‘We've just one family here now. Thee'll be seeing them. They're Mississaugas; their summer village is a few miles further north, by Lake Simcoe. The villages all scatter in winter: each household has its own hunting grounds. If they didn't spread out across the land in winter they'd starve. In winter our Mississauga friends are as close neighbours on the one hand as my uncle Amos is on the other.’

  I was startled to think that the Indians were so close. Clemency said they were good neighbours, because they knew well that Friends came in peace. She'd learned a lot from them, she told me, about the wild plants of the forest, and how to use them for medicines, flavourings and so forth. ‘When we arrived here,’ she told me, ‘they came out of the woods with meat for us when we were building our first cabin – that's the byre now – and they watched us fell the first trees when we made our garden.’

  ‘So thee didn't grow up in Upper Canada?’

  ‘Indeed not. I'm an American.’

  ‘But thee's settled . . . thee's British now?’

  She shrugged. ‘We are Friends.’ She let me ponder that, and then she added, ‘We recognise no quarrel with any nation. We're American citizens – or so we always thought. We left our families behind over the border, and we're fearing now that we'll never see them more. This is our farm. It cost us dear enough; Thomas would never leave it now.’

  I could see a low-pitched log cabin a little way ahead. Smoke blew from the chimney, and I caught the sweet tang of woodsmoke on the air. There was a byre, and a couple of sheds. The garth between was churned to thick mud. Chickens foraged in the ruts; as we approached the cockerel ruffled his fine feathers and announced us with a rousing cock-a-doodle-doo.

  ‘The bull goes in the home field with the cows. I'll open the gate, if thee can let him loose.’

  The bull wandered off, snorting, and I fell into step beside her again, coiling the tether neatly as I walked. ‘Do thee and thy husband farm this land alone?’

  ‘I have no husband, Friend.’

  ‘I'm sorry.’ I blushed like a lass in my embarrassment, but she wasn't looking my way. ‘Thee, and thy uncle too, spoke of “Thomas”, and I thought . . .’

  ‘Thomas is my brother. Thee'll meet my good-sister Sarah in a moment. Come in!’

  The cabin was more spacious within than it looked to be from the outside. It greeted me with a rush of warmth and the combined scents of woodsmoke and new bread. A fire glowed in a huge stone hearth; in the fire there was a bake-kettle with embers banked up round it. The kitchen floor was packed earth, swept very clean, with a rag rug by the hearth. The table was on the right of the door, by a window cut in the wall, so one might peer through the thick glass and see who was coming along the track, even as one sat at meat. There was a spinning wheel in the corner, where the spinner might get the light from the other window, and a dresser piled with crockery against the wall. Above my head were rough-cut rafters where hams of dried meat hung above the hearth, and bunches of herbs and onions. A further door stood half open. I could see a section of board floor; there was a ladder against the partition wall, and a curtained bed place above the inner room.

  ‘Sarah! Is thee there?’

  ‘Here,’ came a voice from the bedroom. Sarah, when she emerged, greeted me in a friendly manner. She was little, plump and brown and freckled, and reminded me of a speckledy hen we had at home that used to come in and sit by the hearth. My mother's opinion was that the creature, showing more imagination than most of her kind, thought that she was really a cat. When I got to know Thomas I understood why he had chosen Sarah, for I found him to be an easygoing fellow, who valued comfort at his hearth and snugness in his bed more than vast intelligence or vivacity or argumentation. Whiles I see his point, for all that I made such a very different choice.

  It was certainly a more primitive way of life than any I had known, and yet at Highside we live simply enough. The very byre at Yonge Street had started out as a cabin for a family of six – Clemency told me it took but a week to build, for everyone in Yonge Street came to help – and there must have been barely room for all to lie down at night. The new cabin seemed small enough to me, even though there were only the four of us. I had a shakedown by the kitchen fire, and as the winter wore on I was glad to be so close to the warmth, for the floor was draughty. In the end I stayed with them right through till the end of Third Month.

  It was a house of deep mourning, as I soon discovered. The typhus had raged through the new settlement two years before, and four of the family had died in it. Thomas and Clemency had lost both their parents and their two sisters within the space of a month. In the face of such loss I knew not what to say, but that my prayers were with them, and they seemed content with that. I was of practical help to them. It was useful to have another man about the place in winter. There were logs to haul and cut, ice to break and water to fetch from under it, and cattle in the byre to feed and water. We did some building work making cattle stalls in one of the outhouses. Thomas and I took the sled on wood trips, and set traps, which sometimes brought us rabbits, and sundry small animals that were strange to me, for the pot. The Armitages were a family long skilled in carpentry, and they'd learned woodland skills as well from their Indian neighbours. I learned a great deal that winter which stood me in good stead.

  The forest lapped at the edge of the fields, shut out only by a post and rail fence. On our first night of snow Clemency gave me a bearskin to cover me. I exclaimed at the size and thickness of it.

  ‘It's not as big as some,’ said Clemency. ‘Thomas shot that one in our own oatfield last year. By harvest time there were two or three of them coming in and helping themselves every evening. He shot this one, and the other two haven't been back.’

  ‘In thy own field} But . . . is that not dangerous? Is thee safe in the woods?’

  ‘Nowhere on earth is safe, Friend. But as for bears – they don't usually attack. If thee makes enough noise they keep out of thy way. I met one once when I was picking blueberries. We were both so busy getting our berries that neither of us noticed the other. I think the bear got as big a shock as I did. I just shouted as loud as I could and it went off.’

  ‘Was thee not feart?

  ‘Frightened? Of course I was frightened! But it's true, they hardly ever attack people.’

  ‘And if they do?’

  ‘Then they kill. Thee can't run or climb faster than a bear. If thee keeps still, and prays to God for mercy, then perhaps the bear won't eat thee. But then again, perhaps it will.’

  As it got colder, I was glad to roll myself up in my bearskin every night, and glad, too, to think that any lurking bears in the forest were sleeping deeply until springtime. I slept pretty well myself. The brown-black fur was thick and coarse, but surprisingly soft against my shirt. I could have done with a hide like that in daytime. Never had I known such cold. There were days when the heat from the fire seemed to be killed stone dead while the logs yet blazed in front of u
s. Clemency sewed me a deerskin tunic and a foxfur cap to wear outdoors, and I missed the warmth of them sorely when I had to dress suitably for Meeting. I'd sit on my bench at the back of the Meeting House while the cold came creeping in around the doors and windows, trickling through to my skin wherever it could. The snow fell early, and sometimes it lay right up to the eaves of our cabin. I could in no way walk in it, but Thomas helped me make a pair of snowshoes like the ones they all had. We made the round frames by steaming stems of ash, then I wove the centre part with rawhide, as Clemency showed me, and fixed leather straps to tie them to my boots. I was pleased with my handiwork, but the first time I set out on them I could do nothing but trip over my own feet and fall headlong. It was a day of fine powdery snow, and the sun shone on us in long yellow slanting beams as we chased one another about the clean white yard. I was honestly trying, but my antics made Clemency laugh so hard the tears fell into her shawl and froze there. Then I did get the hang of it, and Thomas ran before me throwing snowballs, which I threw back, and fell again, and caught him, and then we fell together, rolling over and over while the fine snow stuck to us.

  Times we were serious enough, and the work got done too. In Twelfth Month Clemency told me what all three of them had known a month or more, which was that her good-sister was in the family way, and of a sickly sort. So more work fell to Clemency after that, while Thomas and I laboured outside. One icy morning there was a thick layer of ice on the snow, so that every footstep I made knocked a round hole with a loud crunching noise. Days like that it was so freezing clear that one could hear the blow of an axe from nearly a mile away at Amos's cabin. Sometimes there was a sound like a shot from the woods, but they said it was but a branch breaking, or a whole tree splitting apart just from the coldness of it.