Wicked Woods

by Steve Vernon

  “It’s easy work,” Tom swore. “Just swing a pick and drag the gold out to the bank.”

  “It’s been my experience that the words work and easy have never really coupled together all that well,” Bill noted.

  “Bill, I reckon you were born in the middle of the week and have spent most of your life looking for the day of rest,” Tom said.

  “I swear I’ve never met a man so lazy as you.”

  Bill knew it was true, but he would be burnt, sunk, and blasted before he’d ever agree with the other two.

  “Take a look in the mirror, sometime when you think of it,” Bill said. “If you’ve a mind to stare into the face of laziness.”

  “Come on fellows,” Joshua said. “We’re burning daylight at both ends of the fuse.”

  Joshua was the youngest of the trio, and was in this game mostly for the fun and adventure of it. He’d met the other two men in a Saint John tavern and once they found out he had a bit of experience in black powder blasting, they talked him into coming along.

  “There’s gold off the coast,” Bill had said. “The Mi’kmaq I talked to told me they’d found shiny rocks glittering and shining in the dark of the woods like stars in the night sky.”

  The truth of the matter was that old Bill could talk a drowning man into draining a glass of water before he went under. He was a fine one for talk, although not much for following through. Yes sir, he was all blow and no go, our Bill.

  “Gold, you say?” Joshua had asked. “My pockets are light enough to float these days. I could do with a little golden lining.”

  “All you want,” Bill promised. “Gleaming like fireflies on a foggy moonless night.”

  So the three men pooled their wherewithal and bought an old dory. Well, that isn’t quite the truth of it, but that’s how Bill and Tom told Joshua the story. The fact was, Bill bought a cou–ple of bottles of rum with Joshua’s money while Tom stole an old dory, and they set off from the coast of Saint John, hoping to find glory.

  When they’d rowed about as far as they felt they had to, Tom pointed into Red Head Harbour and shouted out, “We land here.”

  Joshua, not knowing any better, rowed the two rascals in. They dragged the dory up and looked around in the darkness.

  “Look at that rock formation,” Bill said. “That looks just like a keyhole, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s a good sign,” Tom swore. “The gold will lie right on through there, you bet your life.”

  “Well what are we waiting for?” Joshua asked. “Let’s get her done.”

  So the three men made their way into the woods around Red Head, following their noses and trusting to luck.

  Now perhaps this had started as a bit of a lark, but the three soon found a new purpose in their enterprise. They set to their labours with a will that was astounding for a couple of ne’er-do-wells and one starry-eyed youngster. They staked out a claim and dug as deeply as they could into the stubborn New Brunswick dirt. When the digging proved too difficult, Joshua stepped in and blasted it free with a judicious application of black powder and fusing.

  After the dirt was loosened, the two scoundrels, Bill and Tom, leaned back on their shovels and let Joshua do the majority of the digging. They found silver, not gold, but it would spend just as readily, and when it came time to divide it up Bill and Tom were happy to do the counting and the double-checking.

  The three men prospered. They dug for silver in the spring, summer, and fall. In the winter, when a blanket of snow covered the New Brunswick forest, they boarded with local residents. It seemed they would make a go of it.

  Tom and Bill took easily to their prosperity. They ate well and drank when they could. However, Joshua caught a fever of sorts. He forgot all about fun and took to the notion that the degree of their success depended solely on his effort. He began to skip meals and spend his spare time digging in the mine. He forgot to shave and wash and wore the same suit of clothes for digging as for sleeping.

  Conversations around the campfire circled around the next day’s digging.

  “We should be at it,” Joshua would say. “We should be up and digging. There’s no time to sleep.”

  “That silver’s been there a long time,” Tom and Bill would tell him. “It’ll wait for us to catch a little shut-eye.”

  “Silver runs away like a dog in the night if you don’t keep at it,” Joshua said.

  “It’ll keep,” Tom said.

  Joshua wasn’t so sure of that. He began to imagine that his partners were stealing away while he slept, digging the silver and pocketing it for themselves. It was foolishness on his part. What need did they have to pocket what he dug for them so freely?

  Now silver is a tricky thing and a vein can disappear into the darkness of the dirt just as readily as water spilling through sand. After a time the vein ran out, and the three men were left rooting about in a played-out mine.

  “She’s done for,” Tom decided one night.

  “She doesn’t hold any more silver than a hoop full of hope,” Bill agreed.

  Joshua didn’t like the sound of that thinking.

  “You’re trying to cheat me,” he said. “There’s plenty of silver left down there.”

  “Cheat you? How, boy?”

  Joshua stared at them angrily. The glint of the fire danced in his partners’ eyes. Their eyes looked like silver dollars running away, to Joshua.

  The three men argued until Joshua picked up a small keg of black powder and held a torch close to it.

  “You two are trying to rob me blind,” he said. “I’ll blast us all to kingdom come if you don’t stay away from my mine.”

  The two men stared at their young partner. They had been so busy spending their profits that they hadn’t seen how far Joshua had disconnected from reality. They tried to talk a little sense into him, but he called them names and cursed at them. Finally, they’d had enough.

  “The mine is yours if you want to keep it,” they told him.

  “That’s fine by me,” Joshua answered.

  The two men packed their kit in silence and left the camp to the silver-obsessed Joshua. After walking a few miles towards the shoreline, they had second thoughts. It seemed they had a con–science between them.

  “We can’t leave him out here,” Tom said.

  “A little space and time will do him good,” Bill replied. “We can come back in a day or so when he’s had time to regret his rash temper.”

  Just then a gout of smoke and thunder roared up from the direction of the keyhole mine. The two men raced back franti–cally, but when they got to the mine site it was too late. There was nothing to be seen but a flooded pit of rubble. Joshua must have gone down into the mine with the entire keg of black powder, determined to unearth the vanished vein of silver. His rashness had brought the whole mine in on him and opened up an under–ground stream to boot.

  “That’s the last of him, I reckon,” Tom said.

  “It’s his mine now for sure,” Bill said.

  Twenty years later, a pair of local fisherman working a fish weir off of Red Head heard a persistent tap-tap-tap, like a man bang–ing a sledge deep in the darkness of the mine. Since then, folks around Red Head Harbour swear that in the woods they can hear a strange repetitive pounding, like the sound of a man banging out a hole for a powder blast.

  Is it the ghost of young Joshua hunting for his missing silver lode? The answer to this question remains as elusive as the silver vein that ran away from Bill and Tom and Joshua like a dog in the night.

  9

  A ROPE FOR

  MADAME

  LA TOUR

  SAINT JOHN

  Shakespeare tells us that all the world is a stage and all the men and women upon it are merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and their cues, and one person can play many parts. Consider then, the life and death of Saint John’s Madame La Tour.

  Françoise Marie Jacquelin was de-scribed as a beauty by all who knew her. There was something in her
eyes, something that burned and would not be beaten. She was, from all accounts, a successful actress, treading the theat–rical stages of Paris with a conqueror’s bearing. Still, time creeps and steals from us all. At the age of thirty-two, Françoise became worried. She wasn’t being offered the lead roles that she had been accustomed to any longer. In fact, she wasn’t being offered any roles at all.

  So she looked for another offer. She accepted a marriage pro–posal that was brokered by a reputable Parisian agency from a man she had never met. His name was Charles St. Etienne de La Tour. He was a French fur trader and seigneur, the holder of land originally granted to the king of France. The marriage offered security to a woman who was running out of choices. She sailed to meet him at his palisaded wooden stronghold at the mouth of the Saint John River in New Brunswick.

  La Tour had grown up in the Maritimes, arriving on the east coast at the age of fourteen, in the company of his father. Back then, as you know, the people of Acadia were tossed like driftwood upon a raging sea, yet La Tour and his father stubbornly remained where they had taken root. La Tour grew up and was appointed to serve as the governor of Acadia by the King of France, Louis xiii. The seigneur built Fort La Tour in 1632, establishing the area’s first European settlement.

  The trouble began when a bureaucratic foul-up and the application of many francs to a few slyly greased palms led to the awarding of a second governorship to La Tour’s archrival, the Sieur D’Aulnay Charnisay. D’Aulnay ensconced himself within a stronghold similar to La Tour’s directly across the Bay of Fundy, in Port Royal, Nova Scotia. This feud was brewing as Françoise Marie Jacquelin sailed across the Atlantic and braved the roaring Fundy waves as she headed into the mouth of the Saint John River.

  She took to the role of matriarch and wife as if she were born to it, becoming an equal partner in La Tour’s trading business and accompanying him on his journeys. It is said that she had a fine eye for pelts and could haggle with the best of them.

  When D’Aulnay tarnished the La Tours’ reputation in France by declaring that the pair had crossed over to the British, a death sentence was placed upon their heads, should they be caught within French borders. Even so, Madame La Tour journeyed to France in 1642. She appealed to the throne, swearing that both she and her husband had turned down all British advances. In the end the monarchy believed her and the death sentence was overturned.

  At one point during the long siege, Madame La Tour was sail–ing home from France aboard a chartered ship commanded by one Captain Bayley, whom she had commissioned to see her safely back to Fort La Tour. However, when D’Aulnay’s blockade ships headed Bayley off, he locked Madame La Tour in the hold of his ship and swore that it was nothing more than a law-abiding trading ship bound for Boston Harbor. To prove this, he turned his vessel around and headed straight for Boston, where Madame La Tour disembarked and promptly sued the captain for violating his charter. She was awarded two thousand pounds in compensation and used the money to charter three sturdily built New England vessels to brave D’Aulnay’s blockade, while carrying supplies and arms to the besieged Fort La Tour.

  Once there, Madame La Tour advised her husband to sail to Boston and declare himself to be a good upstanding protestant.

  “Ask for a minister to preach the word of God to the men at Fort La Tour,” Madame La Tour told him. “And promise that if the Bostonians will help us conquer D’Aulnay and rule Acadia then we will share our conquests with them.”

  Charles La Tour eagerly took his wife’s advice and sailed out of Saint John Harbour in April 1645. No sooner had he gone than Madame La Tour started an argument with the friars of the fort, no doubt hoping to clear the way for the expected protestant minister and his accompanying reinforcements. The friars were indignant with her show of anger and set out for Port Royal, taking eight sturdy soldiers with them. The soldiers in question were far too Catholic to remain long in a fort where friars were unwanted.

  The friars and troops were made welcome at Port Royal and D’Aulnay plied them with smooth talk, good wine and food, before asking many probing questions that finally brought to light the important fact that Charles La Tour had left the fort under the protection of his wife and forty-five troops. Not much of a number to withstand a concentrated siege.

  D’Aulnay rallied every man he could in Port Royal, sailing them across the Bay of Fundy and erecting a hasty fortification on the west side of Saint John Harbour. He set up his cannons and in the process captured a small vessel bearing an important message for Madame La Tour. It read that her husband Charles had been delayed and was not returning to the fort for another month.

  This was all the news that D’Aulnay needed to hear. The fort was his, as far as he could see. He ordered Madame La Tour to surrender the fort, but she ran up a red flag of defiance that some say was sewn out of a worn red petticoat. Whether commanding a troupe of actors or a troop of soldiers, Madame La Tour was more than ready for the task. Her troops hurled insults and cannon–ades from behind the walls of Fort La Tour, defying D’Aulnay’s attempts to overrun the fort. For three days, they maintained their resistance in spite of D’Aulnay’s superior numbers.

  But on the fourth day, a guard turned traitor and allowed D’Aulnay’s forces access to the fort. D’Aulnay took the fort in a day, promising that the forty-five defenders would be spared if they laid down their arms. Yet D’Aulnay proved to be treacherous with his word.

  He made Madame La Tour watch as the turncoat guard was forced to hoist and hang each of his fellow defenders at the end of a rope. One by one, her brave soldiers swung and dangled under the New Brunswick sun. D’Aulnay decorated the walls of the fort with corpses of hanged men as Madame La Tour stood by help–lessly, her hands tied and a noose draped about her own neck. The crows gathered for a feast and a feed —some say that the crows that live in Saint John today still wait hopefully for a similar mass hanging.

  Madame La Tour was allowed to walk freely in the captured fort; however, when D’Aulnay caught her in an attempt to send a message through friendly Natives to her missing husband, he locked her in a cell. Three weeks later, Françoise Marie La Tour was dead. The romantics will tell you she died of a broken heart. Others believe that D’Aulnay poisoned her. Who can know?

  Fort La Tour was razed and its exact location lost in the vaga–ries of unrecorded history. D’Aulnay, now aware of what dealings Charles La Tour was making in Boston, demanded reparation for the help that Boston had offered. The Boston governor awarded D’Aulnay the gift of a sedan chair that had been captured in a privateer’s raid, simply because the governor had no use for such a contraption.

  D’Aulnay, however, was satisfied to receive what he saw as an admission of Bostonian guilt. He planned to parlay this admission into a lucrative trading opportunity, but fate intervened. On May 24, 1650, D’Aulnay and his valet tipped their canoe in the basin of Port Royal. They clung to each end of the overturned boat for an hour and a half before succumbing to the chill of the early spring Atlantic. He was buried with all honours and survived by his grieving wife.

  This was Charles La Tour’s chance. Through a series of political intrigues he seized ownership of Port Royal, and turned D’Aulnay’s wife and children out to fend for themselves. Three years following the death of her husband, D’Aulnay’s wife agreed to marry Charles La Tour. D’Aulnay’s four sons grew up, and served and were killed in the wars of Louis xiv, and his daughters all became nuns. Thus, not a drop of D’Aulnay blood remained in the territory of Acadia. Charles La Tour was the final victor.

  Françoise Marie La Tour is believed to have been buried somewhere handy to the ruined fort, however, as the exact location of the fort is a mystery, so is the gravesite. A 1950s archaeological dig on the eastern side of the harbour turned up a handful of cannon barrels, musket balls, and shards of crock–ery. The cannons appeared to have been double shot with two balls jammed in against each other, and to have had their fuse holes spiked so as to render them useless. This is an undeniable
sign of cannons that have been captured and destroyed, or else destroyed before capture.

  Since then there have been several claims, all unsubstantiated, regarding the discovery of Madame La Tour’s remains. One man claimed that he found her body bricked up in the cellar of an old house; however, the majority of Saint John’s older houses were built upon posts and lacked any form of brickwork in the cellar.

  A Saint John shipwright tells of how, during the construction of the shipyards, a woman’s body was unearthed. She had long hair and the clothing of a person who was well-to-do, but no signs of identification were present. The workmen who dug up the remains promptly reburied her and never recorded the site of their discovery. It was better, they believed, to let the woman sleep in peace. Old bones rest uneasily and should seldom be disturbed.

  Huia Ryder, a New Brunswick historian, reports that at the same time an old man in Saint John swore that he and his family often saw a grey lady walking the shores of the western side of the harbour.

  Saint John folk will still tell you of a grey lady who is seen walking the shore near Portland Point on April nights. When approached, she seems to fade away. Some say she runs while others claim that she drifts off like smoke on the breeze.

  Is this the ghost of Françoise Marie La Tour? Who knows? I believe that any actress as bold and daring as Madame La Tour would not willingly give up the spotlight, and would seldom miss an opportunity to perform.

  10

  THE

  BARKING DOG

  KINGSTON

  An argument is like a sleeping dog. If you wake it too suddenly, there is just no telling whom it will bite. In the early 1800s, just outside of Kingston, New Brunswick, a pair of neighbour–ing farmers named James Rogers and Peregrine White sparked up an argu–ment that ultimately ended another man’s life.