by Ann Birch
Sam put his arm around her waist. “May I have the honour, ma’am?” He planted a kiss on her whiskery cheek and felt her stiff body relax for a minute. Then he released her and plucked a berry from the wreath.
“Dear Mr. Jarvis, it is now my turn,” Mrs. Widmer said, coming up close behind the old woman.
“Look at the wreath, Mrs. Widmer.” Mrs. Powell turned and gathered up the folds of her dress. “You must surely know the traditions of Yuletide. All philandering must stop once the last berry has been removed. Mr. Jarvis cannot oblige. There are no more berries.”
“No more berries, you say? Ah, but there are!” Mrs. Widmer lifted up a loop of greenery and pointed to one remaining berry. Then she moved in close to Sam, shutting her eyes and turning her mouth up towards him.
Mary pushed in front of her guest. “My turn then, ma’am. Wives have precedence on such occasions. If it’s the last berry, it’s mine.”
So Sam leaned down and kissed his wife, aware as he did so of Mrs. Jameson’s blue eyes fixed upon him.
The guests trooped towards the coat tree and the pile of scarves, gloves, gaiters, pattens, boots and muffs stowed at the entrance. Sam caught a glimpse of a shapely leg as Mrs. Jameson bent over for a moment to button her canvas gaiters.
He and Mary stood at the door to wave goodbye to their guests. The sleigh bells were still ringing in their ears when Mary slammed the door and turned to him. “That woman is intolerable, Sam.”
“Widmer was one of the reasons I wasn’t hanged, Mary. Have you thought about what we owe the man?”
“Oh Sam, you don’t find her attractive, do you? And what did she mean by ‘Papa’s horns’? Does that have some ribald connotation?”
“To answer your questions briefly. ‘No,’ and, ‘No idea.’ Now let’s go and see what the children are up to.”
NINE
Please, sir...” Sam looked up from his newspaper to see Cook standing in the doorway of the breakfast room. Her arms were covered in flour, and her face was flushed, probably from the heat of the bake oven.
“What is it?”
“There be a savage come to the kitchen door, sir. He wants to see you. He says he won’t wait outside and now he be seated on a chair by my fire warming hisself. What am I to do, sir?”
“Go back belowstairs. I will be there directly.”
Sometimes the Indians did not follow white man’s rules. Sam remembered John Beverley Robinson’s story of a native man who had come into his wife’s bedchamber after she had delivered one of their sons. He looked at the babe in its rocking cradle beside the bed, stroked its head and departed through the imposing front door. Had the man perhaps remembered a wigwam on the site of the Robinson mansion?
Sam descended the narrow staircase. The kitchen was dark, lit only by the open hearth, and he squinted into the gloom at the tall, thin man seated by the fire, who rose to greet him.
“Nehkik,” a familiar voice said. “May you walk well in the New Year. I bring gifts to lighten your journey.” Jacob pointed to a deerskin sling on the floor by a chair.
“Jacob!” Sam rushed forward. He hugged the Indian and threw his arms around his tri-coloured blanket coat, while trying to avoid stepping on his heavy moccasins. “What are you doing here, friend?”
And right away, as his arms touched Jacob’s bony frame, he knew something was wrong. He stepped back. Jacob’s eyes glittered and his cheekbones and chin protruded from the sunken skin of his face. There were black smudges on his cheeks.
“Are you ill?”
“Hungry, Nehkik. I am in Toronto with my father, Chief Snake, and my friend, Elijah White Deer. We come by snowshoe across the lake and south to town. It has been a long journey. We go today to speak to the Governor, to ask for blankets and food. We camp for three nights with Mississauga friends by the big lake. Then we go north again.”
“Bring bread and butter, cheese, ham and tea,” Sam said to Cook, who watched them from behind the broad oak table. “And be quick about it.” And turning to Jacob, he added, “You will stay, please, Jacob. Here you will have a warm bed and plenty of food, and you can rest and grow strong again.” It was hard to keep his voice steady as he stared at the emaciated figure of his friend.
“No, I thank you, Nehkik. I must go back to my family soon. They are hungry.”
Cook set a plateful of food in front of Jacob. “Sit here close to the fire,” Sam said, “and say no more until you have eaten.”
“First, I give gifts.” Jacob opened his sling and brought out the objects, each wrapped in deerskin. “This for your lady,” he said, uncovering a pretty fan of dyed fishskin. Next came four pairs of beaded moccasins for the boys, four cornhusk dolls for the little girls, and last, a piece of polished, weighted wood, which Sam viewed with delight.
“A snowsnake! Oh, that will be fun. I’ll take my sons out on the ice one of these fine days. But where are your father and your friend?”
“They find a fox carcass back there.” He gestured in the direction of the henhouse. “They scrape it clean now and take it home when we go.”
Then Jacob reached out and pulled the plate of food in front of him. From a beaded pouch around his neck, he took out a small bone-handled knife and a lead fork and set them beside the plate. Though he probably had not eaten for some time, he cut his ham carefully, slipped slices of cheese between the bread, and chewed each morsel slowly. The lines on his face smoothed out. At last, he set down his empty cup.
“Now, Jacob, you must have a pipe with me and tell me your story. I want to know why you have been hungry in this land of deer and moose.” Sam took two pipes from the rack near the cupboards and passed a pouch of tobacco to his friend. He filled his own pipe, tamped down the tobacco, lit it and puffed. Jacob did the same.
Cook pushed open the small window beside the hearth. A blast of icy air blew in. Sam turned to her, “Close the window, damn it. If you don’t like the pipe smoke, go sit in the scullery.” And out she went, banging the kitchen door behind her.
“Now, Jacob...”
“I tell you once before about the Governor. Not this new Governor, but the one who comes before...” He paused and took another puff on his pipe.
“Governor Colborne. Yes, I remember.” Colborne had ordered three Indian bands from different islands in Lake Simcoe to move north to the Narrows and live together. There, so Colborne reasoned, he could monitor the Indians’ movements more closely. But then he grew frightened of the “threat”, as he called it, of all those “savages” in one place. Some of the Indians had moved back to Lake Simcoe, with Colborne’s blessing.
“All that moving back and forth, it is disaster, Nehkik. When we move to the Narrows, we leave behind crops on the land. But we do not worry, there are many moose at the Narrows, so we have plenty to eat. But when we go back home again to Snake Island, we find nothing but weeds. Nothing to eat there but mushrooms and berries.”
“But there is game, is there not? Do you not have moose there, too?”
“Many white men settle on the lake, shoot deer, shoot moose, shoot partridge. A moon ago, old white man points a rifle at me when he sees me stalk deer. ‘Go away, savage,’ he says, ‘this is my land and my deer’.”
“Like Windigo,” Sam said, remembering the story Jacob had told him on one of their hunting trips. Windigo was the cannibal hunter with a heart of ice, tall as a towering white pine, who ate every living creature that walked upon the earth. “Himself only for himself,” was Windigo’s cry.
“Yes, like Windigo.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Jacob was a quiet man, and he and Sam had often sat by their campfire in the wilderness for hours, each deep in his own thoughts. Now, glancing at his friend as he smoked, Sam noticed the black marks on his face. They were not the dirt that came from a long trek across country, but something quite different.
“The black paint on your cheeks, Jacob—you are in mourning? Who has died?”
“My wife.”
And now
in his voice there was such sorrow mixed with anger that Sam was at first afraid to question him further. He got up and poked at the fire. He wound up the clock jack and set the roast of beef turning once more in the hastener.
“And your children, friend?” he said finally, as he remembered that Jacob had once mentioned two small girls, perhaps four and five years of age, and two boys of nine and twelve.
“With the grandmother. But she is old and sick, too. She is a good woman, does what she can...” Jacob tapped the contents of his pipe onto the empty plate and stood up. “But children need a mother.” He looked at Sam, one man to another. “And I need a wife.”
“You and I have had good times together, Jacob. I will go with you this day and talk to our new Governor. I will tell him of the plight of your people and ask what can be done. Do not despair.”
Jacob smiled. It deepened the lines in his sunken face, yet his eyes shone in the gloom. “I tell my father, Chief Snake. I say to him, ‘Maybe Nehkik can help’.” Jacob took Sam’s hand in his long bony fingers. “May the Great Spirit who rules our world guard and protect you.”
As Jacob moved towards the kitchen door, Sam suddenly remembered Mrs. Jameson’s request. “Jacob,” he said, “I have a friend who is writing a book on Upper Canada. She wants to let Europeans know about the life of the country’s original inhabitants. Would you, your father, and your friend consider spending an hour with her now? She would offer some food, if I asked her, and we should still have plenty of time to see the Governor.”
“Yes, Nehkik.”
Sam got into his coat and the moccasins which Jacob had given him months ago. He and his friend put on their snowshoes and moved into the pine trees behind the house. As they went forward, their tracks disappeared in the swirling snow.
TEN
Anna sat at the pine table in her bedchamber rereading the letter she had written to Ottilie von Goethe. Perhaps it was the type of letter that Mrs. Hawkins would label “Written by Lady Snob”, but Anna thought it was clever, exactly the sort of thing her friend would enjoy. After all, Ottilie, in her free-spirited way, was always on the search for a new man in her life.
Dearest Ottilie:
Are you growing weary of your lover, le beau Charles? Do you yearn for a new objet d’amour? Come here, my dear, and I will present you with an Indian chief.
He will be tall and muscular, and you will grow accustomed to the stink of his sweat and the filth of his deerskin leggings. He will be a man of few words, and those he speaks, you will not understand. So you will not have to converse with him, nor will there be tiresome preliminaries to your love-making. He will simply throw you over his broad shoulders and carry you off to his wigwam deep in the pine forest. On a comfortable mat of boughs and branches, he will make you his very own... squaw.
There will be household tasks you must learn, of course, but these will be easy. You must skin a bear or two to make a warm covering for the nuptial mat. You must snare a rabbit, skin and gut it, and boil it over your campfire into a tasty stew. He may need a gallon of cheap whiskey each day, but that you can bargain for from a greasy trader.
When your handsome chief tires of you, or you of him, there will be no lingering heartache. He will strike off your head with his tomahawk. Or you may do likewise. White man’s courts will pay no heed. Indians have their own marital customs and their own solutions for dissension.
When I contemplate my marriage to Mr. Jameson, I may envy you. We have our meals on a table, but I hear only the clink of the stopper on the wine decanter and the rustle of his newspaper. Sometimes I long for a bear to skin. Or a tomahawk to wield.
I have asked the Superintendent of Indian Affairs—a rather good-looking white man—to bring some of his Chippewa charges to meet me. So far he has not complied, but if he does, I shall pick the perfect specimen for you. In the summer I travel into the Canadian wilderness, where I shall find out more, and pass on my wisdom to you.
From your loving friend cum marriage broker,
Anna
She gave the letter to Hawkins to post. Somewhat to her surprise, she had discovered on one of her walks about town that there was a post office. She had heard so much from her European friends about the backwardness of Canada. This office was in fact an imposing three-storey red brick structure in the Georgian style. Hawkins told her that the postmaster had to pay for staff, fuel and candles from his own pocket, and she suspected that he rolled some of the letters he received into spills to light his hearth fires. Who could blame him? Few of the populace could afford to pay the postage on the letters addressed to them, and there were piles of unclaimed correspondence. She had seen how one old man abused the system. He claimed he could not read, had asked the postmaster to read the letter to him, then said, “Don’t know none of the folk mentioned. Won’t pay for nothing that’s not mine.”
She sat down then to do the translations of the German essays she had brought with her. She had just finished the second essay and started on the third when Mrs. Hawkins interrupted.
“Come quick, ma’am, there be people here to see you.”
She thought immediately of another dreary encounter with Mrs. Powell and her daughter Eliza. She was in Toronto to promote Robert’s social reputation, true, and she should probably be pleasant to them, but enough was enough. “Can you invent a plausible excuse, Mrs. Hawkins? I have three hours of study before me as you can see.” She gestured at the books on the table.
“But I think you be interested in these people, ma’am, if I may say so.”
“Not Mrs. Powell then? Nor yet Mrs. Robinson or Mrs. Widmer?”
Mrs. Hawkins laughed. “No indeed, ma’am. Mrs. Powell and them would have nought to do with these ones. Three of them, anyways. Three be savages and one be Mr. Jarvis, the Indian keeper.” Mrs. Hawkins’s cheeks were flushed with excitement. She flapped the skirt of her apron. “Oh, ma’am, to think of real savages in our new-papered drawing room. Do they sit upon chairs, ma’am?”
“Let them decide. I shall be there directly. And please get a meal ready for them. Anything you can come up with in a hurry.”
As soon as the door closed, Anna ran to her bureau, pulled open the top drawer, and found exactly what she was looking for, a bag of blue wampum. She hooked it onto the belt of her skirt.
In the entrance to the drawing room, Mr. Jarvis stood, ready to make the introductions. The Indians were in file behind him.
“May I present Chief Snake, ma’am?” he said, and gestured to a tall man in a red blanket coat and leggings. Fastened to the Indian’s grey braids was a long black plume which dangled behind one ear. The Chief bowed.
“And Jacob Snake, his son.” This was a younger man in a tri-coloured blanket coat with a pretty beaded pouch that hung around his neck. His cheeks were daubed with black paint.
“And Elijah White Deer.” Elijah smiled and pointed at the bag fastened to Anna’s belt. He said something in his native language.
“The Chief and Elijah don’t speak English, and I, alas, speak no Chippewa. Jacob will translate,” Mr. Jarvis said.
“Elijah pays you a compliment, ma’am. He says he likes the wampum bag which you wear on your belt.”
“Please tell him, ‘thank you’. The wife of the New York Governor gave it to me while I was in New York City on my way here. And please say that I too am impressed by the strings of blue wampum on Chief Snake’s neck. And that in a minute or two, my housekeeper will serve breakfast.”
All this was translated; everyone smiled and bowed. Anna noticed that Mr. Jarvis seemed especially pleased with her offer of breakfast. Then they moved into the drawing room where the Indians went directly to the fireplace. Elijah took the bellows and pumped up the fire to rich red flames. There the three men stood, backs to the burning logs, obviously enjoying the warmth.
Anna exchanged a few inanities about the weather with Mr. Jarvis. The Indians made no attempt to talk, yet they seemed perfectly at ease.
Mrs. Hawkins came into the d
ining room with a tray of cold meat, bread and beer. Everyone moved towards the table. At first the Indians tried to use the knife and fork that had been placed at each setting, but then they took out their own knives from the deerskin slings that they wore across their shoulders. Apart from a tendency to impale the ham on the end of these knives, their manners were good.
“Their restraint is remarkable,” Mr. Jarvis said, speaking quietly into Anna’s ear, “especially when one considers how hungry they must be.” In a normal voice, he added, “We are on our way to the Governor to ask for rations of food and a supply of blankets. My companions have walked over the snow a distance of eighty miles, and not one of them has eaten for two days.”
“You forget, Nehkik, that I have an excellent meal with you this morning.” Jacob Snake took a clean, but much worn, square of cotton from his beaded pouch and wrapped his bread and meat in it. He paused for a moment, looked at Anna, who nodded approval, and continued his folding of the cloth around the food. He passed his tankard of beer to his father, Chief Snake.
Anna turned her attention back to Mr. Jarvis. “I have some questions to ask while I have you here with your party. But I am fearful of giving offence through my ignorance.”
“I am happy,” Jacob said, overhearing her comment. “Not often does white man show an interest in our ways.”
So she asked about the making of the beautiful porcupine-quill baskets she had seen in the local shops, about their sacred scrolls, about the use of birchbark in their canoes, about their attitude to the white settlers, and about whether they were forced to take Christian oaths in a courtroom. While Jacob responded, he turned occasionally to speak to his father in his own language, apparently to check the veracity of his comments to her. The old man seemed pleased to take part in the discussion.
“And I must caution you, ma’am,” Mr. Jarvis said, “not to lump all Indians together under one category, as so many people do. There is as much difference between the customs and language of, let us say, the Chippewa and Mohawk nations, as there is between the French and the English.”
