Death hovered in the shadows, and Susanna shrank from its touch. Her mother had finally passed away in 1864, her ninety-two years belying her constant complaints of ill health. Both her brother Sam and Catharine’s son James Traill died in 1867. Her sister Sarah’s husband, Richard Gwillym, died in 1868 (“Dear Thay … looks sweet in her weeds,” wrote Agnes). Agnes had at last resumed her correspondence with Susanna, but her letters were full of medical grumbles. “Dr. Wilson … said I had a liver complaint of long-standing and my illness in the spring had been wrongly treated by leeching and blue pills,” she moaned.
One brisk October day in 1869, John Moodie sat on the porch of his cottage attempting to split some firewood with his good right hand. Susanna, who was returning from a walk, put her hand on his shoulder as she passed through to the kitchen door. “You naughty creature,” she teased her husband. “Did you take the opportunity of my being out to kill yourself ?” John laughed: “I feel quite well and strong, today. I mean to cut all the wood for the parlour stove, it will give me a good appetite for dinner.”
The two old people pottered their way through the day. In the evening, they settled into chairs on each side of the parlour stove, and John read aloud while Susanna knitted new socks for him. After thirty-eight years of marriage, they still delighted in each other’s company. “He looked so beautiful,” Susanna recalled a few days later. “The silky snow white hair waving on his shoulders. The noble face illumined by the lamp and the pure fair complexion just tinged with a bright glow, that gave to lip and cheek almost the bloom of youth.” At nine o’clock, Susanna brought her husband a tumbler of milk and a bun and remarked that it was time “for respectable old people like you and I to be in bed.” She helped him into the bedroom, where he still slept in their iron bedstead and she slept on a low couch nearby, and started unbuttoning his shirt for him. “Dear Susy,” John grinned, “I give you a deal of trouble.” Susanna smiled back. “It is no trouble. I always bless God that I am here to help you.”
John manoeuvred his stiff left leg awkwardly into bed, then Susanna plumped up the pillows to make him comfortable. She leaned down and kissed his broad brow, and “bade God to bless my old darling, and give him a good night’s rest.” John reached up to her, pulling her down to his breast, and said in an exaggerated Scots accent, “My dear auld wife, may He bless you.” They were the last words of love Susanna ever heard from John.
It was still dark when Susanna awoke with a start. Someone had cried out, “Mother!” She quickly struggled off the couch and went to his bedside. “Dear Johnnie, are you ill? What is the matter?” John appeared quite coherent as he replied, “Mother, I did not call you. But I am very thirsty. Have you any drink here?” Susanna lit the oil lamp, and brought him a glass of water.
As she watched John brush the glass away and struggle to speak again, Susanna realized that something was wrong. She rose to send the servant for the doctor, but John insisted that, “Doctors can do me no good … Get me over the bed and open the window, I want more air.” By now, the sky was gradually changing from inky black to luminous blue, but the wind from the open window was icy. John, in the grip of a second stroke, was struggling for breath. Susanna wrapped a cloak round him, but he promptly threw up a quantity of slimy foam. He was dying, and Susanna knew it.
John leaned heavily on the window sill, gasping for air. Susanna finally got him back into bed. Desperation creeping into her voice, she begged him to say a few final words—a final message of love to his children. He waved his hand, took two deep breaths, closed his eyes and, as Susanna tearfully put it, “passed through the dark river as peacefully as a child going to sleep.” As Susanna stared in horror at his body, she heard the mill bell tolling six times in the distance. It had all been so quick, so abrupt. How could John have left her in such a rush?
Robert Moodie, his sister Agnes and brother-in-law John Vickers arrived by train the same day to help Susanna with the funeral arrangements. Neither Dunbar nor Donald showed up to mourn their father, but the town of Belleville came out in force to honour John Dunbar Moodie. The Belleville Intelligencer noted that, “Mr. Moodie was a man of warm social affections, had a great many personal friends, and died very generally regretted.” The town council moved a resolution expressing its sympathy to Mrs. Moodie and family in the loss they had sustained. The funeral procession, led by a horse-drawn hearse, straggled almost the full length of the road from the Moodies’ humble cottage to St. Thomas’s Anglican Church on Bridge Street East, on the smart side of town. “Even the men whose persecutions had shortened his days paid respect to his remains,” Susanna wrote to a friend. Nevertheless, black-coated Tory well-wishers like Allan Dougall and Mr. Mackenzie Bowell (a protegé of Benjamin’s, and future prime minister of Canada) were received with a steely, unsmiling glint as they clutched their top hats and mouthed clichés about her husband’s kind heart and service to the community. One of John’s most important enemies was not amongst the throng at St. Thomas’s Church that chilly autumn day. George Benjamin, the Jewish immigrant who had made a strategic conversion to Christianity years earlier, was already buried in the Anglican graveyard.
After the service, Susanna wailed as John’s body was lowered into his grave. “What sorrow is equal to this sorrow?” she sobbed. “It is a strange new feeling to feel so desolate and alone. I ought to be glad. I ought to rejoice that his exit was so easy and painless, that he had for months looked forward to death with pleasure, that the merciful Father saved him from what he most dreaded, a long, lingering death of helplessness and suffering.” Instead, she was plunged into “the gloom of grief.” Her children stared at her anxiously, not knowing how best to comfort her.
For Susanna, widowhood was a death sentence. She was desperately lonely. John had been the centre of her existence; she depended on his love, good humour and enthusiasm to give her own life shape. He had made her laugh, and stopped her taking herself too seriously. He had always read everything she wrote before she sent it off to editors. With him, she felt clever, loved and appreciated. John had protected her from both her own storms of feelings and others’ criticisms. She couldn’t even imagine life without him. “Never, never, can I hope to be so happy again,” she wept. All her children had left home, and anyway, she had never been as close to any of them as she had been to her dear John. “For him I painted, for him I wrote, and I now feel that my occupation is gone,” she wrote to an old friend in England. “Poor Susy is alone—has no motive to live for herself.”
Chapter 17
“A Wail for the Forest”
Widowhood, which was so threatening for Susanna, had proved a liberation for Catharine Parr Traill. It meant she no longer had to put a brave face on the grim life with an ailing, failing husband. After Thomas’s death in 1859, she continued to struggle with the poverty and ill health that had dogged her; her correspondence is liberally speckled with references to lumbago, neuralgia, rheumatism, gout and sciatica. But in none of the hundreds of letters that have survived does Catharine mention that she misses the companionship of her husband. While Susanna confided to her sister, two years after John Moodie’s death, that she still clung “with passionate love to the long, long ago,” Catharine scarcely paused for breath before she was “up and doing.”
Widowhood suited Catharine, who was sustained by her sense of humour and faith in God’s benevolence. Photo taken at Port Hope by R. Ewing in 1867.
Loneliness was not a problem. Catharine’s devoted oldest daughter Kate lived with her and ran the household. And Catharine was soon far more comfortably settled than she had been in years. Although she’d had only a few dollars in her purse at the time of her husband’s death, with her brother Sam’s help she soon scraped together the capital required to buy some land in Lakefield that sloped steeply down to the river. There she built a little frame cottage that she called Westove, the name of the bankrupt Traill family estate in the Orkneys that she had also given to her first log home in Upper Canada, twenty-seven long wi
ndows opening onto Westove had clapboard walls, long windows opening onto a view of the water and gingerbread trim round the eaves of the high-peaked roof. Her bedroom was on the ground floor, and in the early hours of each day she could lie awake listening to the dawn chorus. It was cosier than any of the houses the Traills had previously lived in: the east wind didn’t blast through the bedrooms, as it had in Oaklands, or whistle up the staircase, as it had at Wolf Tower. Catharine put colourful rag rugs on the floor and curtained all the windows in secondhand red velvet drapes, with net curtains. For someone who loved to gossip with neighbours and exchange news in the general store, life in the close-knit community of Lakefield was heaven.
Catharine immediately began to plan for Westove an English country garden full of violets, scarlet geraniums, primroses and dahlias. When she focussed the same talent for organization on the lives of her children and grandchildren, she began to sound like a Strickland matriarch. Her eldest daughter Kate was commissioned to do most of the weeding in the garden. Her second son Harry fenced in the backyard so his mother could plant potatoes. Catharine’s son-in-law Clinton Atwood, now married to Annie Traill, found his sturdy horse and carriage commandeered if Catharine needed a ride to visit Frances Stewart in Peterborough or Annie at the Atwoods’ farmhouse near Gore’s Landing. An echo of Agnes’s imperiousness crept into Catharine’s manner.
Hither and thither Catharine swept between friends and relatives in Belleville, Brockville and the Peterborough region, dispensing family news, medical advice and geranium clippings to an ever-widening circle of acquaintances and relatives. She acted as a sort of human information exchange, connecting the rapidly reproducing ranks of Stricklands, Traills and Moodies. Among them, the three Strickland siblings who had left Suffolk for Canada in the early years of the century would eventually have 111 grandchildren who survived childhood. “The family being so scattered calls for longer letters,” was Catharine’s happy complaint, as she wrote to her two youngest sons, William and Walter, who were both working west of the Red River with the Hudson’s Bay Company. She was always at hand when a new addition was expected to the families of her children, nieces, nephews or friends. “Percy [Strickland’s] wife … was confined on the 12th of this month with a fine little girl,” she wrote her friend Frances Stewart in 1862. “Of course dear old Percy looked much to me to see that matters went on rightly.” working west of the Red River with the Hudson’s Bay Company. She was always at hand when a new addition was expected to the families of her children, nieces, nephews or friends. “Percy [Strickland’s] wife … was confined on the 12th of this month with a fine little girl,” she wrote her friend Frances Stewart in 1862. “Of course dear old Percy looked much to me to see that matters went on rightly.”
Catharine’s beloved Westove, at Lakefield: any Strickland relative was warmly welcomed.
Now in her sixties, Catharine beamed at the younger generation even as she cast a disapproving eye at their values. When she stayed with Agnes Fitzgibbon in Toronto in 1863, she clucked at the way that young women in the city behaved, declaring herself “rather disgusted with the way in which they dress for effect in public.” While Agnes and her Toronto friends revelled in the arrival of music halls, London fashions and racy novels, Catharine shared her disapproval with Frances Stewart: “The luxurious style of dress, amusements and idleness of the young men and women of the last few years have encouraged a greater laxity in their manners and ideas. You and I perfectly agree in our opinion, respecting the want of delicacy in the fast dances, besides the effect on the moral character.” Yet for all her busybody gregariousness and talk of the “good old days” (tales of which must have horrified her nieces and nephews), Catharine had a kind heart and was a welcome guest in many households. Her white hair neatly tucked under a starched cap, her black gown (a castoff from Agnes) frayed at the cuffs and her bright blue eyes sparkling with life, she quickly determined what needed to be done. She would sit up all night with a feverish child, teach a musical grandchild to pick out a melody on the piano, talk about old times with the dying, or help lay out a corpse. Small wonder that her shy, stay-at-home daughter Kate regularly received notes that Catharine’s return from some sociable little trip would be delayed because her hosts “all want to keep me longer with them.”
Kate Traill, Catharine’s eldest daughter, who devoted her life to her mother’s welfare.
However, Catharine was far from a merry widow—she still needed to earn money. The first entry in her journal for 1863 begins: “On examining the state of my purse I find just $4.30. This is all the funds I have to begin the year with. It is true that I have half a barrel of flour, and some meat and I have often been without meat and money. God will provide as heretofore.”
Catharine had known from childhood that God only helps those who help themselves; and for her that meant writing. Over the past thirty-five years she had worked in a variety of genres—children’s stories, romances, sketches of nature and autobiographical narratives. Although none of her books had made her a fortune, they sold well and had established her reputation in both Britain and Canada. She continued to churn out stories for educational and children’s magazines, and she knew which subjects were the perennial favourites of European readers, then and now —“Snow, ice storms, forest scenery … a flight of snowbirds would make a pretty little poem.” But her submissions were returned with demoralizing frequency, and with advancing age, she had less tolerance for hustling unsympathetic publishers or pleasing periodical editors. Like Susanna, she felt out of touch with the tastes of the main audience for her publications: the British. Her attention was increasingly focussed on the world at her own doorstep, within British North America—in particular, the natural world.
Ever since she had crossed the Atlantic, Catharine had collected and studied flowers, grasses, mosses, lichens and ferns. Nature study was a relief “from the home-longings that always arise in the heart of the exile, especially when the sweet opening days of Spring recall to the memory of the immigrant Canadian settler old familiar scenes …when all the gay embroidery of English meads and hedgerows put on their bright array.” Nature, for Catharine, was pervaded with divine purpose—its beauty and harmony illustrated God’s power and goodness. She never found a plant that she couldn’t love both for its looks and as an example of God’s creation. The bud of the water-lily, lying just below the surface, “is ready to emerge from its watery prison and in all its virgin beauty expand its snowy bosom to the sun and genial air,” she observed in a letter home in her first months in Upper Canada. Every year, she watched the changing seasons with a delight that always crept into whatever book she was writing at the time. “The pines were now putting on their rich, mossy, green spring dresses,” reads a passage in her Canadian Crusoes. “The skies were deep blue; nature, weary of her long state of inaction, seemed waking into life and light.” In The Female Emigrant’s Guide, she provided a month-by-month description of natural events, which covers everything from croaking frogs to wildflowers. In August, “the squirrels are busy from morning till night, gleaning the ripe grain … they seem to me the happiest of all God’s creatures, and the prettiest.”
But Catharine’s nature study wasn’t all Wordsworthian reverie and nostalgia for Suffolk’s daisies, bluebells and buttercups. She took a serious interest in every aspect of a plant: its appearance, its life cycle, its medicinal and food value, its relation to other plants. During her first decade in the silent and unexplored backwoods, she searched for the name of any unfamiliar species in the only botanical text she could lay her hands on: Frederick Pursh’s Flora Americae septentrionalis (North American Flora), published in 1814, which Frances Stewart had lent her. Since Catharine had never studied Latin, she stumbled through Pursh’s descriptions, “and when I came to a standstill I had recourse to my husband.” She copied Pursh’s use of the Linnean classification system of plant species, largely based on the number of stamens and pistils in the flower. Her husband’s books were lumpy with all t
he pressed specimens she had inserted between their pages. Her journal was full of careful notes.
Had Catharine been born a hundred years later, she would have become a serious scientist. But stuck in remote Douro Township, or on the Rice Lake Plains, Catharine had as much hope of mingling with professors of botany, who could tell her exactly how to mount and label her specimens, as she had of mingling with important authors in the London publishing business. She was so poor that she was never able to afford to visit the greatest natural wonder of her adopted land, Niagara Falls. She couldn’t even do accurate plant drawings; unlike Susanna, she had never mastered the art of flower-painting. She was an avid collector, and her “herbarium,” or collection of dried specimens, was one of her greatest sources of pleasure. Album after album was filled with elaborate arrangements of dried material.
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