Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [104]
Susanna wrote of herself as a wife and mother: there was always a baby in her arms or a child by her side as she faced the challenges of bush life. In a chapter set in the bitterly cold winter of 1837 (“During the month of February, the thermometer often ranged from eighteen to twenty-seven degrees below zero”), she recorded how she coped alone when the roof of her log cabin caught fire. “Large pieces of burning pine began to fall through the boarded ceiling….The children I had kept under a large dresser in the kitchen, but it now appeared absolutely necessary to remove them to a place of safety. To expose the young, tender things to the direful cold was almost as bad as leaving them to the mercy of the fire. At last I hit upon a plan to keep them from freezing. I emptied all the clothes out of a large, deep chest of drawers, and dragged the empty drawers up the hill; these I lined with blankets, and placed a child in each drawer, covering it well over with the bedding, giving to little Agnes the charge of the baby to hold between her knees, and keep well-covered until help should arrive. Ah, how long it seemed coming!”
Roughing It in the Bush was more than a collection of “events as may serve to illustrate a life in the woods,” as Susanna modestly claimed. It was the dramatic story of her own journey of self-discovery, as she faced the rigours and disorientation of pioneer life. She presented herself as the delicate young lady that she had been when she arrived in Canada, and with whom English readers would identify, rather than the toughened, middle-aged woman who had survived the loss of two children and now lived in a prosperous town. When the hopelessly naive Moodies arrive in the New World, “All was new, strange and distasteful to us; we shrank from the rude, coarse familiarity of the uneducated people among whom we were thrown; and they in return viewed us as innovators, who wished to curtail their independence by expecting from them the kindly civilities and gentle courtesies of a more refined community.” Susanna dwelt on her incompetence as a farmer’s wife, her inability to bake bread or organize a bee. She didn’t brag about the fact that, before they all left the woods, Catharine acknowledged her as the best baker of breads and pies in the district.
Susanna carefully reworked the sketches to appeal to English sensitivities, and she gentrified her language: “face” became “countenance,” “bite” became “masticate.” In an 1847 issue of the Literary Garland, she had revelled in the gory details of a man who had tried to cut his own throat in a botched suicide attempt, and quoted the words of Ned Layton, the rescuer, directly: “I then saw that it was a piece of the flesh of his throat that had been carried into his windpipe. So, what do I do, but puts in my finger and thumb, and pulls it out, and bound up his throat with my handkerchief … ” But Susanna decided that a British reader wouldn’t have the stomach for such a vivid description. In the account of the same incident in Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna prudishly remarked: “Layton then detailed some particulars of his surgical practice which it is not necessary to repeat.”
A decade after she had lived through these experiences, Susanna was able to put some distance between herself and her life. She was candid about the hardships of the immigrant life. She explained that Canada was the country for the “industrious working man” who