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By Root 1203 0

It in the Bush made the very name of Canada hateful to us all,” she recalled. “We had always striven hard to keep up the respectability of the family in spite of loss of property, and it was very mortifying to have a book like that going the round of some vulgar upstarts….You cannot imagine how vexed and mortified my dear sister Agnes was, and at the time when she was at the very height of her fame to have passages from that book commented upon and ill-natured remarks made by people who were envious of her great fame. This will in a slight degree give you some idea of the state of things, and explain the backwardness of much correspondence.”

Chapter 14

Good Advice

C atharine hated finding herself caught in the middle of the row between two angry, sharp-tongued sisters. By nature a peacemaker, she herself would do anything to avoid confrontation. She felt especially threatened by this particular family rift because she depended so much on both Agnes and Susanna.

John and Susanna Moodie were Catharine’s closest relatives in Canada—her only relatives while her brother Sam was wife-hunting in Suffolk. The two sisters wrote to each other on their birthdays, and they traded children’s clothes, suggestions for herbal cures and items that arrived in the care packages from England. Her link with Susanna was a crucial psychological prop to Catharine. Of course, Catharine had other friends, particularly Frances Stewart and her daughter Ellen Dunlop, in Peterborough. They provided the day-to-day conversational intimacy that a talkative and outgoing woman like Catharine appreciated. They wrote to Catharine frequently, and Frances often sent a few dollars when Catharine was desperate. Mindful of the destruction Susanna’s pen had wrought, Catharine confided to Ellen in a letter her relief that, “I have written nothing which my children need regret to have my name attached to, or the dear friends who have ever taken so kindly an interest in my career read with pain.”

But Susanna was the person that Catharine turned to in a crisis. In 1852, the bailiffs once again knocked at the Traills’ door, looking for payment of outstanding debts. Thomas was by now far too enmeshed in despair to cope, and since he had never talked about business affairs with his wife, Catharine felt equally helpless. She had no idea what the court was allowed to claim. Could the bailiffs seize the flour and pork in her larder? Could they carry off the crops that were still in the ground but had already been sold to the neighbour? Did the Traills have any say in the value of the items that would go into a bankruptcy sale—Thomas’s gold watch, the kitchen stove, the gun that Thomas had carried in ’37, his books? She wrote a frantic letter to her sister describing her predicament. “I have been vainly waiting and hopelessly hoping to go down to Belleville,” she told Susanna. “I have many questions to put to Moodie which would possibly save me some embarrassment and blunders … so very desiring [am] I of being with you even for two days [that] I would let no obstacle stand in the [way] of it as I think it might be of great service to us in many ways beside the great comfort to me of seeing you.”

This particular crisis was averted, but by mid-century, clearly the tables were turned between the two sisters. Twenty years earlier in the colony’s backwoods, Catharine had been the strong, sunny-tempered elder sister who reassured and comforted her sibling. Now it was Susanna, living in a comfortable stone house in a prosperous town, who could offer a hand to her sister trapped (in Susanna’s words) in a “cold comfortless house on the plains.” Catharine’s visits to Susanna were her only respite from worry. Being stuck at Oaklands throughout the long winter eroded her ability to sail through life with hope, resolution and perseverance. “During the cold weather I feel unable to write or stir myself. I appear to stagnate to become wrapped up in self, only thinking of the present ill and how to keep myself warm….My dear husband is sadly depressed again. This is the season