• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1108 0

’s paddle slowed, and the vessel came to a halt about twenty-five miles from Lakefield, the men in the party retrieved their fishing rods and baited their hooks. The Reverend Mr. Clementi and Percy Strickland were particularly lucky, and soon several plump black bass and salmon trout were gutted and ready to be fried on a portable stove. They made “a capital dinner,” in Susanna’s opinion. Then the party disembarked on the north shore, where there was a natural landing place, called “Julien’s landing” after an old French-Canadian fur trader who had built a shack there. Kate Traill set off to climb a nearby hill, called “the big sugar loaf rock,” while the elderly members of the party sought the shade of the woods. Some aspects of the wilderness had not changed in three decades: the black-flies and mosquitoes were still relentless. Catharine, hot on the trail of a delicate fern that she just knew lingered in these woods, brushed them off with an imperious wave of her hand. But Susanna had never made the best of things, and she was not about to start now. As she angrily tried to swat the insects, she almost stepped on a snake. It was enough to send her marching back on board. Nevertheless, she described the trip to friends as “a grand party.”

After she was widowed, in 1869, Susanna had been slow to take up Catharine’s invitations to stay with her at Westove, in Lakefield. Susanna never displayed either the sense of family or the instinct for survival that Catharine always had. When Catharine was vulnerable, she retreated without hesitation into the comforting Lakefield fold of the Strickland clan. She had done this both in 1832, when the Traills first arrived in Canada, and in 1859, after Thomas Traill’s death. But Susanna floundered after John’s death, just as the Moodies had floundered after their arrival in Upper Canada in 1832. She had no roof to call her own, and she spent the rest of her life ricocheting amongst various friends and relations. The trip to Stony Lake took place at the start of one of her longest sojourns with Catharine at Westove, after Susanna had tried and rejected a variety of other options.

Immediately after John’s death, Susanna had joined her youngest son, Robert, in Seaforth, sixty miles northwest of Toronto. Of Susanna’s five children, only her youngest son had felt the full force of this passionate woman’s love. Robert had been born in the relative comfort of the Belleville years. By the time he was a toddler, Susanna had lost one child in infancy and another child, Johnnie, in a drowning accident. Little Robert was infinitely precious to her—and like his father, he could always raise her spirits. After John’s death, he was the first to insist that Susanna should come and live with him. He had recently been appointed stationmaster at Seaforth, which was on the Grand Trunk Railway branch-line between Goderich and Stratford. His offer to Susanna was more than generous, since it meant that he would have to support, on a very limited salary, not only his delicate wife Nellie and their three small children, but a mother and a mother-in-law who couldn’t stand each other. They were all crammed into a badly built, four-room house, the front door of which opened directly onto the platform. Every time a train thundered by, or drew to a shuddering halt, the house shook. Nellie’s mother, Mrs. Russell, constantly shrieked at the children or slapped them, setting off gales of tears. Susanna spent most of her time in her own bedroom, painting, knitting or writing, and wishing she had somebody to talk to. “Ah my dear sister,” she wrote to Catharine. “My poor, sore heart is so empty….The days seem so long and sad.”

Susanna, alone and lonely.

After a year of the chaos in Robert’s household, Susanna had had enough. Catharine entreated her sister to come and stay with her, but Susanna yearned to return to Belleville and John’s grave. “Whenever, lately, I visited my husband’s grave, it appeared to me such a blessed haven of rest, that I longed with an intense longing to lie down beside him. Poor darling, the harebells