Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [52]
It affords me much pleasure,
To hear how your treasure,
Increases in land and in money.
And I give you great joy
On your hopes of a boy
To feed on your butter and honey.
And in the meanwhile,
Baby Aggie’s sweet smile,
And Katie’s gay prattle must be
A fund of sweet mirth
As you sit by your hearth,
With Susie at breakfast or tea.
John’s hopes for a boy were answered: in August 1834, John Alexander Dunbar (always known as Dunbar) was born.
Both Susanna and Catharine had come to childbearing relatively late, but now they too were caught up in the exhausting cycle of frequent pregnancies and births. Susanna would have seven babies within eleven years, her first when she was twenty-nine and her last when she was forty. Most of her pregnancies were difficult and her labours were long; she often thought she was going to die. Catharine spaced out her nine pregnancies a little more: she was thirty-one when James was born and forty-six when the last of her children arrived, in 1848. No letters survive describing the backwoods births, when doctors were always miles away and women had to rely on friends like Frances Stewart (and later Catharine herself) to be midwives. Neither woman would have written such letters: in the nineteenth century, the messy business of childbirth was never mentioned in polite society or literature. In Britain during this period, an allusion to a woman being “with child” or “lying in” was considered the height of indelicacy. (During the early 1830s came the first whimsical mentions of babies being found under gooseberry bushes.) The modern imagination recoils from the idea of giving birth in a log house, with the wind howling outside, flickering candles providing the only light and raw whisky the sole source of pain relief. The bush abounded with stories of women who died either during childbirth, or because puerperal fever set in afterwards, or because the strain of too many pregnancies caused heart disease.
Motherhood came as naturally to Catharine as breathing. It was the most meaningful activity in her life. She was always prepared to give more love than she took, and she saw no conflict between her family and her impulse to write. Since her first child didn’t arrive until after she had reached Peterborough, and while she was staying with friends, she had been able to enjoy her first few weeks with him. She always hugged and kissed all her babies and treated her offspring as children long after they had grown up. Thomas was a distant parent, but Catharine made up for him. She taught her toddlers little prayers, and she read to them as they got older. She made her daughters rag dolls out of scraps of fabric. She led her brood on long, exciting walks through the forest, showing them where the deer gathered at the water’s edge and how to collect frog spawn. Soon the window sills and shelves were as loaded with treasures as the window ledge of Catharine’s Reydon Hall bedroom had been. The Traill children responded to their mother with deep affection, mixed (as they got older) with exasperation provoked by her suffocating love. The Traill cabin exuded warmth, with its constant smell of baking, its patchwork quilts (Catharine was an expert quilter, who loved quilting bees) and a fire that blazed brightly in its hearth. Catharine’s homemaking gifts even succeeded in cheering up Thomas, for whom life in the backwoods was proving a ghastly disappointment.
The dynamics in the Moodie cabin, a mile down the lakeshore, were quite different. John was an indulgent, loving father who could always be persuaded to play a tune on his flute or get down on hands and knees and pretend to be a bear. But Susanna was never entirely at ease as a mother. Tense and emotionally needy, she could never embrace her maternal role whole-heartedly. The writing impulse gnawed at her; she did not put her children’s needs first in the same unthinking way that Catharine did. She was not a natural hugger like Catharine, and although she loved her babies, she resented their demands. It