• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1128 0

of the past seven years and the arrival of four children. John was still, as Susanna wrote years later in Roughing It in the Bush, “my light of life.” Their letters pulsate with buoyancy and desire, but unslaked libido is only half the story. John and Susanna were more than man and wife. They were united in a friendship that was unusual by nineteenth-century standards, and is refreshing to a twentieth-century reader. They took each other seriously as writers: whenever possible, Susanna showed John her work before she sent it to the publishers. John was terribly proud of his clever wife and always encouraged her literary ambitions. While he was in Toronto, he managed to sell several of Susanna’s patriotic ballads, as well as some of his own poems, to The Palladium, a Toronto newspaper published by a Rice Lake acquaintance of the Moodies, Charles Fothergill.

Soon after John disappeared to Toronto, Susanna realized she was expecting a fifth child. A woman of Susanna’s age and class in England during this period would have been treated as an invalid; her “delicate state” would have required her to avoid exercise or excitement. But by 1838, Susanna had left such feeble behaviour far behind. She and her youngsters were alone in the bush with only Jenny, an illiterate Irish servant, to help her. This pregnancy appears to have given her a rush of energy. As soon as the sap started flowing, she organized Jenny to make maple sugar. Once the snow had melted, Susanna sowed the spring crops and planted her garden with a wide assortment of vegetables, including melon and cucumber. Thomas Traill could only envy his neighbour’s achievements. “She is farther advanced than her brother or me, or indeed any of the neighbours,” he wrote to John Moodie. “I am happy to say that all your children look fat, fair and flourishing as do mine, and you will find on your return which I hope will be soon that everything has been managed admirably in your absence and every difficulty met with energy, constancy and courage. I am proud to do justice to the worth and value of your most excellent wife. She is indeed a treasure of which you may be proud.” Thomas found himself asking if he could borrow Jenny to help him plant potatoes.

Thanks to John’s military pay, the Moodies were nibbling away at their debts to Peterborough merchants and to various labourers. But Susanna worried constantly about the hundreds of dollars they still owed. Even after a hard day of field work, she busied herself at night with anything that might bring in some cash. She painted birds and butterflies onto the hard bracket fungus fans that grew on trees, then gave the finished works to her brother Sam to sell to his Peterborough cronies. Invited to contribute to a new Montreal publication, the Literary Garland, she wrote late into the night, by the uncertain light of old rags dipped in pork lard and stuffed into the mouth of a bottle. The Literary Garland, published by John Lovell, was the first successful literary magazine in British North America, and it was also the first to pay its contributors. Susanna shed tears of pride and relief when her first payment arrived, in the form of a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. And she took her courage in her hands and composed a letter to the new Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, Sir George Arthur, in which she described her family’s circumstances and requested that John should be allowed to continue in the regiment, “which, by enabling him to pay our debts, would rescue us from our present misery.”

In August, John Moodie’s regiment was disbanded and John returned from the front. Soon after the Moodies’ joyful reunion, a third son, John Strickland, was born safely. Susanna’s hard work resulted in the most abundant crops the Moodies had ever reaped. “The harvest was the happiest we ever spent in the bush. We had enough of the common necessaries of life,” Susanna noted. In the evenings, she and John resumed their old habit of taking gentle sails across the lake. But John was now out of a job, and the dark cloud of debt hovered over the family.