Stones (13 page)
“The men weren’t there tonight.”
“Thank goodness.” I took a sip of my tea. “One time when I was in grade ten our class went to the science fair in the city. We were supposed to meet at the bus after lunch in the cafeteria there. It was a nice day so I went outside to
sit in the sun and watch the city people go by. There was a bench just near the bus.
“I took off my leather jacket — a birthday present — and closed my eyes. When I opened them I was surrounded by about a dozen guys, a gang. They pressed close to me and I stood up, clutching my jacket. They pushed closer, started swearing, throwing insults, and one of them demanded that I give him the jacket.”
“A swarming.”
“Yeah, and I’ll tell you, it was scary. They pressed me so close I could hardly breathe. Those men from my dream, their voices, remind me of that, and it’s worse each time.”
Raphaella shook her head. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
I tried to lighten the mood. “Look at the bright side.”
“Which is?”
“I didn’t give up my jacket.”
I got Raphaella back home by 2
A.M
. I stopped the van about a block from her place, under an ancient willow, and shut off the motor.
“There’s one chance,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. A long shot. Mom knows I was at the library, studying. Sometimes she goes to bed early, nine or so. If she’s asleep, I might be able to get in the back door and up to my room without her noticing. It’s worth a try.”
“Okay. How will I know if you got in all right?”
“If you hear a blast like a nuclear explosion, you’ll know she woke up and nabbed me. If not, I’ll flick my bedroom light on once. It’s the room at the front, second floor.”
I watched her run down the quiet street, up her driveway and around to the back of the house. A few minutes later, the upstairs window lit up for a split second, then went dark again.
I started the van and drove back to the trailer.
T
he first thing we did next day was stop at the African Methodist Church.
“Wait, let me get my notebook,” Raphaella said as we got out of the van.
We approached the monument. It was a dull day, muggy and warm, with an overcast sky. The grass was green and damp, and the heavy odor of lilacs hung in the air.
“Read me the names,” Raphaella said, clicking her pen. “Hurry. I don’t like it here.”
Under the inscription “Names of those who worshipped and are buried here,” I read out, Banks, Barber, all the way down to Washington.
“Interesting,” Raphaella murmured as she jotted the last surname.
“Yup. All Anglo-sounding names except one.”
“Duvalier.”
At the trailer we sat out on the patio, swatting the occasional mosquito. The green woods were inviting — in daylight.
Raphaella flipped through her notebook. “Here we are,” she said. “Some of the names are here. Most of them have ‘unknown’ noted as the place of birth. Three are from Ohio, one from Guinea, and yes! Duvalier — from Haiti.”
“Which explains the French name,” I said. “Most slaves lost their African names and were named after their owners. Haiti had a lot of French landowners.”
Raphaella’s eyebrows arched. “Very impressive,” she commented.
“I ain’t stupid, you know. I’ve been doing a little reading myself. Let’s finish our drinks and get down to the township offices.”
We spent all afternoon at the land office, standing in lines, talking with bureaucrats — they were suspicious of us until we explained we were doing a project for school — paying for photocopies, poring over survey maps. Eventually we found out what we wanted to know.
Shortly after the untouched wilderness between Barrie and Penetanguishene was surveyed, Nevil Maitland, a relative of the governor, occupied his land grant on the fourth concession line, just south of present-day Edgar — although the town wasn’t there yet and the concession line was just that, a line on a map, not a road. Maitland brought his wife, Elizabeth. They had been living in York.
A few years later, thanks to the governor’s interest in helping blacks settle, Jubal and Hannah Duvalier located on the third concession line. Silverwood was on what was once the Duvalier grant. Other blocks of land had been surveyed but not yet claimed. The church was built on land granted by the governor in 1849, which we already knew.
We were also aware, from Raphaella’s research, that by the 1830s, grants were made to indigents, families without money or privilege or military service, and even as these European-born settlers were moving in, the blacks were trickling away.
By 1900, the Maitlands had bought up all the land between the third and fourth concessions for more than a mile south of Edgar — including the Duvalier farm — except for the
little piece where the church stood. Then their luck seems to have taken a turn for the worse. Piece after piece of land was sold off, including the area where Silverwood stood.
“So the woman we saw is probably Hannah Duvalier,” I said as we drove back to Orillia.
“You mean, was.”
“Yeah, although I sort of think of her as still, well, not alive exactly, but —”
“I know what you mean. She’s probably walking from her cabin to Jubal’s grave.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“But there’s something we still don’t know. Why does she walk? Why isn’t she at rest?”
“And another thing,” I said. “Did you notice where Jubal’s grave is? It’s outside the churchyard, on the other side of the fence.”
“Right.”
“Seems strange.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet there’s a story there.”
“Something has always nagged at me. How come there are no headstones? Jubal’s grave doesn’t have one, either.”
“Oh, that’s elementary, Watson. There are old photos in that little book that has the names listed. The old grave markers were made of wood.”
“So they just rotted away over time, like the bodies buried under them.”
“Don’t be ghoulish.”
“You want to know what else I’ve been wondering all day?”
“Shoot.”
“Are the men I hear every night in the bush on that list of names from the monument?”
I dropped Raphaella off downtown near her mother’s store and picked up a medium pizza, double cheese, pepperoni and mushrooms. Dad was in the showroom, talking with a customer who was eyeing a Boston rocker as if she wanted to eat it. I waved to him and got to work.
Clearing a space on my workbench, I put down the pizza, retrieved a pad and pen from the office, and opened Elizabeth Maitland’s diary. Taking care not to drip gobs of pizza sauce onto the valuable object, I turned to the first page and began to read. Before long, the pizza, forgotten, grew cold.
It has long been my purpose to commence a diary, and, having removed to this our new home, I am presented with the perfect opportunity to put into effect this long deferred project
.
I record, then, the year, 1825; the place, the Maitland Farm (if, indeed, this place may, without much exaggeration, be so deemed), in the township of Oro, on concession road number four, which is, at present, merely a track; approximately eighty miles north of York. I am compelled by honesty to describe our surroundings as unsettled wilderness, until recently the abode only of savages
.
Our rough, log home being recently completed five years after Nevil located his land grant, and our outbuildings, of similar construction (and, it must be owned, appearance) also established; our five acres cleared, we are indeed a homestead. It would be the grossest exaggeration to describe the land as pleasing to the eye, littered as it is with the stumps of laboriously cleared trees, among which the crops are sown, so that the fields resemble a devastated landscape rather than the
tidy patchwork of the Old Country; but Nevil has pronounced the soil fertile and the drainage excellent
.
I freely admit, dear Diary, that I was held in the grip of not a little fear at the prospect of leaving York and taking up what can only be described as a rough life in the wilderness between Kempenfeldt and Penetanguishene; but Nevil is set on establishing a dynasty in the new world, and has made it abundantly plain that, short of falling upon a cache of gold, the only course of action is to build a life from the ground up, literally. That we are embarked upon an enterprise which may bear fruit only generations hence is a thought constantly on my mind, but I shall not fail to bring to the task all that is in my power
.
Elizabeth Maitland didn’t say anything in five words if she could use ten, but it was hard to get mad at her. I guess that was the way educated people wrote in those days. Her personality gradually came off the page. She was a brave, hardworking woman who put up with a husband who seemed, at least the way she talked about
him, to be narrow-minded, demanding and, more than anything else, ambitious.
The diary might have been interesting to a history prof, or maybe my dad, but not to me. Forcing myself to concentrate, I began to scan the pages more quickly, on the alert for key words. Many pages had been ruined by water that smeared and blurred the ink. Some had fallen out or been ripped out.
Years passed; it was 1827.
Yesterday morning, as I was working in the kitchen garden, there emerged from the trees on the edge of the west field a figure whose uncommon appearance startled me more than I care to admit, for her structure was tall and straight and her skin coal black. She wore homespun, with a bandana of white on her head and stout, if rather the worse for wear, boots on her bare feet
.
She greeted me politely, her words conveyed with a lilt and flow not at all familiar to my ears, and said that she and her husband Jubal Duvalier had located on the third line to the west of us
.
Her name was Hannah, she said, and
she was looking for work, and, as I had now two babies to care for …
The Maitlands hired Hannah to help in the house one day a week. She was an experienced domestic. She and Jubal had been brought to York by a businessman who had bought them in Haiti years before, moved to the U.S. and ended up in Upper Canada. When their owner died of influenza, they were freed according to his will. Stuck in a foreign country with no money and no means of support, Jubal and Hannah had taken advantage of the land grants open to former slaves and freedmen.
Elizabeth Maitland mentioned Jubal as well as Hannah. Although he was not allowed in the house — Nevil objected “on principle” to having a black man, but not a black woman, under his roof — he sometimes played his harmonica for Elizabeth, who suffered from “the sway of a dark mood” sometimes. I guessed that meant she was depressed.
Another thing Elizabeth hid from Nevil was Hannah’s skill in medicine. She gathered plants and made her own “decoctions” and had more than once helped cure the Maitland children’s illnesses. She also served as a midwife to some
of the black women in the area and, Elizabeth hinted, a few of the whites as well.
I read on. It was 1830.
Poor Hannah, so lost since Jubal passed on, and so heart-broken that the African congregation insisted that he could not be buried in the Methodist cemetery, but only on the edge of the hallowed ground. She blames herself, poor woman, though she would not, at first, say why. It was only after no little coaxing on my part that she admitted to me, as a friend, for such we regarded one another, that Jubal was rejected because Hannah practiced what she obliquely called the “old religion.”
I stood up and stretched the kinks out of my back, and was surprised to find it was almost ten o’clock. I put the diary and my notes in an old leather satchel Dad kept in the office and, balancing the box of cold pizza in one hand, turned out the lights and locked the back door.
As I drove to Silverwood, I went over in my mind what I had learned. Raphaella and I had pegged the mystery — or part of it. But what was the “old religion,” and why was it so bad —
in the eyes of others — that the congregation had rejected Jubal and Hannah?
Elizabeth was quite a character — educated, intelligent, tolerant when many in her area, like her husband, were not. It must have been tough to leave the civilized life at York and set up house in the bush, bring babies into the world, work from dawn till dusk. I wondered what she looked like. What color was her hair? Her eyes? Was she slender, stout, or tall like Hannah?
Like a rock falling on my head, a thought hit me. I had no idea what Elizabeth looked or sounded like. But I knew what Hannah Duvalier looked and sounded like, because I had seen her ghost.
