When the couple arrived in “the Land of the Trees,” they found the thirty thickly wooded acres they’d petitioned from the Canadian Land Registry already occupied by a band of roving Mohawk, who’d been displaced from their traditional trapping grounds by a local lumber concern. Despite his compassionate ways, James Craig bought a rifle and raised a local militia to drive the band from his property, a brutal yet necessary act that many of us had once performed ourselves. Some of the Mohawk refused to vacate and grew so uppity there wasn’t much to be done except shoot them as examples and burn their women and children out.
A well-appointed house was constructed in the fire-cleared section. There, James accepted as his clientele the local lumberjacks and axemen who’d also been lured by the Dominion’s great woods, fleeing famine or, for many, their own spotty pasts. Irish, Norwegians, Finns, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Frenchman, and fellow Scots of low birth—they were degenerates all, in Fiona Craig’s vocal estimation, outcasts well beneath her husband and the bucolic life she’d envisioned for herself. Fiona kept to her chambers whenever the men frequented her husband’s office.
The restorative country air did little for James’s health, however, and when his condition turned and the bloody sputum and sweats beset him, he shed half his weight in a fortnight. In just a month he lay dead in their marital bed at the age of thirty. The shock of her husband’s departure left Mrs. Craig unstable. She’d been duped, that was her view—by whom she wouldn’t tell Parson Brennan when she described to him the feeling—by false promises of prosperity and a new life. Many said she resented this forested continent itself for the trickery. In the end, Fiona Craig was left shrill and embittered with the Devil’s rage.
James had provided a good-sized nest egg, it was rumoured, allowing her to maintain the ways of a woman of means. She kept the house to herself and surprisingly took no boarders. She had the house painted a blinding white, the kind of white that tarnishes after just a year. With her nearest neighbour four miles distant, she rarely attended church and was seldom seen in town, though whenever she was, she’d always be well turned out: corsets, bustles, and frilly dresses she must’ve sewn herself or mail-ordered. She’d purchase odd items at the general store, like needles and thread, noxious chemicals, and bolts of French lace. All requested with a belittling shriek that some of the less generous among us compared to that of a diseased eagle. Our children feared her as a witch, and told stories of the dead doctor’s ghost and the cursed fortune that Fiona kept buried somewhere on her woodlot.
While none of us figured her a kind woman, when she agreed to harbour those two orphans our opinion of her improved, if only slightly. Many of us were convinced that she’d soften on those poor wretches over time, that they’d be a remedy for her loneliness and strange ways. And after they’d suffered a few miserable weeks out in that dreary hut, she’d take them into one of the many bedrooms of her big white house, and given the chance, perhaps would even come to love them as her own.
But on the day we brought them to her porch, she slapped Everett, the cheerful, dark-haired one, for slouching, then did the same to Harris, the skeptical, blonde one, for posing too many questions. Then she made them both swear against ever entering her house for as long as they lived, even if she invited them inside herself. In retrospect, it’s clear to us now that we overestimated the pliability of Mrs. Craig’s heart.
THOSE BOYS
AFTER THEY TOOK up residence on the Craig woodlot, mere days passed before the plunder of our vegetable plots began in earnest. Turnips, peas, carrots, and lettuces vanished as soon as they ripened. We’d leave our shotguns racked and wait up late to hurl handfuls of stones at the two shadowy figures fleeing into the woods. Small stones, mind you. This was charity then: small stones. It’s a notion that’s not understood anymore, charity. If we’d fed those boys outright, they’d conclude that the world owed them something, which, as we all know, it doesn’t. So we made inquiries with Mrs. Craig to ensure she was providing for them as she was required, and she insisted she was, though we had no means of verifying it. Despite her assurances, and our stones, those boys continued to raid our gardens and trespass on our land with impunity. They stole apples and chickens and eggs and women’s undergarments from our laundry lines. They even kidnapped one of old Gord Campbell’s prized lambs, dragging it bleating back to their hut, and were fixing to roast it when we had some of our older boys lead an expedition to rescue the creature and put a modest licking on the pair.
Many blamed Mrs. Craig, contending that the only mind she ever paid those boys was to rouse them at dawn by kicking their shack’s flimsy walls before leaving outside their door a bucket of the daily provisions that our contract required her to furnish. It was widely held that Mrs. Craig could scarcely stand the sight of them, and only took them in to sock money away for more finery, or her own private castle in Scotland.
Still, no one had the fortitude to discipline the boys as they ought to have been. Instead, when we heard that their hut was leaking and their clothes were rain-rotten, we left a roll of good tarpaper by their door. Then it was a bushel of apples when they looked scurvy. When we heard coughing from the direction of the woods, we’d leave jars of fish oil and some old blankets, and some fresh cream cooling in the shafts of our wells for them to find and pilfer.
Throughout that first year, the boys would often come knocking on our doors so that Harris, who’d by then assumed the role of spokesman for the pair, could ask odd questions, such as “What time is it?” or “How high are the clouds?” And while some of us suspected the true purpose of this was to assess our houses as potential targets for robbery, the more sympathetic among us figured it was so they could sample the smell of a legitimate home—of baking things and detergents, fruit and coffee—if only fleetingly.
Whenever the boys came into town, it was always an event. In light of the frequency with which things fell into Everett’s pockets, shopkeepers either followed them around or shooed them off. Harris would always stride a few steps in front of his brother upon the plank sidewalk, Everett merrily trailing just behind with his bemused smile and easy gait. In their Sunday best our children would follow the two primitives just to watch them scale the tall elms that our township’s founders had planted in the square, jumping branch to branch like a couple of howler monkeys, rising so high the limbs could scarcely support them. Some Sundays all you’d see of those two boys were the soles of their boots, and it was up there that they often practised their swearing.
“Peckerwood!” Harris would yell at the top of his lungs.
“Pisswidget!” Everett would yell in reply. And this scatological one-upmanship would play out for nearly half an hour, the two almost tumbling to the ground from the riot of their laughter that shook the elm’s uppermost leaves.
Bedding our own youngsters down in the evening, we’d remind them: “At least you aren’t out there on that dark woodlot by yourselves with the bears and the wolves to sing you to sleep,” and they’d hold us tighter and sit up straighter at the table the next day and take to their chores with greater zeal.
Over the boys’ second summer on the woodlot, Everett managed to construct a pair of four-foot bows from windfall alder, along with arrows he fashioned from dogwood shoots and fletched with jay feathers. The boys soon became proficient at shooting hares, which kept running in the dirt even after they were skewered through the ribs. They learned to scrape and tan the hides, and, it was rumoured by our children, slept in each other’s arms beneath a heap of rabbit pelts.