And then so many of them die on the way over and so many more of them are held up in Quebec. By the time they get through all that and get aboard a boat that will bring them down this way, it’s a wonder they know who they are themselves. I expect it would be easy enough to lose track of a man, if someone was disinclined to be careful in the first place, and by all accounts there’s little care taken about anything in this whole sorry business.”
Canada had been warned to expect a heavy influx of emigrants this year. The potato crop in Europe had failed again after several seasons of failures. According to the newspapers, most of the population of the green country of Ireland lived on nothing but potatoes at the best of times, and this latest disaster had put them into a crisis. The ports were full, they said, with anyone who could scrape together the passage money, all frantic to get aboard a ship.
Canadian authorities, mindful of the epidemics of cholera that had arrived in previous years, had directed port city officials to inspect each emigrant to determine which of these unfortunate travellers should be quarantined and which was healthy enough to continue the journey up the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario and beyond. Those fortunate enough to pass this examination were piled aboard lake steamers and shunted along to the next port, where again they were sorted. If someone was determined to conceal his identity, there was plenty of opportunity for paperwork to go missing in all this chaos, and Thaddeus could think of no other reason why the drowned man would have assumed his disguise.
“I expect it’ll be up to us to bury this poor fellow,” the doctor said. “I’ll gladly donate the canvas we used to move him, and I suppose a couple of the local fellows might dig the grave, if asked.”
Thaddeus nodded. It was an indication of his advancing years, he supposed, that the doctor had not asked him to perform such heavy labour, and certainly he was grateful on behalf of his aching knee, but at the same time he was a little annoyed that his infirmities had become so evident to others. Never mind, let the younger men dig. He would stand by the graveside and say the words if no other minister could be prevailed upon to officiate. But they should do it soon, before the smell from the putrefying corpse got any worse.
Chapter 2
Luke Lewis’s backside had had more than enough of bouncing around on the seat of the mail wagon. He had been grateful when Benjamin Rumball offered him a ride down the long miles of the Huron Road to Galt. Otherwise Luke would had been faced with one of two equally daunting prospects — he could have walked the entire distance, or he could have asked his brother Moses for the use of the sway-back horse that was too old for plowing anymore. It would have been a plodding ride with the horse, who moved only a little faster than a walking pace and would need to be fed and watered, not to mention rested at frequent intervals. If he had walked, he would no doubt have been offered rides by farmers travelling the road, but none of them travelled far. Their assistance would have been sporadic and temporary and for long stretches of the way non-existent.
However, news of Luke Lewis’s departure had spread surprisingly rapidly through the far-flung and sparsely populated settlement. He had pretty well resigned himself to shank’s mare by the time word had gotten around that he intended to go all the way south to Toronto, where he would board a passenger steamer and be carried along the shore of Lake Ontario and beyond. And it hadn’t been long before a solution had presented itself, or rather himself.
Luke had bumped into Benjamin Rumball at the general store in Clinton. “I hear you’re headed south,” Rumball said. “If you’ve no other way down the road, you can come with me. After all, I’m going anyways, and I’d be glad of some company along the way.”
Once a week, Rumball drove the Huron Road all the way from Goderich to Galt, collecting parcels and letters along the way. At Galt, he picked up whatever post was waiting and then he headed north again.
“I go all the time,” Rumball said, “so I don’t care which particular time you pick. Just meet me here in Clinton.”
Luke had immediately accepted the offer. It was far better than walking, certainly, and much better than riding the old horse, but Rumball’s wagon was singularly ill-sprung and Luke’s backside insufficiently padded to absorb the constant bouncing up and down on the rough wooden seat. Rumball, on the other hand, was shaped very like his name sounded, round and upholstered, and he seemed oblivious to the discomfort.
The road had not improved in the five years since Luke had travelled the opposite way in a wagon. He had been riding with his brother Moses then, and although he’d started the journey in a state of high excitement, he’d soon had the enthusiasm shaken out of him. By the time they had reached their destination — a tract of unsettled land that looked very much like all the other tracts of unsettled land they had just passed through — he had begun to realize the enormity of the adventure, and just how much work it was going to take before Moses’s choice of farmstead would begin to resemble anything like a farm.
They had thrown up a shanty as fast as they could, neither of them keen on staying any longer than was absolutely necessary with their older brother, Will, who was homesteading on the next lot. Will had a two-year head start, but with two of them to do the heavy work, they had soon caught up.
The heavily forested land had provided more opportunity than just farming for the Lewis boys. Soon after they settled on their lot, the Canada Company’s lands began to attract more settlers — just a trickle of them — from England and Scotland and Ireland, places where the trees had long since been chopped down and the lands turned into fields. These novice settlers had little idea how to proceed with a farm that was still wilderness. Luke found that he could make good coin as a chopper, and even Moses and Will abandoned their own work at times to help in the back-breaking work of cutting out small trees and brush and piling bigger logs into great heaps that could be safely burned. It was this labour that had provided Luke with the wherewithal for his current plans.
As the time approached for his departure, a number of his neighbours had besieged him with requests. It started with Jack Thompson two farms over, who asked if Luke could leave a message with a cousin whose farm was just a few miles down the road. This cousin had borrowed some harness months ago, Jack said, and now Jack needed it back. Luke thought this was a reasonable enough request and agreed that he could deliver the request “since he was going right by.”
Then Mrs. Jack asked him to drop off a parcel of baby clothes to her sister who was farmsteading with her husband farther south along the road. “Just leave them at the inn at Mitchell. She’s expecting her first come September,” she said. “It’s as easy for you to take them as it is for Jack to ride to Clinton and ask the mail.”
It also wouldn’t cost any money to have Luke carry them, he realized, but he didn’t voice this thought. He would have to hide the parcel from Rumball, otherwise the innkeeper might demand postage for it. But the Thompsons were good neighbours, and had done the Lewises many a favour, so Luke felt he should oblige.
Then Ezra Miller asked if Luke could stop by his father’s house in Galt and tell him to send his oldest boy north for the summer. The requests snowballed after that.
Almost everyone in the neighbourhood, it seemed, agreed that Luke was a far better choice of carrier than Benjamin Rumball, who was reliability itself with letters, but was apt to forget any verbal messages he was asked to pass on. Luke was charged with leaving news of engagements, announcements of births and deaths, and reports of the state of this year’s crops.
He had protested that he was merely going home for a visit, and hadn’t time to take care of all these things, but his neighbours, plus their neighbours (and, it seemed, everyone else within twenty miles), had pestered him until, in the end, he agreed that he would do his best to take care of their business along the way.
Luke
