City Wolves Read online

  “I’m going to marry Emma,” he said in a meeting with his parents, “She has given her consent. A small ceremony in the chapel. No expense. But I could do with a little help in the cost of getting across the ocean and acquiring some land in the Canadas.”

  “Are you serious, lad?”

  “I am, sir.”

  The yule log in the large fireplace crackled and spat in the silence. The squire stood up and held out his hand to Herbert. “I congratulate you, my son. It sounds like a practical venture.”

  “Thank you, sir. And mother?”

  “So far away, in such a dangerous land …” she protested but then stepped forward to embrace him.

  “Thank you, mother.” He patted her back then drew away. “I would like to present my betrothed.” Herbert went to the doorway and brought Emma in, holding her hand firmly.

  She curtsied slightly then said, “I will look after him, to the best of my ability, ma’am. And sir.”

  Emma revelled, to this day, in the look of surprise on the face of her in-laws, that she should so speak up and in such a good accent.

  Herbert had done well in the new country. He bought a hundred acres of land just a half day’s journey outside the city of Halifax. A barn and a log cabin were already built near the creek that ran through it, though only half the land was cleared of woods. Over the years, Herbert established an apple orchard and put his six sons to work looking after the cows and pigs, the horses and plowing, the planting and reaping. He even managed to clear another ten acres, using some of the trees to add onto the log house a bedroom, bigger kitchen, and enlarged sleeping loft.

  He called the farm Wolf Woods because he was fascinated by the sound of wolves howling at night in his woods. At first he worried that they might come close and do harm to his livestock, Emma’s chickens, or even his children. He kept a gun over the doorway. But he never saw the wolves or their tracks outside of the woods. He liked to write home about the wolves in his woods, knowing what good table conversation it would provide for his parents and their friends.

  Unlike his father, he had no desire or time to become squire of the hunt. He became interested in the politics of his new country, spent more and more time in Halifax, and got himself elected to the provincial legislature of Nova Scotia in 1876.

  “This is the great epoch of my life,” he said to Emma, his thumbs in his waistcoat. “Next to marrying you, of course. A man’s life can become of real importance in a young country like this, helping with its development. We can change the course of history!”

  Herbert was becoming quite an orator. He liked to practise in his own household with wife and eight children gathered round the long table.

  “It’s a pity your parents didn’t live to see this,” said Emma, seated at the other end of the table spoon-feeding baby Alice. “They would be proud of you.”

  “And of you, my dear wife.”

  I doubt it, thought Emma. I’ve grown from a mouse into a tired old workhorse. Worn out with childbearing and doing all the jobs of a full staff at Squirrel Hall. Washing, ironing, sewing, mending, gardening, preserving, cleaning, endless cooking and baking. Endless! Followed by endless washing up. I’m too tired to read a book, even if I had the time. And you have no idea how much I hate the very walls of this house. Made of undisguised tree trunks! It couldn’t be more primitive. And never a friend to talk to within. Hedgeless fields without. Wild wolves howling in the night. How I miss the red brick houses, row upon row, in my Yorkshire village. Cobbled streets with people I know, coming and going. The smell of a coal fire. My poor old parents and my sisters. I’ll never see them again. Nor the grandeur of Squirrel Hall. Oh dear. Oh dear.

  “Momma’s weeping!” Meg got off her place at the end of the bench and tugged at her mother’s sleeve.

  “Finish your meal,” said Emma sternly, pushing Meg away. “You are talking nonsense. Keep your place at the table, or you shall have none.” Emma stood up, carrying Alice. “I must see to the apple crumble.”

  Alice began to cry.

  “My poor little one. My poor little one.” Emma nuzzled her cheek into Alice’s, transferring her tears and her self pity.

  2

  TOMORROW’S LESSON

  MEG FOUND MORE INTEREST in playing with small animals on the farm than in trying to play with baby Alice, who seemed always to be crying in one kind of frustration or another. Chickens and geese scattered as Meg toddled after them but soon ones more curious or brave would stand and observe her. Some eventually let her touch their head. Some followed her at a distance. Piglets offered her their snouts. Meg played outside with the cats and kittens since Emma had declared the house off limits to animals and no dogs were allowed on the farm after the collie got rabies and had to be shot.

  Emma herself feared the outdoors, did not go beyond necessary trips to the outhouse, and refused to tend the garden because she hated snakes and feared coming upon them. They weren’t poisonous or large, but it was enough that they slithered across one’s path, hid in the wood pile, or curled up under her tomato plants. She had never seen a snake in England but she knew all about them from the Bible and other stories that depicted them as evil, slimy, aggressive, and generally poisonous. Early on, Emma gave up chasing outdoors after little Meg and told her older brothers to keep her out of danger in the barnyard. As Meg grew bigger, calves and colts became her companions.

  “Peeeuuuw!” said Alice when Meg came indoors. “You stink like our brudders.”

  “Brothers.” Meg wrinkled her nose back at Alice.

  “She speaks well for her age,” said Emma. “Stop picking on her.”

  Meg’s main job when she was eight years old was to look after the chickens. Each evening she made sure they were all safely in an enclosed section of the barn. Each morning she let them out and fed them, pouring a pail of grain into one trough, water into the other. She gathered the eggs, cleaned them with vinegar, and sorted them into baskets of small and large, for home use and for sale. Weekly, she pitched out soiled straw onto the manure pile and put fresh straw in the nests and on the floor. She liked the work and particularly the payoff, going with her brother in the wagon into Halifax to sell the eggs.

  She loved the laying hens with their quirky gait and glances, their discernibly different characters, and their busy, productive lifestyle. But she had to steel herself to the short lives of the meat chickens, all the fuzzy little chicks that grew into plump chickens who would be scooped up, strung up on a hook, and then have their necks wrung and their bodies plucked of all feathers. There was a toughness, an emotional distance to be maintained with those you raised to kill and eat. Meg was relieved, glad that in her mother’s rigid list of girls’ work versus boys’ work, it fell to her brothers to kill the chickens. But it outraged her that the boys were given almost all the outdoor jobs while she had to stay inside doing housework.

  “It’s not fair,” Meg said to her mother one evening as she finished drying the dishes, while outside, her brothers made a game of pitching hay. And inside, five-year-old Alice was allowed to play with the mixing bowls. “When I was Alice’s age, I had to help with the dishes, not just play with them.”

  Emma said nothing. She had just sat down to knit after washing the dishes. She was too weary to respond to Meg’s questioning.

  “I want the wooden spoon,” said Alice, reaching to take it from Meg’s hand as she dried it. “I’m making a pretend cake.”

  “You can’t have it,” said Meg. “I’ve just cleaned and dried it.” She raised it above Alice’s reach.

  “Mommy! Meg is teasing me again!”

  “Give Alice the spoon,” said Herbert from his desk in the corner.

  Meg made a face at Alice but handed the spoon out to her, holding it over the bowls Alice had arranged on the floor. Alice reached for it, tripping over the bowls, fell and scraped her knee. Meg helped Alice, screaming, to stand up then quickly gathered up the bowls, and shouted “Nothing broken!”

  “No thanks to yo
u, is it!” Emma stood up, losing her temper, railing at Meg, “Now look what you’ve done! Your little sister’s knee bleeding. You could have broken her bones, along with all the crockery. There’s nary a moment’s peace around here, is there! Can you not just get on with the job and stop questioning your place and everything you’re told to do? You’ll never get on in life with such cheeki-ness.”

  “Emma, my dear …” Herbert stood by her but couldn’t decide what to say.

  “It’s time for the hairbrush, Herbert. She has to learn her place and to obey. You told her to give Alice the spoon and she held it out of reach of the poor little thing.”

  “Prepare yourself, Meggie,” said Herbert, looking pained.

  Punishment for the young girls was the hairbrush administered to the bared bottom laid over the knee of the parent. Punishment for the boys was a strapping over the bared bottom in the privacy of a barn stable. Herbert did not enjoy administering the punishments but it was his place as a man and he agreed with his wife that children should be punished for wrongdoing. He had been strapped by his father. The hairbrush for little girls was Emma’s insistence.

  The problem in spanking Meg with the hairbrush was that it caused her to pee onto the lap of the spanker. Repeated experience of this taught the parents to take the child out to the outhouse before she was spanked. At eight years old, Meg was expected to go to the outhouse on her own. She met her brothers coming in for the night.

  “Why such a long face, Meg?” asked Stewart.

  “You’re not getting the hairbrush again, are you?” said Dave.

  Meg burst into tears as she ran to the outhouse. She heard her brothers go into the log house as she opened the door of the outhouse. She shuddered in the cold night air of early May as darkness was gathering. She lifted the wooden lid over the round hole and set it down. The fumes from the pit of human excrement far below ascended. Meg covered only half the hole with her small bare bottom and hung onto the edge of the board box, lest she fall in. She heard the sound of her urine landing far below.

  Then, with the lid back in place and her hand on the outhouse door latch, Meg made a sudden decision. She would not go back into the house for her spanking. She would bolt.

  She ran behind the lilac bushes and crouched at their edge out of sight from the house. Too cold in her blouse and pinafore, she decided to make for the barn. She would spend the night with her chickens. But as she reached the big pile of straw in the barn yard, she heard her father calling from the house, “Meg! Meggie, come inside now. You must.”

  Hiding behind the straw, Meg saw her father open the door of the outhouse then hurry back to the house. “Lads!” he shouted. “Get out here. We have to find your sister. Quick! Bring lanterns.”

  Meg dove into the pile of straw. She buried herself deeper and deeper into it, preparing to cover her face as well as her head in straw.

  “She’s probably in the barn,” she heard her father say, “hiding amongst her blessed chickens.”

  As she lay hidden in the straw, she heard them calling for her and shouting at each other as they searched the chicken coop, the stables, the hay loft, the grain bins, even the pig pen.

  “She won’t hide out with pigs, lad!”

  “You’re right, Dad,” Stew shouted back. “She ain’t here. But I wouldn’t put it past her. She thinks every animal’s her pal.”

  “Don’t say ‘ain’t,’ lad. Sounds like you were raised in a barn.”

  “It’s the sorry truth, Dad,” said Dave. “Meg’s not to be found in barn or yard.”

  “Come, then. We must take the news to your mother.”

  Lifting the straw away from her face, Meg saw that they had left the latch loose and the barn door creaked open. Raccoons, foxes, wolves, any creature could get in and kill her chickens. She made a dash for the barn and closed herself inside it. The hens began to cluck, cows to moo, pigs to snort. She went around soothing and hushing them. She climbed into the hayloft and took a perch on a beam where she could see the house through cracks in the barn boards. She saw her father come out with his arm around her mother, holding a lantern in his other hand. Stew, Dave, and Joe spread out in search-party formation. Andy was left inside minding Alice.

  “She’ll be eaten by wolves!” Emma was frantic. “Torn apart. Eaten alive. Meggie! Meggie, come home. Come out from hiding, wherever you are.”

  The boys searched up the lane and along the creek. Her parents searched the orchard.

  “She could be hiding in the trees. You know how she likes to climb them. Oh that girl!” Emma cried as she passed near the barn, “How could she do this to me! When we find her I shall shake the living daylights out of her!’

  “Now, now Emma. Talk like that won’t bring her back.”

  There was silence and then talk too muffled for Meg to hear as her parents circled the barn and then came inside it. Meg sank down in the hay. Emma and Herbert looked in on the chickens.

  “She’s such a good girl, really.” Emma was gently sobbing. “A hard worker, like me. Think of the money she has brought in from these hens. I haven’t time, or patience, to tend them the way she does. I’ve been too hard on her, haven’t I? If I had had more girls and less boys, more to help me out in the house, I wouldn’t have asked so much of her. Wouldn’t have driven her off … into the hands … or jaws, of Lord knows what. I’m better with Alice. Oh Lord, give me another chance with my little Margaret. Named after my own mother she was.”

  “We’ll find her,” said Herbert. “She’ll be in your arms by tomorrow, if not sooner.”

  “Don’t tell me that!” Emma cried. “A little girl can’t last a night in this God-forsaken wilderness. And there is no tomorrow. Ever! We have to find her now! Margaret! Meggie!” she shouted to the rafters. “Come back. You won’t be spanked, if you just come back. Now!”

  Just as Meg was about to emerge, her mother screamed in desperation and fled from the barn to the house, to her bed. I’ll wait until dawn, thought Meg. I’ll go back into her arms, tomorrow.

  She fell asleep for brief periods. She woke with the hay scratching her cheeks and looked out on the night. She saw deer come single file to the creek, moving cautiously, stopping in perfect stillness when they sensed something alarming, then moving on when they saw it was just a fox heading toward the barn. The deer drank and went back to the woods, leaping with a gracefulness that made Meg sigh in awe. Then she clenched her teeth as she watched the fox circle the barn, then creep to the door leading out from the chicken coop. She scrambled down from the hayloft and rushed through the coop to make sure the door was secure. It was. She stroked the heads and backs of her hens, mumbling their names. The rooster crowed. She cautiously opened the door onto the earliest light of dawn. Closing the door behind her, she headed for the house.

  She stopped suddenly when she saw, not far away, three wolves facing down the fox. All four animals turned and stared at Meg. The fox took off. The wolves continued to stare. Grey wolves with white faces and mesmerizing ginger eyes, alert, staring at her.

  “Meg! Lie low,” her father shouted from the house.

  Meg was too frightened to move. Gun shots were fired into the air as the wolves turned and ran, disappearing into the woods. Meg stood watching them.

  Her father swooped her up, embraced her, set her down. She ran to the house where her mother stood in the doorway. “It’s tomorrow, Momma. I’m back.”

  Emma pulled her inside. Slapped her hard on the face, with her forehand and then her backhand. She whacked her behind. “Don’t you ever, ever, run away again.”

  “Emma!” Herbert yelled. “That’s not the way …”

  Meg stood in shock, her face stinging. Alice came running, crying. Emma bent down to embrace Alice. Then she extended her hand out to Meg. “Come, my little Margaret, let us begin afresh.”

  Meg burst into tears as she was pulled into her mother’s arms.

  3

  MEG’S FIRST PATIENTS

  MEG WANTED TO SEE THE WOLVE
S AGAIN. She was sure it was they who kept the foxes at bay and hence her chickens protected. She tried to wake herself before dawn in order to watch out the loft bedroom window for them, but she always slept through until the bright morning light and then there was no sighting of fox or wolf. Watching from the window in darkness after her siblings had gone to sleep was no more productive. Some nights she could hear the howling of wolves but they never came into sight.

  There were different opinions within Meg’s family as to what might have happened, had Herbert not fired into the air when Meg stood eye to eye with the wolves.

  “They would have attacked,” said Emma. “It’s in their nature. That’s why wolves were driven out of England.”

  “You never know,” said Herbert, politically astute.

  “Our Meggie faced them down,” teased Dave. “Didn’t you, Meggie.”

  “I want to see them again,” said Meg. “It’s the only way of knowing, for sure.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!” said Alice.

  “You’d better not!” Emma frowned.

  It was another three years before Meg saw them again. Late afternoon, in the spring, Emma sent Meg fiddlehead hunting with Alice. “Go on. Scat! Get out of my hair.” Emma handed them a pail. “Let me get on with the baking in peace. But don’t be long. You have to peel the potatoes for supper, Meg.”

  “What about Alice?” said Meg. “Doesn’t she have to do anything?”

  “Don’t be lippy,” Emma warned Meg, then added, “Alice will help set the table.”

  As they set off, Emma called from the doorway, “Have Stewart or David accompany you. You are not to go into the woods alone.”

  “Stewart or David,” Meg mimicked. “Joseph and Andrew. Robert and George. No one but our Mom calls them that.”