Читать книгу The Yellow Briar - Patrick Slater - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIt was early in the spring of 1847 that I first got to know that young girl’s family, as I played around the Tavern Tyrone at Toronto. It is a long journey back, indeed, from life’s end to the little boy at the starting of it.
My family were of the poor Irish. A sailing vessel, returning to Quebec for timber, that year called at an Irish port to load its decks, as cheap cargo, with famished and wasted emigrants on their wild flight from the famine and the plague. Woe’s me! Unspeakable were the miseries of that long,tempest-tossed voyage in a filthy, fever-stricken ship. Half its human cargo were buried at sea; and, as the vessel sailed past Father Point, the waters of the St. Lawrence for miles behind were strewn with bedding tossed overboard by sailors making the decks shipshape for port. As a flat scow was being towed slowly up the river near Prescott, my poor father was stricken down. He went under shallow earth quickly, without benefit of clergy. My mother wailed after the manner of Irish women, and counted her silver. It was a handful of coppers she had, with a few sixpenny bits and a shilling. A steamboat brought the widow Slater and her small son to Toronto. How fortunate it was she had only one child.
My mother took lodgings with Mr. Michael O’Hogan in a small frame house that still stands, in tottering decay, on the east side of York Street, a few doors down from Richmond Street. Our living-quarters were upstairs in a small back bedroom, which we shared with a large family. She was only a slip of a girl, she was one of them black Irish. You know what I mean? There was the mop of raven hair, the swarthy skin, and a touch of down on the lip. Beyond the cruel, desolate ocean, there had been a sparkle of fun in her eyes, and the tongue of the laughing little baggage had been always on the wag. But the poor little Irish girl was fair distraught, now, with the outlandish ways of the crazy, new-world town, and sore afraid of its streets infested with Protestants and nigger-folk. She was sick at heart; she was homesick for the earthen floor of a sod cabin, with its friendly smell of burning turf and the sour buttermilk.
My mother got odd scrubbing jobs, day work like; and I ran about the street. A little lad of eight or nine years has some clear-cut impressions printed at that age on the tender, unscarred membranes of the brain; and they remain distinct and vivid to the end of his days. I got odd jobs myself, splitting kindling and doing chores in the morning for Mistress Kitty O’Shea, who lived in a little frame cottage where Shepherds Lane now is. She was a jolly, ruddy-faced little body, with silver always in her pocket; and she had fashionable ladies lodging with her. On fine afternoons, Paddy Casey would come round with his open carriage and spanking pair. Mistress Kitty O’Shea and her stylish guests were driven slowly up and down King Street to see the sights and take the air. Of course, I did not understand the business at the time; but no doubt my friend Kitty wanted other folk to know the sort of house she was running.
In 1847, there was plenty going on in Toronto to fill a young lad’s mind and keep his face agape. We had come from drippy Donegal where, in the little pockets and quarter-acre patches, “the praties grow so small they have to eat them skins and all.” Toronto seemed to me a stirring, big town; and things were in constant commotion. There were brawls aplenty for the seeing, and startling street fires by night. Then, too, there were the public hangings. Adventure bunted into a fellow round any corner; and there was lots to eat.
At the moment, Toronto had become a booming frontier town. For fifty years previously, the obscure, isolated little place had been struggling within its muddy self to keep up the smart military and social swagger of the capital of Upper Canada. Its trade had been obliged to play second fiddle to high-hatted policies of Crown government. Things had moved slowly. To amount to anything in those days, a person required an official job or an official connection of some kind.
But rapid changes were now setting in. The magnetic telegraph had arrived; and railroads were things actively thought about. The Canada Company was pushing settlement with vigour. There had been a crop failure in Europe in the summer of 1846; and the rot or curl in the praties that brought woe to the thatched cottages of Ireland and the shieldings of the Highlands gave better prices for farm produce to the log cabins of Canada. A flood of immigration set in, which in one season dumped 35,000 new-comers at the port of the placid little, official town — mostly wild Irish, but many people, also, from the Highlands and the English counties. Hammers rang early and late, in all directions, cracking up frame dwellings and lodging places. In 1847, Toronto was a town of small creeks, tanbark, and taverns. With 17,000 residents, the little city had 136 fully-licensed taverns and thirty-two stores with liquor-shop licences. Some of the immigrants brought little gear with them, but they had plenty of hatreds and ugly suspicions packed in their settlers’ effects as they crossed the ocean.
A few days after my mother and I arrived, I knocked up an acquaintance with a young lad by the name of Jack Trueman, whose father kept the Tavern Tyrone, a small public house on the south side of Queen Street, just around the second corner. He was a man of great strength both in deed and word. When his temper was stirred, he tossed his beard about with his hand; and he could bandy great oaths with the best of men. John Trueman was a teetotaller, and always wore a boiled shirt. Jack told me he wore it to bed. Himself was a stocky, middle-aged man; and no doubt he died in the honest belief that he had always been the complete master of his household. The family were Protestants, and attended the Church of St. George the Martyr, on John Street. The tavern was a decent, tidy, well-kept lodging place; and those who frequented the small tap-room facing the street were Irishmen whose views agreed with those held by Himself of the boiled shirt. He had a tart, bitter tongue for the views of all others; and they went elsewhere for their liquor.
I got along first-rate with young Jack Trueman, because I let him boss me around to his heart’s content. I split kindling willingly for him, and I slopped in buckets of water for use in the kitchen. He was a harsh taskmaster over me, and many a time I got a smart clout on the lug and was told to take that for a dirty little dogan. But, at other times, he was open-handed enough and a good sharer. I liked to hang around the Tavern Tyrone; and I paid cheerfully for the privilege. It was young Trueman who showed me the town; and at first I believed everything he told me.
What appealed strongly to my young mind about the Trueman place was a narrow alleyway to the east of the tavern, leading back to a stable in the rear where two cows and pigeons were kept. I liked the job of chivying the cows along Queen Street to a pasture field in the west. One evening, the cows got in the way of the carriage of His Lordship, the Chief Justice, and I got a wicked cut from the coachman’s whip.
All Trueman’s cows were breachy by nature; and for years they were headstrong in the notion that a cow-path should be made across the field in front of Osgoode Hall. The heavy and formidable iron fence along Queen Street stands to this day in front of the law courts as a memorial to John Trueman’s cows. The law, they say, is tender in its treatment of established customs and ancient ways. For generations, the Bench and Bar of Ontario have continued to sidle and dodge themselves into the precincts of Osgoode Hall through curious stock-yard openings that were specially designed in Europe to keep out Trueman’s cows. Some monument to a woman’s milk-pail! And, by the way, the young lady from Baltimore got her blue-grey eyes as an heirloom from Sarah Trueman of the Tavern Tyrone.
On my rare visits to Toronto, years back, one of my pleasures was to take my stand a little before dinner-time at the head of York Street, and watch Her Majesty’s justices negotiate those barricaded openings in their haste to start a heavy day’s work. But, latterly, I haven’t been in Toronto much. The last judge I saw doing the trick was His Lordship, the late Chief Justice, Sir Glenholme Falconbridge. The ageing judge was toting a green bag and getting through seemed quite an effort. What a master Falconbridge was of the English tongue, and how sparingly he used it! He liked to catch speckled trout up our way, also — if his companion rowed the boat. But if he left it to others to write the long judgments, he did into English an exquisite lyric:
Come, Lesbia, while we may;
Let’s live and love our lives away:
And care not what the old folk say.
The sun that sets will rise again as bright:
There is no rising for our little light;
It sets in never ending night.
Count me a thousand kisses o’er.
Count me a thousand kisses more,
And then, we’ll count them o’er and o’er again!
CATULLUSV
If getting along agreeably with young Trueman was sometimes a problem for me, young Jack often had occasion to scratch his head over problems of his own. His father was a stern, arbitrary man of harsh temper, and sorely set on ruling his son. Many a good beating he gave the boy. One morning I was viewing one of these affairs from the corner of the alley. Jack was hollering blue murder.
His mother Sarah, a quiet, kindly woman, and a simple soul after all, stepped out into the yard to do something about it.
“Are you aware, sir,” she remonstrated, “that you are beating the boy unmercifully?”
“Aye, madame!” said Himself between the welts, “I am trying hard to do that same.”
The mother’s pent-up feelings hurried her away quickly through the kitchen door. Jack’s collie was also objecting; but he stood his ground, and showed his teeth. After a moment, his feelings got the better of him. He went right in and took a biting hold on the man’s calf. The dog meant business, and the North of Ireland let out a grand howl. The three of us scuttled down the alley.
On the morning of the twenty-fourth of May, the guns at the fort spoke; and the 81st Regiment of Foot paraded in honour of the young Queen. It was a gala day for the local gentry. Upper Canada had the spirit and turn of mind of a small Crown colony. It had been founded by families who suffered on the king’s side in the old colonies. It had justified its very existence as a protest against American ways and methods. It had grown slowly, leaning heavily on England for spiritual and economic support. But free trade in England had recently knocked the prop from under the Canadian flour-barrel. There was the smell, moreover, of radical political changes in the local air. And now people of no account were flocking into the country, more concerned with making a living than with supporting the established order. How necessary that a strong demonstration of loyalty be given!
And the old order extended itself. That evening, the people around York Street got full and felt happy; and the gentry drove their ladies in open carriages to a fancy-dress ball. Of a sudden it rained cats and dogs. There were many yards of material in a lady’s costume in those spacious days; and when one considers the undies they wore, it is a problem how the young creatures got their things dried out that night to dance the light fantastic.
The festival of St. John the Baptist arrived. Young Jack confided to me there would be great goings-on at the Trueman place that night. Himself and Mr. William Cassidy — him that kept the gaol — were forming a secret society; and the first meeting would be held in the front room upstairs. Some Mr. Grand Lodge in Dublin had written letting them do it. I was impressed with the awful and horrible nature of this business. They would have John McLaughlin at the door to keep anyone from spying on them. They wrote their names in blood, so Jack told me. They drank each other’s blood. It was enough to make a fellow’s hair stand on end.
If ever a thorough job of house-cleaning was done, the Trueman women did it that day. I went around in the evening to look the situation over. The street door of the tap-room was closed. There were Scots and other strangers about the place, all in their Sunday clothes and wearing little pinnies. Everyone of them looked as handsome as the knave of hearts.
Yes, something seemed to be going on in the front room over the bar.
I sneaked upstairs to have a look, but Mrs. Trueman saw me. She said I had better be slipping away home.
I asked Mr. Michael O’Hogan, our landlord, about the affair. He had a drop of drink taken.
“Arrah, my boy!” he exclaimed. “Beware of them cursed Masons.”
He shifted his seat on the bench with the slow, clumsy, angular motions of an Irishman whose feelings are aroused.
“Whist lad! they’re a crew of black-hearted, murthering scoundrels.”
Three or four cronies were with him; and, in their secretive-like way, they had been calavering together. Your Celt makes a secret even of his old clay dolley. It is hidden in the hand and smoked furtively from the side of the mouth. He smokes as if nursing a sore left jaw. We Irish are not very trustful; and sometimes that fact makes us not very trustworthy.
There were slow, knowing, Celtic nods in the room as face solemnly answered to face.
“Purgatory is not for the likes of them,” declared Mr. O’Hogan, marking the mournful occasion by filling his pipe with borrowed tobacco.
“St. Peter — God bless him — claps every Mason into hell to be boiled in oil.”
A long silence set in.
“Aye, the devil keeps a hot flail hanging on the corner-beam of hell for the likes of them.”
Mrs. O’Hogan planted herself in the doorway. She wore a dirty short skirt, and her arms were akimbo.
One of the men present observed her condition.
“It is swelled up you are, Bridget,” he told her, as he twisted his neck and spat on the floor. “It is buttermilk you have been drinking.”
“It be,” said Mrs. O’Hogan.
“If it be a boy,” observed Mr. O’Hogan, “Holy Jasus be praised!”
Around the corner from their lodge meeting, the Masons got a thorough going over that night. The liquor Mr. O’Hogan and his friends had drunk ran hot in their veins, and their emotions were on fire. The murder of poor William Morgan was canvassed in all its gruesome details.
“I mind well the said William Morgan,” declared Mr.O’Hogan, after the story had been talked out. “He worked at John Doel’s brewer, not a block away from where you are sitting.”
It was a creepy tale of plotted murder they told. Of course, I do not remember the details as given that evening. But I know the story well enough. How could it be otherwise? For fifty years, the fate of William Morgan was discussed, on and off and pro and con, before every fireside in Upper Canada.
Morgan, it appeared, claimed to be a Free Mason from Canada, and a lodge at Rochester was careless and let him in. He proposed to get out a book divulging the secrets of the craft. A hot story was promised the gullible public.
The local craftsmen at Rochester were greatly disturbed. They took immediate action, and, as Masonry had great influence in New York State, Morgan was arrested on a trumped-up charge of petty larceny and bundled off to an outside town. The charge fell down; but Morgan was kept in gaol because he could not put up a bond for $2.65.
On the night of Tuesday, September 26, 1826, someone paid the debt for him and he was released. Directly in front of the gaol, he was gagged and thrown into a closed carriage. He was afterwards locked up in the stone block-house facing the parade ground of the American fort at Niagara. He lay in an underground apartment used for storing ammunition. Colonel William McKay, a Knight Templar, had him in charge.
At a meeting of Masons, held in Lewiston, it was resolved to discipline Morgan. The meeting was informed the assistance of two brethren would be required. The result of the balloting would remain secret; but the two men who drew marked ballots would be met by another craftsman at ten o’clock on a certain evening on the plain near Fort Niagara. The password would be “Thomson-Johnson.”
Two men met at the time and place appointed. The third man joined them. Johnson was directed to fetch a row-boat. The other two repaired to the basement of the old stone fort.
Morgan begged for mercy — but he cried in vain. His body was then placed in a gunny sack, which, being weighted with a chain, made a heavy burden for two men to carry. The boat was rowed out into the river. There was a splash. The boat returned to shore. The three separated without a further word being spoken.
“The dirty heretics!” observed Bridget O’Hogan, calmly. “And it is the likes of them look down on the likes of us.”
What seemed to disturb Mr. O’Hogan’s mind, in connection with the story, was not the fact that the poor man had been murdered by the Masons — he expected nothing better of them. He was wrathy because Masonry was so powerful that the State did not bring the murderers to justice.
“Oh yes!” he told us, as he sucked his cutty, “we had midnight burnings and horrible murders in Ireland; but, if one peeked through the window, he saw the soldiery leading off the miserable creatures in irons to trial and to death.”
The story of William Morgan brought disrepute to the Masonic Order, and an element of distrust to the minds of the neighbours of every member of the craft. I mention it, now, merely because it is a fair example of the unbridled prejudices of the times, which charged against every great body of men the reckless acts of its individual members. Every child knows, nowadays, that the Free Masons have a beautiful system of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols. In their retreats of friendship and brotherly love, may God be with them. May the rays of heaven shed their benign influences upon them, and enlighten them in the paths of virtue and of science.
But I feel that way toward them, not because of the secret mysteries they hele, ever conceal and never reveal — and which are very suitable for Sunday-school instruction — but because they form a harmless and respectable body of my fellow countrymen. There is no unkindly feeling in my old Catholic heart toward any of the secret fraternal, racial, or religious societies that infest this young country. It is only nature for birds of a feather to flock together. Such societies may all have some uses toward a common good; but there is a savour of snobbery at the basis of them all. They tend also to keep asunder Canadians who otherwise might more freely break the bread of patriotism at a common board and offer up to a land of freedom the full measure of their united and sincere devotion. Religious and lodge influences in public affairs have been a blighting curse in Canada. To get anywhere in my day, the aspirant had to be a bigot or a joiner; and, even today, there are poor prospects for any respectable loose fish.
There never was any question as to the kidnapping of Morgan. In January 1827, Edward Sawyer and two other members of the craft pleaded guilty in New York State “to conspiring to seize and carry William Morgan from gaol to foreign parts and there continually to secrete and imprison him.” Sawyer was given a month in gaol.
The other side of the story was that Morgan had been helped to run away to Canada to avoid his creditors.
“But,” as Mr. O’Hogan exclaimed, “if the said William Morgan was alive, why did they not produce the man and save their ugly faces?”
The next morning early I slipped around to see what had happened at the Tavern Tyrone. Himself was about, as usual, giving orders. His daughter Violet was making up a feather bed in the double-bedded room upstairs over the bar. No sign saw I of ought untoward. The first meeting of King Solomon’s Lodge, No. 22, G.R.C., had evidently passed off without anyone being hurted.
Young Jack Trueman may have heard more of that lodge meeting than was intended for his ears; or perhaps he had the gift of a powerful imagination. He claimed to have hidden under the bed in the back bedroom upstairs, with his ear to the partition. In any event, the matter was much on his mind; and, in the afternoon, he herded a dozen youngsters into the Trueman stable to hold a lodge meeting of his own. I was in charge of the door; and Jack had a hammer and an empty beer-barrel.
He gave the barrel three smart knocks; and we all came to attention.
“What now, brethren, is our first care?” he demanded, in the heavy burr that reminds one of St. Andrews.
I had my instructions.
“To see that the lodge is properly tyled, worshipful sir,” said I.
“Direct that duty to be done,” commanded Trueman, Jr.
So I hammered three times on the inside of the stable door, and a little negro boy, posted outside, hammered back three times to tell us everything was in order.
But young Jack refused to believe our ears. Over and over, he insisted that we holler at him:
“The door is properly tyled, worshipful sir!”
So I went out to make dead sure about it; and then I quietly stole away on more interesting business of my own.
