On the occasion of Mr. Bernard’s legendary seventy-fifth birthday party at the Ritz-Carlton, in 1973, the Gazette printed a list of those fortunate enough to be invited. And within months the old bootlegger was dead. Cancer. Smith went to the funeral, mingling with the mourners, and there he was confronted by the Judas himself.
“I’m Tim Callaghan. Remember me?”
“I remember you.”
One morning only a week later Mrs. Jenkins rapped on the door to Smith’s room. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”
“I’m not expecting anybody.”
“He says it’s important.”
And he was already there, sliding past Mrs. Jenkins, his smile benevolent. “Bertram Smith?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’d like to speak to you alone.”
Mrs. Jenkins, her massive bosom rising to the insult, didn’t budge.
“What’s black and white and brown,” she asked, nostrils flaring, “and looks good on a lawyer?”
“How did you know I was a lawyer?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“Black and white and brown and looks good on a lawyer?”
“Uh huh.”
“Sorry.”
“A Doberman,” Mrs. Jenkins said, marching out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
“Now tell me what you want here,” Smith said.
“Providing that you are Bert Smith, the only issue of Archibald and Nancy Smith, who came to this country from England in 1902, and that you can produce the necessary documents to prove your identity, what I want, sir, is to tell you that we have been looking for you for years. You are the beneficiary of a considerable legacy.”
“Hold it,” Smith said, inching open the door to his room. But she wasn’t listening outside. “All right, then. Go ahead. Tell me about it.”
Three
One
Strawberry was descended from United Empire Loyalists. The name of his great-great-grandfather, Captain Josiah Watson, was inscribed on a copper plaque embedded in a boulder on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, a memorial dedicated to the pioneers “who braved the wilderness that their progeny, et al, might enjoy the advantages of civilization in one of Nature’s wonderlands.”
One day Strawberry took Moses to see the boulder. It stood on a height that had long since become a popular trysting spot for local teenagers. Strewn about were broken beer bottles and used condoms. Standing alone when it was first set in place, the boulder now overlooked VINCE’S ADULT VIDEOS on the roadside and, directly below, a billboard announcing that the surrounding terrain would shortly be the site of PIONEER PARK CONDOMINIUMS, complete with state-of-the-art marina. Yet another ACORN PROPERTIES development under the supervision of Harvey Schwartz.
Moses found Captain Watson’s name mentioned in Settling The Townships by Silas Woodford. “The first permanent location of what we now call Watson’s Landing was made by Capt. Josiah Watson, U.E. Loyalist from the province of New York, who came from Peacham, Vt., sometime during the later years of the 18th century.”
Perhaps it was the likes of the captain that another local historian, Mrs. C.M. Day, had in mind when she wrote in History of the Eastern Townships, Province of Quebec, Dominion of Canada, Civil and Descriptive: “Generally speaking, the class of men who comprised our earliest population were anything but religiously inclined: indeed, it has been said, and we fear with too much truth, that a really God-fearing man was a rare exception among them.”
No sooner did these ruffians harvest their first crop than they distilled the surplus grain to make spirituous liquors, which prompted Mrs. Day to note with a certain asperity, “The way was thus gradually but surely prepared for drunkenness, poverty, and the various forms of vice which often culminated in crime and its fearful penalties.”
Such was certainly the case with Captain Watson who, staggering home from a friend’s cabin one rainy spring night, managed the difficult feat of drowning in a ditch filled with no more than three inches of water. His son Ebenezer, also a prodigious drinker, seemed destined to follow suit until he was literally plucked out of a Magog gutter one day by that interloper known as Brother Ephraim.
“‘Behold,’” Brother Ephraim said to him, “the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.’”
Brother Ephraim, sole author of Evidence from the Scriptures of the Second Coming of Christ in the Eastern Townships about the year 1850, later revised the date to 1852 and, finally, February 26, 1853.
Thrusting his demons behind him, Ebenezer Watson joined Brother Ephraim and his two leading converts, the Reverends Columbus Green and Amos Litch, preaching against the tyranny of hootch and spreading fear about the coming of Judgement Day.
Many of Ephraim’s followers, Ebenezer Watson prominent among them, taking to heart his warning about camels and rich men, signed over their livestock and the deeds to their properties to the Millenarian Trust Company. In preparation for the World’s End, they also bought ascension robes from Brother Ephraim. The men weren’t concerned about the cut of their loosely fitted robes, but many of the women, especially the younger ones, had to return for innumerable fittings in the log cabin that Brother Ephraim had built for himself in the woods. They came one at a time and only much later did they speculate among themselves about the ridges and deep swirls and curving hollows carved into his back.
The Millenarians never numbered more than two hundred and were subject to ridicule in some quarters. Say, in Crosby’s Hotel or round the hot stove at Alva Simpson & Co., dealers in Proprietary Medicines, Perfumery, Rubber Goods, Hair Preparations, Druggists’ Sundries, &c., &c., &c. The laughter of skeptics heightened after the world failed to end as predicted on June 2, 1851. It was plain to see that the Millenarians, gathered in their robes in the Magog Town Meeting Hall, had been stood up by their Maker. A journal popular in the Townships at the time, The Sherbrooke Gazette, also proprietor of SMITH’S PATENT EGG BEATER (will beat a pint of eggs in five seconds), noted, “From the failure of calculations of Brother Ephraim as to the ‘time of the end’, many of his followers apostatized, but a large number continued steadfast.”
They could hardly be blamed. The land they were attempting to cultivate, once the hunting ground of the Algonquin nation, was ridden with unmanageable humps and strewn with rocks. The first settlers, their grandparents, had organized themselves into groups of forty to petition for a township ten miles square, splitting the forest between them, the agent grabbing the choicest site.
The grandparents set out with a camp-kettle, an axe, a gun, ammunition, sacks of seed, and maybe a cow or two or an ox. There were no roads. There were not even trails. Until they managed to build their first log shanty with a bark roof and an earthen floor, they were obliged to sleep out in the woods, making a bed of hemlock branches, using the largest ones for a windbreak. Without matches they were dependent on flint, steel and spunk. Come June they had to keep smudge fires lit, in the dim hope of fending off moose flies big as bumblebees. There was no hay. So they destroyed the dams in the beaver meadows, drained the flooded land, and relied on the wild grass that grew there. They learned to eat cowslips and nettles, pigweed, ground-nuts, wild onions. They coped with panthers and catamounts, black bears killing calves and carrying them off. Once they acquired lambs and turkeys and chickens, they discovered that these were hostage to lynx and wolves. Most of the clothes they wore were spun and woven by the women who learned to master hand-card, distaff, wheel, and loom. If they were lucky, only three years passed before they brought in their first harvest. If the crop failed, the men felled trees and made black salt, tramping forty miles to market their sacks of potash, for which they were paid a pittance.