By Ebenezer’s time the families lived in real cabins, with a cavity for a root cellar, a stone fireplace, floors of hewn planks, and furniture of a sort. Roads had been opened and covered bridges thrown across rivers and streams. There were grog-shops, saw and grinding mills, general stores, a doctor (struck off the register in Montreal) who could be sent for, churches, newspapers, a whorehouse, and plenty of homebrew whisky. But some things remained the same. For six months the settlers endured isolated and savage winters, enlivened only by the occasional brawl or suicide or axe-murder. They stumbled out of bed at four A.M. to tramp through the snow to milk their cows. Then there were spring floods and black flies and mosquitoes and work from sunup to sundown, and after that the accounts to be done. Usually they were obliged to plant late, because the fields were frozen hard as cement until the end of May. Often they never got to harvest what they planted, because there was an unseasonal hailstorm or the frost struck late in June again, or the fierce summer sun withered the corn in the fields. Idiots and malformed children were plentiful in villages, where marriage among first cousins was the rule rather than the exception. The women who didn’t die in childbirth were old before their time, what with all the cooking and canning and sewing and milking and churning and weaving and candle-making. The men who rose before dawn to clear their poor hilly fields of rocks and stumps and tend to their crops and livestock had to start chopping winter wood in May. The harder they worked, the deeper they seemed to sink into debt. No wonder, then, that they welcomed a prophet who offered them an end to the only world they knew.
Brother Ephraim, consulting with the Reverends Litch and Green, went back to his calculations, leaning heavily on the Book of Daniel, and came up with a brand new date, March 1, 1852, which was happily not too far off. Yet again he exhorted his flock to cleanse itself. So more Millenarians signed over their holdings. Neglecting their farms, they flocked into the Magog Town Meeting Hall once more and were stood up once more. A headline in The Townships Bugle ran:
HUNDREDS IN TOWNSHIPS ARE PLUNGED INTO DIFFICULTIES
Brother Ephraim set a new and irrevocable date: February 26, 1853. More property was signed over. While the Millenarians were preparing for the World’s End, however, a twice-disappointed, despondent Ebenezer Watson slid back into drinking, clearing the kitchen shelf of his wife’s supply of the Rev. N.H. Downs’ Vegetable Balsamic Elixir, highly recommended for the cure of neuralgia, rheumatism, headache, toothache, colic, cholera-morbus, and diarrhoea. Once again Ebenezer became a fixture at Crosby’s Hotel.
“Hey, Eb, when you get there if there are no blizzards or bankers or pig shit, would you be kind enough to drop us a note?”
Understandably fed up with ridicule and impatient for the end, Ebenezer one morning consumed a jug of homebrew, donned his ascension robes and climbed to the roof of his barn. At exactly twelve noon he jumped, heading for heaven solo. He didn’t make it. Instead he fell, slamming into a boulder jutting out of the snow, dying of a broken neck.
Ebenezer left his wife and six children no more than the original eighty-acre farm, which, through a fortunate oversight, he had neglected to sign over to the Millenarian Trust. And that night, even as the Watsons grieved, lakeside residents were wakened by the yapping of dogs. They figured that Brother Ephraim was going out to check his traplines on the Cherry River, but he was never seen in Magog again.
Ascension, without Brother Ephraim, was not going to be much fun, so only seventy-odd Millenarians turned up at the Town Meeting Hall on February 26. When they were grounded for a third time, they turned on the Reverends Green and Litch. Both men of God were beaten and tarred and feathered and then driven out of Magog on a sled. News of the swindle was reported with glee in the Montreal Witness, the writer enjoying a good laugh at the expense of the yokels. The next thing the dispossessed Millenarians knew was that three middle-aged strangers, obviously men of substance, came all the way out from Montreal. The strangers put up at Magog House, keeping to themselves, whispering together. They ate dinner with “Ratty” Baker, the local banker, studying surveyors’ maps and consuming a good deal of wine, especially the plump, red-faced fellow, a lawyer.
The next morning the Millenarians were invited to a meeting by the lawyer, who offered to represent their interests in court, saying it was a dead cinch he could recover their property. Pausing to sip from a sterling silver flask, he assured them that they were looking at a grandson of a tiller of God’s green acres himself. He understood what land meant and how it got into a man’s blood. Often, he went on to say, even as he argued a case successfully in the supreme court of the land, he wished he were back on his grandaddy’s farm, cutting hay, the sweetest smell in creation. But even before he began talking nonsense to them, Russell Morgan, QC, just wasn’t the sort to gain the Townshippers’ confidence. He wore a beaver coat and spats and sported a silver cigar cutter, riding a big bouncy belly.
“Yeah, but if you got our land back the mortgages would come with it you betcha.”
“No, sir,” he said, refreshing himself from his flask. Before quitting town Ephraim Gursky—for that, he told them, was the Hebrew scoundrel’s proper name—had paid off all the mortgages with gold nuggets the size of which the bank had never seen before.
The lawyer’s two confederates, Darcy Walker and Jim Clarkson, seated at the back of the hall, immediately grew restive. One of them pulled out an enormous linen handkerchief and did not so much blow his nose as honk it. The other one banged his cane against the plank floor.
“Mind you,” Russell Morgan, QC, added hastily, betrayed only by a rush of blood to his jowls, “Gursky certainly didn’t find those nuggets in Township streams. He brought them with him.”
“He wasn’t a Hebrew,” a boy called out. “He was a Four by Two.”
“That happens to be Cockney argot for Jew, young fella, and Ephraim Gursky is one of the worst of that nefarious race. He is not only wanted by the police here, but also by the authorities in England and Australia.”
A murmur rose among the Millenarians, a murmur that a gratified Russell Morgan, QC, took for outrage, but was actually prompted by naked admiration.
“No shit!”
“Tell us more.”
“Ephraim was transported from London, England, to Van Diemen’s Land in 1835, a forger of official documents. The rest is understandably murky. We don’t know how he came to this great land of ours.”
“What would your services cost us, Mister Man?”
“Why not a penny, sir.”
“We may be stupid,” Abner Watson said, “but we ain’t crazy. How much?”
Russell Morgan, QC, explained that if he lost the case, which was unthinkable given his brilliant record and fabled courtroom eloquence, then his services—much sought after, he needn’t point out—would come to them pro bono publico.