Chapter 13

THE STORM

September 7, 1882

Captain Craig eyed black clouds scudding across the horizon when he docked the Australasia in Owen Sound a little before noon. Weather permitting, he was scheduled for a return run to Collingwood later in the day. Below decks, Leonard Babington looked out a porthole and saw trees on shore bend and break as they were buffeted by the wind. All afternoon, he waited for word from the engineer to throw more wood onto the fire, now banked and awaiting its chance to flare into life. Just before supper, an order came down from Captain Craig: “Cancel the sailing, boys. It’s too damn rough to go out there tonight.”

The storm raged that night and then all day. The Australasia was riding easily at anchor the next morning when Captain Craig received orders to make his run to Collingwood. The return trip was uneventful and they were back in Owen Sound when Leonard heard a commotion on deck. He found the first mate and the engineer crowded into the pilothouse. Captain Craig had news for them. Reports were coming in of ships damaged and lost. A telegraph gave them details of the sinking of the S.S. Asia. She’d left Owen Sound about midnight and was known to have floundered in mountainous seas. The telegraph said a single lifeboat had carried the only two survivors, a teenaged boy and a girl, to shore. An Indian found them and took them to Parry Sound in his canoe. One hundred and twenty-three passengers and crew had drowned.

“Damn shame,” Captain Craig declared. “Bloody want of judgment, leaving port in the face of that storm.”

The sinking reminded Leonard of the risks of boating on the lakes and he thought of his parents and how they would have worried about him. He went to the telegraph office and sent them a wire to say he was safe. He felt relieved he’d done the right thing.

As the Australasia was getting up steam the next morning, a messenger came aboard with a telegram for Leonard. He opened the neat buff envelope and read with shock and surprise:

THOUGHT YOU HAD DROWNED. FATHER INJURED. COME HOME. MOTHER.

On the train that afternoon, Leonard wondered what had happened to his father. In a silent Vandeleur Hall he found Erasmus in the back bedroom, heavily bandaged and lying on his back, a light blanket covering an emaciated frame. He thought his father had shrunk, he looked so vulnerable and helpless. Leonard sat with him all afternoon and into the evening. When Erasmus opened one eye and saw Leonard beside the bed, a slight smile crept across his lips.

“I prayed you’d come,” Erasmus whispered. “We were blasting stumps. They told me you’d drowned. It shocked me pretty bad. I didn’t pay attention to what I was doing.”

“That’s all right, father. You need to rest now. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“Promise me you’ll stay for good,” Erasmus pleaded.

“Hell, Father, I can’t guarantee that. But Mother and I will look after you.”

Leonard left the bedroom and found his mother in the kitchen. “How in the world did he blow himself up?”

“Erasmus always hated that job, dynamiting stumps. It was so dirty and dangerous. They were out there when Jamie Ross showed up from the Henderson store. He said they’d had word the Australasia had sunk. All aboard supposedly lost.”

She turned her face away and wiped her eyes with a towel.

“Erasmus must have been so shocked he forgot what he was doing. Sam Mellon was helping him. He says Erasmus just stood there. He forgot he’d lit a fuse. When the dynamite went off, he was standing right beside the stump. It threw him over on his back. Tore an eye right out of his head.

“It wasn’t until Dr. Griffin got here that we found out it was all a mistake. He said it was the Asia, not the Australasia, that had sunk. He laughed and laughed. Told Jamie he would have to examine his ears.”

Leonard returned to his father’s room. He was feeling even more gloomy, convinced that what had happened was not his father’s fault, but his own. His father had always been afraid something would happen to Leonard, but it was Erasmus who has come close to killing himself.

Leonard saw a tear trickle down his father’s cheek. Erasmus tried to speak but his words were no more than a whisper. “Tell me you forgive me, Leonard, for trying to keep you home. I’ve loved you more than life itself.”

“I know, Father, I know.” Leonard let his head drop into his hands. He had no doubt his father loved him. He realized their struggle was borne out of his father’s wish to mold him into something Leonard could never be.

Sitting with his father, Leonard thought about why his parents had chosen to abandon the England of Queen Victoria and settle in this isolated corner of Canadian backcountry. He remembered having long talks with his mother, and one day having come across a stack of letters packed away in a trunk. Between what he’d been told and what he read, he gradually assembled the true reason for their having come to Vandeleur.

Bit by bit, the story emerged that Erasmus, scion of an eminently respectable family in Derbyshire, knew that as a younger son he could never inherit his father’s estate. He had the choice of two occupations: the clergy or the army. Neither appealed to him. While he contemplated his future, he enjoyed carousing with friends in the pubs of Derby and gambling at the tables of the Erewash Club. He took a wife, the estimable Esther Brandreth, a pretty girl who knew much of literature and poetry but little of homemaking. They would have lived splendidly on her income had Erasmus’s gambling debts not risen to more than five thousand pounds.

“We have decided you must go abroad,” Erasmus was told. “You can count on receiving an annual remittance. I have arranged to clear your debts, but you must never return to England.”

“Father, you can’t do this to me,” Erasmus protested. “I will lose Esther. Honest to God, I’ll never gamble again.”

His father insisted that all the arrangements had been made and that nothing could be changed. Erasmus was given a choice between Canada and Australia. He chose Canada, thinking, as he one day confessed to Leonard, that because it was closer, he would stand a better chance of some day returning home. On a spring day in 1852, Erasmus and Esther, who had agreed to stay with him and take their chances in Canada, sailed for Montreal. They were on their way to the Queen’s Bush in Canada West where a grant of fifty acres, once part of lands inhabited by the Ojibway Indians, had been secured for them in the Township of Artemesia, County of Grey.

It seemed to Leonard that Esther had accepted banishment with less complaint than his father. “Splendid, just splendid,” she had exclaimed the first time she saw the Beaver Valley. She and Erasmus stood at the brow of a hill facing the Escarpment, the height of land that ran like a spine through the Queen’s Bush, all the way to the tip of the Bruce Peninsula in Georgian Bay. To the east rose a line of hills dappled in sunlight and deep shadows, their gentle shapes testament to thousands of years of glacial erosion. A vast tableland that had once been the bed of a tropical sea stretched behind them to the western horizon. At their feet lay the valley of the Beaver River, which fell over the escarpment into a deep rift at a point known as Eugenia Falls. There, joined by the waters of a smaller stream, the Boyne River, it flowed placidly north to Georgian Bay.

Erasmus freely admitted to his son that he had known nothing of the new land of Canada or what it would take to draw sustenance from the fifty stony acres ceded to him. His remittance brought him money for the family’s essential needs, with enough left over to hire settlers to build a log cabin. Eventually, Erasmus mastered farming well enough to assemble one hundred acres that he stocked with diary cattle and planted to wheat, oats and barley. He became a devout parishioner of the Wesleyan Methodist church on the Beaver Valley Road, a stone’s throw from the Vandeleur School. Their families in England did not forget them. From time to time Leonard’s granddmother sent out fancy ball gowns that had been worn the mandatory single occasion. Esther stuffed them into a trunk and never put them on.

At last, Leonard realized, he had begun to understand the difficult relationship of a father and his son. He noticed that his father had awakened, and Leonard began to speak now of his feelings. “Your whole life’s gone into building up Vandeleur Hall,” he said. “It’s all you cared about – the land, the crops, the house. You wanted to prove to yourself that what happened in England was something that occurred when you were young and foolish. So you tried to instill the same desire in me – to make a glorious thing of this piece of wilderness. But I was born here. I took it as I found it. It was the natural world for me – the forest, the streams, the wild animals.”

Leonard waited for his father to say something, but there was no response. Leonard tried to explain how his thirst for fresh experience had driven him to explore the world outside Vandeleur.

“Everyone has to find their own place. You found yours here, four thousand miles from home. I don’t have to travel that far to get to know this new country we’re building. Canada is young, not even as old as me. I’m going to grow old with it.”

Whether it was the shock of seeing his son, of hearing Leonard’s refusal to promise to stay in Vandeleur, or simply the exhaustion of staying alive until his son had come home, the breath of life was ebbing from Erasmus. He sighed, closed his remaining eye, and let an arm slip over the edge of the bed.

Leonard’s mother had come into the room as he was talking. She flung herself onto the bed and embraced her husband. Leonard let her cry for a few minutes, then gently raised her to her feet and took her to the big bed that Erasmus had brought from Philadelphia. He put a blanket over her. Leonard sat up most of the night, reflecting on the past and thinking of his future.

He dreaded the funeral. “I wish we didn’t have to do this,” he told his mother. He visited the Methodist minister in Vandeleur, Richard Orgell, to ask him to conduct the service. After hearing a half hour of sermonizing on God’s will in life and death, Leonard left the manse feeling more dejected than ever. Worse than the grief he felt at the loss of his father, was the guilt that he once again carried in his mind. His thoughts were of all the slights and disagreements that had come between he and his father. He had been an ungrateful son.

When the service began at the Vandeleur Methodist Church, nearly every pew was full. Reverend Orgell was a thin and tired-looking man and Vandeleur was his fifth or sixth charge, evidence that his spiritual skills were either very much or very little in demand. The service marched with disciplined precision, from the recitation of John 11.25, “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies,” through the singing of a hymn from the Methodist song book, and into a prayer commending the soul of Erasmus to God’s care.

The words of the minister didn’t mean very much to Leonard. His grief had brought on disdain, not for his father but for the sermon he had heard, for the man who mouthed it, and perhaps for the church in which it was delivered. It was his father he had come to honour; nothing he’d heard bore any resemblance to the reality of the parent he’d known. He stood at the end of the service, embraced his mother, and walked out with the four pallbearers carrying his father in his coffin.

All stood with heads bowed as the coffin was lowered into a grave behind the church. Jamie Ross, who had carried the false news of Leonard’s sinking to Erasmus, apologized for what he had done. Leonard considered that Jamie had been a fool not to have known the difference between Leonard’s Australasia and the Asia, but he saw no point in berating him. “You couldn’t help it, Jamie, you were just repeating what you’d been told.” Later, neighbours brought food to the house and everyone talked late into the night.

Leonard did his best to help his mother overcome her worries about keeping up Vandeleur Hall. She was uncertain for the future of their property and hoped Leonard would take up where his father had left off. “Who will do the work, see the cattle are attended to, and keep us going?” Leonard promised he would not leave Vandeleur Hall without hiring all the help his mother would need. “We’ll get one of the neighbours to manage the fields and look after the cattle,” he promised. “I’ll get a housekeeper for you and I’ll try to come home once a month to make sure you’re all right. I’m really not cut out to stay and run the farm. Your books and stories have filled my head with all kinds of ideas. I’m glad they did, but I’ll never be content to live the life of a farmer.”