Solomon Gursky Was Here (24 page)

“‘Some spend on things they can use, I splurge on paintings,' says dazzling Vanessa Gursky, the English beauty, wife of Lionel Gursky, likely the next CEO of the James McTavish Distillery Ltd. Chatelaine of a castle in Connemara, but equally at home in her Fifth Avenue penthouse (‘My crash pad in the Big Apple,' as she so charmingly puts it) or her Nash terrace flat in Regent's Park, the peripatetic Vanessa's portrait has been painted by both Graham Sutherland and Andy Warhol. Here, left, she is seen standing before her favourite, the portrait painted by Annigoni, a picture of beguiling elegance.”

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.

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.