The Burying Ground (2 page)

“You'll be all right now, Holden,” one of them said when he saw Luke. “The doctor's here.”

“He'll probably have to remove the leg, you know,” another offered, resulting in a further, and louder, round of moaning from the injured man.

“Shush!” a woman said to the man who had spoken. “You're scaring him!”

“That was what I was hoping to do.”

“Well, stop!”

Luke ignored them all and lowered himself to one knee in order to assess the injury. Sometimes these wounds could be nasty, the laceration rarely clean, the edges of the wound ragged and shredded, depending on the sharpness of the axe.

After a moment, he turned to the boy. “Can you find me some clean rags?” he asked. “Freshly washed ones, that haven't been used for anything else?”

The boy nodded and disappeared into the house.

Luke untied the boot, removing the laces entirely in preparation for taking it off. There was a great deal of blood spilling out from the slash in the toe. He would have to move quickly once he'd withdrawn the axe.

The boy returned, wordlessly holding out a wad of rags. They looked reasonably unstained.
They will have to do
, Luke thought.
I can only hope they're truly clean.

He looked around at the gaggle of onlookers at the fence.

“Could you give me a hand?” he asked. “You,” he said pointing at the man who was hoping for an amputation. The woman who had shushed him pushed him toward the garden gate. The man approached Luke reluctantly.

“I need you to pull the axe out while I take his boot off.”

The man paled, his jokes forgotten, but he reached for the wooden handle.

“Not until I tell you, mind. And pull it straight up and out.”

Luke grasped the edges of the boot, then said “Now.”

As soon as the axe head was freed, he slid the boot off in one smooth motion, then grabbed the bundle of rags and jammed a wad of them into the wound as blood spurted out. His patient screamed.

It had only taken a few seconds to accomplish, but it had been long enough for Luke to see that the toe was almost entirely severed, attached to the foot by only a small piece of bone and a flap of skin. He would have to remove it.

He would have preferred to get the man inside and away from the prying eyes of the onlookers, but that would take too long — the sooner the severed digit was out the way, the sooner Luke could stop the bleeding.

He looked up at the man who was still standing with the axe in his hands.

“The toe's gone,” he said. “It's hanging by a shred. I need to finish the job, but I'll need you to hold while I cut. Do you think you can manage that?”

“What? Oh, my toe, my toe,” the injured man wailed.

Luke ignored him.

The standing man gulped. “All right, I guess.”

“Put the axe down and kneel down, on the other side of the foot.”

The man complied.

“Now, when I take the rags away, you need to grab the toe by the end and pull it taut so I can see where I have to cut.”

“Nooooooo!” screamed the injured man.

“I haven't actually done anything yet,” Luke pointed out to him. “Save your screams for when I do.” And then he looked at the other man. “Now.”

He held his scalpel ready with one hand and pulled the cloth away with the other. His unwilling helper gingerly grabbed the toe and lifted it away from the foot. Luke sliced. The toe detached and both his patient and his helper fainted, the latter still holding the severed digit like a purple, blood-spattered trophy.

The bleeding was easing off a bit, Luke could see, the wound starting to clot on its own. There was enough skin left, he judged, that he could suture it closed around the jutting piece of bone. He fished a needle and a length of catgut out of his bag and began coaxing the skin up around the wound, sewing it in place wherever he could find undamaged flesh.

He was halfway through the task when the man holding the toe came to again. He took one look at the grisly relic in his hand and promptly fainted again.

When he was satisfied with his handiwork, Luke enlisted the aid of a beefy neighbour, and together they carried the patient into his kitchen, where they laid him on the small bed in the corner. Luke sluiced himself off at the kitchen pump.

When he emerged into the dooryard again, the swooning assistant was gone. He had left the toe where it fell, in the middle of the yard. Luke retrieved it, wrapped it in an unused rag, and handed it to the boy.

“Bury this under a bush somewhere,” he said. “That way your Pa's foot won't itch so badly. I'll check on him tomorrow.”

Satisfied with his morning's work, he tipped his hat and left by the garden gate, suddenly feeling quite optimistic about his decision to come to Yorkville. The village was still small enough that word of his backyard surgery would spread, especially since no account of the operation would fail to include a grisly description of the toe, or the information that a grown man had fainted at the sight of it. The next time a mishap occurred, few would insist on waiting for “the old doctor” instead of accepting Luke's attendance. The fees he brought in to the practice wouldn't be exactly
lucrative
, as his old schoolmates so seemed to desire, but they would be steady and help to solidify his position as the junior partner. In spite of Dr. Christie's unsettling office skeleton, Luke was starting to feel quite cheerful about his future prospects.

He was lost in these pleasant thoughts as he made his way back to the Christie house, so it took him a moment to realize that a voice from somewhere behind him was calling his name.

“Mr. Lewis?” the voice said again. “Is that you?”

Luke turned to discover that he had been hailed by a scrawny little man whom he was quite sure he had never seen before.

“Yes, I'm Mr. Lewis. Well …
Doctor
Lewis, actually.” It still seemed odd to use the title. “Could I help you?”

But the little man had a puzzled expression on his face. “I'm sorry, I've mistaken you for someone else. I was sure you were someone I once knew, but now that I'm closer I can see that you couldn't possibly be him.” His brow wrinkled. “And yet you say your name is Lewis?”

“Yes. Luke Lewis. And you are…?”

“Morgan Spicer. Pleased to meet you.” Then the worry lines on his brow cleared away. “
Luke
Lewis? You're Thaddeus's son then.”

Luke sincerely hoped that his father's reputation as a solver of crimes had not reached Yorkville. He had been forced to recount the stories of Thaddeus's adventures far too many times. It had all happened a long time ago, though, and with any luck the memory of them had faded. His own adventure with his father, on the other hand, was known to only a handful of people. There had been none of the public acclaim that had attended the other two crimes. And then, from somewhere deep down in his mind, something stirred in his memory. Morgan Spicer. Where did he know that name from?

“I met you once,” Morgan said. “A long time ago. In Demorestville. You were about to travel west with your brother.”

And then it came to him. Spicer was a sorry little stray who had tagged along with Thaddeus on the Hallowell Circuit, in Prince Edward County. He had wanted to be a preacher, Luke recalled, but Thaddeus determined that he needed to learn how to read and write first, and offered to teach him as they rode. It was a propitious decision on his father's part — Spicer had been instrumental in the apprehension of the murderer Isaac Simms.

“Mr. Spicer. Of course.” Luke held his hand out for Morgan to shake. “I do recall our meeting.”

“I'm sorry about the mistaken identity, but you must realize how much you look like your father.”

“Not so much these days, I'm afraid. My father has aged since my mother died.”

Spicer's face fell. “She's dead? Oh dear. I didn't know. I'm so sorry. She was a nice lady.”

“She was. We all miss her sorely. But what about you? Are you a minister here?”

“No. I'm not a minister. My application was never approved.” It was obviously a sore subject, Luke realized, for Spicer quickly went on. “So where is your father now?”

“Here as well. More or less. He's gone back to the preaching business, at least on a temporary basis.”

Spicer seemed excited by this intelligence. “Here? On Yonge Street? I would like very much to see him, and not only to renew our acquaintance. I have a difficulty I would appreciate his advice on.”

“I'll tell him I met you,” Luke said. “He will have completed his circuit in a few days, I expect and then he'll come back here. Could I give him any indication of the nature of your difficulty?”

He had no idea if his father would be happy to see Morgan Spicer or not, especially if the man required advice. Although, he supposed, that was what a preacher was for, really.

“It's to do with the Strangers' Burying Ground,” Spicer said. “There has been a very odd occurrence there, and I can make no sense of it. I'd like to ask Mr. Lewis what he thinks. Tell him he can find me at the Keeper's Lodge by the front gates.”

Luke's first thought was that Spicer must be referring to ghosts or hauntings or some other nonsense that people associate with graveyards. He knew that his father would be quick to dismiss anything of this nature as a trick of the imagination, but then Spicer peered up at him anxiously. “Tell him it's important. Tell him it's a
puzzle
.”

No request would bring his father running faster, Luke figured, whether he was personally interested in seeing Spicer again or not. Thaddeus loved a puzzle.

“I'll tell him,” Luke said, and then he tipped his hat and went on his way, wondering if anything that happened in a graveyard could possibly be any stranger than a skeleton whose finger followed you around the room.

Thaddeus Lewis had given up horseback riding, and now made his rounds in a hired trap pulled by a rib-thin pony. The provision of a horse and cart was one of the conditions that he had insisted upon when he'd been approached by Philander Smith to take temporary charge of the Yonge Street Circuit. He was too old to ride, he pointed out to the bishop, and his aching joints plagued him too badly.

He was reluctant at first to agree to do even that much. He was settled into a comfortable routine in Wellington, after he'd got over the initial shock of his wife Betsy's death. His son Luke kept him distracted for a while. Luke called upon him to unravel a mystery that had arrived on Canada's shores with the great influx of sick and starving Irish three or so years before. They chased up and down the shore of Lake Ontario from Kingston to Toronto and back again and eventually found the truth of the affair. But at the conclusion of the excitement, Luke went on to Montreal to study medicine, and Thaddeus was faced with the unappealing prospect of returning to his small cabin behind the Temperance Hotel where he spent his days alternately helping out with the routine drudgery of looking after guests and assisting one of Wellington's leading citizens, Archibald McFaul, with his complicated business affairs.

It was enough — only just enough — to keep his loneliness at bay, although he still felt a pang of loss every time he returned to the cabin at the end of the day. He never really became used to the idea of Betsy's death, but he seldom let this be known. He kept his sorrow to himself and mumbled over it late at night when he had nothing else to distract him. It became a treasure of sorts that he guarded jealously and shared with no one.

And then his routine began to fall apart. Business dwindled to a standstill in Canada West. Britain's Free Trade policies had destroyed Canada's markets and there were now no ready buyers for the timber that grew so plentifully or the wheat that sprouted out of the ground. Mr. McFaul's affairs were not as complicated as they had once been. He had less business to conduct and less correspondence to see to. The businessman reluctantly informed Thaddeus that his services were no longer needed. He had hopes, McFaul said, that economic times might improve in the future, especially if trade continued to grow with the United States, but for the time being, financial prospects were dim.

“If some of these railways they're proposing actually mater-ialize, that will help,” McFaul said. “But in the meantime my business has contracted along with everyone else's. I'm sorry, Thaddeus, but there just isn't enough work to keep you on.”

Things changed at the hotel as well. Custom fell off. There was still plenty of work to get through every day — especially since Sophie, the genius in the kitchen, was once again expecting, and after several disappointments hoped this time to complete the process of birthing a child. Her brother, Martin, though, was let go from the Wellington planing mill, and he was immediately, and quite rightly, offered a place at Temperance House. The hotel belonged, after all, to his mother.

Martin was young, and far more help than Thaddeus had ever been. Nothing was said, no hints were dropped, but it was clear that the hotel was trying to support far too many people, even with Thaddeus working for nothing more than room and board.

He was far more receptive to the notion of being a preacher again when Bishop Smith returned a second time and repeated his urgent request that Thaddeus ride Yonge Street in the name of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The decision was made easier for him by the arrival of Luke's letter, with the news that he was considering a situation in Yorkville. Thaddeus hoped that the advice he gave his son was based on Luke's best interests and not his own, but it was extraordinarily convenient all the same. When he was tired of congregational hospitality, of lumpy mattresses and kitchen beds, when he had completed his circuit and needed dry socks and a clean shirt, he could go to Luke's. He wrote to Bishop Smith at once to accept the appointment.

Now, as his pony pulled him along Yonge Street, Thaddeus marvelled at how much the circuit had changed in the course of just a few years. He'd first come here in 1834, when he finally gave in to the siren call of the preaching life. He was received into the travelling connection at the Methodist Episcopal Church's annual conference at the chapel at Cummer's Settlement. Yonge Street was little more than a track at the time, muddy and perilous with holes and fallen brush. Now he found that whole sections had been macadamized, improvements paid for by the tollgates that halted travellers and demanded fees for passage.

Little villages clustered around mills and the inevitable taverns that lined the road on its long march toward Lake Simcoe. These inns had been the breeding ground for Mackenzie's doomed rebellion in 1837. Every grievance, every complaint was trotted out on the taproom floor and catalogued until the stolid farmers of North York rose up and formed a pitchfork army. They marched down Yonge Street only to be ambushed and overpowered. Too few of them had marched home again. But now all was forgiven, apparently. Even the rebel leader, Mackenzie, was beckoned home, and the villages themselves had settled into a pattern of slow, sleepy growth until the collapse of the wheat market threw them into crisis again.

These settlements were beads on the string of road as it led north. Yorkville with its breweries; Drummondville, famous for the Deer Park estate; Davisville and its potteries; Eglington and the infamous Montgomery's Tavern where the Rebellion had faltered so badly. And so on north to York Mills, Lansing, and Cummer's.

He had returned to Cummer's Settlement only once since he'd been appointed as a circuit rider. It had been a few years later — 1838 if he remembered correctly. He was a seasoned campaigner by then and was asked up onto the platform to preach at a camp meeting that had lasted three days. And when he finished exhorting the crowds to a frenzy of conversion and confession, he had been invited to share a meal with Jacob Cummer and his family.

Cummer was a German from Pennsylvania who had built a mill on the Don River and opened a tinsmith's on Yonge Street, but in those rough and ready days when the area was far from civilization, he had also trained himself to be the local doctor and veterinarian. Like Luke had done up in the Huron, Thaddeus reflected, except that Jacob had never bothered to acquire any formal credentials. The Cummers were Lutherans when they arrived in Canada, but when Jacob built his log meeting house he had invited all denominations to use both the church and the campground. Later the Cummer family formally joined the Methodist Episcopals. The old man died a few years after that shared meal, but the majority of his fourteen sons and daughters still lived either in the village or nearby and, in particular, the oldest son Daniel was proving to be a stalwart supporter of the church. Of all the villages on the Yonge Street Circuit, Cummer's Settlement was the place where Thaddeus would receive the surest welcome.

He looked forward to seeing Daniel Cummer again and was pleased that the man was waiting for him in front of the meeting house. He was far less pleased when he realized that nearly all the men present for the class meeting were Cummers, sons of Cummers, or married to Cummers. But then, he reflected, Yonge Street was never as rich a ground for the Methodist Episcopals as other parts of the province, and too many Methodist adherents had been drawn off by the Wesleyans, or by one of the other numerous versions of the doctrine.

When he completed the meeting, Daniel, as Thaddeus had hoped he would do, invited him to share a meal at his house. He confirmed that the Methodist Episcopals had lost ground on the Yonge Street Circuit.

“As you know, the Presbyterians and the Anglicans have always done well here,” Daniel said as he dipped into the savoury stew his wife served up, “but there are a lot of New Connection and Primitive Methodists as well. And, of course, Wesleyans.”

The British arm of John Wesley's church had attempted a union with the Methodist Episcopals some years previously. The partnership soon fell apart, but the Methodist Episcopals suffered greatly by the Wesleyans' claim on all of the property that had been brought to the merger at the time.

“It's an uphill battle to keep the old church alive,” Thaddeus said. “Otherwise I doubt you'd be seeing me today. Bishop Smith must have been desperate to ask an old man like me to take a circuit again.”

“I expect he is desperate, there are so few of you left. I dare say there are no more than a handful between here and Cobourg. And your work is made all the harder by the times. The fall in wheat prices has badly affected the farmers of York, although here and there you can see signs that things are stirring again. John Hogg has started to lay out lots at York Mills, I hear.”

“If I remember correctly, most of the land there is swamp, isn't it? Swamp, and a murderous steep hill.”

“Your memory is good,” Daniel said. “No one can fathom what he's up to. People have started calling it Hogg's Hollow, which doesn't make it sound very appealing, but he must think he can sell the land. And now that David Gibson is home again, he's making plans to build a mansion.”

Gibson had been one of the leading figures in the 1837 Rebellion. Like Mackenzie, he escaped to the United States before he could be arrested for treason. Unlike Mackenzie, he had fared well there. He was a surveyor, and found work building the Erie Canal. It must have been profitable, Thaddeus thought, if he could now afford to build a mansion.

“And farther up the line?” he asked. “What can I expect there?”

“More of the same, I'm afraid,” Daniel replied. “You might do well in Langstaff, but I'm not sure it's even worth your while to stop at Thorne's Hill. Not with the cult that's sprung up around Holy Ann.”

“Holy Ann? And who would that be? It sounds like something that belongs more rightly with the Catholic Church.”

“No, no she's a Methodist. Wesleyan. But a very strange one. They say she has the second sight and can perform miracles in answer to prayers.”

“Only God can do that.” Thaddeus was immediately on the alert. He had experience with women who claimed miracles and turned out to be charlatans.

“I know, I know,” Daniel said. “Just try and tell that to the ignorant folk who traipse up to Thorne's Hill to drink from her well, all of them expecting to be cured of their ailments.”

“Who exactly is she?”

“Her name is Ann Preston. She's a poor, ignorant Irish girl, brought to this country by Dr. Reid as a servant. She seems to be particularly adept at locating lost articles, just by praying to God for guidance, but I don't think anyone took her seriously until the Reids' well went dry.”

“What happened then?”

“She prayed to God, of course, and fetched up two buckets of the purest water,” Daniel replied.

“Was it raining at the time?” Thaddeus wanted to know, and Daniel looked at him in astonishment, then started to laugh.

“I've wanted to ask that question myself,” he said. “Good for you.” And then he grew serious again. “There's a great deal of work for you to do here, Thaddeus. I'm afraid it's not the easy circuit you might have been led to believe it was.”

“I've had harder,” Thaddeus replied. “I took on a whole nest of Universalists near Rideau one time.” But he was beginning to understand why Bishop Smith had been so anxious to have him return to the travelling connection. The Methodist Episcopal Church was fighting for survival.

He discovered how correct Daniel Cummer's assessment was as he trotted north. There were only three women waiting to meet him at the general store in Newtonbrook. And as his weary pony trotted into Thorne's Hill, he passed a knot of people clustered around a wellhead. Supplicants to Holy Ann, hoping she could cure them or reform them or make their chickens lay, he expected. And when he reached the wagoner's cottage where he was supposed to conduct a class, there was no one there but the apologetic owner. It was hard for an ordinary preacher to compete with miracles, he reflected, when all he had to offer was a sermon or two.

He was cheered somewhat by the number of people in attendance at the meetings in Langstaff. There were three Methodists at the men's class and five at the women's, and they all came again in the evening to hear him preach. Oddly, there were no taverns in Langstaff and Thaddeus hoped that the lack of liquor was as a result of the influence of the church, but he was afraid that it was more due to the lack of prosperity in the small settlement.

Langstaff was where his boundary ended, the villages farther north more properly part of the Markham or Vaughan Circuits, so he arranged times and places for his return, then turned the cart to work his way southwest through sparsely scattered settlements as far as the Humber River. From there he would circle around to Yorkville and take a day or so to visit with his son. It wouldn't be the same as going home to Betsy, but it would do.

Even though Yonge Street was by no means the lar­gest circuit he had ever ridden, and in fact he hadn't had to cover it on horseback as he had in the old days, Thaddeus found that disappointment had exhausted him by the time he reached Luke's. He felt none of the exhilaration that came from preaching to overflowing halls or counting up new converts on this first round. He had accomplished nothing more than the humdrum exercise of reaffirming the faith of the already committed.

He was given a good dinner at the end of his last class meeting, however, so when he reached Dr. Christie's yellow brick house on Scollard Street he was content to go straight upstairs and sink into a deep sleep on the daybed in Luke's sitting room.

The next morning he found his way to the dining room, where a place had been set for him. Christie seemed pleased that he was there.

“More the merrier,” he said, beaming. “When Luke asked if you would be welcome, my one question was whether or not you were capable of intelligent dinner conversation. He assured me that you were, and I suppose that applies to breakfast as well. I'm hoping it will compensate for the inelegant presentation of the meal. Never mind, here comes Mrs. Dunphy. Dig in.”