Act of Injustice Read online

  When the report came back from the medical examiner in Toronto, the coroner, Dr. Christoe, hastily reassembled the inquest jury. He told the jury the presence of strychnine in Rosannah’s organs had definitely been confirmed. It took only a few minutes for the the jury to conclude that Cook Teets had used strychnine to “feloniously poison” his wife. Leonard noted there’d been talk of a four thousand dollar insurance policy, of which Cook Teets was the benficiary. Constable Field was dispatched to arrest Cook at his home. He offered no resistance, and Field took his prisoner by train to Owen Sound, where he turned Cook over to the governor of the county jail.

  Leonard headed his article THE FATE OF A BRIDE. The crime, he noted, had “sent a tremor of excitement” through the community. His story added that Cook’s possession of the poison, together with the incriminating insurance policy, “supplied the motive for the suspected crime.” But Leonard felt compelled to report that testimony had indicated “strychnine is a poison that generally acts very quickly, producing death in from ten minutes to four hours.” To this fact he dutifully added: “The evidence so far goes to show that Cook Teets was not in the company of his wife for a period of twelve hours or more before her death.”

  Chapter 2

  THE PLEA

  November 3, 1884

  On the morning that Cook Teets came to trial, a year after Rosannah’s death, Leonard Babington rose at dawn in his room at Coulson’s British Hotel, his usual stopping place in Owen Sound. When an hour’s wait failed to produce hot water for a morning bath he decided, reluctantly, to forego the pleasure of the tub. He shaved from a chilled basin, a three-day stubble resisting the blade of his straight razor, and dressed quickly. Stepping carefully around patches of ice, the residue of an unseasonably early storm, it took him twelve minutes to trudge the five blocks to the courthouse.

  Leonard hurried through the vaulted front door of the Grey County Court Building and up the narrow staircase to the courtroom on the second floor. He paused at the top of the stairs to look out the big windows at the harbour and saw dark water lapping against its docks. It looked as bleak as he felt, ghost-like and all but empty with winter on the way. In other seasons, it offered a sanctuary where vessels on runs to the Upper Lakes, Chicago, and Minnesota found respite from treacherous gales that could turn Georgian Bay into a seething ocean of froth and foam.

  He was glad to be able to claim the last seat at the table set up for newspapermen who had come to cover the trial. Cook Teets was just now being brought into the courtroom, shackled in handcuffs and leg irons. Finally, Cook was to face a jury to answer to the murder of the girl Leonard had loved. He was convinced of Cook’s guilt, but apprehensive at what the trial might reveal. It would, Leonard knew, force Rosannah’s mother to confront unwanted ghosts from her past. Just as it would stir up bitter memories of his own that he had no wish to recall. He looked forward to the end of the trial when he could put Rosannah’s life and death behind him. It was time to start thinking about his future and what he would have to do to make a success of his newspaper. Find a good wife, build up the Chronicle, make it a real paper, more than just the “local rag.”

  Leonard scanned the faces of the four men settled at the newspaper table. He exchanged glances with the two he knew, Henry Heatherwood from the Owen Sound Advertiser and Andy Fawcett, the editor of the neighbouring Flesherton Advance. The other men introduced themselves as reporters from Toronto. They represented the Globe and the Evening Telegram. Leonard felt edgy in their presence, knowing they might find out about his past relationship with Rosannah.

  “What are the folks in Vandeleur saying about this case?” the Telegram man asked.

  “That it’s a God-awful shame and a horror, that girl being poisoned,” Leonard Babington replied. “We’re just a small place so everyone feels they’ve a stake in the trial.”

  “Why is it,” the Telegram man wondered, “that the most ghastly crimes seem to occur in these out-of-the-way places? There was the Donnelly family – Black Donnellys, they called them, and Irish, too – all but wiped out by a vigilante gang, down near London. Nobody ever convicted.”

  “We’ve had no such gangs around here,” Leonard said. “People here are mostly law-abiding. They’re used to hard times. They have none of the niceties of life you enjoy in Toronto. They might as well be living in Transylvania.” Leonard was determined to say nothing of his own, earlier experience as a reporter in Toronto. Nor of the fact he had known Rosannah or that he had written a stinging story about Cook Teets when he shot at a gang of boys who had pelted him with snowballs. Fortunately, the bullets had gone astray.

  Leonard realized that for the Toronto newspapermen, this must be just another dreary murder trial, albeit in a bucolic setting. He hadn’t been sure how to answer the Telegram man’s questions. He only knew that for settlers in the Queen’s Bush, life was a struggle to survive on what they could extract from its stony soil, be it meagre crops or wild game bagged by shotgun or fishhook.

  Leonard looked around to see how many people from Vandeleur were in the courtroom. His attention focused momentarily on Scarth Tackaberry, a tall, ruddy-faced man who had wrapped his legs under the bench in the second to last row. He knew Scarth only slightly, one of another of the large families that lived in the Beaver Valley. Scarth’s father had come from England but the family had Irish blood. They were a tribe Leonard had never cottoned to. Sly and mischievous, Scarth had been expelled from the Vandeleur school at the age of eleven after setting fire to the hair of the girl who sat in front of him. He had never gone back. Later, there were rumours he’d been having his way with Rosannah Leppard.

  Huddled in the front row were Cook’s mother, Margaret Teets – an old lady, nearly ninety – and his sister, Sarah. Leonard thought they looked shrunken, as if trying to make themselves invisible. Beside them sat Cook’s oldest brother, Nelson Teets. He had run the family’s sawmill and furniture workshop since the death of old Jacob Teets. Nelson sat upright, bowing to no one despite the embarrassment of his brother’s arrest.

  To Leonard and most others in the courtroom, Cook Teets was a familiar sight. Leonard knew him as a man of broad shoulders and thick chest, with cloudy blue eyes. Today, the bushy black hair that covered Cook’s head and face gave way to a beard turned prematurely grey. He sat upright, his hands clenched at his knees. He stared toward the courtroom windows, seemingly unmoved by the gravity of the charge against him.

  The crowd, aroused by the sight of the accused, muttered its scorn but quieted when Angus McMorrin, the clerk of the court, bellowed “Oyez, oyez, oyez, all rise, this court is in session, the Honourable Mr. Justice John Douglas Armour presiding. All persons having business before the High Court of Justice, attend now and ye shall be heard.”

  McMorrin thumbed through a bundle of court papers. When he found the sheet he sought, he read out the charge and turned to ask: “Cook Teets, how do you plead, guilty or not guilty?”

  Leonard shifted his view to Cook. He was convinced his plea would make not a whit of difference to the outcome of the trial. He could barely disguise his loathing of the man. How could someone possessed of his senses kill his beautiful young wife, a woman half his age and the mother of two little girls? In Leonard’s mind, there was no forgiving Cook.

  Judge Armour, who had travelled to Owen Sound from Cobourg to preside over this sitting of the Fall Assizes of the Ontario High Court of Justice, let the seconds tick into a half minute while he waited for a response from Cook.

  “How does the prisoner plead?” he finally demanded. Leonard Babington thought his voice communicated a loss of patience. At last, Cook Teets rose to his feet.

  “Not guilty,” he answered. His voice was firm and clear.

  Judge Armour nodded imperceptibly. Leonard dipped his pen into the ink well on the table in front of him and inscribed the date on a pad of white paper: Monday, November 3, 1884. Looking up, he noted a mural of the Coat of Arms of Great Britain and the Empire that dominated one wall. A U
nion Jack was affixed to one side of it. A full-length portrait of a stern Queen Victoria hung on the other side. There were no Canadians more loyal to the Crown than the people of Grey County, he told himself.

  Jury selection took less than half an hour. Three farmers – described as yeomen in the jury’s warrant – were chosen, along with a warehouseman, two shopkeepers, a bookkeeper, a retired ship captain, a deckhand, a stone mason and two blacksmiths. Most were dressed in their Sunday best and they shifted about in their elevated seats, a little nervous but secure behind their wooden railing.

  Leonard was surprised to see a Negro, the stone mason Henry Johnson, on the jury. His small home and acreage would have barely met the four hundred dollar property qualification, a rule that ensured juries were filled with men of quality. When the Grey County board of selectors suggested to Sheriff Moore that Johnson’s name be added to the roster, they must have never expected he would be called.

  James Masson, the lawyer defending Cook Teets, had used his right of challenge to veto three prospective jurors but had raised no objection to Johnson.

  Nor had Alfred Frost, charged with prosecuting this case. He was known to be proud of the role his father John Frost had played in providing sanctuary for hundreds of Negro runaways who had reached Grey County via the Underground Railroad They lived first as squatters, clearing off trees and planting crops on what had been forestland. Then came the government survey and when the value of the land was set at a dollar fifty an acre, few could pay the price. Most gave up their homes and drifted to towns like Owen Sound. Now, those who had taken to town life were getting the vote and Alfred Frost would not have it said he treated coloured people less fairly than whites. Anyway, Leonard thought, Johnson was as entitled as any man to the dollar fifty a day juror’s pay. And his inclusion was not likely to have an undue influence on the outcome.

  The afternoon before the trial, on the train that carried Leonard from Vandeleur to Owen Sound, he had encountered Rosannah’s parents, James and Molly Leppard. He took a five-dollar bill from his pocket and offered it to Molly. “Get something for the children,” he said. Molly waved his hand away. “I’m can’t think about that. I’m to testify tomorrow,” she said, turning to stare out the window. “It’ll be hard, very hard.” Her coolness surprised Leonard. “You know I’d want them to have this,” he said. Again, Molly refused the money. “We might be poor but that doesn’t mean we take charity from you.”

  Leonard sighed as he looked at Molly sitting with her husband and her daughter Bridget in the second row of the courtroom. She gave no sign of recognition. She didn’t need to act so prim and proper, he thought. It still hurt him that she’d rejected the money he’d offered her. After all, he’d known the Leppards for years and had visited them many times before moving to Toronto. Molly had been welcoming enough then, although he had known she would never have permitted a Methodist boy like him to marry her daughter.

  Cook Teets, Leonard thought, seemed almost too large a man to fit into the space allotted him in the prisoner’s dock. Leonard watched him tilt his head to one side. He looked older than his fifty-four years. A bandage fashioned from a white handkerchief covered an inflamed eye. His skin, pale from his incarceration, made a sharp contrast against the dark blue of his shirt.

  The jurors gazed intently at Cook Teets, their looks fixed on the thick eyebrows that weighed like small anvils on his forehead, the circles under his eyes, and his straggly beard. Leonard knew that Cook was seeing none of the particularities of their faces. The singular fact about the prisoner, a reality that by now had manifested itself to everyone in the courtroom, was that Cook Teets was blind.

  Chapter 3

  A BOY AND THE DARK

  November 29, 1842

  Cook Teets felt feverish and confused as he listened to the formalities that began his trial for murder. By concentrating on the sounds and smells of the courtroom, he was able to umravel much of what was happening around him. He blinked unconsciously when the time came to answer to the charge he was facing. His lawyer had told him to plead not guilty. He had stood to speak. When he sat down his mind shifted to the day when he had awakened to find himself blind. If that hadn’t happened he wouldn’t be here, he thought.

  As a boy in Marcellus, New York, before his father moved the family to Vandeleur, Cook had been a gentle child, often bullied by his schoolmates. It was another snowy November day – Monday, the 29th – when Cook was twelve years old that Otis Freeman, who fancied himself the toughest boy in the village, had gathered his gang on the steps of the schoolhouse.

  “About time we taught this little runt a lesson,” Otis told his minions, pointing to Cook. “Teacher’s pet … always trying to get on the good side of old Mrs. Holmes.” Cook thought this a good time to run off. The price of sticking around would be at least a roughing up and quite possibly a bloody nose.

  Cook and Otis were in the same class, even though Otis was three years older, the result of him having failed three different grades. Otis had been picking on Cook for months, mainly because he made an easy target. Cook was small for his age, reticent and unskilled in such boyish pastimes as choking kittens, setting snarling dogs on each other, or using slingshots to kill songbirds.

  When the boys began to pelt him with snowballs, Cook ran faster. He looked back to see if they were gaining on him. A wet snowball hit him in the face. It stung like blazes and he knew even before he crumpled to the ground that a good-sized rock must have been imbedded in it. He felt blood gush onto his nose and into his eyes. He heard Otis shout, “Don’t nobody say I threw that or you’ll be sorry.” Cook blacked out while he lay in the snow and when he came to he was aware only of the silence of the street and the grey fog that covered his eyes. He stumbled home to be cleaned up and put to bed by his mother. When he awoke the next morning he was unable to see, and thought his eyes had been bandaged. When he put his hands on his face and found nothing there, he cried out in terror. He couldn’t understand that he was destined to live in a world of darkness.

  Cook’s parents sent for a doctor but the only advice he could offer was to keep the boy’s room darkened. Cook stayed in bed for three weeks and tried to understand what being blind would mean. “Why did this happen to me, Mum? I never did anything to Otis Freeman. How come he put a stone in that snowball? What’s going to become of me?”

  “I don’t know but your father has spoken to Mr. Freeman and he’s given Otis a good thrashing. The doctor says if we keep your room dark, you might get to see again.” Cook never did get his full sight back and it was not until many years later he learned that the stone that had hit him had detached the retina of one eye. An inflammation followed that led to blindness in his other eye. He was told prompt surgery might have saved his sight but no surgeon had been available to perform such a miracle.

  Cook never went back to school. He learned to rely on other senses – hearing, touch and smell – and guided by his three brothers and encouraged by his sister Sarah, led a life not too different from that of other boys. As he grew older he began to detect shapes and shadows in the void of his sight, but he remained pensive and shy, seldom volunteering his thoughts.

  Cook’s father Jacob Teets had served a long apprenticeship before becoming a master cabinet-maker. His family had come from Germany. Jacob moved his wife Margaret and Cook and his three brothers and sister Sarah to the Queen’s Bush the year that Cook turned twenty-four. “That country’s got free land,” Jacob told his wife. “And fine stands of hardwood. Good for making furniture.”

  Torn from his familiar surroundings, Cook became dejected and morose. Only when his brother Nelson started teaching him to make furniture did he begin to assert himself. “You’re doing a good job,” Nelson told him every day. “If ever you need anything, you’ll always have me here beside you.”

  Jacob, being one of the first into the district, had taken up a grant of fifty acres of Crown land just north of the new village of Vandeleur. The land had rolling fields, sandy so
il, and a clear pond fed by springs. The pond released a stream that flowed into the Beaver River. Jacob built flues to divert the stream toward a waterwheel that he used to power a large circular saw he had brought from Toronto. He knew that the property’s ample stands of maple, elm, birch and pine trees were its most valuable asset. He harvested the trees carefully and chose the best wood to make tables, cabinets, commodes and bed frames.

  “The pieces are sturdily made and nicely finished,” one of his first customers told him. Word spread and before long most families in nearby townships owned at least one piece of Teets furniture. The work enabled Jacob to keep his family comfortable and prosperous.

  In comparison to the Teets and the Babingtons, the Lepppards lived in dire want, yet in their own way were serenely content in the log house James and Molly had put up on the land they occupied near Eugenia Falls, where the Beaver River tumbled over a seventy-foot precipice to the valley below. Molly kept the house going between giving birth to nine more babies, chasing deer from her vegetable garden, and stocking a root cellar with turnips, potatoes, carrots and beets.

  Molly gave birth to their new home’s first baby unattended except by a neighbouring woman. When a priest called on her a few days later, Molly had no idea what to name the little girl. “Why not Rosannah?” the priest suggested. “A Godly name, it means Rose of Grace.” Molly agreed, and the child spent her first three months in a basket before being put in a tiny bed with her sisters Elizabeth and Bridget. They played on the drafty floor that winter, moving outdoors as soon as the snow melted. Later, they ran barefoot in the mud and by the summer of her second year, Rosannah had put her toes into the river and had learned to balance on Elizabeth’s lap atop their horse, Sadie. As she grew older, Rosannah liked to tag alongside her father as he tended his crops, milked his cow, and herded a half dozen sheep. He often said she was of more help to him than either of her brothers, who were bigger and stronger. He didn’t mind if she forgot to say her prayers at night and when Molly complained he told her, “The girl’s fine, just let her be.”