Heart So Hungry Read online

  as always,

  this book is for Rita and Bret and Nathan

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book such as this cannot be written without a great deal of help. Among the many librarians and archivists to whom I am indebted for their research assistance, I extend a special thanks to Gail Weir at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies Archives in St. John’s, and Sherri Campbell at the Eccles-Lesher Memorial Library in Rimersburg, Pennsylvania.

  As always, I am grateful to my agent, Peter Rubie, for his friendship and faith. And to my editor, Michael Schellenberg, for his insights and suggestions.

  This book is a hybrid of fact and fiction. The events and individuals depicted here are a matter of historical record; scenes have been expanded and dramatized based on known facts.

  PROLOGUE

  May 4, 1956

  “I AM GOING TO EXPLORE,” the old woman said. The friend with whom Mina Hubbard was visiting cautioned her not to stay out too long, their midmorning tea would be ready soon. The friend would have preferred that Mina not go out at all, for at eighty-six years old Mina had become a bit forgetful of late. More than once she had “gone to explore” the town of Coulsdon, a suburb of London, England, only to lose her bearings and be brought back to Fairdene Road by strangers.

  But Mina Benson Hubbard Ellis was not the kind of woman who could be persuaded to pass the day in a rocking chair, especially not a fine spring day like this one, a day that smelled of balsam and spruce and of rivers swift with melted snow. A Canadian who had trained as a nurse in New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mina still possessed the same headlong spirit that had defined her as a young woman, the same iron will that, in 1905, had made her one of the most celebrated women of her time.

  Even now that spirit was evident in the quickness of her gait and in the angle, not quite imperious, at which she held her chin. She came away from her friend’s house, paused for a moment to enjoy the scent of the bright May morning, then strode in the direction of the Coulsdon South railway station. She crossed the busy street with barely a glance at the traffic, extending her arms in both directions like a traffic cop, enforcing a path for herself, as was her habit.

  Few people if any in Coulsdon were aware of Mina’s fame and accomplishments. Few knew of her lecture tours across America and England. Few knew that during the Second World War, while bombs dropped all around her lovely home in London’s Hampstead neighbourhood, Mina, as described by biographer Anne Hart in the CBC radio program Through Unknown Labrador, was “serving up left-wing causes with the tea, and retiring each night, oblivious to bombs, to a bed whose silk coverlet was always spread with the grey blanket she had slept under on the long-ago Labrador trail.” Few knew that at thirty years of age Mina had been timid and indecisive, that she had considered herself unattractive and of small value except as a companion to the man she all but worshipped, the hapless Leonidas Hubbard Jr., whose ignominious fate would soon determine her own.

  If the citizens of Coulsdon knew Mina at all, it was as a small, eccentric old woman—a woman who now, on this sparkling spring day, climbed a grassy bank near the railroad tracks and strolled along like an explorer on a high ridge, eyes searching for something or somebody.

  According to the Purley and Coulsdon Advertiser of May 11, 1956, Jill Foster, a fourteen-year-old girl, was standing on the platform of the Coulsdon South station when Mina came down the grassy bank and walked toward the tracks. Jill wondered where the old woman thought she was going; she had already passed the pedestrian walkway that would have brought her safely across the tracks to the station. Then Mina opened a gate intended to keep pedestrians away from the tracks, and Jill nudged her companion, fifteen-year-old Roger Aslin.

  Roger cupped his hands to his mouth. “You’d better watch out there!” he called. “Train’s due any minute now!”

  But Mina paid no attention. Perhaps she did not hear well. Perhaps she assumed that an approaching train could be held at bay by her outstretched arms, just as the cars and lorries were.

  Or perhaps she knew full well that a train would never yield, that some things in life remain unswervable. A woman’s iron will, for example. A wife’s unflinching devotion.

  In any case, Mina paid no heed to the warnings. She paid no heed to the rumble of the train as it approached the station, or to the shrill blast of its whistle. Maybe the rumble reminded her of a waterfall’s roar, a sound that, in an earlier time, had never failed to thrill her. In those days every new waterfall and every new set of rapids had murmured with the promise of discovery, and she had approached each one with a constriction in her throat and the hope that somehow, miraculously, Leonidas, her Laddie, would be waiting there to receive her, to welcome her back into his arms.

  Now, she crossed the first set of tracks and stepped into the centre of the second set, and there paused, lifted her chin slightly, and smiled once more.

  The children on the platform screamed to her. Mina turned her face to the sun. Did she hear the shouts of warning? Or were her thoughts attuned to another world entirely, to the perfume of pine in the air, the scent of a misty river a world and a lifetime away? Did she again feel that familiar tightening in her chest and hear in the train’s approach the rumble of a waterfall rushing to engulf her on such a fine spring day … a perfect day for her journey’s end?

  PART I

  How It Began

  WHATEVER MINA’S MOTIVE for stepping onto the tracks that day, her devotion to Leonidas Hubbard Jr. was surely at the heart of it. He was a man whose infectious enthusiasm for adventure altered not only his own life but hers and many others’ as well.

  As a child growing up in rural Michigan, Hubbard developed a passionate interest in history and geography and a love for the natural world. Mina later described him as an imaginative and sensitive boy who had been reared on stories of travel and adventure. “His imagination kindled by what he read,” she wrote, “and the oft-repeated tales of frontier life in which the courage, endurance, and high honour of his own pioneer forefathers stood out strong and clear, it was but natural that the boy under the apple trees should feel romance in every bit of forest, every stream; that his thoughts should be reaching towards the out-of-the-way places of the earth where life was still that of the pioneer with the untamed wilderness lying across his path. …”

  He brought those same sensibilities to his duties as a reporter for an evening paper in Detroit, where he went to work upon his graduation from the University of Michigan in 1897. A slight man of large ambitions, it wasn’t long before he yearned for more challenge and adventure. In the summer of 1899, with less than five dollars in his pocket, Hubbard left Detroit for New York City. New York was throbbing with growth, the perfect place for him to launch himself into the ranks of his heroes. His most fervent desire was to become as famous as Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Peary and Jack London, all bold and independent souls, men with fire in their blood. He considered himself cut from the same cloth.

  Unfortunately, Hubbard arrived in New York City with no contacts, no letter of introduction and no job prospects. Armed only with clips of his work in Detroit he trudged from door to door in search of a position. No offers were forthcoming.

  All too soon the money ran out. With nothing to eat, his energy faltered, and for two days he staggered from place to place so weakened by hunger that he feared he would be arrested for public drunkenness.

  Finally, when it seemed he was destined to collapse and die unnoticed on those friendless streets, an acquaintance from Michigan appeared out of nowhere and forced fifteen dollars into Hubbard’s trembling hand. That same day one of Hubbard’s stories was accepted for publication. But even better news was yet to come. A few days later he was hired as a staff writer for the Daily
News. Before long he was getting all the best assignments for that paper and also selling an occasional piece to the Saturday Evening Post.

  Then, calamity. In early May the headaches began, a pulsing ache like a hammer to his brain. Then the cough and sore throat, the nosebleeds and constipation. That first week he continued to work, doing his best to ignore the pain. But when his temperature rose and would not return to normal and the other symptoms worsened too, a doctor sent him to the Long Island Infirmary. Just like that his job with the Daily News was whisked out from under him.

  In a few short weeks typhoid fever can rob a man of all dignity. Certainly Leonidas Hubbard Jr. felt he had lost that and more as he lay abed in the quarantine ward. During the long days and longer nights of May 1900, as his body fought off the illness, he wondered anxiously what new misery would befall him.

  The only bright spot in his life was his nurse. The comely Mina Benson, shy and petite, was a not quite pretty woman but with a gaze so soft that he had more than once felt himself drifting away on it. And she was a wonderful listener as well. A very good thing, too, considering how much Hubbard loved to talk.

  From his hospital bed he regaled the shy girl—and he could not help but think of her as a girl, so deferent and modest, though at thirty she was two years his senior—with the tales he never tired of recounting. He told her of Peary’s work in Greenland and among the Eskimos and his plans to conquer the North Pole, “The North Pole! Just think of it.” He told her of Stanley’s exploration in mysterious Africa, of John Wesley Powell’s thrilling one-armed exploits in the American West. The name of Leonidas Hubbard Jr. will one day be added to that list, he told her. Exactly where he would go and precisely what he would accomplish, he did not yet know. But a place in history awaited him.

  Mina was certain of this as well. She could feel his greatness when he spoke, could feel her skin flush with the intensity of his passions. That he even deigned to confide in her, a plain and unworldly farm girl from Ontario, this she found amazing and beyond explanation.

  It was clear to Hubbard that Mina was smitten with him, and he had to admit that they would make a good pair. But what did he, an unemployed journalist, have to offer other than his stories, the tales he knew by heart of his grandfather’s exploits as an Indian hunter in Ohio, his father’s adventures as a hunter and trapper in the forbidding wilds of Michigan?

  In Hubbard’s darkest hours Mina’s quiet faith in him became his only strength. She knew in her heart that a man of his talents would soon be on his feet, more successful than ever. “I don’t think anything can keep you down,” she confessed with a blush. And because Mina believed it—dear, sweet girl—Hubbard believed it too.

  After four frustrating weeks he was finally moved out of the quarantine ward. For a man as restless as he, it was like a release from prison. He walked endlessly up and down the hallways, filling the time between Mina’s visits to his room. He had never been the kind of man who could sit still for long, not unless he was reliving an adventure through his writing or reading, traipsing through dark forest, paddling against the current up a glittering stream. Besides, he had to toughen up his legs if he was soon to hit the streets again.

  He promised Mina that when he was released from the hospital he would take her hiking and canoeing and fishing. They would go on picnics and explore the surrounding woodlands together. Mina happily agreed to accompany him wherever he wished to go.

  In the meantime Hubbard walked the halls. During one of these strolls he noticed a man seated at the bedside of a pale but pretty woman, holding her hand in both of his. The man, who appeared to be maybe ten years older than Hubbard, heavier and with thinning hair, was dressed in a good suit, a suit far more fashionable than any Hubbard could afford. But the man’s face was drawn, his eyes clouded with grief. And on the cheeks of the pale woman whose hand he clutched was the telltale bloom of consumption.

  Hubbard felt compassion for that man, and a strange kind of kinship. He considered approaching him, offering his sympathies. After noticing the gentleman on a few more occasions, always seated at his wife’s bedside, looking so utterly alone, that was what Hubbard did. The husband, after a moment’s hesitation, seized Hubbard’s hand. His grip, Hubbard later told Mina, was as desperate as that of a man “about to drown in the ocean of his grief.”

  The man’s name was Dillon Wallace and he worked as a lawyer in Manhattan. He and his wife, Jennie, had been married only three years. And now she would soon be gone from him. It was so cruel and unfair, he confessed; too much for a man to bear.

  Hubbard and Wallace spent many hours together in the hospital. Hubbard spoke of his own misfortunes, if only to demonstrate that Wallace was not the sole recipient of raw treatment from the fates, and as evidence that tragedy can be overcome—“Must be overcome!”—lest one wishes to linger forever in the fog of despair.

  They talked of the activities they had once enjoyed, found they each longed for the pleasure of a hike through woods where no sound of man intruded, for the accomplishment of filling a creel with sleek trout pulled from a sun-spangled stream. In their shared miseries and common pleasures they took strength and comfort.

  Not long after meeting Wallace, Hubbard was released from the hospital. But no longer was he alone in New York. He had made many friends through his work at the Daily News and the Saturday Evening Post and he had developed a deep bond with Dillon Wallace. His most devoted friend by far, however, and now also his sweetheart, was Miss Benson. All readily assisted Hubbard every way they could, with money, letters of introduction, and with a confidence in him to match his own.

  To get his strength back that summer, Hubbard spent some time camping in the Shawangunk Mountains in southern New York state. It was precisely what he needed, a medicine taken in the whisper of a breeze through the branches, the call of crows in foggy tree-tops, the scent of a campfire, the delicious puck and sibilance of rain pattering on a canvas tent. His new friend Dillon Wallace sometimes accompanied him on these trips. The long hikes and quiet evenings were salubrious for Wallace, a widower now. In fact it was only at these times with Hubbard or when buried in work at his Manhattan office that the lawyer could step away from his grief for a while.

  That August Hubbard armed himself with a packet of articles and a letter of introduction and called on Caspar Whitney, editor and owner of a popular outdoor magazine called Outing. Whitney, like all who met Hubbard, could not help but be impressed with the young man’s enthusiasm and confidence. Though slight of stature, Hubbard projected a powerful presence, a charisma. There was always a smile on his handsome face, and his sharp, finely chiselled features, especially those eyes bright with the spirit of adventure, commanded attention.

  The man has energy and ambition, Whitney thought. Why not give him a try? Whitney offered an assignment, an article about the Adirondacks. Hubbard turned it in under deadline, a fine piece of writing.

  “All right,” Whitney told him. “I’ll take you on.”

  And suddenly all past miseries fell away from Leonidas Hubbard Jr. Not only was he a salaried writer again, but his work would appear in the same pages as that of Peary and Teddy Roosevelt.

  Early the next year, Hubbard decided that the time was right for him to act upon his “firm resolution” that “a certain portion of Canada be annexed to the United States.” He travelled to the farming country of Bewdley, Ontario, to request permission for that annexation. Mr. and Mrs. Benson were delighted by his proposal, and they granted their approval.

  Hubbard returned to New York City an exultant man. All the pieces of his life’s dream were falling into place. A plum position with a prestigious magazine and a lovely, sweet woman who had agreed to be his wife. It was everything he had ever hoped for.

  Within days he was assigned a series of articles that would take him through the southern states. Neither he nor Mina could abide the notion of being separated for the months it would take to complete the assignment, so arrangements were quickly made for what
Mina would describe as “a quiet wedding in a little church in New York.” On the last day of the first month of 1901, they began their life together as husband and wife.

  For the next five months theirs was a transient life. From the mountains of Virginia they travelled through the backwoods and along the dusty roads of North Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi. Hubbard not only gathered research and filed articles for Outing, he sold freelance pieces too, one on moonshining and one about an old pirate hangout, both to The Atlantic Monthly.

  Mina served as his assistant, eagerly pitching in at every turn. Whether hunting, hiking, researching, writing, or simply talking of his plans for their life together, Hubbard was indefatigable, and his optimism was contagious. Mina had never felt so alive nor so loved.

  After their southern trip the couple rented a house in Wurtsboro, a village in New York’s scenic Mamakating Valley, from which Hubbard could commute to work in Manhattan. The hunting and fishing in the Mamakating Valley were excellent, and the Hubbards’ friends visited them regularly. Especially Dillon Wallace. Mina found the lawyer to be a quiet man and sometimes a bit too sombre, but of course she forgave him his melancholy air; he had every right to it.

  Mina frequently cooked for her Laddie and their guests in Wurtsboro, veritable feasts praised by everyone who sampled them—roasts of lamb or beef, mountains of mashed potatoes, honey-glazed carrots, cakes and puddings and coffee and brandy. Sometimes the Hubbards and a friend or two would venture forth on a camping trip into the mountains, and these were the suppers Mina most enjoyed, communally prepared over a campfire for appetites so huge after a day of tramping and canoeing that even the simplest of fare—fried trout and bacon, tea with biscuits and marmalade—satisfied as no banquet ever could.

  But Mina did not always accompany her husband on his camping trips. In November 1901 he travelled to the Shawangunk Mountains with Dillon Wallace, and it was on this trip that Hubbard first articulated the dream he had been harbouring since just a boy. A dream to lead an expedition of his own into uncharted territory, an exploration of unknown lands that would forever after link the name of that land with his own.