My Name is Resolute (56 page)

America told us which of them had held her and which had torn her clothing. But in truth, Cullah said, when he confronted the men all of them came to each other’s aid, and he’d had no choice but to give them all a good drubbing.

“All at one time?” Brendan asked him.

“Aye, boy.”

“Six trained soldiers?” his son asked again.

Cullah appeared insulted. “What are six lobster-backs to a braw and hearty Scot? Slavering ninnies. Long as they did not have time to load a musket, I had naught to fear.” I laughed but with bitterness. I felt proud of him yet worried that he would bring more retribution upon himself. The Crown would endure no thwarting of an order of billeting.

One day as I went up to clean ashes from the hearths, I caught the corporal creeping up the stair, opening the door to my bedroom with a wary hand. “What say, there?” I called. I gripped the ash bucket with both hands, ready to throw it.

He gave a short laugh. “Pardon, Mistress. The boys have need of a stone to sharpen the cutter he gave us to make firewood with.”

“The stone is in the barn, along with the other tools.”

“Yes, Mistress,” he said, smiling, and sauntered back down the steps to return to his chores.

America became as a drifting shadow, terrified to come from the tower room without her hair under her cap and fully clothed, when before she had joined us at breakfast in a shawl and wrapper. She told me that now she lived in constant fear. I showed her how to open the wall in her tower room, to find an entire flight of stairs that would get her straight into the barn on the ground floor. The barn already looked as if it were joined to the house, but the little hallway that allowed us to care for our animals without braving the cold was narrower on the inside than it seemed from outside. I showed her the key to opening the cupboard in the kitchen, which had a room behind it from which a person could, by means of eyeholes, see the kitchen and parlor along with outside by the front door. I showed her how she could stop on the stairway to the loom, turn to her left, push aside the board, and through that opening find herself above the loom on a solid floor in the room where August had hidden. A small window that appeared as normal as any from outside lit the room. Below the window sat the locked chest where Cullah kept the pipes.

In this dark place lit by a dirty window and my single candle, I felt as if time again had rolled in upon itself, as if I stood in the hold of the
Falls Greenway,
the deck shifting and rolling, the low ceiling overhead dangling with cobwebs and filth from above. I heard Patience’s voice when I asked, “Were you trying to knock my brains out?” Patey had said, “If that was what it took to save you.” And I had cried and pushed her away, thinking her nothing but cruel, believing she hated me. I looked now at America, trembling, her small bosom heaving from imagined torment, for she was old enough to know what a man meant to do with a maid, whereas I had not known. Tears filled my eyes and my whole frame shook. Patience had not hated me. She had loved me. I wrapped my arms about America and held her as if I were Patience, as if she were me, patting her back, soothing with murmurs like doves’ sounds. I said, “We shall be strong of heart. Those men may be stout and more in number than we, but they are foolish and ruled by lust. We shall have the day because we shall be ruled by virtue and wits.”

“Mistress?” America asked with a whimper in her voice.

“Yes?”

“You are so kind to me, Mistress. I shall not forget you as long as I live. I shall always love you.”

Well and aye, I thought. If a lass had someone to care for her, she stood a chance in this life. I said, “Do not tell the children. They are still too young to keep this place a secret and might want to play here. If there is need of them coming here for safety, that will be soon enough for them to find it out.”

“Is there a secret place in the barn, too?”

I smiled. “You have seen the flat place on the east side? It is cold and wet, and would suit for the direst of need, but you will not need it. That place is to store old farm equipment.” There was, of course, another place above it, dry and secure. I could not have said why we built it so. It kept us both happy to know it was there, as invisible as a fairy’s breath, and large enough for our family to sleep within.

One late November evening, when a bitter wind howled outside and cries of old haunts murmured through the rafters, only five of the soldiers came to supper. “Where is Ross?” I asked, for by then I knew them.

“He claimed a fever this morning. Lazy lout.”

“Well, I am not traipsing all the way to the attic,” I said. “One of you take up his supper.” We finished eating. The soldier named Collin took a cup of ale and a trencher with a piece of venison and herbs in sauce up the stairs. In a few minutes he came down, his hands still full. “Well?” I asked. “Did he want it not?”

“He won’t be wanting any more now, Mistress. Ross is dead.”

They buried him down the hill by Goody’s grave. We discovered that of the men staying in Jacob’s empty house, two had died already, and the other four were ailing. Within two days, Brendan and Jacob had a fever and a hard, dry cough. Cullah came down with it the same day as America, Gwyneth, and Barbara. I recognized this from what other women had described. We had contracted throat distemper.

That evening, after an afternoon of plaintive wailing, my precious Barbara died in my arms and dear, tiny Grandan got fever. While I tended him, my head ached, my ears hummed, and dizziness caused me to lose footing as I tried to nurse him while moving from the parlor to the kitchen. Benjamin and I began coughing the next morning, and a couple of the soldiers did their best to bring us warm ale and boiled potatoes they made. Fever raged through me along with chills, sweating, but a nursing babe cannot be denied, so I took him to my bed with me, and I held my darling Grandan as he took his last ragged breath. We had our other children now on pallets in our bedroom, and that night, Cullah, coughing as if he would turn himself inside out, dragged himself from his bed to adjust Benjamin’s coverlet and found our second boy had left us, too. I was too ill to weep. When I woke and sobbed, I fainted.

I took to my bed as Cullah and the last whole man of the soldiers lit a fire in the graveyard yet again to soften the earth for another grave. I do not remember them burying the children. I knew not whether any of them lived. I thrashed, for I remember my hand hitting the wall and something making a loud noise. Soaked in my sweat, I could not eat and did not want the water on a spoon someone tried to force between my lips.

I was told that one of the soldiers went to Concord for a doctor, but the man would not accompany the soldier to our house, for the town was full of it then, and there was little to be done. Children lived or died at the will of God. Adults took it and had half a chance, but most children below the age of twenty perished.

The ache I felt in my back and arms was treachery, but the ache in my throat and belly alarmed me even in my sleep, but I did sleep, unable to do anything else. I felt the warmth, though, slickness flooding around me. The hands, gentle but strong and somewhat fumbling, moved me back and forth, a sort of soft tumble, as they cleaned around me.

When at last I could raise my head and take my own broth from a spoon, I no longer carried a child. Jacob, we still had, as well as America and our two, Brendan and Gwyneth. Cullah would speak nothing of it all. I took his hand and we wept bitter, wearing tears, until at last he left me there and I wept until I slept again, in that dark, dreamless void of illness that is more a treading the line between living and dying than true sleep.

It was the eighteenth of December when at last I rose to don clothes. I had lost all my motherly plumpness, and though I had mourned the loss of a narrow waist that allowed me to show off my lavender dress so long ago, I now mourned the sallow, shrunken hag I felt I appeared. Cullah, too, seemed drawn and wretched, America dragged herself from one chair to another, Gwyneth whined every moment she was awake, and dear Brendan alone seemed ready to return to life. I took no joy in anything. My babes had been buried before I saw them dressed and cleaned for their last repose, I remembered in a mysterious, cloudy way. I spent days weeping or on the verge of it.

Of the soldiers, four remained alive on December twenty-sixth. That day I told Collin Trask and Corporal Landon to go in the woods and cut a tree and bring it to the hearth for Christmas. I was not going to deny my remaining children a bit of plum pudding, a shining shilling, and a warm fire. In a place where celebrating Christmas was a crime, I made us criminals, witnessed by these men who had the power to arrest us, these harbingers of death who had already done worse.

Corporal Landon nodded, said nothing, and did as I bade him. Collin scratched his head and said, “I’ve never had Christmas before. Will there be pudding, Mistress?”

“I will do what I can, son,” I said, feeling so ancient that this boy but fifteen years younger than I seemed as a child to me. I made a small pudding with hard rum sauce, and Cullah lit it the way my pa used to do. I watched the blue flames lick the edges, remembering how the rules dictated it should be the size of the smallest child’s head, and though the others moaned with delight I wept at the table. Cullah’s face washed with red; he could not stop his tears. The children and the soldiers thanked me for the pudding, but I ate none of it, apologized for having a headache, and went upstairs to bed.

1747

In January the soldiers moved on. We had done our duty as subjects of His Royal Majesty, George Second. They had brought with them ravenous appetites for food, randy attitudes toward our ward, and death itself to my babies. No matter that they had softened their manner and tried their best in the end, my heart was hardened to agonizing iron. I watched them go and had to stop myself from spitting on their heels. They brought this corruption, this devil’s wrath upon my family, and I hoped they all died screaming.

Cullah spent the rest of that winter repairing and sharpening his tools. He also worked the blades of his battle-axe and claymore, dagger and dirk, and a short-sword he brought from town. I worried, for he neglected his shop, and orders stood waiting for furniture, paneling and trim, and, as always, coffins. I brought the woolen wheel upstairs to sit by the great fireplace after supper while the children read me their lessons. Before our season of illness, Cullah had listened to them, amazed, I think, that they could read, and enthralled by the stories they read aloud. Now, for hours before we went up to bed, he stared hard into the fire itself, paying no attention to the children or me. On a night in late February when a blizzard howled at our chimney, I asked him, “Why must you sharpen those again? You should be after the miller’s chest of drawers.”

“Three times in February I heard an owl after the sun rose. I saw a black cat on my way to town, walking back and forth as if to dodge something in the road, then it turned back and made tracks in the shape of an arrow.”

All those portended death. Death had been at work in our house aplenty. “Why did you not tell me before this?”

“I didn’t want you to fear. I believe war is coming.”

“I fear your reticence more.” At length I said, “I know no fear. Three of my babies have died in my arms, and me powerless to ease their suffering. Part of me lies buried in each of their graves. I am dead already, husband. Tell me not of war. Death is not my enemy. Living is.”

Cullah’s head rotated without expression, his eyes wide and staring like the owl his movement mimicked. His eyes brimmed with tears and he said, “Do I mean less to you, then? And Brendan? Gwenny? Are we not worth your taking one more breath?”

“Of course the living are in my heart.” I looked down at my hands and took my foot off the treadle, letting the wheel slow to a stop, its comforting clicks slowing, slowing, running out of time as the ticking of a great clock winding to a stop. “I did not mean that, Eadan. But you talk of war as if we must prepare for it. I will not think of war nor plan for it. War, you say? What should I do if you were killed? I would keep Gwenny and Brendan in until they are apprenticed, and then I should wish to die.”

Cullah’s face contorted with pain. “My pa is old but he is with me, yet. Upstairs, sleeping, sounding like a band saw shearing planks off a tree full of burls. His wife, my mother, is dead. His other sons, too. Now he has buried grandchildren. Even though I am a man, and I do not need him to keep me, I want him alive. Whether I live or die, your children will want you alive as long as you can stay alive. I want you alive.”

Tears dribbled down my face and fell to my bodice as I said, “I am no use to you or anyone.”

“That is a fairy talking, trying to fool me,” he said. Then he rose and knelt at my side. Taking my hand in his, he kissed my palm and then my fingers, folding them until my hand was as a small apple cradled in his hands. “You are so sad, so full of grief. I know better, my fair one. Believe me in this. You have no need to be of use. You have the need only to be.”

I fell into his embrace, burying my head against his neck.

“Hush now. The bairnies will hear you and then how would they feel?” He pulled himself back and smiled at me, the saddest, most burdened smile I have ever seen. “See then? That is Resolute. That is the wife I knew.”

I heard a sound behind us and turned to see America Roberts on the steps, watching us with rapt attention. Her eyes glistened with unspent tears. “Beg pardon, Mistress. Gwyneth is crying. She says she wants her babbies. I gave her her merry poppet but that did not soothe her and I don’t know what she means.”

In that moment, Gwyneth herself peeped from behind America’s bed gown, holding on to the girl’s legs. We held out our hands to both of them, and Gwenny ran to her pa, saying, “Pa? I want our babbies. Get them out of the ground now.” America nestled close to me and I put my arm about her.

I asked, “Is Brendan awake, too?” as Gwenny then climbed into my lap and put her thumb in her mouth, gripped a strand of America’s hair, and snuggled betwixt us.