My Name is Resolute (57 page)

“I know not, Mistress,” America said.

I turned to Cullah and said, “Perhaps he is too grown to let us know he mourns.”

Cullah nodded. “Boys spend too much time crying. Their hearts are too big and there is so much they cannot understand. Then when a man begins to mature he believes he must not weep or he will lose his manhood. Sooner or later, he discovers that sorrow does not destroy it, but when it is all new to him, this growing, this strengthening, it feels too breakable to risk. His fear is so great a burden that he must carry it inside until sometime when he is sure that he will not become a boy again for it.”

Though Cullah prepared for war, though he haunted the woods with his pipes, and harried trees with his broadsword and battle-axe, war did not come. Not then.

*   *   *

Three soldiers came in July with another order of billeting. Cullah took his claymore from its closet and sent them flying for their lives through the fields. Jacob said, “They will come back with more and arrest us. If they do, I will go with them and hang. You will hide, Cullah.”

Cullah clapped his father on the shoulder and said, “No. If they return, we shall tell them I could not read their orders, and thought they meant war upon us. Then we will say we gladly will allow them billeting here, and they will cause us no problems at all, I think, now the fear of Eadan Lamont is in them.”

I shuddered and turned away from them as if men’s plots and power felt too brutal to behold. At least, the soldiers did not return.

*   *   *

Cullah returned to his shop. His sadness, rather than warping his work, made him put his heart into every piece. No longer was his furniture merely good, simple, and useful. He spent more time designing it, making drawings, sanding and polishing, as if everything were done for one of our lost children. The finished work was endowed with some ethereal quality of form and air, as if tables’ legs floated their platform, rather than held it. Chests rose to heights so tall that it took a step stool to reach into the topmost drawers; he carved shells into rich mahogany and black cherry cabinet drawers and put brass pulls in the centers, topped them with lathed finials fine as a wisp, and worked rosettes that looked like petals. The legs upon which each piece stood seemed too delicate to hold it. His prices went up and up, for his work was sought among the gentry of Boston, and to own a MacLammond highboy or table became a boast. No one asked why the mark he made on the back of each chest was a small thistle with
EL
in the center.

Cullah told me he had an order from the house of Spencer in Virginia, after having shipped a marvelous pair of matching chests to the house of Fairfax, the largest plantation in that province. “Imagine,” he said. “The old rotter, spending money for my work. I believe I should deliver it myself.” He said it, though, without a smile. Without joy. It was as if the sadness of his heart showed in his craft so that an inanimate object like a clover-shaped lampstand vibrated with his emotions.

With no more clouties to change and wash, I had time again to weave. My weeks of spinning wool had left me with plenty of supply, so I dyed the yarn black and made fifty yards of it by August. I embroidered it with black, so that it seemed richer than it was, a pattern that could not have been woven in.

*   *   *

This day, this muggy, misty August day, soon as Cullah had gone, I fastened my shoes to set out to the field, and heard a great din from the yard. There might be a bear in the goat yard, or a fox in the henhouse, so I grabbed a broom. Anything I could not chase with a broom, I would not chase at all, preferring to lose a goat than my own hide. I peered out the glass in the parlor, and saw the form of a man moving between the trees.

I ran the stairs two at a time, roused the children in their bedrooms and pulled them into the hallway with me. Someone intent on doing us harm would go up the main stairs. I called, “Brendan? Gwyneth? America? Follow me.”

Down we went, into the room behind the kitchen cupboard. I looked out the glass again. Here came the man. An Indian slipping from tree to outbuilding, now crouched by the wooden fence at the goat shed. I got behind the cupboard and pulled it shut.

Before much time had passed, I heard the familiar squeak of the door hinges. The Indian was in the house. No one followed him. From where I stood, I could see him moving with the stealth of a cat, listening, sniffing the air. He looked into the pot of beans on the hearth. He moved the cask of dried fish from where I had left it, and even peered at the cupboard, so that I drew away lest he see the reflection of my eye through the hole. He did not go up the stairs. He stopped at my spinning wheel and rotated the wheel with one hand, jumping back as it made its ticking sound. From the basket on the floor he took a roll of woolen thread, the finest I had made, and pushed that into his waistband. Then he walked out the door, leaving it ajar, the children huddled together. I ran to the window to see him dart into shadows by the barn and from there into the woods.

Later, when I got the children from the cupboard, I tried to cheer them by making sport of any robber who came but to steal yarn.

Brendan said, “He’s going to make a braw nightcap for his bairnies.”

Gwenny added, “Do Indians know how to knit and tat, Ma?”

We laughed. But I asked Cullah to buy us a pistol, and to teach me how to fire it.

*   *   *

That September old Barnabus died. He was found stretched out on his floor by someone peeping in the window, as if he had simply chosen a strange place for a nap on a warm afternoon, hands clasped upon his chest, a faint smile opening his lips. Cullah and I gave ten shillings for him to be buried beside the wife whom he so loved. We tried to get the man’s huge dog to come with us, but when we got to the edge of town the beast took off into the woods and we could not find him though we searched an hour.

That night following our burying Barnabus, we lay together for the first time since our poor infants had died. I felt little pleasure from it as I had before. He stopped and rolled over, staring at the ceiling. “Wife?” he said.

“Yes, husband?”

“My heart is not in it. I cannot.”

“Mine is so blackened, too, that I want to lie near you, nothing more.”

After so long a time I thought he had fallen asleep, he said, “Resolute? I want to read more than my name. I want you to teach me to read.”

I leaned upon one elbow and looked in his direction, though the room was too dark to see him at all. Leading with my lips pursed, I planted a kiss, surprised to place it on his eyebrow. “If you wish it, I will do it. I will become a teacher,” I said, and patted his beard, which had grown quite stout. “Although if you are to be my pupil, you must be sheared. I find too much wool does make the mind linty.”

After a moment of silence he drew in a breath and laughed a single loud hurrah, following it with a ripping gale of laughter. “Perhaps I’ll tie bonny ribbons about the mat so that it tickles my lady’s fancy.”

I laughed, too. Then I said, “I insist on shaven pupils, Mr. MacLammond.”

He reached out into the darkness and patted my arm. “Then if it cannot be skinned, I shall at least cut it nicely. Will that suit you, Lady Lamont?”

I followed his tease. “Aye, Sir Knight of the Realm, it will.”

“You will have to let me do the learning of it in bits here and there. Slip me a paper with something upon it. I do not want my children to know their pa cannot read.”

I suspected they already knew. “Discretion shall be our word.”

“I thought our word was ‘sword.’”

“Oh. Oh, yes, it was.”

“I love those old days, my Resolute, those days before we knew such pain and grief. We have lost them forever before we realized how happy we were.”

“Aye.”

“Would they could come again, I should never again be angry for a farthing shorted on my bill. I should never again curse the cold or rain or the heat of summer. If I could have them back, I would suffer no sadness upon any of our hearts.”

“Oh, Eadan. I do love you with all my heart. I love you more than I knew I could love anyone.” I lay back down upon my pillow. “I fear I shall spoil our children now.”

“Aye. It matters not. Life is short and must be lived. We must not let them become lazy or cruel, but beyond that, give them what they want.”

After a long handful of moments, I said, “Eadan? Give me a child.”

“What?”

“Give me a child, husband. I beg you. Give me a child.” I placed my hand upon his chest, right above his heart.

He felt in the darkness for my face and kissed me slowly, tenderly. “Is that your wish, wife?”

“Most earnestly.”

“I am but yours to command, then.”

CHAPTER 26

Michaelmas 1750

At last, in 1750 before I had turned thirty, Brendan was thirteen and Gwyneth was eight, I gave birth to another boy child. We named him Benjamin after our other Benjamin. That year, too, Brendan went to apprentice with his father and with that, Cullah confided to me, he apprenticed not only as a woodsmith but as a Highland warrior. Cullah slowed his business to spend two hours every day away from the shop with Brendan, teaching him Gaelic songs and charms, and how to fight with everything from a battle-axe to his bare hands. The boy grew quiet, taller, and along with a wisp of dark hair on his chin, a seriousness came to his face as the boyish joy left it.

Father and son became inseparable. I felt the loss of my boy. It was as if he saw that he was to become a man, and that women, particularly mothers, had no place in that. Perhaps that was true. I remember the battle I faced for so many reasons in just weaning him. This was another weaning. While I yearned for the lad’s head upon my breast as of old, I thanked God that he had a father. Without Cullah what would Brendan have done?

That year, Jacob’s eye had gone white. He had lost stature and strength, too, and slumped over, feeling his way about the house and grounds with hands outstretched. It was as if the manhood and strength that took hold in the younger Brendan drained itself from the older Brendan to achieve it.

Cullah came to me one morning before leaving for the shop. He held a leather piece, folded about a roll of plaid. “It’s gone to moths and rot,” he said as he opened it up. He spread the cloth wide. “Can you make this?”

“Of course I can,” I said. “Mostly blue, with a strand of white and then red, four blacks, five greens. How many yards do you want?”

“Maybe a bit longer, another yard would help. And more than one. Make the same for Pa and my boys. When it is done tell me and we will hide it. And you must tell no one as you work on it. It must be done in secret, even from the family. Resolute, I don’t want the children to remark to some playmate that their ma is making plaids in the basement. And there is that girl, too. We don’t know but what her loyalty might change with the attention of some young swain. What I’m asking is against the law.”

“Then why are you asking it? You have carried this old plaid around for years. Why, now, do you need a new one?”

“War is coming.”

As I readied for bed that evening, I wondered if my husband were going mad. I asked God in my prayers whether the curse on this house, or Goody Carnegie’s spirit, or some other shade of evil had attached itself to him. I thought as I warped the loom, perhaps he believed that by being ready for war, he could forestall such an event.

Cullah renewed his practice of the pipes. To my greatest surprise one day he came home from town with a drum so large Gwenny could fit within it if we had let her go in. He had made drumsticks upon his own lathe, and began with a simple pattern to teach Brendan how to hold and play the drum.

In the evenings when Gwenny was sent to bed, Cullah learned not just to read and write in English, I taught him some Latin and French as well. The French were, after all, Scotland’s allies. This fact, we cautioned Brendan, was not to be spoken of before others. He looked at me with the most serious face, that tiny fuzz of darkening hair upon his lip, and said, “Mother, I swear to you, I carry a thousand secrets already. One more is nothing for you to have a care about.”

I sat up straighter, feeling as if I had just heard my own words from my son’s mouth. “Well and aye, then, Brendan.”

*   *   *

By 1752, for reasons I could not comprehend, the prices of all my wool and linen doubled and then doubled again. It took a shilling to buy what a farthing bought a few months before. Our money dwindled, not in the amounts, for I guarded and counted the coins once a week, then placed them back in their little hole. The dwindling seemed to come from some incredible force, something that made everything cost more and, consequently, the money worth less.

By the end of that year, too, another shock came to Lexington town, for the man who had been the minister at First Church for over fifty years suddenly died. The Reverend Mr. Hancock had always appeared to be older than Methuselah. What did surprise Cullah and me both was that the church came to us for a share of his funeral. We gave them two pounds and seven. Deacon Brown received it with a frown. “Will that be all?” he asked. “You know the value of our money is dropping daily by the regulation of currency. It will take two hundred and twelve, we calculate.”

Cullah said, “I will give you three pounds then, but I would rather see that his widow had food and clothes this winter, than to clothe a dead man, no matter who he is.”

“Mr. Hancock’s widow has asked for five hundred bricks for the burial place.”

“Deacon, I am a working man. You know we honor the man as you do. Besides, a widow that presumes to need five hundred bricks for a single grave must be sending his horse and buggy with him.” Cullah smiled.

“Will you not preserve your standing in the church, then?”

My mouth fell open, but I could not speak. Cullah said, “I hear the talk about being ‘tight as a Scotchman,’ as they say. I think my standing is justly served by this donation. Now, sir, will you have supper with us?”

*   *   *

In the Year of Our Lord 1753, when we heard the king had changed the calendar in a confusing eleven-day jump, I was thirty-three at Michaelmas. Shortly after my birthday, I bore the girl who was to be my last child. We waited to bestow her with a name, so much had we feared putting another child in the grave. All that time we agreed to only call her my ma’s word
Gree-a-tuch,
as if she were not real. When she had lived until the first of May, we named her Dorothy Ann. Dolly, for short. I kissed her warily, fearful of the pain of loving her, though love her I did; fearful lest she hurt me by dying.