My Name is Resolute (70 page)

It took a week, but Dorothy tired of the game and quit giving us all high signs every few minutes.

Later that week a committee of officials appeared early at our door before Cullah had finished breakfast. By the time they left, we stood silent, becalmed of even the basest of courtesy. We had been handed a printed and smeared “Notice of Taxation” that levied a tax upon every acre we owned and gave us but thirty days to come up with five pounds to place in the hands of the provincial treasury. Cullah glared, and said, “I would like to know how they think a laboring man can give six weeks’ earnings every year and still feed a family. Have we that much in reserve?”

“Yes,” I said. “Though only in what August sent.”

He stuck his chin forward. “If you will, my dear wife, count it out in the smallest coin we have. Ha’pennies and tuppence. Copper. Better yet, printed notes. Let them have the worthless Massachusetts paper if we have aught of that. Here’s one in my pocket. Use it to start.”

Every week that went by it became harder to afford things we used to spill. Flour and salt, sugar and tea. We tried to sell our vegetables but people did not buy. Beer was so high we bought cider, and Cullah built a cider press so we could make our own, but we could not make enough in one harvest to last a year, and it would get hard so soon that at times the children went to bed drunk. The work of flaxing had been so difficult that we ended up with little to spin, and we did not plant it that year.

I had never made my own candles, but the price of them now made them so dear I sought to buy wicks instead. The wicks and molds cost what a six months’ supply of candles might, but I could get many times that, I thought, if I could but grow clever at making them. I soon discovered that I detested making candles. The smell of tallow was revolting and I spilled it so often my floors were slick. I moved the process to outside the barn. Though in appearance it could be said that I had indeed created a candle, the results were smoky, melting tapers that burned to the stub in an hour. I soon lamented buying the molds and wicks for I could have spent the money on real candles.

Gwenny and I worked together then, when she could. We went with the children hunting bayberries, and the poor ones worked their best, coming home scratched and sweating. When they complained I told them of my years picking flax, and warned them not to cry for a scratchy bayberry bush was nothing to a flax field. Getting the oil from the berries meant an extra day of boiling, but it made better candles, sweet smelling and twice as strong.

Everywhere I looked, I found ways to scrimp. Making do became almost a religion to me. I felt proud of the things we undertook, the things we all learned together. Proud, but meager.

The tax collector came while Cullah was gone to work. I counted out printed banknotes adding up to two pounds eight, then stacks of pennies and ha’pennies. He asked me for a drink. I pulled water from the well and gave it him. “Have you no ale?” he asked.

“Ale? All we have is in your hand, sir,” I answered. “We have had no ale in this house for a fortnight. We drink water. Consider it God’s ale. Quite calms the spirit with no chance for drunkenness.”

“Tea?”

I had tea, but I was too angry for courtesy. “Who can afford tea, sir?”

As he walked away with two months of Cullah’s earnings I winced under the weight of this new sort of poverty in a way I never had when I was starving. I remembered the slave woman saying, “We know what that cost. You eat it.” I sat on a stump in the garden where my family’s labors barely wrested aught for our table. I had to sit a while and remember. Even asking my own memory what it was that connected it to this. At last I realized that poverty was a kind of captivity. Then I picked up my hoe and went to work. I dared not complain to Cullah because I was so angry it would bring out my worst nature. I cut a new line in the earth for yet more beets and parsnips. Carrots, potatoes, beets, beans, and parsnips. Perhaps squash this year. Squash did not keep well, but it livened the blood. Yes, I shall plant squash. “I shall ask Roland,” I said aloud to the soil, “to procure some squash seed.”

In the distance, a bell sounded. This was not Sunday. It could only mean some alarm. Over the tops of trees to the west, a haze of smoke drifted skyward. I ran toward it, not setting down the hoe. People came from all around, gathering as neighbors do, to the house of Virtue Dodsil. It was engulfed in flame. A spark from the chimney had caught the thatch. All of them were out, except for the house cat. There was little that could be done other than watch the place burn to the ground. Virtue himself stood before it, his whole body atremble like I have never seen before. He shook with such violence he had to shift his feet to keep standing.

I said to him, “Will you come to my house? At least for a few days?”

“No. We will live in our barn. At least we have that.”

I returned to my home and loaded my arms with blankets we could spare. Some new that I had made, some old to be placed upon the ground. I had woven goods aplenty, but little else to give. His wife took them with somber thanks. Then she looked at them more closely and said, “These are new. You didn’t mean to give us new blankets, did you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Emma, you need them.”

“Mistress MacLammond, Resolute, you are wondrous kind.”

That night, I lay awake thinking about our roof. “Cullah? I want you to build the chimney taller.”

“It is tall enough, Ressie. Dodsil’s roof caught fire because his chimney was full of holes, not because it was too short. Our chimney is good.”

“It is very old. It was here two generations ago.”

“It is two feet thick on all sides. Sleep, wife.”

CHAPTER 32

May 18, 1759

Sunday at Meeting, Reverend Clarke spoke with fiery words about the freedom of mankind. We of Lexington town were convinced there was no distance at all between our rights as British citizens and our godliness. One night at a town meeting, he had us shaking in our boots when he said, “Goodman Parker has been held, used most dreadfully and badly beaten, and charged with treason for carrying our minutes of the last meeting to the town council in Boston.”

All around the room, talk grew more heated. Cullah proclaimed that he was loyal but would not be crushed by the iron boots of the British Crown. I wondered at that because Cullah would never profess loyalty to the English Crown. Jacob listened, but said nothing. Scriveners wrote with mad excitement, taking down all that occurred. At last, Reverend Clarke asked for someone willing to carry our notes to Boston. “We will have two copies prepared, so that one may perchance get through. Two messengers. Who will go?”

Cullah stood and shouted, “I will go. There’s one man for you.”

Jacob’s face brightened. “I say, I shall be glad to go.”

Another man across the room shouted, “Take me. I’ll make it through.”

I pictured them slinking through the woods and brush, Redcoats on their tails like dogs after a fox. I stood. Amidst the shouting men, it was a while before anyone noticed, even Cullah seated next to me. I stood upon the bench where I had sat. The din about me shrank to almost nothing.

Reverend Clarke asked, “Goodwife MacLammond. Have you aught to say?”

“Yes,” I said. “Take me. I go to Boston every week. Put the papers in my handcart, and I shall walk there as I do every other time, with my child upon my apron strings. The soldiers will be looking for men carrying parcels, or horses with packets. I will stroll right up to the door and bid them all good day along the way.”

Nary a foot moved nor a sniffle was heard. The rumble of men’s voices began as faraway thunder mixed with laughter and rose to a terrible pitch. “A woman? A woman! A message taken by a woman. It’s terrible. It’s ungodly. It’s wonderful. It’s brilliant. It’s heresy.”

I stepped off the bench with Cullah’s help. His eyes flashed with more anger than I had ever seen. I had thought I was presenting a brave and unique solution. I had no idea he would be so alarmed. He folded his arms and looked straight ahead, the muscles in his jaws making his beard move. Jacob said nothing.

At last, Reverend Clarke held up his hands. “We will vote on this suggestion.” Vote they did. It was given to Cullah to carry one packet, to another man to carry the second. As we rode home, he simmered, not speaking.

We climbed the stairs and I felt the stunning blow of his silence as if he had slapped my face. I undressed for bed, unsure what to say or do. When he removed the packet from his coat, he slipped it underneath the top drawer of the tall chest by the door, where it would rest below the drawer and above the dust cover. I watched, rapt, but he blew out the candle before he turned toward the bed. We lay side by side. Still he spoke nothing, and touched me not at all. At last, I could bear it no longer and I said, “Cullah, I do not know why you are so—”

“I have never been so angry with you in all these years, wife. Never once have I had to still my hand from throttling the stubbornness out of you.”

“It seemed a good plan.”

“Speak no more of it. Bad enough that you raise your voice in Meeting.”

I wept openly, sobbing, my elbow above my eyes like a child.

“You made me a fool before the whole town,” he said. “Or do they think I am the coward who put you up to it? At the least, I am now a man whose wife must outthink him in public at the cost of her hearth and home. Is that what you think of me, Resolute? Am I but a fatheaded gob to be outdone? You made me a henpecked gamock before the church by your scorn for my offer.”

“Scorn? I meant no scorn.” I had felt enthusiasm. I had thought it called on my courage. I turned away from him and faced the wall. Between my sobs I gasped out, “I have never thought of you with scorn. What I said makes sense to me, still.”

“You could be captured and taken and beaten, in the name of God. Flogged naked in a pillory with none to protect you this time. Or worse. You could be a-abused!”

“I have been beaten before, Eadan. I have been beaten until it tore the clothes from me and I could not stand.”

He went silent again, and I felt his anger rekindling, for his whole body trembled. When at last he spoke, it was in a whisper. “Abused, too?”

I turned to him, my own anger showing now. “You were with me on our wedding night, husband. You answer that question, was I virgin or not? When I said beaten I meant beaten until not one inch of my body was without bruises.”

After a long silence, he asked, “How old were you?”

“Ten or so. Eleven. No one cared when my birthday was, so I lost track sometimes.”

“A babe. No older than our Dolly.”

“A slave.”

He sighed. “The thought of you in the hands of British soldiers makes me weak, as if I could die from the image alone.”

“If I made you feel foolish, my dearest husband, I am sorry. I thought only of a plan to get the message through, not meaning to step on your pride. You were not angry that other men offered the same.”

His great hand lay upon my shoulder. “Men die for their causes. I was feeling proud and brave, then, to offer to carry the message. And yes, my pride was big enough you could not move without stepping on it.” He laughed softly. He kissed the top of my shoulder and put his hand over the place he had kissed. “Would you have me believe you were feeling proud and brave, as well?”

I rolled over to face him. “And why not? You asked me not long ago what I believe in, what was there in life that I would keep so close as to die for. The more I heard tonight, the more I knew what it was. I have been a slave, Cullah MacLammond. A caged captive. I believe in liberty.”

“They call it treason.”

“You have joined the rebellion. You came here to this shore as a rebel Scot. Do you think freedom is a cry that exists only in men’s hearts? Do you think women know nothing of slavery and bondage? It is worse, for we are subject to the whim of any master, be he a lord or a husband. A woman must abide as she can. You are a kind and loving husband, but it is not always so. Even a pious man may be a tyrant of a husband and a ripping bad father. Do you think I could sit there these many weeks, and listen to those words, hear you speak of your worries and of war, and not be moved?”

“I thought women cared for nothing but children and home. And sometimes—”

“What?”

“Sometimes finery. I did not say it because I know you are not vain.”

“Simply because a woman cannot swing a sword that is taller than a man does not mean she cannot feel those same stirrings that you feel in a battle. She must fight with cleverness instead of muscle.”

“Unless she’s Saint Joan.”

I stopped my tears and said, “Saint Joan the lunatic.” I sighed. The moon was bright and I could see his face outlined in faint blue light coming through the window. “I am no lunatic, though I know I can be brash. I, too, shudder in terror at the thought of you carrying messages through the forest at night. Do not roll your eyes at me, Cullah MacLammond. I do. It is not your courage I doubt, but courage will not stop a ball. We must be united. We must trust each other, just like our bairnies giving each other signs and signals that all is well. Never think I would do aught to shame you. If I can help you, you have but to call upon me. That is what I meant tonight.”

“Then never put yourself in danger from soldiers. Never do it, Resolute. I would be undone. Our children would be orphans, cast out, for I would meet the headsman for what I should do if you were taken from me.”

He pulled me to him and held me as if I were a treasure so delicate it might disappear on his touch. He said, “And how, in this dark room, did you know I rolled my eyes? Are you sure you are not fey?”

“I have lived with you these many years, husband. I did not need to see your face to know it.” I hated it when we argued. But I loved it when the harsh words gave way to reason and the anger was replaced with embrace. He chuckled, a deep, warm sound, and sang a wisp of a song to me, kissing my head. And we slept.

Cullah carried one message to Boston and then two. Sometimes word came and he walked there and back through the night, sometimes he simply put what looked like a blank sheet of paper in his work pack and left it at a public house near his shop in Lexington.