My Name is Resolute (82 page)

“Well and aye.”

“Cullah, war is coming.”

*   *   *

And still more British soldiers came from across the sea. Margaret wrote me that by then the streets of Boston smelled of ordure. No woman was safe walking alone even in daylight, and except for her own, colonials’ houses and businesses were regularly searched and the latter closed for nonpayment of taxes.

Our men of the local militia from Massachusetts Colony began calling themselves Patriots, and meeting in fields, even my own, for drilling and instruction in musketry and swordplay. I remembered vivid images of Cullah swinging his axe and claymore, a man become a whirling, mighty fighting machine. He tried his best with them, but he had indeed lost vigor. I reminded him to learn the musket, too, very much afraid he would misjudge his strength against an enemy with cannon and musket, and like the Highlanders of old, charge against them with but a sword. I clucked my tongue, wondering how these lads and old men would stand against a regiment of soldiers from an army that controlled much of the world.

One afternoon Cullah met me in the barn as I milked the cow. He held a long-barreled fowling musket, and seemed startled when he saw me, as if he were guilty of something. “Where did you get that, husband?”

“Isaac Davis made it from parts. I carved the stock. He’s shot it. It’s a true aim.”

I stood. The thing was taller than I was. “You have never owned one before now. Have you decided to go fowling, then?”

“I may not have the strength to swing a sword like a young man, but this war will be fought with weapons such as this.”

“Yes, I am sure you are right,” I said and sighed, trying to hide my relief. He was coming back, then, fully, and did not need a wife to tell him how to fight. Did I want a war? I asked myself. Naturally, surely, I believed, things on this continent would eventually be settled by courts, and justice will be more free. But for my husband, something about preparing for a battle gave him life, gave him courage that simple farming did not. I believed he always anticipated war the way some people always look for bad weather, but the man who was prepared for bad weather always had a snug roof, too. “Do you have shot for it?”

“I do. I took money from our last chest.”

“How much is left in there?”

“Ten pounds and seventeen shillings. I’m off now. Isaac is drilling us in shooting, all day. Will you be all right?”

“I will, Cullah.” As I watched him saunter away, I thought, Ten pounds? That would not get us through a year. Those who owned farmland as we did at least did not have to fear starvation. A paper of pins that had cost six shillings the year before was twenty, and none to be found. Black pepper to season food was almost nonexistent. Someone put a rhyme in the newspaper about seasoning his eggs with gunpowder and serving them to the royal army. The cinnamon with which I had once enlivened our Christmas pudding was to be had no more. Tea was up three shillings an ounce and coffee could not be found, so that those who preferred it were attempting to create it from burned wood bark and causing themselves illness. Myself, I boiled water and made a toddy of apple cider, and sometimes I boiled pears, too.

Dysentery rampaged through Boston, then started in Lexington, too. Influenza hit that December of 1769, and then smallpox was found on a sailor dead in an alleyway. His body had been eaten by rats, and for two days no one thought unusual a man lying facedown in a gutter after a ship of the line made port. The disease spread to three fourths of Boston, others being already immune, and then through the countryside.

And then with the new year it took my Gwyneth. I had sat by her side and sung to her, old nursery songs of windy days and Maypoles. Baby Peter got the scourge as well. Gwenny held Peter in her arms when she followed him to the next world, for the babe was already gone though she knew it not. We buried them together in the same grave. Gwenny and Roland’s oldest son died also; the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, recovered. Though Roland became ill it was short-lived, and little Sally suffered a day of fever and then was up playing. I watched her as she visited my house, fearing that she would return to illness even worse, but she did not. Two weeks later, she continued in good health. Dorothy escaped, too, though I knew not why. All one can do in these times is to be thankful for survival.

My dearest Gwenny. I missed her so. She was both a child and a sister to me. Cullah put down his musket, barely ate, and spent nine evenings sighing, staring into the fire. Alice, like me, had come through smallpox as a child.

I traded a bolt of silk for several bushels of roving, and wove a hundred yards of plain gray wool with no more color than the sheep had bestowed it for dyes were not to be had. I wore black. I did little embroidery for I could not buy silk thread and I could not embroider with my needles worn so small I could not hold them. I found that there was always someone who knew our signals and codes, and who could get me five pounds for a bolt of wool, ten for a bolt of linen. When I was not at my loom I spent days hackling linen in the barn.

*   *   *

On March 5, 1770, in Boston, some drunken young men threw snowballs at a soldier in uniform. They had caught the Redcoat alone and had been having fun at his expense when some of his fellows heard the commotion and rushed to his aid. Taunts and ignored orders came from both sides. The snowballs coming at the soldiers turned to ice chips and rocks, broken bottles, then horseshoes. The soldiers fought back with what they carried. Muskets. In a moment, five young men lay dead, a score more wounded.

Now a craftsman in his own right in Revere’s shop, Benjamin told me that he had helped, working well into the night on an etching, so that by March 6, the newspaper published a print of soldiers firing upon an innocent crowd. “They were warned to stop, Ma,” Benjamin said as I looked at the drawing. “They were told. Why would a person not take hold of themselves when faced with a musket? Why not simply cease? It was all in fun but they grew violent.”

“The human heart is harder to turn from its course than a river,” I said.

“Five died, Ma. Five boys. I knew two of them. They were just drunk, Ma. Fools full of drink, throwing snowballs. Redcoats should all die.”

“No. Your brother is one of them, too. They are not all cut from the same cloth.”

“Few of them have any intelligence at all, then.”

“That may be true. Then again, a soldier follows orders and it is his ranking officer we must blame if something is amiss.”

As spring drew on we worked our own farm from sun to sun. Cullah’s strength seemed to come back to him, though not his size. He seemed thin, but he could still fell a tree and split firewood just as quickly as before.

One afternoon in mid-May, Roland came to the door. He sat at the table before us. He looked into Dorothy’s eyes, and asked her to marry him, to take her sister’s place. She already knew and loved the children, he said. They needed a mother. He needed a wife. Would she accede to his offer? He promised he would make her a good husband, and provide for her all the days of her life.

“But will you love her?” I asked.

“Fondness grows,” he said. “Like a wild rose. She lived with us for years. We are comfortable together. I am old, but I will be a good husband.”

Cullah turned to Dolly. “What say you, of this?”

She smiled. “Pa, Ma, I have always loved Roland. I loved Gwenny, too. When I felt my heart growing attached to my sister’s husband, I came back to your house so I would neither tempt nor be tempted. I could never marry another. I will go with Roland. I love Gwenny’s children.”

“Well,” Cullah said, “a girl needs a husband. But it seems so soon. I suppose if Reverend Clarke will approve it, I will not stand in your way.”

They married just two weeks later in the apple orchard. Reverend Clarke blessed their union under a bower of apple blossoms, their perfume drenching us like mist. It was as if the earth stretched herself at that moment, as if the loss of so many of her children allowed abundance of her other gifts. I looked at Gwenny’s poor babes, scars pitting their faces, and knew Dolly would be mother to them as if they were her own, for I saw them take her hands eagerly as only a child could.

Cullah decided not to reopen his shop. Though he had some tools at home and our friends and neighbors sought after his work, his large machinery could not be replaced with the money we had. I believed that in that year of deprivation, his heart was gone out of it. Our passion for each other seemed to wane, too, but our affection grew. I was startled one day to realize that my courses had ceased. There would be no more children for us. Cullah was no longer obsessed with making his lovely furniture, and I missed the sparkle that came into his eyes when he used to tell me about the challenges of it. Making a bead around a drawer front, set so that it had exactly a sixteenth of an inch on all sides when closed, was as exciting to him as a tracing of yellow silk on a gray linen to me.

We planted our fields, side by side, and spent our summer evenings hand in hand, walking the orchards and the fields, lingering by the stream when the wild geese led their goslings about, or settled on a bench he had built by the stream’s edge. If the weather was rainy, we stayed by the fire and read aloud. Cullah was quite proud of his ability at last to read, and though it went slowly, we had many a good evening’s entertainment that way. I found myself smiling at him as he worked at a word, thinking how humble and good he was, how earnest. How I loved him.

Alice kept the house, tending it until things sparkled in ways I never had managed before. Our house seemed so empty, to me, yet in every corner, I heard the echo of children laughing or squabbling over some slight by one of the others. I saw their little noses pressed against the window glass looking out at the snow, or remembered tending them and the endless days of illness.

*   *   *

When next I went to visit Margaret, intending to do some errands on the way, September’s first hint of frost was in the morning air as I set out to drive through barricades and questioning soldiers to brave Boston’s streets searching for needles and pins. Margaret seemed drawn and she wore a patch upon her face I had not seen before. “I am marked forever by this disease,” she said, pulling the patch from her face. “This ridiculous thing is the rage in London. People there wear patches though they have no smallpox scars to cover, did you know that?”

“No, I did not.”

“I look like a cur.”

I studied my callused fingers. I had spent so many hours at the loom, I felt almost as if I could not walk without repeating in my mind the clickety-tick sounds of the countermarche. It was just as the day we alighted the ship and the sand on dry land seemed to roll like a wave. “I have my scars, too. You look like a woman. The reason we love to see a babe is to be reminded what immortal beauty will be. We cannot walk this earth without our marks. Will you and George come for Thanksgiving in November?”

“Did you not hear? Governor Hutchinson has outlawed it. He said it was too frivolous, and that the colonists ought to be thankful they are not all hanged, rather than celebrating.”

“
He
is a cur.”

“Resolute? When did you grow so old?”

“Why, what a terrible thing to say.”

“I told you I was rude. I did not wish to imply your mien was unattractive. But, as you said to me, we are only as good friends as we are honest ones. I meant that you have such a motherly way about you. It is wisdom as if you were a hundred years old. I never noticed it when we used to sit and gossip. When did that change?”

I did not want to repeat the obvious to her that it often came with motherhood. I valued Margaret. I loved her spunk and vitality. I wanted to see myself in her, I suppose. “It comes with the scars, sweet Margaret.” As I picked up the reins—for I had learned to drive my own wagon—I said, “Margaret? If I have need of you? If ever I cannot get into Boston and want you, what can I do?”

She smiled as if she, too, knew we needed this. She reached into her skirt and into her pocket, and pulled out a silver shilling. “Send me this,” she said, placing it in my hand and closing my fingers with hers. “Send me a shilling and I will come. Only keep it in your hat, and let no one spend it.”

“Send a shilling,” I said. “It will only happen, of course, if I may trust any messenger with a shilling in these times.”

“True. Sixpence will do as well. Farewell, friend. I know not whether we will meet again soon. There’s talk they will close the town completely.”

“Let us plan, then. Come to my house next Tuesday for tea. I will spend my last lump of sugar making cakes.”

“I will, then. As long as it is your last,” she said with a grin. “I relish that sort of extravagance.” We both laughed, knowing, I suspect, that it was no doubt true, and that it would be bittersweet in any event. “If I can find a needle I shall bring it, also.” We kissed each other’s cheeks and bade farewell.

Tuesday morning arrived and I gathered eggs earlier than usual, intending to begin whipping the whites for a light cake. Alice sat sewing, making herself a quilted petticoat in the fashion I had showed her, one with secret pockets sewn in. Cullah was in the field with Roland. I worked happily, expecting my friend, and sifted flour, then set to beating the eggs. My arms grew weary before I got the egg whites to rise up in stiff mountains, like snow in a bowl.

A heavy hand rapped at my door and a voice called, “Open up in the name of His Majesty King George.”

“Just a moment,” I called in reply, knitting my brows as I stared at Alice. I went to the door just as it came flying inward at me. “La!”

There stood a gaggle of soldiers, seven or eight of them. “Outside, woman. Who else is in here? Everyone outside, now. Look lively. Out the door!”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You have but to ask and I will provide you food such as I have.”

“Our orders is to search this house and premises.”

“For what, sir?”

“For anything that seems amiss. Now out with you.”

I turned my head this way and that, looking at my bowl of beaten egg whites, mounded up for a cake sitting beside a crushed cone of sugar and a pile of whitest flour, sifted nine times. I took my cloak from its peg by the door, and Alice did likewise. We stood in the yard while seven soldiers ran indoors. From the yard, I heard all manner of banging and crashing, quiet periods, and then more knocking about. After a while, one of them held the door ajar while the others joined and carried out chests, dumping the contents upon the damp ground. They brought out the mahogany highboy, Cullah’s last creation for our house, pulled drawers from their places, tossing them here and there.