The Midwife's Revolt (2 page)

2

MAY 1775.
IT was a bright spring
morning in the North Parish. I had been fighting tears since waking with the dawn. I milked and fed our cows, then fed my husband, Jeb, to whom I had been married but eight months. Then I prepared his sack, and Thaxter, our field hand, brought our horse around to the front of the house. Jeb was busy gathering his things and so did not notice, as a young man set upon battle will not, that I could not look at him for fear of breaking down.

He was heading to Cambridge, where he would join Colonel Prescott’s regiment. The bloody events of Concord and Lexington were fresh in our minds, but we didn’t speak of them. I kept my face turned to my tasks: filling his flask with cider, cutting a goodly morsel of dried beef, measuring out the preserves.

“Lizzie, have you seen my cap?” he called from our pokey little chamber upstairs.

I espied the cap upon the kitchen chair before me, but said nothing right away. The sooner he was ready, the sooner he would leave me with only the roaring sea for my companion.

We had come to housekeeping on this parcel of land given to Jeb by Josiah Quincy in September of 1774. Jeb’s father was a cousin of Colonel Quincy; he had given us the farm as a wedding gift. Josiah Quincy was also Abigail Adams’s uncle. And so, in a sense, I was related to that illustrious lady.

We arrived to discover the splendor of our situation: our parcel had been carved out of a three-hundred-acre estate called Mount Wollaston, upon which Colonel Quincy had newly built a large home. This beautiful, rolling land stretched all the way from the road to the sea. Our parcel, closer to the shore than the colonel’s house and slightly to the east of it, contained wooded acres, hay fields, and pasture. We had to clear the land surrounding the cottage-garden plots. Close by our cottage stood several sheds and a barn, all in great need of repair.

Winter in Braintree had made me and Jeb intimate by its very harshness. We had not enough wood, despite Jeb’s efforts, and he was obliged to wade through shoulder-high drifts of snow up the hill to the colonel’s house. The old colonel had suggested Jeb take what he needed without coming inside to ask.

But Jeb did not like to make free use of others’ labor. Only in the direst circumstances did we ever impose upon that connection, although Ann, the colonel’s wife, often left parcels on our stoop, for which we felt gratitude and shame in equal measure.

And so, borrowing as little as we could, we slept by the fire in our kitchen. We had a window there, and, oh, what a view we had! How many hours did we spend lying together, looking out that window across the dunes and toward the sea? On days when the wind blew from the northeast, the pungent aroma of the colonel’s stables wafted over us. The stench always made us laugh.

In the parlor—a grand word for what it was—we had placed a settle by the fireplace. Its thick plank top folded down for ironing. We lit the fire in this room only for company. Parson Wibird stopped in every week after meeting to see how we were getting on, which was kind of him. We were still adjusting to our new church. The parson was a gentle but—Lord, forgive me!—somewhat ridiculous man. He had a stooped and wiry frame, and when he listened to us, his toothless mouth hung open so long we thought he would drool. We often saw him riding bumpily down the lanes in his rusted curricle. Oh, he was a gentle, kindly soul, but in our youthful eyes that made him all the more laughable. He is gone to his Maker now.

I was happy to lie close to my Jeb in the darkness. From time to time, we heard the drunken groan or whistle of Thaxter, our field hand, making his way to the necessary behind the corn shed. Though we would have been sleeping one moment earlier, upon hearing Mr. Thaxter smack blindly into the necessary, missing the step and cursing, Jeb and I would burst out laughing.

Thaxter, a man of perhaps thirty-five, was an odd fellow content to spend his days alone, especially if he had a good bottle of rum and a pouch of tobacco. He was willing enough to work if you asked—much like an old ox reluctant to take a step without a whip. On loan from the colonel, Thaxter was meant to be a temporary fixture in our young married lives. But, finding himself quite content in the little shed behind the necessary, he stayed for several years and soon blended into the landscape like the opossums and groundhogs that crept about by night.

Jeb touched my face by the firelight and teased me that I’d be quite fat by spring, so frequently did we obey the holy command to go forth and multiply. And all around us was silence, save for the crackling embers, the ocean’s roar, and the mournful howling of the wind.

Now, as he readied to leave, I hoped and prayed I was with child. I was naive enough to believe that the Lord would not take a father from his unborn child.

Jeb descended the stairs and espied his cap upon the chair. “Here it is.” He sighed with exasperation and looked at me. “Oh, Lizzie.” He smiled and came to embrace me, but I rejected his touch. I had no wish to fall apart then. I wished to give him all my strength. Feeling me reject him, Jeb merely laughed and said, “Oh, you’ll miss me, all right. I know you better than you think.” With a tender smirk, he hoisted his musket and gear over his shoulder and strode out of doors, where Thaxter had readied our beautiful horse, Star, a sprightly Narragansett pacer. He had been a wedding gift from the Boylstons.

Jeb hoisted himself up, and I handed up his sack. I had filled it with everything I could: cheese, oatcakes, bilberry preserve, good dried meat, and a leg of chicken left over from the night before. Looking up at him, I had to shield my eyes from the sun.

“You are tan,” he remarked, looking down at my arms. “May you be a good little farmer while I’m gone. Watch Thaxter doesn’t drink all our rum.” He smiled. Everything he said to me in those days had an ironical tone, for we were both quite new at this farming business and still felt ourselves to be playacting at it. Jeb and I had grown up in staunch British families surrounded by city comforts, right on Cambridge’s Tory Row.

He looked back at me thoughtfully and tenderly as he turned Star toward the path to the road. “You’re a strong woman. Oh, how I love you, Lizzie Boylston!” And with that, he blew me a kiss. Star began to trot quickly down the path.

What? Was there to be no tender embrace? Did he think I was made of stone? Did he think I could bear it without at least a final kiss? Why should he think so? Because I hauled bushels of corn? Because I delivered healthy babes in the dead of night, with no help save from ignorant servant-girls? Because, bored and shut in as a girl, I had read my father’s library? Shakespeare, Dante, Ovid, Saint Augustine—of what use were they to me now? I wanted to cry out that I was soft inside and could not bear it.

“But I’m not! Jeb, I’m not strong!” I cried after him.

Sensing my agony at last, Jeb slowed. He turned Star around, leapt off him, and came running into my arms. He kissed me then. I reached up and with my fingers touched his soft face, barely yet shaven, and his soft curls, which I had pulled back with a piece of my finest homespun linen.

“Oh, be careful, my love,” I said.

“I will,” he whispered. “Indeed, I have no
wish
to leave you.” He lingered about my neck, kissing it tenderly. I felt his fingers move toward my bosom.

I might be soft, but he could not afford to be. I pushed him away. “Up you go, soldier.”

He tore himself from me, mounted Star, and gave me a salute. “Yes, sir.” Then he nudged Star with his knees and disappeared up the coast road toward Boston.

When he was truly gone and I could no longer hear Star’s hooves upon the ground, I sat myself in the open doorway of the kitchen garden. The chickens, thinking I had something for them, came pecking at my feet. But I had nothing for them except tears.

Within moments, the enormity of my solitude wrapped itself around me, and I felt quite done in. I had no one in the world now. No one save his family, whom I ardently disliked. My own mother had died of the throat distemper in 1769. And my father, who had been a judge in His Majesty’s court, had fled to England at the start of the Troubles. A man of great secret sympathy for the Cause, he had intended to return once the Rebels had been “put down,” but he caught pneumonia and died within a week of landing there. Finally, there was my brother, Harry, who had joined a privateer ship that fall, just after Jeb and I moved to Braintree. I knew not whether he lived. I missed them all unspeakably now and felt heartily sorry for myself.

To shake off my gloom, I stood and wandered about my too-silent house. I entered the dairy, a small room to the right of the kitchen, to gaze upon my medicines, which lined the wall shelves. “Witch’s potions,” Jeb called them. I ran my fingertips over the jars and vials of powder, potions, and poultices. Senna, manna, Glauber’s salt, snakeweed.
Here’s rosemary. That’s for memory.
Of what use were they to me now? None could bring back my Jeb.

He wrote me every day from Cambridge, and I wrote him back. I nearly borrowed a horse and rode out to him. But Jeb would not have liked that. Conditions, while they were to get much worse, were already bad. The water was putrid, and our soldiers, who were drinking cider all day, were dirty and unruly. Many were sick, he wrote. The fearsome canker rash was everywhere, and some also had the bloody flux. No, I could not ride to Cambridge. It would have pleased me to do so, but not him. I was just learning to be a woman—to give pleasure freely and to take it when offered. But I was also learning to defer. To defer was the lot of womankind.

Then, in the second week of June, I received a message that made me shiver: rumor had it that Jeb’s regiment would soon be marching to Charlestown. The Regulars were poised to fire from Copp’s Hill, and they must be held back.

I can tell you no more at present. But know that you are dearer to me than anything in the world. I will write from our new camp.

I heard nothing further. I wrote once more, but I knew not whether my letter had reached him. All the while, I had hoped and prayed I was with child. Then I began to bleed and suffered terrible cramps. I lay in bed feeling ill all that hot June day, and did not realize that I had fallen asleep until a loud noise woke me.

3

JUNE 17, 1775.
At four in the
morning, our entire parish was awakened by what sounded like a terrible explosion north of town. I bolted up in the darkness. I felt the blood that had pooled between my legs during the night. I lifted my chin to force the tears back into my eyes. No time for tears.
He has no heir
, I thought. I changed my pad of cotton, wishing desperately to steady my shaking body by a cup of lady’s mantle tea, but was driven abroad by the thunderous noise.

It was a long mile’s walk to the base of Penn’s Hill from Mount Wollaston, but that was where everyone was headed, as it afforded the best view of Boston. I recall figures passing me in the darkness—vague, shadowy figures, some still in bedclothes and others with torches. The tanner and Parson Wibird, Brackett the innkeeper, and the Cranches—and me, a young wife among many, though some had babes beneath their shawls. We all headed through town to climb the hill.

And, oh, how I prayed it
was
Boston under siege, not Cambridge or Charlestown. At last I found myself atop the hill where many others stood watching in awe and terror, whispering or quietly sobbing. I did neither that I recall; I merely stood there in the hellish torchlight, feeling the rumble and watching the flames shoot up higher and brighter. There was a rumble of fear upon that hill, too, mixed with that of the cannons. Occasionally, a cry pierced the darkness. Young children clung to their parents’ legs while the older ones ran about, excited by the commotion. I didn’t speak but only watched the smoke form above Charlestown, gray against the black sky. I knew Jeb was there.

As the sky lightened, I noticed a woman standing by my side with her arm around a small boy of about seven or eight. She, too, said nothing, spoke to no one, but merely watched in horror, clutching her child.

Someone with a torch passed by, and in that momentary flicker of light I saw that it was Abigail Adams, wife of our delegate John Adams, with her eldest boy, John Quincy. When our eyes met briefly, her face softened in recognition, but still I saw she could not quite place me.

“Jeb Boylston’s wife,” I offered. “Elizabeth. Lizzie.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “Of course. We met several months ago, I believe, at meeting. We are related. I’m Abigail, and this is Johnny.” Johnny looked up at me from under his mother’s arm. “Is Jeb not here?” She looked around.

“No, he is
there
”—I nodded in the direction of the smoke—“with Colonel Prescott.”

Suddenly, there was a terrible
crack
. It sounded close, like lightning hitting a tree. I could feel my knees buckle beneath me.

“Are you hurt?” Abigail fell at once to her knees, searching my person. “Where? Where is the wound?”

“No, no.” I shook my head, endeavored to stand. “I feel—I have this feeling
. . .
” I sobbed into my shawl, unable to voice what I felt. What I
knew
. I struggled up. “I must go,” I said.

“Go? Where do you plan to go at this hour?” she asked, thinking reason had left me, as indeed it had. All around was darkness, save for the hectic torches blurring swaths of firelight.

“I must go to him.”

“
There?
” She nodded toward the smoke over Charlestown. “You know that’s impossible.” She placed her arm around me. “Oh, dearest, I know what it is like to be separated from your beloved. But you must bear it. There is nothing else to be done. Tomorrow
. . .
” She sighed. “Tomorrow we’ll know more, perhaps.”

“But I will
not
bear it,” I rudely replied. “I must go, and go now. I will borrow a horse of Colonel Quincy.”

I moved away, certain she now thought me a most unpleasant woman. I began to walk down the hill toward home but soon felt a hand press against my forearm.

“If you really
must
go, then take John’s mare,” Abigail said. I shall never forget the way she said
must
. There was no irony in her tone but rather a kind of acknowledgment, even resignation. “Tell Isaac to accompany you. It will be faster that way and far safer. Go to Cambridge. They will have news there, if anyone has.”

I hugged her to me, grateful to have made a friend in this darkest hour.